Cinemorphosis

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  • DREAMING OF BARBARA EDEN

    DREAMING OF BARBARA EDEN

    I grew up in VA housing, transplanted army barracks rebadged “Flavet Villages,” in Gainesville, Florida. The barracks were close to an alligator swamp and a forest where a Mynah bird was always perched on the same tree branch so it was a favorite pastime before bedtime for my father and me to visit the bird on the edge of the forest and converse with it. At dusk, there was a low tide so the alligator dung was particularly pungent. While the smell repelled most, I found the strong aroma strangely soothing and stimulating in a way that made me feel connected to the universe. One evening while my father and I visited the Mynah bird, we could hear a distant radio playing “Bali Ha’i,” sung so beautifully by Juanita Hall. From the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific, “Bali Ha’i” is about an island paradise that seems so close but always remains just out of reach by those who are tantalized by it, causing great melancholy. But I suffered no such melancholy. Paradise was in my presence as my father and I stood by the enchanted forest and spoke to the talking Mynah bird. 

    The ache of an elusive paradise didn’t afflict me until I discovered I Dream of Jeannie in 1965. The blonde goddess Barbara Eden lived in her genie bottle, a luxurious enclosure with a purple circular sofa lined with pink and purple satin brocade pillows and the inner wall lining of glass jewels shining like mother of pearl. More than anything, I wanted to live inside the bottle with Jeannie. To be denied that wish crushed me with a pang of sadness as deeply as Juanita Hall’s rendition of “Bali Ha’i.” That Jeannie’s bottle was in reality a painted Jim Beam Scotch Whiskey decanter speaks to the intoxication I suffered from my incessant dreams of Barbara Eden. 

    Living in the bottle with Barbara Eden was my unconscious wish to never grow up, to live forever in the womb with my first crush. I realized I had the personality of a man-child who never wanted to enter the adult world in 1974 when as a thirteen-year-old bodybuilder, I had started my training at Walt’s Gym in Hayward, California. Converted from a chicken coop in the 1950s, the gym was a swamp of fungus and bacteria. Members complained of incurable athlete’s foot and some claimed there were strains of fungus and mold that had not yet been identified in scientific journals. Making a home in the fungal shower stalls was an oversized frog. The pro wrestlers had nicknamed the old-timer frog Charlie. The locker always had a bankrupt divorcee or other in a velour top and gold chain hogging the payphone while having a two-hour-long talk with his attorney about his bleak life choices. There was an unused outdoor swimming pool in the back with murky water black with plague and dead rats. A lonely octogenarian named Wally, who claimed to be a model for human anatomy textbooks, worked out for several hours before spending an equal time in the sauna and shower, completing his grooming with a complete-body talcum powder treatment so that when he spoke to you, he did so embalmed in a giant talcum cloud. The radio played the same hits over and over: Elvin Bishop’s “Fooled Around and Fell in Love” and The Eagles’ “New Kid in Town.” What stood out to me was that I was just a kid navigating in an adult world, and the gym, like the barbershop, was a public square that allowed me to hear adult conversations about divorces, hangovers, gambling addictions, financial ruin, the cost of sending kids to college, the burdens of taking care of elderly parents. I realized then that I was at the perfect age: Old enough to grow big and strong but young enough to be saved from the drudgery and tedium of adult life. It became clear to me then that I never wanted to grow up. I wanted to spend my life luxuriating inside the mother of pearl bottle with Barbara Eden in a condition of perpetual adolescence.

    Wanting to live in Jeannie’s bottle wasn’t just about being joined to the hip with the one I loved. It was about protection from evil. This became apparent in 1972 when I was ten, and I watched an ABC Movie of the Week, The Screaming Woman. Based on a Ray Bradbury short story, the movie was about a woman buried alive. Her screams haunted me so much that I could not sleep for two weeks as I imagined the mud-covered lady under my bed crying for my help. I swore I would never watch a scary movie again, but a year later when my parents had left for a party, I was bored, so I watched Night of the Living Dead. What I learned from watching these scary movies is that when you see depictions of evil, you can’t “unsee” them. Those visions leave a permanent mark so that nothing is ever the same again. What was once the happy, innocent sound of the neighborhood jingle of the ice cream truck is now a jalopy full of devil-clowns ready to exit the vehicle and kidnap me from my room. I tried to remedy my trauma by watching The Waltons and Little House on the Prairie, but these wholesome depictions of family life could not bring back the innocence that was lost forever, so at age eleven, I was already conceiving my elaborate bunker for the Great Zombie Apocalypse. And that bunker, of course, was Jeannie’s bottle.

    In my early teens, my life became a futile quest to find substitutes for living inside Jeannie’s bottle. For example, in 1974 I visited several friends and neighbors who had recently purchased waterbeds, tried them out, and became convinced that waterbeds would afford me a life of luxury, unimagined pleasures, and relaxation that life had so far denied me. I persuaded my parents to buy me one. My love affair with the contraption proved to be short-lived. Its temperature was either too hot or too cold. It leaked. It often smelled like a frog swamp. I remember if I moved my body, there would be a counterreaction, like some invisible wave force fighting me as I tried to get comfortable. One day the waterbed leaked so badly that the floorboards were damaged and my bedroom looked like something out of Hurricane Katrina. What was supposed to be a revolution in sleep proved to be a nightmare, and my quest to find a substitute for Jeannie’s bottle had to be started afresh.

    The longing to be inside Jeannie’s bottle is a regression impulse, and I can’t talk about regression without mentioning Cap ‘N Crunch. My mother indulged my appetite for this sugary cereal and bought me all its variations: Cap ‘N Crunch with Crunch Berries, Peanut Butter Cap ‘N Crunch, and then the renamed versions of the same-tasting cereal: Quisp, Quake, and King Vitamin. Quaker cereals took their winning formula of corn and brown sugar flavors and sold several variations with different mascots and names. 

    As a kid watching these cereals being advertised on TV, it was clear that too much of a good thing was not a problem. On the contrary, I felt compelled to taste-test all these cereal varieties the way a sommelier would taste dozens of Zinfandel wines from the same region or a musicologist would listen to hundreds of different versions of Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony.

    Eating six versions of Cap ‘N Crunch afforded me the illusion of variety while eating the same cereal over and over. I was a seven-year-old boy who wanted to believe I had choices but at the same time didn’t want any choices. 

    You will sometimes hear about the man who is in his sixth marriage and his wives in terms of appearance, temperament, and personality are all more or less the same. The man keeps going back to the same woman but wants to believe he has “found someone new” to give him the hope of a new life. 

    That was essentially my relationship with Cap ‘N Crunch. Not only was I stagnant in my food tastes, but I was also regressing into sugar-coated pablum. My love of cereal, which endures to this day, was the equivalent of finding comfort in Jeannie’s bottle. 

    In addition to sweetened cereal as evidence of my emotional stagnation was my choice of damaged role models. While I was fixated on I Dream of Jeannie, my bodybuilding partner Bull was fixated on Gilligan’s Island. Choosing Bull as my role model must have prolonged my delayed development. Bull was not known for his social decorum and gallantry. One example that stands out is that one night we were swimming at the Tanglewood apartments swimming pool when Bull found a giant orange fluorescent bra hanging by its strap on the diving board. It practically glowed in the dark. Bull grabbed the bra and twirled it above his head as if he were going to fling it. Then he stopped and said it was his sister’s birthday the next day, and he had forgotten to buy her a present. He didn’t even wrap it. He just gave his sister this orange bra, and she wasn’t even shocked. For her, it was just another day in the life of having a crazy brother. When I think back to my delayed development in the world of dating and relationships, I have to attribute much of that delay to my misguided choices of male role models. It would be unfair, after all, to lay all the blame on Jeannie. The fact was that I was in love with Jeannie as a fantasy, but as a real woman she terrified me.

    This was evident on one warm California spring afternoon in 1973.  After sixth-grade classes were over and the bus dropped us off at Crow Canyon Road, we would often walk across the street to 7-Eleven to get a Slurpee before trekking up the steep hill that was Greenridge Road. I was standing inside 7-Eleven with my friends listening to “Brandy, You’re a Fine Girl” playing on the store radio when the Horsefault sisters, both freckled with long blonde hair and beaming, mischievous blue eyes, came into the store and asked me if I wanted to see a rabbit inside their cage. One was an eighth-grader and the other a high school sophomore. They lived in a farmhouse behind the 7-Eleven. I had no interest in seeing a rabbit inside a cage, but the girls had high cheekbones and figures that reminded me of my first crush, Barbara Eden, so I told them I was very interested in seeing their caged rabbit. I exited 7-Eleven with the girls, and we walked about a hundred yards on a trail that was covered with dry horse dung and surrounded by a field of grass before we reached the outskirts of their farmhouse. Behind a thicket of bushes was a large cage, with the door slightly ajar. A heavy chain lock hung on the door latch. I looked inside the cage, but I saw that there was no rabbit. At this point, the sisters, cackling like witches, grabbed me and tried to drag me into the cage. It was clear that they were attempting to prank me, put me inside the cage, lock the door, and make me their prisoner. But I was too strong for them, and as we wrestled outside the cage and rolled on the grass, we became enveloped in a cloud of dust and hay. In a nearby coop, chickens were clucking and flapping their wings with great alarm and alacrity. When the sisters, now covered in sweat, realized they did not have the strength to carry on with their mission, I fled them and rushed home. I was outraged that they had tried to steal my freedom,  and I diverted myself by watching my favorite TV show, I Dream of Jeannie, starring the gorgeous Barbara Eden, who played a lovelorn genie trapped in a bottle except when summoned by her master. Clearly, I was still too young to understand the exquisite pleasures of irony. 

  • WHY WE PREFERRED THE BRADY BUNCH OVER THE BUGALOOS

    WHY WE PREFERRED THE BRADY BUNCH OVER THE BUGALOOS

    Airing from 1969 to 1974, The Brady Bunch parachuted into a world where psychedelic counterculture wasn’t just in the streets—it was infiltrating children’s television like an unsupervised batch of bad acid. This was the golden age of Sid and Marty Krofft, the demented puppet masters behind some of the trippiest, most hallucinatory shows ever greenlit for kids who just wanted to eat their Froot Loops in peace.

    Take The Bugaloos, for instance. A gang of groovy humanoid insects pranced around Tranquility Forest, looking like Woodstock refugees who had lost a bet with Mother Nature. I.Q. the grasshopper, Harmony the bumblebee, and Joy the butterfly flitted through a kaleidoscopic fever dream, their wings flapping to the rhythm of some drugged-out sitar riff.

    Then there was H.R. Pufnstuf, a show that didn’t even pretend to hide its narcotic inspiration. The premise? A boy named Jimmy, possibly the first recorded victim of child abduction via talking boat, washes up on an island ruled by a towering, lisping dragon in a sash. He’s relentlessly hunted by a witch named Wilhelmina W. Witchiepoo, who cackles and screeches like she just took a bad hit of something cooked up in Timothy Leary’s basement. It was a surrealist nightmare wrapped in felt, and we just accepted it as part of our Saturday morning routine.

    And let’s not forget Lidsville, the unholy love child of Alice in Wonderland and a mescaline bender. A kid falls into a magician’s oversized hat and enters a world where—stay with me here—the hats are alive. Sentient bowler hats, deranged cowboy hats, and scheming top hats all vying for dominance in a dystopian headwear hierarchy. It was a concept so bizarre that it made H.R. Pufnstuf look like a Ken Burns documentary.

    Meanwhile, our parents had no idea what we were watching. They assumed we were parked in front of harmless Saturday morning cartoons, blissfully unaware that we were being force-fed a psychedelic trip disguised as children’s programming. Looking back, it’s no wonder an entire generation grew up with a slightly warped sense of reality—half of our formative years were spent under the subconscious influence of a neon-soaked acid carnival.

    But The Brady Bunch wanted no part of this trippy circus. Instead, Sherwood Schwartz’s creation pressed the rewind button, bypassing the counterculture entirely to resurrect a 1950s fantasyland straight out of Leave It to Beaver and Dennis the Menace. This was a world where no one dropped acid, but plenty of people dropped wholesome life lessons over dinner. ABC executives were spooked by the show’s aggressively retro vibe—after all, this was the era of protest marches and free love, not avocado-colored appliances and canned moral epiphanies. Yet America couldn’t resist the lure of a sanitized, hyper-organized utopia where the biggest crisis was Jan losing her glasses. The Brady home became a saccharine oasis, offering the myth of innocence to a country drowning in cultural upheaval. It was a fantasy so potent that, decades later, it would be skewered in Pleasantville—a reminder that even the shiniest mirage of perfection can’t hide the cracks in the human condition.

    I still remember a conversation from middle school that stuck like gum to the bottom of my brain. We were confessing how much we envied the kids with curfews. That’s right—curfews. Rules. Structure. While their parents were saying things like, “Be home by 9,” ours were basically saying, “Don’t set the house on fire.” The culture we grew up in was simple: adults did their thing (drink, argue, vanish), and we kids were left to figure out life on our own, like feral cats with no boundaries.

    Sure, we flirted with chaos, captivated for a hot minute by the surreal carnival of Sid and Marty Krofft’s fever-dream creations. Watching The Bugaloos or H.R. Pufnstuf was like peeking into a world designed by someone who’d eaten a bad batch of brownies. But the novelty wore off fast. You can only handle so many psychedelic forests and talking hats before you crave something—anything—that makes sense. That’s why we kept returning to The Brady Bunch and later Happy Days. Deep down, we knew that life imitating a bad acid trip wasn’t sustainable. Chaos might be entertaining, but it doesn’t tuck you in at night or teach you that everything can be neatly resolved in 30 minutes.

  • The Monkees, Dave Draper, Proust, & the Lessons of Irony

    The Monkees, Dave Draper, Proust, & the Lessons of Irony

    Like millions of Americans, I once believed The Brady Bunch wasn’t just a sugary sitcom fantasy—it was a blueprint for how families should work. Polyester-clad harmony, avocado-colored kitchens, and life lessons that landed with the gentle thud of a sitcom laugh track. But why, decades later, does the Brady house at 11222 Dilling Street remain one of the most photographed homes in America? Why has the show’s popularity only exploded since its 1974 cancellation? And most baffling of all—why do people still worship at the altar of Sherwood Schwartz’s pastel-hued utopia?

    In The Way We All Became the Brady Bunch, Kimberly Potts excavates this cultural phenomenon, tracing its roots to Schwartz’s other fantasy fiefdom—Gilligan’s Island. Both shows peddled the same delusion: you could toss together any group of mismatched personalities, and through teamwork, pluck, and a catchy theme song, everything would turn out just fine. In reality, unresolved resentment doesn’t dissolve neatly before a commercial break, and a shared kitchen doesn’t magically make step-siblings love each other. But Schwartz wasn’t interested in reality—he was selling optimism in Technicolor.

    Sherwood Schwartz was America’s high priest of idealism, a man who saw divorce rates skyrocketing and decided to counterprogram with an unshakably cheerful alternative. His blended family would work, dammit, and they would thrive in a sun-drenched suburban utopia filled with pep talks and hugs. And I bought it. I was all in. From Captain Kangaroo reading The Little Engine That Could to Charles Atlas ads in comic books promising that a few reps with a dining chair could turn me into the next Hercules, I inhaled this belief system like it was the antidote to life’s inevitable disappointments.

    And then came The Monkees.

    October 16, 1967. The day irony smacked me in the face like a custard pie. I was five years old, watching the episode “I Was a 99-lb. Weakling”, blissfully unaware that my entire worldview was about to collapse. Micky Dolenz, my favorite Monkee, gets humiliated on the beach by Bulk, a Speedo-clad monument to muscle played by Mr. Universe Dave Draper. Worse, Bulk steals Brenda, the beach goddess, right out from under Micky’s drumstick-wielding hands.

    Desperate to win her back, Micky joins Weaklings Anonymous. Their plan? Soul-crushing workouts and chugging fermented goat curd—a protein shake seemingly designed by the devil. He even sells his drum set to fund his transformation. The stakes couldn’t be higher.

    And for what? Just as Micky nears his big, muscled-up revenge moment, Brenda has an epiphany—muscles are out. She ditches Bulk for a bookish intellectual reading Remembrance of Things Past. Apparently, Proust is sexier than pecs.

    Sitting in front of my Zenith TV, I felt my faith in the universe disintegrate. The lesson was clear and soul-crushing: hard work guarantees nothing. You could sacrifice, sweat, and sip liquefied goat tragedy, only to have fate laugh in your face. The Monkees had broken me. I didn’t have the word for irony at age five, but I felt it snake into my bloodstream like a slow-acting poison.

    Turns out, the Brady fantasy was a warm, comforting lie. The world wasn’t a sitcom. Sometimes, no matter how much goat curd you drink, Brenda’s just not into you.

  • NOTHING TRIGGERED CHILDHOOD FOMO MORE THAN THE BRADY BUNCH

    NOTHING TRIGGERED CHILDHOOD FOMO MORE THAN THE BRADY BUNCH

    In the scorching summer of 1971, when I was nine and convinced that destiny owed me something spectacular, my family and four others carved out a rugged paradise on Mount Shasta. For two weeks, we fished, water-skied, dodged hornets, and lounged beneath the hypnotic drone of a massive battery-powered radio blasting The Doors, Paul McCartney, Carole King, and Three Dog Night. It should have been idyllic. It should have been.

    One morning, while the other families fried pancakes, prepped their fishing gear, and reveled in their pioneer fantasies, I was still wrapped in my sleeping bag, immersed in the most transcendent dream of my life. This wasn’t just a dream—it was a divine calling. I had met The Brady Bunch in downtown San Francisco, right beside a gleaming red cable car. Their smiles were radiant, practically angelic, and their body language said it all: I had been chosen. The adoption papers had already been signed in some conveniently located government office, and it was official—I was now a Brady.

    Questions swirled in my nine-year-old mind: Would I get my own room in their split-level suburban utopia, or would I have to bunk with Greg? More importantly, how soon would I appear on the show? Just as I was about to find out, reality crashed in like a wrecking ball. Mark and Tosh, my so-called friends, yanked me out of my blissful state, insisting it was time to go fishing. Fishing? Fishing?! I had just been welcomed into America’s most wholesome sitcom family, and now I was expected to slum it with worms and hooks?

    I sulked like a deposed prince. All day, I stomped around Mount Shasta, scowling like a kid exiled from paradise, my Brady Bunch dream stuck inside me like a splinter. I couldn’t tell anyone. What was I supposed to say? “Sorry, I can’t go fishing; I was about to move into a Technicolor utopia where the biggest problem is whether Marcia gets a date to the dance.” Yeah, that would go over well.

    “Get with the program!” my dad barked in his military tone. “We’re living in the wild!” The wild? I didn’t want the wild. I wanted avocado-green appliances, shag carpeting, and Alice the maid serving pork chops and applesauce. Instead, I got yellowjackets hovering over our food, a fishing pole, and a cold dose of reality. I was not a Brady, and the sting of it lingered longer than the mosquito bites.

    But here’s the punchline—my Brady Bunch fantasy wasn’t some rare stroke of delusion. Millions of kids across America were staring at that pastel-hued utopia, convinced that salvation came in the form of avocado-colored kitchens and polyester bell-bottoms. Creator Sherwood Schwartz was practically running a cult without knowing it—he received hundreds of letters from kids in broken homes, willing to renounce their possessions, hitchhike cross-country, and pledge fealty just for a shot at joining the sacred Brady fold. The show had become a sitcom Mecca, and nothing triggered childhood FOMO quite like realizing you weren’t born into that family.

    And here’s the cosmic joke—while we were glued to those 30-minute morality plays, dreaming of a world where even a busted nose got a feel-good resolution, the actors’ real lives were flaming train wrecks. Addiction, affairs, infighting—the Bradys weren’t living in a sitcom, they were trapped in a full-blown soap opera. Turns out, while America was fantasizing about swapping families, the actual Bradys probably wished they could swap out of their own.

    Should we have expected the actors to live the squeaky-clean fantasy they sold us? Of course not. Expecting that is like assuming Superman pays his taxes. Hollywood doesn’t run on truth—it runs on glossy façades, and The Brady Bunch was one of the greatest of them all. They spoon-fed us choreographed family bliss while drowning in off-screen dysfunction. And yet, we still crave that fantasy. Once you’ve had a taste of Brady-level wholesomeness, it’s like emotional junk food—artificial, saccharine, and utterly addictive.

    To this day, I still have dreams that I’m in that opening theme song, my face glowing in one of the squares, beaming at my Brady siblings. In that dream, I am forever young, forever safe, basking in the manufactured warmth of a world that never really existed.

  • WAITING FOR THE TV SIGNAL TO RETURN IN THE EXISTENTIAL WASTELAND

    WAITING FOR THE TV SIGNAL TO RETURN IN THE EXISTENTIAL WASTELAND

    Back in the 60s, television had the audacity to shut down for the night, leaving me stranded in an existential wasteland. It always ended the same way: a schmaltzy, patriotic ballad swelling over footage of the American flag waving in slow motion, as if Uncle Sam himself were tucking us in with a condescending pat on the head. Then, the screen would fade to an ominous test pattern—either those eerie vertical bars or, even more unsettling, the stoic, unblinking face of an American Indian chief, as if he alone were left to guard the void. Accompanying this visual purgatory was the sound—a relentless, high-pitched electronic hum that felt less like white noise and more like the auditory embodiment of cosmic abandonment. This was the twilight zone of childhood, the precise moment when the world lost all structure, and I was left floating in a limbo where the only certainty was that television would eventually return in the morning, reborn like a phoenix of mediocre sitcoms and local news.

    Fast forward to today, and I find myself in a similar purgatory—except this time, it’s digital, and it wears the face of an online watch retailer that has long since abandoned its post. Seiya Japan, once a temple of horological obsession, has been in an alleged “temporary closure” for years, a phrase now about as reassuring as an airline’s promise that your delayed flight will board “shortly.” Instead of a haunting test pattern, I am met with a pastel-green square floating in cyberspace, within which a lone white cloud drifts aimlessly, adorned with clip-art relics of some forgotten vacation brochure: ice cream cones, airplanes, umbrellas. And the word—TRAVEL—mocking me like a fortune cookie prediction scribbled by a sadist.

    Above this static dreamscape, a message attempts to soothe: “We will be suspending the site temporarily to take a break for refreshing our minds and bodies.” Years have passed. No updates. No relaunch. Just the same passive-aggressive “We’ll be back when we feel like it” hostage note. Was Seiya lost to the siren call of endless leisure, his days now a blur of mai tais and infinity pools? Or was this all an elaborate long-con, a digital ghost story designed to keep obsessive collectors like me trapped in an endless cycle of clicking, hoping, refreshing?

    Much like that childhood moment of staring at a lifeless TV screen, waiting for the world to reboot, I keep returning to Seiya Japan, desperate for signs of life. But nothing changes. It’s an airport departure board flashing DELAYED in perpetuity, a cruel exercise in futility. And yet, I linger. Because much like the test pattern of my youth, I still believe—against all reason—that one day, the signal will return.

  • THE TRIUMPH OF CAPTAIN KANGAROO

    THE TRIUMPH OF CAPTAIN KANGAROO

    I was five years old when I learned my first brutal lesson about the arms race of dominance. It happened in the treacherous, high-stakes jungle of the Flavet Villages Apartments in Gainesville, Florida—more specifically, in my treehouse. It wasn’t much, just a few wooden slats nailed to an old tree, but I ruled it like a king. One day, hoping to impress Tammy Whitmire, I dangled before her what I believed to be the ultimate prize: a box of Sun-Maid Raisins.

    And not just any raisins—these came in that iconic red box featuring the beaming Sun-Maid girl, her cherubic face framed by a halo of golden light, a bonnet perched on her head like a saintly crown. She cradled a bounty of grapes in her arms, promising sweetness, purity, and divine nourishment. I flashed that box like a high roller showing off a wad of cash. “Come up,” I told Tammy, “and these are all yours.”

    She was halfway up the wooden slats, eyes locked on my offering, when the unthinkable happened. From a rival treehouse, Zane Johnson’s smug little face emerged from a cluster of leaves. “Raisins?” he scoffed. “I’ve got Captain Kangaroo Cookies.”

    And just like that, I was dethroned. Tammy froze mid-climb, her expression shifting from hopeful delight to naked contempt. My raisins, once a gleaming beacon of temptation, now looked like a sad handful of shriveled failure. I watched, helpless, as she abandoned my tree and scrambled toward Zane’s perch with the urgency of a stockbroker chasing a hot tip. Within minutes, she and Zane were nestled together, giggling and feasting on his double-fudge, cream-filled cookie sandwiches—confections so decadent they made my raisins look like rations for an ascetic monk.

    As they licked chocolate from their fingers and cast pitying glances in my direction, I slumped in my treehouse, a rejected monarch in exile. At some point, I drifted into the sleep of the vanquished, only to be jolted awake by a fiery agony. Red ants—drawn, no doubt, by the scent of my untouched raisins—had swarmed my body, turning my sanctuary into a writhing hellscape. Screaming, I fled to my apartment, where my mother plunged me into a scalding bath, drowning dozens of ants still clinging to my welt-covered skin.

    As I soaked in that tub, covered in welts and drowning in existential despair, the brutal truth smacked me harder than a Captain Kangaroo cookie to the face: I was a loser. Not just in the Tammy Sweepstakes, but in the grander, merciless war of seduction and social dominance. The game wasn’t about charm, wit, or even strategic treehouse placement—it was about bait. And I had shown up to the high-stakes poker table of childhood courtship with a pathetic handful of raisins, while Zane waltzed in with a royal flush of double-fudge, cream-filled supremacy.

    That was the day the cold, reptilian logic of the universe seared itself into my brain: Raisins are for chumps. Cookies are for kings. And in the arms race of attraction, Captain Kangaroo doesn’t just win—he conquers.

  • THE ALPHA MALES OF COLD WAR TV

    THE ALPHA MALES OF COLD WAR TV

    As a small child, I had a surprisingly sharp grasp of the Cold War, thanks in no small part to my relentless viewing of The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. Russian spies Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale were my first introduction to geopolitical villainy, their cartoonish skullduggery revolving around stealing U.S. military secrets and pilfering jet fuel for nefarious purposes. These two Soviet saboteurs lurked on American soil, risking their lives for the Motherland, making it clear to me that the United States and Russia were locked in a high-stakes global chess match—one where espionage, sabotage, and suspiciously bad Russian accents were the order of the day.

    But it wasn’t just Rocky and Bullwinkle feeding my young mind a steady diet of American military might. TV shows across the board hammered home the same lesson: the true Goalkeepers of Dominance weren’t politicians or businessmen; they were highly decorated military officers, soaring through the skies and beyond. Exhibit A: I Dream of Jeannie.

    Major Anthony Nelson, astronaut, and all-American heartthrob, was living the dream—piloting spacecraft, rubbing shoulders with generals, and, most importantly, stumbling upon a genie in a bottle who just happened to be Barbara Eden in a sheer harem outfit. As far as my prepubescent brain was concerned, this was a direct confirmation of how the universe worked: the smartest, most disciplined men—those with military and scientific prowess—got the most beautiful women. If you weren’t a decorated officer or a NASA golden boy, good luck summoning a blonde bombshell out of a lamp.

    This hierarchy of Alpha Males wasn’t just something television taught me—it was practically family doctrine. My father, an infantryman turned engineer, was living proof. In fact, without his sheer resourcefulness and competitive streak, I wouldn’t exist.

    In the early 1960s, my father was stationed in Anchorage, where he and another army suitor, a certain John Shalikashvili (who would later become a U.S. General and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), found themselves locked in a battle for the romantic affections of my teenage mother. Their duel was temporarily paused over Christmas—Shalikashvili went home to Peoria, Illinois, while my father visited his family in Hollywood, Florida. But my father, ever the tactician, decided to cut his holiday short, determined to beat Shalikashvili back to Alaska and win the girl.

    The problem? His cream-colored 1959 Morris Minor was suffering from a faulty Lucas fuel filter, and the auto parts store was fresh out of replacements. Undeterred, my father—who would later become a top engineer at IBM—rigged a temporary fix using a prophylactic and a paperclip, fashioning a makeshift spring to keep the fuel pump from locking up. It was a ludicrously desperate, MacGyver-esque solution, but somehow, it worked. He made it to Seattle, caught the ferry to Alaska, and reunited with my mother a full 48 hours before Shalikashvili arrived.

    Nine months later, I was born. In the great Cold War of romance, my father had won the ultimate victory—not through military rank, but through sheer ingenuity, timing, and, apparently, latex-based automotive engineering.

  • BREAKING BAD: AN ADDICTION TO BEAUTIFUL SADNESS

    BREAKING BAD: AN ADDICTION TO BEAUTIFUL SADNESS

    Watching Breaking Bad twice isn’t just recommended—it’s a moral obligation. It’s also required to declare it the greatest TV show of all time, even if it’s only in your top three, because the fanboys won’t tolerate anything less. And, honestly, they might be right. I devoured Breaking Bad in the full religious fervor its converts describe, an experience that felt almost biblical in scope. Yes, the show is a masterclass in plotting, character arcs, reversals, and edge-of-your-seat suspense. But at its core, Breaking Bad isn’t about meth, morality, or even power. It’s about Walter White’s eyes—those cavernous, haunted wells of defeat. Without them, the show collapses.

    What makes those eyes so tragic? A single, crushing word: demoralization. Walter White begins as a good man, fighting tooth and nail to support his family, only to be rewarded with a Job-like curse—a terminal illness and a society that treats educators like disposable placeholders. Stripped of dignity, forced to work a humiliating second job washing cars for the very students who mock him, he finally breaks bad—cashing in his chemistry genius for a descent into meth-laced perdition. Breaking Bad is a tragedy in the classical sense, charting the fall of a man who was never evil, just desperate, and in his desperation, damns his own soul.

    But here’s the thing: Breaking Bad isn’t just about whether Walter White loses his soul. It’s about whether we can bear to watch him do it. And that takes me back to those eyes—deep pools of melancholy that remind me of another doomed wanderer from TV history: Bill Bixby’s Dr. David Banner in The Incredible Hulk. Like Walter White, Banner is a man crushed under the weight of a world that doesn’t understand him. Like Walter, he transforms into a monster, not because he wants to, but because he must. And like Walter, he walks alone.

    Nothing captures that loneliness quite like The Incredible Hulk’s “Lonely Man” piano theme, composed by Joe Harnell—a piece so heartbreaking, so drenched in sorrow, it practically seeps through the screen. Every episode ends the same way: Banner, shoulders slumped, hitchhiking down an endless road to nowhere, forever exiled from a world that fears him. Swap out Banner’s tattered duffel bag for Walter White’s grim smirk in the show’s final scene, and you’ll see they’re walking the same road.

    Looking back, I realize that my love for The Incredible Hulk in my teens and Breaking Bad in my middle age isn’t a coincidence. It’s an addiction—to beautiful sadness. I’m drawn to characters whose sorrow is so vast, so overwhelming, that it takes on a tragic elegance. They aren’t just suffering; they’re symphonies of suffering, played in minor keys. And I can’t stop listening.

  • THE BEEKEEPER: ALPHA MALE COSPLAY AT ITS FINEST

    THE BEEKEEPER: ALPHA MALE COSPLAY AT ITS FINEST

    Every so often, a movie swaggers onto the screen with such unshakable confidence in its own purpose—an unspoken contract between filmmakers and audience—that I can’t help but admire the sheer bravado. The Beekeeper, an Amazon Prime testosterone spectacle starring Jason Statham, is precisely that kind of film: a brutal ballet of vengeance so perfectly engineered for maximum chest-thumping satisfaction that it practically deadlifts itself.

    Our hero, Adam Clay, is a man of few words and many well-placed punches. His backstory? Nonexistent—because real action heroes don’t need exposition. They exist in a realm where stoicism equals strength, silence signals imminent violence, and full sentences are for the weak. Clay has chosen a life of peace, tending to bees on the estate of a kindly old woman, harvesting honey, and bestowing jars of liquid gold upon her as an act of gratitude. How exactly beekeeping prepares a man for high-level assassination remains a mystery, but the implication is clear: Adam Clay would rather live in the Edenic tranquility of clover honey, but if you disturb the hive, you will suffer his wrath.

    And, predictably, the hive is disturbed. A predatory phishing scam wipes out his landlady’s life savings, pushing her to despair and suicide. In that moment, Clay transforms from beekeeper of bees to beekeeper of vengeance, waging a holy war against smirking tech bros and their cabal of government-protected elites. His righteous fury catapults the audience straight back to the glory days of 1970s revenge-fueled ass-kickery, when heroes like Billy Jack and Buford Pusser solved systemic corruption with sheer brute force.

    The film’s producers deserve a standing ovation for their keen understanding of the bottomless demand for Alpha Male cosplay. This is pure cinematic pre-workout, a high-octane fantasy designed to spike aggression, validate every grueling hour in the weight room, and keep disaffected young men hypnotically tethered to their gym memberships. You, too, can be Jason Statham, if you only commit to your macros and the “warrior’s path.”

    Which brings us to the real fantasy at play here: the Monk Bro mythos—that lone, protein-fueled ascetic who carves himself into a Greek statue through sheer discipline and disdain for the modern world. The Monk Bro isn’t just a guy who lifts; he’s an ideology. He renounces traditional paths to adulthood—homeownership, relationships, emotional depth—and instead devotes himself to the only thing he can control: his body, his regimented diet, and his simmering resentment toward a world that doesn’t recognize his sacrifice.

    And here’s where The Beekeeper becomes more than just another revenge thriller: it’s a full-throated endorsement of the Monk Bro ideal. Statham’s character is the Platonic ideal of monkish masculinity—solitary, disciplined, lethal, utterly uninterested in romance, and powered entirely by righteous fury and lean proteins. This is not just an action movie; it’s a recruitment poster for every disaffected young man who has ever traded human connection for a relentless pursuit of muscle definition.

    Which brings me to the question I can’t shake: Why the bees? The movie is called The Beekeeper, yet the titular occupation has virtually nothing to do with the plot. Yes, “Beekeepers” is the name of an elite shadow organization of ex-special-ops agents, but that hardly explains the lovingly shot sequences of Statham methodically tending to his apiary. Why the rustic honey jars? Why the solemn reverence for beekeeping as a metaphor for… what, exactly? It’s as if someone spliced together John Wick and a National Geographic special on pollinators. Pooh Bear goes Punisher.

    And yet, for all its bizarre choices, the movie delivers exactly what it promises: a masterclass in stoic masculinity, a symphony of shattered bones, and a power fantasy where the hive is safe, the villains are obliterated, and every gym bro watching goes home dreaming of their own righteous war against the smug, tech-savvy forces of evil.

  • ROAD HOUSE IS A 2-HOUR INFOMERCIAL FOR TESTOSTERONE

    ROAD HOUSE IS A 2-HOUR INFOMERCIAL FOR TESTOSTERONE

    My pride as a lifelong bodybuilder took a glorious nosedive one recent evening when, sprawled on the couch like a man who had long abandoned ambition, I decided to indulge in the cinematic opus that is Road House. This film—if we must use that term generously—stars a Jake Gyllenhaal so sculpted he looks like Michelangelo, midway through carving David, got bored and said, Screw it, let’s make him a UFC fighter instead.

    Gyllenhaal plays a brooding, sinewy bouncer in Key West, grinding out a living by doing what all action heroes must—protecting a bar and its stunning owner, played by Jessica Williams, from the looming threat of corrupt mob bosses. Naturally, this leads to an inevitable showdown with their number-one enforcer: Conor McGregor, sporting the physique of a shaved grizzly bear on clenbuterol, his veins bulging like he’s one flex away from detonating. His performance lands somewhere between rabid pit bull and man who hasn’t blinked since 2019, and frankly, it’s magnificent.

    The plot? Barely there—thinner than a gas station receipt and about as consequential. It’s the classic Western trope: a stranger rides into town, cleans up the mess, and leaves behind a trail of broken bones and smoldering stares. But let’s not kid ourselves—the storyline exists solely as an excuse to showcase glistening, heaving slabs of muscle in slow motion. The camera caresses each bicep, each rippling lat, with the kind of reverence usually reserved for Renaissance art. It’s not an action movie so much as a two-hour infomercial for pre-workout supplements, high-intensity interval training, and whatever unregulated substance has been making its way through underground fight gyms.

    Somewhere between Gyllenhaal’s 47th shirtless moment and McGregor snarling like a man whose only source of hydration is pure testosterone, I found myself reaching for my phone—not to check the time, but to Google Conor McGregor’s diet plan. Because Road House isn’t just a film—it’s a flashing neon sign reminding you that you are, at best, a sentient pudding cup compared to these granite-hewn demigods. This isn’t entertainment; it’s an intervention. And the message is clear: drop the remote, pick up a kettlebell, and try to reclaim your dignity before it’s too late.

    When the credits finally rolled and I peeled myself off the couch, I had a revelation—if I wanted my memoir, Cinemorphosis: How I Become the Hero of Every Show I’ve Ever Watched, to thrive in today’s ruthless marketplace, it too needed a marketing tie-in. Just as Road House is a Trojan horse for fitness supplements and gym memberships, my book needed its own branded merchandise. But considering my subject matter—living vicariously through TV characters—the only viable promotional tie-in would be a chain of Self-Flagellation Chambers™, where disillusioned TV addicts could atone for their wasted lives. Or perhaps a TV Watcher’s Repentance Kit, complete with a burlap sack, an artisanal cilice, and a deluxe “discipline” whip for those long, dark nights of the soul.