Cinemorphosis

Tag: books

  • Holy Flex: When Arnold Was a God and Comedy Was Salvation

    Holy Flex: When Arnold Was a God and Comedy Was Salvation

    I spent five different decades writing novels not out of some noble artistic calling but out of sheer ego, self-aggrandizement, and the desperate hope of achieving wholeness. My faith wasn’t in literature—it was in the idea of a book, a symbol of permanence, a self-mythologizing gospel that would ensure my immortality. The writing demon that drove me wasn’t interested in craft or connection—it was fueled by compulsion, blind ambition, and existential terror. The kind of fear that makes a person scramble to ward off the specter of death by chasing a “Moment Fixed in Time”—to borrow therapist Phil Stutz’s phrase—is the kind of fear that guarantees bad writing. Too much desperation, not enough strategic detachment and self-critique.

    The ego has a singular focus: obsession at the expense of reason. This can’t be emphasized enough. Every self-improvement book touting the virtues of discipline, daily writing habits, and relentless perseverance should include a bold disclaimer: If you don’t regularly stop to scrutinize, revise, and—when necessary—abandon ship, you’re not being disciplined; you’re being delusional. But here’s the problem: the ego does not like reality checks. The moment it invests time and energy into a project, it refuses to let go, clinging to the wreckage with all the grace of a drowning man hugging an anvil.

    The most terrifying realization I’ve had in writing this book is that my ego craved something impossible—not just to create a book, but to create a book so earth-shattering it transcended art itself, becoming a kind of religion. A work so revelatory that it would stop people in their tracks and change their lives forever. And why did I believe such a thing was possible? Because I had seen it happen before.

    When I was fifteen, I was a competitive Olympic weightlifter, fully convinced of my athletic destiny. And then, in 1977, I saw Arnold Schwarzenegger in Pumping Iron, and my resolve crumbled faster than a poorly made protein bar. I had seen Arnold before, but this was different. Watching him on screen was like witnessing the second coming of Hercules—except with a better tan and an Austrian accent. And I wasn’t alone. Arnold wasn’t just a bodybuilder; he was a messiah, and we were his disciples.

    One afternoon, at Walt’s Gym, I worked out with a firefighter who had recently been a finalist in the Mr. California bodybuilding contest. He was a walking relic of 1970s masculinity—tall, tanned, blond, with a thick mustache that could have doubled as a broom, and black horn-rimmed glasses that made him look like a muscle-bound Clark Kent. After casually repping 300 pounds on the bench press, he stood up, flexed, and stared at himself in the mirror with the reverence of a man gazing upon a religious icon. “When I first saw Arnold,” he said, “I felt I was in the presence of the Lord. ‘There stands the Messiah,’ I said to myself. ‘There stands God Almighty come to bring good cheer to this world.’”

    He wasn’t just speaking for himself—he was speaking for all of us. Arnold was our savior, our Pied Piper of Pecs, leading us to the promised land of biceps, triceps, and quads capable of crushing watermelons. Bodybuilding stopped being a hobby and became a movement, spreading through gyms like a protein-fueled religious awakening. The only cure? More reps, more protein shakes, more flexing, more relentless, never-ending pursuit of physical perfection.

    But then I went to college, and something shifted. I read Kafka, Dostoevsky, and Nabokov, studied classical piano, and discovered that intellectualism had its own form of flexing. Suddenly, it wasn’t enough to be physically powerful—one had to be smart, profound, an artist. And then came A Confederacy of Dunces, right when David Letterman was ushering irony into the cultural bloodstream, and I realized that the ultimate flex wasn’t just intelligence—it was humor.

    Reading Dunces was a punch to my pompous, self-regarding gut. I was Ignatius J. Reilly in my own way—socially awkward, excessively self-serious, painfully convinced of my own importance. And then, suddenly, a comic novel liberated me. It didn’t just make me laugh—it pointed me in a new direction. My life’s mission was clear: I would carry the torch of John Kennedy Toole, Philip Roth, David Letterman, and George Carlin, making people laugh their way to salvation.

    I would write comedy as a religious experience.

    It was a fool’s errand, and only someone with a pathological ego would embark on something so misguided.

  • A Confederacy of Dunces Ruined My Life

    A Confederacy of Dunces Ruined My Life

    If I was indeed possessed by a misguided writing demon in the mid-’80s—courtesy of reading A Confederacy of Dunces on repeat and subsequently squandering decades chasing a fool’s errand to capture some fraction of Toole’s novelistic splendor—then one could argue, with a certain tragic flair, that A Confederacy of Dunces ruined my life. Of course, that’s a spectacular oversimplification, but it has a nice literary ring to it, the kind of statement that cries out for a memoir deal. A perfect hook for a writing addict who, in theory, is supposed to have sworn off writing books but is secretly mainlining one on the side. It’s theatrical, adolescent, irresistibly neat. But let’s indulge the idea for a moment: a novel ruined a young man’s life. Decades later, the question remains—what do we do with this squandered life? Do we ignore it, dismiss it as a useless souvenir, or can something be salvaged from the wreckage?

    If there’s anything worth extracting from my own literary misadventures, it’s a warning to younger, equally deluded souls who might be possessed by the same demon of ambition. And make no mistake—ambition alone will not get you anywhere worth going. Yes, it will drag you through years of toil, ensure you hit your daily word count, and convince you that sheer willpower equals literary success. But ultimately, ambition alone will lead you into a tunnel with no exit. You’ll work hard—but not the right way. You’ll write, but without joy, without connection, without meaning. You will produce, but you will not matter.

    So instead of chasing the illusion of grandeur, you should be asking yourself four crucial questions. First, are you having fun with the creative process? If not, why are you doing this? The comedian Tiffany Haddish once said that Eddie Murphy pulled her aside and told her that if she wasn’t having fun on stage, the audience would sense it—and once she embraced that, her career took off. The same applies to writing. If your joy doesn’t translate onto the page, don’t expect anyone else to find it. Ambition will get words onto the page, but it won’t make them worth reading. Second, are you the only person in the world who could write this book? What unique gifts, obsessions, or quirks of personality make you the best person to write this, or are you forcing an idea simply because you think it’s marketable? If the demon of ambition is blinding you to your weaknesses, rest assured that agents and editors will see them clearly—and they will tell you to go home. The demon, of course, won’t listen. He never does.

    Third, why this book? Can you articulate—persuasively—why your book matters? Will it survive in an attention economy where a two-minute TikTok can go viral while your ten-year opus sells six copies? Do you know what your book is competing against? Can you justify its existence? 

    Imagine, for a moment, that you’ve never been published and have no social media following to catapult your debut novel into relevance. How exactly do you think this book is going to survive? Picture a horde of baby sea turtles, freshly hatched, flopping their way toward the ocean. Before they even touch the surf, they’re picked off by seagulls, crabs, raccoons, foxes, coyotes, frigatebirds, herons, egrets, snappers, jacks, barracudas, dolphins, sharks—the list of assassins is endless. The ones that do make it into open water face even worse odds. And yet, statistically, they still have a better shot at survival than your novel has at flourishing into a living, breathing piece of art that embeds itself in millions of imaginations.

    So before you get too deep into your literary fever dream, you need to ask yourself a sobering question: Is there enough juice for the squeeze? Best-selling author Sam Harris certainly asked himself that before shifting his focus away from books to his wildly successful Making Sense podcast. I remember him breaking it down with ruthless efficiency: writing a book can take five grueling years—writing, editing, publishing, book tours—and even after all that, sales might not justify the effort. Meanwhile, he can record a podcast in a few hours and reach millions instantly. No torturous rewrites, no endless editing loops, no begging the world to care.

    And that’s a best-selling author speaking. You’re not one. You’re a nobody with a dream, convinced that your fragile little hatchling of a book will somehow defy the gauntlet and fulfill your delusions of literary immortality. You have lost your mind. More than likely, the book won’t be read. Which brings us to your final, painful reckoning.

    Will your book actually connect with anyone? Or will it be yet another tree falling in the forest with no one around to hear it? Failure to connect isn’t bad luck—it’s bad writing. If your prose exists in a silo of delirious echoes, unread and unloved, then it isn’t literature—it’s literary vapor, ghostly and weightless, doomed to drift into oblivion. And here’s the cruelest truth of all: your writing demon won’t make this distinction. He’ll tell you that writing is writing, that piling up pages is progress, that if you just keep going, success is inevitable.

    It isn’t.

    Had I asked myself these questions before chasing my writing demon down every blind alley, perhaps I would have written with purpose instead of compulsion. But I was too busy obeying the demon to pause and think. If you’re an aspiring writer, don’t make the same mistake. Ambition can drive you forward, but only if it’s tethered to something real—joy, originality, necessity, and connection. Otherwise, you’re just manufacturing words, filling pages with the sound and the fury, signifying nothing.

  • The Urge to Write Is the Urge to Dominate

    The Urge to Write Is the Urge to Dominate

    Looking back, I’m torn between admiring my audacity and filing a restraining order against my judgment. How, exactly, did I manage to pin so much hope on novels that, despite their half-decent opening chapters, quickly spiraled into the literary equivalent of a stalled elevator—going nowhere and deeply uncomfortable for everyone involved?

    In contrast, my short essays were clearly sharper, more potent—but I refused to let reality intrude on my mission. No, I was going to write the comic novel.

    This compulsion was never about art. It was about pain—the kind so deep that Jonathan Franzen famously coined Ache to describe the existential condition of adulthood: the rude awakening that we are not, in fact, the center of the universe and that our desires will always outrun our ability to satisfy them.

    Manuscriptus Rex feels this Ache acutely and has embarked on a fool’s errand to silence it with literary fame. But why this brand of glory? Why not build a real estate empire, become a movie heartthrob, or invent the perfect bed that guarantees twelve uninterrupted hours of blissful, coma-grade sleep? Because Manuscriptus Rex is too much of a narcissist for mere wealth, beauty, or utility. Writing a book—one that matters—offers something more intoxicating: the power to hijack people’s brains.

    And that’s what you really crave—not just admiration, but full cognitive occupation. You want your words burrowed into the minds of millions, your dream world dictating their thoughts. Your need for validation is so bottomless that only mass literary infiltration will mollify you. That this ambition is wildly improbable, driven by pathology, and guaranteed to bring more suffering than satisfaction? Irrelevant. The mission is all that matters. And the mission is literary dominance.

    My wife once observed that men, with their colossal egos, often wake up with sudden revelations, epiphanies so grand they feel compelled to start religions. She’s not wrong. The novelist, the polemicist—what are they really doing but trying to ignite a movement, disrupt the world, and bask in the glow of their own importance? Their gospel isn’t about some grand truth—it’s about them, standing center stage, ablaze with self-appointed brilliance.

    Religion is the ultimate expression of literary dominance. I think of the Apostle Paul himself, scribbling his epistles in a manic frenzy, waging rhetorical war in the bustling marketplace of spiritual ideas, demolishing rival orators, and confessing his own unhinged nature in Romans—his theological magnum opus, a mini-Bible inside the Bible. Only eighty pages in total. That was the sum of his obsessive writing, and yet his literary dominance is established. He’s been the talk of the town for over two thousand years. Whether they like him or not, people still want to hear what he has to say about the human condition. 

    This was the novelist’s role five decades ago, back when novelists were secular prophets, summoned to The Dick Cavett Show to pontificate on the issues of the day—because, once upon a time, their opinions mattered.

    And that’s what I loved about Cavett. Even as a ten-year-old, I grasped the show’s implicit assumption: the intellectual life was its own parallel universe, just as electrifying as Paul’s eschatological one—except with better punchlines.

    Perhaps Cavett planted the seeds of my literary delusion, setting the stage for a demon that would fully blossom into madness a decade later when I read A Confederacy of Dunces—then Portnoy’s Complaint and The Ginger Man. If I could write something as riotously funny as those masterpieces, I wouldn’t just be funny—I’d be brilliant, important, part of the conversation. My name would be etched into the pantheon of literary wit, my shattered self-esteem miraculously restored. I would find completion.

    And lest you think this was mere posturing, let me be clear: my aspirations weren’t some carefully curated cool pose. I was, without question, funny—not in the “guy who recycles late-night monologue jokes” way, but in the gimlet-eyed, take-no-prisoners way that slices through the world’s absurdities like a scalpel. I was an ally of Kafka, wielding my literary axe to shatter the frozen ocean of human folly. My quest was real, my voice authentic, my success inevitable.

    Except, of course, it wasn’t.

    I failed. Repeatedly. The novels kept coming, and to my credit, they got better—sharper, wittier, good enough to attract literary agents, which was dangerous because it fed the delusion. This wasn’t a phase. It became a lifelong affliction. In my twenties, thirties, forties, fifties—hell, even my sixties—the novels kept churning, like those chocolates on the conveyor belt in I Love Lucy, coming faster than I could process, devour, or even appreciate.

    The demon was still in business.

    And how good were these books as the result of all my literary effort? “Just okay.” Which, in an attention economy, is about as useful as a dial-up modem in the age of fiber optics. “Just okay” might sell 300 copies—a number so pitiful that the editor who championed your book could lose their job over it.

    But sure, let’s keep the dream alive.

    Having failed to write my grand, world-shaking book and having let A Confederacy of Dunces derail my life, I am left standing amid the wreckage of my literary ambitions, clutching at whatever scraps of wisdom I can salvage. Something must be redeemed, after all. And what better way to salvage a wreck than by turning it into yet another book? The Confessions of a Recovering Writing Addict.

    But of course, that’s just the demon running its mouth again. The same devious little imp that once whispered sweet nothings about my inevitable literary greatness now insists that my failure is my brand, my gimmick, my golden ticket to the book that will finally rock the world.

    And what is this seismic masterpiece, this literary game-changer? Oh, just a book about aspiring writers so starved for attention that they write not as artists, but as junkies, chasing the next fix of validation. A cautionary tale wrapped in a confession, packaged as a sales pitch—because irony, it seems, is the one thing I have mastered.

    Writing with an ego hellbent on domination, we writing junkies reveal an uncomfortable truth—we all have a little Paul in us. We insist we write out of sincerity, fueled by a pure, burning need to communicate something true. But let’s not kid ourselves. Deep down, what we really crave isn’t truth—it’s importance. Recognition. Veneration. And, above all, relevance.

    We aren’t just stringing words together; we’re mounting a last-ditch offensive against oblivion, hammering out prose as if sheer verbosity might hold off the reaper a little longer.

    In the end, we place our hope in something as fragile as a glue-and-paper book in the digital age, believing—despite all evidence to the contrary—that it will elevate us, transcend us, and make us immortal.

  • Confessions of a Recovering Writing Addict

    Confessions of a Recovering Writing Addict

    I’ve been given the most self-defeating assignment imaginable: I must write a book about my recovery from compulsive writing so that the telling of my recovery violates the terms of my sobriety.

    The first symptoms of my affliction emerged in 1984, when I made the catastrophic mistake of reading A Confederacy of Dunces. John Kennedy Toole’s masterpiece introduced me to Ignatius J. Reilly—a bloated, hot dog–devouring medievalist in a world that had tragically moved on from the 14th century. With the conviction of a deranged prophet, Ignatius stomped through New Orleans, denouncing modernity as if civilization itself were a personal affront. His absurdity was electrifying, a revelation. That was the moment I became possessed.

    This wasn’t some harmless creative itch. This was a full-blown psychosis, the kind that whispers in your ear late at night and tells you this is your purpose. Worse, it took root at the exact moment I was an impressionable young man, inflated with the kind of intellectual vanity that only a 23-year-old can achieve. Watching Ignatius clash with reality, I had an epiphany—comedy wasn’t just entertainment; it was a weapon, a higher calling.

    And then came the real disaster: I became convinced that I was meant to be a satirical novelist. Not in a vague, “wouldn’t that be cool” way, but in a divinely ordained, words-branded-into-my-flesh-with-a-cattle-prod kind of way. It was not a career choice. It was fate.

    And so began my decades-long descent into literary madness.

    ***

    To understand the bloated sense of self-importance that fueled my literary delusions, we need to revisit my place of employment—a temple of pretension where my ego found fertile ground. In the early 1980s, I funded my college education by peddling fine wines and imported beers at Jackson’s Wine & Spirits in Berkeley, conveniently nestled just up the street from the Claremont Hotel on Ashby Avenue. It was the perfect setting for a young man to marinate in delusions of grandeur—surrounded by cork-sniffing sophisticates, armchair sommeliers, and the kind of clientele who believed a well-aged Bordeaux could double as a personality.

    My coworkers were the sort of intellectual show-offs who could reduce an Oxford don to a stammering fool. They held advanced degrees in everything from literature to linguistics, chemistry to musicology, and they wore their academic pedigrees like badges of honor, brandishing them in a booze emporium as if the walls were lined with first editions rather than bottles of Chianti. They’d read Flaubert in the original French and sneered at English translations with the kind of disdain usually reserved for bad table wine. To them, working for any corporation that might dare to track their time was an act of existential surrender. Instead, they peddled fine spirits with an elitism so thick you could bottle it, cork it, and slap a vintage label on it. Their motto? “Service with a smirk.” 

    I wanted to fit in, so I read voraciously, parroting these cultural heavyweights who could debate the nuances of two French Beaujolais for an entire shift while tossing out quotes from Kierkegaard or Camus. Soon enough, I was well on my way to becoming a full-blown snob, the kind who could turn a simple idea into a verbal labyrinth designed to impress rather than clarify. Slow hours found us planted by the registers dissecting the finer points of Nietzsche’s existential dread, Wagner’s bombastic compositions, and Kafka’s literary conundrums. I became intoxicated with my own intellect (mostly because I couldn’t afford the good wine) and used every fifty-dollar word in the book to convince myself I was superior to anyone with a steady paycheck. Working alongside this oddball crew was comfortable and, let’s face it, easy, but it lulled me into a delusion: I might not be wealthy or gainfully employed, but I was intellectually rich, or so I told myself.

    By my mid-twenties, I was perfectly content to be the Nerf football-throwing, Borges-quoting slacker clerk who waxed poetic about the existential themes of Alberto Moravia and the tragic pessimism of Miguel de Unamuno while restocking shelves with Chianti. 

    To further swell my already bloated ego, I spent my early twenties teaching college writing part-time, fancying myself some sort of literary prodigy destined for greatness. Whether I was regaling my students with pompous insights—laced with Nabokovian verbosity—or delivering the same drivel to wine store customers, I reveled in the delusion that I was the gravitational center of the universe. Every word I uttered, every pretentious quip, felt like a gift to the world—never mind that no one had asked for it.

    Thus mired in a fever swamp of self-regard, I began my holy quest, an epic pilgrimage of delusion. Throughout the ’80s and ’90s, I churned out novels at a terrifying speed, convinced that sheer productivity equaled genius. Wow, I must be good at this! I thought, mistaking volume for talent, like a man believing that eating more hot dogs makes him a Michelin-star chef.

    The novels blur together now, a vast landfill of ambition outpacing execution, but three stand out for their sheer absurdity.

    In 1989, I wrote Herculodge, a dystopian satire in which being overweight or displaying cellulite was illegal. This premise, better suited for a five-minute SNL skit, somehow sprawled into a 60,000-word novella, proving that even bad ideas can be tediously stretched to novel length.

    In 1991, I produced Omnivore, the tragic tale of a man who could never find satisfaction eating his own food, forcing him to break into houses and devour leftovers from strangers’ refrigerators. Only through cat burglary could he achieve satiety—a premise that sounds brilliantly unhinged in a John Cheever short story but unbearable at novel length. Unfortunately, I chose the latter, cramming 10 percent story into 90 percent padding, like an overstuffed burrito of literary excess.

    In 1992 while teaching college in the California desert, I lived next to a man who was less a neighbor and more an anthropological oddity—a legal brief-reading, Kenny G-blasting exhibitionist who pranced around the apartment pool in custom-print Speedos while slowly tanning himself into a deep mahogany hue. He became the unwitting inspiration for The Man Who Stopped Dating, my novel about an uncouth playboy who receives a vengeful fruit basket from one of his scorned lovers. A single bite from a deliquescing mango leaves him cursed with a permanent stench, a condition suspiciously similar to fish odor syndrome (trimethylaminuria, for the medically inclined). His hero’s journey becomes a desperate quest to rid himself of the smell, find redemption, and maybe—just maybe—salvage his soul.

    Convinced I had spun pure gold, I went all in—I adapted the story into a screenplay and shelled out a cool two grand to have Hollywood script guru Linda Seger take a scalpel to it. Her verdict? Great premise. Catastrophic structure. Apparently, my masterpiece wasn’t so much a movie as a sprawling narrative train wreck, gasping for subplots, character depth, and the basic bones of a coherent story.

    But did that deter me? Of course not. In my fevered delusion, the mere act of consulting with Hollywood’s premier script doctor meant I was practically in—one fortuitous lunch meeting away from a bidding war over my genius. I could already hear studio execs brawling over my brilliance, assuming they could hold their breath long enough to endure a script about a man who smells like low tide.

    In reality, I wasn’t Hemingway. I wasn’t even a second-rate Elmore Leonard. I was Rupert Pupkin, the delusional failure from The King of Comedy, rehearsing for a fame that was never coming. The difference? At least he had the decency to keep his fantasies in his mother’s basement.

  • When the Horsefault Sisters Tried to Lock Me in the Rabbit Cage

    When the Horsefault Sisters Tried to Lock Me in the Rabbit Cage

    One warm California afternoon in the spring of 1973, after sixth-grade classes had spit us out and the school bus rumbled off, leaving us at the corner of Crow Canyon Road, my friends and I followed our sacred ritual: a pilgrimage across the street to 7-Eleven to score a Slurpee before facing the long, punishing climb up Greenridge Road. Inside that air-conditioned oasis of fluorescent lights and sugar, “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl)” crackled from the tinny store radio, its chorus bouncing off the racks of bubble gum and beef jerky.

    That’s when the Horsefault sisters walked in like a blonde tornado.

    They were tall, freckled, and wild—sunburned Valkyries with tangled golden hair, mischievous blue eyes, and the kind of high cheekbones that made me momentarily forget I was twelve. One was an eighth grader; the other, a high school sophomore, already possessing the dangerous confidence of someone who knew she could upend your world with a glance. They lived on a rundown farmhouse just behind the store, surrounded by fields and mystery.

    “Wanna see a rabbit in a cage?” the younger one asked, her grin too wide to be trusted.

    I didn’t give two figs about rabbits, but the sisters had figures that awakened my dim childhood memories of Barbara Eden in I Dream of Jeannie—my first crush and the gold standard of unattainable beauty. So naturally, I replied, “Absolutely.”

    We left 7-Eleven, the door jingling behind us, and crossed into a sun-bleached field dotted with dry horse dung, the air sharp with the tang of manure and wild grass. A dirt trail wound past scrubby bushes and led to the edge of their sagging farmhouse. Behind a thicket of weeds sat a large iron cage with a rusted chain hanging off the latch. The door yawned slightly open like the maw of a trap.

    I peered inside. No rabbit. Just hay, a few feathers, and a faint smell of old alfalfa and chicken droppings. Before I could even register the absence of the promised bunny, the sisters attacked—howling with glee like feral imps. One grabbed my arms, the other lunged for my legs, and together they tried to wrestle me into the cage.

    It was clear: I had been duped by a pair of rural sirens, not into love, but into captivity.

    But they had underestimated me. I was stocky, wiry, and recently obsessed with Charles Atlas. I fought back with the desperation of a wrongfully accused man resisting a wrongful life sentence. We rolled in the tall grass, kicking up dust, hay, and chicken feathers as if auditioning for a Benny Hill episode shot on a farm. A nearby chicken coop exploded with chaos—panicked clucks and frantic wing flaps erupted like a poultry apocalypse.

    The sisters, now sweaty and streaked with dirt, were panting from their failed coup. Realizing they didn’t have the brute strength to imprison me, they collapsed in giggles and defeat. I seized my chance and bolted—running like a fugitive through the meadow, Slurpee long forgotten, heart pounding like a kettle drum.

    I got home, still breathless, still incensed by the attempted kidnapping, and turned on the TV to calm my frayed nerves. There she was: Barbara Eden, in her satin harem pants and cropped top, looking radiant and unbothered, stuck in her gilded bottle and waiting to be summoned. For the rest of the afternoon, I lay on the carpet in front of the television, sipping water from a mason jar and watching Jeannie coo and blink and call her master “darling.”

    Unlike me, she never had to wrestle two hormonal farm girls behind a convenience store to escape a rabbit-less cage.

  • Worst College Student Ever

    Worst College Student Ever

    I was the worst college student ever. But before we get to that, let’s roll back to the fall of 1979 when I began my illustriously doomed university career. I was seventeen, an Olympic weightlifting champ and a competitive bodybuilder, laser-focused on my singular dream: win Mr. Universe, crush Mr. Olympia, and then ride that shredded glory to a personal gym empire in the Bahamas. My priorities were crystalline: achieve a beautiful body, maintain that body in a setting conducive to permanent oil-and-Speedo living, and ensure that the only clothes I wore for the rest of my life were posing trunks.

    This goal, as impractical as it was narcissistically vivid, never impressed my recently divorced mother. She called me a nincompoop every time I talked about opening a tropical gym. When I insisted my friends — Frank Zane, Tom Platz, Robbie Robinson, and the rest of the pantheon I knew only from the glossy pages of Muscle & Fitness — would come visit, she replied, “Those aren’t your friends. They’re from your magazines. I’m not stupid.”

    Contrary to the meathead stereotype, I graduated high school with straight A’s. But that was less a testament to my intellect and more an indictment of a system that funneled students through a bureaucratic sleepwalk. One of my classes was called “Money Matters.” We learned how to write checks and keep a budget. This was first-grade math masquerading as life skills. Another gem was “Popular Lit,” in which we read any three books of our choosing and wrote one-page reports so lax, you could submit a fever dream scrawled in pencil and receive an A. Our teacher looked like she lived under a freeway overpass and had the hygiene regimen to match. I never saw her do anything other than read People magazine and clip her nails with industrial wire cutters.

    It was abundantly clear that we weren’t being educated. We were being warehoused until adulthood. A teacher once muttered to a colleague in the hallway, “We’re training them to flip burgers.” And I believed him.

    But I didn’t care. I wasn’t going to flip burgers or go to college. I was going to sculpt my body into a Greek god, win a shelf of trophies, and retire to an island where protein shakes flowed like wine. And I had evidence of my imminent glory: I trained at The Weight Room in Hayward alongside John Matuszak, a defensive end built like a mythological beast and known for body-slamming offensive linemen and the occasional jukebox. We bonded over T-Bar rows and cheesy radio duets. Once, during a particularly syrupy ballad, Matuszak curled his lip in disgust, growled, “Bullshit,” and rep-pounded 400 pounds like he was hammering nails into sentimentality’s coffin.

    Then there was Joe Corsi, local supplement tycoon and aged bodybuilder with a Dracula-meets-Jack-LaLanne aesthetic. Jet-black hair, dyed eyebrows, and a sleeveless jumpsuit that gave off the vibe of an aging lounge lizard hawking protein powder. He praised my “exceptional structure” and called me the next big thing. I waited for the sponsorship that never came.

    Mother, skeptical of the steak delivery sponsorship I kept promising her, finally cornered me in the kitchen where she was butchering a raw chicken like it had committed a felony. “College,” she said. “It’s your only option.”

    “What about Joe Corsi?”

    “What about him? Unless he’s showing up with T-bones, you’ve got nothing.”

    So I swallowed my Speedo-clad pride and applied to Cal State. Tuition was seventy-eight dollars a quarter. Cheaper than buying meat from Louie Corsi, Joe’s brother, who had offered me a pyramid scheme disguised as an entrepreneurial opportunity.

    I entered college with all the enthusiasm of a man being marched to the gallows. I had no respect for my professors. They were walking, talking resumes with gourmet cookware fetishes and tales of their African safaris. My Ethics professor — the Dean of Philosophy — had recently left his wife for his secretary and cruised into the parking lot in a Porsche convertible, his toupee flapping like a bat out of hell. I despised him on sight.

    Despite my straight A’s in high school, the university diagnosed me as an academic disgrace. I was unfit even for “Bonehead English” and was relegated to “Pre-Bonehead,” held in a boiler room next to maintenance. Janitors poked their heads in to laugh at us. And I deserved it.

    I lacked academic skill, yes, but I also lacked common sense. One day, a neighbor’s Siberian Husky licked me on the mouth. Panicked about AIDS, I called a local radio station and asked a doctor if canine kisses could transmit the disease. The doctor assured me I was safe. My mother, emerging from her bedroom after hearing the broadcast, said, “Was that you on the radio? You thought dog spit gave you AIDS? Cool it, buster.”

    It was a humbling moment. But not humbling enough to help me pick a major.

    Criminal justice bored me. The legalese read like a Choose Your Own Adventure designed by Kafka. Sociology and psychology books were impenetrable clouds of jargon. Reading them felt like slashing through kudzu with a machete. History had the narrative flair of a warehouse inventory list. Oceanography was fine until I developed a Pavlovian twitch to the professor’s favorite words: “viscosity,” “liminal zone,” and “denitrification.”

    Accounting nearly broke me. Ten minutes in, I walked out. The professor asked for my name. I said, “That won’t be necessary. You’ll never see me again.”

    I was failing, flailing, and officially on academic probation by spring. The university handed me a letter saying, in essence, “Shape up or ship out.”

    So I turned to my father.

    He invited me over for steaks. On the patio, he asked how school was going. I confessed everything. He listened, chewed, and finally said, “You can’t be a garbage man.”

    “Why not?”

    “You’re too vain. Imagine telling people at a party you’re a sanitation engineer. You’ll crack under the weight of social disapproval.”

    He was right. My ego wouldn’t allow me to collect trash. I needed a title with cachet. So I returned to campus, hat in hand, to pick a major. English it was. Why? Because the prose in other fields made me want to fling myself into traffic. Because I longed for writing that didn’t sound like it was composed by a committee of caffeinated consultants.

    And because I couldn’t learn in a room full of thirty-five people. My mind jittered like a squirrel on espresso. I taught myself grammar from a handbook. Syntax became my sanctuary. Grammar gave me what life hadn’t: structure, coherence, and rules that actually worked.

    Nietzsche once said we haven’t gotten rid of God because we still believe in grammar. He had a point. Grammar was my personal theology. It saved me.

    My grades rose. My confidence grew. The tutoring center hired me. Then I was offered a teaching gig.

    The university that once tried to boot me now wanted me at the helm.

    I had become, with astonishing irony, the worst college professor ever.

  • The Great, on Hulu, is your TV Mount Everest

    The Great, on Hulu, is your TV Mount Everest

    So, you’ve just finished watching the complete 3 seasons of The Great on Hulu, and now you’re a broken shell of a human being. This “anti-historical” comedy about Empress Catherine the Great, penned by the devilishly talented Tony McNamara, is hands-down the best thing you’ve ever seen on television. And now, you’re plunged into a depression so deep that not even Elle Fanning’s radiant smirk or Nicholas Hoult’s glorious, sociopathic wit can pull you out of it. Why? Because you know, deep in your soul, that you’ll never see a script with such biting humor, impeccable cadence, and penetrating insight again. Ever.

    The Great is your TV Mount Everest, and the air up there is so thin that coming back down to the ground feels like an existential freefall. Desperate for solace, you decide to drown your sorrows in another “costume comedy,” because clearly, nothing soothes the soul like more ruffles and wigs.

    Enter The Decameron on Netflix—a comedy about the bubonic plague in 14th Century Italy. Yes, someone thought it would be a good idea to wring laughs out of a pandemic that killed a third of Europe. And the shocking part? They actually pulled it off. You’re impressed. Sort of. But at the same time, let’s not kid ourselves—the writing is not even in the same universe as The Great. It’s like comparing a Michelin-starred meal to the tastiest TV dinner you’ve ever had. Sure, it’s good, but come on—it’s not The Great. But here’s the kicker: you can’t trust your judgment anymore. You’ve entered a full-blown Post-Masterpiece Meltdown. On one hand, you’re bending over backward to be generous toward The Decameron, because you know deep down it’s unfair to compare anything to the sheer brilliance of The Great. On the other hand, you’re haunted by the suspicion that your generosity might be blinding you to the show’s actual merits—or lack thereof. You’re like someone who’s just lost the love of their life and is now attempting to date again by swiping right on Tinder with tears streaming down their face.

    Can you really trust your post-Great heart to judge anything properly? To make matters worse, The Decameron features the enigma that is Tanya Reynolds, an actress whose face is a bafflingly delightful conundrum—one moment goofy, the next serenely beautiful, as if she’s somehow tapped into a facial time machine that can travel between awkward adolescence and timeless beauty at will. Her intoxicating, elastic pulchritude is the final nail in the coffin of your short-circuited judgment. Your critical faculties, once sharp as a chef’s knife, now resemble a spoon trying to slice through steak. And you used to take pride in your TV criticism! Now you’re floundering in a sea of existential doubt, questioning everything—your taste, your standards, your very identity as a TV aficionado. So here you are, a once-confident critic, now reduced to a quivering mass of uncertainty, all because you stumbled upon Tony McNamara’s masterpiece, The Great. It’s like finding out you’ve been living in Plato’s cave all along, and now you’ve seen the light, you’re doomed to spend the rest of your days in the shadows, longing for the brilliance you can never unsee. Welcome to your new life in the Post-Masterpiece Meltdown. Enjoy the view—such as it is.

  • FOMO and the Mythical Past Can Ruin You

    FOMO and the Mythical Past Can Ruin You

    I remain haunted by three men who, decades later, are still gnashing their teeth over a squandered romantic encounter so catastrophic in their minds, it may as well be their personal Waterloo.

    It was the summer of their senior year, a time when testosterone and bad decisions flowed freely. Driving from Bakersfield to Los Angeles for a Dodgers game, they were winding through the Grapevine when fate, wearing a tie-dye bikini, waved them down. On the side of the road, an overheated vintage Volkswagen van—a sunbaked shade of decayed orange—coughed its last breath. Standing next to it? Four radiant, sun-kissed Grateful Dead followers, fresh from a concert and still floating on a psychedelic afterglow.

    These weren’t just women. These were ethereal, free-spirited nymphs, perfumed in the intoxicating mix of patchouli, wild musk, and possibility. Their laughter tinkled like wind chimes in an ocean breeze, their sun-bronzed shoulders glistening as they waved their bikinis and spaghetti-strap tops in the air like celestial signals guiding sailors to shore.

    My friends, handy with an engine but fatally clueless in the ways of the universe, leaped to action. With grease-stained heroism, they nursed the van back to health, coaxing it into a purring submission. Their reward? An invitation to abandon their pedestrian baseball game and join the Deadhead goddesses at the Santa Barbara Summer Solstice Festival—an offer so dripping with hedonistic promise that even a monk would’ve paused to consider.

    But my friends? Naïve. Stupid. Shackled to their Dodgers tickets as if they were golden keys to Valhalla. With profuse thanks (and, one imagines, the self-awareness of a plank of wood), they declined. They drove off, leaving behind the road-worn sirens who, even now, are probably still dancing barefoot somewhere, oblivious to the tragedy they unwittingly inflicted.

    Decades later, my friends can’t recall a single play from that Dodgers game, but they can describe—down to the last bead of sweat—the precise moment they drove away from paradise. Bring it up, and they revert into snarling, feral beasts, snapping at each other over whose fault it was that they abandoned the best opportunity of their pathetic young lives. Their girlfriends, beautiful and present, might as well be holograms. After all, these men are still spiritually chained to that sun-scorched highway, watching the tie-dye bikini tops flutter in the wind like banners of a lost kingdom.

    Insomnia haunts them. Their nights are riddled with fever dreams of sun-drenched bacchanals that never happened. They wake in cold sweats, whispering the names of women they never actually kissed. Their relationships suffer, their souls remain malnourished, and all because, on that fateful day, they chose baseball over Dionysian bliss.

  • 95% of books are just bloated short stories and essays with unnecessary padding

    95% of books are just bloated short stories and essays with unnecessary padding

    As part of my rehabilitation from writing novels I have no business writing, I remind myself of an uncomfortable truth: 95% of books—both fiction and nonfiction—are just bloated short stories and essays with unnecessary padding. How many times have I read a novel and thought, This would have been a killer short story, but as a novel, it’s a slog? How often have I powered through a nonfiction screed only to realize that everything I needed was in the first chapter, and the rest was just an echo chamber of diminishing returns?

    Perhaps someday, I’ll learn to write an exceptional short story—the kind that punches above its weight, the kind that leaves you feeling like you’ve just read a 400-page novel even though it barely clears 30. It takes a rare kind of genius to pull off this magic trick. I think of Alice Munro’s layered portraits of regret, Lorrie Moore’s razor-sharp wit, and John Cheever’s meticulous dissections of suburban despair. I flip through my extra-large edition of The Stories of John Cheever, and three stand out like glittering relics: “The Swimmer,” “The Country Husband,” and “The Jewels of the Cabots.” Each is a self-contained universe, a potent literary multivitamin that somehow delivers all the nourishment of a novel in a single, concentrated dose. Let’s call these rare works Stories That Ate a Novel—compact, ferocious, and packed with enough emotional and intellectual weight to render lesser novels redundant.

    As part of my rehabilitation, I must seek out such stories, study them, and attempt to write them. Not just as an artistic exercise, but as a safeguard against relapse—the last thing I need is another 300-page corpse of a novel stinking up my hard drive.

    But maybe this is more than just a recovery plan. Maybe this is a new mission—championing Stories That Eat Novels. The cultural winds are shifting in my favor. Attention spans, gnawed to the bone by social media, no longer tolerate literary excess. Even the New York Times has noted the rise of the short novel, reporting in “To the Point: Short Novels Dominate International Booker Prize Nominees” that books under 200 pages are taking center stage. We may be witnessing a tectonic shift, an age where brevity is not just a virtue but a necessity.

    For a failed novelist and an unapologetic literary wind-sprinter, this could be my moment. I can already see it—my sleek, ruthless 160-page collection, Stories That Eat Novels, four lapidary masterpieces gleaming like finely cut diamonds. Rehabilitation has never felt so good. Who says a man in his sixties can’t find his literary niche and stage an artistic rebirth? Maybe I wasn’t a failed novelist after all—maybe I was just a short-form assassin waiting for the right age to arrive.

  • The Slurpee, the Sirens, and the Rabbit That Never Was

    The Slurpee, the Sirens, and the Rabbit That Never Was

    It was a warm California afternoon in 1973, the kind where time stretched lazily and everything smelled like fresh-cut grass, asphalt, and melted sugar. After sixth-grade let out, we piled off the school bus at Crow Canyon Road and made the mandatory pilgrimage to 7-Eleven, where a cherry Slurpee was both a status symbol and a life force.

    Inside, I was mid-slurp, soaking in the neon buzz of the store, when “Brandy, You’re a Fine Girl” crooned from the radio—a song about a sailor who refuses love for the sea, a detail I should have paid more attention to. Because, right then, the Horsefault sisters walked in.

    They were freckled, long-legged, and dangerously charismatic, their mischievous blue eyes glinting with some hidden scheme. One was in eighth grade, the other a high school sophomore, but their combined power far exceeded their individual ages. They lived in a farmhouse behind the 7-Eleven and approached me with an offer that, in retrospect, should have triggered immediate alarm:

    “Do you wanna see a rabbit in a cage?”

    I did not want to see a rabbit in a cage. But they had high cheekbones and figures that activated my deeply ingrained Barbara Eden fixation, so naturally, I announced that I was deeply invested in seeing this rabbit.

    I followed them out of the store, Slurpee in hand, as we walked about a hundred yards down a trail littered with dry horse dung, the sun casting long shadows over the tall grass. This was, in hindsight, my first mistake.

    At the end of the trail stood a large, ominous cage. The door hung slightly ajar, a thick chain lock dangling menacingly from the latch. I peered inside, expecting my promised rabbit. Instead, I saw nothing but the dark void of impending doom.

    Before I could process the cold realization that no rabbit existed, the sisters cackled like witches, grabbed me, and began dragging me toward the cage. The plan was clear: shove me in, slam the door, lock me up, and leave me to contemplate my poor life choices.

    But I was too strong, too desperate, too unwilling to be some kind of farm-boy prisoner. I fought back, and in the ensuing struggle, we tumbled into the dirt, rolling in a cloud of dust and hay, limbs flailing like a low-budget Western bar fight. Nearby, chickens screeched and flapped in terror, as if foreseeing my imminent imprisonment.

    Sweaty and defeated, the sisters finally let go. I scrambled to my feet and bolted, leaving behind my half-finished Slurpee—a tragic casualty of war.

    The Horsefault sisters had nearly claimed me as their caged trophy, but I had escaped. Barely. I never saw the rabbit. I doubt it ever existed. But I did learn an important lesson that day: if two gorgeous, devious girls invite you to see something in a cage, you are probably the attraction.