Cinemorphosis

Tag: health

  • The Shame of Being Crock Blocked

    The Shame of Being Crock Blocked

    I learned the invaluable lesson of staying in my lane in 1989, a year that will forever be etched in my memory as the year I brought industrial sludge to an English Department potluck picnic. I was a freshly minted lecturer at a university in the California desert, and it was my inaugural potluck. Naturally, I was determined to impress my colleagues with a culinary masterpiece. I had a slow cooker, a gift from my mother, which I imagined to be my ticket to gastronomic glory. So, I decided to tackle curried lentils—a dish so ambitious it could have been named “Lentil Apocalypse.” I poured lentils into the slow cooker until it was practically bursting at the seams. Next, I added what could only be described as an entire bottle of curry, along with a mountain of chopped onions and celery. Unsure of how long these lentils needed to avoid the dreaded “raw green beetle” look, I left them cooking all day. By the time I made my way to the picnic, the contents had morphed into what resembled a toxic waste spill, a sludge so thick it could be used to pave roads. With all the bravado of a culinary adventurer, I placed my slow cooker among the other dishes. As hours ticked by, my creation remained untouched. The English Chair, Solomon, seemed to take pity on me. He ladled a small portion onto his plate in a gesture of charity, but his reaction was nothing short of tragic. His face contorted in a way that suggested he’d just tasted a toxic waste dump, and he looked as if he might need a hazmat suit and a team of medics. From that day on, I was never again entrusted with bringing food. Instead, my muscles were put to better use hauling giant bags of ice, crates of wine glasses, and cartons of boxed wine to future events. Eventually, I learned my lesson and found my true calling—one that involved heavy lifting and zero culinary experiments. And so, I stayed in my lane, with a clear understanding that my talents were best suited for anything other than poisoning my colleagues with curried lentils.

    My ordeal points is an example of being Crock Blocked–the uniquely mortifying shame experienced when your potluck contribution—usually involving a Crock-Pot, misplaced ambition, and a suspiciously gelatinous texture—is avoided by everyone, like it’s radioactive. Crock Blocked is when your dish becomes a pariah on the buffet table, gathering flies instead of praise, while nearby casseroles are ravaged like it’s the last supper. You watch helplessly as guests whisper about “that lentil thing,” your dreams of impressing the crowd slowly congealing into a turmeric-scented failure. You leave with your dignity dented, your Crock-Pot still full, and your social standing demoted to Ice Guy.

  • Cerealphilia

    Cerealphilia

     Cereal is more than a grain; it’s an existential dream of happiness and the maternal embrace. As kids, we didn’t just eat cereal—we engaged in epic love affairs with cartoon mascots, played mind-bending board games on the back of the box, and embarked on treasure hunts for plastic trinkets buried deep within the sugary abyss. We sent box tops to claim submarines, shirts, hats, and other merchandise that, in hindsight, had all the utility of a chocolate teapot.

    My cereal obsession reached such dizzying heights that I fantasized about growing up to be a Major League baseball star who exclusively dined on cereal for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. In my dreams, I was a grocery store legend, cart packed to the brim with Cap’n Crunch, Franken Berry, Count Chocula, Froot Loops, and Lucky Charms. Cereal was my ticket to mindless self-gratification, whisking me away with Pinocchio to Paradise Island, where we’d lose our minds, sprout donkey ears, and bray like beasts in a symphony of sugary delirium.

    In the 1970s, cereal spun tales of the good life and ultimate success. We gorged on granola, wheat germ, Wheaties, and Special K, convinced we were one spoonful away from becoming paragons of health, fitness, and suburban nirvana. One of the era’s cereal prophets was Euell Gibbons, the outdoor enthusiast who, with a straight face, asked us in Grape-Nuts ads, “Ever eat a pine tree? Many parts are edible.” Gibbons spun a yarn about Grape-Nuts that promised to ground us in the Earth, bestow vitality, and arm us with survival skills fit for a post-apocalyptic rainforest escapade equipped with nothing but a buck knife and a loincloth. In reality, eating the gravel-like cereal resulted in thousands of dentist visits for chipped teeth and a crunch so deafening, it drowned out the morning radio.

    Despite all this, Grape-Nuts still haunt my cravings. The crunch and malty flavor have me hooked. I’ve read that Grape-Nuts are the only store-bought cereal that hasn’t been subjected to extrusion, that nefarious heating process that murders nutrients. Instead, Grape-Nuts are baked like a loaf of bread, ensuring that each bite is a dense, jaw-breaking tribute to my childhood.

    There was a time in my adult life when I raged against the societal norms that prevented me from consuming cereal for all three meals. I longed for cold store-bought cereal for breakfast, oatmeal for lunch, and buckwheat for dinner. I envisioned my cereals adorned with peanut butter, walnuts, chia seeds, hemp seeds, and berries to pack in nutrients and calories. But my plan was thwarted by my wife and twin daughters, who, in their maddeningly rational mindset, refused to partake. Clearly, I was on the brink of an eating disorder, or perhaps my subconscious was grasping for the lost comfort and convenience of my cereal-drenched youth.

    Yuval Noah Harari has plenty to say about our destructive quest for comfort and convenience in Sapiens. He argues that as foragers, hunting animals and gathering fruits, we were sharp, alert, fit like Special-Ops fighters, and generally happy. But when we settled down to farm, convinced we were making life easier, we fell for history’s biggest con. Agriculture, which brought us mountains of grains and cereals, was the dawn of obesity, tooth decay, impotence, arthritis, hernias, scoliosis, rampant thievery, economic disparity, starvation, infectious disease, mass animal cruelty, and misogyny. We weren’t duped by people but by wheat, rice, and potatoes—plants that manipulated us into cultivating them, chaining us to the fickle rhythms of the harvest, and inflicting more misery than any human could.

    Maybe I was getting played by cereal. It wormed its way into my psyche, hijacked my thoughts, and turned me into a zombie who couldn’t watch TV without retreating to the kitchen for a bowl of cold cereal by 7 p.m., seeking the soothing crunch as I stared, glassy-eyed, at the screen.

    My excessive thoughts on cereal point to Cerealphilia–a condition in which love for cereal evolves from innocent childhood affection into a full-blown emotional dependency masquerading as nutritional strategy. Cerealphilia sufferers don’t just eat cereal—they commune with it, fantasize about it, and defend it with the fervor of a late-stage cult member. Symptoms include justifying cold cereal for dinner as “wholesome,” craving the cardboard crunch of Grape-Nuts like a Pavlovian hit, and resenting anyone who dares suggest you diversify your diet. At its core, Cerealphilia is comfort-seeking disguised as health enlightenment, a warm milky bath for the soul stirred with nostalgia, rebellion, and a sprinkle of dietary delusion.

    Diagnostic Checklist for Cerealphilia:

    1. Box-top Hoarding: You’ve considered raiding your attic for vintage box tops in case the Cap’n ever reopens the mail-order treasure vault.
    2. Cereal Monogamy: You’ve eaten Cap’n Crunch in more variations than you’ve had actual romantic partners.
    3. Midnight Communion: Your idea of unwinding involves a mixing bowl of cereal and a trance-like TV binge by 7 p.m.—without fail.
    4. Grape-Nuts Evangelism: You’ve told someone, without irony, that “many parts of a pine tree are edible” while crunching through Grape-Nuts like a woodland druid.
    5. Multi-Box Illusionism: You “rotate” between six cereal boxes to simulate dietary variety while consuming 99% corn and sugar in slightly different shapes.
    6. Mascot Emotional Investment: You’ve had an existential crisis over the retirement of Quake the Coal Miner.
    7. Snack Shame Evasion: You justify an evening bowl by claiming it’s your “light dinner” or “a superior protein vehicle.”
  • Déjà Chew 

    Déjà Chew 

    When I was a kid, my mother indulged my insatiable appetite for sugary cereal, Cap’n Crunch, in all its glorious variations: Cap’n Crunch plain, Cap’n Crunch with Crunch Berries, Peanut Butter Cap’n Crunch, and the audaciously renamed versions that tasted exactly the same: Quisp, Quake, and King Vitamin. I felt a burning compulsion to taste-test all these varieties with the meticulousness of a sommelier sampling dozens of Zinfandels or a fromager savoring different types of Camembert, or a musicologist analyzing hundreds of versions of Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony. Eating six versions of Cap’n Crunch was my way of embracing the illusion of variety while devouring the same cereal over and over again. I was a preadolescent boy, steadfast in my desire to believe I had choices, yet paradoxically terrified of making any. It’s like hearing about the man who’s on his sixth marriage, each wife a near-carbon copy of the last in appearance, temperament, and personality. The poor sap keeps circling back to the same woman, convincing himself he’s “found someone new” and pinning his hopes on a fresh start. That was me with Cap’n Crunch. I was stuck in a sugary Groundhog Day, endlessly looping through bowls of the same old cereal under different guises. Not only was I stagnant in my food choices, but I was also regressing into a sugar-coated stupor. My love for cereal, which persists to this day, was my way of vanishing into a chosen comfort zone. In that sugary sanctuary, I found both bliss and oblivion, content to float along in a sea of crunchy sameness, convinced I was exploring new culinary frontiers.

    This type of delusional behavior points us to Déjà Chew–the eerie sensation that every “new” cereal tastes exactly like the last one you swore was different. The uncanny sensation of culinary déjà vu happens when, despite the flashy new box, the novelty-shaped marshmallows, or the misleading “limited edition” label, your spoon hits the same old sugary slurry you’ve been eating since the Nixon administration. Déjà Chew convinces you you’re exploring new taste frontiers, when in fact you’re just riding a merry-go-round of processed nostalgia. It’s the foodie equivalent of dating your ex’s identical twin and calling it personal growth. One bite in, you know exactly where this is going—but you chew on, comforted by the illusion of variety and the soothing crunch of your own arrested development.

  • Longing to Return to the Syrupocene Era

    Longing to Return to the Syrupocene Era

    Back in the 60s and 70s, nutritional concerns were as relevant to us as an old vinyl record in a streaming world. We were blissfully unaware of things like sugar grams and carbohydrate counts. On weekend mornings, my parents would sometimes treat me to a local pancake house, where I indulged in my favorite dish: apple pancakes. Now, picture this: a stack of ten flapjacks, each one a marvel of culinary excess. To say the pile was monumental is like calling Mount Everest a hillock. As I sat next to it, I looked like a hapless Lilliputian standing beside a mountain of golden, buttery goodness. The age-old question had to be asked: Was I going to eat these pancakes, or were they going to consume me in a pancake avalanche? Spoiler alert: I ate them. Every last one. These pancakes were no ordinary breakfast fare. They were brimming with cinnamon-spiced apple compote, slathered in creamy butter, and drenched in what must have been a half-gallon of maple syrup. If I had spilled that syrup, it would have created a sugar tsunami. To wash down this syrupy mountain, I guzzled down several tall glasses of orange juice, which was basically just liquid sugar with a side of citrus. The sheer volume of insulin-spiking sugars and carbohydrates I ingested could have given a modern endocrinologist a cerebral hemorrhage. I was consuming enough sugar to make Willy Wonka look like a health food advocate. After these epic breakfasts, rather than running outside to join my friends in their energetic games, I would slump into bed in a state of what could only be described as a Carbohydrate Coma. I was so catatonic, my friends might as well have been playing a game of “Guess Where’s the Sleeping Kid?” The trauma inflicted on my pancreas was beyond imagination. It was like a small factory working overtime without a break, pumping out insulin at a rate that would have made any modern dietitian faint. In those days, gluttony was a virtue, and self-indulgence was a badge of honor. We reveled in our ignorance, blissfully ignoring the fact that our indulgences would make today’s health-obsessed populace break out in a cold sweat. So there I was, a child of the 60s and 70s, living in an era where pancakes and orange juice were not just meals but monumental feats of indulgence. Our motto was simple: “Why worry about nutritional concerns when you can have another stack of apple pancakes?” Our golden era of gluttony was truly a feast for the ages—literally and metaphorically.

    This memory points us to the Syrupocene Era–a mythic golden age spanning the 1960s and 70s when nutritional ignorance reigned supreme, and breakfast was less a meal and more a caloric Greek tragedy performed in maple-soaked acts. The Syrupocene was a time when food pyramids hadn’t been built, glycemic indexes hadn’t been discovered, and “carb-loading” wasn’t a fitness strategy—it was a lifestyle.

    During the Syrupocene, children guzzled orange juice like it was an IV drip from the gods, consumed pancakes in stacks that could double as insulation, and considered butter a vegetable. It was a utopia of food denialism, where a carbohydrate coma was mistaken for a nap and diabetic shock was just “a sleepy Sunday morning.” The only sugar tracker in town was your mother asking, “Do you want more syrup, honey?”

    The Syrupocene didn’t end with an apocalypse—just a quiet whimper as food labels, cholesterol, and science crept in like puritans at a Mardi Gras parade. But those who lived through it still carry the memory: a wistful ache for the era when gluttony was innocent, ignorance was delicious, and a pancake wasn’t a sin—it was a ten-layered sacrament.

  • My Personal Sane Eating Lexicon: Cravattenuation, Savorosity, and Munchdrift

    My Personal Sane Eating Lexicon: Cravattenuation, Savorosity, and Munchdrift

    On April 10th, fresh off a family vacation in Miami and still spiritually sticky with airport pastrami sandwich guilt, I stepped on the scale and was greeted with a soul-curdling 247 pounds. Yes, some of it is lifelong muscle from half a century of hoisting kettlebells and playing Hercules in the garage. But make no mistake—this number was a slap in the face, a statistical insult to my dignity. Fueled by a righteous anger I can only describe as metabolic revenge, I went to war.

    First, I cut my meals down to three per day and gamified the system like a psychological Jedi. My lunchtime yogurt-and-berries bowl got reassigned as a post-nap “treat,” and a humble apple—normally the most boring fruit in the bowl—was elevated to nightly “dessert,” strategically scheduled for 8 p.m. to give my inner child something to cling to as the kitchen closed. I also slashed my coffee intake from 36 to 18 ounces (don’t worry, I’m still barely human), and dropped my creatine from 6 grams to a mere 3—enough to retain my swole, but not enough to float like a sodium balloon.

    Meanwhile, I came to grips with the ugly truth that I was overstuffing both my freezer and my face. The freezer had become a metaphor for my appetite: jammed with frozen berries, low-carb snacks, and delusions of future discipline. Constantly raiding it created two problems: overconsumption and literal water puddles from a clogged defrost drain. My wife and I emptied the thing out like detoxing hoarders, and miraculously, the fridge stopped weeping. I then purchased a chest freezer for the garage to create a buffer zone—a cold storage moat to protect the kitchen from my impulsive nibbling.

    By April 19, I had dropped to 240 pounds—a loss of seven pounds in nine days, even with an Easter cheat day that involved chocolate cake and blueberry pie, which I regret nothing about. Today I weigh again after my workout, prepared to assess the pastry fallout. But here’s the real revelation from those ten days: the hunger I thought I was feeling wasn’t hunger—it was performance anxiety from my stomach, a neurotic need to react to every twitch of emptiness like it was a national emergency. That, my friends, is where Cravattenuation comes in.

    Cravattenuation is the noble and necessary art of muting your inner snack gremlin—the one who panics at the first polite growl of your stomach and demands cheese. It’s the mental and metabolic recalibration that teaches you this: real hunger is not a 3 p.m. yawn with a craving for almonds. It’s a deeper emptiness, one you can actually enjoy. Because when you let your appetite stretch out and breathe, you arrive at meals not with guilt or compulsion, but with appetite and joy. Hunger becomes less of a trigger and more of a drumroll.

    Cravattenuation the deliberate process of retraining your body to interpret minor hunger signals not as existential emergencies but as low-priority system notifications: “You might want to eat in a bit” instead of “RAID THE PANTRY OR DIE.” Just as meditation teaches you to sit with discomfort rather than react impulsively, Cravattenuation teaches you that a little hunger isn’t a crisis—it’s foreplay for a better meal.

    We’ve been conditioned by snack culture and anxiety-driven consumption to treat hunger as something to be feared and fixed immediately, like a smoke alarm or a toddler tantrum. But when you practice Cravattenuation, something remarkable happens: your threshold for hunger strengthens, and the urgency softens. You learn to sit with a mild stomach pang without spiraling into carb-lust. Over time, you develop what can only be described as Hunger Discernment: the ability to separate emotional nibble-itching from true physiological need.

    The Unexpected Perk:

    By making your body earn the meal—not through punishment, but patience—you begin to eat with a clarity and joy that’s been missing since the dawn of office vending machines. Food tastes better when you’re actually hungry for it. Not “kinda bored” hungry, not “scrolling through cheese reels” hungry, but real hungry. Cravattenuation helps you not only manage your weight with more ease and grace, it re-enchants the eating experience itself. You’ll start treating meals like mini homecomings rather than pit stops at a dopamine gas station.

    Name for the Healthy State: Savorosity

    (savor + satiety + curiosity)

    Savorosity is the elegant state you enter after mastering Cravattenuation—a zone where hunger feels less like a hostage crisis and more like an invitation. It’s when you greet mealtime with curiosity and pleasure, not guilt or compulsion. It’s when you chew slower, taste deeper, and know you’ve arrived not because you gave in to a craving, but because you earned your appetite.

    Cravattenuation gets you there. Savorosity keeps you there. And together, they free you from the tyranny of the pantry’s siren call.

    Of course, the desired state of Savorosity has an opposite condition: Munchdrift, which is the mindless, momentum-driven eating that results from random grazing, emotional nibbling, and culinary boredom. It’s what happens when hunger is no longer a signal but a background noise, muffled by routine snacking and phantom cravings. In the Munchdrift state, meals are neither anticipated nor savored—they’re accidental. A handful of nuts here, a swipe of hummus there, three spoonfuls of cottage cheese at midnight, and suddenly, you’ve eaten 1,200 calories without ever feeling either full or satisfied. The food doesn’t taste bad; it just doesn’t taste like anything—because your palate is bored and your appetite never had a chance to sharpen.

    While Savorosity is marked by intentionality, restraint, and presence, Munchdrift is all drift and no anchor. It’s eating as ambient noise. It’s the cognitive equivalent of scrolling Instagram while watching TV while wondering why you’re still chewing. 

  • How to Stop Your Appetite from Heckling You and Achieve Savorosity

    How to Stop Your Appetite from Heckling You and Achieve Savorosity

    Coined Term: Cravattenuation

    (craving + attenuation)

    Extended Definition:

    Cravattenuation is the psychological and physiological art of turning down the volume on your inner snack gremlin—the one who starts kicking the back of your consciousness the moment your stomach makes a polite gurgle. It’s the deliberate process of retraining your body to interpret minor hunger signals not as existential emergencies but as low-priority system notifications: “You might want to eat in a bit” instead of “RAID THE PANTRY OR DIE.” Just as meditation teaches you to sit with discomfort rather than react impulsively, Cravattenuation teaches you that a little hunger isn’t a crisis—it’s foreplay for a better meal.

    We’ve been conditioned by snack culture and anxiety-driven consumption to treat hunger as something to be feared and fixed immediately, like a smoke alarm or a toddler tantrum. But when you practice Cravattenuation, something remarkable happens: your threshold for hunger strengthens, and the urgency softens. You learn to sit with a mild stomach pang without spiraling into carb-lust. Over time, you develop what can only be described as Hunger Discernment: the ability to separate emotional nibble-itching from true physiological need.

    The Unexpected Perk:

    By making your body earn the meal—not through punishment, but patience—you begin to eat with a clarity and joy that’s been missing since the dawn of office vending machines. Food tastes better when you’re actually hungry for it. Not “kinda bored” hungry, not “scrolling through cheese reels” hungry, but real hungry. Cravattenuation helps you not only manage your weight with more ease and grace, it re-enchants the eating experience itself. You’ll start treating meals like mini homecomings rather than pit stops at a dopamine gas station.

    Name for the Healthy State: Savorosity

    (savor + satiety + curiosity)

    Savorosity is the elegant state you enter after mastering Cravattenuation—a zone where hunger feels less like a hostage crisis and more like an invitation. It’s when you greet mealtime with curiosity and pleasure, not guilt or compulsion. It’s when you chew slower, taste deeper, and know you’ve arrived not because you gave in to a craving, but because you earned your appetite.

    Cravattenuation gets you there. Savorosity keeps you there. And together, they free you from the tyranny of the pantry’s siren call.

  • DeDopaminification: Breaking Up with the Machine That Loves You Too Much

    DeDopaminification: Breaking Up with the Machine That Loves You Too Much

    DeDopaminification is the deliberate and uncomfortable process of recalibrating the brain’s reward circuitry after years—sometimes decades—of synthetic overstimulation. It’s what happens when you look your phone in the face and whisper, “It’s not me, it’s you.” In a culture addicted to frictionless pleasure and frictionless communication, DeDopaminification means reintroducing friction on purpose. It’s the detox of the soul, not with celery juice, but with withdrawal from digital dopamine driplines—apps, feeds, alerts, porn, outrage, and validation loops disguised as “engagement.”

    In Alone Together, Sherry Turkle diagnosed the psychic fragmentation wrought by constant digital interaction: we’ve become people who talk less but text more, who perform connection while starving for authenticity. In one of her most haunting observations, she notes how teens feel panicked without their phones—not because they’re afraid of missing messages, but because they fear missing themselves in the mirror of others’ attention. Turkle’s world is one where dopamine dependency isn’t just neurological—it’s existential. We’ve been trained to outsource our worth to the algorithmic gaze.

    Anne Lembke’s Dopamine Nation picks up this thread like a clinical slap to the face. Lembke, a Stanford psychiatrist, makes it plain: the modern world is engineered to overstimulate us into oblivion. Pleasure is no longer earned—it’s swipeable. Whether it’s TikTok, sugar, or digital outrage, our brains are being rewired to expect fireworks where there used to be a slow-burning candle. Lembke writes that to reset our internal reward systems, we must embrace discomfort—yes, want less, enjoy silence, and learn how to sit with boredom like it’s a spiritual practice.

    DeDopaminification is not some puritanical rejection of pleasure. It’s the fight to reclaim pleasure that isn’t bankrupting us. It’s deleting TikTok not because you’re better than it, but because it’s better than you—so good it’s lethal. It’s deciding that your attention span deserves a tombstone with dignity, not a death-by-scroll. It’s not heroic or Instagrammable. In fact, it’s boring, slow, sometimes lonely—but it’s also real. And that’s what makes it revolutionary.

  • Harry Potter and the Chamber of Dental Horrors

    Harry Potter and the Chamber of Dental Horrors

    My journey with claustrophobia is not a quirk. It is a full-blown, sweat-drenched neurological prison riot. And nowhere does this disorder stage a more operatic coup than in two places: the dentist’s chair and the bowels of Universal Studios, Studio City.

    Let’s start with the latter—a cautionary tale that should be printed on the back of every park map. I should never have stepped foot in that glorified mall of overpriced grease traps and postmodern carnival barkers wearing epaulets, who reeked of mothballs and dashed dreams. But I did it—for my twin daughters. For my wife. For the illusion that fatherhood sometimes requires nobility.

    The fatal mistake? Boarding the Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey ride, a title that now feels like prophecy. After a Kafkaesque hour in line, I was shoehorned into a toddler-sized aircraft seat, and then came the final insult: a steel bar clamped down on my chest like it was sealing me into a medieval torture rack. My 52-inch ribcage was not consulted. My lungs issued an immediate protest.

    As the ride lurched forward into a black tunnel engineered by Satan himself, I realized I was not going to survive. I began pleading, then shrieking for them to stop the ride—a desperate man reduced to primal terror. Mercifully, the passengers next to me joined in my hysteria, and their collective outcry finally penetrated the headset of some underpaid engineer who ground the machine to a halt. A stoic security guy with a Secret Service haircut approached as I peeled myself out of the deathtrap.

    “You want to debrief me in the trauma tent?” I muttered, trying to laugh through the ash cloud of my dignity.

    Fast-forward to a few weeks later: I’m back in another chamber of horrors—Dr. Howard Chen’s dental office. A kind, soft-spoken man, Dr. Chen has the patience of a monk and the eyes of someone who’s seen too much. During a routine procedure, he inserted a rubber bite block into my mouth—also known as the Mouth Prop from Hell. It jammed my jaw open, restricted my ability to swallow, and in seconds, transported me back to that Potter ride with its clamping harness and tunnel of doom.

    I shot up from the chair, peeled off my flannel shirt like it was doused in napalm, and stood hyperventilating while sweat poured down my face like I’d just run the Boston Marathon with a fever.

    Dr. Chen asked gently, “Are you going to be okay, Jeff?”

    “I can’t have this rubber thing in my mouth,” I gasped, holding it like it was radioactive.

    He removed it. Deep breaths. Back in the chair. We finished the procedure bite-block free, no further incidents—except for my lingering shame.

    My visits to Dr. Chen are a multisensory assault. I am what polite society would call a “super smeller.” What that means in a dental context is that I’m stewing in a noxious stew of clove oil, latex gloves, glutaraldehyde, and ghostly wafts of tooth dust from patients past. Throw in the sound of Neil Diamond warbling over the speakers and it becomes less a cleaning and more a ritualistic descent into madness.

    Every visit turns existential. I begin contemplating my soul, my legacy, and the probability that I’ll die while getting a fluoride rinse. It’s the only time I think about the afterlife more than I do during a colonoscopy—and that includes the part when they say, “You may feel a little pressure.”

    To his credit, Dr. Chen is a saint. He accommodates all my neuroses, never rushes me, and tries to soothe me with words that sound like Buddhist proverbs run through a dental insurance filter. “Let the Sonicare do the work,” he tells me. “But I don’t trust it,” I reply. “Then you must learn to trust.” “But I am a man of doubt.” “That, Jeff,” he says, “is obvious.”

    At my most recent appointment, he warned me of potential decay under an old filling. “We may need to do a root canal.” I responded like a man learning he’d tested positive for eternal damnation.

    “What can I do to stop this?”

    “Cut the sugar. Don’t brush like you’re sanding drywall.”

    “So what you’re saying is, I’m threading the needle here.”

    “Basically, yes.”

    “Doctor, I crave absolutes.”

    “Join the club.”

    Dr. Chen’s resignation to life’s uncertainty is what keeps me coming back. That, and the knowledge that no other dentist could possibly endure the psychological obstacle course that is my biannual cleaning.

    After my last visit, dazed from polishing paste and light dental trauma, I left the office only to nearly reverse my car into a black SUV. The horn blast nearly cracked my molars. As I sat there recovering, I looked up and saw Dr. Chen watching me from behind the blinds—no longer smiling, but staring with the flat, weary eyes of a man who had just confirmed what he’d long suspected: his patient was, in fact, completely insane.

    And he was right.

  • The Kettlebell Monk and the Return of the Yoga Cult

    The Kettlebell Monk and the Return of the Yoga Cult

    I’ve been lifting weights since I was 12 years old—long enough to have calluses older than some of my students. My loyalty has always been to iron, not incense. And yet, twice in my life I’ve flirted with the cult of yoga. First from 2005 to 2008, when Power Yoga made me sweat like a sinner in a sweat lodge, and again recently, from 2023 to 2024, when something primal in me remembered the bliss of holding Warrior Two while the room turned into a personal rainforest.

    But iron always calls me back. Resistance training, especially kettlebells, is my native language. It’s the blunt poetry of movement: swing, squat, grind. There’s no chanting, no ambient whale noises—just the thud of steel against gravity and the holy ache of delayed-onset muscle soreness. Still, yoga lingered in my subconscious like a forgotten lover with a very flexible spine.

    Then came the dream.

    I was living in what could only be described as a monastic exercise gulag perched high in the Swiss Alps—imagine if The Sound of Music were choreographed by a CrossFit cult and everyone smelled faintly of magnesium chalk and regret. My cell was a minimalist slab of concrete, colder than a Russian novel and just as unforgiving. There I was, hammering out kettlebell swings with the grim dedication of a prisoner serving a life sentence for crimes against rest days, when it hit me—not just a muscle cramp, but a full-body epiphany.

    I missed the sweat.

    But not just any sweat. Not the stoic, industrial, man-against-iron kind that kettlebells demand. I missed yoga sweat. That slow, creeping, mind-liquefying ooze you earn by holding Crescent Lunge for six minutes while your brain gently transitions from “I am one with the universe” to “I am dying alone on this mat.” It’s the kind of sweat that doesn’t just leave the body—it evacuates your ego with it.

    The sense of FOMO hit me like a rogue medicine ball to the face. I wasn’t just missing out on yoga—I was exiled from it, cast into the outer darkness where there is weeping, gnashing of teeth, and tight hip flexors. The regret was theological. Yoga wasn’t just an option anymore. It was a spiritual ventilator.

    In the dream, I staggered from my training cell like a sinner leaving the confessional. I entered my quarters—bare except for a desk, a lamp, and the faint scent of despair—and rearranged it like a man staging his own resurrection. Then, with the urgency of a convert and the shame of a backslider, I Googled yoga poses. Warrior. Triangle. Pigeon. All the old apostles.

    I wandered the grounds like a deranged prophet in compression leggings, possessed by a holy compulsion to evangelize. I whispered gospel truths: “Downward Dog is deliverance,” “You are your breath,” “Meat is a distraction.” People followed. Of course they did. We began practicing together, flowing through vinyasas with cult-like synchronicity. We ate vegan three times a day, spoke only in Sanskrit-inflected aphorisms, and achieved a level of hamstring enlightenment most people only dream about.

    It was utopia, with better posture.

    Then I woke up.

    Still in a fog of sacred revelation, I marched to my computer, opened my long-neglected list of yoga sequences in Google Docs, and committed to the third phase of my yoga life: twice a week, no excuses. Five days of kettlebell discipline to keep me grounded, two days of yoga to unlock whatever transcendental weirdness lives in my hips.

    Because as much as I love kettlebells—and I do—they’ve never given me that hallucinatory bliss, that euphoric disintegration of self, that only comes from holding Triangle Pose until your consciousness starts leaking out of your ears.

    Iron builds the body. Yoga does something else. And I’m not going to miss out this time. 

  • Brains for Glory: How Football Became the Lottery of the Left Behind

    Brains for Glory: How Football Became the Lottery of the Left Behind

    In Alana Semuels’ “The White Flight from Football,” we meet Shantavia Jackson, a single mother working the night shift at Home Depot. With three sons—ages 11, 12, and 14—she turns to youth football not just for recreation but as a form of structure, mentorship, and protection. Coaches become surrogate father figures, teaching discipline and teamwork. For her son Qway, who lives with a mental disorder, football provides a stabilizing force: a team that functions as his support system.

    For Shantavia, football isn’t just a sport—it’s an escape hatch. She can’t afford to send her sons to college, and she sees football as the only viable route out of a life circumscribed by poverty. It’s a desperate gamble, but in communities like hers, desperate gambles are often the only kind available.

    Against this backdrop, research continues to pile up showing that tackle football can cause severe and irreversible brain trauma. In response, many parents—particularly white and affluent—are pulling their children out of youth leagues. The ability to make that choice is, at its core, an expression of privilege. While white participation in youth football declines, Black participation remains disproportionately high: 44 percent of Black boys play tackle football, compared to just 29 percent of their white peers. This racial divide plays out on the national stage: today, Black athletes make up nearly half of all Division I college football players, up from 39 percent in 2000, while white athletes have dropped from 51 percent to 37 percent.

    The implication is grim: Black children are more likely to accept long-term risks because they have fewer short-term options. White children, cushioned by economic security and broader educational opportunities, can afford to walk away. The more the science reveals about the dangers of early head trauma, the more it becomes clear who is left holding the risk.

    And the science is damning. A 2017 Boston University study found that athletes who began playing tackle football before age 12 were twice as likely to develop behavioral problems and three times as likely to suffer from clinical depression. A separate study by Wake Forest University revealed that boys who played just one season of tackle football between the ages of 8 and 13 showed diminished brain function. The greatest fear is CTE—chronic traumatic encephalopathy—a degenerative brain disease caused by repeated hits to the head, not just concussions. Even subconcussive blows can cause lasting damage. In 2017, researchers examined the brains of 111 deceased NFL players. They found CTE in 110 of them.

    In response, some former players and medical experts now advocate delaying tackle football until high school, when bodies are more physically mature and kids are better able to understand and implement safe tackling techniques. But the sport is growing, not shrinking, and its profitability only reinforces the risk. At Texas A&M University, football generates $148 million a year. That revenue stream depends on a constant influx of young talent—often from families like Shantavia’s—eager for a scholarship and a shot at something better.

    The decision to play football, or not to, has become yet another expression of America’s racial wealth divide. As of 2021, the median wealth of white households was $250,400—about 9.2 times that of Black households, which stood at just $27,100. Though there have been modest gains in Black wealth, the gap remains vast. In 2022, the median wealth for Black households rose to $44,890—still far behind the $285,000 median for white households. This disparity isn’t merely numerical; it’s structural, baked into the opportunities people can or cannot access.

    In this context, football becomes less a sport and more a bloodletting ritual—one that disproportionately brutalizes the bodies of those with the fewest alternatives. For children growing up in neighborhoods with failing schools, limited healthcare, and short life expectancies, football isn’t just a game. It’s a high-stakes wager: risk your brain for a future, or settle for no future at all.