Cinemorphosis

Tag: fiction

  • Sleeping with the Enemy: My Twelve-Year War with a Hybrid Mattress

    Sleeping with the Enemy: My Twelve-Year War with a Hybrid Mattress

    Twelve years ago, I spent about $2,500 on a California king hybrid mattress. Choosing the firmness felt less like shopping and more like negotiating a peace treaty between two warring factions of my anatomy. My heart wanted extra firm. My hips, burdened by the indignity of side sleeping, demanded something more forgiving. Conventional wisdom insisted that side sleepers need cushioning, but too much softness has always struck me as a design flaw masquerading as luxury. A plush mattress feels like a bed that has already lived a long, difficult life before arriving in your bedroom. Firmness, by contrast, exudes confidence. It says, “I’ve got you.” Plush whispers, “Good luck.”

    So I compromised and bought a medium-firm hybrid. It was the sensible decision. It was also, I suspect, the wrong one.

    I was never in love with the mattress. It relieved some pressure on my hips, but every night I found myself wishing I had ignored the sleep experts and trusted my instincts. Over the years, the compromise became a nightly ritual. Around one in the morning, I would abandon the bedroom and migrate to the living room.

    There, oddly enough, awaited my favorite bed.

    The couch itself deserves little credit. We bought it online six years ago because it looked handsome, not because it possessed any detectable concern for the human spine. It sits low, feels stiff, and offers about as much cushioning as a church pew. To make it habitable, I purchased a three-inch self-inflating camping mattress—a miraculous piece of engineering that silently inhales air without a pump and transforms an indifferent couch into something approaching civilization.

    My nightly arrangement has become embarrassingly elaborate. One pillow supports my head. Two more live beneath my knees whenever I rotate onto my back. A velvet blanket completes the ensemble. Together they create what I affectionately call my homeless encampment.

    My wife finds the nickname less amusing than I do.

    Whenever guests are coming over, she politely reminds me that respectable families generally do not display camping equipment in their living rooms. So I dismantle the encampment long enough to preserve the illusion that functional adults live here. Once our visitors leave, however, the mattress returns to its rightful place. As an added bonus, it triples the comfort of the couch for watching television.

    Fortunately, my wife doesn’t resent my nightly migration. If anything, it benefits both of us. I wake several times each night to visit the bathroom, while she sleeps lightly enough to awaken if a moth lands too aggressively on the windowsill. Sleeping in the living room allows me to use the guest bathroom and grants her several uninterrupted hours of sleep.

    I’ve discovered I’m hardly alone. My cousin does the same thing. So does my father-in-law.

    This raises an important scientific question.

    Is couch migration a uniquely male phenomenon?

    Perhaps our prehistoric ancestors developed the habit as a survival strategy. Maybe every few hours one caveman would quietly relocate to another corner of the cave to keep saber-toothed tigers from developing predictable dining habits. Somewhere an evolutionary psychologist is no doubt preparing a grant proposal entitled Nocturnal Male Couch Migration: An Adaptive Response to Pleistocene Predation. I wish that scholar the best of luck. I have more pressing concerns.

    Namely, buying another mattress.

    After twelve years, my hybrid has begun exhibiting the subtle symptoms of mattress middle age: faint depressions, a hint of fatigue, and support that now feels more nostalgic than structural.

    Buying a mattress was already maddening twelve years ago. Even then, the process resembled defending a doctoral dissertation in applied sleep science. You had to choose among innersprings, memory foam, latex, hybrids, pillow tops, Euro tops, plush, medium, firm, and the delightfully evasive category known as luxury firm—apparently invented for shoppers unwilling to admit they had absolutely no idea what they wanted.

    Today the situation has descended into magnificent absurdity.

    Modern mattress shopping requires fluency in pressure mapping, copper infusion, graphite cooling, zoned lumbar support, phase-change materials, edge reinforcement, biometric sleep tracking, AI-adjustable firmness, and enough proprietary foam technologies to qualify for military clearance. Every manufacturer assures you that its latest innovation has finally solved humanity’s oldest engineering challenge: lying down.

    By the time you’ve compared enough models, you’ve forgotten what sleep even feels like.

    Buying a bed now resembles selecting a spacecraft for a mission to Mars. All you wanted was eight peaceful hours. Instead, you’ve accidentally enrolled in graduate school.

    My strategy this time is refreshingly simple. I’ll buy a firm hybrid mattress and let a two-inch topper negotiate peace with my hips. The mattress will provide the confidence; the topper can handle diplomacy.

    That leaves only one obstacle: the mattress showroom.

    These retail stores exert a mysterious gravitational pull on commission salespeople whose weekly Costco runs apparently depend upon whether my hips achieve emotional closure on Mattress Number Seven. As I stretch out on one bed after another, I can almost hear them calculating mortgage payments from the angle of my shoulder.

    The alternative, of course, is ordering a mattress online.

    But buying a bed you’ve never tested strikes me as the consumer equivalent of accepting a mail-order bride. More often than not, the relationship ends with both parties discovering the true meaning of the word incompatibility.

    So I’ll brave the showroom.

    I’ll smile politely at the salespeople.

    I’ll pretend not to notice the desperation in their eyes.

    And I’ll wear long pants and socks.

    After watching thousands of strangers climb onto those mattresses in their bare feet, I refuse to expose my own. A man may lose his dignity to age, insomnia, and nocturnal couch migration, but there is no reason to surrender it barefoot in a mattress store.

  • The Go-Home Heat of Ordinary Life

    The Go-Home Heat of Ordinary Life

    Around seven this evening, I found myself in Target performing the small rituals of domestic survival. I drifted first to produce, where I stood contemplating six-packs of kiwis—those fuzzy, unglamorous orbs that look like they were designed by a committee that feared both beauty and commitment.

    To my left stood a blonde woman in black athletic tights, late thirties, hair cinched back by a black headband. Her eyes were ringed with the faint bruising of fatigue or life—or both. When she saw me reach for the kiwis, her face brightened with the sudden, evangelical urgency of someone who has found a truth and is no longer capable of keeping it to herself.

    “Have you ever bought the golden ones?”

    I nodded, already sensing the sermon.

    “I love those because you can eat the skin.”

    “I can do without the skin,” I said, hoping to signal that my relationship with fruit had boundaries.

    She leaned in, undeterred. “Don’t skip that part. That’s where you’re getting all your antioxidants, folate, vitamin E, and fiber.”

    She delivered this litany with the confidence of someone who had recently completed a deep dive into the internet’s temple of wellness influencers and emerged fluent in their catechism.

    “I’m a true believer in the kiwi,” I said, offering a diplomatic half-truth in the hopes of ending the exchange.

    It did not end the exchange.

    She urged me to seek out the golden kiwis and to consume them whole, skin and all, as though salvation itself depended on my willingness to chew through fuzz. I smiled, nodded, and executed a tactical retreat.

    She struck me as a fundamentally decent person, but I recognized the type. I’ve met her before in various incarnations: the recently converted, the self-reinvented, the earnest disciple of a new regimen. Somewhere in her recent past, there had likely been a fracture—addiction, heartbreak, loneliness—and now she clung to nutrition and fitness as both shield and scripture. Her enthusiasm, admirable in theory, had exceeded her social boundaries. 

    Five minutes later, we encountered each other again in the granola aisle, approaching from opposite directions like two diplomats from uneasy nations. Our carts collided in that narrow space, and she immediately yielded.

    “You can go first.”

    The earlier fervor had drained from her. In its place was a kind of tentative humility, as though she had replayed the kiwi lecture in her mind and found it excessive. She seemed smaller now, slightly folded into herself, her previous confidence replaced by a quiet, almost visible self-consciousness.

    I sensed embarrassment, perhaps even shame—not because she had said anything offensive, but because she had revealed too much of herself too quickly. Now she was attempting restraint, but the adjustment hadn’t taken. The performance read not as composed but as deflated.

    The poor woman was unraveling in real time, her emotional weather shifting faster than she could dress for it.

    “No worries,” I said, and moved past her.

    Later, at home, I found myself thinking about the kiwi evangelist with more sympathy than irritation. I recognized the impulse. I know what it feels like to become intoxicated by an idea and immediately want to share it with anyone within earshot. I have been that person—too eager, too talkative, too quick to mistake oversharing for connection. Only later does the embarrassment arrive, that slow realization that enthusiasm, when stripped of self-awareness, can become its own form of social aggression.

    People rarely reward that kind of personality. In professional wrestling, every story revolves around two archetypes: the Babyface, the hero who earns the audience’s affection, and the Heel, the villain who earns its contempt. Some Heels possess charisma so magnetic that people love hating them. They generate what wrestling insiders call real heat. Their arrogance, cruelty, and swagger become irresistible entertainment. In sports broadcasting, Howard Cosell was the apotheosis of this phenomenon. He irritated millions with such magnificent consistency that irritation itself became addictive. America tuned in partly to watch the games and partly to watch Cosell be Cosell.

    But there is a far more unfortunate kind of Heel. He isn’t fascinating enough to hate. He merely occupies oxygen. His habits are tedious, his mannerisms grating, his conversation a slow-acting sedative. Wrestling has a name for this, too: go-home heat. The audience doesn’t boo because the villain has done his job brilliantly. They boo because they want him off the screen. They aren’t emotionally invested. They’re simply exhausted.

    Sometimes I wonder whether our brains instinctively divide humanity into Babyfaces and Heels. If so, most of us who become Heels don’t achieve the glamorous status of generating real heat. We generate go-home heat. We become the person whose presence subtly shortens conversations, whose invitations quietly stop arriving, whose absence is greeted not with grief but with relief.

    I’ve felt that kind of heat more than once. The cruelest version isn’t public humiliation; it’s private disappearance. A friend stops calling. Invitations evaporate. Conversations become obligations. You realize you’ve crossed an invisible line from Babyface to Heel, not because anyone announced it, but because the emotional temperature in the room has changed. You can feel the polite distance settling in like cold fog. At that point, dignity requires only one response. You respect the boundary. You gather your things. You go home.

    Marriage provides one of the purest laboratories for go-home heat. I’ve known more than a few husbands whose wives finally reached the end of their patience and, with varying degrees of diplomacy, informed them that the show had been canceled. The message was always some variation of the same theme: I’ve grown up. You haven’t. Life with you has become lonelier than life without you. In the early days of courtship, these men were Babyfaces. They possessed charm, humor, ambition, and just enough mystery to generate what wrestling fans call pop—the roar of approval when the hero bursts through the curtain. But pop has a shelf life. If the hero never develops beyond his opening act, applause curdles into indifference. The jokes become stale. The promises expire. Eventually the audience stops cheering and starts looking toward the exit. Divorce, in many cases, is simply the marriage announcing that the Babyface has become the Heel.

    I recently watched a far less consequential but equally revealing Heel performance at Trader Joe’s.

    It was a quiet Saturday morning. About fifteen minutes into my shopping, I was comparing pasta sauces beside two sisters in their sixties, both sporting jet-black hair and the alert posture of women who had spent decades detecting trouble before it fully arrived. Then trouble arrived.

    A disturbance erupted in the frozen-food aisle.

    At first I assumed it was the familiar soundtrack of retail life—employees exchanging sarcastic insults, one playing the Babyface, the other the Heel, everyone secretly enjoying the performance. That illusion lasted perhaps three seconds. The voices hardened. The volume climbed. This wasn’t banter. This was a genuine kerfuffle, the kind baseball announcers once used to describe a bench-clearing brawl after someone wore a ninety-five-mile-per-hour fastball in the ribs.

    The dialogue quickly settled into the hypnotic repetition of an absurdist play.

    “Stop coughing on the food.”

    “Mind your own business.”

    Again.

    “Stop coughing on the food.”

    “Mind your own business.”

    The sisters and I exchanged the universal glance of strangers silently agreeing that civilization had taken an unexpected coffee break. Around us, employees gathered in nervous little clusters like prairie dogs emerging from their burrows to determine whether the predator had moved on.

    I never saw the alleged cougher. He remained an unseen villain, a phantom whose crimes could no longer be verified. But I did meet his prosecutor.

    He stormed into our aisle still simmering with indignation, muttering fragments of his closing argument to no one in particular. He was a bodybuilder in his late twenties with the unmistakable lat-spread gait of a man who had spent so much time widening his back that walking normally had become optional. He carried a grocery bag in each hand as though they were ceremonial dumbbells. Gray sweatpants. Turquoise T-shirt bearing the single word STRONG, just in case anyone had mistaken him for an accountant.

    The shirt was drenched with sweat, suggesting he’d recently emerged from the nearby UFC gym and hadn’t yet made the psychological transition from gladiator to grocery shopper.

    His expression attempted righteous indignation, but something betrayed him.

    He looked around.

    No one was applauding.

    No one admired his courage.

    No one seemed grateful that justice had been served in aisle seven.

    Instead, every face wore the same expression: Please remove this man from the premises.

    The go-home heat was overwhelming.

    He had mistaken confrontation for leadership, volume for authority, and muscles for moral credibility. Whatever point he believed he was making had been eclipsed by the spectacle of his performance. The entire store had unconsciously promoted him from self-appointed hero to official nuisance.

    For just a second, I caught something almost touching flicker across his face. It was the expression of a balloon discovering a pin. His certainty leaked away. Chagrin briefly appeared before pride hurried back to cover it.

    As for me, I reverted to one of humanity’s oldest survival instincts.

    I became wallpaper.

    I examined jars of marinara with scholarly intensity, refusing to make eye contact. The last thing I wanted was to be drafted into another man’s private morality play.

    A few minutes later, I spotted him again while checking out.

    He stood two lanes away.

    The entire store seemed aware of him.

    People stole glances over shopping carts. Conversations paused. The emotional climate had shifted. If Trader Joe’s had permitted audience participation, I suspect candy-bar wrappers, reusable shopping bags, and overripe bananas might have sailed gracefully through the air.

    He knew.

    His eyes darted around the room. He tucked his chin toward his chest, rounded his shoulders, and attempted the oldest disappearing act known to embarrassed human beings: becoming physically smaller. Unfortunately, shame rarely makes anyone less conspicuous. It merely signals to the audience that the verdict has already been rendered.

    The whispers began.

    “What a jerk.”

    “One guy can ruin the whole atmosphere.”

    “He really overplayed his hand.”

    “That guy watches way too many Bro videos.”

    He hurried out of the store with the defeated posture of a politician leaving the courthouse after an indictment, squeezed his improbable physique into a modest Honda Civic, and disappeared into traffic.

    Go-home heat is a cruel force, but perhaps it serves an evolutionary purpose. Every society needs mechanisms for enforcing its unwritten rules. Sometimes applause rewards admirable behavior. Sometimes boos remind us where the boundaries lie. Like every weapon, however, go-home heat demands restraint. Used wisely, it protects a community’s moral norms. Used recklessly, it becomes little more than collective bullying disguised as virtue.

  • The Gospel of the Golden Kiwi

    The Gospel of the Golden Kiwi

    Around seven this evening, I found myself in Target performing the small rituals of domestic survival. I drifted first to produce, where I stood contemplating six-packs of kiwis—those fuzzy, unglamorous orbs that look like they were designed by a committee that feared both beauty and commitment.

    To my left stood a blonde woman in black athletic tights, late thirties, hair cinched back by a black headband. Her eyes were ringed with the faint bruising of fatigue or life—or both. When she saw me reach for the kiwis, her face brightened with the sudden, evangelical urgency of someone who has found a truth and is no longer capable of keeping it to herself.

    “Have you ever bought the golden ones?”

    I nodded, already sensing the sermon.

    “I love those because you can eat the skin.”

    “I can do without the skin,” I said, hoping to signal that my relationship with fruit had boundaries.

    She leaned in, undeterred. “Don’t skip that part. That’s where you’re getting all your antioxidants, folate, vitamin E, and fiber.”

    She delivered this litany with the confidence of someone who had recently completed a deep dive into the internet’s temple of wellness influencers and emerged fluent in their catechism.

    “I’m a true believer in the kiwi,” I said, offering a diplomatic half-truth in the hopes of ending the exchange.

    It did not end the exchange.

    She urged me to seek out the golden kiwis and to consume them whole, skin and all, as though salvation itself depended on my willingness to chew through fuzz. I smiled, nodded, and executed a tactical retreat.

    She struck me as a fundamentally decent person, but I recognized the type. I’ve met her before in various incarnations: the recently converted, the self-reinvented, the earnest disciple of a new regimen. Somewhere in her recent past, there had likely been a fracture—addiction, heartbreak, loneliness—and now she clung to nutrition and fitness as both shield and scripture. Her enthusiasm, admirable in theory, had outrun her social calibration.

    Five minutes later, we encountered each other again in the granola aisle, approaching from opposite directions like two diplomats from uneasy nations. Our carts collided in that narrow space, and she immediately yielded.

    “You can go first.”

    The earlier fervor had drained from her. In its place was a kind of tentative humility, as though she had replayed the kiwi lecture in her mind and found it excessive. She seemed smaller now, slightly folded into herself, her previous confidence replaced by a quiet, almost visible self-consciousness.

    I sensed embarrassment, perhaps even shame—not because she had said anything offensive, but because she had revealed too much of herself too quickly. Now she was attempting restraint, but the adjustment hadn’t taken. The performance read not as composed but as deflated.

    The poor woman was unraveling in real time, her emotional weather shifting faster than she could dress for it.

    “No worries,” I said, and moved past her.

    Later, at home, I found myself thinking about her with sympathy. I know that impulse—the sudden surge of enthusiasm that spills over onto strangers, the desire to connect that arrives without a proper governor. I’ve been that person, pressing too hard, talking too much, revealing too quickly, only to retreat later into a private audit of one’s own excess.

    If I ever find myself eating golden kiwis, skin and all, I suspect I’ll pause for a moment and offer a small, private prayer for her—for whatever she’s trying to fix, and for the courage it takes to try fixing it in public.

  • The Unexpected Mercy of a Good Deed

    The Unexpected Mercy of a Good Deed

    It was late June of 2026. My wife and twin teenage daughters departed for a ten-day trip to London and Paris. I was invited and declined.

    Five hours on an airplane to Hawaii or Miami is my upper limit. Beyond that, my claustrophobia begins negotiating surrender terms. Ten days sprinting across Europe sounded less like a vacation and more like a competitive endurance event with no trophy at the finish line.

    You could say I have become jaded.

    In my younger years, I traveled widely—Russia, Ukraine, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Spain, Italy, France, England, Mexico. Travel opened my wife to the world. It had the opposite effect on me. My brain absorbed so much stimulation that it eventually shut down. While other people became energized by novelty, I became overwhelmed, withdrawn, and vaguely catatonic. Age has not improved the condition.

    My family understands this about me.

    No one was offended when I declined Europe.

    A few weeks after their return, we would all vacation together in Coronado. That was my kind of travel: buffets, poolside canopies, leisurely walks, and visits to Rolex and Breitling boutiques—not to buy anything, but to observe wealthy men purchasing luxury watches with the same casual indifference that others display when buying mangoes and guavas at a roadside market.

    My ideal vacation involves no driving, no itineraries, no guided tours, and no obligation to learn anything. Give me an infinity pool overlooking the ocean and enough free time to fantasize that I am immortal.

    I spend so much time inside my imagination that eventually I need a vacation from it.

    With my family gone, however, I knew the danger.

    Left alone, I would disappear into my own head.

    Chaos awaited there.

    To protect myself, I established a routine.

    Morning coffee.

    Writing.

    Piano.

    More coffee.

    A kettlebell workout in the garage accompanied by podcasts.

    A protein salad.

    A nap with more podcasts.

    A yogurt snack.

    More piano.

    A crime documentary.

    Dinner.

    More piano.

    Another crime documentary.

    Then bed, where podcasts continued whispering through my earbuds until morning.

    The first two days were unpleasant.

    I felt guilty, restless, mildly depressed, and perhaps a little insane.

    On day three, my wife and daughters video-called from London to report that their hotel room was tiny. The establishment was called the Zedwell Capsule Hotel. Calling it a hotel seemed generous. It was essentially a collection of sleeping pods.

    Nothing says “Welcome to Europe” quite like spending your first night in a glorified dresser drawer.

    One of my daughters was so distressed by the arrangement that she cried.

    After the call, I looked up the pods on YouTube.

    I recoiled in horror.

    For the first time all week, I felt grateful I had stayed home.

    By day four, I had settled into my routine. My family had moved on to more spacious accommodations in Paris. I missed them, but their daily calls and texts reassured me that they had not forgotten my existence.

    Meanwhile, I had time to think.

    During one kettlebell workout, I listened to Coleman Hughes and Caitlin Flanagan discuss why so many members of Gen Z and Gen Alpha were deciding not to have children.

    Economic concerns played a role, but the larger issue appeared to be radical individualism—the belief that spouses, children, and obligations interfere with freedom, mobility, and self-actualization.

    The discussion reminded me of sociologist Zygmunt Bauman and his concept of “liquid modernity.”

    Bauman argued that modern culture encourages people to remain perpetually fluid: endlessly reinventing themselves, constantly changing identities, refusing permanence, commitments, or fixed obligations. Personal truth becomes the highest authority, even when it is constructed from ignorance, immaturity, or wishful thinking.

    Children become burdens.

    Marriage becomes negotiable.

    Commitment becomes optional.

    Self-fulfillment becomes sacred.

    Part of me enjoyed my temporary freedom from family responsibilities.

    But I had no illusions about where my meaning came from.

    It came from responsibility.

    It came from being needed.

    The fantasy that life improves when every obligation disappears struck me as a cultural scam—a glossy marketing campaign disguising selfishness as enlightenment.

    Spend enough time on YouTube and TikTok and the pattern becomes obvious. The algorithms worship youth, beauty, novelty, and self-display.

    What passes for radical individualism often looks suspiciously like perpetual adolescence with better lighting and stronger filters.

    Then, on day five, something remarkable happened.

    My mortgage company sent me an email.

    The message informed me that my house was essentially paid off.

    If I wired approximately $3,700, the loan would be satisfied.

    I stared at the screen.

    My fifteen-year mortgage had become a thirteen-year mortgage because I had consistently paid an extra three hundred dollars toward principal every month.

    I had not realized how close I was.

    According to the online loan schedule, the mortgage still appeared to have years remaining. Apparently the system never fully accounted for the extra payments.

    In practical terms, I had just discovered that I no longer owed roughly sixty thousand dollars I had assumed was still hanging over my head.

    I called my wife in Paris.

    “The house is paid off,” I told her.

    I could hear the relief in her voice.

    She shared the news with our daughters, who would soon be driving. We were already anticipating the possibility of a third vehicle and insurance premiums that might require federal disaster assistance.

    The timing could not have been better.

    Providing security for my family made me happier than any luxury purchase ever could.

    I was grateful I had not squandered money chasing vanity.

    No pec implants.

    No liposuction.

    No Porsche.

    Restraint had quietly accomplished what indulgence never could.

    Restraint, I realized, is a superpower.

    On day seven, another responsibility arrived.

    A UCLA student named Hannah—a longtime family friend—had seven enormous duffel bags stored in our office. She was flying from Portland to Los Angeles and needed transportation to her dorm.

    I agreed immediately.

    Internally, I panicked.

    Driving to LAX stresses me out.

    Driving around UCLA stresses me out.

    Driving anywhere that involves students, luggage, and uncertain parking stresses me out.

    Hannah suggested taking an Uber to a Starbucks near the 405 to make things easier.

    I refused.

    Not because I was noble.

    Because I knew her.

    I had known her all her life.

    She was bright, disciplined, scholarly, and unusually composed for nineteen. Her parents were dear friends of ours. My wife loved her mother like a sister. Her father possessed the rare combination of business success and genuine kindness.

    I texted:

    “It would be my pleasure to pick you up at LAX.”

    This was technically a lie.

    I dreaded every minute of it.

    I checked Google Maps repeatedly.

    I monitored her flight obsessively.

    I left Torrance shortly after six.

    Forty-five minutes later, after navigating detours and traffic, I spotted Hannah outside the Alaska Airlines terminal.

    She climbed into the car.

    We talked.

    About UCLA.

    About Europe.

    About my paid-off house.

    About our upcoming Coronado vacation.

    By the time we reached Westwood, I had relaxed.

    The weather was glorious.

    At 7:15 p.m., sunlight still illuminated the streets. Students wandered casually through campus wearing shorts and T-shirts.

    The scene reminded me of Italy in the summer of 1973.

    I suddenly remembered a gelato vendor who spent his afternoons whistling Paul McCartney’s “My Love.”

    Not for customers.

    Not for tips.

    For himself.

    The memory remained vivid because the man seemed genuinely in love with life.

    At Hannah’s dorm, we made three elevator trips carrying duffel bags to the tenth floor.

    I was wearing a Nirvana T-shirt.

    A tall, skinny student walked past wearing the exact same shirt.

    He looked at me and smiled.

    “Nice shirt.”

    The room itself was small and claustrophobic.

    I immediately thought of my family sleeping inside London pods.

    Hannah thanked me.

    I wished her well.

    Then I drove back to Torrance.

    When I pulled into my driveway and the garage door rose, I felt unexpectedly satisfied.

    I texted Hannah’s father.

    Mission accomplished.

    Then I sat alone in my car and asked myself a question.

    “When was the last time you did something nice for someone? When was the last time you got off your butt and helped a friend?”

    The answer embarrassed me.

    I realized the favor had benefited me as much as Hannah.

    I struggle with religious faith.

    Yet the thought that entered my mind was unmistakable.

    God had shown me mercy.

    God had gotten me out of my own head long enough to do something useful.

    Inside the house, I was starving.

    But I had already eaten my meals for the day.

    I didn’t need more calories.

    I drank a glass of sparkling water instead.

    The hunger subsided.

    I watched a single crime documentary and prepared for bed.

    Just before turning off the light, I repeated the lesson that had quietly woven itself through the entire week:

    Restraint is a superpower.

  • The Death of Reading and the Rise of Thrusts

    The Death of Reading and the Rise of Thrusts

    One afternoon, drifting into a post-workout nap after a particularly glorious kettlebell session, I heard a famous writer tell a popular podcaster that nobody reads books anymore.

    Nobody.

    Not even him.

    He explained that social media had colonized his attention span. Years of feeding his narcissism to the digital machine had apparently consumed whatever brain cells were once responsible for sustained reading. There was something startling about hearing this confession from a public intellectual. It was like hearing a Michelin-starred chef announce that he now survives entirely on vending-machine burritos.

    The timing could not have been worse.

    I had recently completed writing a collection of fifteen stories. I had spent years dragging them through countless revisions, rescuing them from weaker incarnations, sanding rough edges, amputating dead passages, and rebuilding them sentence by sentence until they finally resembled what they were supposed to become. I was absurdly proud of them. I glowed with satisfaction. My pecs still felt inflated from kettlebell presses, and my literary vanity was enjoying a similar state of expansion.

    Then reality barged into the room.

    Nobody reads anymore.

    A bestselling author now sells perhaps ten thousand copies and celebrates as though he has conquered Gaul. An obscure author such as myself sells precisely zero. The arithmetic was not encouraging. My glow dimmed. My pumped-up ego suffered a rapid deflation.

    That evening I climbed into bed feeling mildly bereaved. I instructed my smart speaker to play classical music. It responded by offering business reports. I asked again. It played ZZ Top. I asked a third time. More ZZ Top. By the tenth attempt, after what felt like a hostage negotiation, it finally surrendered and delivered Johann Sebastian Bach.

    As the music drifted through the room, I picked up several books.

    I didn’t care about any of them.

    I tried another.

    Nothing.

    I opened my Amazon wishlist and scrolled through hundreds of titles accumulated over years of optimism. History. Biography. Philosophy. Literature. Politics. Books I had once believed would transform my life.

    I wanted none of them.

    It wasn’t exactly boredom. It wasn’t exactly depression. It was something murkier—a kind of spiritual flatness. An intellectual anemia.

    Part of my mood may have stemmed from guilt. My wife and twin daughters were exploring London and Paris. I had stayed behind. The long flights felt intolerable, and if I was honest, my curiosity about Europe had faded. I had wandered its streets decades earlier. Returning now felt like rereading a novel whose plot I already knew. The enchantment was gone.

    I comforted myself with thoughts of an upcoming trip to Miami. A five-hour flight I could survive. Noise-canceling headphones would seal me off from humanity, and I could retreat into the biography of some legendary athlete. Sports biographies had become my literary comfort food. They soothed me while jet engines roared and the earth drifted by thirty thousand feet below.

    Seeking rescue from my malaise, I purchased a discounted book for a dollar.

    A dollar.

    Even at that price I felt overcharged.

    The subject was humanity’s search for belonging and meaning. On paper this sounded promising. In practice it felt like an essay stretched onto a medieval torture rack until it reached book length. Every chapter seemed padded with repetition and filler. The author’s central insight could have fit comfortably on a cocktail napkin.

    I abandoned it after a few pages.

    Disgusted with both the book and myself, I opened YouTube.

    Then salvation arrived.

    The algorithm presented a kettlebell instructor demonstrating an exercise called the thrust.

    The movement was brutal: a clean, followed by a squat, followed by an overhead press. It looked demanding, athletic, and slightly insane.

    My ennui evaporated instantly.

    I wrote the word “thrusts” into my Google Docs notebook.

    One word.

    That was all it took.

    Suddenly I was excited about tomorrow. I could picture myself waking before dawn, walking into the garage, and attempting this new movement. The anticipation generated more enthusiasm than hundreds of books, dozens of streaming shows, and an entire internet overflowing with content.

    This realization disturbed me.

    I was sixty-four years old. By all cultural expectations, I should have been entering the season of deep reading and contemplation. I should have been savoring great books the way aristocrats savor caviar. Instead, I was ricocheting around the house like a Labrador retriever waiting for someone to throw a tennis ball.

    The truth was difficult to deny. At this stage of my life, only a handful of things reliably pierced the fog. Discovering a beautiful chord progression on the piano. Finding a new kettlebell movement. Learning some technique that made me eager to wake up the next morning.

    Had YouTube not delivered that single word to me—thrusts—I might have spent the entire day wandering through a desert of boredom.

    That is what unsettled me most.

    Not that I couldn’t find a book I wanted to read.

    Not that Europe no longer called to me.

    Not even that writers themselves were abandoning books.

    What unsettled me was how little it took to reignite my enthusiasm. One word on a screen. One exercise. One tiny challenge awaiting me at dawn.

    At sixty-four, after all my reading, writing, teaching, traveling, and philosophizing, the thing that saved the day was not Bach, literature, or civilization.

    It was a kettlebell.

  • The Woman Who Mistook Defiance for Freedom

    The Woman Who Mistook Defiance for Freedom

    Sarah Miller’s essay, “A Diehard Drinker Accidentally Quits,” begins with a complaint. She is irritated by the younger generation’s suspicion of alcohol and by the growing cultural enthusiasm for sobriety. To Miller, drinking is not merely a recreational habit. It is one of the last remaining expressions of humanity in a world increasingly obsessed with optimization, efficiency, and self-improvement. Why obsess over liver health, she wonders, when the planet is overheating and the news cycle resembles a parade of civilizational breakdowns? Abstaining from alcohol strikes her as less like wisdom than another form of puritanism disguised as wellness.

    Her social circle reinforced this belief. These were not derelicts slumped on barstools. They were productive professionals who folded alcohol into what they considered meaningful and life-affirming pursuits. They made homemade wine. They experimented with elaborate sangrias and cocktails. Drinking was not a vice. It was culture, creativity, fellowship, and pleasure.

    Miller’s relationship with alcohol began early. At seven years old she drank Molson Export Ale with her father. As she grew older, she noticed that alcohol transformed him into a darker, more cynical version of himself. It had the opposite effect on her. Drinking made her feel buoyant, expansive, and at peace. Alcohol became less a beverage than a companion, helping her reconcile herself to a world that often seemed irrational and exhausting.

    She drank throughout high school and college and came to a simple conclusion: she preferred the person she was when she drank. As a young adult, she settled into a routine of two or three drinks a day. Once or twice a week she endured a hangover substantial enough to make the next morning miserable but not severe enough to inspire change. Every couple of weeks she drank heavily enough to lose two full days to recovery.

    Gradually, however, alcohol stopped delivering its promised rewards. One evening she verbally attacked a close friend, apologized for her behavior, and then celebrated the reconciliation by pouring herself another drink. The absurdity of the sequence escaped her at the time.

    By her mid-thirties she experimented with Alcoholics Anonymous but quickly abandoned it. She could not convince herself that she belonged. The people around her told stories of spectacular collapse—lost jobs, ruined marriages, arrests, blackouts, and public humiliation. Compared to them, she seemed almost respectable. Her drinking lacked the cinematic drama she associated with alcoholism. She was not self-destructive enough to qualify.

    Soon afterward she met a man whose appetite for alcohol exceeded even her own. His drinking eventually drove her into Al-Anon, the organization designed for people whose lives are affected by alcoholics. The irony was remarkable. She could identify addiction in her boyfriend clearly enough to attend support meetings, yet she remained blind to the same disease operating within herself.

    Al-Anon taught her several painful lessons. She learned that she could not fix another person. She learned that obsessing over someone else’s problems could become a convenient distraction from confronting her own. Most importantly, she learned what alcoholism actually looked like. Armed with that understanding, she left her boyfriend. Yet she still refused to apply those lessons to herself.

    In retrospect, Miller recognizes that her denial was strengthened by cultural trends she claimed to despise. The more society celebrated sobriety, the more stubbornly she defended drinking. If everyone else was abandoning alcohol, she would cling to it with greater enthusiasm. Her drinking became an act of rebellion.

    She devoured memoirs written by alcoholics and reassured herself with the same comforting refrain: “I’m not half as bad as they are.”

    Meanwhile, reality was becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. Her nightly half-bottle of wine had a peculiar tendency to expand. The measurements became elastic. She developed what she calls “creative geometry,” a talent for convincing herself that large pours were somehow modest ones. Promises dissolved. Four drinks a week became twenty-five. Twenty-five became forty.

    By her fifties, desperation had replaced confidence. She tried nearly everything. Reiki. Acupuncture. Self-hypnosis. Therapy. Microdosing. Mushrooms. She attempted to address her anger, her judgmental instincts, and her paranoia. Eventually she embarked on what she describes as a psychedelic odyssey involving large quantities of MDMA and psilocybin. The experience produced not enlightenment but grandiosity. She became euphoric, convinced she was communicating with the dead. Even her therapist began expressing concern—not only about her mental state but also about her drinking.

    Miller believes she might have remained what recovery circles call a “high-bottom drinker” indefinitely. Then a romantic disappointment cracked the illusion. After being ghosted by a boyfriend, she found herself drowning in anxiety and grief. A friend handed her a glass of wine.

    She drank it.

    Nothing happened.

    The sadness remained exactly where it was.

    For the first time, alcohol failed to perform its most important function. The medicine no longer worked.

    She decided to attend online A.A. meetings and take a break from drinking. Almost immediately she noticed subtle but profound changes. Going to bed felt pleasant. Daily routines felt distinct and sweet. Waking up without a hangover felt like discovering a forgotten luxury. The anger that had accompanied her for years began to evaporate.

    Then came the realization she had spent decades avoiding.

    Her life had become a nightmare.

    At an A.A. meeting she finally introduced herself by saying, “My name is Sarah, and I’m an alcoholic.”

    The admission did not diminish her. It clarified her.

    Looking back, she now views her elaborate calculations about half-bottles of wine with disgust. The memories strike her as a form of body horror. She sees that her drinking was not self-care, self-expression, or rebellion. It was self-abuse. Every drink carried the same hidden message: I cannot deal with this. I cannot deal with you. I cannot deal with life.

    Sobriety, therefore, became more than abstinence. It became the willingness to face reality without anesthetic.

    Miller’s essay ultimately serves as a case study in the destructive power of the ego. The ego whispers that we are different from everyone else. It assures us that addicts are other people. It convinces us that our flaws are exceptions, our rationalizations are wisdom, and our compulsions are choices. It insists that reality should bend itself to our preferences. When reality refuses, the ego searches for relief, often in the very habits that deepen our suffering.

    The cruelest trick the ego performs is persuading us that self-destruction is self-preservation.

    What makes Miller’s story compelling is that her recovery is not merely a triumph over alcohol. It is a triumph over pride. Her real addiction was not simply to wine but to the belief that she was exempt from the truths that governed everyone else.

    In that sense, sobriety is not merely the absence of alcohol. It is the presence of humility. It is the moment when a person stops arguing with reality and finally agrees to live inside it.

  • The First 48 and the Search for Truth

    The First 48 and the Search for Truth

    The finest television dramas I have seen over the last twenty years have all revolved around crime. The Wire. Breaking Bad. Better Call Saul. Justified. Fargo. Rectify. That last series remains criminally overlooked. It deserves to stand beside the others in television’s pantheon. In my view, it is one of the greatest shows ever made.

    What these crime dramas share is not merely murder, drug trafficking, corruption, or law enforcement. They share a darker and more unsettling premise: human beings are not naturally reasonable creatures. Left to our own devices, we are capable of astonishing selfishness, cruelty, irrationality, and self-destruction. We require guardrails—family, community, moral codes, social expectations, religion, friendship, duty—to keep us from driving straight into the ditch. Remove those restraints and entropy takes over. The result is a Bosch painting come to life: chaos, degradation, madness, and suffering spreading outward from a single bad decision.

    Crime stories force writers to confront the largest questions human beings can ask. What is justice? Can evil be redeemed? How much corruption can a person tolerate before becoming corrupted himself? Is there a point of no return? How do you preserve your sanity after staring directly into the abyss? How do you maintain faith in the value of human life when surrounded by sociopaths who treat other people as disposable objects?

    Given my immersion in fictional crime, perhaps it was inevitable that I would eventually tumble down the true-crime rabbit hole. Over the past year, I have consumed an embarrassing number of crime documentaries and docuseries. Among them, The First 48 stands apart.

    The premise is simple: homicide detectives in cities such as Atlanta, Tulsa, Miami, Memphis, New Orleans, Cleveland, Minneapolis, Dallas, and Kansas City race against the clock to solve murders during the critical first forty-eight hours after a killing. Some suspects are criminal masterminds. Most are not. Many possess the strategic sophistication of a raccoon trapped in a garbage can.

    The detectives, meanwhile, perform a strange form of civic triage. They comfort grieving families. They persuade reluctant witnesses. They canvas neighborhoods. They interrogate suspects. They sift through surveillance footage. They survive on cold pizza, convenience-store coffee, and whatever fragments of sleep they can steal before the next phone call drags them back into the darkness.

    What strikes me most about these shows is not violence.

    It is truth.

    More precisely, the absence of it.

    Every case begins buried beneath layers of deception. Witnesses lie. Suspects lie. Friends lie. Family members lie. People lie reflexively, habitually, and often for no discernible reason. The default setting seems to be: conceal, evade, distort, deny.

    A detective asks a simple question.

    The witness responds as if he has been asked to surrender state secrets.

    Only when the evidence becomes overwhelming—when the walls close in and every escape route has been blocked—does the truth begin to emerge.

    Watching these detectives, I am struck by the almost spiritual nature of their work. In a world thick with confusion, self-interest, manipulation, and darkness, they devote enormous portions of their lives to pursuing a single objective: finding out what actually happened.

    They sacrifice evenings with their families. They sacrifice sleep. They sacrifice peace of mind. Day after day, they stare directly into humanity’s ugliest impulses and insist that the truth be uncovered, that the dead be given a voice, and that justice be given a chance.

    Perhaps that is why crime stories continue to hold my attention while so much other television feels disposable. The stakes are existential. The conflict is ancient. Truth versus deception. Light versus darkness. Order versus entropy.

    Once you become absorbed in that struggle, it becomes difficult to care very much about who got voted off the island.

  • The Garage Door That Aged Me

    The Garage Door That Aged Me

    I miss my old Genie garage door opener and the vanished age of competence it represented. The old Genie operated according to a refreshingly primitive philosophy: electricity goes in, button gets pushed, garage door goes up. It demanded nothing more from its owner than a functioning thumb and a basic understanding of cause and effect. It belonged to a world where machines served human beings rather than requiring human beings to audition for the privilege of operating them.

    The new Genie belongs to a different civilization entirely. It greets you like a twenty-year-old Silicon Valley intern conducting a security clearance. Before the garage door will consent to rise six feet into the air, you must download an app, create an account, verify an email address, enable Bluetooth, grant permissions, update firmware, agree to seventeen pages of terms and conditions, and perhaps burn a small offering before the altar of the Cloud. The old Genie made you feel like the master of a machine. The new Genie makes you feel like a bewildered medieval peasant petitioning an invisible digital bureaucracy. Nothing reminds an aging homeowner of his mortality quite like discovering that the garage door now speaks fluent smartphone while he still speaks fluent button.

    Wanting buttons instead of apps is a sign of misalignment. The older I get, the more I recognize this condition. Misalignment occurs when the world quietly changes languages while you continue speaking the old one. It is one of the defining afflictions of the geriatric class. At sixty-four, I found myself replacing the Genie of Old with the Genie of New, and I required assistance from my wife. This was not a proud moment.

    Together we entered the garage. I watched as she climbed a ladder, removed the white plastic cover from the unit, located the Bluetooth button hidden somewhere in its technological intestines, and synchronized our phones. She programmed the second remote I had purchased from Amazon. She solved every problem that had defeated me. When I thanked her, she responded with the kind of observation only a spouse can deliver: gentle in tone, devastating in effect.

    I was, she explained, exactly like one of her sixth-graders. I had no patience. I wanted the universe to suspend operations until my problems were solved. Unfortunately, the universe had declined my request. New problems kept arriving. New technologies kept appearing. My misalignment with the world kept widening.

    At that moment, I realized I had entered a new phase of life. I was no longer merely impatient. I was becoming dependent. My brain still functioned perfectly well, but it no longer possessed the elasticity it once had. Technology evolved like a city rebuilding itself overnight. I evolved with the speed of continental drift.

    In that moment of horror, my thoughts turned to Moria.

    When you’re old, you must prepare for what I call Morian Drift: the gradual sensation that the world has moved on without you, leaving you to wander through the ruins of once-intuitive systems while younger people navigate effortlessly through technological labyrinths you barely understand.

    Moria was once the magnificent underground kingdom of the dwarves, a city of glittering halls, colossal pillars, and staggering wealth. But the dwarves delved too greedily and too deep. They awakened the Balrog, a primordial demon of shadow and fire, and their civilization collapsed into ruin. By the time the Fellowship arrives, Moria has become a haunted tomb filled with darkness, crumbling bridges, and the lingering memory of greatness.

    That is how aging sometimes feels.

    You find yourself standing on the Bridge of Khazad-dûm, staring at a technological Balrog that younger generations dismiss as a routine software update.

    The Balrog itself is one of Tolkien’s great monsters: a towering demon wrapped in shadow and flame, carrying a fiery whip and trailing a serpentine tail. It embodies chaos, power, and the consequences of pursuing progress without restraint. During the battle, Gandalf confronts the beast upon the bridge. He wins. The bridge shatters. The monster falls.

    Then comes the whip.

    As the Balrog plunges into the abyss, its fiery lash coils around Gandalf’s legs and drags him down into the darkness. The injury is not merely physical. It becomes a life-altering ordeal that carries him through the depths of Moria and up the Endless Stair. The battle ultimately kills him. Victory itself becomes the instrument of his destruction.

    That image stayed with me as I stared at the new Genie opener.

    The garage door was my Balrog.

    Not because it was especially difficult. Not because Bluetooth pairing is inherently terrifying. But because it revealed a truth I had been trying not to notice. My accumulated competence had encountered a new reality and failed. The problem was not the garage door. The problem was the widening gap between myself and the world I inhabited.

    The new Genie delivered what I now call a Balrog Moment: the sudden realization that one’s hard-earned expertise no longer guarantees mastery, forcing a confrontation with aging, obsolescence, and the necessity of reinvention.

    After defeating the Balrog, Gandalf dies. Later he explains his experience in a single haunting sentence:

    “I strayed out of thought and time.”

    That line has haunted me for years because it captures something profound about growing older. You wake up one day and discover that the culture, the technology, and the assumptions that once felt natural have drifted away from you. You have not left the world. The world has left you.

    Fortunately, Gandalf does not remain dead. He returns transformed. The old wizard gives way to a new one. He emerges wiser, stronger, and better suited to the task ahead.

    That is the lesson I took from my garage-door apocalypse.

    The new Genie showed me that I had strayed out of thought and time. But it also showed me that the answer is not surrender. The answer is reinvention. The alternative is permanent residence in Moria, wandering among the ruins while the rest of civilization marches onward without you.

  • Waterbed Dreams (a short story)

    Waterbed Dreams (a short story)

    In the 1960s, while attending backyard pool parties as a child, I witnessed a ritual that today would likely end the gathering, the marriage, and perhaps someone’s standing in the neighborhood Facebook group.

    The scene always began the same way. The wives lay stretched across poolside loungers like contented seals basking on a warm rock. Their skin glistened with tanning oil. Some drifted in and out of sleep beneath oversized sunglasses. Others were absorbed in paperback novels such as Valley of the Dolls, lost in worlds more glamorous than the suburban tract homes surrounding them.

    Relaxation, however, was a dangerous condition. The husbands regarded it almost as an invitation.

    I would see them gathering in small clusters, exchanging mischievous glances and whispered instructions. Then, with all the stealth of burglars planning a jewel heist, two or three men would creep toward the unsuspecting target. One grabbed the arms. Another grabbed the ankles. Before the woman could register what was happening, she was airborne.

    Splash.

    The victim surfaced in a burst of profanity and shock, treading water while trying to understand why the people closest to her had just transformed her into the afternoon’s entertainment.

    The husbands, meanwhile, doubled over with laughter. They laughed with the self-congratulatory delight of men convinced they had just performed comedy worthy of prime-time television. What they had actually performed was a public reminder of who possessed the power and who was expected to absorb the indignity.

    Eventually the woman climbed from the pool, dripping and annoyed. She would shake her head, towel herself dry, and wait for the laughter to burn itself out. Then came the final act of the ritual: she was expected to be a good sport. Boys will be boys. No hard feelings. Back to the lounge chair. Back to the conversation. Back to the novel.

    And so the party continued.

    No sociology professor is required to decode what was happening. The message was delivered with all the subtlety of a brick through a window. The prank was never merely a prank. It was a small public demonstration of dominance disguised as horseplay. The husbands enjoyed a privilege that permitted them to humiliate; the wives were expected to absorb the humiliation gracefully.

    You rarely see such scenes today because the cultural lens has changed. What once passed for harmless male shenanigans is now recognized for what it often was: a form of casual cruelty. The laughter remains the same. What has changed is our willingness to mistake it for innocence.

    Whenever I think about those afternoons, I am reminded of Mad Men. One of the show’s great insights is that the madness of mid-century masculinity was not simply its sexism but its astonishing lack of boundaries. Entitlement flourished because it was rarely challenged. And entitlement is inherently abusive because it operates as a zero-sum arrangement. One person enjoys the privilege of acting on every impulse; another person is expected to accommodate those impulses without complaint.

    The tragedy of entitlement is that it does not merely diminish the subordinate. It corrodes the entitled as well. When a culture teaches people that every whim deserves immediate gratification, it quietly exempts them from the responsibilities of adulthood. Why develop self-command when the world conspires to indulge your impulses? Why grow up when you can remain a child and still be handed the privileges of a man?

    Looking back, what strikes me most about those thirty-something husbands was not their authority but their immaturity. They were not imposing patriarchs so much as oversized boys wandering through a civilization that mistook self-indulgence for masculinity.

    The culture celebrated this condition. It built monuments to it.

    Consider the bachelor pad, that sacred temple of male self-mythology. Magazine spreads presented it as a technological wonderland and erotic paradise. The walls were covered in rich wood paneling. A bear rug lounged dramatically on the floor. Intricate models of futuristic cities sat on shelves like trophies from an imagined age of progress. With the clap of a hand, a television descended from the ceiling. A hidden panel slid open to reveal a gleaming liquor cabinet stocked with enough bourbon to anesthetize an elephant.

    The bachelor pad promised that its owner was no ordinary man. He was sophisticated. Connected. Mysterious. He knew where the best restaurants were, which stocks to buy, and which jazz records proved his superior taste. He was always three steps ahead of everyone else and at least five steps ahead of the poor fools living in split-level homes.

    Yet all the razzle-dazzle could not conceal the obvious truth. Behind the secret compartments, imported scotch, and carefully groomed mustache often stood a man-child. The gadgets were sophisticated. The owner was not. The bachelor pad frequently resembled a twelve-year-old boy’s fantasy that had been granted an unlimited expense account.

    Even as a child, I sensed that something was off.

    The world of the 1960s projected confidence, prosperity, and order, but beneath the polished surface ran a current of instability. The adults were supposed to be creating safety and predictability. Too often, they generated turbulence instead. The atmosphere felt less like responsible adulthood than a perpetual fraternity party conducted by people with mortgages.

    Children notice these things.

    We notice who gets to laugh.

    We notice who becomes the punchline.

    We notice who is expected to absorb the humiliation and pretend it never happened.

    Most of all, we notice the gap between what adults claim to be and what they actually are. Long before we possess the vocabulary to describe entitlement, narcissism, or arrested development, we can feel their effects. We can sense when the people entrusted with maintaining order are, in fact, manufacturing chaos.

    And that was the contradiction at the heart of the era: a generation that possessed unprecedented authority often behaved as though authority itself exempted them from maturity.

    Perhaps that is why so many of us flocked to The Brady Bunch every Friday night. The show offered a fantasy of domestic civilization. Here was a blended family that somehow functioned as a cooperative unit. Problems were discussed instead of weaponized. Nobody humiliated anyone for sport. Lessons were learned. Conflicts were resolved. The adults behaved like adults.

    Compared to the poolside kingdoms of suburban entitlement, the Bradys looked less like a sitcom family than a utopian experiment.

    Longing for the Brady family’s utopian world seeped into my dreams and shaped my childhood. Let me take you back to the blistering summer of 1971, when I was nine. My family and four others staked their claim to a slice of rugged paradise on Mount Shasta. For two weeks, we fished, water-skied, dodged hornets, and lazed under the drone of a massive battery-operated radio pumping out The Doors, Paul McCartney, Carole King, and Three Dog Night. It should have been idyllic. Should have been.

    One morning, as the other families fried pancakes and bacon and prepped their fishing gear, I was still in my tent, cocooned in the greatest dream of my life. I wasn’t just sleeping—I was transcending. In my dream, I had met The Brady Bunch in San Francisco, by a gleaming red cable car downtown. Their faces were radiant, practically angelic, and their smiles said it all: I had been chosen. I was going to be the newest Brady kid. Mike and Carol had already signed the adoption papers at some conveniently nearby government office. It was official.

    Questions swirled in my nine-year-old brain: Would I get my own room in their split-level utopia, or would I have to bunk with Greg? And most importantly, how soon would I appear on the show? But just as I was about to find out, reality crashed in like a rude kid on a trampoline. Mark and Tosh, my two so-called friends, yanked me out of my reverie, insisting it was time to go fishing. Fishing? Fishing?! I had just been adopted by The Brady Bunch, and now I had to slum it with worms and hooks?

    I sulked like the overgrown toddler I was. The rest of the day, I stomped around with the scowl of someone who’d been exiled from paradise, my unspoken dream stuck inside me like a splinter. I couldn’t tell anyone. What was I supposed to say? “Sorry, I can’t fish; I was about to move into a Technicolor utopia where no problem is bigger than a 30-minute episode”? Yeah, right.

    “Get with the program,” my dad bellowed, his military tone slicing through the air. “We’re living in the wild.” The wild? I didn’t want the wild. I wanted the Brady kitchen, with its avocado-green appliances and unending love. Instead, I got Mount Shasta, yellowjackets hovering over our food supplies, a fishing pole, and a crushing dose of reality. I was not a Brady, and the sting of it stuck with me longer than the mosquito bites.

    That sulky kid camping on Mount Shasta believed his Brady Bunch fantasy was a rare, precious portal out of his chaotic childhood. Turns out, it was about as unique as a Hallmark card on Valentine’s Day. Like millions of Americans, I grew up dreaming I’d be adopted by the Bradys—soaking up the avocado-colored bliss of choreographed family harmony. But here’s the cosmic joke: while we were glued to the screen, escaping into 30-minute morality plays, the actors’ personal lives were raging dumpster fires. Addiction, affairs, infighting—it was chaos so apocalyptic it made our own messy lives look like spa weekends.

    Should we really expect actors’ off-screen lives to match the squeaky-clean fantasy they sell us? Of course not. Hollywood isn’t built on truth; it’s built on glossy façades. The Brady Bunch is proof. They served us perfectly scripted family bliss, while behind the scenes, they were stuck in their own soap opera. The gap between their TV utopia and reality is as wide as the Grand Canyon—yet we still crave the fantasy. Once you’ve tasted Brady-level wholesomeness, it’s like emotional junk food: artificial but irresistibly comforting.

    In my prepubescence, I not only dreamed I was a member of the Brady family; I dreamed  that my face was in one of the squares on the show’s opening theme song. I’m looking around at my family members, my cheeks bright and cherubic, an eternal youth pumped with a sense of joy and belonging, blind to the off-screen train wrecks that contradicted the Brady’s Edenic wonderland.

    Adolescence put an end to my Brady Bunch fantasies. By then, the Brady family seemed so wholesome, so relentlessly well-adjusted, that they bordered on the monastic. Nobody lusted after anybody. Nobody drank too much. Nobody made catastrophically bad decisions. Every problem was solved in twenty-two minutes and accompanied by a moral lesson. It was a civilization without appetite.

    What I wanted instead was sensuality.

    That is where the Boone’s Farm Apple Wine commercials entered my life. These advertisements took impossibly attractive young women, dressed them in gingham dresses, deposited them in sun-dappled meadows, and surrounded them with rugged, guitar-strumming men who looked as if they had wandered out of a folk album cover. Everyone smiled. Everyone flirted. Everyone appeared to be one sip away from achieving perfect harmony with nature, romance, and themselves.

    Who needed the Brady Bunch when a bottle of apple wine could transport you directly to Eden?

    The commercials were selling more than wine. They were marketing an emerging vision of life that was spreading across America in the early 1970s—a curious blend of sexual liberation, political consciousness, environmentalism, health food evangelism, and openness to alternative realities. This counterculture promised liberation from the buttoned-down conventions embodied by shows like The Brady Bunch. Why settle for suburban order when you could pursue cosmic enlightenment, organic nutrition, and attractive people frolicking through fields?

    The fullest expression of this worldview existed in my hometown at a grocery store called Co-Op.

    Calling Co-Op a supermarket would be like calling Woodstock a music festival. Technically accurate, perhaps, but hopelessly incomplete.

    This was a store “owned by the people.” The employees were unfailingly friendly. The men often sported beards substantial enough to shelter migratory birds and wore survival gear purchased from Co-Op’s adjoining Wilderness Supply Store. Every employee seemed to occupy a different point on the Hippy Spectrum, ranging from mildly eccentric nature enthusiast to someone who appeared capable of receiving stock tips from houseplants.

    Co-Op pioneered innovations that now seem ordinary. It had the town’s first daycare center for shoppers’ children and its first recycling center. Long before environmentalism became corporate branding, Co-Op treated recycling as a sacred civic duty.

    The store’s modest book section served as a literary roadmap to alternative consciousness. There sat Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Peter Tompkins’ The Secret Life of Plants, Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods, Laurence J. Peter’s The Peter Principle, and, towering above them all like scripture atop an altar, Frances Moore Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet, the vegetarian bible of the movement.

    The food selection was equally revelatory. Customers could purchase carob honey ice cream, wheat germ, granola, tofu, brown rice, Japanese yams, and alfalfa sprout-growing kits complete with mason jars. For many Americans, Co-Op served as their first introduction to foods that were not beige.

    With its wilderness store, organic produce, alternative literature, and health-food evangelism, Co-Op was more than a place to buy groceries. It was a sanctuary for those rebelling against The Man. Every purchase carried ideological significance. A bowl of granola sweetened with organic honey was not merely breakfast. It was a declaration of independence.

    Unfortunately, every revolution contains its contradictions.

    The counterculture replaced the Bachelor Pad with the Co-Op Halo: the cognitive illusion in which any food purchased at a cooperative grocery store is presumed incapable of causing weight gain, metabolic dysfunction, or excessive calorie consumption. Under the protective glow of the Co-Op Halo, honey ceases to be sugar, granola ceases to be dessert, and a thousand calories of nuts become an act of political resistance. 

    As a child shopping alongside my parents, I observed these earnest Co-Op revolutionaries lumbering through the aisles. They battled corporate food tyranny one overflowing bowl of granola at a time, their expanding waistlines advancing steadily alongside their moral certainty. They looked like freedom fighters who had accidentally launched an insurgency against their own belt buckles.

    What fascinated me was not their hypocrisy but their humanity. The very people striving hardest to improve themselves remained vulnerable to the same blind spots that afflict everyone else. Their intentions were admirable. Their convictions were sincere. Yet their growing girth served as a reminder that even the noblest movements can become intoxicated by their own righteousness.

    It is no surprise that during the Co-Op Revolution, many of its adherents abandoned conventional beds for waterbeds. The traditional spring mattress belonged to the Mad Men era in the same way the gray flannel suit, the martini cart, and the executive desk belonged to it. It was firm, structured, predictable, and unapologetically patriarchal. You slept on top of it, not with it. It reflected a culture organized around hierarchy, discipline, and the assumption that somewhere in the house a father figure knew what he was doing.

    The waterbed represented an entirely different cosmology.

    The spring mattress was Father.

    The waterbed was Mother.

    More specifically, it was Mother Earth, Mother Ocean, Mother Nature, and Mother Womb rolled into a giant vinyl sack filled with heated water.

    The waterbed arrived as part of the Co-Op Halo revolution. It rejected rigidity in favor of flow, conformity in favor of experimentation, and straight lines in favor of psychedelic undulation. If the spring mattress said, “Get a job, mow the lawn, and report to work on Monday,” the waterbed said, “Relax, brother. Time is a capitalist construct.”

    One belonged in Don Draper’s paneled den beside a hidden liquor cabinet and a collection of imported scotch. The other belonged in a room scented with patchouli, illuminated by a lava lamp, and stocked with dog-eared copies of Diet for a Small Planet and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The spring mattress supported the patriarchy. The waterbed floated a rebellion against it.

    At around thirteen years old, I was fully indoctrinated into waterbed ideology.

    After trying the waterbeds owned by friends and neighbors, I became a true believer. The warm vinyl surface felt exotic and futuristic. The gentle waves suggested depths of wisdom unavailable to those unfortunate souls sleeping on ordinary mattresses. I became convinced that immersion in the Great Aquatic Womb was essential to human fulfillment. Sleeping on a conventional mattress suddenly seemed as spiritually primitive as cooking over a campfire.

    Eventually my parents surrendered to the pressure.

    For a brief moment, I believed paradise had arrived.

    Then reality arrived.

    The first warning sign was the algae.

    The water inside the mattress developed its own ecosystem. Before long my bedroom smelled less like a sanctuary of cosmic consciousness and more like a stagnant swamp in which an alligator might reasonably be expected to surface.

    Then there was the simple act of turning over in bed.

    Waterbed enthusiasts described this as floating.

    In practice it felt more like wrestling a small ocean.

    Every movement encountered resistance. Rolling from one side to the other required planning, momentum, and perhaps a permit from the Coast Guard. A careless shift of position could generate enough counterforce to threaten a shoulder, strain a back, or create waves capable of disturbing neighboring counties.

    The temperature was another ongoing adventure.

    The bed was either too cold or too hot.

    One night I was sleeping in what felt like the North Atlantic. The next night I appeared to be poaching myself. I became a full-time regulator of aquatic climate conditions, endlessly adjusting the temperature dial in pursuit of a mythical state known as comfort.

    But the unforgivable sin was the leaking.

    Waterbeds leaked with the determination of a Greek tragedy fulfilling its prophecy.

    Water leaked onto the floor. Water seeped into places water was never intended to go. The flooring suffered. Mildew flourished. Black mold appeared like an invading army. The very object that had promised harmony with nature was now actively introducing nature into my bedroom.

    My dreams of aquatic enlightenment collapsed.

    My rebellion against The Man had become a battle against a giant bag of malfunctioning water.

    The waterbed was not Mother Ocean.

    It was not the Womb.

    It was not a portal to higher consciousness.

    It was a sea monster.

    A damp, bloated, vinyl sea monster that occupied my bedroom, consumed my patience, and robbed me of sleep. The Co-Op Revolution had promised liberation. Instead, I found myself trapped in an endless maritime disaster unfolding six inches above the floor.

    The waterbed craze of the 1970s eventually collapsed for the same reason most utopian experiments collapse: reality refused to cooperate. The waterbed promised liberation from the stiff, joyless conventions of the Mad Men era. Why sleep on a rigid mattress when you could drift upon a warm, undulating sea of consciousness? Why settle for furniture when you could experience a lifestyle? The problem, of course, was that consumers eventually discovered that sleeping on a giant sack of water came with certain drawbacks, including leaks, mold, algae, temperature fluctuations, and the unsettling sensation of spending every night inside an aquarium.

    Its demise symbolized the fading of a larger countercultural fantasy. The waterbed embodied the belief that freedom could be achieved by rejecting structure in favor of flow, spontaneity, experimentation, and vibes. But markets teach lessons with merciless efficiency. Most people did not want to sleep inside a social movement. They wanted a good night’s sleep. The waterbed had promised transcendence and delivered plumbing problems.

    Ironically, while the culture around me chased one New Age revelation after another, I was becoming increasingly indifferent to all of it. That same year I was competing in Junior Olympic weightlifting meets. I was training hard, taking protein supplements, eating aggressively, and building a life around discipline. By the end of the day I was so exhausted that I could have slept comfortably on a sheet of plywood. The waterbed’s promises of cosmic fulfillment meant nothing to me. Just give me a gym, two hundred grams of protein a day, and leave me alone. I had little patience for the endless parade of theories, lifestyles, and consciousness-expanding schemes emerging from the great 1970s Fever Dream. Every month seemed to produce a new revelation that would supposedly transform humanity. I was far more interested in perfecting my squat.

    Then, in 1978, my muscular future was threatened by something far more alarming than a leaking waterbed.

    One morning, while eating a bowl of Wheaties fortified with a scoop of protein powder and a cup of milk, I opened The San Francisco Chronicle and was seized by a profound sense of dread. The article described the predictions of futurists who believed that Earth’s growing population and dwindling resources would eventually force humanity into space. According to the piece, future generations might abandon the planet altogether, traveling by lunar shuttle to enormous solar-powered colonies orbiting the Earth.

    The article highlighted the work of Princeton physicist Gerard K. O’Neill, who would later publish these ideas in The High Frontier. Humanity, it explained, might someday live in “artificial, closed-ecology habitats in free orbit,” deriving energy from massive solar arrays.

    The accompanying illustrations by artist Don Davis were breathtaking. They depicted lush green hills, cozy cottages, sparkling fountains, rolling meadows, and smiling citizens living in apparent harmony. It looked like a cross between Disneyland, a nature preserve, and Heaven.

    Yet one detail disturbed me.

    Everyone looked skinny.

    Not healthy skinny. Fragile skinny.

    The men looked as though they had never touched a barbell in their lives.

    Suddenly a terrifying possibility entered my mind.

    What if there were no gyms in space?

    What if the absence of gravity eliminated weight resistance altogether?

    What if there were protein shortages?

    What if the future consisted of floating through a giant space cylinder with the physique of an underfed accountant?

    I imagined my hard-earned muscles slowly dissolving until I resembled what bodybuilders of the era called “a tomato with toothpicks sticking out of it.”

    For a sixteen-year-old weightlifter, this was not merely a concern. It was an existential crisis.

    Around that same time, a high-school sophomore named Mary Claybourne developed a crush on me. One afternoon she approached my locker and handed me a birthday card. On the front it read:

    “If It Feels Good, Do It!”

    Inside she had written a sweet note inviting me to ask her out.

    Mary was adorable. She deserved my attention. She deserved my affection.

    Unfortunately, I was preoccupied with the possibility that civilization might soon abandon Earth and relocate to a giant orbiting habitat where progressive overload would be impossible.

    How could I focus on romance when the future of resistance training itself hung in the balance?

    How could I build a physique I could be proud of if humanity was destined to become a race of floating string beans?

    This was my problem with life. Nothing stayed put.

    One fad arrived promising salvation, only to collapse under its own absurdity. Then another emerged wearing different clothes but making the same promises. Every certainty seemed temporary. Every revelation carried an expiration date.

    I longed for permanence.

    Years later in college, I encountered Alfred North Whitehead’s Religion in the Making. Whitehead suggested that religion arises from humanity’s search for permanence in a world defined by impermanence.

    The idea haunted me because it perfectly described what I had been seeking all along.

    I kept thinking about that waterbed.

    For a brief, glorious moment, I believed I had discovered paradise. I floated in the warm womb, suspended in perfect comfort, convinced I had found a superior way of living. Then the vinyl ruptured. Suddenly I was tangled in torn plastic, immersed in a lukewarm swamp, watching paradise drain onto the carpet.

    I abandoned the waterbed and embraced the self-reliance of weight training. Iron never leaked. Barbells never developed algae. A squat rack did not require water treatment tablets.

    Yet even weightlifting failed to provide the permanence I sought.

    According to the futurists, the planet itself might become uninhabitable. Earth could implode under the weight of its own success, forcing me into exile aboard some gigantic orbiting satellite. There I would drift through the heavens as a refugee from gravity itself, searching for a place to perform deadlifts.

    The waterbed had taught me that comfort could disappear overnight. The space-colony article taught me that even the ground beneath my feet might not be permanent.

    And so the search for permanence continued.

    While other boys pursued girls, I pursued certainty. Unfortunately, certainty proved harder to find than girls.

    By sixteen, I had already sacrificed one potential romance because I was busy calculating how to maintain my biceps after humanity evacuated Earth.

  • The Astrology Queen and the Ghost Daughter

    The Astrology Queen and the Ghost Daughter

    In Rachel Syme’s “The Star-Crossed Recluse Who Brought Astrology to the Masses,” she examines the improbable rise of Linda Goodman, the woman who transformed astrology from a fringe curiosity into a cultural phenomenon. Before Goodman, astrology occupied the margins of American life, an embarrassing diversion for eccentrics and mystics. After Goodman, it became mainstream entertainment, a cosmic personality test for the masses. Her books sold tens of millions of copies by offering readers an irresistible promise: the universe had you in mind. Your zodiac sign explained your personality, your appearance, your virtues, your flaws, your romantic prospects, and perhaps even your destiny. Goodman didn’t merely sell astrology. She sold the comforting idea that the stars were paying attention.

    Syme argues that the strangeness of Goodman’s life is captured beautifully in Colurmey Ann LaFaive’s biography Follow the Signs: Searching for Linda Goodman, America’s Forgotten Astrology Queen. LaFaive first encountered Goodman as a teenager and adored her books. Yet the deeper she dug into her subject’s life, the more Goodman resisted easy admiration. She was not merely eccentric but genuinely perplexing. An oddball visionary, a successful entrepreneur, a seeker, and at times a deeply troubled woman, Goodman inhabited a reality in which ordinary boundaries between belief and fantasy seemed remarkably porous. Nowhere was this more evident than in her refusal to accept the death of her daughter Sally. Although authorities ruled the death a suicide, Goodman became convinced that her daughter remained alive somewhere in the world. Whatever fate had befallen the body found in the apartment, Goodman believed it belonged to someone else. The real Sally, she insisted, was still out there.

    Born Mary Alice Kemery in Morgantown, West Virginia, Goodman displayed an appetite for the mystical from an early age. She embraced occult ideas with enthusiasm, believing in fairies, druids, hidden wisdom, and unseen dimensions. After marrying, having two children, and divorcing, she supported herself as a single mother by hosting a radio program called Love Letters from Linda. There she read letters from soldiers separated from their loved ones and soothed listeners with a voice that projected warmth, reassurance, and hope. Long before she became an astrology celebrity, Goodman had already discovered a gift that would define her career: the ability to comfort anxious people.

    Her conversion to astrology occurred during her second marriage after reading a book on the subject. The experience altered the trajectory of her life. Goodman immersed herself in astrology, teaching herself how to construct charts and interpret celestial patterns. She began offering consultations in Manhattan, and demand for her services steadily grew. Then, in the late 1960s, she published Linda Goodman’s Sun Signs. The book became a runaway bestseller and effectively launched mainstream astrology into American popular culture. Goodman had discovered a formula as powerful as it was profitable: tell people that the cosmos has a special explanation for who they are, and they will eagerly listen.

    Success, however, did not bring stability. After divorcing her second husband and moving to Cripple Creek, Colorado, Goodman received the devastating news of Sally’s death in Manhattan. From that moment forward, her life took on the quality of a fever dream. Faced with a suicide note and evidence that convinced everyone else, Goodman remained unmoved. The body was not Sally’s, she insisted, but a double. Dreams convinced her she alone understood the truth. She wandered Manhattan in a state of near delirium, sleeping on the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral and pleading with detectives to reopen the case. Eventually she hired a man claiming to be a former CIA agent and pursued leads in Maine, where Sally had once acted. The investigation grew increasingly bizarre, culminating in confrontations with Sally’s former associates and threats designed to silence anyone who questioned Goodman’s theory.

    It is here that LaFaive’s biography becomes most compelling. Rather than offering a reverential portrait of a beloved cultural icon, she confronts the contradictions that made Goodman both fascinating and troubling. Goodman was capable of extraordinary intuition and extraordinary self-deception. She brought comfort to millions while remaining unable to accept devastating truths in her own life. LaFaive ultimately concludes that her book is, in some sense, a failure because she could not construct a neat, unified theory of Linda Goodman. Yet Syme suggests that this failure is precisely what makes the biography succeed. Goodman remains elusive, contradictory, and mysterious. She emerges not as a saint, a fraud, or a visionary, but as something more interesting: a deeply human figure whose life, like the constellations she loved to interpret, resists being connected into a perfectly coherent pattern.