Tag: fiction

The Wedding Oracle and His Shrink-Wrapped Gospel

In early 2025, I dreamed I was a professional wedding guest—not a guest of honor, not even a plus-one. More like emotional drywall. A freelancer of festivity, dispatched to limp nuptials across the land to ensure they didn’t collapse into the dead-eyed purgatory of a DMV lobby.

I had one suit, perpetually wrinkled, in a shade best described as regretful charcoal. It screamed, “I belong here, but please, God, don’t hand me a microphone.” My sole obligation? To present the bride and groom with a Styrofoam tray of raw hamburger. Apparently, in the twisted logic of dream-world symbology, true love is best commemorated with shrink-wrapped ground chuck. Forget champagne. Forget cake. The holy grail of marital bliss is beef that bleeds on the gift table.

Between gigs, I squatted in a beachside apartment that hovered between quaint and post-apocalyptic. Pajamas were my uniform of leisure. My diet consisted solely of dry cereal eaten by the fistful while I absorbed wisdom from The Three Stooges. Every episode felt like a philosophical fable: three idiots trying to fix a pipe, failing catastrophically, then assaulting each other with blunt tools until the problem either resolved itself or became someone else’s.

Meanwhile, the world decided I was some kind of wedding oracle. Strangers wandered into my apartment at all hours, begging for advice on florals, favors, and whether it was socially acceptable to DJ your own reception. I ignored them. Moe was about to electrocute himself with a toaster, and I had priorities.

Then came the call—from my boss, the high priest of ceremonial meat. His voice was steeped in the weariness of someone who’s officiated more parking-lot elopements than he cares to admit.

“Keep up appearances,” he said, grim as a man reciting his own Yelp reviews. “Smile. Hand out tips. Make people believe in romance.”

I glanced at the hamburger on my counter, still sweating onto the Formica like it was contemplating its own existential horror. “Gotta go,” I muttered, suiting up, grabbing the beef, and heading out the door like a dead-eyed courier for the Cult of Matrimonial Carnivores.

This was my fate: a never-ending circuit of awkward receptions, clinging to the delusion that my presence—and my lukewarm ground beef—might ignite the dying embers of love.

Once the bouquet was tossed to an empty dance floor and the mother of the bride cried in the restroom, I’d retreat back to Moe, Larry, and Curly. My companions. My priests. My lifestyle coaches.

Until one night, it hit me. As I watched Curly get his head lodged in a vise grip for the 117th time, I said aloud, “This can’t be my life.” And right then—bam—the TV flickered.

Walter Cronkite appeared.

He looked directly at me with that father-of-the-nation disappointment usually reserved for presidents and felons. “And that’s the way it is,” he intoned, like a man handing down a divine verdict.

“No,” I whispered. “There’s got to be more than hamburger diplomacy and Stooge theology.”

Cronkite sighed. “I’m sorry. That’s just the way it is.”

And I woke up. Alone. Two a.m. Christmas Eve. The living room reeking of uneaten cookies and fading ambition. My only comfort? The faint echo of Cronkite’s voice as it dissolved into the darkness like the aftertaste of a bad decision.

May 7, 2025
Poseidon Can Wait: My Night at the Bodybuilder Carnival

About six months ago around my sixty-third birthday, I dreamed I was at a strange outdoor carnival—equal parts vintage bodybuilding expo and mythological sideshow. Imagine Venice Beach circa 1977 collided with a protein-scented Renaissance fair. Every booth was oiled, bronzed, and flexing. The air reeked of grilled meat and competitive ego.

I found myself seated at a worn wooden picnic table across from none other than Frank Zane. Yes, the Frank Zane. He appeared cryogenically preserved—shimmering with coconut oil and the kind of disciplined grace that once made garage-dwelling teenagers across America pick up dumbbells in religious awe.

Mid-bite into a hot dog (which I suspect he chewed with the calculated intensity of a surgeon), Zane leaned in and said, “I’m selling everything. Moving into a luxurious underwater mansion.” He said this with the calm gravity of a monk planning his final pilgrimage.

No one questioned him. The idea of Frank Zane embracing Poseidon’s lifestyle apparently struck everyone but me as reasonable.

I didn’t challenge him—this was a man who once ruled the pantheon of iron. But something felt off. Watching him trade barbells for barnacles stirred something protective in me. So I nodded and declared, with biblical authority, that he was one of the top three bodybuilders of all time.

The crowd reacted like I had spoken in tongues. Gasps. Reverent murmurs. Zane glowed under the praise like a bronzed deity sunbathing in worship.

Then, I leaned in.

“Frank,” I said. “Maybe rethink the whole Poseidon thing.”

“Why?”

“Well,” I said, summoning the full absurdity of the dreamscape, “I’ve recently discovered—at 63—that I can throw a 100-mile-an-hour fastball.”

Without delay, a 70-year-old French professor appeared, squatting behind a makeshift mound in catcher’s stance. I wound up and released pitch after blistering pitch, Zeus-style, slicing the air like divine vengeance.

Zane’s eyes sparkled. His jaw dropped.

“I can’t miss this,” he said. “Forget Atlantis. I’ll stay. I need to see you pitch.”

Applause erupted. I had saved Frank Zane from a life of underwater exile. I had become the miracle.

If the great psychologist Carl Jung were analyzing my dream, he might say this:

“Frank Zane is not merely an icon of bodybuilding in this dream. He is the archetype of disciplined masculinity—the part of your psyche shaped by idol worship and heroic longing. His desire to retreat underwater speaks to the lure of fantasy, nostalgia, and detachment. But your fastball—that impossible, mythic feat at 63—is the dream’s axis of transformation. You are no longer the boy in awe of muscle-bound gods. You are the figure of agency, of miraculous reinvention. And the professor? He is the intellect, finally catching what the body has thrown.”

“This dream isn’t a joke. It’s your soul’s comic book. Read it again. And then throw another pitch.”

May 7, 2025
The Monastery of Minimalism and the Data Plan from Hell

My daughters had waged a two-year campaign for smartphones with the moral fervor of suffragettes, only with less patience and more TikTok references. To hear them tell it, arriving at school without one was social suicide—like showing up to prom in chainmail while everyone else paraded in Teslas. Their tragic narrative crescendoed with the kind of melodrama usually reserved for war memoirs. I half-expected them to stand outside Target holding cardboard signs that read, “Will Work for Wi-Fi.”

Eventually, I cracked. Call it love. Call it weakness. Call it what it was: a momentary lapse in parental sanity. I marched them into a gadget boutique in Torrance, the kind of place that takes itself so seriously it might as well charge admission.

This wasn’t a store. This was a temple—a monastery of white walls and Scandinavian despair, where clutter was a sin and every shelf whispered, “You could be better than this.” I felt like I was entering the afterlife Steve Jobs had always dreamed of: sterile, minimalist, and ready to drain your bank account with the gentle efficiency of a Scandinavian hitman.

I approached the altar—sorry, counter—armed with a $700-per-phone budget and the conviction of a man about to lose an argument he thought he’d already won. Behind it stood Rick, the store’s resident tech evangelist, draped in branded black, exuding the smug aura of someone who meditates with their Apple Watch.

“Seven hundred dollars per phone,” I declared, like a man presenting tribute to a minor god.

Rick didn’t laugh—he dismissed me with a flick of the wrist, like I’d just offered to pay in bottle caps. “Forget that,” he said, with the oily charm of a used Tesla dealer. “We’ve got a promo—latest iPhone. Free.”

Ah, yes. “Free.” That four-letter word that always means the opposite. Like “organic” or “democracy.”

By the time Rick was done appending essentials—cases, insurance, screen protectors, and a couple of AirTags so my daughters could be properly surveilled—I was looking at a grand total of $480 per phone. A bargain, apparently, in the same way a $19 cocktail is a bargain if it comes with a rosemary twig and existential despair.

“And the data plan?” I asked, naively hoping for mercy.

“Only forty bucks more a month,” Rick lied with the conviction of a man who lies for sport. The screen behind him flashed our real bill—$300 a month—like the scoreboard at a casino for idiots.

Just as I was ready to abort the mission, the store’s front door blew open like a saloon in a spaghetti western. In walked Rocky, the head manager, a windswept titan who looked like he’d wrestled a leaf blower to style his hair. Rick went pale, as if he’d just seen the Grim Reaper—and the Reaper was asking for receipts.

Rocky summoned Rick to the back with a silent finger wag, like Tony Soprano calling for a private word. The two vanished into the shadows while we stood around, wondering if we were in a deleted scene from Breaking Bad: Genius Bar Edition.

They returned ten minutes later—Rocky smiling like a man who’d just fixed a parking ticket with a crowbar, and Rick looking like he’d aged five years and lost a bet with God.

“You can have the phones,” Rick whispered, his soul visibly limping.

“How much?”

“Nothing.”

“What?”

“It’s… a special promotion,” Rick said, like he was trying to sell me a timeshare in the afterlife.

“And the data?”

“Free for a year. Then it’s $200 a month.”

“Sold!” I said, because I am a man of impulse and poor foresight.

Rick shook my hand with all the warmth of a damp paper towel. His eyes were vacant, as if he had just witnessed the death of capitalism—or his commission.

We turned to thank Rocky, the patron saint of unexpected discounts, but he was gone. No trace. No goodbye. Just the lingering scent of burnt ozone and a whisper in the wind that sounded suspiciously like “Gotcha.”

As we walked out into the sun, shiny new phones in hand, I couldn’t help but feel we hadn’t purchased anything. No—we’d participated in a ritual sacrifice. And somewhere in the back office, Rocky was lighting a candle and laughing.

May 7, 2025
Cheerios, Sea Monsters, and the Jungian Breakfast of Champions

Last night I dreamed I was swimming across what had to be the world’s largest swimming pool—except, instead of water, it was filled with milk and multicolored Cheerios bobbing around like tiny life preservers for the cereal-obsessed. And, of course, because my subconscious loves a good thrill, various sea creatures—none of which belong anywhere near a bowl of breakfast—kept surfacing to snap their jaws at me. I fought them off with my muscular forearms like some kind of gladiator in a lactose-laden arena. Honestly, it was like being trapped in a fever dream where Captain Crunch had declared war on Aquaman.

As I swam across this absurd pool—which seemed to stretch the entire length of the Atlantic Ocean—I looked up and saw the hospital where my twins were born. The place loomed over me like some ominous beacon, and as I crawled my way to the shore of this milky abyss, a nurse with a face like she’d just seen a ghost greeted me in the lobby. “Your daughters,” she said, voice trembling with dread, “they’ve got insomnia. They’re in desperate need of sleep.”

Without missing a beat, I sprinted up several flights of stairs like a man possessed. When I finally reached the nurses’ station, I found my teenage daughters lying on what looked like a giant operating table, their faces twisted in grumpy desperation, practically begging me to do something, anything, to help them sleep. And that’s when the superhuman strength kicked in—because, of course, I suddenly had the strength of ten men, which is exactly what every sleep-deprived dad needs in a crisis like this.

With a heroic grunt, I lifted the entire table—daughters and all—over my head with one arm. Yes, you heard that right, one arm, like I was the world’s most overqualified waiter balancing the world’s most precious (and cranky) cargo. I started rocking the table back and forth, shifting the weight from my thumb to my forefingers and back again, like some kind of human metronome. My daughters, who moments before looked like they were auditioning for a remake of The Exorcist, gradually succumbed to the soothing motion and fell fast asleep, their grumpy expressions finally relaxing into peaceful slumber.

A team of nurses watched the whole spectacle with admiration, their eyes practically glowing with awe. I could hear them murmuring to each other, “He’s the father, the strongest man I’ve ever seen, the protector of the family!” I stood there, basking in the glory of my newfound superhero status, wondering how I’d ever top this one when I woke up—because let’s be real, after this, changing a lightbulb just wasn’t going to cut it.

If Carl Gustav Jung could’ve pulled up a leather chair beside my cereal sea of subconscious absurdity, I imagine he’d have looked at me, chin thoughtfully perched on hand, and said something like:

“So. You swam through milk, eh?”

I’d nod sheepishly.

“Cheerios bobbing like archetypes—tiny, edible mandalas. You’re not just swimming, my friend. You’re navigating the numinous chaos of fatherhood, drenched in the nourishment of your own psychic regression. That milk? Pure maternal archetype. You’ve returned to the source, not to wallow, but to confront the primordial forces that made you.”

“Okay,” I’d say. “But what about the sea creatures trying to eat me?”

“Ah,” Jung would say, eyes twinkling. “The Shadow. Those snapping beasts are the parts of you you’ve tried to bury—rage, fatigue, perhaps even your occasional longing for a quiet, childless breakfast. They surface not to destroy you, but to be integrated. You fought them off like a gladiator. That is… admirable, if a bit performative.”

I’d squint at him. “And the hospital?”

“Ah yes, the birthplace of your twins. But more importantly, the anima’s cathedral. When that nurse appeared to tell you your daughters couldn’t sleep, she wasn’t just talking about them. She was voicing your own inner unrest. Your psyche—tired, stretched, anxious. And yet, what do you do? You charge up the stairs like a mythic hero.”

“You mean when I lifted the gurney over my head with one arm?”

“Precisely. That’s not strength—it’s symbolic function. You became the archetypal Father—the Protector, the soothing hand of structure in a chaotic world. You rocked them to sleep not with muscle, but with the rhythmic power of reliability. That motion—the back and forth—is the dance of integration. Thumb to finger, self to role, ego to responsibility.”

I’d pause. “And the part where the nurses called me the strongest man they’d ever seen?”

Jung would smile, not unkindly. “That is your ego talking. Let it have its moment. You’ve earned it. But beware: the Hero archetype casts a long shadow. Today you’re Hercules. Tomorrow, you’re just a guy trying to fix a dishwasher while muttering about socket wrenches.”

I’d sit in silence for a moment. “So what do I do with all this?”

He’d lean forward, eyes fierce with ancient knowing. “You write it down. You tell the story. You turn the absurd into meaning. Because every milk-drenched monster, every insomniac child, every fever dream is not just chaos—it’s your soul, begging to be decoded.”

And with that, he’d vanish—leaving me soggy, humbled, but strangely seen.

May 7, 2025
The Guardian of the Butt Crack

I grew up believing my father was a superhero in a gray IBM suit—equal parts Clark Kent and Anthony Nelson from I Dream of Jeannie. He carried a leather briefcase that smelled like pipe tobacco and was filled with mysterious implements of tech sorcery: slide rules, mechanical pencils, drafting rulers, protractors. To my wide-eyed, baklava-smeared face, he wasn’t just an engineer—he was The Engineer, an astronaut of logic and slide-calculation who probably held dominion over the machines of the future.

There’s a particular memory that still shimmers with childhood awe: we were at an IBM science exhibit, and there was a robot—yes, a real robot—shaking hands with people like it was running for mayor of Tomorrowland. My father and the robot exchanged pleasantries, and even at seven years old, I could tell who was in charge. The robot was the help. My dad was management.

On the ride home from a Greek deli, sitting shotgun in my father’s red MGB convertible (a car that felt like a rocket ship with leather seats), I asked him how far the Earth was from the sun. “Ninety million miles,” he replied without hesitation, as if he’d just returned from measuring it himself. “How’d you know that?” I asked. “I’m your father. Fathers know everything.” And I believed him. I believed him.

So deeply did I believe, in fact, that I told every kid at our apartment playground that my dad could attach rocket boosters to the jungle gym and take us to Mars. We camped out in the carport like cult followers awaiting a prophet. And when that red MGB finally purred into its space—the exhaust trailing behind it like a comet—we erupted into cheers. Mars was within reach.

But when I presented our request, my father, ever the civic-minded Boy Scout, informed us that launching a rocket ship from the Royal Lanai Apartments without FAA clearance would be a federal offense. “I could go to prison,” he said gravely. Naturally, we accepted this logic. What was Mars compared to civic responsibility?

Then came the cracks.

First, the red MGB started overheating. Constantly. It preferred fog to sunshine and finally coughed its last in a Jiffy Lube parking lot. He traded it in for a turquoise Chrysler Newport—the vehicular equivalent of orthopedic shoes. I watched that red convertible vanish into memory like a fallen deity. The myth of my father’s invincibility began to wobble.

Next came the toast. One morning, I watched him mangle a slice of Wonder Bread with a cold slab of butter and curse under his breath, “There are three things I hate in this life: death, taxes, and hard butter.” The man who could explain orbital mechanics couldn’t conquer spreadability. It was a blow.

Then he tried to cook. Once. His chicken cacciatore effort triggered the smoke alarm, three fire trucks, and the sincere question of whether we were insured for “chef-related catastrophe.”

But the real unraveling happened when we moved to Venado Court, a suburban cul-de-sac so idyllic it could have been sketched by Norman Rockwell and pressure-washed by a Stepford wife. While other dads were grilling in polo shirts and dockers, mine was shirtless in the front yard, yanking weeds from the juniper bushes in low-slung Army jeans with his butt crack on full display. He had an Army tattoo on one arm and the defiant posture of a man who didn’t care if you judged his lower lumbar. And I, poor fool, tried to save him.

“Dad, your butt crack is showing,” I whispered with the urgency of someone reporting a biohazard spill. He just grunted. Again. And again.

Eventually, I gave up on words and assumed a new role in our family drama: The Guardian of the Butt Crack. I stood behind him like a human modesty panel, my small frame casting a loyal shadow over his defiant anatomy. I lived in fear of pedestrians. If a neighbor approached, I shifted like a Secret Service agent guarding state secrets. I was prepared to dive in front of scandal.

But deep down, I knew the truth: my father didn’t care. He was a country boy from Michigan who grew up wrestling snakes in Florida swamps. He’d survived Army barracks and IBM corporate life. No HOA newsletter was going to break him. And eventually, I had to let go. The crack would remain, and the world would keep spinning.

He was still my dad. Maybe not a superhero—but certainly a super character.

May 6, 2025
Moses Meets the App Store in My Descent to Hell

Five years ago, I had a dream that still clings to me like the stench of sulfur on an unwashed sinner. In it, I found myself suspended over a chasm so vast and foreboding it made Dante’s Inferno look like a weekend at Lake Tahoe. This wasn’t just your garden-variety pit of despair. No, this one was styled by some deranged horror set designer who clearly had unresolved issues with gravity and geometry. The rocks jutted out like they’d been forged in spite, sharp enough to slice light itself. Below me? Nothing but an infinite abyss—pitch black, indifferent, and curling with smoke as if Hell had sprung a leak.

My right hand clutched a pulley system that seemed to have been engineered by Torquemada during a particularly creative phase. It squealed and groaned like it hated me personally. Each tug upward felt like hauling an anchor through molasses with a rotator cuff made of stale bread. My muscles howled, my fingers cramped into arthritic claws, and I could practically hear my body whispering, “Let’s just give up and fall dramatically.”

Above me, a shaft of light flickered—not a beacon of salvation, but more like someone had dropped a flashlight into a well and forgot about it. It promised hope the way a gas station burrito promises nutrition: with cruel intent.

Now here’s where the dream leaned hard into surrealism. In my left hand, I held a tablet—equal parts Moses and Steve Jobs. One moment it gleamed with digital sleekness, the next it was stone, chiseled with ancient script and glowing like radioactive guilt. It was a device caught in an existential crisis, flipping between iPad and Ten Commandments with the kind of indecision reserved for suburban dads browsing Netflix.

On one side of this metaphysical gadget was a tableau of indulgence—a pulsating carousel of temptation: flesh, flames, laughter, madness. The orgy of excess, curated in high definition. On the other side? A searing Divine Light—pure, unblinking, and full of that holy judgmental glow that makes you instinctively cover your bits.

As I strained upward—toward gray light, away from that unholy carnival—I had the sinking realization that I might not make it. My body was mutinying. My mind, riddled with indecision. And I knew, deep in my marrow, that if I let go, I’d drop—not just into the pit, but into a punchline told by angels over drinks: “Remember that guy who thought he could have both salvation and the sex party?”

I hung there, torn between moral clarity and high-def carnality, between stone tablet and glowing screen, between self-destruction and self-delusion. And all I could do was pray that I’d wake up before gravity made the decision for me.

May 6, 2025
Flex, Regret, Repeat: My Midlife Crisis, Sponsored by Conor McGregor

My life as an aspiring narcissist hit a new low when my wife and I got home, plopped down on the couch, and decided to indulge in the cinematic masterpiece Road House. This film, if you can call it that, stars a Jake Gyllenhaal so chiseled that he looks like Michelangelo got bored and decided to make an action hero. In this gripping tale, Gyllenhaal plays a tough-as-nails fighter scraping a living in a Key West bar, doing what any self-respecting muscle mountain would do—protecting the bar and its lovely owner, played by Jessica Williams, from corrupt mob bosses. Naturally, this leads to the inevitable showdown with their number-one heavy, played by none other than a bulked-up, foaming-at-the-mouth Conor McGregor, who looks like he’s been subsisting on a diet of raw meat and anabolic steroids.

The plot is thinner than a strand of dental floss—a Western rehash where an outsider rides into town to clean up the mess. But let’s be real: the story is just window dressing for the film’s true agenda, which is to showcase sweaty, glistening muscles and fight montages that could double as a fitness competition highlight reel. The camera lingers on every bulging bicep and rock-hard ab like a love-struck teenager, turning what should be an action movie into a high-budget commercial for protein powder, creatine, and whatever the hell UFC fighters are injecting these days.

As Gyllenhaal and McGregor flexed and fought their way through scene after scene, I found myself reaching for my phone, not to check the time—oh no—but to Google “What is Conor McGregor’s diet?” Because watching this movie is less about enjoying a plot and more about realizing you’re a gelatinous blob compared to the human marble statues parading around on screen. Road House isn’t so much a movie as it is a two-hour reminder that you’re one donut away from needing a forklift to get off the couch.

When the credits finally rolled, and I managed to peel my eyes away from the testosterone-soaked spectacle, I turned to my wife, feeling more deflated than a balloon at a porcupine convention. “I wish I could lose forty pounds and look the way I did when I entered Mr. Teenage San Francisco,” I lamented as if my sad sack of a body was just a protein shake away from making a comeback. I had the muscle once, I swear! But now it’s hidden under layers of adiposity that could cushion a fall from a ten-story building. If they ever invented an advanced generation of Ozempic that came in a pill form, had no side effects, and was covered by my insurance, I’d be the first in line, elbowing grannies out of the way to get my hands on it.

My wife, however, had zero interest in my nostalgic waxing about the “great body” of my youth. This was not her first rodeo. In fact, she could probably recite my entire “glory days” speech from memory, down to the last calorie of the diet I used to follow. Rolling her eyes with the practiced ease of a wife who’s heard it all before, she suggested we watch a rerun of Northern Exposure—her go-to escape from my never-ending lament about the “Greek god” I used to be. But the seafood restaurant ordeal had left me more drained than a used dishrag, and I waved the white flag of surrender. “Nope, I’m hitting the sack,” I muttered, retreating to the bedroom like a defeated warrior, leaving my wife to her beloved reruns while I dreamed of a time when I was ripped, instead of just ripping on myself.

May 6, 2025
The Stall Wars: A Faculty Restroom Horror Story

There I was—distinguished professor of literature, credentialed purveyor of syntax and suffering—perched atop the porcelain throne in the sacred stillness of the faculty restroom, savoring the last vestiges of a sugarless lemon-honey lozenge and the sweet, unbroken silence that comes only from locking the world out, one stall door at a time. Beside me: Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom. Above me: fluorescent lighting dimmer than the future of American democracy. Around me: peace, solitude, and the faint illusion of control.

Then came the talcum fog.

That distinct olfactory offense, paired with the telltale wheeze of a Marlboro-ravaged trachea, shattered the silence. I didn’t have to peek between the stall doors. I knew. It was her. Scary Mary. The tenured temp. The mythological grievance machine. The student who had, for over a decade, haunted our campus like a poltergeist with an administrative appeal form.

“Mary,” I barked from my vulnerable perch, “this is the men’s room. Leave now, or campus police will be called.”

“But Professor,” came the whine, pitched somewhere between a toddler’s tantrum and a chainsmoker’s aria, “I need to talk to you about my grade.”

I tried reason. I tried logic. But Mary had the persistence of a nicotine-stained Terminator. “Not until you explain why I got a C.”

“I read your essay,” I sighed. “Your catering hustle was impressive. One hundred smoked salmon crostini in thirty minutes? Brava. But yes, it was larded with grammatical errors.”

“You used the word larded,” she moaned. “Do you know how that hurts my self-esteem?”

Self-esteem? I was pants-down in a toilet stall having a mid-thesis debate with a woman violating Title IX, and she wanted to discuss feelings?

But Mary was just revving up. Her stubby fingers suddenly curled over the stall partition like something out of The Ring, and soon, her jaundiced head and magnified, frantic eyes emerged over the top. She looked like an unhinged librarian perched in a crow’s nest.

“I can’t afford to flunk this class again!” she gasped, dangling from her makeshift luggage tower like a cirque-de-sociopath act.

I stood up—pants restored, dignity in tatters—and let it rip: “You want honesty? Your essay reads like it was written by a sleep-deprived raccoon using predictive text. It made me reconsider the entire purpose of education. It gave me a migraine and a minor crisis of faith.”

Mary recoiled. “You’re a monster!” she shrieked. “The worst professor in higher education!”

Then physics intervened.

Mary, all 250 pounds of her, teetered from her wobbly platform and hit the floor with the grace of a collapsing filing cabinet. She screamed. Something about her shoulder.

I emerged, washed my hands, and surveyed the carnage.

“You’ll be fine,” I said flatly. “Ice it.”

“Aren’t you going to help me?”

Something cracked open in me—some cocktail of guilt, absurdism, and overcaffeinated bravado. “I can fix it,” I said. “My brother dislocated his shoulder in high school. I saw the coach pop it back in.”

Before she could object, I grabbed her wrist and yanked like a man possessed. There was a meaty clunk and then—a miracle—relief.

“You’re amazing,” she whispered.

“I know.”

She stood up, rubbing her newly aligned limb. “Now that I’m not your student… can we be friends?”

“Absolutely not,” I said, “but I can offer career counseling.”

“No hard feelings?”

“None. Now kindly exit the men’s room.”

I returned home expecting a hero’s welcome, only to find my family gathered around a platter of French Dip, their eyes glued to gravy-soaked baguettes.

“Sit down and eat,” my wife ordered, shoveling horseradish onto a sandwich with military precision.

And so I did.

And let me tell you, that sandwich could have ended wars. The beef was so tender it practically recited poetry on your tongue. The bread straddled that holy line between crisp and pillowy. And the au jus? It was less of a sauce and more of a religious experience. As I dipped, the day’s trauma melted like Swiss cheese under a broiler.

In that moment, I understood: some stories deserve to be told. Others should be swallowed with gravy.

May 6, 2025
The Monster with a Tail: A Southern Gothic Confession

I’ve never forgotten the story one of my students told me in the fall of 1998. She was a re-entry student, a nurse in her early forties juggling UCLA coursework with night shifts at the hospital, and the kind of woman you remember: short, sturdy, bespectacled, with tired eyes that had seen too much and lips that knew how to tell a good story. Most afternoons after class, she’d linger and share dispatches from her Louisiana backwoods childhood or from the VIP wing of her hospital job—tales that ping-ponged between the hilarious and the horrifying.

But one story chilled me to the marrow and stuck in my head like a burr under the skin. It wasn’t about celebrity patients or ER gore. It was about a monster.

She and her cousin Carmen were unsupervised children raised in the heat-choked, school-optional outskirts of rural Louisiana. Left to their own devices, the two girls played what she called “mean games”—tormenting frogs and bugs, and doing other things she refused to describe. They were feral, wild, borderline Lord of the Flies with hair ribbons.

And then came the visitor.

It was an average swampy afternoon when he arrived. The girls were inside an old ramshackle house, probably scheming new atrocities, when the porch door creaked open and in walked a man. Except he wasn’t a man. He had a tail—thick, heavy, and grotesquely alive. It coiled behind him like a muscular question mark, flicking as he made his way into the living room. His body was matted with bristly fur. His voice was low, scratchy, and deeply wrong. He didn’t yell. He didn’t threaten. He spoke, calmly and with dreadful precision, cataloging every evil thing the girls had done to the frogs and insects. Every cruelty committed under the sweltering sun. He ended with a promise: Keep going, and I’ll recruit you.

The thing sat in their house for three hours, its tail twitching as it detailed their future in hell’s internship program. The girls were petrified. When it finally left, slinking back into the thick air and cicada scream of Louisiana summer, they sat in silence. Eventually, Carmen whispered, “Did you see that?” My student nodded, mute.

From that day on, they reformed. Sunday School. Prayer. Fear-based virtue. They never spoke of it again. But the thing had done its job.

My student wasn’t a flake or a mystic. She was a veteran nurse—sharp, sane, and not prone to flights of fantasy. That’s what made it worse. She wasn’t selling me a ghost story. She was delivering testimony.

To this day, I can’t shake the image: two children, alone in a creaky house, visited by a thing with a tail and an agenda. Whether it was a literal demon, a shared hallucination, or a supernatural PSA sent by the universe, I’ll never know. But I do know this: after that story, I never looked at childhood mischief—or Louisiana—in quite the same way again.

May 6, 2025
Return to Purgatory: A Packing Dream from Hell

Last night, I found myself trapped in a sprawling compound of crumbling houses that looked like they were built during the Carter administration and never cleaned since. A communal frenzy was underway: the packing of thousands—yes, thousands—of food items and random clothing for a temporary exodus. Why the mass exodus? Unclear. Fumigation? Apocalypse? A reboot of The Grapes of Wrath? Whatever the reason, it was purgatorial.

The mood? Moronic cheer. My fellow inmates—let’s not flatter them by calling them neighbors—were sipping drinks, cackling, and treating this Herculean labor like a godforsaken block party. Meanwhile, I hovered at the edge of the scene, paralyzed by the Sisyphean logistics of it all. Every cabinet I opened unleashed another avalanche of expired beans and mismatched Tupperware lids. The collective merriment felt obscene, as if they were toasting the Titanic’s elegant descent into the sea.

And just when I thought salvation had arrived—in the form of a 2 a.m. bathroom break—I awoke, staggered to the toilet, and stumbled back to bed hoping to reset my brain. No such luck. The dream resumed exactly where I left off, like I’d hit pause on Netflix and walked back into my own streaming nightmare. There I was again, back in the compound, surrounded by half-drunk revelers blissfully ignoring the sheer futility of their packing, while I stood, a one-man FEMA unit, dreading every box and can like they were symbols of existential despair.

I suppose, in some Jungian corner of my subconscious, this was meant to be cathartic. Maybe a soul purge. Maybe a late-night psychological CrossFit session designed to wring out my nervous system like a filthy sponge. All I know is, I woke up feeling like I’d done emotional burpees for eight hours straight—but to my surprise, I was eager to get out of bed, made a pot of coffee like it was a holy sacrament, and gleefully planned a one-hour kettlebell workout.

May 6, 2025