Cinemorphosis

Tag: family

  • 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.

  • The FOMO Frequency: How I Tried to Tune Back into Real Life

    The FOMO Frequency: How I Tried to Tune Back into Real Life

    As I clawed my way out of my addiction to writing doomed novels (which were really short stories in disguise), a strange thing happened: buried emotions clawed back. It wasn’t pleasant. It was like peeling off a bandage only to discover that underneath was raw, exposed nerve endings. Turns out, the grandiose fever dream of writing had insulated me from reality. Now, stripped of that delusion, I was left unprotected, vulnerable, and completely awake to the world.

    And the world, in 2025, was on fire.

    Literally. The Los Angeles wildfires turned the sky into an apocalyptic hellscape—a choking haze of smoke and fury. The inferno forced me into an act I hadn’t performed in years: I dusted off a radio and tuned into live news.

    That’s when I had two epiphanies.

    First, I realized I despise my streaming devices. Their algorithm-fed content is an endless conveyor belt of lukewarm leftovers, a numbing backdrop of curated noise that feels canned, impersonal, and utterly devoid of gezelligheid, a sense of shared enjoyment. Worst of all, streaming had turned me into a passive listener, a zombie locked inside a walled garden of predictability. I spent my days warning my college students about AI flattening human expression, yet here I was, letting an algorithm flatten my own relationship with music.

    But the moment I switched on the radio, its warmth hit me like an old friend I hadn’t seen in decades. A visceral ache spread through my chest as memories of radio’s golden spell came rushing back—memories of being nine years old, crawling into bed after watching Julia and The Flying Nun, slipping an earbud into my transistor radio, and being transported to another world.

    Tuned to KFRC 610 AM, I was no longer just a kid in the suburbs—I was part of something bigger. The shimmering sounds of Sly and the Family Stone’s “Hot Fun in the Summertime” or Tommy James and the Shondells’ “Crystal Blue Persuasion” weren’t just songs; they were shared experiences. Thousands of others were listening at that same moment, swaying to the same rhythms, caught in the same invisible current of sound.

    And then I realized—that connection was gone.

    The wildfires didn’t just incinerate acres of land; they exposed the gaping fault lines in my craving for something real. Nostalgia hit like a sucker punch, and before I knew it, I was tumbling down an online rabbit hole, obsessively researching high-performance radios, convinced that the right one could resurrect the magic of my youth.

    But was this really about better reception?

    Or was it just another pathetic attempt to outrun mortality?

    Streaming didn’t just change my relationship with music; it hollowed it out.

    I had been living in a frictionless digital utopia, where effort was obsolete and everything was available on demand—and I was miserable. Streaming devices optimized convenience at the cost of discovery, flattening music into algorithmic predictability, stripping it of its spontaneity, and reducing me to a passive consumer scrolling through pre-packaged soundscapes.

    It was ironic. I had let technology lull me into the very state of mediocrity I warned my students about.

    Kyle Chayka’s Flatworld spells out the horror in precise terms: when you optimize everything, you kill everything that makes life rich and rewarding. Just as Ozempic flattens hunger, technology flattens culture into a pre-digested slurry of lifeless efficiency.

    I didn’t need Flatworld to tell me this. I had lived it.

    The day I flipped on a real radio again, I didn’t just hear a broadcast—I heard my brain rebooting. The warmth, the spontaneity, the realness of people talking in real time—it was the sonic equivalent of quitting Soylent and biting into a perfectly seared ribeye.

    If Flatworld taught me anything, it’s that aliveness is exactly what convenience culture is designed to eradicate.

    Once I abandoned streaming, I filled every room in my house with a high-performance multiband radio. My love of music returned. A strange peace settled over me.

    The problem? My addictive personality latched onto radios with a zeal that bordered on the irrational.

    I began gazing at them with the kind of reverence normally reserved for religious icons. When I spotted a Tecsun PL-990, PL-880, PL-680, or PL-660, something in my brain short-circuited. I was instantly enchanted, as if I had just glimpsed an old friend across a crowded room. At the same time, I was comforted, as if that friend had handed me a warm cup of coffee and told me everything was going to be alright.

    But a radio isn’t just a device. It’s a symbol, though I’m still working out of what exactly.

    Maybe it represents the lost art of slowing down—of sitting in a quiet room, wrapped in a cocoon of music or familiar voices. Or maybe it’s something deeper, a sanctuary against the relentless noise of modern life, a frequency through which I can tune out the profane and tune into something sacred.

    The word that comes to mind when I hold a radio is cozy—but not in the scented-candle, novelty-mug kind of way. This is something deeper, something akin to the Dutch word gezelligheid—a feeling of warmth, belonging, and ineffable connection to the present moment.

    Radios don’t just play sound; they create atmosphere. They transport me back to Hollywood, Florida, sitting on the porch with my grandfather, the air thick with the scent of an impending tropical storm, the crackle of a ball game playing in the background like the heartbeat of another era.

    That’s the thing about gezelligheid—it isn’t something you can program into an algorithm. It isn’t something you can optimize. It’s a byproduct of presence, community, and shared experience—the very things convenience culture erodes.

    Many have abandoned radio for the cold efficiency of streaming and smartphones.

    I tried to do the same for over a decade.

    I failed.

    Because some things, no matter how old-fashioned, still hum with life.

    And maybe that’s what replacing streaming devices with radios is about—not just recovering from my addiction to writing abysmal novels, but recovering life itself from the grip of Flatworld.

  • I Was the Worst College Student Ever

    I Was the Worst College Student Ever

    I was the worst college student ever. But before we get to that, let’s start at the beginning. I attended the university in the fall of 1979. I was seventeen. I was an Olympic Weightlifting champion and a competitive bodybuilder with aspirations of going big–winning the Mr. Universe and Mr. Olympia titles and leveraging my fame to open a gym in the Bahamas. My goals were as clear as they were simple: I would have a beautiful body and my work environment would optimize my ability to maintain my beautiful body. As an added perk, I was comforted by the thought that living in the tropics would ensure that I would never have to wear clothes, only Speedos. Clothes made me so claustrophobic that the first thing I wanted to do after getting dressed was to rip my clothes off. The solution? Spend the rest of my life on an island in bodybuilder briefs with tanning oil slathered all over my shaved body. 

    Whenever I’d share my dream with my recently-divorced mother, she would say, “Don’t be a nincompoop. You can’t isolate yourself from the world on some tropical island.”

    And I’d say, “Don’t worry, Mom. I’ll be well connected. I’ll invite my friends–Frank Zane, Tom Platz, Robbie Robinson, Kalman Szkalak, Danny Padilla, Ron Teufel, Pete Grymkowski, and Rudy Hermosillo–to hang out with me. I’ll give them pineapple protein shakes and tell them how bodybuilding became a catalyst for my personal metamorphosis.”

    “You sound ridiculous. For one thing, those aren’t your friends. They’re from your muscle magazines. I’m not stupid.”

    Contradicting the stereotype of being a musclehead, I got straight As in high school, but my high school, like most public schools, was dumbed down to the point that getting a 4.0 GPA was meaningless. One of my classes, for example,  was called “Money Matters.” We learned how to balance a checkbook and plan a budget so that we were saving more than we were spending. At best, you’re looking at first-grade math, a workbook full of simple percentages and fractions. Busy work like this was proof that our school didn’t want to educate us so much as keep us contained all day in an institution so our parents could take a breather from us. Public schools were part of society’s unwritten social contract with adults. Send your children to our schools so you can work enough to live in the suburbs and get a break from the headaches of parenting.

    Another class was called “Popular Lit.” There were no lectures or tests. For the semester, we read any three books we wanted from the library and wrote three one-page book reports. You didn’t have to read the book. You could present chicken scratch on the book report form or make up some crazy dream you had. It didn’t matter. As long as you turned in the book report, you got an A. The teacher was a woman in her sixties who seemed determined to never engage with us. She told us to do “quiet reading” while she sat at her desk reading magazines, paying her bills, and clipping her fingernails. She was ghoulishly pale, she had long, uncombed dyed black hair, overly dark lipstick, and puffy bags under her eyes. No matter the weather, she wore wool coats that smelled of old sweat and bodily decay. Had you not told me she was a teacher, I would have assumed she was a homeless person scavenging the school for discarded cafeteria food from the high school’s trash cans.

    My classes were so dumb I felt like I was in continuation school for juvenile delinquents. Clearly, the teachers weren’t preparing us to become members of the professional class. They wanted us to learn to follow rules so we’d stay out of prison and be satisfied with a blue-collar job or some minimum-wage gig in the service industry. As I heard one teacher say out of the side of his mouth in the corridor to one of his colleagues: “We’re training them to become burger-flippers.”

    The teachers’ contempt for us and their pessimistic belief that only a small remnant of us would attend college meant nothing to me because college was not part of my master plan. Becoming an international bodybuilding sensation and operating a lucrative health club in the Bahamas was. 

    Signs of my imminent success were abundant. Not only was my muscular physique well developed for a seventeen-year-old, but I also had extraordinary networking skills that spoke well of my future business prospects. For example, at The Weight Room in Hayward, I was working out with NFL defensive end star John Matusak who had taken a liking to me. Between sets of bench presses, T-Bar rows, and seated behind-the-neck presses, we would sing along with the songs blaring from the gym’s radio. Watching the Tooz and I sing along with Nicollette Larson doing a cover of Neil Simon’s “Lotta Love” was a sight to behold. People spoke of the defensive end’s ill temper, but when Matusak and I trained, it was a constant Kumbaya moment. 

     You may have seen Matuszak on TV many times, but that would not have prepared you for what you would have seen in person. He was close to seven feet and 300 pounds. His long limbs made him appear slender yet huge at the same time. He had a beard, wild long hair, and the predatory eyes of a hawk. 

    One afternoon, Matuszak was sitting on the bench while the gym’s speakers played England Dan and John Ford Coley’s “Love Is the Answer.” Matuszak seemed offended by the song’s sentimentality. He curled his lips, looked at me, and said, “Bullshit,” before proceeding to rep 400 pounds while repeating his curse as if energized by it.

    In addition to networking with Matuszak, I established a strong bond with fitness salesman and local legend Joe Corsi. In addition to being the number-one salesman of bodybuilding supplements and fitness equipment in the San Francisco East Bay, Corsi had appeared with Arnold Schwarzenegger on an episode of Streets of San Francisco. Corsi’s fitness store was next to The Weight Room and he would often stop by to pay his respects to me. He was in his late sixties. He wore a black single-piece Jack Lalanne-style jumpsuit with no sleeves and a gold zipper, unzipped to reveal his black hairy chest. His biceps were full, round, and veiny for a man his age though showing a bit of sagginess. His hair was dyed jet black. His eyebrows were black, thick, and shiny. His overall appearance was that of a former bodybuilder who had aged into a geriatric Dracula. Whenever he saw me training with the Tooz at the gym, he praised my amazing potential, said I had exceptional physical structure, and was a young man who clearly had the drive to become a world champion. I imagined it would not be long before Corsi would sponsor me the way Joe Weider sponsored Arnold Schwarzenegger. Soon, Corsi would have his people deliver an array of supplements, protein powders, and butcher-paper-wrapped T-bone steaks to my front door. When that happened, my mother would know that I wasn’t joking about becoming a professional bodybuilder for whom going to college was a big waste of time. 

    After I graduated high school, my mom bugged me every day about what I was going to do with my future. I told her I had a clear plan and that Joe Corsi would be my sponsor. She’d say, “This morning I got up, opened the front door to get the newspaper and I didn’t see a bunch of T-bone steaks on the front porch. You sure you’ve got a lock on this?”

    In August, I came home one afternoon from my workout. I entered the  kitchen and saw on the counter a yellow, slimy chicken. The plucked bird looked forlorn, a leper sulking on the cutting board. Mother was standing next to the chicken holding a cleaver. She scowled at the chicken like it was an adversary that needed to be put in its place. 

    “You need to learn to clean out this chicken,” she said, puffing on a cigarette.

    “I don’t want to touch it. It’s disgusting.”

    “You better learn to handle a raw chicken. Otherwise, you’ll never be able to achieve intimacy with a woman.”

    “That’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever heard, Mother.” 

    “You can worry about that later. Have you made plans for the fall?”

    “What do you mean?”

    “College. I’m thinking that’s your best option.”

    I stormed out of the kitchen, walked into my room, turned on my clock radio full blast to the rock station, KYA-FM, and did some finishing-touch dumbbell curls.  Listening to Roxy Music’s “Love Is the Drug,” I visualized myself being a world-famous bodybuilder living on a tropical island and drinking mango juice from halved coconuts while surrounded by hordes of beautiful women helplessly drawn to my masculine allure. 

    I was bathed in sweat when Mother walked into the room with an envelope. 

    “Your high school counselor sent you something. I think you should open it.”

    She tossed the letter on my bed. I wiped off my sweat and tore open the letter. My counselor Mrs. Toscher congratulated me for my 4.0 GPA during my senior year and said it was a certainty that I could attend one of the local Cal States. I told Mother and she said, “Unless you’ve got other options, this is all you got.”

    “What about Joe Corsi?”

    “What about him?”

    “He could be my ticket to bodybuilding greatness.”

    “Unless you’ve got something in writing, you’ve got nothing.”

    I figured I had one last chance with Corsi. The next day after my workout with Matusak, I paid Corsi a visit at his fitness store. He was sitting at his desk when I approached him. 

    “I hear you offer professional guidance to up-and-coming bodybuilders,” I said.

    “Yes, I offer the best supplements in Northern California. I’ve got everything you need.”

    “I’m only seventeen and I’ve come a long way.”

    “You’re big for your age.”

    “When Arnold Schwarzenegger moved from Austria to America, Joe Weider promoted him. They essentially made each other famous.”

    “Yes, it’s a great story. I know both of them, by the way. Great guys.”

    “Well, that’s where you come in. I’m available for promotion.”

    “I see. I’ll tell you what I can do. Young man, do you have a valid California driver’s license?”

    I nodded.

    “Excellent. Here’s the deal. My brother Louie runs a meat business. Best cuts of meat you can get. Steaks, ground sirloin, turkey legs, Cornish game hens, prime rib, all-beef hot dogs. He even sells Philadelphia cheesecake, a big hit with customers. You sell them door to door, and you typically get a fifteen percent commission, but because you know me and because I want to support the local bodybuilding community, I’ll have Louie jack up your commission to twenty percent. I can say with the utmost confidence that if you show some hustle, you’ll pocket close to five hundred a week. You’ll have all the money you need for supplements and then some.”

    “That’s a lot of money,” I said.

    “Yes, but bear in mind, you’ll have to pay for the meat up front. But with profits being what they are, you’ll double your money in a week.”

    “Did you say upfront costs?” 

    “You’ll need to come up with a grand to get into this opportunity. But because I like you, I may be able to talk Louie down to seven hundred. Mind you, he’s providing the van and the meat freezers.” Corsi leaned toward me and whispered, “I’d essentially be helping you to steal my brother’s money, but, hey, you’re young. I’d like to lend a helping hand.”

    “I’ll have to think about it.”

    “Let me know soon. My brother is interviewing several people who already have sales experience. This opportunity isn’t going to last much longer. And remember, everyone eats meat. Everyone loves barbecue. This is an opportunity of a lifetime.”

    As I drove home, I was thinking that going to college would be less taxing physically and less of a financial burden than selling butchered meats door to door. The cost of attending college at Cal State in 1979 was seventy-eight dollars a quarter. That was far cheaper than paying Joe Corsi’s brother a minimum of seven hundred dollars. In addition, I could use my title as a “college student” as a front while I continued my bodybuilding. Going to college would essentially be a delay tactic I could use until I achieved bodybuilding greatness. I would capitulate to Mother’s demand to attend college, but I knew I didn’t belong there. I knew I would be the worst college student ever. 

    I was a terrible student in part because I could not regardless of their achievements admire my professors. I envied them because they were so educated and appeared to have everything I didn’t. They had impressive credentials, world travels, including African safaris, to provide scintillating stories while lecturing; nice clothes, not store-bought but made by celebrity tailors; a well-curated persona enhanced by professional voice lessons; an impressive zip code that made them neighbors of politicians and socialites; membership to various tennis, bird-watching, and yoga clubs and intellectual committees; literacy in multiple languages, mastery of at least three musical instruments, and fluency in gourmet cooking. During lectures, they talked about how they prepared extravagant meals that required lemon zest, capers, and ice baths, and they beamed with pride as they rhapsodized over the pleasures of making homemade puttanesca. I had never met a group of people from one profession who were so in love with themselves. 

    My Ethics professor, who was also the Dean of Philosophy, had recently dumped his wife for his young secretary. He seemed rather oblivious to the rich irony of his life choices and rode his Porsche convertible over the faculty parking lot, apparently unaware of the way his toupee would flop off his bald head like a flying squirrel every time his Porsche caromed over a speed bump. A lack of self-awareness seemed to serve my Ethics professor rather well. I despised him. 

    My bitter envy for my professors was only matched by my spectacular ignorance. I was deemed so illiterate that the university was not content with demoting me from Freshman Composition class into the remedial class, more commonly referred to at the time as Bonehead English. To let me know my place in this world, the university made it clear that even Bonehead English was too advanced for a pariah like myself. I was quickly demoted from Bonehead and placed in the Pre-Bonehead class, a level held in such contempt that the classroom was in the Humanities Building basement next to the boiler room. Broad-shouldered maintenance men wearing denim overalls would frequently peek into the room and cackle at us for being at a level of remediation that was such an embarrassment as to be the equivalent of leprosy. 

    Being envious of my professors and feeling like a college outcast, I was in a constant state of depression and demoralization. This did not bode well as a predictor for my academic success. To add another nail to my coffin, I may have just been plain stupid. I was stupid to judge my professors for having everything I lacked. Had I been smart, I would have humbled myself before them and looked at them as role models so that someday with lots of hard work I would become just like them. I was also stupid for feeling insulted for being placed in the Pre-Bonehead English class. Had I been smart, I would have been grateful for the fact that the university had provided resources for hopeless cases like mine rather than expel me from the university altogether. 

    There were also signs that I was stupid, not just on an academic level but in terms of lacking common sense and what would later be known as “emotional intelligence.” A case in point is that during my first two years of college, there was a lot of distressing news about AIDS and its devastation throughout the world. As a straight person who had not yet entered the world of dating and romance, I was not exactly what you would call high-risk, but that did not stop me from being terrified of getting AIDS. One afternoon, a neighbor’s Siberian Husky greeted me by licking me all over my face and I remember the dog’s wet tongue brushing over my lips. Could I get AIDS from a dog’s kiss? For several days, I couldn’t get the thought out of my mind. Then a week later, KGO Talk Radio had a segment in which a doctor would answer callers’ questions about AIDS. I think I was the first caller. I told the doctor about my neighbor’s dog kissing me on the lips. Was I in danger of getting AIDS? In a very sweet voice, the doctor told me that I was completely safe and that I could kiss dogs to my heart’s content. 

    After the call, I stood in the kitchen almost in tears with a great sense of relief. But then shortly after, my mother came out of her bedroom and said, “Was that you on the radio?”

    I nodded.

    She said, “You thought a dog licking your face could give you AIDS? You need to cool it, buster.”

    Hearing my mother admonish me allowed me at that moment to see how hopelessly stupid I was. I couldn’t believe I had survived so long on this planet. I couldn’t believe I had gotten accepted into a university. Clearly, I was on my way to becoming the worst college student ever. 

    My failings as a college student were rooted in part in my inability to find a major, and my indecision made me miserable. I took a criminal justice class, but the books were mired in lawyer-speak. As a result, the sentences were larded with provisos, caveats, and contingencies reflected in elongated sentences in which I had to wade through several dependent clauses before I reached the independent clause. These sentences were so tedious and convoluted that I felt I had to go through the obstacle course on American Gladiators before I got to the sentence’s main idea. This drove me into a state of madness.

    Then I tried sociology and psychology, but the books were immersed in self-satisfied academic jargon in which self-evident observations were made to look sophisticated and authoritative by virtue of the indecipherable, pretentious and self-indulgent verbiage. Being forced to read these textbooks, I imagined brandishing a machete and slashing through a jungle thick with words like positivity, codependency, external validation, inner child, interconnectivity, facilitate, mindset, marginalization, multi-faceted, dichotomy, and contemporaneously. Hacking my way through this forest of phony language made me tighten my body with so much hostility that I feared I would suffer a self-induced inguinal hernia. 

    Then I gave history a crack. The sheer volume of facts, dates, and places seemed to have compelled the authors to write in a mundane, almost remedial prose style with no distinctive point of view. The result was that I was bored out of my mind. 

    Oceanography was mildly interesting; however, the oceanography professor seemed to have a pathological fixation on the words “denitrification,” “liminal zone,” and “viscosity” so that it reached the point that every time he repeated those words I would skyrocket off my seat like a lab rat receiving an electrical shock. 

    Accounting was even worse. On the first day, the professor bombarded us with algebraic equations, the Index Matrix, the Nullspace, and homogeneous linear systems. Within ten minutes, I made an exit for the door. The professor asked me my name.

    “That won’t be necessary,” I said at the doorway. “You’ll never see me again.”

    In my first year of college, I dropped accounting, criminal justice, and sociology. I also failed a remedial algebra class. In the late spring of my first year, the university sent me a letter explaining that I was officially on academic probation. I could not drop any more classes and I would need to improve my GPA. Otherwise, I would be expelled.

    For me, the letter was more than just a warning. It was an indictment of my entire existence. You hear about struggling writers bearing the repeated pain of rejection slips as they are told their stories and books cannot be, for a variety of reasons, published. The academic letter of probation was a sort of rejection slip, but not for something I had produced. Rather, it was a censure against me as a dysfunctional human being. The university had handed me my ass on a stick. 

    In moments of hitting rock bottom, we must find some kind of strategy or other to climb out of our hole, but my prospects were bleak. I had no college major, no purpose, and no self-confidence. I wasn’t making any money as a bodybuilder. I did not have any romances on the horizon so I could not be energized by the hope of be transformed by the powers of love. I was a young man who, having nothing, was eager for a quick solution. I found myself grasping for straws. I could get a tech degree in refrigeration, become a piano mover, or join the military. There was also a guy at the gym whom we jokingly referred to as The Garbologist who said he could get me a job as a garbage man. The way he described the job to me, working from 5 to 10:30 in the morning, becoming a garbage man seemed like my best bet. 

    I was eager to tell my father about my new plan. He had moved into an apartment about a half-hour away from our home since the divorce, and once a month he’d pick me up, take me to his apartment, and make me a barbecued steak dinner. One evening, we were eating on his patio, and he asked me how I was doing in college. I told him about the probation letter and my lack of interest in higher education. What I wanted was a job that paid well and had good hours so I’d have time to go to the gym.  I had made friends at the gym who worked in sanitation, and one guy said he could get me full-time work as a sanitation engineer.

    My father laughed at me and said, “You can’t be a garbage man.”

    “Why not?”

    “Because you’re too vain.”

    “What’s that supposed to mean?”

    “Imagine this. You’re at a cocktail party and everyone is introducing themselves. Doctor, engineer, lawyer, computer programmer, business executive. Then they get to you. You’re going to tell them you’re a garbage man? Bullshit.”

    “I’m vain?”

    “Of course you are. I’ve never seen a kid check himself out in the mirror as often as you do.”

    “Oh my God, I’m driven by vanity and social status.”

    “You’re finally waking up to the obvious. Now finish your steak and make things right with your college before they expel you.”

    Driving home, it occurred to me that I had rejected criminal justice, sociology, psychology, and history because the books I had to read in those classes were so poorly written that they offended me. It occurred to me that I hungered for a certain quality of writing and that this hunger pointed me to the English major.

    It also occurred to me that my fidgety personality did not learn well in the classroom. My anxieties made it impossible for me to sit inside a classroom with thirty-five other students and comprehend the professors’ lectures. I knew that I would have to be self-taught if I were to get any kind of meaningful education. Therefore, the best thing to do was to purchase my own grammar handbook. From that day on, I resolved to teach myself grammar. 

    Once I learned the basics of grammar, it seemed as essential to life as breathing. I considered that small children without any formal learning were already fluent in the most elaborate sentences. Grammar was proof that life had a clear structure, order, and harmony. To learn all the names of the grammatical parts was to understand the harmony of the universe. When I thought of grammar, I saw rivulets flowing into the streams, streams flowing into the great rivers, and the great rivers flowing into the ocean. 

    For the first time, I understood what Nietzsche meant in Twilight of the Gods where he writes that “I am afraid we are not getting rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.” What he meant is that by studying grammar, I could find order and convalescence from nearly two decades of mainlining the glorification of selfish pleasure-seeking and chaos. Part of my recovery as a probationary student was enlisting in a Twelve-Step Program, and one of the steps was grammar. 

    My recovery was swift and relentless with my GPA spiking to close to 4.0. The university seemed impressed with my reformation. Shortly after hiring me in the Tutoring Center, they offered me teaching positions for freshman composition. The university that had once threatened to expel me had now hired me to teach. I was on my way to becoming the worst college professor ever. 

  • Wrestling with an especially virulent case of “Influenza A”

    Wrestling with an especially virulent case of “Influenza A”

    In I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional: The Recovery Movement and Other Self-Help Fashions, Wendy Kaminer lays waste to the therapeutic fads of the 1990s, particularly the trend of “reclaiming the inner child”—a ritual that took infantilization to near-religious extremes.

    She describes John Bradshaw’s workshops, where grown adults with respectable careers arrived clutching teddy bears like traumatized toddlers, preparing to embark on a guided journey into the mansion of their past. There, as Bradshaw whispered encouragements, lower lips trembled, tears streamed, and a congregation of emotionally overqualified professionals sobbed into the polyester fur of their stuffed animals.

    What floored Kaminer wasn’t the unhinged emotionalism—it was the sheer, shameless conviction. These people weren’t just indulging in a saccharine, self-indulgent spectacle—they were true believers, convinced that squeezing a doll and reliving some long-buried playground trauma was nothing short of a spiritual awakening.

    Kaminer was not impressed. What others saw as self-reflection and healing, she saw as an infantilizing orgy of narcissism, a self-help séance in which grown-ups tried to resurrect their inner kindergartener, only to be possessed by a ghost that refused to leave.

    Now, I’d like to say that my bullshit detector is too finely tuned for me to cradle a stuffed animal and regress into baby talk. But the bitter irony is that writing this memoir has forced me into my own brand of infantilization—just without the teddy bear and group cry session.

    Nothing made this clearer than the pathetic spectacle of my post-Thanksgiving downfall, which started with a game of Russian roulette—except instead of a revolver, I played with rotting cabbage.

    It all began when I decided to make chicken tacos—a wholesome, adult dinner choice. Unfortunately, the bag of shredded cabbage I retrieved from the fridge had been marinating in its own decay for two weeks, slowly transforming into hell’s compost pile.

    The moment I tore open the bag, my wife recoiled with the dramatic flair of a crime scene detective stumbling upon a long-decomposed body. She clutched her nose, waved her hands like an exorcist warding off a demon, and issued a forensic report:

    “That smells like a mix of a latrine and a horse’s taint.”

    A normal person would have taken this as a warning. But, fueled by misplaced confidence and the hubris of someone who had survived worse, I dumped the cabbage on my tacos and dug in.

    Hours later, my immune system, weakened by the Thanksgiving marathon of forced hospitality, collapsed like a debt-ridden empire. The virus that had been lurking in the shadows seized its moment, and by the next morning, I was a feverish, shivering wreck, contemplating my life choices between bouts of violent gastrointestinal reckoning.

    It seems that you don’t need a stuffed animal and a therapy circle to regress into infancy. Sometimes, all it takes is spoiled cabbage and a ruinous lack of self-preservation.

    Naturally, instead of exercising common sense, I channeled my inner cheapskate prophet. “Cabbage by its very nature has a funky scent,” I proclaimed with the confidence of a man who regularly courts disaster. “A little fermentation won’t hurt anyone.” My wife frowned and said, “It’s smelling up the entire kitchen.”
    “We’ll be fine,” I insisted, scooping copious amounts of fetid-smelling cabbage onto my tacos like I was auditioning for a daredevil cooking show.

    At dinner, I was the only one brave—or foolish—enough to eat it. Within an hour, my body issued a resounding, “You absolute moron.” No GI issues, but I felt like I’d been hit by a truck, reversed over, and then hit again. My head throbbed, my eyes were so sensitive to light I had to drape a T-shirt over my face just to listen to a Netflix show, and my energy flatlined by eight p.m. I crawled into bed, feeling like a half-baked zombie.

    The next morning was worse. Still no GI problems, but the 101 fever and crushing fatigue made me question my will to live. I tried to eat some oatmeal and grapefruit, the culinary equivalent of punishment food, but even that felt like too much effort. 

    By day three, no improvement. I’d become a cautionary tale, researching induced vomiting and discovering it was far too late. Apparently, if you don’t purge immediately, the toxins settle in like an unwanted houseguest who insists on staying for five to seven days.

    Being sick in my family makes everyone else suffer. Our teenage twins require constant care, frequent snacks that generate endless dirty dishes, and someone breathing down their necks to ensure homework gets done. My wife had to shoulder it all while I languished in my misery. I apologized profusely for my reckless hubris and promised, at the age of sixty-three, to turn over a new leaf—or at least stop eating ones that reek like death.

    For decades, I’d treated eating old, moldy food like a badge of honor, quoting my dad’s immortal wisdom: “Pilgrims who ate blue cheese on the Mayflower survived disease while the mold-avoiders died.” It was as if I’d been brainwashed into believing spoiled food was a superfood. But this cabbage debacle—this hellish, cabbage-induced reckoning—put the fear of God in me. Never again would I be the fool who eats something that smells like a medieval torture chamber. This time, I mean it. The next funky bag of cabbage? Straight to the trash. May it ferment in peace.

    As the alleged food-borne illness dragged on and my fever turned my brain into a swamp, I found myself pondering a morbid yet painfully stupid thought: What if I died because I was too cheap to toss a two-dollar bag of cabbage? Imagine the headline: “Man Perishes Over Discount Vegetables.” How could I ever forgive myself for such world-class idiocy? Worse, how could my wife ever forget that I lectured her with the smug confidence of a food-safety guru right before scarfing down a fatal dose of rotting produce? I’d be immortalized as the kind of hapless buffoon who wouldn’t even get a name in a Chekhov short story—just “The Idiot Who Ate the Cabbage.”

    Then, because fever dreams and existential crises go hand in hand, another absurd thought hit me: How would my YouTube subscribers and Instagram followers know what happened to me? I’d be gone, but my accounts would still sit there, ghostlike, leaving them to wonder why the witty guy with the diver watches and snack obsession suddenly went dark. What a tragedy—I wouldn’t even get the chance to create a final piece of content documenting my own demise in comedic glory. A video titled, “How Cabbage Killed Me (And Why You Should Toss Yours)” would surely have gone viral.

    This realization struck me as profoundly twisted: content creators care more about producing “engaging material” than their own mortality. Forget self-preservation—I was more upset that my audience might miss out on the hilarity of my self-inflicted cabbage-related downfall. The pathology runs deep: we’re so hooked on being performative, we’d probably narrate our own deaths if we could. Imagine me, breathless and feverish, croaking out, “Don’t forget to like, comment, and subscribe—assuming I make it to tomorrow.” The absurdity of it all made me laugh, which hurt, because even my ribs were exhausted from this cabbage-induced purgatory.

    It was apparent I was so desperate to be relevant on social media that I had become a Gravefluencer–an influencer who extends his reach six feet under, ensuring even death is on-brand.

    After five days of relentless illness, I had a phone consultation with my doctor about what I was sure was self-inflicted food poisoning. I laid out the symptoms with the kind of detail you’d expect from someone auditioning for a medical drama. My doctor listened patiently, then unceremoniously popped my bubble of absurdity. “This isn’t food poisoning,” she said. “You’ve got the flu. It’s going around.”

    Just like that, my grand narrative of culinary hubris—the man who dared to defy rancid cabbage and paid the ultimate price—was dead. Instead, I was left with something far less glamorous: virulent flu. Part of me was relieved that I wasn’t poisoning myself with poisoned produce, but another part of me felt cheated. I’d lost the absurd, darkly comedic morality tale about a man so cheap he nearly killed himself over a two-dollar bag of cabbage. What a waste.

    The doctor wasn’t exactly brimming with solutions, either. “Rest and stay hydrated,” she advised, the way you might tell a child to eat their vegetables. That night, my fever spiked close to 104, launching me into a kaleidoscope of fever dreams where my brain decided to give me the full surrealist experience. Words from my podcasts took on physical forms—spiky, sticky, grotesque shapes—and suddenly, I was inside them. I wandered through caves of conversation, waded through cocoons of dialogue, and got tangled in thick spider webs spun from language. Each sentence wrapped around me, trapping me in its endless loops of nonsense.

    When I woke up, drenched in sweat and feeling like I’d wrestled a linguistically gifted tarantula, I realized the flu wasn’t just an illness—it was a full-blown avant-garde art installation happening in my own head. So no, I didn’t have food poisoning. I had performance art fever. And while it wasn’t the cabbage apocalypse I’d hoped for, it was plenty weird in its own way.

    For six days, I had been wrestling with the so-called “Thanksgiving Flu,” a charming little virus that kept my fever bouncing between 101 and 104, as if my body were auditioning for a medical melodrama. Being that sick wasn’t just about physical misery—it was a battering ram smashing through the cozy little mental structures I had built around my life. Aspirations? Pointless. Health goals? A cruel joke. My reading list? Forget it. Even my hunger for social belonging and validation had been knocked flat. What remained was a stripped-down nihilism so bleak it made Nietzsche look like an optimist.

    Sickness dragged me to a dark place where life felt like a cosmic prank. I could almost hear my 14-year-old self rolling his eyes as I remembered my Grandma Mildred’s wise words from one of her letters: “Illnesses bring out the doldrums.” No kidding, Grandma. That particular flu had brought out more than the doldrums—it had conjured a maudlin cocktail of despair and self-pity.

    In that state, I found myself spiraling into melodrama, muttering things like, “What’s the point? Just end the torment and let me meet my Maker already!” It was ridiculous, of course, but I couldn’t help but notice how flu-induced misery fed into a distinctly male flavor of narcissism. Egotism, after all, was a hallmark of the man-child: the guy who thought the universe should pause when he didn’t get his way.

    Men, it seemed, were uniquely gifted at turning minor discomforts into existential crises. While women powered through illness with a mix of stoicism and practicality, men turned their sickbeds into thrones of self-pity, proclaiming their impending doom to anyone who would listen. And me? I was no exception. With every feverish shiver, I became the star of my own overwrought drama, raging against the cruelty of a world that dared to continue spinning while I wallowed in flu-induced existential despair.

    Sure, Grandma Mildred, the doldrums were part of the package—but why did it feel like men turned those doldrums into an art form? Perhaps the real flu virus wasn’t in my body; it was in my ego, throwing a tantrum because life wasn’t bending to my fevered will.

    I appeared to be languishing in the Flu-tile State—a fever-fueled realization that all human endeavor was futile.

    On day 8 of this flu from hell, my doctor emailed me a cheerful little grenade: “Your symptoms are concerning. I need to see you today.” Fabulous. At 11 a.m., feverish, grouchy, and radiating the energy of a half-cooked zombie, I dragged myself to her office for the usual poking and prodding. COVID? Negative. Influenza? Oh yes, Influenza A—the viral overachiever of the season. My nurse, who’d had it two weeks earlier, gave me the kind of pep talk you’d expect from someone who survived a minor apocalypse. “Seven days of fever,” she chirped, “so you’ve probably got two more to go!” Like I’d won a spa weekend in purgatory.

    But the flu wasn’t the real sucker punch. No, that came when I stepped on the scale. At a soul-crushing 252 pounds, with blood pressure at 166 over 92, Dr. Okada laid it out with the dispassion of someone reading a menu: “You’re at high risk for a massive stroke or heart attack.” She might as well have handed me a shovel and a map to my future grave. Then, just to twist the knife, she added, “You need to lose fifty pounds in six months. Otherwise…” She trailed off, but I got the point: dead man waddling.

    Her final blow came with a steely gaze and a guilt grenade: “If not for yourself, lose weight for your wife and daughters.” Translation: stop being selfish and get your act together before they have to plan your funeral.

    Desperate for a cheat code, I asked about Mounjaro or Ozempic, those miracle weight-loss injectables I’d read about. She barely stifled a laugh. “We prescribe those for people with exclusive employer benefits.” I muttered something about how my college likely doesn’t cover luxury drugs, and her thin smile confirmed it. I’d be fighting this battle the old-fashioned way: with the DASH diet and restricted calories, not cutting-edge pharmaceuticals.

    And then there was the Motrin ban. Apparently, my go-to painkiller was a blood-pressure ticking time bomb. “No more Motrin. Tylenol only,” she said, with all the enthusiasm of a waiter recommending the tofu option. So now, my fevers would be accompanied by a dull, Tylenol-soaked march toward mortality. Fantastic.

    I thanked her—sincerely, I swear—because she wasn’t wrong. But the whole thing felt like I’d been blindsided by a particularly grim episode of The Biggest Loser: Medical Edition. On the drive home, Miley Cyrus’s “Flowers (Demo)” came on, and I—feverish, bloated, and thoroughly defeated—actually cried. Miley crooned about resilience and self-love, and all I could think about was how laxity, that slow, sneaky killer, had been working me over for years. Skipped workouts, mindless snacks, every excuse—it had all led to this: a middle-aged man sobbing in his car, mourning his dignity while stuck in traffic.

    Dr. Okada’s tough love landed like a wrecking ball. This was my moment—the kind where you either turn your life around or start drafting your obituary. Time to put down the Motrin, pick up some discipline, and drag myself back from the brink before I became the subject of one of those tragic lessons everyone ignores until it’s too late cautionary tales.

    I had entered the clinic expecting to get a quick flu diagnosis and maybe a lecture about rest and fluids. Instead, I walked out with the realization that my life wasn’t just off-track; it was an unmitigated dumpster fire rolling downhill. How had I missed it? The creeping wreckage of my existence had been unfolding right under my nose, like a slow-motion train derailment I refused to acknowledge. Denial, thy name is me.

    Dr. Okada, bless her clinical professionalism, had held up a mirror and forced me to see what I’d been expertly avoiding for years: that my life, much like my blood pressure, was a ticking time bomb. I’d been blind to my own unraveling, and now the blinders were off. The view wasn’t pretty, but at least now I knew what I was working with—a fixer-upper existence in desperate need of a renovation.

    My visit to the doctor turned into an unplanned catalyst for a long-overdue moral metamorphosis. I left not just diagnosed, but afflicted by a new condition I can only call the Scales of Justice (and Shame)—that peculiar state where the doctor’s scale transforms into the ultimate moral arbiter. Each number glaring back at me didn’t just measure pounds; it weighed my life choices, my discipline, my worthiness as a functioning adult. It was less a medical device and more a courtroom, and let’s just say I was found guilty on all counts.

    I was convinced that had I been ten years older, this bout of influenza would have finished me off. The first week felt less like an illness and more like the aftermath of a roadside bombing, with me as the unfortunate bystander left mangled in a ditch. My body was a buffet for phantom wolves and mosquitoes—every nerve ending seemed to host its own ravenous pest. Mentally, I spiraled into fever-induced madness, complete with hallucinatory jungle scenes: Gumby-esque AI bodybuilders, sculpted and sinewy yet gelatinous, painted the revolting hue of yellow sea slugs, slithered around me in an Amazonian hellscape.

    By Week Three, the influenza had mercifully downgraded its malevolence, though “mild” feels like an insult to language. I still shivered like a Victorian orphan in a snowstorm, my body temperature yoyoing between inferno and tundra. Aches gnawed at me persistently, like bad houseguests who don’t get the hint. And mentally? I was underwater—grasping at reality as it floats just out of reach. My brain felt stripped of a few critical screws, rattling around and threatening to unscrew the rest.

    At some point, I recalled, in the hazy, fevered way of someone stranded in a desert, that my daughter had lozenges in her room. Fueled by desperation, I shuffled to her door, knocked weakly, and thrust my trembling hands forward as if auditioning for a Dickens adaptation. “Please,” I croaked, my voice barely above a whisper, “fill my hands with lozenges for your poor ailing father.”

    The response? Hysterical laughter. Both of my daughters, cozied up watching TV, howled with the kind of delight usually reserved for viral cat videos. I caught a glimpse of myself in the hallway mirror: pajamas wrinkled like a bad alibi, beanie perched jauntily askew, my face the pallor of a sickly sailor. I was every bit the tragicomic figure they saw—a fevered street urchin begging for cough drops.

    My wife, ever the realist, stormed in to restore order. “We have plenty of lozenges in the kitchen,” she barked, clearly unimpressed by my Oscar-worthy theatrics. She led me, limping and pathetic, to the cupboard, where she proceeded to dump several bags of lozenges onto the table with all the ceremony of Santa Claus unloading his sleigh. My daughters, tears of laughter streaming down their faces, declared me Oliver Twist reincarnated.

    I retreated to bed clutching a handful of lozenges, humiliated but momentarily soothed, only to lie awake wondering when this fever would break—or if the AI bodybuilders would show up again to finish the job.

    Four weeks into my bout with influenza, I emerged bleary-eyed, fever-wrecked, and staring down my old nemesis: addiction. Not the sexy kind you’d brag about in a memoir—just the creeping, mundane kind that comes with a tendency to overindulge in things like self-pity, compulsive behaviors, and yes, an irrational attachment to writing books.

    And so, I emerged from this fever-ridden odyssey not as a transformed man, but as someone who had simply suffered enough to pause and reflect—until the next catastrophe beckoned. If John Bradshaw were leading my recovery workshop, he’d likely hand me a stuffed animal and instruct me to embrace my inner child, soothing my cabbage-traumatized soul with affirmations of self-love. But after weeks of sweating, hallucinating, and contemplating my own obituary over a bag of rotting vegetables, I didn’t need a teddy bear. I needed a referee, a financial adviser, and possibly an exorcist.

    The true lesson here? My inner child doesn’t need rescuing. He needs a restraining order. Because left to his own devices, he’ll continue to eat spoiled food out of spite, spiral into existential despair at the first sign of adversity, and demand that every brush with mortality be converted into premium content. So if I’m to move forward as a recovering writing addict, I have to acknowledge this truth: The inner child is not a sage. He’s a lunatic. And I should probably stop taking his advice.

    CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

    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.

  • What does it feel like to be crushed beneath decades of writing addiction?

    What does it feel like to be crushed beneath decades of writing addiction?

    What does it mean to be pinned down for decades by some vast, crushing force, an unmovable, soul-flattening monolith that convinces you of your own helplessness? More importantly, do we even want to be free from it, or is that liberation its own special kind of agony?

    This takes me back to 1970, watching Adam-12, one of my favorite TV shows, though I only remember one episode. A man was trapped under a fallen telephone pole, the weight pressing into his ribs. When paramedics arrived, they informed him they’d be using a crane to lift it off. “Funny,” the man remarked. “I don’t even feel any pain.” The paramedic’s response? You don’t feel pain now—but once we lift it, you will.

    That moment lodged itself in my brain like a splinter. Because, really, what is breaking free from an addiction if not having a telephone pole lifted off your chest? You think you’re ready for freedom, but then the weight is gone, and suddenly, every nerve in your body starts screaming. You had learned to live with the oppression, adapted to its limits, made peace with your own captivity. And now, you have to face everything that weight once shielded you from—all the wounds you ignored, all the realities you deferred, all the choices you never had to make because you were conveniently immobilized.

    That’s where I am now. My recovery means staying in my lane, so I have to admit that I will never write A Confederacy of Dunces. I don’t have the genius to write something like The Ginger Man. I won’t be crafting an autofictional masterwork à la Emmanuel Carrère’s Kingdom. What I do have is a lifetime spent crushed under the telephone pole of writing addiction, a weight that once gave my life structure—even as it kept me from actually living it.

    So, I had to be the crane operator, the paramedic, and the doctor all at once. I had to lift the damn pole, endure the pain, and figure out how to move forward. 

    Lifting the telephone pole off my ribs did indeed hurt like hell. By the time the 2024 Thanksgiving rolled around, I could feel the weight of grief like an overstuffed holiday plate. I’d said goodbye to my mother during the pandemic, standing outside a nursing home window and offering her love through a mesh screen, as if I were visiting someone in solitary confinement. Two years later, I watched my father—a proud infantryman in his day—fade to 130 pounds, his body surrendering to cancer. Since their passing, the world felt quieter, smaller, like someone had dimmed the lights without warning.

    So, when hosting Thanksgiving fell squarely on my plate, it wasn’t some Norman Rockwell fantasy. It was more like getting crushed by a baby grand piano dropped from the second floor. And instead of gracefully stepping aside, I just let it hit me—because honestly, moving felt like too much effort.

    The guest list wasn’t exactly daunting—just my perpetually single brother, whose dating apps seemed better at generating cautionary tales than romantic prospects, and two of my wife’s teacher friends, both middle school band directors still recovering from clarinet-induced PTSD. The conversation was polite, though it had all the flavor of plain oatmeal.

    Stuffed to the gills but somehow still shoveling pie like our lives depended on it, we trudged through the ritual of TV show recommendations. Each suggestion was delivered with the gravitas of a public service announcement—skip this series at your own peril. Apparently, failing to watch that one obscure, eight-part masterpiece would leave me culturally destitute, wandering through a desolate landscape devoid of punchlines and plot twists.

    Honestly, I enjoyed the company. The real villain of Thanksgiving wasn’t the guests—it was the dishes. The endless scrubbing that left my hands raw, the dishwashing marathon that stretched into eternity, the mountain of dirty plates multiplying like gremlins in the sink. That’s where the wheels came off.

    My wife, meanwhile, glided through the chaos like some kind of culinary sorceress, humming softly as she orchestrated the entire meal with the grace of a Michelin-starred maestro. She didn’t grumble. Not a single passive-aggressive sigh escaped her lips. She was the picture of serene competence.

    I, on the other hand, hovered around the kitchen like a useless NPC in a video game—occasionally moving a plate from table to sink and acting as though I’d just conquered Everest. At one point, I genuinely felt winded after rearranging the silverware. My contribution was so meager it felt performative, like a child pretending to be tired after “helping” Dad mow the lawn by pushing a plastic toy mower ten feet behind him.

    Somewhere between rinsing the roasting pan and glaring at the pile of silverware, it hit me—I was teetering on the edge of a Mope-a-saurus moment. The only thing preventing my full transformation was the vague sense of shame that my wife, who had just cooked for hours, wasn’t grumbling about the aftermath. That’s when you know you’re in trouble—when someone else’s superior competence and good cheer makes you feel like a defective appliance, sputtering through life with a flickering power cord and a weak motor.

    The lethal cocktail of self-loathing and forced sociability had drained me to the marrow. By the time the guests finally took their leave, I should have collapsed straight into bed, preferably into a coma-level sleep.

    But as a writing addict, I stayed up deep into the night and wrote a book proposal. 

    Surviving Thanksgiving: The Essential Guide

    A Memoir of Grief, Dysfunction, and the Existential Terror of Dishes

    Author: Jeff McMahon, recovering member of Write-a-holics Anonymous, part-time Manuscriptus Rex, full-time over-thinker.

    Overview:
    The holidays are supposed to be about gratitude, togetherness, and the warm glow of familial love. But let’s be honest—Thanksgiving is a psychological endurance test wrapped in a turkey-scented mirage of Norman Rockwell propaganda. You either come out of it spiritually enriched or barely clinging to sanity, drowning in a sea of gravy-stained regrets.

    This book is for those of us who, instead of basking in holiday joy, find ourselves staring into the abyss of mashed potatoes, contemplating the futility of existence while our hands prune in dishwater. It’s for the people who, somewhere between the third helping of stuffing and the forced enthusiasm over TV show recommendations, realize they are hurtling toward their final transformation: a hollow version of their former selves.

    Through dark humor, painfully relatable anecdotes, and some uncomfortably personal self-reflection, Surviving Thanksgiving: The Essential Guide will navigate the holiday’s perils—family dysfunction, grief-laden nostalgia, the crushing disappointment of dry turkey, and the passive-aggressive Olympics that inevitably break out over pie. Along the way, I’ll explore the psychology of holiday meltdowns, the delusions of tradition, and why washing dishes can trigger a full existential crisis.

    Target Audience:
    This book is for:

    • Burnt-out hosts who wonder why they agreed to this in the first place.
    • Perpetually single siblings trapped in the “Any Special Someone?” interrogation.
    • Grief-stricken folks realizing the empty chairs at the table hurt more than expected.
    • Introverts who barely survived the social gauntlet.
    • Writing addicts who turn all their misery into book proposals.

    Tone & Style:
    Think David Sedaris meets Kitchen Confidential with a side of A Confederacy of Dunces. It’s part memoir, part cultural critique, and entirely fueled by existential dread and too much pie.

    Managing my anxieties over Thanksgiving, I had conceived a preposterous memoir, a premise clearly more suitable for an essay than a book, but I couldn’t help it. Conceiving of these “comic memoirs” and providing a book proposal was a compulsion. Stopping one addiction didn’t make my compulsions disappear. They simply rerouted, popping up in new, mutated forms, like a literary game of whack-a-mole.

    Now, instead of writing doomed novels, I found myself obsessing over my own struggles, crafting fractured hero tales where I was the comic fool, perpetually failing forward, stumbling through existence like a man who just had a telephone pole yanked off his chest—and is still waiting for his ribs to stop throbbing.

  • First Love in Leningrad, Circa 1984

    First Love in Leningrad, Circa 1984

    The following evening found me slouched in a Leningrad discotheque, still nursing the kind of sore backside only a Soviet bus seat could deliver. I was stationed at a high-top table, reading A Clockwork Orange, trying to project an air of literary detachment while simultaneously avoiding eye contact with the throng of dancers twisting under the flickering neon lights.

    Then she appeared.

    Short, elfin, bespectacled—like an intellectual sprite who had wandered in from some parallel universe where bookish charm trumped disco fever. Her sandy-blonde hair framed a delicate face, and her gaze, sharp and assessing, landed squarely on me. “A very famous book,” she observed, nodding toward my well-worn copy.

    She introduced herself as Tula, a Finn on vacation, and without hesitation, slid into the seat across from me. We launched into a conversation that flowed as naturally as vodka at a Russian wedding—literature, music, the intoxicating allure of Russian novelists who knew how to suffer properly. I rattled off every book I had read, every philosophical revelation I had gleaned, and, with the reckless bravado of a twenty-something, confessed my grand ambition to write a novel.

    “You will be famous,” she declared with absolute certainty, as if she had peered through the murky fog of the future and spotted my name emblazoned on book covers. “I can feel it. You must visit me at Lake Saimaa. We will celebrate. Who knows. Perhaps I too will be a published novelist again. We can live together and be each other’s muse.”

    Flattered, I let my guard down. For two hours, we spoke like old friends who had simply taken too long to meet. Our mutual love for Russian literature, the music of Rachmaninoff, and the strange magnetic pull of doomed genius bound us together in a bubble of conversation. Then, as if she had been waiting for just the right moment, she reached into her purse, retrieved a small scrap of paper, and wrote down a title.

    “This,” she said, sliding it toward me, “is the book you must read.”

    I picked it up and saw the name—The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov.

    She looked at me with the intensity of a woman who had just handed over a sacred text. 

    As we conversed under the glittering gold disco ball, the Bee Gees’ “Too Much Heaven” blared across the club. It became apparent through our self-revelations that neither of us had any romantic experience.  Tula At one point, she said, “I will never marry. I have, what do you say in English? Melancholy. Yes, I have melancholy. You know this word?”

    “Yes, I am no stranger to melancholy.”

    “I am so much like that,” she said.

    “That explains your love of Rachmaninoff.”

    She clasped her hands and almost became teary-eyed. “How I love Rachmaninoff. Just utter his name, and I will break down weeping.”

    I thought I was a depressive, but in the presence of Tula, I had the perkiness of Richard Simmons leading an aerobics class. 

    She asked me what I was doing in Russia. I explained that my grandfather was a card-carrying communist, a friend of Fidel Castro, and a supporter of the Soviet Union. He used a shortwave radio in his San Pedro house to communicate with Soviet sailors in nearby ships and submarines. He visited Cuba as often as he could to bring medical supplies that were in need there. One of his friends, a Hollywood writer, lived in exile in Nicaragua after being arrested in France by Interpol for driving a Peugeot station wagon filled with illegal weapons. My grandfather wanted me to fall in love with the Soviet Union and become a champion of its utopian vision, so he paid for me to go on a peace tour. Had I fallen in love with Russia as my grandfather had hoped? Not really. So far, I had been approached at the Moscow Zoo by a striking woman dressed in black and pearls who my tour guide Natasha warned me was a KGB agent trying to have me arrested for soliciting a prostitute. I was washing my hands at the newly built Olympic Hotel in Moscow when the bathroom sink fell out of the wall and against my torso, causing a bloody cut on my abdomen. I got a fever in Novgorod prompting a beautiful female doctor with a severe face to come into my hotel and give me a shot in the butt.  I was, as my fellow traveler Jerry Gold warned me, approached by young men on the subway who wanted to know if I had any American blue jeans to sell as a way of having me arrested for illicit black-market trading.  Everywhere I went in Russia–hotels, trains, restaurants–there were speakers playing grim chamber music as if the authorities were saying, “Try not to be too happy during your stay here.”

    Tula listened to me talk for a couple of hours with a wide gaze while touching my shoulder. “I need to see you again,” she said.

    We agreed to meet the next day at the Peterhof Royal Palace by the Samson Fountain. There is this giant garden the size of several football fields with monuments, gold statues, and fountains shooting streams of water straight into the blue sky. We sat on concrete steps around the fountains. It was close to ninety degrees as statues of gold naked bodies stood in various poses next to jets of erupting water in a spectacle called The Grand Cascade. Tula wore a short white dress and we sat on the steps. In the heat, we decided I would get us some ice cream.

    While I was walking toward the ice cream bar, a gypsy tried to hand off a baby to me the way a quarterback would hand off a football to a running back. It all happened so quickly. Before the baby was cradled in my chest, a fast-acting Russian police officer grabbed the baby, returned the baby to the gypsy, and shouted at her. I thought she would be arrested, but the officer appeared content with scolding her. She withered at his remarks and slumped away with the child in her arms.  

    I returned with the ice cream and told Tula about the incident with the gypsy. She said things like that happen all the time here.

    “But what was I supposed to do with the baby?”

    “Perhaps adopt it? Buy it? Save it from a life of misery? There is so much tragedy here.”

    “So I was supposed to fly back to the States with a baby? Go through customs and everything else?”

    “I know. It’s crazy.”

    “I don’t think I could be a parent. I don’t have the hardwiring for it.”

    “Me either. I’m too sad to be a parent. Sadness is a full-time job that leaves me with little energy for much else.”

    She finished her ice cream and smiled at me, then said, “You and I are like two kindred spirits meeting each other in this strange world.”

    “It’s hotter than hell out here.”

    “So will you marry someday?”

    I shrugged, then said, “I doubt anyone will take me.”

    “Don’t be so hard on yourself. If I were the marrying type, I would come to America and spend my life with you. We could live in California and be sad together. Wouldn’t that be lovely?”

    It actually sounded rather appealing. Tula and I living a life of sadness, writing novels together, marinating in Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony while discussing the existential torment of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. What other kind of life was there?

    She stood up and said she had to catch her plane back to Finland and gave me a chaste kiss on the cheek.

    “I really hope you find happiness. You are such an outstanding person.”

    “Outstanding?”

    That adjective used to describe me was a bit hard to take. It was like a real estate agent trying to describe a decrepit property by the train tracks as palatial. I repeated the word outstanding with perhaps a trace of sarcasm and said goodbye to her. I never saw her again, but I still remember the vanilla ice cream–the best I’ve ever tasted. 

    Nine months later while back in my routine of working out, playing piano, and doing my college studies in the Bay Area, I received a letter from Tula. I was living with my mother and standing by our front yard’s loquat tree while holding the envelope and staring with fascination at the Finnish return address. Nearby some Mexican parrots were making a ruckus in a neighbor’s dogwood tree. It was a warm May. I walked under the porch light by the front door entrance and read Tula’s letter.

    Dear Jeff,

    So much has happened since I met you. I took your recommendation and read A Confederacy of Dunces. I laughed my ass off, but the book was so sad. I keep the book on my shelf and always think of you when I see it. Now for some big news. Brace yourself. You won’t believe this. I’m getting married! I have you to thank for this. I never thought I was the marrying type, but those two days I spent with you in Russia changed me. When I got back to Finland, I was restless, I thought about you constantly, and even at one time I had this mad idea that I should arrange to visit you, but a high school friend Oliver came into my life, and we began seeing each other, not as friends but as lovers. I have you to thank for this. Meeting you awakened a part of my soul that I had never known before. I hope that you don’t forsake love, as I had planned to do, that you too will find someone special in your life. You deserve it. You are an amazing man!

    Love Always,

    Tula

    I stood at the entryway and listened to the shrill cackles of the nearby parrots. 

    So I was the guy who had helped a sweet-souled depressive fall in love. No, I wasn’t the recipient of that love. But I was the lighter fluid to get the grill going. I was the spark, the catalyst, and the kindling to get Tula on the road to Loveville. I had made a difference.

    I went inside the house, walked into the living room, and played something sad at my ebony Yamaha upright.  I tried to imagine Tula as my sole audience, but she was replaced by the Russian Commander and I could see him mocking me. 

    “You are a charlatan,” I could imagine him saying. “You are an American charlatan in Russia. You must always be put in your place. You must drink warm beer till you puke your guts out. Only then can you find redemption for your vain self.”

    Over the years, I attempted to channel the absurdities of the totalitarian police state into my fiction, convinced I could capture its paranoia and bureaucratic lunacy in novel form. Herculodge depicted a dystopia where physical fitness was the highest moral virtue—where to be svelte was to be righteous, and to carry an extra pound was to invite public shaming and possible exile. Gym-Nauseam imagined a society where citizens willingly surrendered their freedom, not to a dictator, but to the tyranny of endless, punishing workouts, their lives consumed by squats, protein intake calculations, and the pursuit of an ever-elusive “goal weight.”

    As short stories, they worked—a sharp jab of satire, a bitter laugh at the madness of it all. But as novels? They were so catastrophically bad, they deserved their own show trial. Any competent literary tribunal would have sentenced me to hard labor in a Siberian gulag, where I could atone for my crimes against narrative structure by stacking bricks in the permafrost and reconsidering my life choices.

  • What devotion really looks like

    What devotion really looks like

    When I think of love in all its fullness, I dredge up a memory from 1982—a gem buried deep in my psyche from my early twenties. Back then, I was in college, slogging through a statistics course taught by a professor who looked like he’d been teleported straight out of a Dickens novel. Wild white hair defied gravity, crazed blue eyes darted around like they were searching for meaning, a nose as red as a warning light hinted at extracurricular activities with a bottle, and his overall aura was eau de whiskey. He was a kind man, though, in that shabby, endearingly tragic way.

    The class itself was a masochist’s delight, and by week four—when the sadistic monster called “standard deviation” reared its head—half of us were drowning. Among my classmates was an elderly African American couple in their early seventies and always dressed for church, who were either a heartwarming sitcom subplot or walking proof that God has a delicious sense of humor. The husband, a determined relic with a cane, announced on the first day of class that this was his seventh attempt at passing statistics. His wife, the embodiment of long-suffering devotion, was there not as a student but as his support system—a Bible-toting, knitting saint.

    The husband’s approach to learning was…unorthodox. While the rest of us quietly sunk in our seats, he would occasionally leap to his feet mid-lecture, his cane clattering dramatically, and hobble to the chalkboard. Pointing a finger like a preacher calling out sin, he’d declare, “That’s not the answer I got. Let me show you!” And then he’d scrawl his “solution” on the board—a series of hieroglyphics that no one could understand. 

    The professor, to his credit, tolerated these interruptions with the forbearance of a man who had seen worse (probably in his flask). Meanwhile, the wife would bow her head and whisper desperate prayers to “sweet Jesus” as if divine intervention might save her husband—or at least restore a shred of her dignity. Students stifled laughter behind cupped hands, and I sat there, torn between secondhand embarrassment and the sneaking suspicion that this was comedy gold worthy of Saturday Night Live.

    After class, I’d drive home and pop in a cassette of “Tiny Children” by The Teardrop Explodes—a song that paired perfectly with my mood of existential dread. I’d replay the scene in my mind: the old man’s quixotic battle with the chalkboard, the wife’s quiet perseverance. And then, like clockwork, I’d start crying. Not just because I was floundering as badly as he was with standard deviation or because my social skills were nonexistent, but because that woman had shown me something profound: the power of love. Real love—the kind that sticks with you through seven attempts at statistics, through public humiliation, through everything.

    I can still see that couple vividly. The husband’s determination, the wife’s quiet strength, and my own pathetic, lonely self, sitting there and learning—without realizing it—what devotion really looks like.