Cinemorphosis

Tag: books

  • Who Controls the Story Controls the People (college essay prompt)

    Who Controls the Story Controls the People (college essay prompt)

    Using Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass, bell hooks’ essay “Learning in the Shadow of Race and Class,” Ahmir ‘Questlove’ Thompson’s documentary Summer of Soul, and Elvis Mitchell’s documentary Is That Black Enough for You?!? as your central texts, write a 1,200-word argumentative essay analyzing the claim that art, music, film, education, and literacy function as weapons against cultural erasure and oppression.

    As you develop your argument, examine how dominant cultures maintain power not only through physical oppression and economic inequality but also through controlling memory, representation, literacy, visibility, and storytelling itself. Consider how marginalized groups are often denied the power to narrate their own existence and how reclaiming narrative ownership becomes an act of resistance, survival, and humanization.

    In Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, analyze how slavery denied enslaved people literacy, birthdates, ancestry, and historical identity in order to reduce them to property rather than persons. Consider how Douglass presents reading and writing as revolutionary acts that allow him to reclaim his humanity and resist a system designed to silence him. How does his memoir itself function as an act of historical recovery and resistance against cultural erasure?

    In “Learning in the Shadow of Race and Class,” analyze how bell hooks describes education as both a pathway toward empowerment and a site of alienation, performance, and cultural conflict. How does hooks show that race and class shape access to power, belonging, and self-definition? Why do marginalized students often feel pressure to erase or reinvent parts of themselves in elite educational spaces? To what extent does education demand assimilation into dominant cultural codes?

    In Summer of Soul, analyze how the Harlem Cultural Festival celebrated Black artistry, spirituality, joy, and political consciousness during a period of racial upheaval. Why was this massive cultural event largely erased from mainstream historical memory while Woodstock became mythologized as the defining music festival of the era? How does Questlove use archival footage, music, interviews, and storytelling to recover a forgotten history and challenge the marginalization of Black cultural memory?

    In Is That Black Enough for You?!?, analyze how Elvis Mitchell critiques Hollywood’s long history of reducing Black identity to stereotypes while marginalizing Black filmmakers, actors, and stories. How did Black cinema in the 1960s and 1970s challenge Hollywood’s control over representation? How does Mitchell argue that recovering overlooked Black films and artists becomes an act of cultural restoration and resistance against historical erasure?

    As part of your argument, analyze not only the ideas presented in these works but also the rhetorical and artistic methods used by the creators themselves. Consider how autobiography, music, archival footage, imagery, storytelling, editing, voice, and film structure shape audience perception and resist cultural invisibility.

    You must also address at least one counterargument. For example, some critics may argue that art, music, and representation alone are insufficient forms of resistance because symbolic visibility does not necessarily produce economic equality, political power, or institutional change. Others may argue that mainstream culture eventually commodifies resistance movements and transforms them into profitable entertainment. Respond to these objections by evaluating the actual power and limitations of cultural expression.

    As you conclude your essay, consider the larger implications of narrative control. Why do oppressive systems repeatedly attempt to regulate literacy, storytelling, education, historical memory, and representation? What happens to individuals and societies when marginalized groups lose the power to preserve and narrate their own histories? Finally, consider how modern digital culture, social media, AI, and algorithm-driven entertainment continue to shape which voices are amplified, marginalized, archived, or forgotten.

    For your introductory paragraph, explain how the struggle for the dominant narrative is presented in the documentary We Beat the Dream Team and how the film shows that battles over narrative power extend far beyond race into many areas of culture. Analyze how individuals and groups compete to control public memory, define legitimacy, shape historical perception, and claim symbolic victory. Show how the documentary demonstrates that the fight for the dominant narrative is ultimately a struggle over identity, status, recognition, and cultural power.

    Requirements:

    • 1,200 words minimum
    • MLA format
    • MLA Works Cited page with 5 sources
    • Use evidence from all five texts
    • Include a clear thesis with mapping components
    • Include at least one counterargument and rebuttal
    • Analyze specific scenes, passages, quotations, or examples rather than merely summarizing
    • Develop a focused argument about the relationship between narrative ownership, cultural memory, identity, and power

  • How G-Shock Flattened Twenty Years of Watch Collecting

    How G-Shock Flattened Twenty Years of Watch Collecting

    Yesterday I was watching myself play piano on my YouTube channel when I noticed something strange. I could barely focus on the music because my eyes kept drifting toward the Casio G-Shock GW-7900 strapped to my wrist. The watch looked so perfectly correct, so deeply aligned with whatever strange creature I have apparently become, that I caught myself thinking: “That’s it. That’s me. I’m a G-Shock guy.”

    A few hours later I was watching a true-crime docuseries when one of the detectives appeared wearing a Casio G-Shock GWM530. The moment I saw it, some invisible courtroom inside my brain slammed down the gavel.

    Case closed.

    I only want atomic time now.
    I only want resin on my wrist.
    I only want G-Shocks.

    The realization was both satisfying and faintly disturbing, like discovering your subconscious has quietly joined a militant survivalist sect while you were out buying groceries.

    What makes the experience unsettling is that I already possess five beautiful Seiko divers—carefully curated watches representing more than twenty years of obsessive collecting. Those Seikos were not random purchases. They were the result of decades of refinement, experimentation, buying, selling, regretting, and gradually arriving at what I believed was horological enlightenment. They sat in the watch box like sacred artifacts of a fully realized identity.

    Then, roughly four months ago—which psychologically feels more like four geological eras ago—I bought a Casio G-Shock Frogman.

    And the wrecking ball swung.

    The entire architecture of my watch hobby collapsed like a condemned casino in Las Vegas. Out of the rubble emerged a new religion constructed from resin, atomic synchronization, solar charging, and Japanese apocalypse-proof overengineering. I now own five G-Shocks.

    One of them, the Casio G-Shock G-9300 Mudman, was supposed to be its atomic sibling, the GW-9300. The eBay seller made an honest mistake and shipped the non-atomic version instead. Under normal circumstances this would have triggered a small existential crisis because I have apparently reached the point where the absence of Multi Band 6 synchronization feels like spiritual imprecision.

    But strangely, I didn’t care.

    I bought the watch for half price and immediately designated it my “Hawaii Watch,” reasoning that one does not require atomic synchronization while standing beside an edenic waterfall in Kauai pretending, however briefly, that mortality and property taxes do not exist.

    The whole experience reminds me of something my wife once said about men: they crave violent conversion experiences. In my heart, I know she’s right.

    A suburban man often longs for cataclysm without actual destruction. He wants upheaval without bankruptcy. Reinvention without divorce. Apocalypse without inconvenience. Since detonating one’s real life would be irresponsible, the energy gets redirected into symbolic conversions:

    • watches,
    • motorcycles,
    • kettlebells,
    • backpacks,
    • audio systems,
    • tactical flashlights,
    • sourdough starters,
    • wilderness knives.

    The external change may seem trivial, but psychologically it lands like a thunderclap because obsessive men experience identity through systems of allegiance.

    Objectively speaking, shifting from Seiko divers to G-Shocks is not an event of civilizational importance. No treaties were signed. No governments fell. The stock market did not tremble. Yet inside the mind of an obsessive enthusiast, the transition feels spiritually seismic.

    It genuinely reminds me of Losing My Religion.

    The old religion was:

    • mechanical divers,
    • steel bracelets,
    • sweeping seconds hands,
    • vintage romance,
    • and maritime mythology.

    The new religion is:

    • Tough Solar,
    • Multi Band 6,
    • atomic precision,
    • resin cases,
    • and watches designed to survive tectonic activity.

    The funniest part is that I fully recognize the absurdity of all this. I understand perfectly well that I am a grown man psychologically reorganizing himself around timekeeping devices like a monk discovering a new denomination of Protestantism.

    Which is precisely why I can’t help laughing at myself.

  • The Loneliness Entertainment Complex

    The Loneliness Entertainment Complex

    There is something faintly dystopian about solitary people spending hours online watching other solitary people perform the microscopic rituals of daily life: tying shoelaces, cracking open cans of diet soda, pouring kibble into a cat’s bowl, unloading groceries with monk-like precision, folding laundry beneath soft lighting while melancholy piano music drifts through the background like emotional Febreze.

    At some point loneliness ceased being merely a condition to endure and became a genre of entertainment.

    You are not simply alone anymore. You are curating aloneness, aestheticizing it, monetizing it, and binge-watching it as though isolation itself were a luxury lifestyle brand. The modern internet increasingly resembles a vast digital aquarium filled with emotionally sedated people observing one another through glass while reassuring themselves that this counts as connection.

    I sometimes wonder if this phenomenon functions as a form of emotional jiu-jitsu. Instead of confronting the pain of alienation directly, people transform it into a consumer product. The loneliness does not disappear; it merely changes costume. By packaging solitude into soothing, carefully curated content, the sharp edge of disconnection becomes dulled. The ache remains, but now it arrives with ambient lighting, artisanal tea preparation, and a Scandinavian throw blanket.

    We now inhabit a condition I would call Consumptive Solitude: the state in which loneliness evolves from a painful human experience into a consumable form of entertainment. Isolated individuals compulsively watch other isolated individuals perform the mundane choreography of domestic life in order to simulate companionship without assuming the emotional risks, obligations, friction, compromise, or unpredictability of genuine human intimacy.

    This pathology is explored in Faith Hill’s essay “The Strange Appeal of the Solitude Influencer,” in which she examines the rise of what she calls “solitude influencers” and what their popularity reveals about contemporary society. These influencers present carefully curated lives of performative isolation: beautiful apartments, immaculate routines, quiet mornings, tasteful meals, dim lighting, tasteful melancholy, and endless scenes of one person existing in exquisitely controlled seclusion.

    The performance contains all the machinery of attention addiction without the inconvenience of actual friendship. There are no difficult conversations, no emotional demands, no conflicting schedules, no awkward silences, no disappointments, and no compromise. The viewer receives the emotional atmosphere of companionship without having to endure another person’s needs or complexity. It is intimacy stripped of reciprocity.

    Naturally, narcissism plays some role in this ecosystem. But narcissism alone does not explain the appeal. Control may be the deeper force at work. Real life is chaotic, humiliating, exhausting, and unpredictable. The solitude influencer offers the fantasy of total environmental management. Everything is calm. Everything is clean. Everything is curated. Nothing intrudes.

    For burned-out viewers, the effect can become psychologically narcotic, almost ASMR-like in its soothing predictability. After spending the day navigating economic stress, social tension, workplace absurdity, family obligations, and digital overload, people retreat into videos of someone silently pouring a glass of chablis while a Haydn sonata drifts through a minimalist apartment that appears untouched by conflict, debt, sickness, or despair.

    As I read Hill’s essay, I kept thinking about the word infantilization.

    The solitude influencer increasingly functions like a pacifier for emotionally exhausted adults. Millions of viewers recalibrate their nervous systems through these carefully controlled simulations of peace and containment. Some no longer wish to engage fully with the real world. Others feel incapable of doing so. Still others may have quietly surrendered altogether.

    And this is where the phenomenon begins to feel genuinely troubling.

    I suspect there is something psychologically regressive about spending one’s days and nights watching solitary performers enact sanitized domestic rituals for passive spectators. At some point, watching people “play house” begins replacing the harder work of building a life oneself. The performance of adulthood slowly replaces adulthood itself.

    Because you can only simulate intimacy, routine, domesticity, and emotional safety for so long before you begin forgetting what genuine growth requires: risk, struggle, awkwardness, responsibility, sacrifice, and contact with real people whose existence cannot be muted, paused, skipped, unsubscribed from, or optimized into aesthetic tranquility.

    The solitude influencer offers peace without vulnerability, companionship without obligation, and emotional atmosphere without genuine human entanglement.

    And that may be precisely why so many people find it irresistible.

  • Waiting for Moments That Never Come

    Waiting for Moments That Never Come

    I shouldn’t indulge in self-pity or perform the aging writer’s ritual of staring mournfully into the middle distance while pretending the universe failed to recognize his genius. I have much to be grateful for. Still, as retirement approaches, I feel obligated to conduct a private audit of my creative life, and the results are complicated.

    At this stage, I imagined I would feel artistically established, as though decades of writing would eventually crystallize into some stable literary identity. Instead, every morning I wake up and begin again from scratch like a man rebuilding a sandcastle the tide erased overnight. I sit before the keyboard hoping language will once again perform its small daily miracle.

    To my credit, I recently completed a collection of eleven stories. That matters. The stories revolve around men whose obsessions slowly consume them: bodybuilders, hedonists, nihilists, dandies, counterfeit aristocrats, and assorted spiritual casualties wandering through the desert of modern American masculinity. I titled the collection What Does It Profit a Man to Gain the World and Lose His Soul?—which sounds either appropriately biblical or like the warning label on an energy drink marketed to divorced men in sports cars.

    The stories took years to finish because they were rewritten endlessly. Rewrites of rewrites of rewrites of rewrites. Entire paragraphs were dismantled and reconstructed so many times they resembled neighborhoods destroyed by artillery fire and rebuilt brick by brick. Yet I am grateful for the struggle because the stories finally feel as though they exist in the form they were always trying to reach. The characters and scenarios have haunted me for decades, lingering in my imagination like unresolved ghosts demanding literary exorcism. Finishing the book feels less like triumph than relief.

    I harbor no fantasy that these stories will suddenly launch me into literary celebrity. To keep myself psychologically grounded, I think about Rick Bass and his story collection The Watch from the 1990s. Those stories struck me as wild, profound, and emotionally unhinged in the best possible way—worthy of Gogol or Chekhov—yet Bass never ascended into the literary superstardom our culture reserves for a tiny handful of writers. He flourished artistically while remaining, to the broader public, relatively obscure.

    But obscurity is crowded with greatness.

    I think too of one of my favorite bands, The Trash Can Sinatras. I still remember standing inside a grimy T-shirt store on Hollywood Boulevard flipping through posters of The Smiths and Morrissey when “Obscurity Knocks” came over the speakers. The song hit me with such strange emotional precision that I immediately bought their album Cake and became a devotee for life.

    And yet did The Trash Can Sinatras become massively famous? Hardly.

    They nearly disappeared altogether before a small but stubborn online following revived them in the early 2000s. They continue making music today with almost monastic devotion despite occupying only a microscopic corner of the attention economy. As I write this, their official YouTube channel has roughly 3,500 subscribers—a number that feels morally absurd when one considers the beauty and intelligence of their music. In the metrics of the modern algorithmic carnival, they reside near the basement. In my mind, they stand near the summit.

    But perhaps my indignation itself reveals the problem.

    I keep imposing upon artists an American mythology that has been drilled into my brain since childhood: the myth of the self-made man. In this story, success arrives as visible conquest. The hero works relentlessly, overcomes humiliation and doubt, climbs the mountain, and finally receives public veneration, wealth, applause, and symbolic immortality. The crowd cheers. The parade begins. The nectar is consumed.

    Except reality rarely behaves this way.

    Many artists labor for decades, sharpen their craft, discover their authentic voice, and produce extraordinary work only to become beloved by small circles of devoted admirers rather than the masses. They are not failures. The dice simply landed where they landed. They flourished artistically without the bestseller list, Netflix adaptation, sold-out stadium, or blue-check coronation from the gods of cultural relevance.

    Even Dante Alighieri died in relative hardship. History later built the cathedral.

    As an American raised on success mythology—from Horatio Alger fantasies to that smug little children’s story about the train repeating “I think I can”—I find it difficult to fully abandon the fantasy that hard work eventually produces not merely accomplishment but wholeness. Somewhere deep inside me remains the childish belief that if I simply grind long enough, write hard enough, revise carefully enough, and suffer nobly enough, some grand validation ceremony awaits at the end.

    But one of the greatest scenes in The Wire dismantles that illusion with brutal clarity. Detective Lester Freamon warns Jimmy McNulty that police work will not save him. There is no grand parade waiting. No expensive watch. No final moment where the universe declares the suffering worthwhile. Lester tells him plainly: “This job will not save you, Jimmy. It won’t make you whole.”

    That line haunts me because it applies to almost everything Americans worship.

    Career.
    Status.
    Achievement.
    Recognition.
    Fame.
    Productivity.

    We imagine these things will rescue us from our unfinished selves. But Lester understands the deeper truth: life is happening elsewhere while we wait for the grand moment of validation that never fully arrives. As he says, life is “the shit that happens while you’re waiting for moments that never come.”

    What does it mean, then, to “get a life”?

    Perhaps it means accepting that there is no final coronation waiting beyond the horizon. No guaranteed fanfare. No cosmic scoreboard fairly distributing glory according to merit. Perhaps maturity means seeing clearly that art is not a vending machine where years of labor reliably produce fame and transcendence. Sometimes the reward is simply the work itself, the strange companionship of characters who haunted you into existence, and the small circle of people who genuinely understand what you made.

    Perhaps that has to be enough.

  • Learning to Speak Rich

    Learning to Speak Rich

    Known publicly as bell hooks in honor of her grandmother, hooks explores in her essay “Learning in the Shadow of Race and Class” a deeply conflicted relationship with education, class mobility, race, and selfhood. Her story is not a simple celebration of academic success. It is the story of a woman who discovers that entering elite educational spaces often demands a painful reshaping—even partial erasure—of the self.

    hooks describes growing up in a deeply religious working-class black family defined by economic scarcity and moral restraint. Her parents taught her not to expect luxury, comfort, or indulgence. Desire itself carried a faint odor of danger and shame. Material appetites were viewed not as healthy ambitions but as temptations capable of corrupting the soul. As a result, hooks explains that she learned “the art of sublimation and repression,” training herself to suppress wants, ambitions, and emotional needs in the name of survival and moral discipline.

    When she entered college close to home, she found herself stranded in an overwhelmingly white social environment populated by affluent young women whose values seemed completely foreign to her own. Many of these students treated her with ridicule, cruelty, and casual contempt. hooks describes them almost as alien life forms—young women so economically secure and psychologically entitled that they moved through the world with complete confidence in their own importance. They expressed their desires openly and unapologetically, behaving as though comfort, pleasure, beauty, and success were their birthrights.

    To the young hooks, raised in a culture of modesty and self-denial, this behavior was shocking. She associated upper-class aspiration with vanity, ostentation, envy, and cruelty. Yet she also recognized that these women possessed a kind of social confidence unavailable to her own world of repression and apology. Their existence revealed how class shapes not only material conditions but body language, speech, appetite, ambition, and assumptions about one’s place in the world.

    Not all of the white students fit this mold. hooks found friendship with several women from modest economic backgrounds who shared her skepticism toward vanity and excess. These relationships gave her temporary relief from the alienation surrounding her.

    Still miserable at the college, hooks encountered an English professor educated at Stanford University who encouraged her to leave and attend Stanford instead. Her parents reacted with terror. To them, California represented a modern Babylon where humility dissolved into narcissism, vanity, materialism, and sinful desire. Yet hooks could not imagine remaining at the all-white college. Stanford at least offered the possibility of intellectual and racial community, so she persuaded her parents to let her go west.

    Stanford overwhelmed her senses immediately. The campus radiated wealth, ambition, appetite, and institutional power. The architecture itself seemed to proclaim that greatness—especially economic greatness—was the natural destiny of those who studied there. hooks realized quickly that elite universities do not merely educate students academically; they train them socially and psychologically for membership within elite classes. Networking, status management, and the performance of confidence were woven into the institution’s culture as thoroughly as lectures and exams.

    The message Stanford communicated was unmistakable: if you were already wealthy, your job was to become even wealthier and more powerful. If you were poor, your task was to abandon the habits, assumptions, insecurities, and cultural signals associated with poverty and remake yourself in the image of the elite.

    Although hooks found less overt racism at Stanford, she encountered something she found equally disturbing: unapologetic class contempt. Wealthy students and professors openly mocked and dismissed working-class people. She recalls hearing students speak about poorer Americans with startling derision, as though poverty itself reflected stupidity, vulgarity, or moral failure.

    Most shocking to hooks was discovering that this elitism extended into segments of the black intellectual community as well. She describes encountering members of the “black diaspora” who displayed the same contempt toward the poor and working class that she had seen among affluent whites. Poverty was treated not merely as an economic condition but as a psychological defect requiring correction and purification. hooks realized that race alone did not guarantee solidarity; class divisions fractured black communities from within.

    Over time, hooks came to believe that academic success for poor students often requires a painful form of self-renunciation. To become educated within elite institutions meant learning new codes of speech, dress, posture, behavior, and intellectual performance. One had to absorb the language and cultural signals of the privileged classes while distancing oneself from working-class origins. In effect, students from poorer backgrounds often succeed only by engaging in a kind of controlled self-erasure.

    Education, then, becomes morally complicated. It is not simply enlightenment or liberation. It is also performance. Mimicry. Adaptation. Sycophancy. Reinvention.

    By the time hooks earned her doctorate and became a professor herself, she felt not uncomplicated pride but deep ambivalence. She had entered the world of privilege while remaining emotionally loyal to the working-class culture that shaped her identity. She occupied elite academic spaces while refusing to sever her connection to the people and values from which she came.

    I have had the privilege of teaching hooks’ essays to college students since the 1980s—across five different decades of teaching. Of all her works, “Learning in the Shadow of Race and Class” remains my favorite because it exposes the emotional and psychological costs hidden beneath the mythology of higher education.

    Next semester, I plan to assign an essay asking students to evaluate the claim that hooks ultimately portrays higher education as a process requiring painful self-transformation. According to this interpretation, success in college often demands that students distance themselves from their past, imitate the language and cultural behaviors of professors and elites, and absorb the social signals associated with wealth and status. Education therefore becomes not merely intellectual growth, but a complicated mixture of genuine learning, shame, performance, ambition, self-betrayal, and social reinvention.

    Here is the 1,000-word argumentative essay prompt:

    In her essay “Learning in the Shadow of Race and Class,” bell hooks presents higher education not simply as a path toward knowledge and liberation, but as a psychologically painful process of social transformation. As a working-class black woman moving through predominantly white and elite educational spaces, hooks experiences education as both empowering and alienating. She discovers that academic success often requires students from poorer or marginalized backgrounds to adopt new forms of speech, dress, behavior, ambition, and self-presentation associated with wealth and class privilege. At times, this transformation feels less like intellectual growth and more like self-erasure.

    hooks argues that elite colleges and universities do more than teach information. They also train students to perform class identity. Students learn not only what to think, but how to speak, dress, network, express ambition, suppress insecurity, and project confidence in ways that signal belonging within elite professional culture. For hooks, the process becomes morally complicated because upward mobility often demands distance from one’s family, working-class roots, cultural identity, or former self. Success may require what hooks describes as forms of repression, performance, mimicry, and reinvention.

    Write a 1,000-word argumentative essay in which you evaluate the following claim:

    To become successful and “educated” within elite academic culture, students from working-class or marginalized backgrounds often feel pressure to reinvent themselves by adopting the language, behaviors, attitudes, and social codes of the privileged classes, even when doing so creates feelings of shame, alienation, self-betrayal, or disconnection from their past.

    In your essay, analyze how hooks portrays education as both liberating and psychologically costly. To what extent do you agree with her argument? Does higher education genuinely expand human freedom and opportunity, or does it pressure students into performing a new identity in order to gain acceptance and success? Is adapting to elite academic culture a necessary form of growth and professional development, or does it require students to abandon important parts of themselves?

    As you develop your argument, you may consider some of the following questions:

    • How do class, race, and economic background shape a student’s experience in college?
    • What social “codes” do elite universities teach beyond academics?
    • Is there a difference between education and social performance?
    • Does professional success require conformity?
    • Can students remain loyal to their working-class roots while entering elite institutions?
    • Does higher education reward authenticity or performance?
    • Is self-reinvention a healthy form of growth or a form of self-betrayal?
    • How do speech, clothing, confidence, networking, and cultural tastes function as markers of class?
    • Are elite universities spaces of liberation, assimilation, or both?

    You may use personal observations, contemporary examples, films, books, interviews, or other sources to support your argument. Possible connections could include social media culture, networking culture, corporate professionalism, influencer culture, first-generation college experiences, code-switching, or the pressure to cultivate a “successful” personal brand.

    Requirements:

    • Clear argumentative thesis
    • At least three mapping components in the thesis
    • Counterargument and rebuttal
    • Specific references to hooks’ essay
    • MLA format
    • Approximately 1,000 words

    Your goal is not merely to summarize hooks’ experiences, but to evaluate the larger argument her essay makes about education, class mobility, identity, and the hidden emotional costs of social advancement.

  • Growing Up Obsessed with Barbara Eden

    Growing Up Obsessed with Barbara Eden

    As a kid growing up in the 60s, I became obsessed with I Dream of Jeannie.

    Obsessed may actually be too mild a word.

    I knew every episode by heart. I could anticipate each joke, each misunderstanding, each twitch of Jeannie’s magical powers. None of this diminished my devotion. I was hopelessly enthralled by Jeannie herself, played by Barbara Eden.

    Eventually she began visiting me in dreams.

    Whenever she appeared, beautiful aching music accompanied her presence. She would float through my bedroom window, take my hand, and carry me around the world to exotic destinations glowing beneath moonlight. When I awoke, I could still smell her lingering in the room—honey, sweat, nectar, patchouli—the impossible perfume of longing itself.

    The dreams continued throughout my childhood.

    Then one day I encountered two beautiful sisters, and after that encounter Jeannie stopped visiting me in my dreams forever.

    This story is about those sisters.

    It happened during the spring of 1973 on a warm California afternoon after sixth grade classes had ended. The school bus dropped us off near Crow Canyon Road, and several of us wandered across the street to the local 7-Eleven to buy Slurpees before making the miserable uphill trek home along Greenridge Road.

    Inside the store, the radio was playing “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl),” that melancholy yacht-rock masterpiece about romantic disappointment disguised as cheerful singalong music. The frozen-drink machines hummed. The air smelled of sugar syrup, cardboard pizza, and asphalt baking in the afternoon heat.

    That was when the Horsefault sisters entered.

    They were impossible not to notice.

    One was in eighth grade, the other already a sophomore in high school. Both had long blonde hair, freckles, high cheekbones, and mischievous blue eyes that radiated the dangerous energy of girls who enjoyed creating problems merely to see what would happen next. To my sixth-grade brain, they resembled slightly feral versions of Barbara Eden.

    One of them smiled at me and asked:

    “Do you want to see our rabbit?”

    Now, to be clear, I had absolutely no interest in rabbits.

    Had two pimply boys invited me to inspect a caged rodent behind a farmhouse, I would have fled instantly while clutching my cherry Slurpee in terror. But these were beautiful older girls, and beautiful older girls possess the supernatural ability to make adolescent boys enthusiastically volunteer for situations that would otherwise trigger police investigations.

    “Yes,” I said immediately. “I’d love to see the rabbit.”

    Naturally.

    So I followed them.

    We left the 7-Eleven parking lot and walked perhaps a hundred yards down a dusty trail lined with dry horse manure and tall grass swaying in the afternoon breeze. Beyond the field stood their weathered farmhouse, half hidden behind eucalyptus trees and fencing. The place had the unsettling atmosphere of a rural fairy tale where attractive maidens lure travelers into barns never to be heard from again.

    Behind a thicket of bushes stood the rabbit cage.

    It was large enough to imprison a medium-sized farm animal—or an unsuspecting sixth grader. The cage door hung slightly open, and a heavy chain lock dangled ominously from the latch.

    I peered inside.

    No rabbit.

    At that exact moment the sisters burst into shrieking laughter and lunged at me.

    They grabbed my arms and tried to shove me into the cage.

    The truth arrived instantly and with horrifying clarity: there had never been a rabbit. The rabbit was merely bait. I had walked directly into an ambush orchestrated by two hormonally deranged Valkyries whose apparent goal was to lock me inside a cage and transform me into some sort of suburban hostage.

    But they had underestimated me.

    At eleven years old I was already deep into my future bodybuilding destiny and absurdly strong for my age. What followed was less an abduction than a full-contact barnyard wrestling match. We grappled outside the cage rolling through dry grass, hay, and dirt while clouds of dust exploded around us like scenes from a low-budget western.

    Nearby chickens erupted into chaos.

    Inside the coop they flapped wildly, clucked hysterically, and hurled themselves about with the alarm of creatures witnessing either a murder or a satanic fertility ritual.

    The sisters were laughing so hard they could barely breathe. Sweat darkened their halter tops and cutoffs as they struggled unsuccessfully to overpower me. Eventually, exhausted and defeated, they abandoned the mission.

    The moment their grip weakened, I escaped.

    I sprinted home outraged.

    Not merely embarrassed—outraged.

    They had attempted to steal my freedom.

    I stormed into the living room and did what I always did when emotionally overwhelmed by the complexities of existence: I turned on I Dream of Jeannie.

    That night Jeannie came to me one final time.

    As always, she floated silently through my bedroom window accompanied by that beautiful aching music that seemed to emerge from nowhere and everywhere simultaneously.

    But this time something was different.

    She looked sad.

    “The Horsefault sisters want you now,” she explained softly. “It’s time for you to return their affections. They are real girls. Girls who do not drift through bedroom windows inside moonlit clouds.”

    I argued desperately.

    I told her I loved her.

    But she only smiled with melancholy tenderness before slowly retreating backward into a gray mist that swallowed her completely.

    Then she vanished forever.

    After that night, the dreams changed.

    No more Jeannie.

    No more moonlit flights across the world.

    Instead my dreams became feverish and earthly. They featured rabbit cages beneath silver moonlight, hayfields trembling in the wind, and sweat-soaked girls in cutoffs and halter tops chasing me through cornfields while laughing hysterically.

    “Come out, come out, wherever you are!” they cried.

    Over and over.

    And just like that, childhood fantasy gave way to adolescent bewilderment.

    I never watched I Dream of Jeannie again.

  • The Lost Men of Hobcallow

    The Lost Men of Hobcallow

    At first, my colleagues in the small town generously excused my increasingly bizarre wardrobe as “youthful exuberance.” I was a young Bay Area transplant trying to assert some “big city” flair in a desert outpost where fashion trends arrived three decades late. But one fateful day, I pushed the boundaries beyond reason. I strutted into the campus like a peacock ready for a ballroom dance-off, dressed in tight navy blue Girbaud slacks that practically screamed, “I’m here to give a lecture, but I might also break into interpretive dance.” My feet were clad in velveteen Italian loafers, complete with tassels and tiny bells—yes, bells. Who needs socks when you’ve got bells? 

    But the crown jewel of this sartorial disaster—was the sage-whisper green pirate shirt. And when I say “pirate shirt,” I’m not talking about a whimsical Halloween costume. I’m talking about a translucent, billowing monstrosity that looked like it was plucked from the wardrobe of Captain Jack Sparrow after a particularly wild night of plundering. My bulging pecs were practically hosting their own TED Talk through the sheer fabric, and the effect was more Moulin Rouge than Macbeth.

    By the time the English Department Chair, Moses Okoro, finally called me into his office, his patience had clearly evaporated. He looked at me not as one looks at a colleague, but as one studies a raccoon that has somehow wandered into a faculty meeting wearing cologne.

    I walked in, and there was Moses sitting behind his desk. His feet were ensconced in some sort of luxurious foot-warmer device, a necessary accessory for his gout. He flashed me a grin that was half-amused, half-pitying like a man witnessing someone try to cook a steak with a hairdryer.

    “Jeff,” he began, in a tone that suggested he was both fond of me and horrified by me. “You’re a striking figure, I’ll give you that. But this—” he gestured vaguely at the shimmering diaphanous green pirate shirt draped over my torso—“is taking things too far. I can see more than I care to.” 

    I glanced down at my exposed chest and, for the first time, realized that my pecs were starring in their own soap opera under that filmy fabric. Moses continued, “I get it—a man with your bodybuilding prowess wants to flaunt it. But, Jeff, this is an academic setting, not Studio Fifty-Four. Be more of a professor and less of a Desert Peacock.”

    He then instructed me to march straight home, ditch the pirate couture, and return dressed in something befitting a person who isn’t auditioning for a Vegas show. Before I could slink away in shame, Moses added with a smile, “Jeff, I like you. You’ve got potential. But let me remind you, this town is a fishbowl. Whatever you do in the morning, the whole town knows by lunchtime.”

    That was the Hobcallow way—a place where the smallest fashion faux pas became a full-blown scandal before the sun hit noon. As I left his office, I knew that my pirate shirt days were over, along with my delusions of dressing like the love child of Captain Morgan and Don Juan.

    With a sigh, I trudged home to swap my dreams of high fashion for something a bit more… professorial.

    I was grateful I wasn’t fired. I drove back to my apartment and resolved to calibrate myself to the customs of this small desert town. Fresh off the bus from the bustling Bay Area, I found that being marooned in this sun-bleached corner of California had affected my judgment. Without any real friends and even fewer social obligations, I lived in more solitude than was good for my mental health. My one-bedroom apartment became my sanctuary—no roommates, no forced small talk, just me and the sweet luxury of never having to negotiate over chores or TV channels. My companions? A stack of CDs featuring Morrissey, The Smiths, Prefab Sprout, Dead Can Dance, The Cocteau Twins, and other bands that sounded like a group therapy session for depressives. The soundtrack was perfect for a guy laboring over Hercu-Dome, my dystopian novel in which society punishes the overweight with Orwellian fervor for failing to meet state-mandated body standards.

    When I wasn’t writing, I’d plink away on my Yamaha ebony upright, conjuring up self-indulgent sonatas that only the most pretentious of muses could appreciate. I didn’t read music so much as I let it ooze out of me—luscious chords here, shameless glissandos there—while imagining some ethereal goddess materializing in my living room to stroke my ego as I struck a soulful pose.

    Next to my piano sat a small side table stacked with International Male and Urban Gear catalogs, glossy monuments to the theology of misguided masculinity. Their pages overflowed with men wearing mesh tank tops, leather pants, silk pirate shirts, and enough gold accessories to alarm a minor dictator. The models did not look like ordinary humans. They looked like nightclub mercenaries preparing to either seduce someone’s wife or overthrow a Caribbean government.

    To my twenty-seven-year-old mind, those catalogs were not merely selling clothes. They were sacred manuscripts revealing the hidden essence of manhood itself. Every page seemed to whisper the same intoxicating lie: You are only one aggressively unbuttoned shirt away from becoming irresistible.

    So I obeyed the catalogs with religious devotion.

    Month by month my wardrobe drifted further into the outer reaches of fashion psychosis until I eventually found myself teaching composition in semi-transparent pirate shirts that shimmered under fluorescent classroom lighting like the wardrobe of a disco-era vampire. At some point, my clothing ceased being “eccentric” and became an administrative concern. My boss had finally noticed that one of his English instructors appeared to be dressing for a yacht-rock cabaret.

    The message was clear: either the catalogs disappeared or my career might.

    And I needed that career desperately. Returning to the Bay Area was unthinkable. The cost of living there, combined with the savagery of the academic job market, had reduced me during graduate school to the economic status of a lost sailor surviving behind a seafood restaurant.

    Compared to the grim survivalism of my Bay Area college years, my Hobcallow apartment felt less like faculty housing and more like a reward package for a minor petrochemical monarch. The place had vaulted ceilings, sliding-glass shower doors, two swimming pools shimmering beneath the desert sun, a bubbling hot tub, and a laundry room so spotless and functional it felt imported from a Scandinavian utopia. Every afternoon the complex glowed with the tranquil confidence of a place where people drank white wine by the pool and casually discussed mutual funds.

    I would stand there in disbelief wondering whether I was a low-ranking composition instructor teaching comma splices to freshmen or an oil tycoon hiding from federal investigators.

    So settled in this desert hideaway, I now enjoyed a hint of the luxury I’d always been denied. On weekends, I tanned my lean, 195-pound frame by The Springs’ apartment pool. No real friendships blossomed at that pool—friendships are messy and overrated—but I did collect some acquaintances, a bizarre cast of lost souls who could only exist in this sun-scorched limbo.

    Chief among my apartment acquaintances was Leonard Skeazy, an attorney from Santa Monica who was lured out here by a fat signing bonus and a monogrammed office, yet couldn’t shake the resentment of having been exiled to this cultural wasteland. He was the sort of guy who treated “style” like a religion. He sported custom-made Speedos that were purchased at a specialty boutique in Santa Monica—yes, he would actually drive back to the city to replace them whenever the chlorinated pool water faded the jewel tones of his spandex. His long, curly hair and eerie blue eyes made him look like a lounge singer who never quite made it out of the Holiday Inn circuit.

    Leonard was a man of eccentric habits and questionable hygiene. Despite being well into his 30s, he clung to the bachelor dream of finding “the right girl,” although his standards seemed laughably out of place in a town where having a high school diploma was considered highbrow. This was a guy who’d lounge poolside for hours, skin glistening like a buttered croissant, all while blasting Kenny G from his boombox as if smooth jazz were somehow his secret weapon. His breath, tinged with the distinct aroma of last night’s Chardonnay, matched his penchant for sneaking sips from boxes of white wine he kept stashed in his fridge.

    Curiosity (and a lack of better options) led me to visit Leonard at his apartment one day. It was a bachelor pad in the most tragic sense. Despite the fact that he was swimming in cash, his apartment was as bare as a prison cell. The living room housed only a lone couch, a TV balanced on cinder blocks, and—wait for it—an ironing board. Apparently, ironing his endless supply of gaudy silk ties was the only domestic task he took seriously. The walls were completely devoid of art or decor, just barren expanses of beige that made the flickering TV light cast ghostly shadows over the snake-like drape of his ties.

    His bedroom was even more pitiful: no dresser, no closet system—just three open suitcases serving as makeshift storage. It was as if he refused to fully unpack, a subconscious protest against ever settling into this armpit of a town. The fridge, naturally, was a barren tundra except for—what else—more boxes of white wine. Here was a man who had chased the scent of money into the middle of nowhere, only to refuse to acknowledge he’d actually arrived. Leonard was a ghost of himself, haunting his own life, clinging to the notion that he was just “visiting” until he could escape back to the big city. 

    What kind of man, I wondered, gets seduced by a fat paycheck only to spend his days living in a self-imposed purgatory, where the only things thriving are his excuses and his growing collection of faded Speedos? I suppose it was easier for Leonard to pretend he was just passing through than to face the fact that he’d become a permanent fixture in this desolate corner of nowhere, a relic clinging to the fading glamour of a life he never truly had.

    My second poolside companion was Roland Beavers. He was the type of poolside companion that nightmares are made of. Imagine, if you will, a pudgy man in his early thirties with dishwasher-blond hair clinging lifelessly to a scalp that seemed perpetually annoyed at its presence. His physique was more doughy than daring, his chin seemingly having taken an early retirement. And yet, this fine specimen insisted on strutting around the pool in a pair of lava-red terry cloth trunks so undersized that they clung to his hips for dear life, revealing a set of stretchmarks that looked like they’d been painted on by a vengeful graffiti artist. Roland, of course, had an explanation ready for anyone who dared make eye contact long enough to hear it. Those stretch marks? Oh, they weren’t the result of his love affair with powdered donuts. They were the battle scars from his days as a world-class daredevil, hurling himself off the cliffs of Acapulco. You could practically hear the collective eye-roll from the pool regulars every time he regaled them with his tales of high-flying heroics. 

    But Roland’s true calling wasn’t acrobatics; it was unsolicited public broadcasting. Armed with a crumpled newspaper, he’d park himself by the pool and provide live commentary on every “news bit” that caught his eye, apparently under the delusion that everyone within a 20-foot radius was breathlessly awaiting his next headline. His audience, meanwhile, mumbled curses under their breath, desperately wishing he’d take up a hobby that didn’t involve public speaking. Maybe knitting—somewhere indoors. Roland’s social cluelessness reached its peak when playful couples would toss a football or frisbee in the water. For Roland, this wasn’t a game he could just watch; it was an invitation. He’d leap into the pool with all the grace of a boulder, wading into their game like an uninvited ghost at a family reunion. The couples, now robbed of their carefree fun, would give him the kind of look reserved for people who talk during movies before stomping off in search of a Roland-free zone. 

    And heaven help the women trying to sunbathe in peace. Roland, ever the gentleman, took it upon himself to offer his “services” to any woman within spraying distance. Whether it was spritzing their backs with a pump bottle of water or offering to rub sunscreen on their shoulders, Roland never missed an opportunity to “help,” oblivious to the fact that his mere presence was enough to ruin their entire tanning experience.

    Of course, these endless days at the pool weren’t just for Roland’s entertainment; they were an extension of his bizarre domestic life. His mother, Nadine, a woman who looked like she could bench-press a Buick, frequently leaned over the balcony of their apartment—muu-muu billowing in the desert wind—barking orders at Roland to “slather on more sunscreen.” With her hair twisted into tight curls that looked like they might pop loose at any moment and neck veins throbbing like they were signaling an SOS, Nadine’s concern for her son was a constant, vocal presence. “Get inside and eat something, Roland! You’re wasting away!” she’d holler, seemingly unaware that Roland had about 40 extra pounds he could “waste away” without anyone noticing.

    You’d think with all this doting and nagging, Roland might be motivated to get a job, maybe contribute something to society—anything to give the rest of us a break. But alas, Roland and Nadine were comfortably cushioned by the settlement from a lawsuit stemming from Roland’s failed attempt at flight school in San Diego. Apparently, the other students in the dorm took one look at Roland’s face and decided it needed to be rearranged, leaving him with a fractured skull and a big fat check to sit around and bother the rest of us for the rest of his natural life.

    And so there he was—our unwanted poolside companion—who, thanks to his mother’s coddling and that lawsuit cash, was free to spend his days lounging in his ridiculous red trunks, delivering headlines no one asked for, and making our lives just a little more unbearable, one stretch mark at a time.

    My third pool acquaintance was Julian French, a man whose very existence seemed to be a tribute act to Paul McCartney. He was one of those poolside characters you couldn’t make up if you tried. In his late thirties, Julian’s resemblance to the legendary Beatle was so uncanny that you’d swear he moonlighted as a Paul McCartney impersonator in some dingy Las Vegas lounge, crooning “Hey Jude” to half-asleep tourists. He had it all: the same nose, mouth, chin, and those forlorn, droopy eyes that looked like they’d seen every heartbreak in the world. He even rocked the signature McCartney hair—a feathered mullet straight out of 1978, perfectly coiffed and well-maintained, despite the sweltering desert heat.

    However, Julian was no rock god. No, he was a tad shorter, pudgier, and carried a complexion that looked like a battlefield of acne scars. Despite his flaws, Julian clung to his resemblance to McCartney like a man hanging off a cliff by his fingernails. His routine was as stale as a week-old scone: he’d slink into clubs in his black “Beatles jacket,” leaning against the bar with a half-grin that screamed, Yes, I know I look like Paul McCartney—please, someone, state the obvious. And sure enough, some tipsy woman would eventually stumble over, eyes wide with wonder, to ask, “Has anyone ever told you…?”

    For Julian, the club scene was nothing more than a factory line. The pick-up process was practically automated. His biggest challenge was pretending that he wasn’t bored out of his skull by the whole charade. He had to feign surprise when the 397th woman in the last year commented on his uncanny resemblance, as if she were the first brilliant soul to make this connection. In truth, Julian’s brain had checked out a long time ago, letting his face and “brand” do all the heavy lifting.

    As I got to know him better at the pool, Julian dropped a bombshell that was as ridiculous as it was tragic. His real name was Michael Barley. “Julian French” was the result of a rebranding, like he was a faded lounge act looking to stage a comeback. And, of course, this wasn’t enough for our wannabe rock star. With his newly minted name and delusional dreams of fame, he’d taken off for London, where he could really “sell” his phony British accent and Paul McCartney shtick. Unfortunately, London wasn’t buying what he was selling, and after job rejections galore, he skulked back to Hobcallow, tail between his legs.

    He couldn’t move back with his parents. They lived in a trailer home connected to an elementary school, where his father was the janitor by day and a roving locksmith by night. Understandably ashamed, Julian decided he needed to put some distance between himself and his parents’ modest living conditions. 

    But what really terrified him wasn’t the trailer—it was the slow, creeping realization that time was catching up with him. As his face got puffier and rounder, the once-proud resemblance to Paul McCartney was fading fast. Panic-stricken, Julian moved out, took a job at a local car dealership, and tried desperately to cling to the last remnants of his “Beatles glory.”

    When I met him, “Julian French” was an aging caricature, still clinging to his faux-British accent, still hoping that someone, anyone, would recognize the rock star lurking beneath his diminishing resemblance. But deep down, he knew the truth: every year, he looked less and less like McCartney and more like a guy who spends his days bumming around a used car lot and his nights reminiscing about the days when he could walk into a club and have women flock to him. Time, like the receding hairline of a rock legend, is a cruel thief.

    With my three poolside companions, my downgraded wardrobe of intentionally boring clothing, and the illusion of stable employment, I gradually settled into a manageable rhythm at that tiny desert outpost. Hobcallow had begun to feel survivable. I imagined myself lingering there indefinitely, teaching freshman composition beneath the brown haze of desert sunsets while slowly calcifying into one more eccentric faculty fossil.

    Then came the bathroom incident.

    I was seated upon the porcelain throne in the sacred solitude of the faculty restroom, pants resting around my ankles in the universal posture of human vulnerability. In my hands sat a copy of Escape from Freedom, whose pages I was reading with the serene concentration of a monk seeking enlightenment through bowel regularity. For one glorious moment, I believed myself alone.

    Then the atmosphere shifted.

    First came the smell: an aggressive cloud of talcum powder battling unsuccessfully against decades of cigarette smoke. Then came the sound—that unmistakable emphysemic wheeze like an accordion being crushed beneath a pickup truck. Even before I saw her, I knew.

    Scary Mary.

    Mary was one of Hobcallow’s permanent academic phantoms, a forty-year-old perpetual student who had wandered the campus for over a decade accumulating grievances, dropped classes, and nicotine residue. She moved through the college like a bureaucratic poltergeist, dragging behind her a neon-pink luggage cart overloaded with tote bags, paperwork, and unresolved hostility toward authority.

    “Mary,” I said from inside the stall, already exhausted by her existence, “I know it’s you. You need to leave immediately.”

    “Professor McMahon,” came her gravelly chain-smoker rasp, “I need to talk to you about my grade.”

    There are few sentences in the English language less welcome than those words spoken through the door of a men’s restroom stall.

    “Mary,” I replied, “this is the men’s room. I could have campus police arrest you. Leave now.”

    But Mary possessed the survival instincts of a cockroach crawling through radioactive fallout. “Not until you explain why I got a C.”

    As though we were calmly discussing educational philosophy over herbal tea rather than conducting a hostage negotiation through a bathroom partition.

    “We can discuss your grade in my office.”

    But reason had no jurisdiction over Scary Mary.

    A moment later, her long nicotine-yellowed fingers appeared over the top of the stall divider, clutching the partition like a low-budget horror villain scaling castle walls. I stared upward in disbelief as she climbed atop her ridiculous tower of pink luggage until her skeletal, sweating face slowly emerged above the divider like an exhausted demon materializing from a nicotine-scented dimension.

    “You need to help me, Professor,” she wheezed between labored breaths. “I can’t fail this class again.”

    At that point I rose, fully dressed now, vibrating with the fury of a man whose sacred bathroom ritual had been catastrophically violated.

    “You want to know why you got a C, Mary?” I snapped. “Fine. Your incoherent fifth-grade chicken scratch is so catastrophically unreadable it makes me question the entire mission of higher education.”

    Mary recoiled as though slapped. Her cavernous eyes locked onto mine with reptilian stillness.

    “You’re a terrible person,” she hissed. “This isn’t over.”

    Then physics intervened.

    Attempting to descend from her unstable luggage-cart fortress, Mary lost her footing and toppled forward in spectacular slow motion, collapsing onto the restroom floor like a sack of broomsticks hurled from a second-story window. She immediately began writhing and shrieking about a dislocated shoulder. Whether she was genuinely injured or merely auditioning for another campus grievance remained unclear.

    I exited the stall, washed my hands with the eerie calmness of a man nearing psychological collapse, and stared down at the wreckage sprawled across the tile floor.

    “Aren’t you going to help me?” she whimpered.

    Something strange overtook me then. Perhaps it was pity. Perhaps heatstroke. Perhaps prolonged exposure to Hobcallow had finally dissolved the last functioning portions of my judgment.

    “I can do better than help you up,” I announced. “I can fix your shoulder.”

    Her eyes widened with desperate hope.

    “You can?”

    “Absolutely. My brother dislocated his shoulder during a soccer championship. I watched the coach pop it back in.”

    This was technically true in the same way watching a documentary qualifies someone to perform open-heart surgery.

    I grabbed her wrist with both hands and yanked with the reckless confidence of a man operating entirely outside the boundaries of professional liability. Mary screamed loud enough to alarm neighboring departments.

    Then suddenly she blinked in astonishment.

    “Oh my God,” she gasped. “You fixed it.”

    “I know,” I replied, with the casual arrogance of a frontier doctor amputating limbs beside a whiskey barrel.

    Mary slowly rose to her feet, rubbing her shoulder with renewed determination.

    “Mr. McMahon?”

    “Yes, Mary?”

    “I have to pass your class whether you like it or not.”

    I stared at her, too exhausted to fully process the sentence.

    “Yes,” I sighed. “That does remain a theoretical possibility.”

    Relieved that I had somehow escaped arrest, litigation, or exorcism, I headed toward class assuming the nightmare had finally ended.

    The next morning, however, I was summoned to Moses’s office for what the message described as “an urgent matter,” a phrase that in academic life usually means someone has either filed a complaint, discovered a budget shortfall, or decided that your continued employment is an unnecessary luxury.

    Moses was slumped in his leather chair, wearing the grave expression of a man preparing to deliver bad news while also protecting himself from liability.

    “Have you heard?” he asked.

    I shook my head.

    “I received a call from Charlene Johnson, editor of The Hobcallow Chronicle. Her boyfriend is Mary’s brother. He’s not happy.”

    “Mary barged into the men’s room,” I said.

    Moses raised both hands, palms out, as if calming a hostage negotiator. “I’m sure she did. And believe me, you are not the first instructor she has pursued into inappropriate architectural spaces.”

    He paused, letting the institutional fog thicken.

    “But you didn’t handle it in the most ideal way.”

    “She climbed over a bathroom stall.”

    “Yes,” Moses said, with the weary diplomacy of a man who had long ago surrendered to absurdity. “And that was unfortunate. But her brother is a captain in the Hobcallow Police Department, and according to Charlene, he feels your remarks were unusually insulting. Unprecedented, even. Cruel.”

    “She invaded my personal space while I was half-naked and reading Erich Fromm.”

    Moses extended one arm to silence me, the way a priest might halt a drunk parishioner before a wedding toast. “Cruelty has no place in this department.”

    I stared at him. This was academia at its purest: a woman could scale a restroom stall like a nicotine-stained gargoyle, but my tone had apparently violated community standards.

    “If that weren’t enough,” Moses continued, “this morning I received a memo about budget cuts.”

    He stopped and gazed at a framed photograph from the previous year’s department picnic, where several instructors stood around a folding table of potato salad, unaware they were being documented for future elegies.

    “Lecturer positions,” he said, “will be the first to go.”

    “So I’m out,” I said. “Because Scary Mary launched a bathroom assault and I failed to respond with sufficient pastoral tenderness.”

    “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We may have a solution.”

    He picked up a copy of The Hobcallow Chronicle, cleared his throat, and leaned back in his chair with the solemn theatricality of a frontier judge about to sentence a horse thief.

    “One of my primary responsibilities,” he said, “is keeping lecturers employed in good times and bad. In bad times, we must become innovative. We must demonstrate our value to the community.”

    I nodded, performing the expression of a man who understood the moral urgency of public relations.

    “I’ve been working with Charlene,” Moses said, “to generate positive visibility for the university.”

    “You mean Charlene, the newspaper editor who is dating Mary’s brother, the police captain.”

    “Yes,” he said, as if this were merely an interesting footnote and not a cartel of small-town leverage forming around my throat.

    “Charlene and I have developed a way for you to preserve your job. In addition to your teaching duties, you will intervene with local citizens and help them find their true path.”

    “Their true path?”

    “Yes. And I already have someone in mind.”

    I felt the room tilt.

    “The good news,” Moses said, “is that you know him.”

    “Please don’t say Roland Beavers.”

    “Roland Beavers.”

    My stomach dropped through the floor and continued downward toward the earth’s molten core. Roland Beavers was a local cautionary tale wrapped in too-small swim trunks, a man-child whose existence seemed designed to test the outer limits of civic compassion.

    Moses brightened, mistaking my horror for engagement.

    “Roland has certain learning deficits that have prevented him from advancing here at the university. You, my friend, are going to help him.”

    “Does Roland even know how to read?”

    “I would assume nothing,” Moses said, his patience thinning. “But you will teach him grammar, sentence structure, paragraph development—the works. Think of it as mechanical repair. You open the hood, remove the corroded parts, and install something functional.”

    “I’m not known for remediation.”

    “No one is known for remediation,” Moses snapped. “Remediation is tedious, dirty work. It’s like scrubbing mildew off a shower curtain. But someone has to do it, and since you already know Roland, you are the ideal candidate.”

    “Oh, I know him.”

    Moses leaned forward, his eyes narrowing with administrative intensity.

    “You tutor this poor fellow—the sad sack who washed out of aviation school—and turn him into something passable. Then Charlene can run a human-interest feature: ‘Local Professor Helps Troubled Man Rise Above.’ You become not merely a lecturer but an asset. A community figure. An educator with a heart.”

    “A heart that apparently must beat inside a hostage situation.”

    “It might save your job.”

    The room went quiet.

    “Can I at least think it over?” I asked.

    “You have until lunch,” Moses said. “After that, I have a budget meeting where we decide which lecturers get renewed and which ones get released into the desert. Rumor is the cuts may be brutal.”

    And just like that, the full weight of Hobcallow’s budget crisis landed on my shoulders, where it sat beside an even stranger burden: my professional survival now depended on whether I could teach Roland Beavers to assemble a coherent sentence without injuring either of us.

    After being strong-armed by Moses into an unwanted mentorship arrangement that sounded less like education and more like court-ordered rehabilitation, I stormed home fueled by equal parts resentment, panic, and wounded pride. My academic career now appeared to hinge on whether I could somehow transform Roland Beavers—a human caution sign in swim trunks—into a functioning college student.

    I collapsed into my apartment trying to process the catastrophe while contemplating dinner, which at that moment consisted of opening yet another can of tuna and chewing on a raw green pepper with the grim enthusiasm of a prisoner preserving muscle mass in solitary confinement. The whole meal radiated culinary despair. It was not food so much as nutritional surrender.

    Then came the knock at the door.

    I opened it to find Nadine Beavers herself standing in the hallway like a floral-print apparition from the Church of Aggressive Hospitality. She wore her trademark muu-muu exploding with tropical flowers so loud and oversized it looked less like clothing and more like upholstery liberated from a Hawaiian casino lounge. In her arms she carried two steaming casserole dishes with the solemnity of a woman delivering diplomatic aid to a war-torn nation.

    “I heard my son might have the privilege of having you as his personal mentor and tutor,” she said with a sheepish grin.

    Then she gave a strange little snort, as though we were about to enter a backroom gambling arrangement involving counterfeit casino chips and emotional dependency.

    “Figured it’d be nice to get to know what we’re getting into.”

    Before I could respond, she swept past me and deposited the dishes onto my kitchen table with a heavy thud that shook the silverware drawer. One contained a taco casserole radiating molten cheese, cumin, and enough grease to lubricate industrial machinery. The other was a strawberry pie glistening beneath fluorescent lights like a sacred object worshipped by Midwestern church communities.

    The smell alone nearly brought me to tears. Moments earlier I had been preparing to gnaw through dry tuna and uncooked peppers like a survivalist trapped in a nuclear bunker. Now my apartment smelled like human warmth, butter, melted cheese, and the kind of reckless carbohydrate optimism capable of derailing entire diet plans.

    Nadine looked around my apartment with the relaxed confidence of a woman who had already decided she belonged there.

    “Well,” she said, placing both hands on her hips, “if you’re gonna save Roland’s future, you sure as hell aren’t doing it on canned fish.”

    I stood there, transfixed, as she lifted the lid off the taco casserole. The scent alone hit me like a punch—layers of melted cheese, crisped to perfection, with seasoned meat, beans, and salsa bubbling underneath. My stomach growled so loudly it could’ve been mistaken for a Harley-Davidson revving up. Each bubble of cheese seemed to mock my restraint, daring me to dive in. As she unveiled the casserole, I could almost hear the crunch of tortilla chips mingling with that gooey, cheesy goodness. This wasn’t just dinner—it was an emotional rollercoaster masquerading as comfort food.

    But Nadine wasn’t done yet. With the precision of someone handling a priceless artifact, she slowly peeled back the foil from the strawberry pie. The crinkling foil built up anticipation like a suspenseful thriller. Underneath was a glossy, vibrant pie that looked more like a work of art than a dessert. The strawberries were arranged like they’d been hand-placed by a food stylist—gleaming, ruby-red slices sitting in a pool of sweet glaze, nestled within a buttery, golden crust. The smell was an olfactory hug, a heady mix of fresh fruit and pastry that all but made my knees buckle. I could practically taste the sweet-tangy perfection before even lifting a fork. Nadine caught me eyeing the pie with the kind of longing usually reserved for forbidden love and nudged me with a knowing smirk. “Don’t be afraid of it—dig in.”

    With a fork now in hand and no semblance of dignity left, I heaped a mountain of casserole onto my plate and pretended to listen to Nadine recount her son’s tragic life story. I’d already heard every miserable detail directly from Roland himself, who repeated the narrative so often it was like he was auditioning for a reality show nobody wanted to watch. But I knew the price of good food—feigned interest and patience. So I nodded along, punctuating her monologue with sympathetic “hmm”s and “ah”s while internally counting down to dessert.

    That’s when she dropped the real bombshell: Roland was currently sprawled out on their couch nursing a black eye, the result of getting “fresh” with some guy’s girlfriend at the pool. According to Nadine, Roland’s brilliant strategy involved spraying her with water and then trying to join in on a playful water fight—clearly a move that went over about as well as a lead balloon. The girlfriend’s boyfriend solved the problem with his fist, and now Roland was sidelined with a bag of ice and bruised ego.

    “He has no common sense,” Nadine lamented. “I don’t know what to do with him. The psychologist at the university said he needs a mentor, and your boss thinks that could be you.”

    I choked a little on my casserole. “To be truthful, I’ve never mentored anyone before.”

    Nadine’s expression turned serious. “But you’re a teacher—an educator. And you live right here. Do you know how convenient that is? My boy doesn’t like to venture far from home.”

    I tried to explain that this was more of a job for a trained psychologist, but she waved me off like I was suggesting something as outlandish as skydiving lessons. “Forget that. You mentor him, and you’ll be doing some fine eating around here. Am I clear?”

    At that point, I took a bite of the strawberry pie, and whatever resolve I’d clung to dissolved faster than the buttery, flaky crust. The explosion of sweet, tart berries wrapped in velvety smoothness was nothing short of divine intervention. “It’s outstanding,” I said, my voice laced with an awe that was embarrassing for a grown man. “Honestly, it’s the best meal I’ve had in longer than I care to admit.”

    Nadine leaned back in her chair, crossing her arms with the satisfaction of a mafia boss whose offer you can’t refuse. “There’s a reason I’ve been the chair of the Crust and Crumble Club for the last twenty years. People respect excellence in a leader, and pie-making is no different.” She allowed herself a self-satisfied smirk, the kind that made it clear she knew she had me wrapped around her flour-dusted finger.

    “There’s more where that came from if you agree to help my boy,” she continued, her voice silky with unspoken promises. “You’ll love mentoring Roland. The two of you will become great friends. And you could do a lot worse than enjoying homemade taco casserole, extra-cheesy, and an endless stream of pies in your corner. Stability, comfort, and good eats—what else do you need in this God-forsaken desert?”

    I surveyed the spread before me—a smorgasbord of all-American excess, the kind of food that made you forget your troubles until the heartburn kicked in. There was no denying it—I had been bought out by casseroles and confectionery. 

    Seduced by comforting casseroles and fruit pies and terrified of unemployment, I began my tutorials with Roland Beavers. Roland would roll up to my apartment like some kind of culinary Santa Claus, lugging casseroles, chili, cornbread, or a spaghetti feast—all meant to bribe me into pretending we were engaging in serious academic work. These sessions were a farce, a charade we both went along with because, honestly, who says no to free food?

    Moses, in his infinite wisdom (read: desperation), had armed me with a stack of sixth-grade workbooks to use with Roland, presumably to inch him toward literacy. But Roland’s visits were less about learning and more about napping on my couch. He’d complain of headaches after writing half of a paragraph and declare himself “famished” just as he was about to grasp the complexities of a compound sentence. The guy had a black belt in avoidance. Before I knew it, he’d polished off the very dinner his mother had cooked for me, slumped into a food coma, and settled in to watch the Angels game from first pitch to final out. Or he’d watch with fascination the diet guru Suan Powter with her buzzcut shout the merits of lentils on her infomercial where her call to “stop the insanity” seemed to be encouraging her own maniacal demon to flourish. The set was a minimalist nightmare: harsh lighting, white walls, and an audience of desperate souls hanging on her every word. And then there were the graphics—big, bold letters flashing “CUT THE FAT!” and “EAT RIGHT NOW!”—just in case her voice alone wasn’t enough to drill the message into your brain. Every so often, she’d grab a cardboard cutout of the food pyramid and tear it apart like she was dismantling a corrupt regime. By then, I was grading essays and wondering how I’d ended up in this ridiculous parody of a mentorship program.

    It didn’t take long to see that trying to whip Roland into academic shape was like trying to sculpt marble out of a melting ice cream cone. The guy simply didn’t have the drive—or, frankly, the capacity—for discipline. I wasn’t about to carry him up the mountain of success while he sat back and asked for snack breaks. My philosophy was simple: everyone climbs their own mountains. If Roland wanted to remain at base camp eating cornbread, that was his prerogative. My job was to reach the summit of my own ambitions, not drag dead weight up a hill.

    For reasons I never fully understood, Roland regarded my apartment less as a place of study and more as a federally protected sleep sanctuary. He’d lumber through the front door, collapse onto my couch with the tragic relief of a Civil War soldier returning from battle, and within thirty seconds begin snoring with the industrial fury of malfunctioning logging equipment.

    Fortunately, this arrangement worked beautifully for me.

    Officially, I was tutoring Roland Beavers. In reality, I was grading freshman essays while a California Angels game murmured in the background and Roland—Hobcallow’s reigning emperor of arrested development—vibrated my couch cushions with nasal acoustics powerful enough to register on seismographs in neighboring counties.

    The whole situation evolved into a kind of desert academic farce. Roland got a climate-controlled nap chamber safely removed from the watchful eye of his mother, Nadine. I received home-cooked meals from Nadine so enormous and buttery they could’ve qualified as agricultural subsidies. And Moses, architect of Hobcallow’s endless bureaucratic theater, got the appearance of community outreach and educational uplift.

    Nobody seemed particularly concerned that the actual tutoring had died months earlier. The remedial workbooks sat untouched on the coffee table like archaeological artifacts from a failed civilization. In Hobcallow, “tutoring” was less about literacy than optics. As long as someone could point toward two men occupying the same room with a pencil nearby, the program was considered a triumph of social progress.

    During one of our so-called tutorial sessions—which by that point consisted primarily of me grading freshman essays while Roland Beavers used my couch as a federally protected sleep sanctuary—I heard Leonard Skeazy downstairs engaged in yet another operatic confrontation with one of his ex-girlfriends. Leonard had cycled through so many public breakups that the apartment complex treated them like recurring holiday events, but this one possessed a darker voltage.

    The shouting escalated rapidly.

    I set down a stack of essays and walked to the window just in time to witness the spectacle unfolding beside the pool. Leonard and his ex stood nose-to-nose beneath the blistering Hobcallow sun, gesturing wildly like two failed Shakespearean actors performing divorce proceedings in a chlorine-scented amphitheater.

    Then she shoved him.

    Not hard enough to qualify as attempted murder, but with enough force to send Leonard stumbling sideways into the community newspaper rack. His body twisted awkwardly on impact, and he collapsed onto the pavement with a heavy, meaty thud that echoed across the courtyard. He immediately clutched his knee and began howling with such theatrical agony that it sounded less like physical pain and more like a wounded banshee auditioning for daytime television.

    The scream jolted Roland awake.

    He sprang from the couch in a panic, hair disheveled, eyes half-open, moving with the startled confusion of a tranquilized zoo animal suddenly hearing gunfire. By the time I reached the window again, Roland was already barreling down the stairs toward the growing crowd.

    Nadine Beavers had somehow arrived even faster.

    She stood over Leonard in her ever-present floral apron, which fluttered in the desert wind like the battle flag of aggressive maternal intervention. Her expression carried that uniquely Nadine combination of genuine compassion and total exasperation.

    “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Leonard!” she barked. “You’re making a spectacle of yourself.”

    Yet beneath the irritation there was unmistakable concern. Nadine treated wounded narcissists the way battlefield nurses treat delirious soldiers: harshly, efficiently, and with just enough tenderness to keep them alive.

    Roland crouched beside Leonard and helped prop him upright while Nadine examined the swollen knee with surprising gentleness.

    “Serves you right for acting like a fool,” she muttered, though her hands moved carefully across the injury.

    Leonard blinked back tears, gasping dramatically like a fish dragged onto a dock.

    “They’re all against me,” he wheezed. “I’m the victim of character assassination.”

    “Character assassination, my foot,” Nadine snapped. “You’re the victim of your own stupidity. Now stop whining so we can get you standing before the whole complex starts charging admission.”

    By then a small crowd had gathered around the pool, drawn not by concern but by the ancient human instinct to witness public humiliation. Apartment complexes like ours functioned as low-budget Roman coliseums where everyone secretly hoped for spectacle as long as they themselves were not the ones bleeding beside the vending machines.

    With considerable effort—and enough groaning from Leonard to suggest emergency battlefield surgery—they managed to hoist him upright. Roland handled most of the lifting while Nadine hovered nearby like an overbearing but strangely competent vulture overseeing roadside trauma care.

    The crowd slowly dispersed, disappointed the entertainment had concluded without handcuffs, nudity, or visible bloodshed.

    And so Leonard Skeazy limped away between Roland and Nadine like a fallen dictator being evacuated after a failed coup. Behind him floated scattered laughter, muttered insults, and the faint echo of ridicule from the poolside audience. It was the perfect Hobcallow ending: in his endless quest to defend his reputation, Leonard had once again managed only to deepen the legend of his own ridiculousness.

    Watching the three of them disappear toward the Beavers’ apartment, I realized the entire scene possessed the surreal emotional texture of small-town desert mythology. Roland and Nadine, those unlikely knights in polyester armor, had waddled into action to rescue Hobcallow’s most shameless self-saboteur and carry him off for “first aid,” as though this were not merely another chapter in Leonard Skeazy’s endless cycle of vanity, collapse, and public humiliation.

    A few days after Leonard’s poolside collapse, I was standing at my apartment window one afternoon drinking burnt coffee while Roland Beavers snored on my couch with the unwavering commitment of a professional hibernating mammal. That was when I witnessed one of the strangest sights Hobcallow had yet produced—and this was a town with an alarmingly high tolerance for absurdity.

    Parked beneath one of the apartment carports sat an ancient Chevy truck overflowing with wooden crates of apricots, peaches, and nectarines. Emerging from the vehicle were Leonard Skeazy and Julian French.

    At first I didn’t recognize them.

    Both men were dressed in dirt-stained blue work jumpsuits, the kind worn by sanitation crews, orchard laborers, and minimum-security prison workers assigned roadside cleanup duty. Their expensive sunglasses and poolside vanity had vanished. Their faces were sun-darkened and strangely peaceful. Leonard no longer looked like a failed attorney clinging desperately to status. Julian no longer resembled a bankrupt salesman auditioning for yacht-club membership. Together they looked like two men who had wandered off a fruit collective somewhere outside Bakersfield.

    “Roland,” I said, staring through the blinds, “you need to wake up and explain to me why Leonard and Julian are dressed like migrant mechanics hauling peaches into your mother’s apartment.”

    Roland opened one eye with the tragic exhaustion of a man being interrupted during a medically necessary nap.

    “Oh,” he mumbled. “They work for my mom now.”

    I turned slowly toward him.

    “What happened to Leonard’s law career?”

    “He got fired,” Roland said calmly. “Work-code violations. Sexual harassment, I think.”

    “And Julian?”

    “Hadn’t made a commission in almost a year.”

    Roland closed his eyes again, clearly hoping this concluded the conversation so he could return to unconsciousness.

    “No, no, no,” I said. “You don’t get to fall back asleep after dropping information like that. What exactly do they do for your mother?”

    Roland shrugged.

    “Whatever she tells them to do. They’re basically her assistants.”

    Outside the window, Leonard and Julian continued unloading crates of fruit with serene concentration while Nadine directed operations from the apartment doorway like a floral-print field marshal overseeing wartime agricultural logistics.

    “How does she pay them?”

    “She has a budget,” Roland replied.

    “A budget for what?”

    “The Crust and Crumble Club.”

    He said this with such confidence that I nodded reflexively, pretending it made perfect sense when in reality my brain had begun short-circuiting. Somehow my two poolside acquaintances—once obsessed with image, status, and masculine prestige—had been absorbed into Nadine Beavers’s domestic empire and transformed into fruit-hauling assistants dressed like auto-body repairmen.

    Before I could process the full horror of the situation, the phone rang.

    It was Moses.

    And for once, the news was good.

    Apparently The Hobcallow Chronicle had run a glowing human-interest profile about my mentorship of Roland Beavers, portraying me as a compassionate educational savior guiding a local misfit toward literacy and redemption. The article had generated such favorable publicity—and coincided with a miraculous budgetary windfall—that Moses had successfully secured my tenure.

    There would, he informed me, be a celebration in my honor at the campus ale house.

    The following Friday, the Crust & Crumble Club transformed the ale house into a strange hybrid of retirement banquet, church social, and tropical nervous breakdown. Crepe-paper streamers sagged from the ceiling. Dollar-store balloons floated weakly above folding tables. Somewhere in the corner, a battered boombox crooned bossa nova music with the melancholy sophistication of a 1963 cocktail lounge slowly sinking into the sea.

    The dessert tables looked catastrophic in the best possible way. Berry pies, cream pies, cobblers, and pastries stretched across the room in such abundance they resembled offerings to a Midwestern fertility deity. Each pie sat there with glossy perfection, as though auditioning for the cover of Better Homes & Gardens.

    Naturally, Roland arrived in khaki shorts and a Hawaiian shirt already smeared with pie filling. By the time I entered the room, he was elbow-deep in boysenberry pie, grinning blissfully with purple crumbs glued to his face like evidence from a carbohydrate crime scene.

    Nadine spotted me immediately.

    “There he is!” she cried, waving me toward a throne-like chair draped in a crocheted blanket that looked one upholstery stain away from hospice care.

    “Special seat for the man of the hour!”

    Before I could protest, she shoved a paper plate into my hands carrying a mountain of boysenberry pie drowning beneath an avalanche of whipped cream.

    Standing beside her were Roberta Hunter and Felice Orozco, Nadine’s two closest confidantes and Hobcallow’s reigning queens of floral-print judgment. Together they resembled a triumvirate of dessert-loving desert oracles silently evaluating everyone’s moral worth, pie technique, and cholesterol levels.

    Then I noticed Leonard and Julian.

    The two men were hauling cases of champagne and bags of ice into the ale house with astonishing cheerfulness. Their faces glowed with purpose. They congratulated me warmly, slapping my back like loyal campaign staffers celebrating an election victory. Strangest of all, they appeared genuinely happy.

    Happier, perhaps, than when they were pretending to be successful.

    “So how exactly,” I asked Nadine carefully, “did you manage to rein in Leonard and Julian?”

    Nadine exchanged a knowing grin with Roberta.

    “I have my ways,” she said.

    Then she leaned closer, lowering her voice conspiratorially.

    “There’s a certain kind of man who needs my intervention. It’s simply a matter of finding him and helping him discover his proper place in the world.”

    Something about the sentence chilled me.

    The evening dissolved into the predictable rituals of Hobcallow celebration: speeches, applause, cake, cheap champagne, and finally Moses announcing that my tenure entitled me to a new executive desk engraved with my initials so I could feel, in his words, “permanently rooted within the intellectual future of Hobcallow.”

    As though an engraved desk could cure existential confusion.

    Later that night, after the party ended, I remained alone inside the darkened ale house surrounded by popped balloons, empty pie tins, wilted streamers, and the sticky residue of forced merriment. I was in no hurry to return to my apartment where Roland was almost certainly already asleep on my couch.

    Outside, Leonard and Julian loaded leftover pies and party supplies into the Chevy truck while soft bossa nova music drifted from a boombox sitting in the truck bed. The two men laughed together warmly beneath the desert night air. I overheard one of them mention they still needed to meet Nadine afterward to “help her with something.”

    I sat there listening to them and felt something cold settle inside me.

    What had happened to these men?

    What had happened to me?

    We were the lost men of Hobcallow, and Nadine Beavers had not merely rescued us. In her own strange maternal empire of pies, casseroles, errands, and emotional dependency, she had quietly absorbed us completely.

    I tried to suppress the thought by reminding myself that Monday morning I would arrive at work to find a brand-new executive desk engraved with my initials—as though polished wood and bureaucratic recognition might finally convince me I belonged somewhere.

  • Essay Prompt: The Performance Trap: Online Identity, Narcissism, and the Collapse of the Real Self

    Essay Prompt: The Performance Trap: Online Identity, Narcissism, and the Collapse of the Real Self

    In the Netflix documentary The Crash and the Black Mirror episode “Joan Is Awful,” audiences witness characters whose lives become consumed by spectacle, performance, surveillance, and the relentless pressure of online visibility. While the two works differ in genre—one a real-life tragedy and the other a satirical dystopian drama—both raise disturbing questions about how modern digital culture reshapes identity, distorts reality, and erodes the boundary between authentic selfhood and online performance.

    In The Crash, the documentary suggests that Mackenzie Shirilla’s compulsive online self-curation reflected a deeper psychological unraveling in which image management, attention-seeking, and social media validation became inseparable from her sense of identity. Meanwhile, in “Joan Is Awful,” Joan discovers that her life has been transformed into a grotesque entertainment product streamed to millions of viewers, forcing her to confront the horrifying possibility that her real self has become secondary to a digitally manufactured persona designed for mass consumption. In both works, online visibility functions less as a tool for communication and more as a vortex that pulls individuals toward narcissism, performative behavior, emotional instability, and estrangement from reality itself.

    Write a 1,000-word argumentative essay in which you compare The Crash and “Joan Is Awful” to examine the claim that maintaining a constant online presence can suck people into a vortex of unhinged narcissism and madness that makes them unrecognizable from their authentic selves.

    Your essay should analyze how both works depict:

    • the transformation of identity into performance;
    • the addictive pursuit of attention, relevance, and validation;
    • the psychological consequences of constant self-curation and surveillance;
    • the collapse of the boundary between private life and public spectacle;
    • and the dangers of confusing online visibility with genuine human worth.

    You should also address the broader cultural implications of these works. What do these texts suggest about the modern relationship between technology and identity? Do social media platforms merely reveal narcissism already present in human nature, or do they actively manufacture and intensify it? At what point does self-expression become self-erasure?

    A strong essay will move beyond summary and develop a clear argumentative thesis that makes an original claim about the psychological and cultural dangers presented in both works. Your thesis should be supported by detailed analysis of scenes, dialogue, imagery, characterization, and thematic parallels between the documentary and the episode.

    You must include:

    • a clear and debatable thesis;
    • detailed comparison of both works;
    • at least one counterargument and rebuttal;
    • analysis of specific scenes and examples;
    • and thoughtful commentary about the relationship between technology, identity, and modern culture.

    Possible directions for argument include:

    • Social media transforms ordinary narcissism into pathological self-obsession.
    • Constant online performance erodes authentic identity and emotional stability.
    • Digital culture rewards outrage, exhibitionism, and emotional extremity.
    • Online validation creates a dopamine-driven cycle that destabilizes mental health.
    • Surveillance culture turns human beings into entertainment products.
    • The internet encourages people to construct marketable personas rather than genuine selves.

    You may agree, disagree, or complicate the prompt’s central argument, but your essay must directly engage the idea that online self-curation can psychologically deform individuals and distance them from reality.

    Requirements:

    • Approximately 1,000 words
    • MLA format
    • Clear introduction, body paragraphs, counterargument-rebuttal section, and conclusion
    • Use evidence from both The Crash and “Joan Is Awful”
    • Include a Works Cited page

    The strongest essays will avoid simplistic “technology bad” arguments and instead explore the more unsettling possibility that modern digital culture rewards the most performative, narcissistic, and emotionally unstable versions of ourselves until the performance eventually consumes the person behind it.

  • Dreaming of Barbara Eden 

    Dreaming of Barbara Eden 

    As a child of the 1960s, I possessed a vivid understanding of the Cold War and the nuclear arms race, thanks less to geopolitics than to my devoted viewing of The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. The cartoon’s Russian-accented villains, Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale, were forever skulking around America attempting to steal military secrets, sabotage technology, or siphon jet fuel under orders from their unseen despot, Fearless Leader. Serving the fictional nation of Pottsylvania—a barely disguised Soviet Union with worse lighting and thicker accents—they represented the eternal communist menace lurking just beyond the free world’s picket fence. Even as a little kid, I understood the basic message: America and Russia were locked in a planetary knife fight for domination, and everybody was expected to pick a side.

    Television in those days functioned as a kind of patriotic catechism. Cartoon after cartoon, drama after drama, taught me who stood atop the hierarchy of masculine excellence. The Goalkeepers of Dominance were not poets, philosophers, or accountants. They were military men. Fighter pilots. Astronauts. Decorated officers with square jaws, crew cuts, and enough technical competence to vaporize enemy nations before breakfast.

    One such exemplar was Major Anthony Nelson from I Dream of Jeannie. Major Nelson was an astronaut, Air Force officer, scientist, and possessor of the sort of clean-cut competence television regarded as irresistible to women and essential to national survival. Naturally, fate rewarded him accordingly. Stranded on a beach after a space mission, he discovered Jeannie, played by my first great childhood crush, Barbara Eden, a blonde goddess in a pink harem costume who emerged from a bottle prepared to devote herself entirely to his happiness.

    This did not strike me as unrealistic.

    Television had already instructed me that men possessing advanced military rank and scientific aptitude were the Alphas of civilization. These men piloted rockets, commanded bases, protected democracy, and consequently received the lion’s share of earthly rewards: prestige, adventure, beautiful women, and thunderously triumphant theme music swelling behind them as they strode across the screen. Major Anthony Nelson from I Dream of Jeannie discovering Jeannie, played by Barbara Eden, never struck me as fantasy. It seemed more like proper cosmic compensation for loyal service to the American empire. Risk your life for freedom, master aerospace technology, and eventually a gorgeous blonde genie materializes on a beach devoted entirely to your happiness. Such was the moral arithmetic of 1960s television.

    But television was not my only instructor in Alpha Behavior.

    My father taught the course at home.

    Every day I was reminded of his military pedigree when I quietly entered my parents’ bedroom and stared at the framed Army photograph resting on the dresser beside my mother’s jewelry box with its perfumes, rings, tangled necklaces, and atomized clouds of Evening in Paris glamour. Nearby sat my father’s modest silver Timex watch ticking softly through the years like the heartbeat of working-class American masculinity itself. Together these objects formed a strange domestic altar: beauty, time, marriage, discipline, and the fading aura of Cold War heroism.

    The photograph dominated everything around it.

    In the picture, my father, a young Army gunner in the late 1950s, stood in immaculate military dress uniform with the rigid bearing of a man who believed discipline, patriotism, and artillery fire could keep civilization from collapsing into barbarism. The dark uniform bestowed upon him an almost mythological authority beneath the soft bedroom light. His military cap rested perfectly above a face so sharply cut it looked sculpted from granite by a Pentagon propagandist commissioned to manufacture the ideal American warrior for recruitment posters. His bold eyebrows and dark eyes did not merely face the camera—they radiated fearless confidence, the kind possessed by men who believed they could march directly into gunfire and emerge untouched by history. He held his rifle across his chest with solemn authority, as if permanently prepared to defend his honor, his country, or perhaps simply his parking space.

    Like Major Nelson, my father belonged to that sacred fraternity of Gatekeepers of Dominance whose lives seemed full of lessons about toughness, competition, hierarchy, and victory.

    In fact, without my father’s ruthless competitive instincts, I might never have existed at all.

    During his Army years in Anchorage, Alaska, my father became embroiled in a romantic rivalry with another soldier named John Shalikashvili, who would later rise to become Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. At the time, however, both men were merely ambitious young servicemen competing for the affection of my teenage mother after meeting her in a tavern.

    The future fate of American military leadership—and my own biological existence—apparently hinged upon who possessed superior courtship logistics.

    The rivalry paused briefly over Christmas when Shalikashvili returned home to Peoria, Illinois, while my father flew to Hollywood, Florida, to visit family. But my father, sensing opportunity the way a battlefield commander senses enemy weakness, decided to return to Anchorage several days early in order to reclaim tactical advantage.

    There was only one problem.

    His cream-colored 1959 Morris Minor sedan was malfunctioning.

    The Lucas fuel filter had failed, and the local auto parts store still lacked a replacement. Lesser men might have surrendered to mechanical fate. My father instead improvised.

    Using his only prophylactic and a paperclip, he engineered a makeshift repair to keep the fuel pump from sticking open or closed. It was less an automobile repair than a strange act of battlefield ingenuity, the sort of thing that sounds too absurd to be true but somehow becomes more believable precisely because it involves Army men in Alaska during the Cold War.

    The improvised contraption worked well enough to get him to Seattle, where he boarded the ferry to Alaska and arrived back in Anchorage forty-eight hours ahead of his rival.

    Forty-eight hours.

    That was the margin separating General Shalikashvili’s alternate future from mine.

    Nine months later, on October 28, 1961, I was born.

    After observing future John Shalikashvili lose the reproductive arms race to my father, I received my second brutal lesson in competitive dominance at the age of five.

    By then I had constructed my first bachelor pad: a crude treehouse on the grounds of the Flavet Villages Apartments in Gainesville, Florida. Calling it a “treehouse” may be generous. It was essentially several weathered planks nailed into a tree by boys who possessed neither engineering skills nor concern for mortality. But to me it was magnificent—a penthouse suite suspended above civilization itself.

    One afternoon I attempted to lure Tammy Leidecker into my airborne kingdom using what I believed to be irresistible bait: a small red box of Sun-Maid raisins.

    I flashed the box proudly at the bottom of the tree. The package itself radiated authority. The Sun-Maid girl held an enormous tray of grapes while glowing inside a halo of yellow light and white triangles like some Protestant saint canonized by the California Raisin Board. She wore a red bonnet and smiled with wholesome confidence, as if assuring the public that dried fruit represented the pinnacle of human pleasure.

    “Come up here!” I shouted to Tammy.

    And miracle of miracles—she began climbing.

    Slowly she ascended the wooden slats toward my treehouse while I basked in premature romantic triumph.

    Then disaster struck.

    From a neighboring tree emerged my rival, Zane Johnson, jutting his head through a cluster of leaves like a jungle insurgent launching psychological warfare.

    “I’ve got something WAY better than raisins!” he shouted.

    Then he revealed them.

    Captain Kangaroo Cookies.

    Not ordinary cookies.
    Cream-filled sandwich cookies.

    Double-fudge artillery.

    Zane held the package aloft with the swagger of a used-car salesman unveiling a fully loaded Cadillac. The moment I saw those cookies, my heart collapsed into my stomach.

    I instantly understood how Mick Jagger must have felt in 1964 while standing backstage watching James Brown perform his legendary cape routine. Brown would stagger theatrically, collapse from exhaustion, then resurrect himself in a frenzy of sweat and transcendence while the audience lost its collective mind. Those close to Jagger later said he looked shattered watching the performance because he knew no mortal human should attempt to follow it.

    That was exactly how I felt staring at Zane Johnson’s cookies while clutching my pathetic little raisins like a bankrupt peasant holding expired currency.

    I already knew the outcome before it happened.

    Tammy froze halfway up my tree.

    She turned slowly toward Zane’s cookies with the greedy reverence prospectors reserve for gold bullion. Then she looked back at my raisins and gave them a tiny sneer of contempt so devastating it could have been delivered by a Parisian food critic.

    Moments later she descended my tree, sprinted toward Zane’s fortress, and climbed his wooden slats with astonishing athleticism.

    Traitor.

    Soon the two of them sat together inside his treehouse devouring cream-filled chocolate sandwiches while I remained alone in my pathetic dried-fruit kingdom like an overthrown monarch of nutritional austerity.

    When they finished eating, they licked the frosting from their lips and openly gloated at me.

    I had lost.

    Not merely the girl.
    The entire competition.

    As I watched them nestle together in sugar-fueled intimacy, I reclined inside my abandoned treehouse and cried myself to sleep. I imagine it resembled the way Mick Jagger privately wept after witnessing James Brown annihilate the laws of stage performance.

    Several hours later I awoke screaming.

    Red fire ants had swarmed the treehouse.

    Presumably attracted by the raisins, the tiny sadists covered my body from head to toe. The pain was biblical. It felt as though every inch of my flesh had been flogged with electrified stinging nettles.

    I tore down the tree and sprinted back to our apartment shrieking while my mother threw me into a scalding bath to drown the ants.

    As I sat there nursing my swollen welts, I interpreted the entire ordeal with the melodramatic seriousness available only to children and future writers.

    The lesson was obvious.

    In the evolutionary arms race between Sun-Maid Raisins and Captain Kangaroo Cookies, the cookies had won.

    That day the connection between alpha status, superior bait, and reproductive success burned itself permanently into my lizard brain.

    I never entered the treehouse again.

    It remained abandoned afterward, slowly decaying among the branches with only a few relics left behind to testify that someone had once inhabited it: plastic army men, toy cars, gum wrappers, fragments of failed boyhood ambition.

    After the red-ant catastrophe, I retreated increasingly indoors and became obsessed with I Dream of Jeannie.

    Obsessed may actually be too mild a word.

    I knew every episode by heart. I could anticipate each joke, each misunderstanding, each twitch of Jeannie’s magical powers. None of this diminished my devotion. I was hopelessly enthralled by Jeannie herself, played by Barbara Eden.

    Eventually she began visiting me in dreams.

    Whenever she appeared, beautiful aching music accompanied her presence. She would float through my bedroom window, take my hand, and carry me around the world to exotic destinations glowing beneath moonlight. When I awoke, I could still smell her lingering in the room—honey, sweat, nectar, patchouli—the impossible perfume of longing itself.

    The dreams continued throughout my childhood.

    Then one day I encountered two beautiful sisters, and after that encounter Jeannie stopped visiting me in my dreams forever.

    This story is about those sisters.

    It happened during the spring of 1973 on a warm California afternoon after sixth grade classes had ended. The school bus dropped us off near Crow Canyon Road, and several of us wandered across the street to the local 7-Eleven to buy Slurpees before making the miserable uphill trek home along Greenridge Road.

    Inside the store, the radio was playing “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl),” that melancholy yacht-rock masterpiece about romantic disappointment disguised as cheerful singalong music. The frozen-drink machines hummed. The air smelled of sugar syrup, cardboard pizza, and asphalt baking in the afternoon heat.

    That was when the Horsefault sisters entered.

    They were impossible not to notice.

    One was in eighth grade, the other already a sophomore in high school. Both had long blonde hair, freckles, high cheekbones, and mischievous blue eyes that radiated the dangerous energy of girls who enjoyed creating problems merely to see what would happen next. To my sixth-grade brain, they resembled slightly feral versions of Barbara Eden.

    One of them smiled at me and asked:

    “Do you want to see our rabbit?”

    Now, to be clear, I had absolutely no interest in rabbits.

    Had two pimply boys invited me to inspect a caged rodent behind a farmhouse, I would have fled instantly while clutching my cherry Slurpee in terror. But these were beautiful older girls, and beautiful older girls possess the supernatural ability to make adolescent boys enthusiastically volunteer for situations that would otherwise trigger police investigations.

    “Yes,” I said immediately. “I’d love to see the rabbit.”

    Naturally.

    So I followed them.

    We left the 7-Eleven parking lot and walked perhaps a hundred yards down a dusty trail lined with dry horse manure and tall grass swaying in the afternoon breeze. Beyond the field stood their weathered farmhouse, half hidden behind eucalyptus trees and fencing. The place had the unsettling atmosphere of a rural fairy tale where attractive maidens lure travelers into barns never to be heard from again.

    Behind a thicket of bushes stood the rabbit cage.

    It was large enough to imprison a medium-sized farm animal—or an unsuspecting sixth grader. The cage door hung slightly open, and a heavy chain lock dangled ominously from the latch.

    I peered inside.

    No rabbit.

    At that exact moment the sisters burst into shrieking laughter and lunged at me.

    They grabbed my arms and tried to shove me into the cage.

    The truth arrived instantly and with horrifying clarity: there had never been a rabbit. The rabbit was merely bait. I had walked directly into an ambush orchestrated by two hormonally deranged Valkyries whose apparent goal was to lock me inside a cage and transform me into some sort of suburban hostage.

    But they had underestimated me.

    At eleven years old I was already deep into my future bodybuilding destiny and absurdly strong for my age. What followed was less an abduction than a full-contact barnyard wrestling match. We grappled outside the cage rolling through dry grass, hay, and dirt while clouds of dust exploded around us like scenes from a low-budget western.

    Nearby chickens erupted into chaos.

    Inside the coop they flapped wildly, clucked hysterically, and hurled themselves about with the alarm of creatures witnessing either a murder or a satanic fertility ritual.

    The sisters were laughing so hard they could barely breathe. Sweat darkened their halter tops and cutoffs as they struggled unsuccessfully to overpower me. Eventually, exhausted and defeated, they abandoned the mission.

    The moment their grip weakened, I escaped.

    I sprinted home outraged.

    Not merely embarrassed—outraged.

    They had attempted to steal my freedom.

    I stormed into the living room and did what I always did when emotionally overwhelmed by the complexities of existence: I turned on I Dream of Jeannie.

    That night Jeannie came to me one final time.

    As always, she floated silently through my bedroom window accompanied by that beautiful aching music that seemed to emerge from nowhere and everywhere simultaneously.

    But this time something was different.

    She looked sad.

    “The Horsefault sisters want you now,” she explained softly. “It’s time for you to return their affections. They are real girls. Girls who do not drift through bedroom windows inside moonlit clouds.”

    I argued desperately.

    I told her I loved her.

    But she only smiled with melancholy tenderness before slowly retreating backward into a gray mist that swallowed her completely.

    Then she vanished forever.

    After that night, the dreams changed.

    No more Jeannie.

    No more moonlit flights across the world.

    Instead my dreams became feverish and earthly. They featured rabbit cages beneath silver moonlight, hayfields trembling in the wind, and sweat-soaked girls in cutoffs and halter tops chasing me through cornfields while laughing hysterically.

    “Come out, come out, wherever you are!” they cried.

    Over and over.

    And just like that, childhood fantasy gave way to adolescent bewilderment.

    I never watched I Dream of Jeannie again.

  • The Professor and the Nihilist

    The Professor and the Nihilist

    I had been teaching Man’s Search for Meaning for more than twenty years, and over time I became increasingly haunted by a contradiction I could no longer ignore.

    As an intellectual exercise, teaching Frankl came easily to me. In the classroom, I could lecture confidently about suffering, moral courage, existential responsibility, and the human capacity to create meaning under catastrophic conditions. I knew the book so thoroughly that the lessons practically assembled themselves. I could guide students through Frankl’s arguments with the polished assurance of a veteran preacher delivering a favorite sermon.

    But outside the classroom, matters became considerably murkier.

    The older I grew, the more I suspected I lacked the moral authority to teach the book at all.

    Frankl’s memoir is not merely literature. It is a rebuke. It quietly interrogates the reader’s vanity, self-pity, cowardice, and spiritual laziness. The book demands that human beings rise above grievance and become worthy of their suffering. And whenever I compared Frankl’s moral heroism to my own personality defects—my vanity, self-absorption, resentment, melodrama, and appetite for comfort—I found myself thinking:

    Talk is cheap.

    Very cheap.

    It is easy to discuss transcendence while standing safely before a whiteboard in air-conditioned suburban America. It is another matter entirely to embody the principles one teaches.

    Yet despite my growing sense of fraudulence, I remained deeply invested in the book. I enjoyed the subtle glow that came from being perceived as a devoted disciple of Viktor Frankl. Teaching the text allowed me to borrow, however temporarily, some reflected aura of moral seriousness.

    Then came Conner Patrick.

    And the entire arrangement began to collapse.

    What made Conner’s disdain for Man’s Search for Meaning so devastating was that in nearly thirty years of teaching, he was by far the finest writer I had ever encountered.

    Not the most promising.
    Not the most talented “for his age.”

    The best.

    He was only eighteen years old, an English major with no discernible career ambitions, yet his prose possessed an effortless authority that made nearly every other student writer seem linguistically undernourished by comparison.

    Most young writers who wish to appear intelligent assault the reader with thesaurus vocabulary and bloated academic jargon. Conner did the opposite. His writing flowed with such ease and precision that reading his essays felt like watching someone stroll through a vast orchard of Language Trees casually plucking the exact perfect word at precisely the right moment.

    No strain.
    No showing off.
    No sweat visible on the machinery.

    The words simply arrived naturally in his hands.

    His prose was vastly superior to mine, and I knew it.

    At one point I told him:

    “I’ve got a V-6 engine under my hood. Reliable enough. But you—you’ve got a V-12. I can’t compete with that.”

    I also confessed I would be genuinely shocked if he did not eventually become a published writer.

    Conner himself looked less like an aspiring literary prodigy than a mountain man accidentally stranded on a community-college campus. He stood about six-foot-four and weighed well over 280 pounds. He wore faded jeans, hiking boots, and flannel shirts that made him appear permanently prepared either to split firewood or disappear into the Pacific Northwest wilderness for several years.

    A scraggly beard partially concealed the freckles on his cherubic cheeks, while a wool herringbone golfer’s cap sat low over his curly reddish-brown hair. Most days he carried a guitar into class as though wandering accidentally between folk concert and existential crisis.

    Socially, he was pleasant enough. He chatted easily with classmates and generally projected the relaxed friendliness of a gifted person not yet fully aware of the intimidation he inspired.

    But every so often I would catch his blue eyes narrowing slightly while observing other people, and in those moments I glimpsed something colder beneath the surface—an exhaustion with humanity itself, a private contempt that flickered across his face before disappearing again.

    It was the look of someone already disappointed by the species at eighteen.

    Conner would often linger after class long after the other students had drifted out into the hallway, and we would sit talking about his essays, literature, or his older sister Jennifer, who had taken my class the previous year and apparently decided I was competent enough to recommend to her younger brother.

    One of Conner’s essays featured a bald high-school football coach drinking with old friends inside a bar, and it became immediately obvious to me that the character was a lightly fictionalized version of my younger self. Conner had scavenged fragments from personal anecdotes I had casually shared in class and stitched them together into a kind of alternate-universe doppelgänger—one far more reckless, abrasive, and dangerous than I had ever possessed the courage to become.

    The other students loved the essay.

    I did too, though reading it gave me the uncanny sensation of watching someone steal my reflection and improve upon it.

    The important thing was this: Conner knew I respected his intelligence, and because of that respect he felt completely comfortable mocking me.

    More significantly, he felt comfortable disagreeing with me.

    This became painfully evident shortly after my first lecture on Man’s Search for Meaning, during which I explained the semester’s final capstone essay assignment. Students would argue either that Viktor Frankl made a convincing case for meaning as the antidote to existential despair, or that his argument ultimately failed to persuade them.

    After class, Conner remained seated at his desk while the others filed out.

    Then he looked at me and said:

    “You don’t really believe in this shit, do you?”

    The bluntness of the question startled me.

    “What?” I replied stupidly.

    He sighed impatiently, as though disappointed I was forcing him to state the obvious.

    “Come on, man. You know you don’t believe in this shit.”

    What unnerved me most was that part of me immediately recognized he might be right.

    Still, out of instinctive self-defense, I answered:

    “Well actually, I tend to be more agnostic when it comes to the subject of meaning.”

    “Seriously?”

    He was flipping through Frankl’s book in his enormous hands while staring at the pages with open contempt.

    “Take away the impressive Holocaust narrative and what are you left with?” he said. “Just a bunch of homilies about positive thinking. It’s basically Chicken Soup for the Soul for intellectuals.”

    Ordinarily, disagreement never bothered me. I encouraged students to challenge texts. But Conner’s criticism struck differently because he was not merely attacking Frankl.

    He was questioning my judgment.

    According to Conner, I had assigned sentimental tripe disguised as philosophy. Worse, I had emotionally manipulated students into treating cliché as wisdom because I personally needed the book to be true.

    I suddenly felt defensive in a way I hated.

    “I’m not going to lie to you, Conner,” I admitted. “When I first read Frankl at eighteen, the section where he’s marching with the prisoners at dawn and thinking about the spirit of his wife—I cried for like five hours.”

    Conner winced sympathetically, though not respectfully.

    “I’m glad you got something out of it,” he said. “And Frankl seems like a great guy. But all this stuff about meaning is bullshit. You know as well as I do there is no meaning.”

    “Is that what I’m supposed to tell my daughters?”

    “You can tell them the truth or you can tell them lies. It’s your choice.”

    “I want my daughters to grow up, get educated, fall in love, build meaningful lives. That gives me meaning. Does that make me stupid?”

    “You’re confusing meaning with survival,” he replied instantly. “Your love for your daughters is biological. Instinctive. I understand that. But that’s not meaning in the grand Frankl sense.”

    “So Frankl’s delusional?”

    “Of course he’s delusional,” Conner said calmly. “That doesn’t mean I don’t sympathize with him. Look, the guy went through unimaginable horror. He had to convince himself the suffering meant something or he would’ve psychologically collapsed. Most people do that. Meaning is basically an emotional survival mechanism people invent so they don’t lose their minds.”

    But it wasn’t merely his argument that destabilized me.

    It was the way he looked at me while making it.

    Conner spoke as though he regarded us as secret ideological allies—as if beneath my classroom performance, my lectures, my carefully curated professor persona, there existed another version of me fully aware that life was fundamentally meaningless.

    And the horrifying thing was that part of me felt seen.

    As instructors, especially after decades in the classroom, we like to imagine ourselves as stable intellectual authorities. We tell ourselves we are people of conviction who can withstand disagreement without wavering.

    Usually I could.

    But in Conner’s presence, I often felt like a man trying to lecture confidently while standing atop loose sand during an earthquake.

    Then he leaned back in his chair and delivered the coup de grâce.

    “Why are you teaching this crap?” he asked. “Does it make you feel better stuffing meaning down your students’ throats? Are you having some kind of midlife crisis and trying to lecture yourself out of despair?”

    “This is a critical thinking class,” I protested weakly. “I want students thinking for themselves.”

    “But you’re a hypocrite,” he replied immediately. “You tell us to think critically and detach emotionally from arguments. But you can’t do that with Frankl because you worship him. You’re emotionally compromised.”

    Then he held up the book dismissively.

    “Take away your admiration for his heroism and your sentimental memory of crying over his wife, and what do you have left? A bunch of clichés about finding meaning. And you know as well as I do that suffering doesn’t mean anything. Most of life is random pain that people desperately try to decorate with philosophy afterward.”

    Then, as if determined to drive the knife deeper, Conner began explaining why he found Frankl’s philosophy emotionally manipulative and intellectually fraudulent.

    His mother, he said, was deeply religious and believed God had called her to become a foster parent for infants damaged by drugs and alcohol.

    “Ever since I was a little kid,” he told me, “there have been crack babies in my house.”

    He said the phrase without sentimentality or self-pity. Just exhaustion.

    “They don’t recover,” he continued. “They’re permanently damaged. Some of them sleep all night with their eyes open. Some make these awful squawking noises like prehistoric birds. A lot of them can barely function. It’s a nightmare.”

    Then his tone hardened.

    “And what has my mother gained from this so-called higher purpose? Jennifer and I basically lost our childhoods. My mom neglected us because she was so obsessed with saving these babies for God. Half the time she expected us to help raise them.”

    He leaned back in his chair and laughed bitterly.

    “That’s what meaning looks like in real life. Endless stress, resentment, dysfunction, and guilt wrapped in religious self-congratulation.”

    According to Conner, his mother’s “calling” was either pathological altruism, spiritual narcissism, or some toxic combination of both.

    “Honestly,” he said, “Frankl shouldn’t be proud of this kind of shit. I grew up surrounded by people justifying misery in the name of meaning.”

    As had become the custom lately, the class ended on Conner’s terms, not mine. His words hung in the room long after the students gathered their backpacks and shuffled toward the door. I stood there disarmed, mute, and inwardly collapsing beneath the awful suspicion that he had exposed me for what I truly was: a middle-aged professor borrowing moral authority from books whose standards he himself could not meet. I felt less like a teacher than a theological used-car salesman trying to unload existential optimism with bald tires and a cracked transmission.

    I drove home that evening emotionally flattened.

    What disturbed me most was not merely Conner’s argument but my inability to answer it convincingly.

    For days afterward, I replayed our exchanges obsessively in my head the way a defeated boxer rewatches footage of a championship loss searching for the precise moment his legs gave out beneath him. Somewhere, I kept telling myself, there had to exist a devastating rebuttal capable of puncturing Conner’s nihilism once and for all. Surely Frankl’s philosophy could not be dismantled so easily by an eighteen-year-old English major dressed like a depressed lumberjack.

    By the next class meeting, however, I had concluded that the only intellectually honest response was to drag Conner’s objections directly into the open and let the entire class watch the philosophical knife fight unfold publicly.

    I asked his permission beforehand.

    He approved immediately and with almost indecent enthusiasm.

    The little bastard was delighted by the prospect of becoming the classroom heretic.

    So during the following lecture I summarized his objections for everyone.

    “Conner wants us,” I began carefully, “to temporarily set aside Frankl’s heroism and focus strictly on the argument itself. He makes two claims. First, much suffering appears entirely senseless. Second, what people call meaning may simply be a coping mechanism human beings invent to survive psychologically.”

    I paused and glanced toward Conner.

    He sat in the back row smiling broadly with the self-satisfaction of an arsonist admiring his own fire.

    “Now let’s concede something important right away,” I continued. “Massive amounts of suffering do appear meaningless. Consider something like the Indian Ocean tsunami. Hundreds of thousands dead. Entire families erased in minutes. There is no obvious moral lesson embedded in catastrophe on that scale.”

    The room remained quiet.

    “But,” I continued, “perhaps meaning exists on a spectrum. Perhaps human beings occupy what we might call a Meaning Scale.”

    The students leaned forward.

    “At one end,” I explained, “there is spiritual decrepitude. Imagine a severe addict whose entire existence collapses into appetite and self-destruction. He burns bridges with friends and family. He isolates himself. He loses all connection to higher aspirations. His life contracts inward toward emptiness.”

    The students nodded.

    “At the other end,” I continued, “are people who devote themselves to craft, service, discipline, love, or meaningful work. Through sacrifice and commitment they cultivate a higher version of themselves. That movement toward flourishing—that movement toward transcendence—is what I would call meaning.”

    Then I made the tactical error of looking directly at Conner.

    His lips curled upward immediately.

    “It’s great when people flourish,” he said, “but don’t confuse flourishing with meaning.”

    He folded his enormous arms across his chest like a Viking philosopher preparing to sack a monastery.

    “I know a sixteen-year-old evangelist who’s amazing at converting people to his faith. He’s disciplined, charismatic, passionate—everything you’re describing.”

    Then Conner paused theatrically.

    “But his older brother used to be an evangelist too. Now he tours around giving lectures about why religion is nonsense. He helps believers become atheists. He’s flourishing too. They can’t both possess some objective thing called meaning.”

    He shrugged.

    “They’re just pursuing narratives that energize them emotionally.”

    Then came the kill shot.

    “Meaning isn’t objective reality,” he said. “It’s emotional fuel. Complete bullshit.”

    The room fell silent.

    But Conner was only warming up.

    “There’s another problem with your argument,” he continued. “You’re committing the exact kind of either-or fallacy you’ve warned us about all semester.”

    Now he was openly enjoying himself.

    “You’ve created this cartoon universe where people are either spiritually disintegrating addicts or enlightened flourishing saints. But real people are contradictory. Plenty of great writers produced brilliant art while simultaneously destroying themselves with alcoholism. Human beings can flourish and decay at the same time.”

    Then he lowered his voice slightly.

    “You already know this. You’re just too emotionally attached to Frankl to admit it.”

    That sentence struck me with horrifying accuracy because part of me feared he was right.

    Then Conner leaned forward and delivered the existential haymaker.

    “Who wants to believe we’ve been dumped into a meaningless universe?” he asked quietly. “Who wants to admit we’re basically distracting ourselves with careers, hobbies, entertainment, and relationships until we die?”

    Again I felt that awful sensation of standing on shifting sand.

    I could feel myself sliding toward his worldview against my will.

    Panicking internally, I reached desperately for one of my emergency pedagogical flotation devices: Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.

    In a DVD interview, Gene Wilder had explained that the movie was fundamentally about boundaries and self-restraint, so I lunged at this idea like a drowning man grabbing driftwood.

    “Boundaries give us meaning,” I blurted out. “Boundaries teach discipline. They protect us from excess and chaos. Children raised with healthy boundaries are happier than children without them. Boundaries point us toward meaning.”

    Conner shook his head slowly.

    “Boundaries matter,” he conceded. “But they’re survival mechanisms. Not meaning.”

    Still flailing for life support, I snapped: “Take away meaning and what’s left? A nihilistic free-for-all? A Darwinian nightmare where the strong brutalize the weak?”

    Conner smiled lazily.

    “Relax, McMahon. Civilization isn’t going to collapse because people stop reading Viktor Frankl. We cooperate because cooperation benefits survival. Morality is adaptive behavior. That still isn’t meaning.”

    “So we’re just products of evolution?”

    “Pretty much. Can’t handle it?”

    “If what you’re saying is true,” I said, “most people would collapse into despair.”

    “Not at all,” he replied calmly. “Most people are perfectly happy believing comforting delusions. Religion. Cosmic purpose. Destiny. Frankl just packages existential anesthesia for intellectuals.”

    Then he grinned.

    “If grown adults want to believe in Santa Claus forever, more power to them.”

    At this point I decided to change strategy.

    “Can I ask you something personal, Mr. Patrick?”

    “Go for it.”

    “Why are you even in college?”

    He shrugged.

    “Something to do.”

    “You have no plan?”

    “Not really.”

    “Wouldn’t having a plan be better than not having one?”

    “Not necessarily,” he replied instantly. “I know plenty of students who followed ‘the plan’ only to realize they hate their major and hate their future. A lot of plans are disasters. Sometimes not having a plan is healthier.”

    At that moment the discussion no longer resembled a classroom debate. It felt like an arm-wrestling contest between a steroid-bloated carnival strongman and a tuberculosis patient fresh from convalescence. Conner’s arguments kept slamming my hand closer and closer toward the table while I strained uselessly beneath the fluorescent lights pretending I still had a fighting chance.

    I instinctively touched the front of my damp shirt expecting blood.

    It was only sweat.

    “But goals matter,” I insisted weakly. “Goals help us live more fully. As Nietzsche says—and Frankl quotes him constantly—‘He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How.’”

    Conner smirked.

    “Yes, but the Why may itself be delusional. Fascists have Whys. Cult leaders have Whys. Having motivation doesn’t magically create objective meaning.”

    Then he delivered the final insult with almost affectionate cruelty.

    “Honestly, McMahon, you assigned us a book full of platitudes and clichés. Your brain’s gone soft in your old age, bro. You may want to start looking at retirement.”

    By now I could sense the emotional tide of the classroom shifting toward him. Students were smiling at Conner with the admiration usually reserved for charismatic revolutionaries moments before mutiny.

    Conner sensed it too.

    Then, astonishingly, he stood up and addressed the class.

    “Okay, everybody,” he announced. “Show’s over. McMahon and I planned this whole thing beforehand. Rehearsed script. We wanted to demonstrate Socratic dialogue.”

    The students erupted.

    Several called it one of the greatest classes they had ever witnessed. One student said he regretted not recording the exchange and uploading it to YouTube. Another compared us to one of those buddy-comedy duos where two men spend the entire film insulting each other but secretly cannot function apart.

    The giant wall clock showed that the class was over.

    Students slowly shuffled out of the classroom buzzing with excitement.

    Conner remained seated.

    “What the hell was that?” I demanded once we were alone. “You were tearing me apart argument by argument. Then suddenly you rescue me?”

    He shrugged casually.

    “Well, first of all, I like you.”

    “What the hell do you do to professors you don’t like?”

    He laughed. Then he said, “To your credit, you tried to do something ambitious and failed. But at least you tried. Most professors just hide behind the same fossilized lecture notes for thirty years. You fought me. That takes guts. No one beats me in an argument–ever. You’ve got balls, McMahon.”

    “So you spared me because I’ve got balls?”

    “That’s part of it,” he admitted. “But also, I didn’t know anything before I took your class. You taught me some new ways to think critically. I wasn’t going to use the weapons you gave me to publicly humiliate you.”

    Then he smiled.

    “I don’t like many people, but I like you.”

    I shook my head.

    “Thirty years teaching, and I’ve never lost an argument like that. You handed me my bloody head on a stake.”

    “Which means,” he replied triumphantly, “it’s finally time for you to admit I’m right and Frankl’s wrong.”

    “I can’t do that.”

    “Come on, man. I saved you.”

    “You make compelling points,” I admitted. “But I still have some stubborn kernel of faith that meaning exists. If I denied that completely, I’d be lying.”

    Conner nodded thoughtfully.

    “Fair enough,” he said. “But next time, watch yourself in class.”

    Then he grinned.

    “Because next time I’m still going to kick your ass.”