Cinemorphosis

Tag: family

  • Harry Potter and the Chamber of Dental Horrors

    Harry Potter and the Chamber of Dental Horrors

    My journey with claustrophobia is not a quirk. It is a full-blown, sweat-drenched neurological prison riot. And nowhere does this disorder stage a more operatic coup than in two places: the dentist’s chair and the bowels of Universal Studios, Studio City.

    Let’s start with the latter—a cautionary tale that should be printed on the back of every park map. I should never have stepped foot in that glorified mall of overpriced grease traps and postmodern carnival barkers wearing epaulets, who reeked of mothballs and dashed dreams. But I did it—for my twin daughters. For my wife. For the illusion that fatherhood sometimes requires nobility.

    The fatal mistake? Boarding the Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey ride, a title that now feels like prophecy. After a Kafkaesque hour in line, I was shoehorned into a toddler-sized aircraft seat, and then came the final insult: a steel bar clamped down on my chest like it was sealing me into a medieval torture rack. My 52-inch ribcage was not consulted. My lungs issued an immediate protest.

    As the ride lurched forward into a black tunnel engineered by Satan himself, I realized I was not going to survive. I began pleading, then shrieking for them to stop the ride—a desperate man reduced to primal terror. Mercifully, the passengers next to me joined in my hysteria, and their collective outcry finally penetrated the headset of some underpaid engineer who ground the machine to a halt. A stoic security guy with a Secret Service haircut approached as I peeled myself out of the deathtrap.

    “You want to debrief me in the trauma tent?” I muttered, trying to laugh through the ash cloud of my dignity.

    Fast-forward to a few weeks later: I’m back in another chamber of horrors—Dr. Howard Chen’s dental office. A kind, soft-spoken man, Dr. Chen has the patience of a monk and the eyes of someone who’s seen too much. During a routine procedure, he inserted a rubber bite block into my mouth—also known as the Mouth Prop from Hell. It jammed my jaw open, restricted my ability to swallow, and in seconds, transported me back to that Potter ride with its clamping harness and tunnel of doom.

    I shot up from the chair, peeled off my flannel shirt like it was doused in napalm, and stood hyperventilating while sweat poured down my face like I’d just run the Boston Marathon with a fever.

    Dr. Chen asked gently, “Are you going to be okay, Jeff?”

    “I can’t have this rubber thing in my mouth,” I gasped, holding it like it was radioactive.

    He removed it. Deep breaths. Back in the chair. We finished the procedure bite-block free, no further incidents—except for my lingering shame.

    My visits to Dr. Chen are a multisensory assault. I am what polite society would call a “super smeller.” What that means in a dental context is that I’m stewing in a noxious stew of clove oil, latex gloves, glutaraldehyde, and ghostly wafts of tooth dust from patients past. Throw in the sound of Neil Diamond warbling over the speakers and it becomes less a cleaning and more a ritualistic descent into madness.

    Every visit turns existential. I begin contemplating my soul, my legacy, and the probability that I’ll die while getting a fluoride rinse. It’s the only time I think about the afterlife more than I do during a colonoscopy—and that includes the part when they say, “You may feel a little pressure.”

    To his credit, Dr. Chen is a saint. He accommodates all my neuroses, never rushes me, and tries to soothe me with words that sound like Buddhist proverbs run through a dental insurance filter. “Let the Sonicare do the work,” he tells me. “But I don’t trust it,” I reply. “Then you must learn to trust.” “But I am a man of doubt.” “That, Jeff,” he says, “is obvious.”

    At my most recent appointment, he warned me of potential decay under an old filling. “We may need to do a root canal.” I responded like a man learning he’d tested positive for eternal damnation.

    “What can I do to stop this?”

    “Cut the sugar. Don’t brush like you’re sanding drywall.”

    “So what you’re saying is, I’m threading the needle here.”

    “Basically, yes.”

    “Doctor, I crave absolutes.”

    “Join the club.”

    Dr. Chen’s resignation to life’s uncertainty is what keeps me coming back. That, and the knowledge that no other dentist could possibly endure the psychological obstacle course that is my biannual cleaning.

    After my last visit, dazed from polishing paste and light dental trauma, I left the office only to nearly reverse my car into a black SUV. The horn blast nearly cracked my molars. As I sat there recovering, I looked up and saw Dr. Chen watching me from behind the blinds—no longer smiling, but staring with the flat, weary eyes of a man who had just confirmed what he’d long suspected: his patient was, in fact, completely insane.

    And he was right.

  • Field-Testing FOMO: A Preteen Cautionary Tale

    Field-Testing FOMO: A Preteen Cautionary Tale

    One warm California afternoon in the spring of 1973, after sixth-grade classes had spit us out like a bad punchline and the school bus rumbled off down Crow Canyon Road, my friends and I embarked on our sacred post-school ritual: a pilgrimage to 7-Eleven to score a Slurpee before the long, punishing hike up Greenridge Road. Inside that fluorescent-lit temple of artificial flavors, “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl)” crackled from the tinny store radio, bouncing off racks of bubble gum, jerky, and preteen dreams.

    That’s when the Horsefault sisters burst through the door like a blonde tornado.

    They were tall, freckled, sunburned Valkyries from the far reaches of suburban myth—bohemian chaos in halter tops. One was an eighth grader; the other, a high school sophomore with the kind of don’t-care confidence that could collapse a twelve-year-old boy’s worldview with a single sideways glance. They lived in a crumbling farmhouse behind the store, surrounded by the ghosts of chickens and a rumored pony.

    “Wanna see a rabbit in a cage?” the younger one asked, her grin full of bad intentions and orthodontic defiance.

    I didn’t care about rabbits. I cared about girls who looked like they had stepped out of a beer commercial set in a wheat field. And so I followed, fully aware I was marching into a trap and fully unable to care.

    The promised rabbit, of course, was a fiction. There was only a rusted cage yawning open like a rural Venus flytrap and the pungent perfume of hay, alfalfa, and whatever was left of last week’s poultry. The ambush was swift. The sisters descended with whoops and laughter, a feral tag team of dusty mischief trying to stuff me into the iron cage like I was tomorrow’s 4-H exhibit.

    I fought back. I was stocky, wired with sixth-grade testosterone and Charles Atlas dreams. We tumbled in the grass in a chaotic montage of limbs, dust, and feathers—a scene less like a flirtation and more like a deleted sequence from Deliverance if Deliverance had a laugh track.

    Eventually they gave up, giggling, breathless, their cheeks streaked with dirt and conquest. I bolted through the field, leaving behind my Slurpee and what might’ve been the preamble to an adolescence worth bragging about.

    But here’s the thing: they never kissed me.
    They never flirted. Never winked or smirked in that conspiratorial way older girls sometimes do when they’re letting you in on a secret you can’t yet handle. They tried to lock me in a cage and laughed when they couldn’t. That was it.

    And that—not the dirt, not the missing rabbit, not the poultry apocalypse—is what still lingers decades later: the almost. The sense that something wild and electric passed me by, and I walked away not transformed but merely dirty.

    That was my first real encounter with FOMO—before the word existed, before social media turned it into a lifestyle disorder. The regret wasn’t that I was almost caged. It was that I didn’t emerge with a story soaked in danger and romance. I didn’t get the wink. I didn’t get the kiss. I didn’t get them.

    I went home and turned on the TV to find Barbara Eden cooing in her harem pants, still radiant, still unattainable, still safely contained in her bottle. And I realized that day: I didn’t want to summon Jeannie. I wanted to be summoned—chosen, winked at, whispered to. But the Horsefault sisters were not granting wishes. They were disrupting ecosystems and giving boys premature nostalgia.

    And I, poor idiot, had missed my moment.

  • The Brady Bunch Delusion: A FOMO-Fueled Fever Dream from Mount Shasta

    The Brady Bunch Delusion: A FOMO-Fueled Fever Dream from Mount Shasta

    In the blistering summer of 1971, when I was nine years old and fully convinced that the universe owed me something dazzling—preferably in Technicolor—my family and four others staked out a patch of wilderness on Mount Shasta. For two solid weeks, we rough-camped our way through a supposedly idyllic escape: fishing, water-skiing, dodging hornets, and marinating under the sun to a soundtrack of The Doors, Paul McCartney, Carole King, and Three Dog Night blasting from a battery-powered boom box the size of a microwave. It should have been paradise. It had all the ingredients. But for me, something essential was missing—specifically, a split-level ranch house with shag carpeting and Alice the maid humming in the kitchen.

    One morning, while the other families performed their pioneer cosplay—flipping pancakes and waxing poetic about fish guts—I was still swaddled in my sleeping bag, experiencing what I can only describe as a divine transmission. In my dream, I had been plucked from obscurity and absorbed into The Brady Bunch. Not as a guest star. As family. It all unfolded on a sun-drenched San Francisco street corner, beside a cable car gleaming like a chariot of middle-class destiny. Mike, Carol, Greg, Marcia, Peter, Jan, Bobby, and Cindy—smiling like cult recruiters in polyester—welcomed me into the fold. It was done. The adoption papers had been processed. I was now officially Brady-adjacent.

    The implications were staggering. Would I get my own room in this avocado-hued utopia? Or would I bunk with Greg and be forced to suffer his groovy condescension? Would I be featured in a Very Special Episode? Just as these critical logistics were about to be resolved, reality sucker-punched me. Mark and Tosh—my alleged friends—yanked me out of my dream state, barking something about going fishing. Fishing? I had just been inducted into America’s Most Wholesome Family, and now I was supposed to sit on a rotting log and bait a hook like some peasant?

    I sulked through the day like a dethroned sitcom prince, scowling at everything from the trees to the trout. But what could I say? That I’d just been psychically ejected from a pastel-tinted suburban heaven? That I was mourning the loss of a pretend life more emotionally satisfying than my real one? Try explaining that to your father, a military man in tube socks and Tevas, who barked, “We’re living in the wild!” with the enthusiasm of someone allergic to introspection.

    I didn’t want the wild. I wanted shag rugs and chore wheels. I wanted avocado-colored appliances and a staircase for dramatic entrances. I wanted to wake up in a house where even problems came with laugh tracks and gentle moral resolutions. But instead, I got mosquitoes, hornet attacks, and the cold reality that I was not, in fact, a Brady.

    But here’s the kicker: I wasn’t alone in this delusion. In the pre-digital 1970s, The Brady Bunch was the mother of all FOMO engines. Long before Instagram filtered our envy, Sherwood Schwartz’s sitcom utopia beamed into our wood-paneled living rooms and convinced millions of us that we’d been born into the wrong family. It wasn’t just television—it was aspirational family porn.

    And the letters poured in. Hundreds, maybe thousands, from children in broken homes offering to renounce their worldly possessions if they could just live under that sacred A-frame roof with Carol and Mike. The Bradys weren’t just a TV family—they were a mirage of emotional security, mass-produced and broadcast at 7 p.m., five nights a week. Sherwood Schwartz accidentally started a cult, and every kid in America wanted in.

    What no one knew, of course, was that the real Brady kids were unraveling offscreen. Drugs, affairs, backstabbing—your standard-issue Hollywood breakdown, now available in bell-bottoms. While we were fantasizing about solving our adolescent angst in a 30-minute morality play, the actors playing our surrogate siblings were spiraling. Turns out, the squeaky-clean family fantasy was just that: a brilliantly lit lie.

    And yet, we clung to it. Why? Because once you’ve tasted Brady-level manufactured bliss, the real world—be it Mount Shasta or your own dysfunctional dining room—feels insufficient. That’s the cruel brilliance of FOMO: it convinces you there’s a better life just out of frame. And if you don’t have it, something must be wrong with you.

    To this day, I still occasionally dream I’m floating inside that iconic title sequence, my face glowing in one of the boxes, beaming down at Bobby or Jan as if everything in the world had finally clicked. In that dream, I am forever young, forever welcome, and forever untouched by the grinding disappointments of real life. I am, for thirty glorious seconds, a Brady.

    And then I wake up. And it’s just me, my real family, and whatever wildness we’ve decided to romanticize that year.

  • The Stucco Incident: A Tale of Paranoia, Kettlebells, and Redemption

    The Stucco Incident: A Tale of Paranoia, Kettlebells, and Redemption

    My neighbor Joe, a man with a penchant for awkward introductions and cargo shorts, once foisted upon me his friend Raymond—a wiry handyman with a cigarette rasp and a toolbelt that looked like it had seen battle. Raymond had installed our front and bedroom doors with the calm authority of someone who’s spent more time with a level than with his own family. More importantly, Raymond had a black book of contractor contacts so thick it could’ve doubled as a Catholic missal: painters, plumbers, concrete guys, stucco guys, electricians—everyone short of a Vatican-approved exorcist.

    Back in 2007, we’d had our house painted and cloaked in smooth stucco, the kind of finish that whispers suburban respectability. Fast forward to last week: three days of relentless rain and suddenly the back wall looked like it had taken a punch. A large section of the stucco buckled like cheap linoleum. Raymond, unbothered by the decay of manmade things, casually recommended a guy named Jose. Said he’d fix the wall for $650.

    Six-fifty? I was expecting two grand. I nearly kissed my phone. I told Jose yes before he could change his mind, and we agreed he’d start on Wednesday morning.

    That was the plan.

    On Wednesday, I forgot. Utterly. Blissfully. Didn’t check my phone. Didn’t check the time. Just wandered into the garage around 10 a.m. for a kettlebell session, ready to punish myself with Russian swings for no real reason. That’s when I saw it: two missed calls and a text from Jose at 9 a.m. “I’m at your front door.”

    Panic set in. I called him at 10, breathless with guilt. “Jose, I’m so sorry! Where are you?”

    “I’m on the job,” he said, calmly, like I should know what that means.

    “Wait… so, you’re still coming later?”

    Silence.

    After my workout, I crept through the house, peering out the windows like a man who suspects he’s just been ghosted by a contractor. Nothing. No truck. No ladder. Just the usual backyard gloom.

    Convinced I’d blown it—that I was now on Jose’s official “flakes and time-wasters” blacklist—I called him again, borderline pleading. “I’m so sorry for not answering earlier. Please forgive me. I hope we can reschedule…”

    He paused. Then said, almost tenderly, “Jeff. I’m here. I’ve been working in the back of your house the whole time.”

    I turned and looked through the sliding glass door—and there he was, crouched like a monk, phone to ear, smoothing cement with the devotion of a man sculpting a headstone.

    “I’m hanging up,” I said. “I will greet you in person.”

    He laughed, as if to say, You absolute wreck. I ran outside and thanked him more times than was strictly necessary. He just smiled and kept working.

    And the result? Perfect. Seamless. The repaired wall matched the rest of the house so precisely it looked like time had reversed itself. I’m fairly certain Jose undercharged me out of pity.

    Later, when I told my wife about the mix-up and my brief descent into full-blown paranoia, she laughed like it wasn’t the first time. “You’re a mess,” she said. “You get so worked up, you leave reality behind.”

    She’s not wrong. But at least the stucco’s smooth.

  • Popularity Is So 2018 (and Other Truths My Teen Daughters Taught Me)

    Popularity Is So 2018 (and Other Truths My Teen Daughters Taught Me)

    When I ask my fifteen-year-old daughters if someone is popular at their high school, they look at me like I’ve just asked if the fax machine is working. “No one cares about that anymore,” they say, with the weary detachment of two Gen Z philosophers sipping iced boba through eco-friendly straws. I get the same vibe from my college students. I bring up social media stars, expecting at least a flicker of interest. Instead, I get shrugs and the damning indictment: “Being popular on social media is so 2018.”

    So there it is: popularity is dead. Not just the experience, but the entire concept. Dead, buried, and apparently embalmed in the same mausoleum as MySpace and LiveJournal.

    And honestly? Good. If a generation has finally grown numb to the cheap dopamine hits of follower counts and algorithmic clout, that’s a kind of evolutionary win. The whole business of self-branding on social media now feels as outdated as a glamor shot from 1997. Narcissism wrapped in filters is no longer aspirational—it’s cringe.

    But here’s the catch: human nature abhors a vacuum. If popularity is out, something else must rise to take its place. So I asked one of my daughters what really matters now. Her answer was disarmingly simple: “Having a small group of friends you trust and can hang out with.” No influencer deals, no follower counts, no “likes.” Just intimacy, safety, presence.

    That answer stuck with me. Maybe this is the backlash we didn’t see coming: a return to analog friendship in a digital age, a quiet rebellion against the curated fakery of online performance. Maybe they’re not disengaged—they’re detoxing.

    This reminds me of a student I had over a decade ago. Back in the heyday of car-model websites (yes, those existed), she was a minor online celebrity at sixteen—long legs, smoky eyeliner, thousands of fans. Then she got pregnant, gained weight, and her adoring public turned on her like piranhas. She told me, with the grim clarity of someone who’d seen the inside of the circus tent, “It was all fake.”

    By twenty, she was a single mother in my class—cynical, guarded, distrustful, and utterly magnetic in her quiet, unsmiling wisdom. I found her honesty refreshing. Had she come in chirping about TikTok fame and lip gloss sponsorships, I would’ve tuned her out. But her brokenness made her real, and real people are increasingly rare in this era of weaponized positivity.

    I told my current students about her last week. We agreed that she was better off post-fame. Sadder, yes—but also wiser, grounded, and free from the illusion that popularity equals value. The discussion turned to happiness, that other bloated American myth, and how it’s often peddled like a multivitamin you’re supposed to take daily.

    But maybe happiness—like popularity—is overrated. Maybe trust, wisdom, and genuine belonging are what matter. And maybe, just maybe, this generation is smart enough to know that already.

  • Punchlines and Prenups: Why Comedians Make Surprisingly Solid Spouses

    Punchlines and Prenups: Why Comedians Make Surprisingly Solid Spouses

    In her essay “What Comedians Know About Staying Married,” Olga Khazan throws us a curveball: stand-up comics, those neurotic jesters fueled by dysfunction and oversharing, somehow have enviably strong marriages. Yes, the very people whose livelihoods depend on broadcasting their most humiliating personal stories to drunken strangers in dark clubs have—brace yourself—functional, long-lasting relationships.

    This sounds like the premise of a dark joke: A comedian walks into a marriage… and it actually works out?

    Khazan rattles off an eyebrow-raising list: Bert Kreischer (who once famously performed shirtless while talking about binge-drinking with Russian mobsters), Jerry Seinfeld, Jon Stewart, Tina Fey, Conan O’Brien, Adam Sandler, Ellen DeGeneres, Stephen Colbert, Tom Papa, Jim Gaffigan, and Nate Bargatze. Not exactly a group of low-key, emotionally regulated nine-to-fivers. And yet, many of them are married to the same person they were with when they were broke, bombing open mics, and sleeping on stained futons.

    So what’s the secret sauce—besides not cheating with the club manager or moving to L.A. for “more stage time” and never calling home again?

    According to Khazan, it’s that these comics are astute students of human nature. Their job is to analyze and exaggerate the absurdities of life, especially their own. They live in a constant loop of self-examination and observational sharpness, and when that lens is turned inward—not just for laughs, but for emotional insight—it becomes a tool for longevity. In other words, they have weaponized their neuroses for good.

    By that logic, therapists, philosophers, professors, and other caffeine-dependent, overthinking professionals should also have excellent marriage stats. (Spoiler: they don’t.) So the real takeaway isn’t that comedy makes you marriage material, but that a reflective worldview and the ability to call yourself on your own crap might.

    Still, Khazan digs deeper and finds another ingredient: collaboration. These comic couples are often not just married; they’re co-creators. Podcasts, YouTube channels, touring schedules, editing sessions—they’re not just paying the bills together, they’re building something. It’s the opposite of what she calls “mutual stagnation,” that slow marital death by couch, where both parties rot in front of The Great British Bake-Off, silently aging into human-shaped throw pillows.

    I had a flashback reading that: Estes Park, Colorado, 2002. I was the best man at my friend’s wedding. As I helped the priest unload a boxy camcorder from his Volkswagen Beetle, he said, “My brother’s getting divorced. No affair, no drama. They just didn’t grow.” That phrase haunted me. They just didn’t grow. They watched TV every night until they turned into living wallpaper.

    In contrast, the comic couples Khazan describes are building together, or at least sharing war stories from the front lines of the road. They’re not roommates with mutual dental insurance—they’re comrades. And while the rest of us are debating whether to splurge on Disney+ Premium, they’re debating how far they can push a bit about their sex life without getting served divorce papers.

    Khazan points out that this delicate dance—what to say on stage about your spouse and what to leave in the vault—requires real communication. These couples talk about boundaries. They negotiate what’s sacred and what’s fair game. That kind of honesty may not always be funny, but it’s the opposite of resentment.

    And the road? Turns out, time apart isn’t marital poison. It’s oxygen. When one half of the couple is in Omaha doing five shows in three nights, they’re not growing sick of each other’s chewing or laundry pile. They’re getting some much-needed space. Absence makes the heart grow fonder—and also less likely to stab someone for breathing too loudly.

    But ultimately, the golden ticket, according to Khazan, is metacognition: the ability to think about how you’re thinking. It’s that moment where you pause mid-freakout and realize, “Oh. I’m spiraling like a lunatic. Maybe I should stop yelling about the dishwasher and step outside.”

    It reminded me of a moment in my own marriage two decades ago. My wife and I were in the thick of some knock-down-drag-out verbal joust over—well, I have no idea. Whatever it was, we were spiraling fast. But then, mid-argument, I had an out-of-body experience. I hovered above the room like a judgmental ceiling fan and watched myself—a grown man—losing his mind over who knows what. In that moment of clarity, I clutched my stomach, declared I had “intestinal distress,” and locked myself in the bathroom for 45 minutes. Crisis averted. Marriage preserved. Thank you, metacognition.

    So maybe that’s the real lesson. You don’t need to be a comedian to make your marriage work. But it helps to be someone who’s spent a lifetime poking around in the attic of your psyche, who can recognize your own absurdity in real time, and who knows when to quit the bit and retreat to the bathroom before you say something irreversible.

    Marriage isn’t a punchline. But if you’re lucky, it’s a running joke you both keep writing together.

  • Geekee and the Alligator: A Tragedy in Silk

    Geekee and the Alligator: A Tragedy in Silk

    When I was a toddler, I had an unhealthy attachment to a raggedy white blanket I’d christened Geekee—a silken square of heaven that clung to me like a second epidermis. Geekee was not merely a blanket. Geekee was a lifestyle. Tattered, stained, and reeking of a distinct sour-milk-meets-armpit funk, Geekee looked like it had been rescued from the wreckage of a shipwreck and then dragged behind a Greyhound bus. But to me, Geekee was spun moonlight. Its frayed corners were my talismans, which I rubbed obsessively against my cheek like a junkie chasing the next dopamine hit. The soft tickle of that threadbare fabric was my lullaby, my Xanax, my spiritual compass.

    To my parents, however, Geekee was a public disgrace—a dingy square of shame that broadcast to the world that they were too cheap or too neglectful to buy their son a clean blanket. “It smells,” they complained, pinching their noses. “It’s disgusting.” They said I was too old to drag Geekee around like Linus with a trust fund. At four, I was allegedly a grown man in preschool years, and Geekee, they insisted, was holding me back like an emotional parasite in silk form.

    Thus began the war: child versus parental regime. I defended Geekee’s honor with the righteous fury of a mother bear protecting her cubs. I refused to eat unless Geekee was in my lap. I screamed during bath time if Geekee wasn’t nearby, watching like a guardian angel woven by machinery. I slept only under the comforting weight of its matted threads.

    My parents, of course, resorted to psychological warfare.

    Then came the infamous cross-country move—from Florida to California, land of palm trees, broken dreams, and emotional betrayals. Somewhere in the swamplands of Louisiana or perhaps the desolate asphalt wasteland of Texas, my father, who I now believe was channeling Machiavelli, pulled the ultimate con.

    “Look!” he said, pointing out the opposite car window. “A baby alligator!”

    I took the bait. Like the sucker I was, I turned my head. In that moment, my father performed the sleight of hand that would make a Vegas illusionist weep with envy. With the dexterity of a pickpocket, he yanked Geekee from my clutches and flung it out his open window like yesterday’s trash.

    The wind, he told me with faux solemnity, had sucked Geekee away. My cries reached operatic levels. I screamed, sobbed, demanded we stop the car, mount a rescue operation, conduct a blanket-recovery SWAT mission.

    But my father kept driving. “We can’t stop,” he said flatly, as though reading from a war manual. “Besides, Geekee is now keeping the baby alligator warm.”

    A lesser con artist would’ve stopped there, but my father gilded the lily. “The poor little guy has no mother. Geekee’s keeping him company now.”

    And just like that, my grief was hijacked by empathy. The idea of a lonely orphaned reptile swaddled in my beloved Geekee soothed me in a way no logic could. I imagined the baby alligator curled beneath Geekee’s filthy folds, comforted by the scent of my skin, the ghost of my touch. Geekee had found a higher calling.

    It was a lie so cunning, so diabolically effective, that it’s now family lore.

    That was the day I learned that grief, properly manipulated, could be repurposed into myth. And that sometimes, the only thing crueler than losing your favorite blanket is realizing your dad could have written propaganda for a dictatorship.

  • Fear, Fat, and the Fickle Gods of Appetite: A Diet Writer’s Tale

    Fear, Fat, and the Fickle Gods of Appetite: A Diet Writer’s Tale

    Rebecca Johns spent decades whispering sweet, slimming nothings into the ears of women’s magazine readers—low-fat gospel by day, seductive chocolate cake recipes by night. In her Atlantic essay, “A Diet Writer’s Regrets,” she confesses the irony that while readers gobbled up her diet advice like SnackWell’s cookies, she was losing the battle against her own body. At twenty-three, fresh out of college and desperate to shrink her waistline, Johns eagerly volunteered for the magazine’s diet beat. She got the gig—and with it, a front-row seat to her own unraveling.

    As her writing career expanded, so did she. The more she advised others on portion control, the more food tightened its psychological grip on her. She became the oracle of thinness while secretly bingeing and self-loathing. And her audience? They were just as eager to read about lemon-water detoxes as they were molten lava cakes for their next dinner party. The entire racket, she realized, was built on contradiction and fantasy.

    By 2017, she weighed 298 pounds, with a BMI in “Call the doctor” territory. She had tried every acronym on the dieting menu—WW, keto, IF, CICO—but none of them stuck. Then, like a miracle in an injector pen, came Mounjaro. Prescribed in 2023, this GLP-1 wonder drug rewired her hunger like a tech support call for the brain. No more food noise. No more gnawing obsession. Eighty pounds evaporated. At last, she became the kind of person she had written about for thirty years but never met—herself, only thinner.

    But here’s the twist: now that she’s tasted liberation, she’s terrified. Insurance may soon ghost her, and Mounjaro, priced like a luxury car lease, will slip from reach. She knows too much to let herself go back, and not enough to know how to stay the course without her miracle molecule. The horror? She might have to white-knuckle her way through celery sticks and willpower.

    Johns doesn’t mince words when she calls body acceptance a euphemism for surrender. “If skinny were truly optional,” she writes, “we’d all choose it.” And she’s not wrong. If college is driven by fear of poverty, maybe dieting is driven by fear of dying too soon—or worse, returning to a body you fought so hard to escape.

    If fear gets the job done, Johns suggests, then let it. After all, if love won’t keep you away from the donuts, maybe dread will.

  • 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.

  • Something Strange Happened to Me When I Saw My Childhood Home on Zillow

    Something Strange Happened to Me When I Saw My Childhood Home on Zillow

    When I was a kid, my dad worked at IBM in San Jose, and we lived at the very end of Venado Court—a cul-de-sac so serene it felt like a cosmic loophole in suburban chaos. I loved everything about it, especially the absence of cross-traffic.

    Cross-traffic was anarchy—it was second base in Little League, where the game unraveled into sheer bedlam: runners stealing, coaches screaming, fielders panicking. But Venado Court? It was home plate. Safe. Untouchable. The kind of place where nothing bad could happen—unless you count the existential horror of eventually having to leave it.

    The analogy reminds me of George Carlin’s classic bit contrasting baseball and football: Baseball is a pastoral dream, all about going home. Football is military conquest, where you march into enemy territory and get your spine realigned by a 300-pound lineman. Venado Court was baseball. It was safety. It was home.

    Recently, I stumbled onto a real estate site featuring my childhood house—5700 Venado Court, San Jose, California, where I lived from 1968 to 1971. The photos were unsettlingly familiar. My old bedroom. The bathroom where Mr. Bubble and Avon’s Sesame Street shampoo bottles once stood like sentinels of childhood innocence. The backyard, still lush with fruit trees—apricot, peach, plum, and walnut—a miniature Garden of Eden where my mother and the neighbor ladies, in some kind of euphoric domestic alchemy, canned preserves like their lives depended on it.

    The kicker? That house, my sacred childhood sanctuary, is now worth $1.3 million—the same price as my current home in Southern California. A deranged part of me toyed with the idea: sell my house, buy my childhood back, step through the front door like some time-traveling prodigal son.

    But then sanity prevailed.

    I know exactly how that story would end. Not in horror, but in ennui. I’d be trapped in a slow-moving nightmare of banality, watching my enchanted memories dissolve under the fluorescent hum of reality. The house wouldn’t feel like home. It would feel like a set piece in a dismantled dream.

    Thomas Wolfe was right—you can’t go home again. Not because it’s scary. But because it’s boring.