Scripture, if you strip it of incense and italics, offers a blunt warning: don’t build your life on display. Ostentation is not a virtue; it’s a leak. It drains whatever substance you have and then pretends the shine is the thing itself. I think about that now, with the benefit of hindsight and a modest inventory of regrets, and I return to my early twenties at Jackson’s Wine & Spirits in Berkeley, just down the road from the well-coiffed calm of the Claremont Hotel.
Jackson’s was a holding pen for the overqualified. My coworkers were armed with advanced degrees—literature, linguistics, anthropology, chemistry, physics, philosophy, musicology—and a shared conviction that the adult world had failed them first. Institutions were beneath them. Corporations were vulgar. Authority was for other people. So they took their talents to the wine rack and poured them into attitude.
They sold Bordeaux and Belgian ales with a cultivated disdain for both product and purchaser. Customers were a nuisance; humanity, a disappointment. The house philosophy could be summarized in a single phrase, delivered with a raised eyebrow: “service with a smirk.” Irony was their armor and their currency. They wore it everywhere.
What I didn’t see then—but can’t miss now—is how perfectly this posture trains a man in gasbaggery. It rewards the performance of intelligence over the practice of it, the pose of superiority over the discipline of work. You learn to talk rather than to build, to signal rather than to serve. You become fluent in contempt and call it discernment.
It felt like elevation. It was, in fact, a form of drift—polished, articulate, and entirely unmoored.
Over time as we drifted into complacency and lost awareness of our arrogance and folly, we became unwitting members of the Gasbaggerate: a self-appointed guild of eloquent overtalkers who mistake endurance for insight and airtime for authority. Its members gather—physically or online—to exchange monologues disguised as dialogue, each contribution longer, louder, and more self-satisfied than the last. They pride themselves on nuance but deploy it like a garnish, sprinkling just enough complexity to justify their verbosity while never approaching a conclusion that might end the performance. In the Gasbaggerate, listening is considered a quaint hobby, brevity a moral failing, and the highest form of achievement is to leave a room convinced that something important has been said, even if no one can quite recall what it was.
During the wine store’s slow hours, we would display our commitment to the Gasbaggerate by discussing the philosophical curiosities of Nietzsche, the musical excesses of Wagner, and the literary conundrums of Kafka. In many ways, the job had become my comfort zone. It offered me no challenges, yet at the same time, it afforded me the delusion that I was smarter than most people. Whatever I lacked in finances, I compensated with excessive self-regard. Over time, it became clear to me that the longer I worked alongside these proud misfits, the more certain I would become incurably unemployable.
I was drawn to the idea of becoming part of my co-workers’ elitist tribe. Though I had nearly completed my master’s degree in English, I never felt like a good fit for academia. I rarely read what professors had on their syllabi. Instead, I would read what I wanted to read, regardless of its relevance to the class content. I could barely sit still during class. I became restless, fidgety, self-conscious, and prone to social anxieties. It was rare that I ever listened to the professors’ lectures. My mind tended to wander about random worries–my bleak romantic prospects, the lack of airflow inside the classroom, my loathing of driving in traffic to get to the gym after classes, and the absence of high-protein food in my house. I didn’t even like the physical presence of the university with its modern sculptures on the lawns, plaques dedicated to a variety of stodgy luminaries, and the fluorescent-lit classrooms reeking of industrial disinfectants. When people asked me what I majored in, I told them, half-seriously, that I was majoring in “Get the Hell Out” because my discomfort with college compelled me to rid myself of academic life as soon as possible.
In contrast, I was comfortable being a professional slacker at the wine store. Cultivating my irony and sarcasm with my coworkers and the regular customers was my Happy Place. In the lax work environment, I was confident I could go on indefinitely. My paycheck would be too small to buy new cars or pay for medical insurance. Still, the superior physical and spiritual health I could enjoy from “not selling out to the mainstream” would be worth the risk of having to pay out of pocket for the occasional dose of antibiotics.
In my mid-twenties, I was content to spend the rest of my life being a slacker clerk at the wine store, throwing a Nerf football ball to my co-workers through the aisles of Chianti and Beaujolais, and expounding on the mysterious writings of Jorge Luis Borges, Alberto Moravia, and Miguel de Unamuno.
Then one day in the late summer of 1987 I was kicked out of my comfort zone and became the Accidental Professor when my friend Mike Elizalde’s father, Felix Elizalde, a top administrator at Merritt College, begged me to teach for his college when none of his real English professors would get off their asses and teach a special Bridge Program at Skyline High School. “But Mr. Elizalde, I don’t know anything about teaching. I don’t even have a credential.” The chancellor of community colleges said, “No problem,” and I heard his dot matrix printer in his office churning out my California Community College Teaching Credential. I stared at the document like Luke Skywalker seeing for the first time the glowing saber.
Of course, the freshly-printed credential didn’t magically transform me into an actual college professor. This became evident one afternoon while working at the wine store and pouring Braren Pauli merlot to a Cal Berkeley professor in the wine bar. I anxiously confided with him that I was terrified about my new job as a college instructor and the dread I felt for having absolutely no idea what I should be doing in the classroom. With a mane of gray lion’s hair and matching beard, the scholar sipped his merlot, studied me carefully, and told me, “Being a professor is the same as being a carpenter. You bring your materials to the classroom and you and the students build structures together. There will be many occasions when the students won’t want to be in the classroom and they will resist everything you say. Though silent, their collective presence will create an air of hostility in the room. You will have the strong impression that you are talking to yourself and a part of you will die inside. This is where your professionalism kicks in. Through sheer ego and professionalism that demands that you get through the course objectives, you have to ignore their indifference and execute your craft the way a carpenter would build a house.”
Thirty-five years later, I would like to tell him that I never forgot his advice, but I would not tell him the part where on some occasions I would plow through a lecture that was received by the students with implacable indifference, drive home questioning the purpose of my existence, collapse on my bed, curl into the fetal position, and cry myself to sleep.
The Berkeley scholar proved to be right. The best philosophy was to show up to class prepared, brimming with the confidence from that preparation, but be prepared for the students to be disaffected and disengaged at times for reasons that had nothing to do with me but everything to do with their personal concerns: a distressing romance, an aching hunger, money problems, family disputes. Forces were affecting my students’ interest levels that I could not control. If I were to survive as an instructor, I had to acknowledge this brutal fact; on some occasions, I had to be prepared for the ego sting of disengagement and feeling I was talking to myself in a room of thirty-five people, then power my way through the class objectives even when I didn’t feel popular and “loved.” The sooner I realized the classroom was about them and their concerns, and not mine, the better off I would be.
Being a successful instructor meant more than being a carpenter. It also meant finding ways to remove my Selfish default setting and entertain the radical proposition that I was not put on Earth to be loved but rather to be of service to others. But to be successful at a job that almost came to me as a freak accident, I would have to struggle to remove depart from my role as a navel-gazing narcissist performing as a know-it-all at a dead-end job.
Had Felix Elizalde not administered a well-timed kick to my posterior in 1987 and pushed me into teaching at Merritt College, I might have perfected the art of professional drift—clocking in at Jackson’s, polishing my ego to a high gloss, and mistaking self-display for a life. That alternate version of me required no great catastrophe. It was the path of least resistance, paved with vanity and lightly dusted with delusion.
We love to credit ourselves with vision, ambition, the mythology of the self-made man. It’s a flattering story: lone hero, steady climb, destiny fulfilled. My life refuses to cooperate with that narrative. It looks less like a conquest and more like a rescue operation—dependent on other people’s interventions, good timing, and the occasional lucky shove in the right direction.
Remove those external corrections—none of which were earned by my sterling character—and I suspect I would have settled into a comfortable swamp of mediocrity, happily narrating my own importance while achieving very little. I would have been busy talking, less busy becoming.
That’s the part we don’t advertise: how close most lives are to going quietly off the rails. Not in flames, but in drift. Extinction doesn’t always arrive as catastrophe. Sometimes it shows up as a man who never quite got started and never quite noticed.
Cinemorphosis 