Cinemorphosis

Tag: fiction

  • The Next One Is Always the One

    The Next One Is Always the One

    About eight years ago, I experienced the horological equivalent of speed dating. Two watches arrived on the same afternoon: a Seiko Sumo SBDC001 with a black dial and sapphire, and the sleeker SBDC051—a reissue of the classic 62MAS. I placed them side by side like two contestants in a Darwinian experiment, then strapped each one on as if I were auditioning them for the role of “forever watch.”

    It wasn’t even close.

    The 051 had the refinement and wrist presence of a watch that knew it belonged. Crisp finishing. Perfect proportions. Lume that could guide ships through fog. The Sumo? It felt cheap. It wasn’t worth half of the 051. I sold it before dinner. Brutal, but deserved.

    Fast-forward eight years. I’m hunting again—not for a grail, but for something that will sing when paired with my beloved orange Divecore strap, the one accessory that unlocks my inner Watch Beast. Naturally, I thought about giving the Sumo a redemption arc—maybe the gray-wave dial SBDC177? But my instincts flared. Once a dud, always a dud?

    Then I spotted the polygonal Seiko SBDC203 (SPB483), aka the “Coastline,” and something clicked. This one looks like it could go toe-to-toe with the 051. Sharp lines, killer specs, and the kind of tactile satisfaction you only get when Seiko decides to actually try.

    Two closing thoughts:

    First, nothing has made me feel more bonded to my watch obsession than the orange Divecore strap. It’s not just a strap—it’s a mood, an identity, a wrist-based mission statement.

    Second, I’ve come to believe the real addiction isn’t the watches. It’s the brain hijack you constantly crave. The way your brain lights up when The Next Thing to Get starts coming into focus. That little thrill of clarity when you think, Yes, this is the one. It’s the same buzz I get from customizing a Camry XSE in Heavy Metal Gray on Fletcher Toyota’s website and seeing it listed for “only” $38K—a car I may or may not buy but already love as if it’s parked in my soul’s garage.

    Humans are a deranged species. We crave imaginary ownership like it’s the secret to inner peace.

  • The Wind Stole My Midterm

    The Wind Stole My Midterm

    Last night I dreamed I was co-teaching a college course on health and mixed martial arts with Eliot—the bearded jazz musician who moonlights as a Trader Joe’s clerk. He was fired up like a preacher at a tent revival. I, on the other hand, had the enthusiasm of a dogwalker who’s just spotted a fresh pile and no bag.

    Eliot, bless his plaid soul, had prepped a morning exam for his students—neatly typed, stapled, and probably color-coded. Meanwhile, I forgot I was even supposed to give a test. My lectures were improvised jazz solos, long on flair and short on structure. I’d wander into class and riff about cholesterol, Muay Thai, or the history of granola, depending on my mood or what I’d eaten for breakfast.

    But here’s the kicker—I had better material. Buried under the kitchen of my imaginary mansion was a secret archive: white binders filled with decades of syllabi, obscure readings, quizzes, interviews, and errant genius. I never used them. Too lazy. Too proud. Too me.

    Eliot, the eager grasshopper, somehow discovered the hidden staircase that led to the front porch—don’t ask how dream architecture works—and climbed it with evangelical zeal. I watched from my perch in a bathrobe, coffee in hand, while he scaled those steps like a man training for the Tour de France. When he reached the door, breathless and bright-eyed, he begged for the archive.

    So I gave it to him—several white binders, edges fraying like the conscience of a plagiarist. He held them like sacred scrolls, eyes gleaming with the same reverence I once had before tenure made me soft and cynical. I felt a flicker of gratitude. At least someone would use them. At least the work would live on.

    Then came the twist.

    He informed me, with the officious glee of a parking enforcer, that according to some obscure clause in the college handbook, I’d have to sit for his early-morning exam to renew my credential. Me—the man who had literally written the test’s DNA. I considered studying, briefly. Then I took a nap instead.

    The exam was held in the middle of a chaotic street fair, somewhere between a kettle corn booth and a band playing off-key Fleetwood Mac covers. Wind tore through the papers like it was auditioning for a disaster movie. Test pages flew like startled pigeons, and students chased them in panic. It was academic absurdism, pure and uncut.

    And me? I was at peace. I knew—somehow, with prophetic clarity—that there would be no consequences. That the wind, the noise, the anarchy, would camouflage my ignorance. Eliot’s students would struggle. I’d bluff. The test would become performance art, and no one would remember the score.

    What separated me from Eliot wasn’t intelligence or experience. It was weariness. He was still playing to win. I was waiting for the buzzer. He taught with the fire of the newly converted. I taught like a man allergic to rubrics and enthusiasm. He saw a future. I saw a pension.

    And maybe, in that dream, I realized I had already started to retire—from effort, from purpose, from caring about the difference between good teaching and showing up with anecdotes and gumption. Eliot wanted to be me. I wanted to be gone.

  • Everyone Has an Origin Story. Here Is Mine

    Everyone Has an Origin Story. Here Is Mine

    The Road Trip That Made You Possible

    Everyone has an origin story. You are no exception. Yours begins with your father. Without your father’s sheer audacity and competitive determination, you wouldn’t even be here today. Long before you were a glint in his eye, your father was locked in a battle of epic proportions—an all-out, no-holds-barred contest for the affections of your eighteen-year-old mother. And this wasn’t just any competition. His rival? None other than John Shalikashvili, future United States General and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Their battlefield? The smoky, beer-soaked bar scene of Anchorage, where the stakes were higher than a highball glass during happy hour.

    Their duel for your future mother’s heart took a brief Christmas ceasefire when Shalikashvili retreated to his tactical command center in Peoria, Illinois, while your father returned to Hollywood, Florida, to soak up some sunshine and plot his next move. But as he lounged by the pool, your father realized that victory in this romantic Cold War required swift and decisive action. So he cut his vacation short, crammed himself into a cream-colored 1959 Morris Minor—a vehicle that looked like it had been assembled from the Island of Misfit Toys, complete with a coat hanger for an antenna and door handles barely clinging on by the grace of duct tape—and embarked on the most high-stakes road trip of the 20th century.

    Halfway through this odyssey, the car’s fuel filter decided to go on strike, leaving your father stranded in the middle of nowhere. When the local auto parts store couldn’t supply a replacement, your father—who would later perform engineering miracles at IBM—pulled off a MacGyver-level feat of mechanical wizardry. Armed with nothing but a prophylactic and a paperclip, he fashioned a makeshift fuel filter that was equal parts creative desperation and mechanical blasphemy. This duct-taped miracle kept the fuel pump from either flooding the engine or abandoning ship entirely, depending on its mood.

    Driven by the urgency of love and the fear of losing ground to Shalikashvili’s brass-polished charm, your father powered through the journey, ignoring his growling stomach like a man possessed. Subsisting on loaves of bread devoured like a feral squirrel, he soldiered on, skipping meals because, who needs food when you’re racing against the clock to prevent a military coup over your future wife?

    After a ferry ride that probably felt like crossing the River Styx, your father finally arrived in Anchorage, a full forty-eight hours before Shalikashvili could swoop in with his military swagger and irresistible authority. Nine months later, you were born, the ultimate trophy in this love-struck arms race.

    Even before you took your first breath, your father’s victory over Shalikashvili imparted some crucial life lessons: The competition is fierce, and life is a zero-sum game where you’re either a winner or a nobody. To survive, you must find a competitive edge, and if you ever get complacent, rest assured, someone will move in on your turf faster than you can say “ranked second.”

    As a teenage bodybuilder obsessed with becoming Mr. Universe, opening a gym in the Bahamas, and silencing your critics, you often thought about bodybuilding great Ken Waller stealing Mike Katz’s shirt before a competition in the movie Pumping Iron. Something as trivial as a missing shirt could send your opponent into a tailspin, disrupt his focus, and rattle his confidence like a cheap shaker bottle. Like Mr. Universe Ken Waller, your father taught you that power is a road paved with relentless cunning, ruthless strategy, and a healthy dose of underhanded shenanigans. 

    But underneath the shenanigans and Machiavellian flair, your father taught you one core truth: sweat more than everyone else. Out-hustle, out-grind, outlast. In his gospel, sweat wasn’t just effort—it was currency. The person who left the biggest puddle won. 

  • Flex Day: A Tragedy in Tube Socks

    Flex Day: A Tragedy in Tube Socks

    Another Flex Day had dawned—yet again a gaudy parade of icebreaker drivel, PowerPoint piety, and educational workshops led by people who looked like they’d been conjured by a bureaucratic séance. Against my better instincts—and with a flicker of masochistic hope I should’ve interrogated—I signed up for a session titled Exercise and Mental Wellness. It was being held in the Hobcallow campus gym, a crumbling monument to deferred maintenance and broken promises. If buildings could sigh, this one would’ve let out a long, exhausted groan. Everything about it screamed “run,” but I ignored the sirens blaring in my skull and walked straight in, armed with denial and a water bottle.

    The gym was a fluorescent-lit dungeon, the kind of place where even the light seemed desperate to escape. The air reeked of mildew, ancient sweat, and the crushed dreams of generations who’d suffered through dodgeball and underfunding. I could practically hear the scent—a low moan of institutional despair.

    Then the “fitness expert” took the stage. He looked like he subsisted on steamed kale and unprocessed anxiety. His limbs were pipe cleaners, and his tube socks rode high up his shins like he was waving tiny surrender flags. A whistle hung from his neck, though it clearly served more as costume than command. The guy had the aura of a substitute gym teacher in a 1979 after-school special—minus the charm. With the fervor of a man unveiling the cure for cancer, he launched into a sermon on the redemptive power of push-ups. According to him, daily push-ups could defeat depression, boost classroom charisma, and chisel us into statues Michelangelo would envy.

    I sat among fifty or so other professors, all of us bearing the glazed, shell-shocked expressions of people who’d just survived a bureaucratic earthquake. When the whistle-wielder asked for a volunteer to demonstrate the proper push-up, silence fell across the gym like a dropped curtain. Heavy. Suffocating. It was the sound of collective academic burnout, of souls ground into dust by budget cuts and endless committee meetings.

    Eventually, someone was nudged forward. “Volunteer” was a generous word. The man was more of a human offering. He shuffled onto the stage in a suit that draped off him like wet laundry. His glasses clung to his face like they were afraid to be part of what came next. He moved like a man who had made a series of increasingly regrettable choices that had all led here.

    Then he went down for the push-up—and the moment collapsed into slapstick tragedy. His arms gave out instantly, like a folding chair kicked from behind. His glasses launched from his face and slid across the gym floor, desperate for escape. He lay there wheezing like a deflating accordion, the very embodiment of what happens when the intellect thrives and the body is left for dead.

    You’d think someone might offer sympathy. A supportive chuckle. Maybe a smattering of ironic applause. Nope. The room was pure stone—emotionally fossilized. A few professors exchanged murmured postmortems. Most stared ahead with the blank-eyed stillness of DMV patrons or people deep into a hostage negotiation.

    And when it finally ended, I fled. I bolted, heart pounding, mind racing, lungs grateful just to be outside again. It wasn’t enlightenment I’d found that day. Just confirmation: some kinds of despair really do come with a whistle.

    After surviving thirty Flex Days—each one more spiritually numbing than the last—I’ve come to a grim conclusion: these spectacles aren’t designed to make us better instructors. No, they’re the bureaucratic equivalent of waterboarding. Their true purpose is to remind us, in the most humiliating way possible, that we are not free agents but indentured servants to a cabal of institutional overlords who wouldn’t recognize actual education if it bit them on their lanyards. The activities they concoct—team-building scavenger hunts, trust falls, and workshops on how to smile while grading—aren’t just irrelevant to higher learning. They are a brazen insult to critical thinking itself, proof that the people orchestrating these charades are not only disconnected from the classroom, but from basic cognitive function. Flex Days are not professional development; they’re intellectual purgatory dressed up in business casual.

  • How Your Flintstones Moment Made You Pursue Higher Education

    How Your Flintstones Moment Made You Pursue Higher Education

    Charlene’s office had been a shrine to immaculate control—gleaming surfaces, aligned papers that looked like they’d been measured with a laser level, and an air of clinical precision that could make a Swiss watchmaker weep tears of admiration. But that day, the outside world was doing its damnedest to breach her fortress. A dust storm had rolled into Hobcallow with all the subtlety of a biblical plague. It was mid-afternoon, but you wouldn’t have guessed it. The sky was choked in an apocalyptic shade of brown, casting the office in a bruised sepia tone. The overhead lights flickered like they’d given up hope. Dust smeared the windows like greasy fingerprints on a crime scene, and Charlene—who waged holy war against dirt—cringed at every grain that dared defile her glass.

    If anyone could stare down Mother Nature and win on points, it was Charlene. You’d have bet your last protein shake on it.

    She tried to tune it all out and focus on her latest mission: turning you into some kind of intellectual demigod for her next newspaper feature. She tapped her pen on her notepad with the kind of sharp, deliberate rhythm that could cut glass. Then she leaned in, smiling like a predator who’d just cornered a wounded animal. “Tell me,” she said, “what were the defining moments that led you to pursue higher education?”

    The wind screamed outside like a banshee in heat, but you leaned back and let yourself drift. “There was this bouncer gig I had at seventeen,” you began. “Maverick’s Disco in San Ramon. Three bucks an hour—ten cents above minimum wage. Free soda, free peanuts. I thought I was rich.”

    You could still picture it: a swirling disco inferno of polyester pantsuits, platform shoes, and hair sculpted into helmet-grade updos. The Bee Gees were on loop, the dry ice fog never cleared, and the lights pulsed like a migraine. It was paradise—until it wasn’t.

    “At first,” you said, “I thought I’d struck gold. I got to flex my lats and mingle. But after a while, it all started blending together. The same couples, the same fights, the same sweaty desperation. One night, mid-shift, I had this epiphany—Fred and Barney cruising in their Flintstone-mobile, but the background just repeated: tree, rock, house, tree, rock, house. That loop ruined the cartoon for me. And suddenly, it was ruining my life, too.”

    Charlene’s pen was flying. You could tell she was high on narrative gold.

    “Maverick’s became my Flintstones moment,” you said. “Week after week, the same loop: wide-eyed people chasing magic and leaving with hangovers and broken heels. And I realized I was part of it—punching the clock, buying into the monotony. I needed something more unpredictable. So I chose college. I needed to break the loop.”

    Charlene looked like she was about to levitate from her chair. The dust storm outside didn’t matter—she was in a state of pure journalistic ecstasy.

    And then you got honest.

    “But look at me now,” you said, and your voice had that creeping bitterness you couldn’t quite stifle. “Degrees? Check. Stable career in higher ed? Check. And what have I built? A life of structure and repetition. Same workouts, same egg whites, same damn protein shakes, same naps, same Angels game every night. I wrapped myself in the very loop I thought I’d escaped. The Flintstones background just changed colors.”

    Charlene’s pen froze mid-air. Her gaze snapped to you with a gleam of ice behind it. That calculating smile returned—sleek, practiced, a smile that had shut down board meetings and ended more than one marriage. “We won’t tell them that part,” she said sweetly. “That’s just between us.”

    You felt the temperature drop, despite the swirling storm outside. It was the smile of someone who took pleasure in control—over narrative, over outcomes, over people.

    You glanced toward the window. The storm was still there, clawing at the glass like a desperate thing. But Charlene’s smile? That was the real weather system in the room.

  • The News Anchor of the Shallow End

    The News Anchor of the Shallow End

    A poolside pestilence—you knew him as Roland Beavers. He was the kind of poolside companion nightmares were made of. Picture it: a pudgy man in his early thirties with dishwasher-blond hair clinging lifelessly to a scalp that looked perpetually annoyed at its assignment. His physique was more Pillsbury than gladiator, his chin having taken early retirement sometime around 1996. And yet, this proud specimen insisted on strutting around the pool in lava-red terry cloth trunks so tragically undersized they clung to his hips like terrified hikers on a cliffside. The stretch marks? They splayed across his skin like graffiti sprayed by a disgruntled street artist.

    Naturally, Roland had an explanation at the ready for anyone who dared lock eyes with him long enough to hear it. Those stretch marks? Not from powdered donuts, perish the thought. No, they were the battle scars of a world-class daredevil—his words—earned from leaping off the cliffs of Acapulco. You could practically hear the collective eye-roll from the pool regulars every time he launched into one of his airbrushed tales of aerial glory.

    But Roland’s true calling wasn’t daredevilry—it was unsolicited poolside broadcasting. Armed with a crumpled newspaper, he’d take up his post like an aging news anchor, providing loud, unfiltered commentary on every blurb and headline, under the delusion that everyone within earshot was waiting with bated breath for his take on gas prices and tabloid divorces. His “audience,” meanwhile, muttered oaths under their breath, praying he’d take up knitting—somewhere indoors, ideally underground.

    You watched his social cluelessness peak during innocent pool games—playful couples tossing a football or frisbee back and forth. For Roland, this wasn’t just casual recreation to be observed; it was a direct invitation. He’d launch himself into the water with the grace of a bowling ball dropped from a rooftop, crashing into their game like a forgotten uncle showing up drunk at a family reunion. The couples would pause, stunned, then shuffle off with expressions reserved for people who talk during movies.

    And heaven help the women just trying to sunbathe in peace. Roland, ever the gallant poolside creep, took it upon himself to offer his “services” to any woman within spraying distance. Whether it was spritzing their backs with water or offering to rub in sunscreen, Roland never missed an opportunity to “help”—oblivious to the fact that his mere presence was enough to derail an entire afternoon of tanning and tranquility.

    These long, unwanted days at the pool weren’t just for his entertainment—they were an extension of the strange domestic theatre unfolding upstairs. His mother, Nadine, loomed over the scene from their apartment balcony, a woman built like she could bench-press a Buick, her muu-muu rippling in the desert breeze like a circus tent threatening lift-off. With her hair wound into curls so tight they looked ready to spring off and attack, she’d bark orders with the authority of a drill sergeant with a megaphone.

    “Slather on more sunscreen, Roland!” she’d bellow, veins throbbing in her neck like they were sending an SOS in Morse code. “Get inside and eat something! You’re wasting away!” This, despite the fact that Roland had a good 40 pounds he could have “wasted away” without anyone shedding a tear.

    You’d think all this doting and nagging might eventually motivate Roland to get a job—maybe contribute something to society, or at the very least give the rest of you a break. But no. Roland and Nadine were comfortably buffered by the settlement from a lawsuit tied to Roland’s brief, disastrous stint at flight school in San Diego. Apparently, his dorm mates decided his face needed some rearranging, and after a skull fracture and several court dates, Roland walked away with a broken head and a windfall large enough to fund his permanent poolside residency.

    So there he was—your unwanted mascot in red trunks—coasting through life on lawsuit money and his mother’s militant affections, interrupting your peaceful afternoons with unsolicited news updates and delusions of former glory. Thanks to the faded glory of his imaginary daredevil days and a bottomless box of Chardonnay, Roland Beavers remained the persistent echo of everything you were trying to escape.

  • The Man Who Refused to Unpack

    The Man Who Refused to Unpack

    Chief among your apartment acquaintances in the godforsaken desert was Leonard Skeazy, an attorney from Santa Monica who had been lured out to this sun-scorched outpost by a fat signing bonus and a monogrammed office chair, yet couldn’t shake the gnawing resentment of having been exiled to what he considered a cultural wasteland. Leonard treated “style” not as a preference but as a full-blown religion. He wore custom-made Speedos purchased at a boutique in Santa Monica—yes, he actually made return trips to the city just to replace them when the pool’s chlorine dulled the jewel tones of his sacred spandex.

    With his long, curly hair and eerie, borderline-glasslike blue eyes, Leonard looked like a lounge singer who never graduated from the Holiday Inn circuit. He was a man of eccentric habits and hygiene choices that defied both logic and cologne. Despite being well into his thirties, he clung to the bachelor fantasy of meeting “the right girl,” though his criteria seemed more fitting for a dating pool in Cannes than in a desert town where a GED qualified you as a local intellectual.

    Leonard could be found most afternoons sprawled poolside, his skin glistening like a buttered croissant under the sun, blasting Kenny G from his battered boombox as if smooth jazz were some pheromonal weapon. His breath often carried the unmistakable bouquet of last night’s Chardonnay, perfectly matched by his habit of sneaking sips from boxes of white wine stashed like contraband in the fridge.

    Curiosity—and let’s be honest, a lack of better options—led you to visit Leonard’s apartment one day. It was a bachelor pad in the bleakest sense. Despite his high income, his apartment felt like a holding cell with Wi-Fi. The living room featured a single couch, a TV perched on cinder blocks, and—because tragedy loves detail—an ironing board, which he used religiously to press his endless collection of gaudy silk ties. The walls were as blank as his emotional availability, barren beige expanses that caught the flicker of the TV and projected ghostly shadows over the serpentine lines of his slithering tie rack.

    Then there was the bedroom. No dresser. No closet system. Just three open suitcases that served as a rotating archive of silk shirts, vintage cologne, and desperation. It was as if he’d never truly unpacked—a subconscious protest against the idea that he’d actually settled in this armpit of a town. The fridge, naturally, was a tundra of emptiness save for—you guessed it—more boxes of white wine. This was a man who had chased the scent of money straight into the middle of nowhere, only to insist he hadn’t actually arrived.

    Leonard was a ghost haunting his own life. A man who treated his presence in this town like an extended layover, still clinging to the fantasy that he’d be boarding a first-class escape back to the coastal glamour of a life he probably never really had. You couldn’t help but wonder: what kind of man gets seduced by a fat paycheck only to spend his days in self-imposed purgatory, where the only things thriving are his excuses and his growing graveyard of faded Speedos?

    You supposed it was easier for Leonard to pretend he was just “passing through” than to admit that he was, in fact, a permanent exhibit in this forgotten museum of stalled ambition—a relic draped in silk and denial, clinging to the illusion of a life that had long since evaporated.

  • Desert Paradise for the Chronically Disenchanted

    Desert Paradise for the Chronically Disenchanted

    Fresh off the bus from the bustling Bay Area, you found yourself marooned in Hobcallow—a sun-bleached corner of California that could only be generously described as a town. With zero friends and even fewer social obligations, you embraced your solitude like a monk taking a vow of silence. Your one-bedroom apartment became your sanctuary—no roommates, no forced small talk, just you and the sweet luxury of never having to negotiate chores or TV channels.

    Your companions? A stack of CDs featuring Morrissey, The Smiths, and other bands that sounded like group therapy sessions set to a minor key. The soundtrack was perfect as you labored over your novel Hercu-Dome, your dystopian magnum opus in which society punished the overweight with Orwellian fervor for failing to meet state-mandated body standards.

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

    Compared to the misery of your college days in the Bay Area, your Hobcallow digs felt like a five-star resort. Back then, you hadn’t been living so much as squatting in a glorified crawlspace. That room had a gaping hole in the wall, perfectly positioned at bed level, letting in gusts of cold air so vengeful it felt like the Bay’s fog had developed a personal vendetta against you. Sleeping wasn’t rest—it was combat. You huddled under layers like you were gearing up for an Everest summit—jacket, hat, and gloves included, if the wind got particularly sassy.

    Your diet back then was a tragicomedy in three acts: breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Cheerios were the lead performer, while bean-and-cheese burritos played the understudy when you felt adventurous. These “burritos” were little more than refried sludge folded into tortillas with all the flexibility of a sheet of drywall. The cheese? The kind that refused to melt out of pure spite, clinging to the tortilla like it was serving a life sentence. Each bite reminded you that you weren’t starving—but you were nowhere near thriving either.

    Your transportation situation was another chapter in your tale of woe. You drove a ten-year-old Toyota Tercel that was less car and more haunted maraca. Every time you touched the brakes, the thing let out a tortured groan, like it wanted to die with dignity. Navigating the Bay Area hills required a white-knuckled grip and a whispered prayer that the Tercel wouldn’t roll backward into a bus full of nuns and cyclists. Fixing it became a twisted game of financial Russian roulette: either repair the brakes or buy groceries. One of you had to suffer.

    Money? Scarcer than warmth in that arctic excuse for a room. Every broken item—of which there were many—demanded a patch job involving duct tape, superstition, and whatever scraps you could scavenge. Gathering enough quarters for the laundromat felt like winning a regional lottery. “Luxury” meant adding an extra spoonful of salsa to your burrito—living on the edge by upgrading the spice level in a meal otherwise soaked in depression.

    Looking back, it was a miracle you escaped that purgatory with your sanity—or whatever passed for it. That drafty hellhole taught you resilience, sure, but more than anything, it taught you to laugh at the sheer absurdity of trying to survive in a city that demanded gold while you were scraping together lint and hope.

    So there you were, newly settled in this desert hideaway, craving a hint of the luxury you’d never known. On weekends, you tanned your lean, 195-pound frame beside The Springs’ apartment pool—a so-called “luxury” pool that only deserved the title because the sign said so. Real friendships didn’t blossom there—friendships were messy and overrated—but you collected a small cluster of “acquaintances,” a bizarre cast of characters who could only exist in this sun-scorched limbo.

    You weren’t thriving, but at least you weren’t freezing or chewing on cardboard disguised as food. And in a place like Hobcallow, that was as close to paradise as you were ever going to get.

  • Love in the Time of Warm Beer

    Love in the Time of Warm Beer

    In 1984, while you were still in college, your grandfather—a card-carrying Marxist who frequented Russia and Cuba and claimed to have befriended Fidel Castro—decided to pay your way for a Soviet-sponsored “Sputnik Peace Tour.” He wanted you to see the Soviet Union through his rose-colored glasses. Maybe, just maybe, you’d come home singing the Soviet anthem with a crimson flag tattoo stretched across your 52-inch chest.

    You joined a group of about a dozen college students from across the country, a few professors from Arkansas and Tennessee, and a Soviet-appointed tour guide named Natasha. The plan was to travel mostly by train—from Moscow to Kyiv, Odessa, Novgorod, Leningrad, and back to Moscow.

    To prep you for the two-week summer adventure, your grandfather handed you a copy of Mike Davidow’s Cities Without Crisis: The Soviet Union Through the Eyes of an American. According to Davidow, the USSR was a society in bloom—happy children with “rose-colored cheeks” played in utopian cities unblemished by the chaos and violence of capitalist America.

    Out of gratitude, you gave the book a fair chance. But by the halfway point, the propaganda wore you down. It was a slog—repetitive, dull, and deaf to irony. You ditched Davidow for A Clockwork Orange, a dystopian acid bath from Anthony Burgess that, had your grandfather caught you reading it, would’ve gotten you labeled a reactionary.

    You carried that subversive novel on the Aeroflot flight from New York to Moscow. That’s when Jerry Gold—a fellow tourist and law student at Brown—noticed it and leaned in with a warning: “They’ll probably confiscate that at the airport,” he said. “They’ll mark you as a troublemaker and keep tags on you. Look over your shoulder. And if anyone offers you good money for your jeans, it’s probably KGB. Black-market trading will land you in prison.”

    You laughed nervously, but the real threat onboard was not the KGB—it was the in-flight food. Small foil-wrapped cheeses, off-color cold cuts, wilted lettuce, and soggy carrot slices—all served by demure flight attendants in drab uniforms. The Aeroflot menu was a direct contradiction to Davidow’s utopia. A lack of good food was a crisis, and pretending otherwise was its own crisis.

    Jerry, peeling the foil off his sad cheese triangle, folded his industrial-grade napkin and pocketed it. “This might be the only toilet paper you get on this trip,” he advised.

    “That’s disgusting.”

    “You ever used an Eastern European toilet?”

    You hadn’t.

    “A hole in the ground. Deep knee bend. Free Jack LaLanne workout. Things can be primitive.”

    You asked why, with all his doom-saying, he’d signed up.

    “College credit. Exotic street cred. How many Americans get to say they’ve been to the USSR?” He bit his cheese like it was a dare. “What about you?”

    “My grandfather wants to convert me. He’s a communist.”

    “So he sent you to paradise.” Jerry pinched a cold cut and gave it a good stare.

    “The food’s not a winning argument,” you said. “Neither is the lack of toilet paper.”

    Jerry smirked. “In the Soviet Union, if you see a line, you stand in it. It means something’s for sale.”

    A week later, you stood sweating in a Kyiv market watching babushkas queue for wrinkled, fly-covered chickens. You thought, Cities without crisis? Bullshit. Sixty-two miles away sat Chernobyl. Two years later, the reactor would blow. Cities without crisis indeed.

    But in 1984, as you encountered shortages, queues, and squat toilets, one detail stirred something close to admiration: classical music playing everywhere—train stations, parks, museums. Rachmaninoff, Shostakovich, Prokofiev streamed from speakers like sonic incense. Was it cultural enrichment or state-sponsored propaganda—a rebuke to Western vulgarity? You wanted to believe it was the former. Your grandfather would’ve insisted it was.

    No one confiscated your Burgess novel at the airport, but the following day, at the Moscow Zoo, you saw a silverback gorilla pounding his chest while a Rachmaninoff piano piece played. Then she appeared: a stunning woman in an elegant black dress, black hat, and pearls. She smiled and told you, “You look very Russian.”

    She wasn’t wrong. Your mother’s family hailed from Belarus and Poland. Even your fellow tourists said you looked native. She added, “Russian men are strong. You are weightlifter, yes?”

    You were. Before bodybuilding, you’d competed in Olympic weightlifting and idolized Vasily Alekseyev.

    “Russian women love strong men,” she purred.

    You blushed and beamed. Then Natasha grabbed your arm and marched you behind some bushes. She said the woman was probably KGB. A honey trap. Kompromat. Whatever the game was, Natasha wanted it shut down.

    But you couldn’t stop thinking about her. You had been awkward and monkish in college, more comfortable with piano, Nietzsche, and protein powder than dating. Now you felt unshackled, lusty, hungry for connection. Natasha had ruined your chance—or so you believed.

    The next morning, you found a grand piano in the lobby of the Moscow Olympic Hotel. You played a sad piece you’d composed. Your fellow tourists gathered, impressed. Truth was, you were a sloppy pianist who overcompensated with melodrama. But you had flair.

    At a nearby table, Soviet military officers drank warm beer. The Commander—tall, square-jawed, festooned in medals—watched you. Then you saw her again: the woman from the zoo, standing by the piano. Before you could approach her, the Commander locked eyes with her, leered, and sent her fleeing.

    He turned to you and mimicked your piano-playing with theatrical finger waggles. His men laughed. He invited you to his table, poured you warm beer, and barked, “Drink!”

    Three times he commanded. You complied. It was the price of being a charlatan. A dandy. A fraud. Russians trained their children in piano. You were a ham with no chops. He knew. They all knew.

    When you got back to your room and twisted the sink’s cold-water knob, the entire unit came off the wall and slashed your chest. You bled, cursed, and lifted your shirt the rest of the day to show off your injury as proof that Russia itself was trying to kill you.

    The Commander popped up again—on the train to Novgorod. He laughed when he saw you. Jerry speculated he was keeping tabs on you. CIA paranoia, or just Soviet protocol?

    You weren’t sure. But by the time you arrived in Novgorod, you had a fever. Natasha insisted on a doctor. Soon, a stunning, no-nonsense woman in a white coat examined you, declared it a cold, and ordered you to drop your pants for a Soviet “remedy.”

    The shot felt like hot tar. Your fellow tourists watched, delighted.

    At a barn lecture the next day, the Commander showed up again, reinforcing that you were always being watched. Jerry managed to prank him with a piece of hay, brushing his neck like a mosquito. The Commander slapped himself silly. Your group stifled laughter. You limped away, your ass sore, your ego tattered.

    Later, at a toy factory near the forest, you saw buses of children arriving. When you asked Natasha if they were starting a shift, she had them shooed away. One boy even got a boot to the backside. You had glimpsed a truth they didn’t want captured.

    That night, North Korean kids in uniforms got the best dinner service at the hotel. You and your group got leftovers, like stray dogs. You were done with Novgorod. You needed Leningrad.

    The next evening, you were sitting in a Leningrad discotheque, still nursing a sore ass, and talking to a cute Finnish girl named Tula. It turned out you had a lot in common. You were both in your early twenties. You both shared a passion for Russian literature and the music of Rachmaninoff. As you conversed under the glittering gold disco ball, the Bee Gees’ “Too Much Heaven” blared across the club. Through your mutual confessions, it became clear that neither of you had any real romantic experience. Tula was short, diminutive, bespectacled, and elfin, with short sandy blond hair. 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 was no stranger to melancholy,” you said.

    “I am so much like that,” she told you.

    “That explains your love of Rachmaninoff,” you said.

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

    You thought you were a depressive, but in the presence of Tula, you had the perkiness of Richard Simmons leading an aerobics class.

    She asked what you were doing in Russia. You explained that your 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 on nearby ships and submarines. He visited Cuba whenever he could, bringing medical supplies that were in demand. One of his friends, a Hollywood writer, had lived in exile in Nicaragua after being arrested in France by Interpol for driving a Peugeot station wagon filled with illegal weapons. Your grandfather had wanted you to fall in love with the Soviet Union and become a champion of its utopian vision, so he paid for you to go on a peace tour.

    Had you fallen in love with Russia the way your grandfather had hoped? Not really. So far, you had been approached at the Moscow Zoo by a striking woman in black and pearls—whom Natasha, your tour guide, claimed was a KGB agent trying to frame you for soliciting a prostitute. You had been washing your hands at the newly built Olympic Hotel in Moscow when the sink fell out of the wall and gashed your torso. You’d caught a fever in Novgorod, prompting a beautiful, stern-faced doctor to give you a shot in the ass. You’d been approached by young men on the subway asking if you wanted to sell your American jeans—just as Jerry Gold had warned—most likely a KGB setup for black-market entrapment. And everywhere you went—hotels, trains, restaurants—grim chamber music poured from loudspeakers, as if the Soviet authorities were saying, “Try not to be too happy while you’re here.”

    Tula listened to your long-winded tale for a couple of hours, wide-eyed, touching your shoulder. “I need to see you again,” she said.

    You agreed to meet the next day at the Peterhof Royal Palace by the Samson Fountain. The place was enormous—a garden the size of multiple football fields, full of gold statues and fountains shooting jets of water into the air. You and Tula sat on the hot concrete steps in the near-ninety-degree heat, flanked by golden naked statues posed around a spectacle known as the Grand Cascade. She wore a short white dress. Eventually, the heat got to you both, and you decided to get ice cream.

    On your way to the ice cream bar, a gypsy suddenly tried to hand you a baby—like a quarterback executing a handoff. Before the infant could land in your arms, a Russian police officer swooped in, seized the baby, returned it to the gypsy, and shouted at her. You thought for sure she’d be arrested, but the officer merely berated her. She shriveled under the scolding and slinked away with the child.

    You returned to Tula with the ice cream and recounted the bizarre scene.

    She nodded. “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?”

    “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 you, then said, “You and I are like two kindred spirits meeting each other in this strange world.”

    “It’s hotter than hell out here,” you said.

    “So will you marry someday?”

    You shrugged. “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?”

    And oddly, it did sound lovely—living in shared sadness with Tula, marinating in Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony, 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. She gave you a chaste kiss on the cheek.

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

    “Outstanding?” you repeated, unable to hide your skepticism. The word struck you as hollow—like describing a house beside train tracks as “charming.” You echoed the adjective with a trace of sarcasm and said goodbye. You never saw her again, but you never forgot the vanilla ice cream—it remained the best you’d ever tasted.

    Nine months later, you were back in your Bay Area routine of working out, playing piano, and slogging through college assignments. You were living with your mother, standing beside the loquat tree in your front yard, holding a letter with a Finnish return address. Mexican parrots shrieked from a neighbor’s dogwood tree. It was a warm May. You walked under the porch light and opened the envelope.

    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. 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

    You stood there, staring at the letter, listening to the parrots cackling in the distance.

    So that was your role—you were the guy who helped a sweet-souled depressive fall in love. Not with you. You weren’t the recipient of her love. You were the lighter fluid, the spark, the kindling that got her fire started. You’d made a difference.

    You went inside, sat at your ebony Yamaha upright, and played something sad. You tried to imagine Tula as your audience, but her image was pushed out by the Russian Commander. You could see him sneering.

    “You are a charlatan,” he said in your mind. “An American charlatan in Russia. You must always be put in your place. You must drink warm beer until you puke your guts out. Only then can you redeem your vain self.”

    Over the years, the Commander had become a constant voice in your head—a reminder that you were pretentious, fraudulent, self-regarding. And maybe that wasn’t a bad thing. Maybe you needed him. He was the unexpected gift of a trip designed to make you a Communist but instead taught you to keep your inner ham in check.

    Because an American charlatan in Russia was still a charlatan everywhere else.

  • Bahama Dreams

    Bahama Dreams

    You had been the worst college student ever. But to understand the full catastrophe, you had to start at the beginning.

    It was fall 1979. You were seventeen, riding high as an Olympic weightlifting champion and competitive bodybuilder. You had dreams of going big—Mr. Universe, Mr. Olympia—and then opening your own gym in the Bahamas. It all made perfect sense: a beautiful body, a tropical environment, and zero obligation to wear clothes beyond Speedos. Regular clothing gave you claustrophobia. You wanted to slather your shaved body in tanning oil and live free, unburdened by sleeves or pant legs.

    When you shared your paradise plan with your recently-divorced mother, she gave you her signature eye-roll. “Don’t be a nincompoop. You can’t isolate yourself from the world on some tropical island.”

    “Don’t worry,” you’d reply, dead serious. “I’ll be well connected. I’ll invite Frank Zane, Tom Platz, Robbie Robinson, Kalman Szkalak, Danny Padilla, Ron Teufel, Pete Grymkowski, and Rudy Hermosillo. We’ll hang out, drink pineapple protein shakes, and talk about how bodybuilding transformed our lives.”

    “They’re not your friends. They’re models in your stupid magazines,” she’d say. “I’m not an idiot.”

    Contrary to the meathead stereotype, you had earned straight As in high school. But your high school had been so dumbed down that a 4.0 GPA was about as meaningful as a participation ribbon. You had taken classes like “Money Matters,” where you learned to balance a checkbook and write rudimentary budgets. Your education had all the intellectual heft of a marshmallow.

    Another class, “Popular Lit,” required you to read three library books and submit one-page book reports. That was the semester. Your teacher, a ghost in a wool coat, spent her days reading tabloids and clipping her nails while you and your classmates pretended to read. She looked more like a sleep-deprived fortune teller than an educator.

    It was clear no one was preparing you for intellectual greatness. They were prepping you to stay out of prison and flip burgers with dignity. College wasn’t even part of your plan. Bodybuilding glory was. Still, you begrudgingly agreed to attend the local university to avoid being kicked out of the house and forced into the brutal world of full-time work.

    Despite your disdain for higher education, you saw signs of your future greatness. You had the body. You had the connections—like the time you trained with NFL legend John Matuszak, aka “the Tooz,” at The Weight Room in Hayward. Matuszak, nearly seven feet tall, was a force of nature. You two would bench press to England Dan and belt out love songs between reps.

    You also befriended fitness store owner Joe Corsi, a vampiric former bodybuilder in a sleeveless jumpsuit who told you with conviction that you were destined for greatness. You envisioned a Weider-style sponsorship complete with daily deliveries of steaks and supplements.

    College was supposed to be a brief detour. A holding pattern. A cover story.

    You failed miserably.

    You couldn’t stand your professors. You envied them—envied their tailored clothes, their African safaris, their artisanal puttanesca recipes. You resented their polished lectures and their effortless confidence. Your Ethics professor, a philandering dean with a toupee that behaved like a terrified woodland creature, became your personal nemesis.

    The university deemed you too hopeless for regular freshman composition. You were placed in Bonehead English, then demoted further into Pre-Bonehead, a class so embarrassing it was held in the basement next to the boiler room. Maintenance men would peer inside and snicker like you were part of a secret leper colony.

    Worse still, you may have just been stupid. When a neighbor’s Siberian Husky licked your lips, you panicked and called into KGO Talk Radio to ask if you could contract AIDS from a dog. You weren’t even dating anyone, yet you had managed to develop a highly specific form of neurotic celibacy.

    Your mother overheard the broadcast.

    “You need to cool it, buster,” she said.

    You agreed. You couldn’t believe you’d made it this far in life.

    You tried every major—Criminal Justice, Sociology, Psychology, History, Oceanography, Accounting. Each one drove you deeper into despair. You couldn’t stomach the language, the jargon, the self-congratulatory tone of academia. You dropped classes. You failed others. The university put you on academic probation and handed you your soul on a stick.

    You hit bottom.

    You considered alternatives: tech school, piano moving, garbage collection. The gym guy nicknamed “The Garbologist” said he could get you in with the sanitation department.

    You told your father. Over steaks on his patio, you made your case. You needed a job with good hours and gym time. Sanitation had potential.

    “You can’t be a garbage man,” your father said.

    “Why not?”

    “You’re too vain.”

    That stopped you cold. He was right.

    From that moment, you had an epiphany: You hated those classes because they were poorly written. What you craved was great writing. You became an English major. You also realized your fidgety nature required self-directed study. You bought your first grammar handbook and taught yourself the mechanics of language like it was the Rosetta Stone.

    You saw grammar as proof that the universe had structure. That your scattered life might be wrangled into order. Nietzsche once wrote, “We are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.” Now you understood what he meant. Grammar was your God. Grammar was your salvation.

    You improved your grades. You got hired by the university’s Tutoring Center. Then they asked you to teach. The same institution that had nearly kicked you out now trusted you to educate others.

    That’s how you began your journey—from the worst college student ever… to the worst college professor alive.