Cinemorphosis

Tag: health

  • Restraint Is the Superpower You Need

    Restraint Is the Superpower You Need

    In a few months I will turn sixty-five, and at first glance I appear to be doing everything right. I swing kettlebells. I pedal my Schwinn Airdyne with the determination of a man trying to escape a prison camp. I accumulate sweat at an industrial scale. My workouts are filled with muscle, stamina, grit, and a willingness to suffer that borders on the theatrical.

    Yet I deserve no bragging rights.

    In fact, I deserve a large serving of Humble Pie with a side dish of Contrition.

    Why?

    Because after decades of lifting, pedaling, sweating, straining, and pretending to be a rugged disciple of physical culture, I somehow missed the memo about the true superpower of fitness.

    The superpower is restraint.

    Not deadlifts. Not kettlebells. Not interval training. Not grit.

    Restraint.

    The real challenge arrives not during a workout but fifteen minutes before one, when a tiny twinge of hunger appears and whispers seductive nonsense into your ear.

    “Perhaps a small snack?”

    The suggestion seems harmless enough. Maybe some apple slices. A few crackers. A little hummus. Nothing excessive. Nothing worthy of a confession.

    But this is where adulthood enters the arena.

    The inner child says, “I’m hungry.”

    The inner adult replies, “You’ll survive.”

    The child says, “Let’s eat something.”

    The adult says, “No. This feeling is temporary.”

    The child says, “But I’m uncomfortable.”

    The adult says, “A little discomfort is not an emergency.”

    The child says, “What if I starve?”

    The adult says, “You weigh 230 pounds. Starvation is not currently on the agenda.”

    The child says, “I need fuel.”

    The adult says, “You need self-control.”

    The child says, “You’re mean.”

    The adult says, “Finish your workout.”

    This conversation, repeated thousands of times over a lifetime, turns out to matter far more than any exercise program.

    Unfortunately, while I spent decades cultivating muscle and stamina, I neglected to cultivate authority over my rapacious inner child. The result is that I carry roughly thirty extra pounds around like a monument to unfinished business.

    My doctor wants me to get my annual blood work done—cholesterol, triglycerides, glucose, and the rest of the alphabet soup. But I find myself reluctant.

    Why?

    Because the last time I took the test I weighed 230 pounds.

    A year later, I still weigh 230 pounds.

    Why spend money confirming what I already know?

    Part of me wants to send my doctor a message:

    “Dear Doctor,

    I am currently too fat to appreciate another blood test. The numbers will simply inform us that I remain exactly as fat as I was last year. Instead, I am attempting to acquire the superpower of restraint. Once I possess it, I shall happily report for blood work so that both of us may enjoy the pleasant novelty of improved results.”

    The power of restraint is difficult to overstate.

    Right now I train six days a week and hover around 230 pounds. I suspect I consume something close to 3,000 calories a day.

    If I consistently reduced that intake to around 2,200 calories, I could probably eliminate half my training volume. I could abandon hours of cardio, keep a few weekly kettlebell sessions, and gradually become a lean, muscular 200-pound version of myself.

    That realization is both liberating and humiliating.

    For years I treated exercise as the hero of the story.

    Exercise is important, but restraint is the executive producer.

    Exercise burns calories.

    Restraint prevents them from arriving in the first place.

    Exercise can strengthen your body.

    Restraint changes your body.

    Exercise can improve your health.

    Restraint determines whether the improvements are visible.

    Training can carry you only so far. At some point you arrive at a fork in the road where sweat stops being the limiting factor and appetite takes over.

    That is where the battle is won or lost.

    Restraint is the exit sign leading away from adiposity and self-reproach.

    Restraint is the quiet force that makes training matter.

    Restraint is what allows effort to cash its check.

    And so, as I prepare for today’s workout, there will be no pre-exercise snack. No crackers. No apple slices. No hummus.

    Just a tall glass of Contrition.

    And perhaps, if I am fortunate, a small sip of adulthood.

  • Lost in the Cerealverse

    Lost in the Cerealverse

    I am a recovering Baby Boomer, a man spending his adult life in slow convalescence from my generation’s excesses, delusions, appetites, and spectacular lapses in judgment. We were a gullible people, easily hypnotized by charisma, pseudoscience, and televised absurdity. We watched self-proclaimed psychic Uri Geller bend spoons on The Merv Griffin Show while audiences reacted as though Moses himself had just parted the Red Sea with silverware. We read The Secret Life of Plants by Peter Tompkins and became convinced our begonias possessed emotional needs and that our geraniums required not merely sunlight and water but emotional affirmation and perhaps a little Barry Manilow. We devoured comic-book advertisements promising Charles Atlas physiques, X-ray vision, and Sea Monkeys sophisticated enough to establish maritime republics. Television commercials showed eager blondes like Farrah Fawcett rubbing shaving cream onto the cheeks of Joe Namath while exhausted housewives suffered public humiliation for failing to remove “ring around the collar.” Even bad breath became a moral catastrophe. One whiff of halitosis and television implied your marriage, career, social standing, and perhaps your begonias would collapse simultaneously.

    Then came the great cultural psychedelicization of suburbia. We witnessed Woodstock, ogled at Hugh Hefner’s satin-lined Pleasure Palace, and absorbed the full narcotic force of Hair. I can personally testify that once “The Age of Aquarius” entered the bloodstream of my San Jose neighborhood, things deteriorated rapidly. One moment neighbors were making peach preserves while drinking Florence Henderson-approved Tang beneath respectable patio umbrellas. The next moment those same backyards had been transformed into hot-tub diplomacy zones populated by nudists, swingers, divorcees, and mustachioed men named Skip discussing transcendental meditation beside tiki torches. Divorces multiplied like mushrooms after rain. Wheat germ became mandatory. Tanning without sunscreen evolved into a civic religion. Entire adults developed an inexplicable longing to go on tour with The Partridge Family. We were sold a vision of freedom defined almost entirely by consumer pleasure-seeking, and like gullible Labradors chasing a tennis ball off a cliff, we lunged after it enthusiastically.

    To this day, Boomers remain burdened by what can only be described as a Hydra-headed collection of addictions, nostalgias, and narcissistic compulsions. We benefited from affordable housing, cheap college tuition, generous job markets, and an economy that still allowed mediocrity to purchase a respectable ranch home with avocado-colored appliances. Yet instead of building ladders for future generations, many of us climbed upward and kicked the rungs away behind us while lecturing younger people about “hard work.” Retirement only intensifies the pathology. Rather than volunteering or developing civic virtue, many Boomers retreat into nostalgia pageants. They attend fantasy baseball camps where aging Hall of Famers teach sixty-eight-year-old insurance salesmen how to bunt. They go on African safaris and return home narrating their adventures in the booming voice of Commander McBragg. They attend The Rolling Stones concerts hoping the pelvic gyrations of octogenarian rock stars will somehow exempt them from mortality itself. Culture critics have noticed all this and responded with flamethrowers. Bruce Cannon Gibney portrays Boomers as empathy-deficient sociopaths in A Generation of Sociopaths. Lyman Stone argues we ruined everything. Jim Tankersley accuses us of devouring resources and fleeing responsibility like drunken Vikings looting the treasury. Meanwhile Joe Queenan observed that Boomers possess the supernatural ability to transform even the most banal activities into monumental spiritual “events” requiring extensive planning, emotional reflection, and enough data analysis to launch a moon mission.

    As someone born near the tail end of the Baby Boom in 1961, I would now like to contribute my own testimony to the prosecution. My story concerns cereal. But the word cereal is hopelessly inadequate for describing the psychological labyrinth into which my generation willingly wandered. Cereal sounds harmless, like something discussed by dietitians or dentists. No, what consumed us was something far larger and more immersive: the Cerealverse. To become lost in the Cerealverse is to undergo a form of infantilization in which the rituals, mascots, sugar rushes, and comforting repetitions of childhood cease being temporary pleasures and instead become an entire operating system for adult life. You believe you are moving forward, maturing, evolving. In reality, you are merely orbiting the same tiny constellation of appetites and nostalgic comforts over and over again like a trapped satellite incapable of escape. The Cerealverse does not merely feed you. It suspends you in a permanent state of emotional adolescence while convincing you that your stagnation is happiness.

    I can’t talk about infantilization without mentioning Cap ‘N Crunch. My mother indulged my appetite for this sugary cereal and bought me all its variations: Cap ‘N Crunch with Crunch Berries, Peanut Butter Cap ‘N Crunch, and then the renamed versions of the same-tasting cereal: Quisp, Quake, and King Vitamin. Quaker cereals took their winning formula of corn and brown sugar flavors and sold several variations with different mascots and names. 

    As a kid watching these cereals being advertised on TV, it was clear that too much of a good thing was not a problem. On the contrary, I felt compelled to taste-test all these cereal varieties the way a sommelier would taste dozens of Zinfandel wines from the same region or a musicologist would listen to hundreds of different versions of Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony.

    Eating six versions of Cap ‘N Crunch afforded me the illusion of variety while eating the same cereal over and over. I was a preadolescent boy who wanted to believe I had choices but at the same time didn’t want any choices. 

    You will sometimes hear about the man who is in his sixth marriage, and his wives in terms of appearance, temperament, and personality are all more or less the same. The man keeps going back to the same woman but wants to believe he has “found someone new” to give him the hope of a new life. 

    What you are witnessing is infantilization, the illusion that you are moving forward when in fact you are trapped in a Moebius strip. A Möbius strip creates the illusion of movement while trapping you inside the same continuous surface forever. You keep traveling forward, yet mysteriously return to the exact psychological point where you began. The horror of the Möbius strip is not that it stops you from moving. The horror is that it allows you to move forever while never truly arriving anywhere.

    To illustrate this horror properly, allow me to transport you back to the late 1970s when I worked as a bouncer at Maverick’s Disco in San Ramon, California. The job paid the princely sum of three dollars an hour—roughly ten cents above minimum wage—which at the time felt like entrance into the capitalist elite. The compensation package also included unlimited soft drinks and nightly exposure to enough polyester jumpsuits, platform shoes, and chemically fortified feathered hairdos to trigger multiple fire-code violations simultaneously. At first I considered the job a masterstroke of efficiency. I was killing two birds with one stone: earning money while prowling the disco floor performing involuntary lat spreads in tight shirts, all while socializing with an endless parade of beautiful women marinated in Jean Naté, cigarette smoke, and disco lighting. Like Cap’n Crunch, the disco promised nonstop excitement, sugar-rush pleasure, and cartoon happiness. But beneath the glitter and bass lines lurked something much darker than depression. It produced anhedonia—the condition in which the brain becomes so overexposed to stimulation that pleasure itself begins to short-circuit. When I think of anhedonia now, I think immediately of Maverick’s Disco.

    Because every night at the disco was supposedly “another exciting night,” yet every night was exactly the same. The same swaggering men in open-collared satin shirts. The same women adjusting their mascara beneath bathroom mirrors. The same Bee Gees songs vibrating through nicotine fog. The same desperate hunt for validation disguised as fun. Over time, the repetition became spiritually suffocating. Humanity itself began to look repetitive, fraudulent, vain, and emotionally trapped inside a giant behavioral loop. Working there reminded me strangely of the moment I stopped enjoying The Flintstones as a child. One afternoon I noticed that while Fred and Barney drove their stone-age car down the highway, the background scenery—trees, rocks, buildings—repeated endlessly in a looping cycle. Once I saw the wraparound background, the illusion collapsed permanently. I was no longer watching prehistoric adventure. I was watching cost-cutting animation techniques. The magic died instantly. Maverick’s Disco produced the same revelation. Every Friday and Saturday night I watched customers arrive radiating grand expectations of glamour, romance, transcendence, and reinvention. Then at closing time I watched those same faces stumble toward the parking lot glazed over with exhaustion, disappointment, loneliness, and stale gin. Yet the following weekend they returned to repeat the ritual all over again like worshippers trapped in a polyester Möbius strip. At some point I realized the disco itself had become the wraparound background of my own life, and that realization terrified me. I understood dimly that I did not merely need to quit the job. I needed to escape an entire stagnant mode of existence before I calcified inside it permanently.

    Sadly, escaping the Cerealverse—or any form of infantilized comfort addiction—is never so simple. The programming begins early. The imprinting runs deep. Even now, navigating my sixties, I remain vulnerable to the gravitational pull of bowls filled with sugary mush and edible nostalgia. Much of the blame belongs to Euell Gibbons, the patron saint of crunchy Boomer mysticism. Gibbons presented himself as a woodland prophet—a bearded naturalist survival guru who appeared in commercials for Grape-Nuts explaining with dead-serious authority that many parts of a pine tree were edible. This bizarre botanical trivia somehow qualified him, in the minds of millions of Boomers, to lecture the nation about nutrition and moral virtue. The subliminal message was unmistakable: eat Grape-Nuts and you too could survive alone in the wilderness wearing nothing but a loincloth and carrying a buck knife. Never mind that the cereal itself possessed the texture of roofing gravel and was responsible for enough chipped molars to enrich the American dental industry for decades. Eating Grape-Nuts produced a crunch so violent it could drown out the kitchen radio. Yet none of that mattered because the Boomer generation elevated cereal consumption into a kind of spiritual discipline. Granola, wheat germ, and gravel-like fiber clusters ceased being mere breakfast foods and evolved into moral performances, edible declarations that one was enlightened, natural, spiritually purified, and metabolically superior to the unwashed masses whose kitchen cabinets were not overflowing with mason jars of buckwheat groats, flaxseed meal, carob powder, and steel-cut oatmeal dense enough to patch potholes in municipal highways.

    It is impossible to contemplate the Cerealverse without returning to the early 1970s when my family shopped at a San Francisco Bay Area grocery store called Co-Op, a market proudly advertised as “owned by the people,” which gave the place the atmosphere of a food store crossed with a minor political uprising. The employees were unnervingly friendly. Many of the men had beards thick enough to shelter migratory birds and wore wilderness gear purchased from the store’s adjoining “Wilderness Supply Store,” a retail annex catering to customers who wished to survive both societal collapse and a weekend camping trip near Mount Tamalpais. Everyone at Co-Op seemed to exist somewhere on the Hippy Spectrum, ranging from mellow acoustic-guitar environmentalist to full-blown anti-capitalist survival mystic. The store boasted the town’s first daycare center for children while parents shopped and the first recycling center long before suburban America learned to pretend it cared about the planet. Alongside bins of organic produce sat a modest but influential bookstore stocked with sacred countercultural scripture: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, The Secret Life of Plants, Chariots of the Gods?, The Peter Principle, and towering above them all like the Vegetarian Torah itself, Diet for a Small Planet. The food inventory looked less like groceries than supplies for an agrarian uprising: carob honey ice cream, wheat germ, granola, brown rice, tofu, Japanese yams, and alfalfa-sprout cultivation kits complete with mason jars so suburbanites could grow revolutionary vegetation beside their kitchen sinks.

    Co-Op was therefore more than a grocery store. It was a sanctuary for people rebelling against what they ominously called The Man. Eating granola drenched in organic honey was not merely breakfast but a political declaration, a crunchy repudiation of corporate America performed with wooden spoons and sandals. Every overflowing bowl of wheat germ signaled moral superiority over the poor unenlightened masses still eating Wonder Bread and Frosted Flakes beneath the fluorescent tyranny of Safeway. Yet the movement possessed a glaring contradiction large enough to require its own waistline. For all their rhetoric about health, moderation, and spiritual purification, many of these granola apostles suffered from a condition I came to think of as Granola Belly. They consumed calorie-dense granola, wheat germ, honey, nuts, seeds, and carob desserts with the evangelical intensity of people who believed organic calories somehow obeyed different laws of thermodynamics. As I wandered the aisles with my parents, I observed these rotund revolutionaries waddling past bins of lentils and herbal teas, their expanding stomachs bouncing beneath ponchos and safari vests while they discussed sustainable farming and the evils of processed sugar between bites of honey-coated granola containing enough caloric density to sustain minor civilizations.

    Looking back, the granola faithful of the Co-Op era were the spiritual ancestors of a distinctly Boomer contradiction: the fusion of lofty ideals with spectacular self-indulgence. They strutted through their people-owned utopia imagining themselves guerrilla warriors in the battle against corporate oppression while simultaneously consuming enough “natural” food to feed small Scandinavian fishing villages. Their granola bowls became sacramental objects, edible proof of enlightenment and rebellion. Yet like so many Boomer crusades, the movement eventually collapsed beneath the weight of its own appetites. They denounced consumer culture while buying fifty-pound sacks of artisanal oats. They preached moderation while drowning yogurt in rivers of organic honey. They fantasized about escaping modern decadence while polishing off entire tubs of carob ice cream. Their growing bellies became physical manifestations of a generation uniquely skilled at confusing indulgence with liberation. Nothing better captures the Boomer spirit than a man in hiking boots and a macramé vest lecturing others about corporate tyranny while absentmindedly eating twelve hundred calories of “healthy” granola.

    Like those self-indulgent Boomer hippies waddling through Co-Op with honey in their beards and granola in their intestines, I too became trapped inside the Cerealverse. My attraction was not merely to cereal’s sugary, infantile comfort but to its deeper promise: the fantasy of a frictionless existence. As a preadolescent boy fantasizing about growing into a baseball slugger with the heroic bulk of Reggie Jackson and Greg Luzinski, I imagined myself living as a carefree bachelor whose weekly grocery shopping consisted entirely of loading a cart with towering stacks of cereal boxes—Froot Loops, Sugar Pops, Cap’n Crunch, Count Chocula, and whatever other brightly colored sugar delivery systems the cereal industry was using to infantilize America’s youth. In my fantasy, adulthood was not about responsibility, marriage, or civic engagement. It was about ease. Convenience. Minimal friction between appetite and gratification. My spiritual guide for this philosophy was Uncle Norman from The Courtship of Eddie’s Father. In one episode, Uncle Norman explained to young Eddie that he had discovered the secret to avoiding dishes and wasting time at the dinner table: eat every meal standing over the kitchen sink. Demonstrating the method by consuming an entire head of lettuce directly above the drain basin, Norman proudly explained that his technique eliminated unnecessary cleanup, table setting, and other exhausting rituals associated with civilization itself. At that moment my brain detonated with revelation. The Uncle Norman Method became not merely a humorous TV gimmick but a governing life principle that would shape my habits, aspirations, and psychological orientation for decades.

    Aspiring to become a disciple of Uncle Norman, I began envisioning an entire lifestyle engineered around minimizing friction with reality. Why make a bed when a sleeping bag could simply be flopped across the mattress indefinitely like a tarp covering abandoned machinery? Why water plants when plastic foliage required no emotional commitment? Why learn to cook when cereal, toast, bananas, and yogurt cartons could sustain human existence with minimal labor? I planned to work within a five-mile radius of my home and only date women living inside my zip code because romance should never involve excessive driving. I saw no need for a laundry hamper since dirty clothes could be deposited directly into the washing machine drum until a sufficient mound accumulated to justify pressing START. Color coordination became unnecessary because I would own only black clothing, transforming my wardrobe into the textile equivalent of a low-budget European art film. Since bedsheets themselves struck me as unnecessary complications, the linen closet could instead house protein powder, brewer’s yeast, and protein bars. Grocery shopping would always occur during low-traffic morning hours to avoid crowds and unnecessary human interaction. Before entering restaurants, I would study menus online with military diligence so I could order instantly without burdening waiters or fellow diners with indecision. The moment the bill arrived, my credit card would already be positioned and ready for extraction like a gunslinger preparing for a duel. Most importantly, I vowed never to own a truck because trucks attract acquaintances who suddenly remember your existence whenever couches need moving.

    It is painfully clear to me now that the Uncle Norman Method emerged directly from the Cerealverse and that its deeper logic depended upon disengagement from the world itself. Infantilization, after all, is partly a yearning to return to the womb—to retreat from complexity, responsibility, unpredictability, and emotional entanglement. Depression often disguises itself as convenience. You tell yourself you are simplifying your life when in reality you are shrinking it. The Uncle Norman Method was not really about efficiency. It was about withdrawal. It was a way of quietly informing the world: “I can no longer process your noise, obligations, and chaos. I am dimming the lights, retreating into my cave, and marinating in my routines. Please do not disturb me unless absolutely necessary.” There is an episode of Seinfeld in which Jerry remarks that a man wearing gray sweatpants in public is essentially announcing that he has given up on life. Cereal as a staple food operates the same way. A bowl of cereal declares that the effort required to create a meal exceeds your emotional willingness to participate in existence. The Uncle Norman Method therefore was not enlightened minimalism. It was glorified laziness camouflaging exhaustion, melancholy, and retreat from adulthood beneath the sugary crunch of processed grain.

    I can assure you that as a man in his sixties with a wife and teenage daughters, behaviors aligned with the Uncle Norman Method are not greeted as signs of enlightened efficiency. They are treated more like symptoms requiring intervention. By Friday evening I am often so psychologically depleted from the workweek that the very idea of preparing dinner or driving somewhere for takeout feels like being assigned a humanitarian relief mission in a war zone. In these moments, the seductive logic of the Cerealverse returns with full narcotic force. More than once I have proposed what I considered a magnificent family innovation: “Oatmeal Night.” I present the concept with the enthusiasm of a Silicon Valley disruptor unveiling revolutionary technology. “Picture it,” I proclaim. “A glorious oatmeal bar! A Dutch oven filled with perfectly cooked steel-cut oats. Glass bowls overflowing with blueberries, bananas, diced sweet potatoes, walnuts, pecans, raisins, chocolate chips—an evening of rustic abundance and nutritional splendor!” My family responds as though I have proposed surviving winter inside a roadside bunker while rationing grain during the Dust Bowl. Their synchronized eye rolls contain a single unified message: Dad is once again trying to convert exhaustion into philosophy. They refuse to participate in my retreat from civilization disguised as Scandinavian peasant cuisine.

    Because to live inside the Cerealverse is ultimately a form of exile. It is separation—not merely from cooking, effort, or dishes—but from life itself. I am reminded of something Stephen Colbert once said while discussing hell with Bill Maher. Colbert remarked that hell is separation from God. That definition stayed with me because it perfectly describes the spiritual condition of the Cerealverse. To be trapped there is to become severed from vitality, intimacy, effort, sensuality, and communal joy. You become disconnected from the very things that make existence rich and earthly. Fortunately, if there exists such a condemned state, there must also exist its opposite—a glimpse of heaven. To understand that heaven, we must travel back to 1969 and the first time I tasted homemade salsa. Our neighbors, Mike and Felice Orozco, made salsa entirely from ingredients grown in nearby backyard gardens. The salsa sat upon the coffee table inside a volcanic-looking tureen as though it were some sacred artifact requiring both reverence and caution. You could smell it the instant you entered the house: chilies, onions, garlic, tomatoes—alive, aggressive, unapologetically real. The aroma alone made every jarred supermarket salsa taste like liquefied bureaucracy.

    And then there was the color. Not the synthetic red of restaurant chains or the dull industrial redness of mass production, but a deep ruby crimson possessing the vivid authority of something born directly from sun, soil, sweat, and care. I have eaten excellent salsa across decades of restaurants and dinner tables, but nothing has ever equaled the salsa Felice Orozco taught my mother to make in the late 1960s. Even now, when a Mexican restaurant serves a salsa remotely approaching that standard—even halfway—I regard it as evidence of moral seriousness in the kitchen. Because Felice Orozco’s salsa was never merely food. It was philosophy disguised as a condiment. It carried within it a quiet but radical argument about what matters in human life. Families passing down recipes are not merely exchanging ingredients; they are transmitting devotion, memory, discipline, continuity, and love. 

    Unlike the frictionless emptiness promised by the Cerealverse, this salsa required labor, patience, mess, participation, and community. There was nothing optimized about it. No shortcuts. No convenience strategy. Just human beings gathering together, giving their time, energy, and affection to produce something fleeting and beautiful. That salsa was a masterpiece not because it was authentic, artisanal, or fashionable, but because it was made by people who cared about one another deeply enough to create something unforgettable together.

    As someone who has spent decades trapped inside the Cerealverse and beholden to the Uncle Norman Method, I can assure you that Felice Orozco’s salsa was love itself, a gift from God. 

  • Swamp Creature

    Swamp Creature

    When my wife and I had twins in 2010, she insisted they attend preschool. I argued that preschool was unnecessary and vaguely ridiculous, little more than an expensive holding pen filled with finger paint, gluten-free crackers, and parents humblebragging about their toddlers’ “advanced verbal skills.” My wife countered that I was thinking like a Boomer who had grown up in a civilization where childhood still contained dead zones of unstructured time and where kindergarten did not resemble an Ivy League admissions process. In today’s world, she explained, failing to place your children in preschool was viewed almost as a form of negligence because children were expected to arrive at kindergarten already preloaded with socialization protocols, emotional vocabulary, and rudimentary STEM competencies. 

    What she was really telling me was something far larger and more unsettling: I came from an era so saturated with available time that it shaped not merely our schedules but our consciousness itself. Back then, the American Dream still felt obtainable without turning every waking hour into an optimization project. We had entire Sundays available for glorious wastefulness. Families would leave home at nine in the morning and spend the entire day at the Oakland Coliseum watching double-header baseball games under the blazing sun, eating colossal hot dogs drowning in mustard and sauerkraut, spilling popcorn across their laps, and sitting through nine-hour marathons of suspense, boredom, beer fumes, arguments with umpires, and fireworks erupting over the outfield at night. Nobody returned home resentful about “losing a day.” The whole point was to lose it.

    Only a fool from my generation would lecture younger people today about “slowing down” or offer some suffocating Hallmark bromide about stopping to smell the roses. We had the luxury of wasting time because economically and culturally the walls had not yet closed in around us. Housing costs had not yet mutated into intergenerational psychological warfare. Child-rearing had not yet become a hypercompetitive résumé-building campaign beginning at age three. 

    Boomers were spoiled in ways we barely understood, and part of being spoiled is existing without boundaries while believing such freedom is morally normal. Even our forms of wasting time were fundamentally different from today’s digital diversions. Squandering your life doomscrolling through TikTok or vaporizing hours inside algorithmic entertainment ecosystems produces a particular kind of dehumanization because every click, pause, and emotional twitch is harvested, quantified, and monetized. Your wasted life becomes data. By contrast, losing yourself for ten hours at a baseball game, a shopping mall, or wandering around town with friends had a strange earthly grandeur to it. You felt embedded in the physical world rather than absorbed into invisible software architecture. Even idleness carried a feeling of privilege, expansiveness, and freedom.

    Parents in my era barely supervised their children at all, which now sounds less like parenting and more like a federally unsanctioned wilderness experiment. After breakfast we were effectively jettisoned into the outdoors like feral raccoons and not expected home until dinner. Our parents had only the vaguest idea where we were, what we were doing, or whether we remained technically alive. We rode bicycles through construction sites littered with exposed nails, lumber piles, electrical wire, and trenches deep enough to conceal small military operations. We launched homemade ramps over creeks in reckless attempts to imitate Evel Knievel. We trespassed through cow pastures, ravines, and forbidden properties specifically because they were marked with rusty barbed-wire fences and gigantic DO NOT ENTER signs that functioned less as deterrents than invitations to glory. We were chased by bulls, guard dogs, furious ranchers, and occasionally pellet-gun fire. We built forts, detonated firecrackers, swung from vines, crashed into poison oak, and stumbled upon rattlesnakes, black widows, coyotes, bobcats, and the occasional mountain lion. Then at night we returned home filthy, bleeding lightly, and coated in dust while our parents merely instructed us to take a bath before inhaling enormous portions of meatloaf, chili, tacos, and turkey pot pies so we’d possess enough calories to resume our campaign of reckless mayhem the next morning. 

    There is something about boys left alone for huge stretches of time in woods, fields, and ravines that sends the imagination into overdrive. The chaos, enchantment, stupidity, and myth-making generated by unsupervised childhood cannot be replicated inside carefully managed schedules overseen by anxious adults armed with hydration packs and developmental benchmarks.

    This abundance of time made people of my generation feel special in ways that are difficult to explain to those raised in later eras of acceleration, optimization, and perpetual anxiety. Because time felt plentiful, life itself felt expansive. You could drift. You could loiter. You could waste entire afternoons wandering shopping malls, watching baseball games, sitting in diners, riding bicycles nowhere in particular, or staring at the ceiling listening to records without feeling the moral panic that you were “falling behind.” 

    But that feeling of abundance carried hidden dangers. Comfort can seduce a person into passivity. Your environment begins shaping you slowly, almost imperceptibly, the way coral spreads across a reef. Little by little, routines harden around you. What once felt like freedom quietly calcifies into a loss of agency.

    This story is really about the gradual loss of agency—or more precisely, how close I came to surrendering it completely. I had too much time, too little supervision, and a desperate hunger for identity, so I drifted into Walt’s Gym believing it was a sanctuary where boys became men through discipline, suffering, and muscle. In reality, it was something far stranger and more dangerous. It was the equivalent of the island in The Adventures of Pinocchio where wayward boys are seduced into becoming donkeys, only our transformation occurred beneath flickering fluorescent lights amid mildew, barbells, and the smell of stale protein shakes. We thought we were forging ourselves into superior beings, but slowly the environment began shaping us instead. The gym’s mythology, vanity, arrested development, and obsessive rituals accumulated over us like swamp sediment until many of us lost the ability to distinguish self-creation from self-entrapment. In my case, I did not become a donkey. I became something more amphibious—a creature half human, half swamp thing, marinating for years in a fetid ecosystem of male insecurity while mistaking that slow psychological calcification for transcendence. 

    By the time I was fourteen in 1976, Walt’s Gym had become my personal Mothership, where my lifeblood beat and I felt the life force raging inside of me. The gym was in Hayward, California—a hallowed hall of iron that had started its humble life as a chicken coop in the 1950s. 

    The gym was a biological catastrophe masquerading as a fitness facility, a steaming swamp of fungus, bacteria, mildew, and human despair waiting to colonize the flesh of the unwary. The locker room floors glistened with suspicious moisture that no mop, prayer, or municipal intervention could ever fully eradicate. Members spoke in hushed, traumatized tones about incurable cases of athlete’s foot and whispered of fungal strains so exotic and aggressive that even the world’s most decorated mycologists would recoil in professional defeat. Men entered the showers with healthy skin and emerged looking as though they had contracted diseases previously encountered only by sailors returning from cursed islands in the South Pacific.

    Somewhere inside this microbial wetland allegedly lived an enormous frog the professional wrestlers had affectionately named Charlie. Charlie supposedly lurked among the fungal shower stalls like the gym’s amphibious patron saint. Though I never personally saw him, the wrestlers swore he existed. They described him with such conviction that I found myself wondering whether Charlie was real or merely a hallucination conjured by men who had absorbed too many chair shots to the skull. Perhaps Charlie was not literally a frog at all but a prophetic vision born from the gym’s diseased subconscious. The longer I trained there, the more plausible this theory became.

    After all, what were we becoming ourselves?

    We marinated daily inside this fetid ecosystem breathing mold spores, soaking in swamp humidity, and absorbing the psychic residue of failed marriages, steroid rage, and protein-induced flatulence. Like Pinocchio slowly transforming into a donkey through moral corruption, perhaps we too were undergoing a grotesque metamorphosis. Given enough years beneath flickering fluorescent lights, enough fungal exposure, enough sets of squats and bench presses performed in the gym bog, perhaps we would all eventually evolve into bloated amphibious creatures squatting permanently beside mildew-coated drains.

    Perhaps Charlie was not the gym mascot.

    Perhaps Charlie was our future.

    The locker room was perpetually occupied by a cast of characters who seemed to have wandered out of a grimy noir film. There was always some bankrupt divorcee draped in a velour top and gold chain, hogging the payphone for marathon sessions with his attorney, discussing the bleakest of life choices and the staggering attorney fees required to sweep his sordid past under the rug.

    Out back was an unused swimming pool, its water murky and black, a cauldron of plague and dead rats. Walt, the gym’s owner, had a peculiar ritual. On occasion, he would stroll outside, brandishing a pool net like a scepter, scoop up some unfortunate deceased creature, and hold it aloft for all to see. This grim ceremony was invariably met with a thunderous round of applause from the gym-goers, after which Walt would toss the cadaver into a nearby dumpster and take an exaggerated bow as if he were performing some grand Shakespearean drama.

    Walt’s Gym also boasted a lonely octogenarian named Wally, who claimed to be the model for human anatomy textbooks. Wally’s routine was nothing short of legendary: He would work out for hours, then spend an equal amount of time in the sauna and shower, concluding his ritual with a complete-body talcum powder treatment. When he spoke to you, he did so embalmed in a giant talcum cloud, a ghostly specter of gym dedication.

    The radio played the same hits on a relentless loop: Elvin Bishop’s “Fooled Around and Fell in Love,” The Eagles’ “New Kid in Town,” and Norman Connors’ “You Are My Starship.” As a kid navigating an adult world, the gym was my barbershop, a public square where I eavesdropped on conversations about divorces, hangovers, gambling addictions, financial ruin, the staggering costs of sending kids to college, and the burdens of caring for elderly parents.

    It dawned on me then that I was at fourteen the perfect age: old enough to grow big and strong, yet young enough to be spared the drudgery and tedium of adult life. The consequences of making the gym my second home, I realized, was never growing up. The gym encouraged me to cling to the juvenile dream of muscle-bound glory and to sidestep the soul-crushing responsibilities that awaited the grown-ups.

    One of the twisted delights of haunting Walt’s Gym in the mid-70s was rubbing shoulders with Big Time Wrestling stars who looked like they had been plucked straight off my TV screen and dropped into my sweaty, adolescent reality. Training next to legends like Kinji Shibuya, Pedro Morales, and Hector Cruz was a dream—until my big mouth and cluelessness repeatedly turned it into a farcical nightmare.

    Despite sporting muscles aplenty for a fourteen-year-old, I was hopelessly deficient in common sense. Case in point: during a cable lat row session with Hector Cruz, I naively mentioned that I’d heard rumors wrestling was fake. Hector, his forehead etched with jagged scars like some sort of horrifying topographical map, shot back, “Look at these scars on my face! Do they look fake to you?” I silently pondered how plastic surgery could be a pretty convincing art form.

    Another day, I spotted a random towel draped over the calf machine and, deciding it was fair game, used it to mop my sweaty brow. Within seconds, a man who looked like he bench-pressed trucks for breakfast sprang off his bench press, accusing me of towel theft and threatening to deliver a comprehensive ass-whooping if I weren’t such a dumb kid. Lesson learned: gym towels are not community property, and swiping one is akin to committing grand larceny.

    But my greatest gym faux pas involved my enthusiastic grunting and screaming during heavy lifts. Thinking my primal roars added a touch of drama to my workouts, I was oblivious to the irritation I was causing. That is, until a competitive bodybuilder, with muscles on his muscles and a glare that could melt steel, took me aside. He explained that my caveman screams were fraying the nerves of the other gym-goers, and if I didn’t tone it down, one of them would gladly pummel me into silence, likely to the cheers of the entire gym.

    I discovered that surviving Walt’s Gym wasn’t just about lifting heavy weights; it was about adhering to an unspoken social contract where courtesy and modesty were essential currencies. Failure to comply meant facing the very real possibility of an ass-beating, a lesson I learned the hard way while navigating the gladiatorial arena of mid-70s bodybuilding.

    Another defining feature of the gym was the strange brotherhood formed around a common obsession. Every regular member had seen Pumping Iron, and after seeing it, none of us were ever quite the same again. Before the film, we merely possessed a vague desire to become bigger, stronger, and somehow more formidable than ordinary civilians trapped in the soft upholstered world outside the gym doors. But after witnessing Arnold Schwarzenegger on the screen, our obsession acquired theology. Arnold was no longer merely a bodybuilder. He became our Guiding Shepherd, our Teutonic prophet of hypertrophy, the smiling Austrian messiah who descended from Mount Olympus carrying revelations about biceps, destiny, and competitive supremacy. Watching Arnold speak proudly and unapologetically about bodybuilding gave us the emotional jolt of witnessing the Second Coming, only instead of salvation through holiness, the path to transcendence involved incline presses, tuna fish, and progressive overload.

    Many of the men at the gym described seeing the film in terms usually reserved for religious conversion experiences. Before Pumping Iron, they were merely lifting weights. Afterward, they had Purpose. One afternoon I was training with a bodybuilder who embodied this transformation perfectly—a tall, deeply tanned fireman who had recently placed as a finalist in the Mr. California contest. He looked like a cross between a Marlboro advertisement and a chemically enhanced Viking philosopher. He had thick blond bushy hair, a huge mustache, black horn-rimmed glasses, and the swaggering confidence of a man who believed his lats deserved constitutional protections. Between sets he spoke about Arnold with the reverence medieval monks reserved for saints.

    The fireman loaded more than three hundred pounds onto the bench press and began repping the weight with violent authority while the gym filled with the metallic groan of bending steel and testosterone-fueled grunting. After finishing the set, he stood up slowly, breathing hard, then turned toward the mirror and flexed his chest. His pectoral muscles surged outward in thick slabs beneath his skin like fighting pit bulls trying to escape a burlap sack. The sight transfixed him. He stared at his own reflection with awe bordering on spiritual intoxication, as though Arnold himself had briefly entered his body and bestowed upon him a sacred glimpse of bodybuilding glory.

    Only fourteen years old, I wanted desperately to follow in the footsteps of the gym’s top bodybuilders. Watching them flex before the mirrors with narcotic self-admiration, I became convinced that muscle was more than tissue. Muscle was salvation. Muscle gave a man sex appeal, authority, confidence, and immunity from humiliation. The massive men roaming the gym floor did not merely appear strong; they looked complete, as if every insecurity, rejection, and private terror had been welded beneath layers of chest, shoulder, and arm development. I wanted that transformation for myself with religious intensity.

    So I devised a five-year plan.

    By nineteen, I would be huge, shredded, and competition-ready. While other boys worried about homework, driver’s licenses, and awkward conversations with girls, I was calculating protein intake, studying arm measurements, and fantasizing about posing beneath hot stage lights glazed in baby oil and triumph. In my imagination, the crowd would gasp at my physique while judges nodded gravely at the emergence of a new genetic phenomenon. I would no longer be mistaken for a dreamer, a fantasist, or some gawky suburban oddball hypnotized by muscle magazines. No. The contest stage would serve as my rite of passage, the proving ground where I would finally separate myself from pretenders and dabblers.

    That was the deeper appeal of bodybuilding: it promised brutal clarity.

    Either you possessed the discipline to transform yourself into something extraordinary or you did not.

    There would be no hiding behind charm, excuses, intellectual abstractions, or family pedigree. The body itself became evidence. Standing before the mirror at fourteen, I believed with absolute sincerity that if I could build a magnificent physique, I too would become magnificent. I was not training merely to gain muscle. I was training to manufacture an entirely new human being—one who radiated certainty instead of confusion, dominance instead of fear, and purpose instead of longing.

    Technically, I did achieve my dream in 1981 when I placed runner-up in the Mr. Teenage San Francisco bodybuilding competition. The seven years of lifting, posing, dieting, flexing, mirror worship, and protein consumption had produced tangible results. I had become one of those bronzed young men standing beneath hot stage lights while judges scrutinized my deltoids as though evaluating military architecture. But this story is not really about trophies, symmetry, or muscle definition. The physique itself, despite all the bulging spectacle, is almost beside the point. What matters is what those years inside Walt’s Gym did to me psychologically. To understand that damage properly, we must travel exactly one week before the competition.

    By then I had reduced my carbohydrates to near-starvation levels in preparation for the contest. The strategy worked. My physique looked carved from polished teakwood. Veins twisted across my arms like blue electrical wiring beneath the skin. Every muscle stood out in high-definition relief. But there was an unexpected side effect: my clothes no longer fit. At 180 pounds of deeply tanned and surgically lean teenage flesh, my pants hung off me like borrowed garments from a scarecrow. This required a new wardrobe, which led me one afternoon into the fitting room of a Pleasanton shopping mall clothing store. While I stood behind gauzy curtains trying on slacks with the solemnity of a diplomat preparing for Geneva peace talks, I overheard two attractive young women outside arguing over which one of them should ask me out. They were both beautiful. As far as I was concerned, they were welcome to form a coalition government and date me jointly. The problem was that I had absolutely no idea how to speak to women. That was the tragic oversight in my years at Walt’s Gym. I had trained my biceps, triceps, chest, back, and abdominals with fanatical precision, yet somehow forgotten to develop an actual personality. I could flex my arm and cut glass with the peak of my bicep, but socially I remained underdeveloped, less human than amphibious—closer in spirit to Charlie the locker-room swamp frog than to an emotionally functioning adult male.

    Outside the fitting room, the women’s voices became louder and more competitive, as though I were a prize steer at a county fair. Their escalating excitement filled me not with confidence but with terror. I imagined them wrestling each other atop the store carpet in pursuit of the spoils while I remained frozen behind the curtain like a malfunctioning mannequin. This was supposed to be my moment of triumph. Seven years earlier I had entered Walt’s Gym believing muscle would transform me into a magnetic, self-assured Alpha Male. Instead, when confronted with actual female attention, I panicked and projected such overwhelming aloofness that it was like scattering banana peels at my own feet and watching every romantic possibility slip away in slow motion. I appeared arrogant, inaccessible, and full of myself when in reality I was merely frightened—a timid imbecile hiding inside a fortress of muscle.

    For a brief period spanning my mid-teens into my early twenties, I possessed the kind of looks that would have caused the men featured in Cosmopolitan’s “Bachelor of the Month” spreads to spiral into despair. But physically maturing and psychologically maturing are not the same process, and my emotional development lagged years behind the body I had painstakingly engineered through almost daily resistance training. The entire bodybuilding quest was supposed to culminate in sophistication: a man gliding confidently through life inside custom-tailored Italian suits while women admired his masculine authority. Instead, after years spent among men trapped in varying stages of arrested development, I emerged as a heavily muscled beefcake possessing the personality of a wilted houseplant. I had constructed the body of a Greek god only to inhabit it like a bewildered tourist who had wandered accidentally onto Mount Olympus. 

    My exterior was complete—bronzed, intimidating, and sculpted to near absurdity—but the interior remained unfinished, a psychological construction site littered with emotional scaffolding and giant WORK IN PROGRESS signs flapping in the wind.

  • The Teen Who Had It All Figured Out

    The Teen Who Had It All Figured Out

    I was sure my teenage bodybuilding quest would bring me fame and fortune. Signs of my impending greatness seemed everywhere. Not only had I developed an unusually muscular physique for a seventeen-year-old, but I also believed I possessed extraordinary networking abilities that boded well for my future as a world-famous bodybuilder and tropical gym entrepreneur. After all, while ordinary teenagers worried about algebra quizzes and acne, I was training alongside professional athletes and cultivating what I considered elite social capital.

    At The Weight Room in Hayward, for example, I worked out regularly with John Matuszak, the massive NFL defensive end known to fans as “The Tooz.” For reasons still unclear to me, Matuszak had taken a liking to me, and I interpreted this as further confirmation that destiny had marked me for greatness.

    Between sets of bench presses, T-bar rows, and seated behind-the-neck presses, we sang along to whatever soft-rock ballad drifted through the gym speakers. Watching the Tooz and me harmonize with Nicolette Larson singing Neil Young’s “Lotta Love” was one of those surreal spectacles only the late 1970s could produce. There we were surrounded by clanging iron, ammonia salts, sweat puddles, and steroidal aggression while two men built like escaped Vikings serenaded one another with tender California pop lyrics.

    People often spoke fearfully of Matuszak’s temper, but during our workouts the atmosphere felt less like an NFL locker room and more like a chemically enhanced Kumbaya retreat.

    Television could not adequately prepare you for Matuszak in person. He was a biological event. Standing close to seven feet tall and weighing nearly three hundred pounds, he somehow appeared lanky and gigantic simultaneously, as though his limbs had been stretched by industrial machinery. He wore his beard and long hair with the wild authority of a mountain outlaw, and his pale predatory eyes possessed the fixed intensity of a hawk searching for movement in distant grasslands.

    One afternoon he sat beside me on a bench while the gym speakers played England Dan and John Ford Coley’s syrupy anthem “Love Is the Answer.” The sentimental lyrics appeared to offend him on a molecular level. He slowly curled his lips, looked at me with utter disgust, and muttered:

    “Bullshit.”

    Then he lay beneath four hundred pounds on the bench press and began repping the weight with terrifying force, repeating the word between repetitions as though contempt itself had become a pre-workout stimulant.

    In addition to networking with John Matuszak, I cultivated what I considered another crucial professional alliance: my relationship with local fitness legend Joe Corsi. In the bodybuilding ecosystem of the San Francisco East Bay, Corsi was practically a minor deity. He sold more supplements, weight-gain powders, and fitness equipment than anyone in the region, and his credentials appeared unimpeachable to my teenage mind because he had once appeared alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger on an episode of The Streets of San Francisco. To me, this television appearance elevated him beyond ordinary humanity and into the sacred cinematic realm of bodybuilding aristocracy.

    Corsi owned a fitness store next door to The Weight Room, and he frequently wandered into the gym to observe the lifters like a seasoned jungle naturalist inspecting promising wildlife. He was already in his late sixties, but he dressed with the flamboyant confidence of a retired nightclub vampire who had recently discovered Nautilus equipment. His uniform consisted of a sleeveless black one-piece jumpsuit in the style of Jack LaLanne, complete with a gold zipper pulled halfway down to reveal a thick mat of black chest hair. His arms remained impressively full and vascular for a man his age, though gravity had begun its slow negotiations with his triceps. His hair was dyed a shade of black so aggressive it looked chemically weaponized. His eyebrows were equally dark, thick, and glossy, giving him the appearance of a man who had personally declared war on aging and refused to surrender despite mounting evidence.

    Overall, Corsi resembled a geriatric Dracula who had traded bloodlust for protein powder.

    Whenever he saw me training with Matuszak, he showered me with praise. He said I had “world-class structure,” “exceptional symmetry,” and “champion potential.” At seventeen, these remarks struck me not as casual gym flattery but as contractual prophecy. I became convinced that Corsi would soon sponsor me in the same way Joe Weider had sponsored Arnold Schwarzenegger. Any day now, I imagined, trucks would begin arriving at my mother’s house delivering crates of supplements, industrial tubs of protein powder, and enormous butcher-paper-wrapped T-bone steaks intended to fuel my ascent to bodybuilding immortality.

    When this glorious sponsorship materialized, my mother would finally understand that I was not joking about bypassing conventional adulthood altogether. College would be exposed for the pointless detour I knew it to be.

    Unfortunately, my mother remained skeptical.

    After I graduated from high school, she badgered me daily about my future with the persistence of an IRS auditor.

    “What exactly are you going to do with your life?”

    “I already told you,” I said confidently. “Joe Corsi is going to sponsor me.”

    She would stare at me for a moment, then deliver the kind of devastating realism only a financially stressed mother can summon.

    “Well,” she said, “this morning I opened the front door to get the newspaper and I didn’t see a pile of T-bone steaks on the porch. You sure you’ve got a lock on this?”

    Of course, I was sure. What I lacked in viability, I made up for with cocky, self-righteous rectitude.

  • Mr. Olympia Goes to College

    Mr. Olympia Goes to College

    I was the worst college student imaginable. Not mediocre. Not distracted. Catastrophically misaligned with the stated purpose of higher education. But before we get to the academic wreckage, we must begin in the fall of 1979 when I arrived at the university at the age of seventeen carrying not intellectual ambition but bodybuilding delusions of tropical grandeur.

    At the time, I was an Olympic weightlifting champion and competitive bodybuilder whose life plan possessed all the sophistication of a teenage steroid fantasy scribbled on a cocktail napkin. I intended to become Mr. Olympia, conquer Mr. Universe, achieve international fame, and eventually leverage my bronzed magnificence into opening a gym somewhere in the Bahamas. My career goals were astonishingly clear: maintain a beautiful body and construct an entire existence devoted to preserving that beautiful body indefinitely.

    As an added strategic advantage, I was deeply attracted to the tropical lifestyle because it minimized the need for clothing. I hated clothes with almost theological intensity. Clothing felt restrictive, oppressive, and fundamentally hostile to my vision of human flourishing. The moment I finished dressing, my immediate impulse was usually to tear everything off again like a deranged orangutan trapped in formalwear.

    This is why the Bahamas seemed ideal.

    No parkas. No wool sweaters. No suffocating layers of civilization.

    Just tanning oil, ocean air, and perpetual existence in bodybuilding briefs.

    People today talk endlessly about “life hacks,” usually involving productivity apps or minimalist desk setups. Allow me to offer a superior life hack developed by my seventeen-year-old brain in 1979: eliminate clothes altogether. There’s your optimization strategy. Imagine the savings alone. No suits. No winter jackets. No agonizing over fashion. Merely rotate between several pairs of Speedos while glistening permanently beneath the Caribbean sun like a narcissistic sea mammal.

    This, I believed, was adulthood perfected.

    Meanwhile, the university mistakenly assumed I had arrived to pursue an education.

    Whenever I shared this magnificent vision of my future with my recently divorced mother—who was meanwhile trying to perform minor financial miracles just to keep us solvent—she reacted with the exhausted realism of someone who had actually paid utility bills before.

    “Don’t be a nincompoop,” she would say. “You can’t isolate yourself from the world on some tropical island.”

    But I was seventeen, chemically saturated with bodybuilding mythology, and utterly immune to practical concerns.

    “Don’t worry, Mom,” I assured her with the confidence of a man who had never balanced a checkbook. “I’ll be well connected. I’ll invite all my celebrity bodybuilding friends to visit me.”

    Then I would begin listing names with reverential excitement as though reading apostles from sacred scripture: Frank Zane, Tom Platz, Robbie Robinson, Kalman Szkalak, Danny Padilla, Ron Teufel, Pete Grymkowski, Rudy Hermosillo. In my imagination, these men were not distant figures from glossy muscle magazines but intimate companions who would naturally gather around my future Bahamian gym drinking pineapple protein shakes while discussing symmetry, calf development, and the spiritual dimensions of hypertrophy.

    I envisioned myself lounging beside them under swaying palms while explaining how bodybuilding had catalyzed my personal metamorphosis into a bronzed titan of self-actualization.

    My mother stared at me with the expression of a woman realizing she had accidentally raised a delusional peacock.

    “You sound ridiculous,” she said flatly. “For one thing, those aren’t your friends. They’re from your muscle magazines. I’m not stupid.”

    Her remark landed with the force of unwanted reality.

    To me, however, the distinction between celebrity and friendship still seemed negotiable. After all, I had spent hundreds of hours studying these men’s physiques in magazines with such devotional intensity that I felt we already shared a profound spiritual bond. Surely if they someday met me on my tropical bodybuilding island, glistening heroically in tanning oil while handing them frosty pineapple shakes, they too would recognize the connection.

  • The Limits of Gasbaggery

    The Limits of Gasbaggery

    Comparison is a reliable factory of misery. At sixty-four, with retirement in sight, good health, a wife, and twin daughters under the same roof, I possess the raw materials of a decent life. Yet a few minutes of comparing my gasbaggery with the professional gasbags–my favorite podcasters and YouTubers–and the arithmetic collapses. I measure my output against their reach, my voice against their polish, and conclude—too quickly, too confidently—that I am a small, forgettable thing. This kind of self-excoriation is a symptom of comparison collapse: the rapid psychological deflation that occurs when one measures a competent, grounded life against the amplified success of public figures, resulting in an exaggerated sense of smallness untethered from reality.

    If I want to be a professional gasbag, I suppose I could become an online influencer. I have a good communications background, having taught college writing for forty years, but my qualifications stop there. In truth, I have no skills or interests worthy of making me an influencer. I don’t feel compelled to sermonize college writing online. I’ve trained my body for decades, but I have no appetite to package kettlebells and nutrition into content as if they were revelations. I love wristwatches, but talking about them only seems to exacerbate my already debilitating timepiece addiction. 

    Knowing I can’t be an influencer makes me drift into a soft, theatrical lament: I wish I could be somebody–a gasbagger with lots of reach. I succumb to the fallacy: “If only I could become a professional gasbagger, I’d find happiness. Woe is me.”

    To combat my self-pity, I think of my daughter and I playing Yahtzee. When the dice fall short of glory but still land on something usable—a Full House, a Small Straight—we shrug and say, “I’ll take what I can get.” It’s a small sentence with a sturdy backbone. Life does not hand out only Yahtzees or their analog, a life of glory and fanfare. Life offers partial wins, mixed hands, and the occasional quiet competence. Taking what you can get is not surrender; it is calibration. It means knowing the difference between what can be improved through discipline and what must be accepted without drama. It is not mediocrity. It is accuracy.

    The second idea is less a principle than a confession: I cannot will myself into being a YouTube star. I do not have the desire to edit for twelve hours a day, to hype products, or to rehearse insights that anyone can find with a competent search. My attention, such as it is, doesn’t belong so much to my YouTube channel about watch obsession these days as much as it belongs to a small corner of the internet—my less popular piano channel with fewer than eighty subscribers. There, I introduce a piece, play it, and accept the likely outcome: twenty views, one generous like. It is a modest exchange, but it is honest. I am not forcing a persona into existence; I am following a thread that feels like mine.

    This refusal to force myself down a path that doesn’t align with my heart reminds me of a basic truth from yoga. Some days the body opens and the breath cooperates; I go into a state of sweat-induced bliss from the exercise intensity, but about one day every two months, the joints resist, the mind wanders, and the practice feels like a negotiation with gravity. On those days, you do not escalate the conflict. You ease back. You take the version of the practice that the day allows. I see the same pattern on the exercise bike. Most sessions render about 700 calories per hour; but once a month or so the legs turn to lead and the numbers sag. Two days ago, I posted a modest 500 calories and left it there. No drama. No verdict. The next ride would likely return to form. It usually does. It wasn’t the Yahtzee of exercise bike sessions. It was the Full House. 

    So when I hear the voice of envy and my self-grandiosity pouring out operatic self-pity with remarks like “My life is so paltry,” and “Why am I not the YouTube star I deserve to be?,” I have to remind myself I can discipline and push myself to be a better person and make a better life without forcing myself to do things that aren’t driven by my heart or things that are spurred by comparing myself to others. 

    Though I lack the reach of my favorite gasbags–Sam Harris, Mike Pesca, Katie Herzog, Jesse Singal, Andrew Sullivan, Jonah Goldberg–I am nevertheless a gasbag albeit on a smaller scale. They are the Yahtzees. I am the Full House. 

    I am not succumbing to mediocrity. I am simply stating my place on the Gasbag totem pole with the objectivity of reporting the weather. 

    Seething with envy or undergoing some sort of “rebranding” probably won’t change the situation. I’d rather occupy my modest space with a modicum of grace than spend my remaining years as a bitter, self-appointed understudy, convinced that the spotlight was stolen.. 

    As a lifetime gasbagger with the boorish grandiosity of Commander McBragg, I am seeking Full House Acceptance: The sober recognition that most lives are built from partial wins—modest reach, limited audience, quiet competence—and the decision to inhabit that reality without resentment.

    Not all gasbags are created equal.

    And not all of them need to be.

  • The Protein Prophet Meets Late-Stage Capitalism

    The Protein Prophet Meets Late-Stage Capitalism

    You spent a lifetime preaching the gospel of whey protein to a congregation that greeted you with eye-rolls and the occasional “musclehead” slur. Undeterred, you carried yourself with the calm arrogance of a man who knows the future and is watching everyone else arrive late. While they dabbled in fad diets and moralized over carbs, you quietly mixed your whey protein scoops—one in the morning over your groats, another in the afternoon with yogurt—like a chemist of hypertrophy. You hit your macros. You built your muscle. You extended your health span. And best of all, you did it on the cheap.

    You were right.

    Which is where the trouble begins.

    Now the world has caught up, and like all converts, it has arrived with a fanaticism that would make you blush. GLP-1 users clutch whey like a lifeline to their disappearing muscle mass. Aging populations treat it as insurance against frailty. Influencers chant “protein-maxxing” as if it were a sacrament. Food companies, never ones to miss a profitable crusade, have stuffed protein into everything short of tap water—cereal, ice cream, pancakes, corn chips—each product whispering, You, too, can be righteous.

    The result? Demand has detonated. Prices have surged. The humble tub of whey—once the blue-collar ally of the disciplined lifter—now sits on the shelf with the smug expression of a luxury good. Up 50 percent. Maybe doubling next year. The powder of the people has been gentrified.

    So tell me, prophet of protein, how does it feel?

    You wanted vindication. You got it. You wanted the world to recognize the power of protein. It has. You are no longer a fringe eccentric. You are mainstream. You are validated.

    And you are paying for it.

    There was a time when you were a misunderstood zealot, buying your whey in peace, your habits dismissed as obsessive but harmless. Those were the golden years—the years of ridicule and affordability. Now the masses have joined you, and like all mass movements, they have driven the price of entry skyward.

    You didn’t just win the argument.

    You priced yourself out of it.

  • Three Protein Wafers and a Funeral for Joy

    Three Protein Wafers and a Funeral for Joy

    I drank my first protein shake in 1975, at thirteen—an age when you’ll ingest anything if it promises muscle. It was milk and two heroic scoops of Bob Hoffman’s “Super Hi-Proteen,” a granular blend of soy, brown sugar, and the kind of mystery ingredients that seemed to come with a warning label in spirit if not in ink. I swallowed it like a pledge of allegiance. Years later, I realized I’d been spooning down hog slop with a marketing budget.

    Protein powders, of course, grew up. Whey replaced soy, monk fruit and stevia replaced sugar, and the flavor profile advanced from “punishment” to “tolerable.” I returned, cautiously, folding a scoop into my oatmeal or stirring it into yogurt. A lifetime lifter develops a habit I’ll call protein insurance—the quiet reassurance that your muscles won’t starve because you forgot to eat like a grown man.

    And so the shake became a fixture—less a meal than a policy.

    Bodybuilders and civilians alike now drink these things by the gallon, not just for insurance but for convenience. Which raises a question that refuses to stay polite: assuming we’re not slowly marinating ourselves in trace metals such as lead and cadmium, are we doing something more subtle—something that damages the soul? Rachel Sugar poses a version of this in her Atlantic essay “Admit It, That Protein Shake Is Basically Soylent,” where the modern ideal appears in a hoodie: a tech bro so devoted to efficiency that he outsources eating to a beige slurry. Why cook, why chew, why pause, when a bottle can reduce nourishment to a task you can complete between emails?

    Enter Soylent, the Willy Wonka chewing gum of Silicon Valley—a full meal compressed into a swallow, a dinner table dissolved into a transaction. At best, it tastes like competent baby food. At worst, it tastes like ambition without appetite.

    Soylent had its moment and then receded, but the protein shake did not. It adapted, multiplied, rebranded. Giants like The Coca-Cola Company now print money selling pre-made bottles fortified with protein, “adaptogens,” and antioxidant halos. The label reads like a résumé; the experience reads like chalk. A nation too busy to cook, trained to snack, and newly anxious about muscle retention—thanks to the rise of GLP-1 receptor agonists—is primed to accept frictionless nutrition. Open. Sip. Be optimized.

    None of this is accidental. The arithmetic of food is unforgiving: real food spoils and yields modest margins; ultra-processed food endures and pays dividends. The industry didn’t just produce these powders—it educated us to desire them, dressed them in the language of health, beauty, and time savings, and invited us to trade ritual for efficiency.

    Last week, I tried a thought experiment on my writing students. They’re working on an argument about whether ultra-processed foods are villains to both body and soul.

    “Imagine,” I said, “three protein wafers a day. They regulate appetite, deliver perfect nutrition, sculpt you into an Instagram after photo, and carry you past a hundred. No cooking. No dishes. No decisions.”

    I let that sit for a moment.

    “Now imagine what disappears. The dinners that run long. The laughter that spills over the table. The argument that turns into a story. The quiet, ordinary pleasure of chewing.”

    In this optimized life, your insurer applauds and your followers multiply. But you become something flatter—efficient, photogenic, and faintly ghostlike. Not dead, exactly. Just thinned out where life used to be.

    I asked for a show of hands. Who would choose the wafers?

    Not one hand rose.

    For all our flirtation with powders and promises, the verdict was clear: they want to be healthy, yes—but not at the cost of becoming efficient shadows of themselves. Real food, with all its inconvenience and noise, remains the center. The shake can stay as insurance. It just can’t be the policy that replaces the warmth of home.

  • Leanmaxxing and the New Fantasy of Frictionless Medicine

    Leanmaxxing and the New Fantasy of Frictionless Medicine

    As a boy watching Star Trek, I was transfixed by the Tricorder–that tidy slab of certainty doctors waved over a body the way a priest might wave incense over a mystery. No scalpels, no tubes, no anxious waiting rooms with their stale magazines and fluorescent despair. A quick scan, a soft chirp, and the problem surrendered. The body, usually so coy and uncooperative, became a readable document–its secrets itemized, its fate clarified. It was medicine without friction, diagnosis without drama. In that universe, ignorance lasted seconds.

    For decades, the Tricorder sat where all good fantasies sit: just out of reach, gleaming with impossible efficiency. But reality has a way of cheating. The future did not arrive as a handheld scanner; it arrived as chemistry–specifically, a class of drugs that seems to negotiate directly with the body’s most stubborn impulses. If the Tricorder promised instant knowledge, GLP-1 drugs promise something more unnerving: the quiet rewriting of appetite, metabolism, and behavior from the inside out.

    In her New York Times essay “The Great Ozempic Experiment,” Julia Belluz catalogs the early returns, and they read less like a drug profile than a wish list that forgot to edit itself. Yes, there’s weight loss–the headline act–but the understudies keep stealing the show: concussion recovery, addiction dampening, relief from menopause symptoms, long COVID, alopecia, inflammation, arthritis, IBS, anxiety, brain fog. The list grows with the confidence of a rumor that keeps being confirmed. By the time you finish reading, you suspect the drug might also fix your credit score.

    The catch, for now, is almost comically modest: nausea and paperwork. The body may revolt briefly; the insurance company may revolt permanently. Yet demand surges, fueled by users who report not just slimmer bodies but upgraded lives–better mood, sharper focus, revived social calendars, improved fertility. It’s less a medication than a lifestyle intervention with a prescription pad.

    Clinicians, watching this unfold, have begun to reach for a new framework–the “root-cause” theory–because the old boxes no longer hold. These drugs don’t respect the tidy borders between endocrine, cardiovascular, and neurological disease; they trespass, improve, and move on. Even more disorienting, benefits appear in patients who don’t lose weight at all: better heart, liver, and kidney function, as if the drug were quietly tuning systems we didn’t know were connected.

    And here is where the story turns from miracle to question mark. As GLP-1 use spreads–along with the culture’s sudden enthusiasm for “leanmaxxing”–we risk trading one distortion for another: the cartoon body, now achieved pharmacologically rather than cosmetically. It is far too early to crown these drugs the real-world Tricorder, and just as premature to condemn them as a Faustian bargain. Like AI, they are moving faster than our ability to narrate them. We are watching a technology outrun our categories, and the only honest response, for now, is attention without prophecy.

  • The Day the Gym Lost Its Soul–and I Took Mine Back

    The Day the Gym Lost Its Soul–and I Took Mine Back

    The gym in the 1970s was my holy temple. Not the antiseptic, glass-and-chrome shrines of today, but something closer to a workshop for men trying to hammer themselves into existence. The places I trained were rough, honest, and gloriously indifferent to appearances. No mood lighting. No eucalyptus towels. Just iron, sweat, and a shared work ethic.

    There were relics, of course, absurd contraptions left over from the Eisenhower years. Chief among them: the fat-jiggling machine. You strapped a belt around your waist or backside, flipped a switch, and the machine vibrated you like a malfunctioning appliance. The promise was surgical fat loss. The reality was public humiliation. No one touched it. To be seen using that thing was social suicide, a one-way ticket to pariah status. Even as teenagers, we understood that dignity had weight, and that machine stripped it from you ounce by ounce.

    Everything else, though, was perfect. The equipment did its job. The atmosphere did more. You could spend three hours there and feel cheated when you had to leave.

    Then came the 80s and 90s, and the gym got a facelift and a personality disorder. Out went grit; in came gloss. Chrome multiplied. Music was no longer background; it was an assault. Televisions blinked from every angle like slot machines. Smoothie bars appeared, as if protein needed to be accessorized. Personal trainers hovered, predatory, unctuous, and overfamiliar, radiating a kind of rehearsed enthusiasm that made you want to check your wallet.

    I tolerated the spectacle because I had no alternative. I didn’t have a garage full of equipment. The gym, vulgar as it had become, still held a monopoly on my routine. I assumed I’d be there until my dying breath.

    Then, in 2005, at an LA Fitness in Torrance, the illusion cracked. I noticed I was getting sick constantly—four, five colds a year. The common denominator wasn’t mysterious. It was the sauna, that damp Petri dish where strangers exhaled their pathogens in communal harmony. Add to that the blaring music, the social butterflies mistaking gossip for training, and the creeping sense that the place had become a theater of distraction rather than discipline—and I was done. The gym hadn’t betrayed me. It had simply revealed what it had become.

    So I left.

    In my early forties, I had no interest in bulking up. Call it instinct, call it desperation. Whatever it was, it pushed me toward power yoga DVDs. Bryan Kest and Rodney Yee became unlikely guides. I loved the sessions: the control, the focus, the quiet authority of breath over chaos. But yoga had a ceiling. Four to five hundred calories an hour wasn’t enough to outrun my appetite. If I lived on lentils, tofu, moong beans, and restraint, maybe. I didn’t.

    So by 2007, I pivoted to kettlebells.

    That wasn’t a compromise. It was a revelation.

    Kettlebells gave me intensity—eight hundred calories an hour—and something else the gym had quietly drained from me: engagement. Swings, squats, farmer’s carries were simple movements with endless variation. Enough complexity to keep boredom at bay, enough brutality to keep me honest. Nearly twenty years later, I’m still at it.

    And here’s the part no one advertises: I stopped getting sick. The revolving door of colds vanished. The gym, it turns out, had been taxing me in ways I hadn’t fully accounted for. Walking away from it wasn’t just a change in venue; it was a correction.

    Training at home became more than convenience. It became control. No membership fees. No commute. No background noise of other people’s trivialities. Just the work, stripped down to its essentials. I had removed friction where it didn’t belong and kept it where it mattered.

    That’s the difference between a real life hack and a counterfeit one.

    A real life hack replaces the original with something equal or superior. A counterfeit gives you convenience at the cost of substance, then flatters you into believing nothing was lost. My kettlebell training didn’t dilute the gym experience; it surpassed it. It demanded more precision, more coordination, more accountability. No machines to guide you. No rails to hide behind. Just you, the weight, and gravity’s indifference.

    This morning, I found myself studying kettlebell variations on YouTube—stop-start swings, double front squats—scribbling notes with the enthusiasm of a kid circling toys in a catalog. The same pulse I get when I spot a new Seiko Monster or Casio G-Shock release: anticipation, possibility, a little irrational excitement.

    Today is supposed to be an Airdyne day. An hour on the Schwinn, steady and predictable. But the kettlebells are calling. I know better than to give in. Experience has taught me the discipline of alternating days and sparing my joints, but the urge is there, insistent, almost childish.

    That’s how I know I’ve done something right.

    When your “discipline” starts to feel like anticipation, that’s not a workaround.

    That’s a life recalibrated.