Cinemorphosis

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  • Your Brain Is the Checkout Aisle Now

    Your Brain Is the Checkout Aisle Now

    Recently, Sam Harris told Josh Szeps something obvious but still worth repeating: since around 2009, social media has been conducting a mass psychological experiment, and the results have been, in a word, catastrophic. The rise of conspiracy junkies, rage-peddling charlatans, and democracy’s steady unraveling isn’t a glitch—it’s the inevitable outcome of letting the world’s worst instincts marinate in an algorithmic stew.

    Just now, while scrolling through YouTube, I found myself wading through a sewer of clickbait: miracle diet hacks, steroid-fueled fitness influencers, and close-up footage of animals devouring each other in 4K. And in that moment, I was struck by a flash of analog nostalgia: the checkout aisle at a 1970s grocery store.

    Remember those? Lined with The Star, The National Enquirer, and Weekly World News. Aliens abducting Elvis. Ten-minute abs. The Pope giving interviews to ghosts. They were grotesque, hilarious, and disposable. Everyone knew they were trash. They were meant for the brain-dead—gossipy or gullible folks who had nothing better to read while waiting for someone to bag their iceberg lettuce.

    But now? Now the tabloids have gone digital, evolved, and metastasized. The checkout aisle never ends. It follows us everywhere, lives in our pockets, and demands not just our attention but our belief. The zombies from the Enquirer covers have entered the bloodstream of public discourse. They’ve traded their tinfoil hats for YouTube channels, Substacks, and monetized paranoia.

    And here we are—standing on the edge, wondering if the culture can somehow hit the brakes, or if we’ve already gone over the cliff in a flaming minivan full of QAnon bumper stickers.

  • The Gods Have Spoken, and They’re Not Retweeting You

    The Gods Have Spoken, and They’re Not Retweeting You

    Look, man. Take a breath. Use some common sense. Build a little structure into your day. Cultivate a modicum of discipline. Be decent. Be helpful. That much should be obvious.

    But here’s what you need to quit: this slow-burning fantasy that you’re some kind of star, some sage of the suburbs, a public intellectual on the cusp of going viral. You’ve spent years constructing a grandiose mental biography—narrating your life as if you’re a misunderstood genius waiting to be discovered at Whole Foods.

    But you’re almost 64. And the gods—let’s be honest—have rendered their verdict. You’re not a prophet. You’re not a disruptor. You’re not the secret third Hemsworth brother who reads Proust and deadlifts.

    You’re just a man. A lucky one. Still breathing, still moving, still able to eat toast without choking.

    You’re withering. You’re going to die. And the more you try to sugarcoat that fact with heroic self-mythologizing, the more ridiculous you sound.

    Learn the art of resignation. Stop treating acceptance like it’s some cheap concession. It’s not weakness. It’s freedom.

    Yes, life’s a battle. You fight your own laziness, your distractions, your unearned vanity. But some things you don’t get to conquer:


    You won’t live forever.
    You won’t be famous.
    You won’t change the world with your podcast or your perfectly structured Substack post.

    And that’s okay.

    Be humble. Find peace in the unremarkable. Go pet your dog. Send a kind text. Make eggs. Thank the sky that you’re still here. Not trending. Not being retweeted. Not transcendent. But here.

  • The Accidental Tourist, Redux

    The Accidental Tourist, Redux

    Yesterday, we flew from LAX to Honolulu aboard a gargantuan United jet so large I half expected to see shag carpet and a spiral staircase to a smoking lounge. The thing was practically a flying condominium—wide-bodied, high-ceilinged, and just roomy enough to avoid triggering my usual claustrophobia. Even while pinned to the aisle seat as fellow passengers formed a stagnant TSA-themed flash mob to jam their overpacked luggage into the overhead bins, I managed to breathe.

    I passed the flight in my usual state of high-functioning dread, retreating into Jim Bouton’s Ball Four on Audible through my Sony noise-canceling headphones—the only legal form of sedation I can stomach at 35,000 feet. Forget reading, forget movies, forget chit-chat. Air travel reduces me to a vibrating vessel of cortisol unless I can disappear into the low, comforting drone of a narrator’s voice. It’s less entertainment and more emergency emotional triage.

    Mid-flight, I spotted a man in first class—reclined, smug, his chest puffed like a hawk surveying the terminal. He wore a Rolex Submariner, its gleaming bracelet catching the light like a flex. For a moment I considered violating my long-standing ban on watch bracelets. But then I re-centered myself. No, I thought. No shiny metal shackles. Stay true to your rubber-strap asceticism.

    As we deplaned and shuffled past the first-class cabin, it looked less like a luxury lounge and more like the aftermath of a Roman orgy. Gargantuan seats sat slumped under rumpled cashmere blankets, like spent emperors. Empty champagne flutes glistened in the overhead lights. Half-melted caviar pearls clung to fine china, and artisanal pizza crusts lay abandoned, their truffle oil sheen dulled by neglect. It was less aviation and more archaeological dig—excavating the indulgences of the airborne elite.

    After getting our luggage, we skipped the usual rental car shuttle chaos (unlike in Maui or Kauai) and simply walked across the street to pick up our reserved vehicle. It was almost… dignified.
    Pro Tip: Disconnect your Sony headphone app before navigating to the hotel, or your phone will whisper silent directions to your eardrums while you make wrong turns into private military roads.

    This morning’s Embassy Suites breakfast buffet was a competent affair—dark coffee, lukewarm eggs, and a waffle station overseen by a teenager with the haunted eyes of someone six minutes into an eight-hour shift. Still, it did the job. Sustenance secured.

    Before the trip, friends warned me that Oahu lacks the charm of the smaller islands. So far, I find that advice overstated. Yes, there are people. But they’re spread out, like tourists in a theme park operating at 60% capacity. Manageable. Tolerable. Occasionally amusing.

    What continues to fascinate me is the ABC Store phenomenon. Every island has them, and each one is a bustling shrine to overpriced macadamia nuts, sunburned tourists, and cold bottled water with just enough condensation to feel spiritual. They are the Walmarts of Waikiki, the cathedrals of caffeine and aloe, always stocked, always staffed by saints, always crawling with those of us trying to patch together a sense of stability while wearing flip-flops and SPF 70.

    As I sit here contemplating the beach and the impossibility of relaxing, I realize something: I don’t know how to vacation. I don’t know how to unplug. I don’t know how to vanish. Perhaps it’s time I reread Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist and finally admit I’m the kind of man who travels with headphones, anxieties, and an internal spreadsheet of projected discomforts.

  • Kettlebells, Clorox, Waikiki Dread, and the Need to Reread Ariel Leve’s An Abbreviated Life

    Kettlebells, Clorox, Waikiki Dread, and the Need to Reread Ariel Leve’s An Abbreviated Life

    At nearly sixty-four, I still work out like a man who thinks death is watching from the corner of the garage, arms crossed, waiting to pounce the moment I skip a kettlebell swing. I train with the same primal urgency I felt at thirteen—when muscle equaled safety, and soreness meant I still mattered. I think about workouts. I talk about them. I bore people to death with unsolicited fitness manifestos. My obsessions are a carousel of age, mortality, exercise, oatmeal breakfasts, French-press coffee, and a pathological resistance to anything resembling leisure, especially vacations.

    Which brings me to now: it’s Sunday, and in a few hours my wife’s friend will drive us to LAX so we can board a United flight to Oahu. I should be thrilled. I’m not. I feel like a hostage in my own well-appointed life. I’m going only because family life requires the occasional sacrifice—and this is mine. A three-night stay at the Embassy Suites in Waikiki Beach. Palm trees. Breezes. Ocean sunsets. All of it unnerves me. I want to be helpful, gracious, even grateful—but I am a neurotic, OCD-addled man-child in a do-rag who agonizes every morning over which chunky diver watch to wear, like I’m prepping for surgery on the space-time continuum.

    I do not want to be the dead weight on this trip.

    Still, I try to prepare. My comfort rituals are in full swing. We’re packing two memory foam pillows because hotel pillows have the spinal integrity of a wet napkin. I created a “Travel Checklist” yesterday with over 30 items. My wife flagged two of them—Clorox gel and a scrub brush—and asked why I intended to pack janitorial supplies. “To disinfect the hotel shower,” I said. She told me I’m crazy. Scratch that from the list.

    We’ll land around eleven tonight, pick up the rental car, check in, visit ABC Store #38—because no Hawaii trip is complete without wandering into an ABC Store to buy bottled water, toothpaste, and the spiritual reassurance that you haven’t forgotten something vital. Then we’ll sync our devices to the hotel WiFi, maybe sit on the bed and stare blankly at the TV for twenty minutes before collapsing into our pancake pillows (if the foam ones failed to survive the suitcase crush). By the time I feel vaguely human, it will be midnight.

    And just like that, the countdown begins.

    We fly back Wednesday. Back to LAX. Back to my routine. By Thursday morning, I’ll be at Trader Joe’s shopping for groceries, then in the garage doing kettlebell swings to reassert my identity as a disciplined, slightly unhinged older man who treats a three-day vacation like a stint in exile.

    My wife’s friends raised their eyebrows when they heard how short the trip is. “That’s all my husband can take,” she told them. I felt seen and exposed all at once. It hit me while writing this: it really is a short trip. I feel guilty for being the reason we trimmed it down to a long weekend. And yet—I’m also relieved. Too much freedom, too much unstructured joy, and I begin to unravel. I need my routines. I need the Mothership. Without them, I drift.

    I’m reminded of a memoir I read nine years ago and plan to reread after this trip: An Abbreviated Life by Ariel Leve. It’s about surviving childhood under the tyranny of a narcissistic, chaotic mother. Leve writes with scalpel precision about how chronic trauma rewires the brain, how the child adapts with emotional detachment and hypervigilance, and how adulthood becomes a performance of normalcy built on damaged circuitry. Her memoir is unsentimental, razor-sharp, and achingly honest. I admire her. In some cracked mirror, I recognize myself.

    When I return from Oahu, I’ll dig up my old copy of her book. It’ll be the perfect homecoming gift—a reminder that healing is a long-haul flight, often with delays, turbulence, and very bad pillows.

  • The Farmer’s Walk of Shame and Glory

    The Farmer’s Walk of Shame and Glory

    At thirteen, I became an Olympic weightlifter—because what else does a wiry, overachieving kid from suburban California do when puberty arrives like a freight train full of testosterone and insecurity? My coach, Lou Kruk, had the gruff certainty of a war general. His command: Squats. Lots of them. Squats were the foundation, the gospel, the holy writ. Lou didn’t care if your femurs screamed or your glutes cried for mercy—he wanted you buried under iron like a potato under mulch.

    And I obeyed. I squatted in the gym. I squatted while playing goalie in soccer. I squatted in line during PE roll call, waiting for Ernie Silvera to butcher yet another attendance list. I even squatted in front of my locker, hoping posture would hide the acne. Eventually, the kids at Earl Warren Junior High stopped calling me by my name. I was simply: Squats.

    But here’s the thing: squats weren’t just reps. They were a romantic infatuation with self-improvement. A ritual. A sacrament. I didn’t fall into squats—I plunged, like a lovesick poet into madness.

    Fast-forward to middle age—forty years and one mid-life crisis later—I traded barbell bravado for kettlebells and met a new myth: the Turkish Get-Up. It felt like choreography from some warrior ballet: lie down like a slain gladiator, then rise with a kettlebell overhead like a triumphant god reanimating himself for vengeance.

    Then came the Farmer’s Walk, and I was undone.

    Here’s the scene: I grab a 48-pound kettlebell in one hand, a 53-pounder in the other, and saunter out of my garage barefoot like a lunatic monk of pain. I circle my Honda Accord, not for superstition, but for symmetry. Then I march around the front lawn, beads of sweat trickling down my temples, tank top clinging to my body like a polyester declaration of war.

    The burn in my delts and forearms? Biblical. Especially when I’ve just finished kettlebell swings and around-the-worlds like some masochistic circus act.

    Why do I love the Farmer’s Walk?

    First: its austere simplicity. It’s manual labor disguised as exercise. I’m hauling metaphorical water, carrying invisible suitcases packed with existential weight.

    Second: it taps into a fantasy. I imagine I’m a young, vigorous farmhand, righteous and virtuous, about to earn a sizzling plate of bacon and eggs just for showing up to life.

    Third: it’s primal. I’m walking twin beasts, two snarling metal bulldogs, and I’m the alpha. My heart rate spikes, my skin gleams, and I feel, absurdly, alive.

    But with greatness comes peril. I go barefoot, which means one mistimed drop and I’m dialing podiatry from the ER. If I stub my toe, I’ll be hobbling like a Dickensian orphan. Then there’s the risk of dinging my Accord, which would be both tragic and hilarious.

    Yet the greatest threat isn’t physical—it’s psychological. I am, without a doubt, the neighborhood oddity.

    My neighbors stare. They whisper:

    “What’s he trying to prove?”
    “Is he unraveling?”
    “Is this a cry for help or a cry for gains?”
    “Why doesn’t he take up pickleball like a normal old man?”
    “Oh dear, that poor wife.”

    But despite the scrutiny, I press on. I rise each morning with the enthusiasm of a caffeinated Spartan. I brew my coffee, stir my buckwheat groats, and prepare for my ritual. And when it’s time to perform my ceremonial promenade across the lawn, kettlebells in hand and sweat on brow, I do so with one thought:

    Let them watch.

  • Naked at the Piano Store

    Naked at the Piano Store

    Last night I dreamed I was dragged, not willingly, to what can only be described as a nocturnal daycare megachurch for toddlers. A female friend insisted I come with her, and because I lack boundaries in dreams, I agreed. It was night—an odd time for finger paints and tantrums—but the daycare manager, a woman in her forties with the strained face of someone who’d long since traded dreams for wet wipes, greeted us like this was normal.

    Almost immediately, a child began howling with the primal rage of someone denied a third juice box. I was conscripted to console him. My solution? A trip to a movie theater—because nothing says early childhood healing like surround sound. The child settled, spellbound by whatever played on screen. The strange part? I couldn’t see it. Or hear it. Apparently, the film was perceptible only to children. Perhaps it was Baby’s First Metaphysics. Or an encrypted Pixar feature accessible only through a purified heart.

    At some point, without ceremony or explanation, I slipped away and found myself on a college campus in daylight. My brother was waiting in a parking lot that looked like a car dealership I had overfunded. I had more cars than common sense and a key ring jangling with so many keys it looked like I had robbed a locksmith. He wanted me to follow him to our mother’s house. It suddenly felt urgent. Cosmic, even.

    I got in my vehicle—a car awkwardly tethered to a trailer—and, for reasons known only to dream logic, I drove from the trailer. It took me several minutes to realize I was operating a vehicle from behind, without a windshield or visibility. I was essentially piloting a missile blindfolded.

    Eventually I stopped—miraculously not dead—and found myself balanced at a deadly incline on an overpass. I had parked inches from becoming a traffic statistic. Bystanders stood around, but no one was mad. No one honked. It was as if my recklessness had occurred in a different dimension of social expectation.

    Near the overpass stood a shopping plaza featuring Yamaha grand pianos, each with the sticker shock of a midlife crisis: $26,000 apiece. I considered entering, comforted by the notion that I had “deep pockets”—but the moment I thought it, I realized I was naked. Fully, publicly naked. Oddly, this didn’t mortify me. I was as invisible as a ghost no one remembered to summon.

    Still, I decided not to enter the piano store and sit bare-bottomed on an $8,000 piano bench. Even dream logic has hygiene limits.

    I wandered into a pair of adjacent, carefully curated Edens—two burial gardens laid side by side, one Jewish, one Christian. Both were equal parts reverence and real estate, immaculately landscaped like death had hired a design team. The air was golden with sunlight, the kind that flatters grief and makes you forget about decay.

    Mourners floated among the headstones in their ceremonial best—linen suits, black veils, tailored despair. The Jewish and Christian worshippers moved in peaceful parallel, as if the afterlife had negotiated a truce that the living never quite managed. Gift shops nestled among the tombstones sold tasteful souvenirs—stone etchings, pressed lilies, probably a limited-edition Torah-meets-Gospels keychain. Everything was clean, sacred, and suspiciously well-funded.

    That’s when she appeared—a Quaker woman in a starched bonnet, all radiant calm and pioneer wisdom. She approached like someone who could knit an entire theological treatise while making a pot of herbal tea. Her smile was unshakeable, beatific in that unnerving Quaker way that suggests she knows something you don’t, but she’ll never say it out loud.

    She asked, in a voice smooth as chamomile, why I looked so troubled.

    I told her the truth: “I’m lost. I’ve been driving blind—literally—and now I’ve crash-landed in a dual-faith necropolis. Also, I’m naked. No clothes, no GPS, no plan. I think I took a wrong turn at sanity.”

    She didn’t flinch. Of course she didn’t. She’d seen worse. She probably taught Sunday school to ghosts.

    She smiled. Help was at hand.

    She summoned a tall man in a radiant yellow tunic—somewhere between a monk and a spa manager—who told me the directions home were complicated and could only be followed on foot. What about my car? My trailer? My sprawling fleet of unnecessary transportation?

    “Let it go,” he said, as if he’d read Marie Kondo for the Soul.

    Suddenly, I was surrounded by Quakers. They had me sit on a wooden chair as the daylight shifted to an amber hush. They prayed in Latin, pouring syllables over me like baptismal water. It was solemn. It was sacred. It was disorienting.

    When it ended, the woman in the bonnet asked if I’d been converted.

    “Not exactly,” I said. “But I did have a religious phase in high school. I was a big fan of Rufus Jones. Fundamental Ends of Life—ever read it?”

    She hadn’t. She was more of a George Fox girl. Fair enough.

    I thanked them for the baptism but declined the full spiritual onboarding. I had priorities: get to my mother’s house, find some clothes, and maybe return for the piano if I could be properly trousered.

    I descended a steep, stone staircase into dense green foliage. At the bottom, I hoped, would be pants—and clarity.

  • Return to the Womb

    Return to the Womb

    I’m three months shy of turning sixty-four, which means I’m old enough to know better and still young enough to entertain delusions. This is a warning to the under-sixties: prepare yourselves. At some point in your late fifties, strange desires start slithering into your psyche like vines through the cracks of a neglected greenhouse. With every new creak of the knees and fresh batch of funeral notices, a part of you will yearn for what I call the Return to the Womb.

    No, not literally—though if you could slide back into a warm amniotic bath and unplug the Wi-Fi, you just might. I’m talking about a psychological regression: the desperate, half-sane longing to be swaddled in tropical heat, to dissolve into mango-scented breezes, and to vanish into a seaside stupor under a drizzle that feels vaguely divine. The dream? To marinate in comfort, far from the cacophony of deadlines and dental appointments, in a climate designed by God for the perpetually tired.

    I was born in Gainesville, Florida in 1961, and to this day I remember the fetid perfume of alligator swamps—a heady, sulfuric funk that now strikes me as oddly comforting. Like Vicks VapoRub for the soul. Is it any surprise that I scroll Zillow listings for barrier islands in South Carolina, Georgian marshlands, and steamy Floridian enclaves? I’m not looking for a home. I’m looking for a feeling—a fetal, lizard-brained feeling that I’ve convinced myself might still be hiding in the heat.

    But here’s the rub: I don’t trust this impulse. This Return to the Womb isn’t a noble call to simplicity. It’s a siren song, crooned by the dark twin of the Life Force—the same demon that tells you to skip your workout, order DoorDash, and stream ten hours of King of the Hill in a comfort-food trance. It whispers of paradise, but it’s peddling paralysis. It’s not vitality. It’s a prelude to decay, dressed in Tommy Bahama and sipping a piña colada.

    Writers like Steven Pressfield and Phil Stutz have been wise to this force for years. Pressfield calls it the Resistance. Stutz names it Part X. Adam Smith, bless his powdered wig, simply called it the need for “self-command”—the daily decision to wrest meaning from entropy, to choose virtue over sloth, action over inertia.

    During the pandemic lockdown, I got a taste of this regression. Sitting masked in my accountant’s office in February 2021, she asked if I was thinking of retirement. Was I thinking of it? Lady, I was living it—in pajamas, in slow motion, surfing real estate listings for stilt houses on Key Biscayne while sipping overpriced Nespresso and pretending buckwheat groats were the secret to immortality. My body had synchronized with the rhythm of a hot tub. I wanted nothing more than to stay submerged.

    Four years later, I still want it. I still want the warm drizzle, the midnight ocean swims, the faint smell of coconuts mingled with chlorine and sea rot. And yet—I know. I know. I know that the moment I submit to this dream of endless hammock-lounging is the moment the soul begins to curdle.

    Phil Stutz, in Lessons for Living, writes about Father Time as a pitiless, judgmental figure—not the kindly old man of greeting cards, but a stern cosmic accountant. He doesn’t care how many steps you walked or how clean your macros were. He wants to know: Did you spend your time on Earth doing something that mattered?

    As someone who’s worshipped at the altar of diver watches for two decades, who has pondered the geometry of bezels and the metaphysics of lume, I took this personally. Time is not just money. Time is judgment. Time is an indictment.

    And the Return to the Womb? It’s a slow lobotomy in paradise. It’s “brain rot” dressed as a beach vacation. It’s the comforting lie that you’ve earned an escape from purpose. But the truth is, the older I get, the stronger this impulse grows. And that, frankly, terrifies me.

    Still—and here’s the kicker—as I type this, I want it. I want the coconuts. I want the warm rain. I want the mangoes. I want the beach walks at twilight where nothing hurts and no one needs anything from me.

    We are mad creatures, aren’t we? Our intellect sees the trap. Our soul feels the pull. And some part of us, no matter how wise or weathered, still wants to disappear into the dream.

  • The Starfish Repetition Protocol

    The Starfish Repetition Protocol

    Last night I dreamed I was at a party—one of those sprawling, slightly off-kilter gatherings where everyone seems to know each other except you. Somewhere between the dip table and a hallway strung with dying fairy lights, a stranger cornered me with an unusual request: would I mind lifting a giant, heavy purple starfish—about the weight of a vintage ceramic ashtray—and pressing it onto their face?

    Why? Exfoliation, apparently.

    And so I did. I lifted the starfish, stuck it to their face, peeled it off, and reapplied. Again and again. Each repetition turned my arms into iron cables. My grip hardened. My forearms bulged like coiled ropes. I could feel the transformation happening—quietly, steadily—beneath my sleeves. I was becoming a beast through the sacred art of facial starfish resistance training.

    At first, the task filled me with low-level panic. Was I doing it right? Was this hygienic? Why me? But repetition, as always, breeds ease. Soon, I could apply and pry the purple creature with smooth, balletic rhythm, chatting breezily with other party guests while keeping time with my new invertebrate dance partner. What began as absurdity settled into ritual.

    No one questioned what I was doing. It was simply understood that this person needed the starfish, and I was the designated applier. No ceremony, no applause. Just quiet fulfillment in knowing my function. I performed my duty with the solemnity of a monk folding laundry—strong, sure, and ready to do it forever.

  • The Unspeakable Miracle of the Clean Break

    The Unspeakable Miracle of the Clean Break

    I stopped buying toilet paper three months ago. Not as an act of rebellion or eco-virtue—just as a natural consequence of no longer needing it. At first, I thought it was a fluke. But week after week, the same strange reality: quick, frictionless exits from the bathroom with nothing left to wipe. Naturally, I retraced my steps. What had changed?

    Breakfast, for starters. I began eating buckwheat groats—just under half a cup—bathed in soy milk, whey protein, and a handful of berries. Think monk breakfast with gym-bro toppings. At lunch, I ditched meat and tinned fish in favor of twelve ounces of super-firm tofu atop a cucumber salad, dressed with Greek yogurt, nutritional yeast, and whatever herbs made me feel like I was living in Tuscany.

    Dinner? Whatever my wife cooks. I’m not a monster.

    Of course, the hero here is the buckwheat. It isn’t wheat, not really—it’s a seed masquerading as a grain, gloriously gluten-free and loaded with insoluble fiber and resistant starch. In less science-y terms: it bulks, it sweeps, it feeds your gut’s good guys, and it delivers the elusive clean break. The kind of bathroom visit where nothing lingers—physically or emotionally.

    Then there’s the tofu. It doesn’t showboat. It doesn’t need to. Its gift is its non-disruption. High in protein, low in drama, tofu is the digestive equivalent of a self-driving electric car. It quietly replaces the gut’s old sputtering engine, the one bogged down by greasy meats and dairy sabotage, and makes everything hum.

    Put the two together, and suddenly, bathroom time became
 efficient. Minimal. Almost elegant. No TP required. Just a moment of stunned gratitude, a small prayer to the intestinal gods, and a confused gaze into the middle distance: Did I just hack the human body?

    And then came the real question: Do I tell people?

    Because while we’ll chat endlessly about protein macros, creatine, cholesterol, and God help us, cold plunges—we go silent on the topic of TP use and the miracle of no longer needing it. And yet, so many are secretly miserable. The bloating, the straining, the endless wiping. And here I am with the holy grail—and I’m supposed to stay quiet?

    No, I won’t promise this will work for everyone. But if you’re even slightly intrigued by the promise of digestive liberation, consider the humble buckwheat. Consider the tofu. And maybe, just maybe, you’ll find yourself typing from a place of lightness, efficiency, and radiant intestinal peace.

  • What Fifty Years of a High-Protein Diet Taught Me

    What Fifty Years of a High-Protein Diet Taught Me

    These days, there’s no shortage of content promising health, strength, and longevity through high-protein diets. Everyone’s got a take. I can only give you mine—earned through fifty years of trial, sweat, and a steady stream of protein powder.

    I first learned the value of protein in 1974. I was thirteen, a Junior Olympic weightlifter, and determined not to be outlifted by anyone with better genetics or better snacks. I made it my mission to eat no fewer than 160 grams of protein a day. That habit never left. For the past five decades—save for the occasional vacation detour—I’ve kept my intake between 160 and 200 grams daily. Today, approaching 64, I train in my garage like a teenager on a mission, kettlebells swinging, breath steady, muscles intact.

    Protein isn’t a trend. It’s foundational. Just the other day, I was driving my daughter and her friend to Knott’s Berry Farm when her friend said, “I think I’m going to faint.” I asked if she’d eaten breakfast. “Yes,” she said. “A bowl of fruit.” I told her the truth: “That’s zero protein. No wonder you’re crashing. First thing you do when we park—go find yourself a carne asada burrito.” I told her to eat a meal with forty grams of steak-powered resurrection.

    Here’s what people still don’t get: if you don’t eat at least 40 grams of protein in a meal, you’ll be starving and sluggish thirty minutes later. It’s not magic; it’s physiology. Back in the day, I inhaled bodybuilding magazines. Everyone warned me: “Don’t believe those. They’re just selling supplements.” Sure, some of them were. But when it came to protein, they weren’t wrong. The numbers don’t lie. For men, 160 grams a day is a solid target. For women, around 120. I’ve lived it. I’ve trained on it. And I’ve aged with it. The science has finally caught up to what lifters have known all along.