Cinemorphosis

Tag: fiction

  • The Accountant, the Hotpants, and My First Taste of Rejection

    The Accountant, the Hotpants, and My First Taste of Rejection

    The summer of 1972, I was ten years old, flying solo from LAX to Miami, parked in the coveted window seat. Next to me, in the middle, sat a blonde woman in her mid-twenties, bronzed to an unnatural, almost radioactive orange, legs crossed confidently beneath pink hotpants with purple and white racing stripes that suggested speed, danger, and an implied warning to stay in my lane.

    In the aisle seat: her conversational hostage, a lean, dark-haired man of about the same age—an accountant, he would later reveal, which felt like foreshadowing.

    For five hours, I listened as they engaged in a dialogue so lively, so animated, I assumed I was witnessing the early chapters of a great love story. She was in dental hygiene school. He had a degree and a steady job. She exuded the kind of effortless confidence that made her gum seem like a gift from the gods when she passed us each a stick of Dentyne, explaining that it would help pop our ears. A public service announcement, delivered with charm.

    The accountant was decent-looking, well-spoken, clearly trying his absolute best—and for five relentless hours, he kept her engaged. They laughed, they shared stories, they existed in a pocket of perfect airborne intimacy. To my ten-year-old brain, this was an ironclad courtship ritual. The chemistry was undeniable.

    Then, the landing. The taxi to the gate. The moment of truth.

    He asked her out.

    She declined. Politely. Firmly. Efficiently.

    My ten-year-old self was staggered. How was this possible? Hadn’t they just shared an entire cinematic romance arc? The witty banter? The shared laughter? The synchronized gum chewing? And yet—nothing.

    I tried to crack the mystery. Maybe he was too bland. Maybe she had a boyfriend. Maybe she just needed to kill five hours before she got back to real life. Whatever the reason, I, a mere child, absorbed his rejection as if it were my own.

    To this day, I remain personally wounded that she turned him down. She turned us down. And for what? Some other guy in tighter pants?

    That flight should have been a lesson in the arbitrary brutality of romance, but all I really learned was that rejection hurts, even when it’s not technically yours.

  • Magical Thinking #7: The Laws of Time Don’t Apply to Me

    Magical Thinking #7: The Laws of Time Don’t Apply to Me

    (or, The Fool’s Gamble Against Father Time)

    There’s a special kind of delusion that whispers in our ears: You’re different. You’re special. The rules don’t apply to you. Other people? Sure, they age, they lose opportunities, they watch time slip through their fingers. But you—you will defy time. You will live in a perpetual Now, a beautiful, untouchable bubble where youth, dreams, and endless possibility never fade.

    Phil Stutz has a name for the figure who shatters this illusion: Father Time—that grizzled old man with the hourglass, reminding us that our only real power lies in discipline, structure, and engagement with reality. Ignore him at your peril, because his wrath is merciless. Just ask Dexter Green, the tragic dreamer of Winter Dreams, who spends his life avoiding reality, chasing pleasure, and worshiping an illusion named Judy Jones.

    Dexter believes he can live outside the real world, feeding off the fantasy of Judy rather than engaging with anything substantial. And for a while, this works. But Father Time is patient, and when Dexter finally wakes up, it’s too late.

    Time Will Have Its Revenge

    At thirty-two, long past his days of chasing the unattainable Judy, Dexter sits in a business meeting with a man named Devlin—a conversation that will destroy his last illusions.

    Devlin delivers the blow: Judy is married now. Her name is Judy Simms, and her once dazzling, untouchable existence has collapsed into something horrifyingly mundane. Her husband is a drunk, an abuser, a tyrant. She is trapped in a miserable marriage to a man who beats her, then gets forgiven every time.

    The once invincible, radiant Judy Jones, breaker of hearts, goddess of his dreams, is now an exhausted, aging housewife living under the rule of a man who treats her like dirt.

    And just like that, Dexter’s winter dream crumbles into dust.

    The Ultimate Betrayal: Time Wins, Beauty Fades, Illusions Die

    The final insult comes when Devlin, with casual indifference, describes Judy as not all that special anymore—her once-mesmerizing beauty faded, her magic gone.

    “She was a pretty girl when she first came to Detroit,” he says, as if commenting on an old piece of furniture.

    For Dexter, this is not just a shock—it is the ultimate existential gut-punch.

    For two decades, he has nourished his soul on the fantasy of Judy Jones, believing that she was something otherworldly, untouchable, worth sacrificing real life for. Now, in a single afternoon, he learns she was never a goddess, never unique, never even particularly remarkable.

    Imagine having a high school crush, the Homecoming Queen, frozen in your memory as perfection itself. Then one day, you look her up on Facebook and she looks like Meat Loaf. That’s Dexter’s moment of reckoning.

    His fantasy was never real. His youth is gone. His life has been wasted chasing an illusion. And now, standing in the wreckage, he feels the full force of Father Time’s judgment.

    The “Butt on a Stick” Moment

    In America, we have a phrase for the soul-crushing moment when reality smacks you so hard you can’t even breathe:

    “Your butt has been handed to you on a stick.”

    Dexter’s life has collapsed in on itself, and his first instinct is the same as anyone caught in the throes of devastation: This shouldn’t be happening to me.

    But as Phil Stutz warns, that thought is pure insanity.

    It is happening. It already happened. The more you protest, the more stuck you become. Stutz calls this victim mentality, the psychological quicksand that keeps people from ever moving forward. Dexter has two choices:

    1. Wallow in his misery, trapped in the wreckage of his illusions.
    2. Learn from his suffering and use it as a tool for transformation.

    Breaking Free from the Winter Dream

    And here’s where things get interesting: now that Dexter’s fantasy has been obliterated, he is free.

    Yes, the truth is bitter. Yes, he wasted years chasing a ghost. But he is no longer chained to the illusion. The question now is: What does he do with that freedom?

    Does he just find another “winter dream” to chase, another illusion to waste his life on? Or does he finally grow up and engage with reality?

    What Would Phil Stutz Tell Dexter?

    Stutz, co-author of The Tools, has a philosophy: Pain is a tool, not a punishment.

    Most people, like Dexter, already know their problems. They just don’t know how to stop repeating them.

    • Dexter knows he was obsessed with Judy Jones.
    • Watch collectors know they keep rebuying the same watches they swore they’d never buy again.
    • Food addicts know they shouldn’t be devouring that entire pizza at 11 p.m.

    But knowing isn’t enough. You need tools to fight your worst instincts.

    The Tools: How to Stop Wasting Your Life

    Stutz realized that traditional therapy was useless—all it did was force people to dig deeper into their childhood wounds without ever giving them real solutions.

    So he created The Tools—specific actions that force people to break free from their psychological traps.

    Stutz doesn’t waste time on introspection without action. He knows that change happens when you move, engage, and disrupt your patterns.

    • Stop trying to “think” your way out of your misery. Take action.
    • Stop believing your problems are unique. They aren’t.
    • Stop assuming time will wait for you. It won’t.

    Part X: The Enemy Inside Your Head

    The biggest enemy to change is what Stutz calls Part X—the part of you that wants to stay stuck, wants to keep wallowing in old habits, wants to keep clinging to comforting fantasies instead of engaging with reality.

    And if you don’t fight Part X, you’ll waste your life exactly like Dexter did.

    Final Lesson: Get Out of the Maze

    If Dexter keeps fixating on his past, he will stay lost in the Maze—that endless loop of regret, nostalgia, and what-ifs that locks people in place while the world moves on without them.

    If he accepts reality, uses his pain as a tool, and engages with life, then he has a chance at something real.

    Because here’s the truth:

    Father Time will take everything from you—except the lessons you learn and the actions you take.

    Use them, or lose everything.

  • Magical Thinking #6: The Delusion of Spectacular Victimhood

    Magical Thinking #6: The Delusion of Spectacular Victimhood

    (or, Why Some People Think Suffering Makes Them Superior)

    Some people wear their victimhood like a crown, believing their suffering elevates them above mere mortals. In their minds, they aren’t just unlucky—they are too special for the ordinary rules of life to apply. While the rest of the world trudges along, accepting the brutal facts of existence (life is finite, love is messy, and rejection is part of the deal), they remain frozen in their own tragic grandeur, convinced their suffering makes them exceptional.

    Enter Dexter Green, the self-pitying protagonist of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story, “Winter Dreams,” who refuses to move forward because his longing for Judy Jones is just too profound, too sacred, too cosmic. He isn’t just some guy—he is a tormented artist of heartbreak, a misunderstood genius of unfulfilled desire.

    Of course, in reality, he’s just a narcissist trapped in a time warp of his own making. His delusion? That his suffering is so grand, his craving so exquisite, that he is somehow above the pedestrian business of healing and moving on.

    Dexter isn’t merely sad—he is bitter, self-indulgent, and wholly consumed by his own perceived tragedy. He wallows in his loss, believing it sets him apart from the dull masses who go on to live their lives, find new love, and accept the passage of time.

    And what exactly is the great, defining tragedy that makes Dexter a card-carrying member of the Victim Elite?

    He will always love Judy Jones, yet he can never have her.

    That’s it. That’s the whole catastrophe.

    Not war, not famine, not betrayal—just the fact that the universe won’t bend to his will and deliver him a dream woman who never actually existed.

    His suffering isn’t noble. It isn’t romantic. It’s a self-inflicted prison, built from narcissism and self-pity. And like all magical thinkers, Dexter is convinced he is too special to follow the laws that govern everyone else. He should be able to have what he wants. He should be able to break the rules of time, fate, and human nature.

    But life doesn’t work that way. And no amount of self-mythologizing will change that.

  • Magical Thinking #2: If You Fantasize Hard Enough, Reality Will Magically Obey

    Magical Thinking #2: If You Fantasize Hard Enough, Reality Will Magically Obey

    (or, The Art of Procrastinating in Style)

    One of the great lies we tell ourselves is that thinking about something long enough is basically the same as doing it. This is a core tenet of magical thinking—the belief that if you mentally marinate in a fantasy long enough, the sheer force of your yearning will bend the universe to your will.

    It won’t.

    Take, for example, the 10-year hostage situation between me and a pair of skinny jeans. For a full decade, those pants lurked in my closet, whispering false hope: One day, you’ll fit into us. Just wait. And so I did. I waited. I waited through countless failed diets, through the betrayal of metabolism, through years of magical thinking that the mere presence of those jeans in my home would, somehow, sculpt my body into compliance.

    Eventually, I accepted the truth: those jeans weren’t a beacon of future success—they were a fabric monument to my delusion. I finally threw them away, but not before they had spent ten years mocking me from the hanger.

    This same delusion infects all sorts of people in all sorts of ways.

    • A man keeps a fisherman’s hat tucked away in a drawer, convinced that someday he’ll own a boat, sail through the Caribbean, and live off the sea. Never mind that he gets seasick on ferries and can’t tell port from starboard. The hat is proof of intent, and that’s enough—for now.
    • A woman buys an aspirational vegan cookbook, proudly displaying it on her shelf. She has never gone a single day without cheese, but surely, just owning the book puts her on the path to righteousness.
    • I strap a big, chunky superhero-esque watch to my wrist, as if its sheer presence will one day grant me the power to save myself. It won’t. It just makes my wrist hurt.

    Magical thinking is the art of replacing action with aesthetics. It’s an elegant way to do nothing while convincing yourself you’re making progress. And it works—right up until the moment reality finally calls your bluff.

  • Claustrophobia Reveals Your True Soul to the World

    Claustrophobia Reveals Your True Soul to the World

    There are many ways to expose your raw, unfiltered self to the world. Some people achieve this through a near-death experience, a public meltdown, or a bout of food poisoning on an international flight. For me, claustrophobia is the great revealer, an unrelenting force that strips away every ounce of composure and leaves me flailing like a man trapped in quicksand. It doesn’t matter if I’m in a dentist’s chair or strapped into a sadistic amusement park ride—when the walls start closing in, I become the star of my own public humiliation showcase.

    The first great revelation of my soul came at Universal Studios, where I made the tragic miscalculation of sacrificing my personal comfort for my wife and twin daughters. A father’s love is boundless, but so, unfortunately, was my terror. The very air of the place reeked of Las Vegas grift, stale churros, and desperate cash grabs. Every corner had some overenthusiastic performer in mothball-scented epaulets or a handlebar-mustached imposter butchering a French accent for a paycheck. But nothing could have prepared me for the medieval horror that awaited on the Harry Potter Forbidden Journey ride.

    After standing in line for an eternity, I found myself wedged into an airplane seat designed for a malnourished Victorian child. A heavy metal harness slammed down on my 52-inch chest like a bear trap, and within seconds, my body entered full-blown rebellion mode. My lungs went on strike, my heart pounded out an emergency evacuation order, and my brain whispered, You are about to die in the most embarrassing way possible. As the conveyor belt dragged me toward a dark, swirling vortex of Hogwarts-themed doom, I did what any reasonable person would do—I began screaming like a man being lowered into a pit of snakes.

    “STOP THE RIDE! I’M HAVING A HEART ATTACK!” I wailed, flailing like an air dancer outside a used car lot.

    At first, no one in charge seemed to care, but the fellow prisoners trapped beside me picked up on my panic and began chanting my cause like a medieval mob: “STOP THE RIDE! STOP THE RIDE!” Finally, a burly security officer in an FBI-grade sport coat emerged, walkie-talkie in hand, and surveyed my meltdown with the practiced patience of a man who had seen worse. I looked up at him, sheepish and sweaty, and asked, “Do you need to take me to a debriefing room?” He chuckled, helped me out of my restraints, and sent me shuffling out of Universal Studios, a broken man.

    But the universe was not done exposing my fragility.

    The Dentist’s Chair: A Torture Chamber Disguised as Healthcare

    Around the same time as the Universal Studios fiasco, I had a similarly catastrophic loss of dignity at Dr. Howard Chen’s dental office. The appointment started out fine—numbing shots, ear-splitting drills, the usual dance with mortality. But then the bite block came out. For those blissfully unaware, a bite block is a rubber wedge designed to keep your mouth open during dental procedures, but in my case, it may as well have been a medieval jaw clamp designed by Torquemada himself.

    The second it locked my mouth open, my brain fired off the same claustrophobic distress signal as it had on the Harry Potter ride. I couldn’t swallow, which meant I couldn’t breathe, which meant I was about to die, right there, in a flannel shirt, under a fluorescent light, to the soft rock stylings of The Carpenters.

    Before I could stop myself, I ripped off my shirt, launched myself out of the dental chair, and began gasping like a shipwreck survivor.

    “Are you going to be okay, Jeff?” Dr. Chen asked, his voice dripping with the calm patience of a man who has dealt with neurotics before.

    “I CAN’T HAVE THIS RUBBER THING IN MY MOUTH,” I announced, holding the bite block aloft like a relic from an exorcism.

    Dr. Chen nodded, his eyes a mix of concern and professional detachment. “Okay, we’ll do it without the bite block.” He gestured toward the chair. “Go ahead and sit back down.”

    I obeyed, heart pounding, and the rest of the drilling continued without further catastrophe. But the damage to my dignity was irreversible.

    Sensory Hell: The Dentist’s Office Smells Like Death

    The claustrophobia is bad enough, but what really pushes me over the edge is that I am what some might call a “super smeller.” Lying in the dental chair, I am forced to marinate in an unholy stew of:

    • Clove oil
    • Formaldehyde
    • Acrylic
    • Glutaraldehyde
    • Latex gloves
    • The lingering decay of other patients’ tooth dust

    It is the aroma of death itself. I am not a dental patient—I am a cadaver in the early stages of embalming.

    And while I fight off nausea, my mind spirals into a full existential crisis. Something about lying prone, mouth pried open, surgical tools scraping at my enamel, makes me contemplate my soul more than any other moment in my life. The sheer vulnerability of the position mimics some prelude to the afterlife, and I am left with only my own morbid thoughts for company.

    Morbidity Hits Different with 1970s Soft Rock

    As if my anxiety needed any further provocation, Dr. Chen’s office plays 1970s easy listening on a continuous loop. The Carpenters, Neil Diamond, John Denver—songs that transport me straight back to my early years as a melancholic prepubescent. Suddenly, I am ten years old again, scribbling dramatic diary entries about my unrequited love for Patty Wilson, the rosy-cheeked blonde girl from fourth grade who never knew I existed.

    But before I can fully dissolve into a puddle of nostalgic despair, Dr. Chen interrupts.

    “You’re brushing too hard,” he warns. “You’re murdering your gum line.”

    “But I don’t trust the Sonicare to do the job!” I protest.

    “You need to have faith in the Sonicare, Jeff.”

    “But I am a man of doubt.”

    Dr. Chen sighs, shaking his head. “I can see that.”

    Final Humiliation: The Dentist Knows I’m Crazy

    During my latest visit, he threw a new horror into the mix: the possibility of a root canal.

    “What can I do to avoid it?” I asked, racked with dread.

    “Relax, Jeff,” he said. “All this stress is hurting your immune system. You need a strong immune system to fight decay.”

    Great. Now I have to worry about stress-induced tooth rot.

    As I staggered out of the office, I nearly reversed into an angry SUV driver, who honked with the force of a nuclear siren. But what truly shattered me was the sight of Dr. Chen, peering through his office window, watching the entire debacle unfold.

    And in that moment, as our eyes met, I knew—I was, without a doubt, the most unhinged patient he had ever seen. There would be no coming back from this.

    Claustrophobia, once again, had revealed my true soul to the world.

  • Bill Burr’s Drop Dead Years: Rage, Reflection, and the Long Road to Emotional Literacy

    Bill Burr’s Drop Dead Years: Rage, Reflection, and the Long Road to Emotional Literacy

    At 56 years old, Bill Burr strides onto the stage looking like a man who hasn’t just survived middle age but has trained for it—lean, sharp, and decked out in a blue sweatshirt, jeans, and sneakers, the unofficial uniform of a guy who’s seen some things but hasn’t yet gone full sweatpants. His latest special, Drop Dead Years (streaming on Hulu), finds him at a crossroads: He’s entered the danger zone—the phase of life where men his age can drop dead at any second. And so, standing before a Seattle crowd, a city he awards first prize in rain-soaked despair, he does what any man staring down mortality would do—he takes stock of his life.

    Burr has baggage, and he knows it. Anger issues? Check. Outdated, offensive language? His wife is on him about it. Emotionally repressed male conditioning? Oh, absolutely. For decades, he’s kept his demons on a leash by staying busy, but when the work stops, his personal hellscape begins. He decides to test a theory: After returning from a tour, instead of distracting himself with projects, he sits in a corner, stares at the TV, and marinates in his own misery. His wife, alarmed, asks if he’s okay. For the first time in his life, he admits the truth: I’m sad. A historic moment for a man raised on the doctrine of shut up and push through.

    But does Burr actually offer any solutions for his emotional demolition derby? Not really—at least not in the special. While he drops breadcrumbs in radio interviews about his self-improvement quest, including the occasional reference to psilocybin therapy, the special mostly stays in the realm of self-awareness rather than self-help. And don’t worry—the fangs are still sharp. Burr unloads on racist conservatives and hypocritical, self-congratulatory liberals with equal fervor, and despite the obvious political leanings of his Seattle audience, no one seems too offended. Maybe that’s part of Burr’s charm—he’s an equal-opportunity agitator, and the crowd knows they’re getting a sermon with a punchline, not a TED Talk.

    Here’s the thing: While I love Burr, I found Drop Dead Years a little… safe. The premise—that wisdom comes with age, that unchecked emotions can consume us, and that kindness and patience improve relationships—is undeniably true but hardly groundbreaking. The performance is solid, his honesty is refreshing, and his intelligence undeniable, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that he was more compelling when I heard him on Terry Gross’ Fresh Air a couple of weeks earlier. There, in a rare good-natured sparring match with the NPR icon, Burr revealed more of himself—and in funnier ways—than he did in his actual special.

    That said, Bill Burr is always worth watching. Even when he’s not at his absolute peak, he’s still one of the sharpest, most brutally honest voices in comedy. So, do I recommend Drop Dead Years? Absolutely. But if you want peak Burr, you might want to queue up that Fresh Air interview right after.

  • The Pitt: A Baptism by Fire in Plato’s Cave

    The Pitt: A Baptism by Fire in Plato’s Cave

    The Pitt is less a hospital drama and more a relentless, fluorescent-lit purgatory where bodies materialize and vanish like restless spirits. It is Plato’s Cave with a heart monitor, a place where suffering is both immediate and endless, and where every decision carries the weight of life and death. At the center of this beautiful chaos stands Robby, played with raw, bruising complexity by Noah Wyle. Robby doesn’t just run the ER—he absorbs it. His darting, anxious eyes scan the ward like a battlefield general, cataloging the wounded, the dying, and the barely surviving.

    Robby is an enigma—both maternal and paternal, a protector and a disciplinarian. His underlings fear and revere him in equal measure. His bedside manner shifts unpredictably: one moment a wellspring of compassion, the next a storm of exasperation. He can soothe, scold, or shatter, but his presence is undeniable. At times, he seems on the verge of simultaneously breaking down, lashing out, and achieving enlightenment. He is less of a boss and more of a priest, a confessor of secrets, a reluctant oracle whose wisdom carries the weight of his own flaws. In a world where suffering is currency, his counsel is invaluable precisely because he is not perfect—he is simply the one who endures.

    At the heart of The Pitt is fatigue—not just the bone-deep exhaustion of long shifts and too many bodies, but the existential fatigue of staring into a bottomless abyss of suffering and death. How does Robby keep going? How does he drag himself out of the wreckage of his own depletion and continue to fight for those who can’t fight for themselves? He is not just the hospital’s flawed hero—he is its high priest, a force of nature holding together new doctors, overwhelmed nurses, and the terrified patients who see him as their last hope.

    But The Pitt doesn’t just immerse us in Robby’s world—it traps us inside it. Like the flickering shadows in Plato’s Cave, the hospital’s chaos and claustrophobia force us to confront the very nature of entertainment. Watching the ER through Robby’s weary, battle-worn eyes becomes more than just storytelling—it is a disorienting reminder of how fragile, how fleeting, and how utterly real the world outside the screen truly is.

  • Selling Out, Buying In: The Savage Brilliance of Matt LeBlanc in Episodes

    Selling Out, Buying In: The Savage Brilliance of Matt LeBlanc in Episodes

    Originally unleashed on Showtime in 2011, Episodes ran for five seasons of razor-sharp satire, skewering the soulless machinery of Hollywood with a precision so brutal it felt like watching a vivisection—if vivisections were hilarious. It remains one of my all-time favorite comedies, a savage yet oddly affectionate takedown of the industry’s relentless appetite for mediocrity.

    The setup is fiendishly simple: Sean and Beverly Lincoln, a charmingly acerbic British writing duo, are lured to Los Angeles with promises of creative control and prestige. What they get instead is an artistic hostage situation. Their critically beloved, whip-smart series is promptly shoved through the Hollywood meat grinder, emerging as an insipid, laugh-tracked monstrosity. Worse, they are forced to resurrect the career of Matt LeBlanc, who plays a delightfully monstrous version of himself—a washed-up sitcom relic clinging to his former Friends glory.

    LeBlanc, padding around in a haze of regret, is a masterclass in self-loathing charisma. He’s paunchier, jowlier, and carries the heavy-lidded exhaustion of a man who has realized, too late, that charm has an expiration date. The sad creases around his eyes whisper, How come the world doesn’t love me the way it used to? He’s a man-child accustomed to zero boundaries, collateral damage in his wake—including an estranged wife and an industry that has moved on. His interactions with the Lincolns are electric: he resents their moral standards, mocks their dignity, and yet, slowly, insidiously, starts craving their approval like a lost toddler looking for parental validation.

    The Lincolns, meanwhile, aren’t just losing creative control—they’re losing themselves. Forced to dumb down their art while simultaneously parenting an emotionally stunted former sitcom star, they begin to absorb some of LeBlanc’s gleeful nihilism, just as he, in turn, starts to thaw under their reluctant affection. The show’s central tension becomes a delicious question: Who will corrupt whom first? By the end, they’ve all been irrevocably changed, bound by a bizarre, dysfunctional, and strangely touching camaraderie.

    LeBlanc’s slow, grudging evolution is nothing short of a masterpiece. Stephen Mangan and Tamsin Greig, as Sean and Beverly, deliver a spectacular performance of unrelenting exasperation, their bewildered expressions a constant gauge of Hollywood’s never-ending barrage of crassness. The result is a show so brilliant, so deftly written, that watching it once wasn’t enough—I devoured it twice, only to appreciate it even more the second time around. Beneath its cynical wit and industry grotesquerie, Episodes is ultimately about the absurd yet undeniable bonds that form when people are forced to suffer together. And in that suffering, something close to love—however warped—takes shape.

  • 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.

  • If you want to lose all your friends, write a memoir

    If you want to lose all your friends, write a memoir

    Things didn’t get off to a great start with Meredith Maran’s Why We Write About Ourselves, a collection of essays on memoir writing. She kicks things off with a dire warning: if you want to lose your friends and nuke your marriage, just go ahead and write a memoir. I had been hoping for a beacon to guide me out of my existential writing crisis and into the Promised Land, but instead, I found myself in a flashing red-light district of Proceed at Your Own Peril.

    Maran dives deep into the murky waters of writerly motivation and resurfaces with the least flattering answer possible: we’re all a bunch of nosy, voyeuristic gossip hounds who want the dirt—preferably dished out in the raw, unfiltered voice of the first-person narrator. It reminds me of Truman Capote’s observation that all literature is just well-dressed gossip, and in the world of memoir, it seems the clothes are optional.

    With the motivations for reading memoirs sufficiently dragged into the light, Maran turns to the reasons people write them. She notes that some see the memoir as nothing more than a narcissistic circus—a playing field where “attention-craving, sensationalistic, crass, and craven” egomaniacs head-butt and navel-gaze their way onto the bestseller list. It’s a bleak portrait, and one that left me momentarily concerned that I, too, might just be another sideshow act in this literary funhouse.

    Fortunately, the writers in Maran’s book offer more redeeming perspectives. Not everyone approaches memoir as a vehicle for public self-adoration or a passive-aggressive airing of grievances. Some actually—brace yourself—write for reasons that are noble, even sympathetic.

    Ayelet Waldman, for instance, delivers a reality check: a memoir cannot simply be a glorified diary, a raw and unfiltered regurgitation of emotions. It must be processed—shaped by craft, analysis, and a clear point of view. In other words, if your memoir reads like the fevered pages of a high school journal, you’re doing it wrong. Writing may be therapeutic, but unless it’s been refined into something resembling art, it has no business being read by anyone who isn’t legally obligated to love you.

    As I devoured the memoirists’ writing advice, one truth became undeniable: The elements that make a great memoir are the same ones that make a great novel—world-building, fearless truth-telling, a well-defined character arc, an engaging narrative, a distinct point of view, and above all, a damn good story.

    But memoir comes with a steeper price. In fiction, a character’s deepest secrets are spilled without hesitation—because, after all, they’re not real. A memoir, however, deals in cold, hard reality, which means that privacy is collateral damage. That’s the rub of memoir: The death of discretion. In a world where people already complain about “too much sharing,” a memoirist must trample that boundary without apology. No holds barred, no skeletons left in the closet.

    So why not just slap a fictional label on it and dodge the ethical landmines? Why not camouflage the truth in a novel and spare yourself (and others) the public exposure? Sometimes, that’s the smarter move. But not always.

    There’s a reason we say, “You can’t make this stuff up.” Some real-life events have an organic absurdity, a cosmic cruelty, or an accidental genius that fiction could never replicate. In some cases, stranger than fiction isn’t just a phrase—it’s a mandate. If a story loses its raw power by being fictionalized, then you have no choice but to write it as it happened, bruises and all.

    Then things get even messier. What happens when you dress a memoir in fictional clothing—using an unreliable narrator, injecting autobiographical flourishes, blending novelistic techniques into something that isn’t quite memoir, isn’t quite novel, but floats in that murky realm of autofiction?

    I considered all of this and still chose memoir. Because for me, writing about a young man whose life was warped, reshaped, and essentially hijacked by comic novels—especially A Confederacy of Dunces—wasn’t just an artistic decision. It was the spine of my existence. It wasn’t just about paying the bills, meeting obligations, or navigating life’s banal logistics. It was about inhabiting two parallel universes at once, toggling between reality and the kind of aspiring literary dream world Steely Dan’s melancholy narrator longs for as a musician in “Deacon Blues.”

    Because for some of us, living in two worlds is the only way to manage ourselves.