Cinemorphosis

Tag: fiction

  • From Sunbathing to Suffering: Surviving Roland Beavers

    From Sunbathing to Suffering: Surviving Roland Beavers

    A poolside pestilence was Roland Beavers. He was the type of poolside companion that nightmares are made of. Imagine, if you will, a pudgy man in his early thirties with dishwasher-blond hair clinging lifelessly to a scalp that seemed perpetually annoyed at its presence. His physique was more doughy than daring, his chin seemingly having taken an early retirement. And yet, this fine specimen insisted on strutting around the pool in a pair of lava-red terry cloth trunks so undersized that they clung to his hips for dear life, revealing a set of stretchmarks that looked like they’d been painted on by a vengeful graffiti artist. Roland, of course, had an explanation ready for anyone who dared make eye contact long enough to hear it. Those stretch marks? Oh, they weren’t the result of his love affair with powdered donuts. They were the battle scars from his days as a world-class daredevil, hurling himself off the cliffs of Acapulco. You could practically hear the collective eye-roll from the pool regulars every time he regaled them with his tales of high-flying heroics. But Roland’s true calling wasn’t acrobatics; it was unsolicited public broadcasting. Armed with a crumpled newspaper, he’d park himself by the pool and provide live commentary on every “news bit” that caught his eye, apparently under the delusion that everyone within a 20-foot radius was breathlessly awaiting his next headline. His audience, meanwhile, mumbled curses under their breath, desperately wishing he’d take up a hobby that didn’t involve public speaking. Maybe knitting—somewhere indoors. Roland’s social cluelessness reached its peak when playful couples would toss a football or frisbee in the water. For Roland, this wasn’t a game he could just watch; it was an invitation. He’d leap into the pool with all the grace of a boulder, wading into their game like an uninvited ghost at a family reunion. The couples, now robbed of their carefree fun, would give him the kind of look reserved for people who talk during movies before stomping off in search of a Roland-free zone. 

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

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

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

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

  • Bachelor of Denial: The Speedo Messiah of Bakersfield

    Bachelor of Denial: The Speedo Messiah of Bakersfield

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

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

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

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

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

  • My Early Days as a Peacock

    My Early Days as a Peacock

    I had no clue back then, but my tragic fashion choices as a young professor in the desert in the early ‘90s were the desperate impulses of a kid who’d missed his shot at feeling special and was clawing to reclaim a glory he’d fumbled away when he was a teenage bodybuilder. Flashback eight years: I was working a job loading parcels at UPS in Oakland, on a low-carb diet that shredded me down to the bone. I was this close to contending for the Mr. Teenage San Francisco title. With a perfectly bronzed 180-pound frame, my clothes started hanging off me like a bad costume. That meant one thing: new wardrobe. Enter a fitting room at a Pleasanton mall, where I was trying on pants behind gauzy curtains when I overheard two attractive young women debating who should ask me out. Their voices escalated, full of hunger and competition, as if I was the last slice of pizza at a frat party. I pictured them throwing down on the store carpet, pulling hair and clawing at each other’s throats, all for the privilege of walking out with the human trophy that was me.

    It was the golden moment I’d always dreamed of, my chance to bask in the attention and seize my shot at feeling like a demigod. So, what did I do? I froze like a deer in headlights, slapping on a look of such exaggerated indifference it was like laying out a welcome mat that said “Stay Away.” They took one look at my aloof facade and staggered off, probably mumbling about how stuck-up I seemed. But here’s the truth: I wasn’t a man full of myself—I was a coward hiding behind muscle armor.

    For a short, fleeting period—from my mid-teens to early twenties—I was the kind of guy who could’ve sent Cosmopolitan’s “Bachelor of the Month” candidates sobbing into their pillows. But my personality was still crawling in the shallow end of the pool while my body was busy competing for gold medals. I had sculpted a physique that would make Greek gods nod in approval, but socially? I was like a houseplant that wilts if you talk too loudly. Gorgeous women practically threw themselves at me, and I responded with the warmth and enthusiasm of a mannequin. Behind all that bronzed, chiseled muscle was a scared little boy trapped in a fortress of self-doubt.

    The frustration that consumed me as I stood there, watching those two retail employees squabble over me, was the same frustration that hit me like a truck a week later at the contest. I entered Mr. Teenage San Francisco as a “natural”—which is just a polite way of saying I didn’t juice and therefore shrank down to a point where I looked more like a wiry special-ops recruit than a bodybuilder. At six feet and 180 pounds, I had the lean, aesthetic “Frank Zane Look” just well enough to snag runner-up. But the guy who beat me was a golden-haired meathead pumped full of steroids and Medjool dates, which gave him muscles that looked inflated by a bike pump and a gut that seemed ready to explode from cramping. 

    The day after the contest, I was laid out at home, basking in the almost-victory and recovering from the Herculean effort of flexing through a nightmare lineup. Then the calls started pouring in. Strangers who’d gotten my number from the contest registry wanted me to model for their sketchy fitness magazines. Some sounded more like basement-dwelling creeps than actual photographers. I turned them down with all the enthusiasm of a nightclub bouncer dealing with fake IDs. But then one call stood out—a woman claiming to be an art student from UCSF, asking me to pose for her portfolio. Tempting, sure, but I politely declined. 

    Why? The reasons were as predictable as they were pathetic. First, I was drained from cutting down to 180 pounds and just wanted to curl up in a hole. Second, I was lazy. The thought of expending energy to meet a stranger sounded about as fun as a root canal. But the main reason? I was a professional neurotic, a certified worrywart who avoided human interaction like it was an airborne disease. The idea of meeting this mysterious woman in a San Francisco coffee shop filled me with a dread so profound that I felt like a cat eyeing a room full of rocking chairs.

    By turning down those offers, I was throwing away the golden advice handed down in the Bodybuilder’s Bible, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder. According to the Gospel of Arnold, I should’ve been leveraging my physique into acting gigs, business ventures, and political fame. But here’s the thing—I didn’t have Arnold’s larger-than-life charisma, his zest for adventure, or his shameless drive to turn everything into a money-making opportunity. While Arnold was out charming Hollywood and turning flexing into fortune, I was content to crawl under a rock and avoid all forms of adventure and new connections. If there had been a way to market my body without ever leaving my room, I would’ve been the undisputed king of the fitness world.

    Instead, I took a different path—one paved with introversion and leading straight to a career as a college writing instructor in the California desert. By the time I hit twenty-seven, I was finally catching up socially—just in time to fantasize about all the chances I’d blown. Strutting around the desert in flamboyant outfits like a peacock trying to reclaim lost glory, I was determined to make up for all the opportunities I’d wasted, finally embracing the ridiculousness of who I’d become.

  • How I Outsmarted the Algorithm and Found a Human Being at Lowe’s

    How I Outsmarted the Algorithm and Found a Human Being at Lowe’s

    Today, I embarked on a noble and deeply aggravating quest: buying a refrigerator.
    I knew exactly which model I wanted — the research was done, the decision made — and I almost bought it online. But Lowe’s website, in its infinite wisdom, offered no civilized scheduling options. Buy today, and you’re rewarded with delivery tomorrow, whether you like it or not. I needed four more days — a minor concession to the gods of logistics, apparently beyond the website’s feeble imagination.

    So I drove to the Lowe’s on Skypark in Torrance, muttering curses at the indignities of modern retail. I marched straight to the Refunds desk, where two clerks stood idle, marooned in a sea of boredom. I said, with the slight guilt of a man about to break protocol, “I know I’m supposed to go to Appliances and hunt down a salesperson, but can you help me?”

    And then — like a choir of angels tuning up in aisle five — one of them smiled and said, “Well, since Appliances is busy, I’ll help you.”
    Her words were a warm poultice slapped onto my stress-riddled soul, the perfect antidote to the week’s ordeal: a refrigerator emergency caused by my seven-year-old Kenmore, which froze over, sneered at my hair dryer attack on its blocked freezer drain, and essentially told me to go pound sand.

    Within ten minutes, the deal was done. I floated out of Lowe’s light as a helium balloon, buoyed by the rarest of modern mercies: competent, unsolicited human kindness.
    Yes, by the time my contractor widens the kitchen doorway to accommodate this new metallic beast, and I pay for the fridge, warranty, and the luxury of hauling my dead Kenmore to appliance hell, I’ll be out two thousand dollars.
    But for a fleeting, golden moment, I remembered that the world, battered as it is, can still be shockingly decent.

  • Remembering the 90s when Seinfeld made existential apathy a form of cultural resistance

    Remembering the 90s when Seinfeld made existential apathy a form of cultural resistance

    I’ve always been a lousy sleeper—a lifelong insomniac, night-thinker, ceiling-staring obsessive. So when my brain, usually a humming engine of late-night anxieties, surprises me by downshifting into a silky semi-sleep, I take notice. I don’t just enjoy those moments—I archive them in some velvet-lined folder in my mind, filed between “Miracles” and “Rare Weather Patterns.”

    One such miracle happened in the summer of 1991 in the gloriously tacky suburb of Buena Park, California. I had recently relocated from the Bay Area to Bakersfield, that Central Valley of hot wind and dust, to teach composition at the university. It was a job that paid me in respect and barely enough money to keep me in burritos and gas.

    Weekends were spent visiting Nicole, the girlfriend of my ex-student Mike, a real-deal Navy SEAL with shoulders like boulders and a heart that thumped exclusively for her. We’d drive south, Mike and I, and wind up at Nicole’s parents’ place not far from Knott’s Berry Farm—California’s budget Disneyland, where roller coasters and churros come with a faint scent of desperation.

    Dinner with Nicole’s folks was always home-cooked, polite, and meatloaf-heavy. But the real magic happened later in the den, where the three of us would settle in for prime-time America’s Funniest Home Videos, back when Bob Saget’s voiceovers made even mild concussions look charming.

    Mike and Nicole snuggled on the sofa, whispering sweet nothings or planning some SEAL Team Six domestic mission. I would sink into a bloated yellow bean bag chair like a man slipping into a warm pond of polyester and forgotten dreams.

    As I floated somewhere between reruns and REM, Nicole’s mom would be doing laundry in the adjacent room, and the floral scent of freshly tumbled linens—fabric softener with notes of lilac and vague suburban joy—would drift in and intoxicate me. The TV flickered. The lovers whispered. I, utterly ignored, entered a state of transcendence usually reserved for monks or the chemically enhanced.

    In that half-dream, I’d rocket through constellations, revisit my childhood neighborhood where everyone still had knees that worked, and rendezvous with a mysterious dream woman who always met me at sunset on a Hawaiian beach. I was twenty-nine, single, unburdened, and lazy in a way only the early ‘90s allowed—when Seinfeld made existential apathy a form of cultural resistance.

    Looking back now, from the sagging perch of sixty-three, it’s easy to sigh at the sheer, stupid comfort of it all. I no longer live in that bubble-wrapped world where being a third wheel was a blissful kind of freedom, where responsibility was just a concept in other people’s lives.

    Still, on a quiet afternoon, stretched out on my modern couch, if the narrator of a nature documentary starts detailing the mating habits of sea otters in a sonorous British whisper, something in me softens. The air thickens. I begin to drift. And for a flickering moment, I’m back in that bean bag—yellow, ridiculous, sublime—floating on the fabric-softened breeze of a world that no longer exists.

  • Streamberry, Self-Loathing, and the Algorithmic Abyss: How “Joan Is Awful” Skewers the Curated Life

    Streamberry, Self-Loathing, and the Algorithmic Abyss: How “Joan Is Awful” Skewers the Curated Life

    In Black Mirror’s “Joan Is Awful,” Charlie Brooker offers more than a dystopian farce—he serves up a wickedly accurate satire of the curated lives we present online. It’s not just Joan who’s awful. It’s us. All of us who’ve filtered our flaws, outsourced our personalities to engagement metrics, and whittled ourselves down to algorithm-friendly avatars. The episode doesn’t critique Joan alone—it roasts the whole rotten architecture of social media curation and shows, with brutal clarity, how the pursuit of digital perfection transforms us into insufferable parodies of our former selves.

    First, let’s talk about performance. Joan, like any good social media user, lives her life as if auditioning for a role she already occupies—one shaped not by authenticity but by optics. She performs “relatable misery,” complete with awkward office banter, fake smiles, and passive-aggressive salad orders. Social media rewards this pantomime, demanding we be palatable, aspirational, and vaguely miserable all at once. The result? A version of ourselves designed to please an audience we secretly resent. Joan is what happens when your curated self becomes the dominant narrative—when branding overtakes being. Her AI-generated counterpart doesn’t misrepresent her; it distills her curated contradictions into a grotesque caricature that somehow feels… accurate.

    Second, there’s the fact that Joan—like all of us—is under constant surveillance. In Joan Is Awful, it’s not just the NSA snooping in the background—it’s the entire viewing public, binge-watching her daily descent into algorithm-approved degradation. This is what we’ve signed up for with every “I accept” click: to become content, voluntarily and irrevocably. Our data, behaviors, and digital crumbs are fed into the algorithmic sausage grinder, and what comes out is a grotesque mirror held to our worst instincts. The AI Joan is not a stranger; she’s the monster we’ve been molding through every performative tweet, selfie, and humblebrag. In a world where perception is currency, she’s our highest-valued coin.

    Then comes the psychological shrapnel: identity fragmentation. Joan can no longer tell where she ends and Streamberry’s Joan begins, just as many of us can’t quite remember who we were before the algorithm gave us feedback loops in the form of likes, retweets, and dopamine pings. This curated self isn’t just a mask—it becomes the default setting. The dissonance between public persona and private truth breeds an existential malaise. Joan’s real tragedy isn’t that her life is on TV—it’s that she’s lost the plot. She’s a passenger in her own narrative, outsourced to a system that rewards spectacle over substance.

    Let’s not forget the moral rot. Watching your AI double destroy your reputation while millions tune in might seem horrifying—until you remember we do this willingly. We doomscroll, rubberneck scandals, and serve our digital idols on platters made of hashtags. Joan, sitting slack-jawed in front of her TV, is no different from us—addicted to her own collapse. It’s not the horror of exposure that eats her alive; it’s the realization that her own worst self is exactly what the algorithm wanted. And that’s what it rewarded.

    Ultimately, Joan Is Awful is a break-up letter with social media—if your ex were a manipulative narcissist with access to all your personal data and a flair for psychological torture. Escaping the curated self, as Joan tries to do, is like fleeing an abusive relationship. You know it’s toxic, you know it’s killing you—but part of you still misses the attention. The episode doesn’t end with a triumphant reinvention; it ends with Joan in fast food purgatory, finally unplugged but still wrecked. Because once you’ve sold your soul to the algorithm, the buyback price is steep.

    So yes, Joan is awful. But only because she reflects what happens when we let the curated life take the wheel. In the Streamberry age, we aren’t living—we’re streaming ourselves into oblivion. And the worst part? We’re giving it five stars.

  • Kleptobite

    Kleptobite

    When I was six years old in 1968, I lived for a year with my grandparents in Belmont Shore. One day after school, a distraught neighbor, a 79-year-old widow named Mrs. Davis, said she locked herself out of her house. Could she borrow me to climb through her bedroom window and unlock the front door for her? With my grandmother’s approval, I did just that. I pretended to be a cat burglar, slithered through the ajar window, and walked through her house. With great curiosity, I examined the interior of the living room.  The floor was covered with a plush, floral-patterned rug. The centerpiece of the room was a large, floral-patterned couch. It was flanked by two wingback chairs, upholstered in a velvety red fabric. Each chair had a lace doily draped over the backrest. A coffee table with spindly legs sat in front of the couch, its surface crowded with an assortment of knickknacks: a porcelain figurine of a ballerina, a small crystal bowl filled with wrapped candies, and a couple of framed photos. The walls were adorned with family portraits, framed cross-stitch samplers, and a large, oval mirror with a gold frame. A grandfather clock ticked methodically in the background, its pendulum swinging with a steady rhythm that made me feel lost in time. Something came over me. Being alone, I felt possessed with a transgressive spirit, and I lifted the candy jar’s lid and, even though I disdained hard candy, I stuffed a butterscotch candy in my pocket before opening the front door for Mrs. Davis. I felt guilty for my act of theft because Mrs. Davis proclaimed me to be her newly-minted hero and handed me a crisp one-dollar bill, which I would later spend on Baby Ruth and Almond Joy Bars. I had difficulty sleeping that night. I worried that Mrs. Davis might feel inclined to take inventory of her candies and discover that one was missing, prompting her to demote me from hero to villain. My career as a thief had come to a quick end. On the other hand, I had a glimpse of what it was like to be a superhero entering houses and saving people in distress. I convinced myself that my career as Superman was just beginning. 

    My act of thievery points us to the lexicon term: Kleptobite–the act of stealing a food item not for its flavor or nutritional value, but purely for the electric thrill of transgression. A Kleptobite is less about appetite and more about theater—the petty larceny of a Werther’s Original lifted like a crown jewel, the pilfered peppermint filched under the nose of a trusting septuagenarian, not for the tongue, but for the adrenaline. Often committed in plush-carpeted living rooms with doilies and ticking clocks, this culinary crime wave is fueled by a cocktail of boredom, childhood hubris, and vague superhero delusions. Side effects include guilt-induced insomnia, paranoia about candy audits, and overcompensating acts of heroism.

  • Chewtality

    Chewtality

    Every morning during my teenage years, I’d stagger out of bed and make my daily plea to the heavens: “God, please grant me the confidence and self-assuredness to ask a woman on a date without suffering from a full-blown cerebral explosion.” And every morning, God’s response was as subtle as a sledgehammer to the forehead: “You’re essentially a walking emotional landfill, a neurotic mess doomed to wander the planet bereft of charm, romantic grace, and any semblance of healthy relationships. Get used to it, buddy.” And thus commenced my legendary odyssey in the land of perpetual non-dating.

    This was not the grand design I had envisioned. No, the blueprint was to be a suave bachelor, just like my childhood idol, Uncle Norman from The Courtship of Eddie’s Father. At the ripe age of eight, I watched in awe as Uncle Norman demonstrated his revolutionary kitchen hack: why bother with dishes when you can devour an entire head of lettuce while standing over the sink? He proclaimed, “This way, you avoid cleanup, dishes, and the pesky inconvenience of sitting at a table.” In that glorious moment, I was struck with a revelation so profound it reshaped my entire existence. The Uncle Norman Method, as I would grandiosely dub it, became my life’s guiding principle, my personal beacon of satisfaction, and the defining factor of my existence for decades.

    Channeling my inner Uncle Norman, I envisioned a life of unparalleled convenience. My bed would be perpetually unmade because who needs sheets when you have a trusty sleeping bag? I’d never waste time watering plants—plastic ones were far superior. Cooking? Please. Cereal, toast, bananas, and yogurt would sustain me in perpetuity. My job would be conveniently located within a five-mile radius of my house, and my romantic escapades would be strictly zip code-based. Laundry? My washing machine’s drum would double as my hamper, and I’d simply press Start when it reached capacity. Fashion coordination? Not a concern, as all my clothes would be in sleek, omnipresent black. My linen closet would be repurposed to stash protein bars, because who needs linens anyway?

    I’d execute my grocery shopping like a stealthy ninja, hitting Trader Joe’s at the crack of dawn to dodge crowds, while avoiding those colossal supermarkets that felt like traversing a grid of football fields. 

    Embracing the Uncle Norman Way wasn’t just a new approach to dining; it was a radical overhaul of my entire lifestyle. The world would bow before the sheer efficiency and unadulterated convenience of my new existence, and I would remain eternally satisfied, basking in the glory of my splendidly uncomplicated life.

    Of course, it didn’t take long for my delusion to expand into a literary empire—or at least, that was the plan. The world, I was convinced, desperately needed The Uncle Norman Way, my magnum opus on streamlining life’s most tedious inconveniences. It would be part manifesto, part self-help guide, and part fever dream of a man who had spent far too much time contemplating the finer points of lettuce consumption over a sink. Each chapter would tackle a crucial element of existence, from the philosophy of single-pot cooking (aka, eating directly from the saucepan) to the art of strategic sock re-wearing to extend laundry cycles. I even envisioned a deluxe edition featuring tear-out coupons for discounted plastic plants, a fold-out map of the most efficient grocery store layouts, and, for true devotees, a companion workbook to track their progress toward the ultimate goal: Maximum Laziness with Minimum Effort™.

    Naturally, I imagined its meteoric rise to cultural dominance. Talk show hosts would marvel at my ingenuity, college professors would weave my wisdom into philosophy courses, and minimalists would declare me their messiah. Young bachelors, overwhelmed by the burden of societal expectations, would turn to my book in their darkest hour, finding solace in the knowledge that they, too, could abandon the tyranny of dishware and lean fully into sink-based eating. The revolution would be televised, one head of lettuce at a time.

    Uncle Norman’s “system” introduced me to Chewtality–the ruthless prioritization of caloric input over culinary pleasure, a lifestyle doctrine where taste, ambiance, and social norms are discarded like expired salad dressing. It’s the stoic efficiency of consumption that transforms meals into mechanical refueling sessions, often while hunched over a sink, shirtless, chewing with the urgency of a man on parole from dignity.

    Rooted in the gospel of Uncle Norman, Chewtality celebrates the unsentimental art of eating for sustenance and speed. Why savor when you can shovel? Why sit when you can hover? Why use plates when God invented hands and the stainless steel basin? This isn’t just a meal strategy—it’s a worldview: one where the blender pitcher is a chalice, the saucepan is a throne, and the lettuce head is both entree and ideology.

    In its highest form, Chewtality produces a false sense of superiority—an unshakable belief that your Spartan choices signify enlightenment, when in reality, you’ve just spent dinner crouched over the sink eating raw spinach like a raccoon with a library card.

  • Appetyranny

    Appetyranny

    One of the most memorable TV ad campaigns of my youth in the late 1960s was “How Do You Handle a Hungry Man?” The stakes were sky-high. Imagine the scene: a harried housewife in her perfectly pressed apron, hair teased to high heaven, facing off against her husband, the archetypal Hungry Man. He enters the kitchen with the imposing gait of a lumberjack who’s felled a forest, his appetite as vast as the Grand Canyon. He casts a skeptical eye over the bubbling pot on the stove, nostrils flaring like a bloodhound on the scent. The tension is palpable. But fear not! With a dramatic flourish, she opens a can of Campbell’s Manhandlers soup, the magical elixir that transforms her kitchen into a culinary Colosseum. She pours the contents into a pot, and it’s as if she’s summoned the culinary gods themselves. The soup is no ordinary broth; it’s a veritable cornucopia of steak chunks, peas, and potatoes, swimming in a rich, hearty base that promises to tame even the most insatiable of appetites. As the aroma wafts through the kitchen, her husband’s eyes widen in delight. He grabs a spoon and dives in, and the transformation is instantaneous. His previously skeptical demeanor melts away, replaced by pure bliss. He slurps the soup with the gusto of a Viking at a medieval banquet, and she watches, triumphant. The jingle plays in the background, a triumphant anthem to her victory over hunger.

    The food industry at the time was relying on Appetyranny–the 1970s advertising-driven psychosis in which a woman’s entire self-worth was measured by her ability to quell the beastly hunger of her man. Fueled by jingles and canned soup, Appetyranny framed female failure not in terms of character or intellect, but in spoonfuls: if he’s still hungry, you’re unlovable.

    It was the golden age of culinary gaslighting, where a man’s growling stomach was treated like a ticking bomb, and your job—housewife, mother, woman—was to neutralize it with sodium-laced beef sludge. Fail, and you risked suburban scandal. Succeed, and you were serenaded by baritone jingles that implied your marriage had been saved by soup.

    Side effects of Appetyranny include:

    • The belief that men turn feral without starch by 6 p.m.
    • Buying food with names like Manwich, Sloppy Joe, or Hearty Beef ‘n’ Barley
    • Mistaking Campbell’s labels for emotional validation
    • A lifelong association between love and ladles

    Appetyranny wasn’t just marketing. It was a meat-chunk manifesto from the patriarchal pantry, where the kitchen timer doubled as a ticking bomb of feminine adequacy.

  • The Curse of the Shamewich

    The Curse of the Shamewich

    I remember the day well. I was six years old as I trudged to Katherine R. Smith Elementary in San Jose, California, with three boys who would’ve made excellent talent scouts for the smell police. Usually, a Hostess Fruit Pie or pink Sno Ball made lunch a bright spot in my otherwise bleak existence, but not today. Today, the stench of rotten tuna wafting from my Captain Kangaroo lunch box was so potent it could’ve been classified as a biological weapon. My companions, gagging and accusing me of harboring a dead sea creature, demanded an explanation.

    Finally, I surrendered. We stopped in a field separating the Stop & Go Market from the school, and I opened the lunch box. There it was: the festering tuna sandwich, now a slimy, mayonnaise-coated abomination that had broken free from its plastic baggie and redecorated the inside of my lunchbox like a Jackson Pollock painting from a nightmare. We stared in horror at the black tuna juices, streaks of inky malevolence, and chunks of something unholy smeared all over the tin pail’s lining.

    “How could you eat that?” one boy asked, his voice a mix of pity and revulsion. I shrugged, resigned to my fate. It was my lunch, after all. So, I closed the lunch box, sealing the miasma inside, and we continued our grim march to school. I placed my lunch box alongside everyone else’s in the designated coat closet, a ticking olfactory time bomb among the innocent.

    Then came the Duck-and-Cover Drill. We crawled under our desks, awaiting the end-of-the-world announcement from the principal. But instead of nuclear annihilation, Mrs. Corey and the entire class were assaulted by a stench so vile it made everyone question their will to live. “Who brought a dead creature into my classroom?” she demanded, her forehead crinkling, nostrils flaring. Students squeezed their noses and made mock gagging noises, adding to the apocalyptic ambiance.

    The boys I’d walked to school with pointed at my lunch box, the source of the olfactory Armageddon. Mrs. Corey approached it like a bomb disposal expert, slowly opening the lid to reveal the horror within. She gazed at the contents as if she had just uncovered a portal to the underworld. “Did your mom pack this?” she asked, her voice tinged with disbelief and horror.

    I nodded. Mrs. Corey winced, a look of cosmic condemnation crossing her face, as if my entire bloodline was responsible for this culinary atrocity. She closed the lunch box with a finality that suggested she was sealing away a great evil, handed it to the teacher’s aide to place outside, and announced that my food was unfit for consumption. She then solicited volunteers to donate a part of their lunch to me, the pariah of the playground.

    Too mortified to eat, I sat on my blanket, avoiding the curious and horrified stares of my classmates. My appetite was dead, much like the tuna that had ruined my day. I remained on my blanket, and imagined I looked like David Draper in that Monkees episode. Rather than be a pathetic figure in need of charity, I would be a vision of glory and strength, the focal point of everyone’s admiration. My fantasy of walking like a Skyscraper among the Shacks of Mediocrity at the beach was interrupted by my stomach growling in protest at the cruel hand fate had dealt me.

    Little did I know, I had been cursed by the Shamewich–the deep, haunting sense of culinary disgrace one feels when a packed lunch goes rancid, rogue, or just plain weird—and becomes the epicenter of public ridicule. A Shamewich isn’t always a sandwich, but it’s always a moment—a sensory trauma in which your identity is temporarily replaced by the aroma of failure.

    It’s the rank stench of black tuna juice wafting from your Captain Kangaroo lunchbox. It’s the entire class gagging under their desks while your lunch gets escorted out like a radioactive crime scene. A Shamewich is not just what you eat—it’s who you become in the eyes of your peers: the one whose mother packed a biohazard in bread.

    Symptoms include:

    • Desire to sink into the floor or self-immolate
    • Permanent suspicion of mayonnaise
    • Fantasies of reinvention as a muscle-bound hero from The Monkees
    • Never bringing tuna to school again unless you’re ready to own the nickname “Fish Bomb”

    A Shamewich leaves an emotional stain long after the mayonnaise has been wiped clean. It’s not just a bad lunch—it’s a rite of passage.