In Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder, Arnold Schwarzenegger observes that bodybuilding is not merely a means toward self-improvement of the body. It opens other doors as well in business and other enterprises. I found that Arnold was right: My teenage years of toiling in the gym and amassing muscles finally paid off in 1979 when, at the tender age of seventeen, I landed the coveted position of bouncer at Maverick’s Disco in San Ramon, California. I was rolling in dough, earning a whopping ten cents over the minimum wage at three dollars an hour, while enjoying the luxurious perks of free soft drinks and peanuts. My nights were spent amidst a sea of polyester pantsuits and hairdos so heavily sprayed they constituted a legitimate fire hazard. I thought I had hit the jackpot, killing two birds with one stone: raking in the cash while strolling around the teenage disco, flexing my lats, and mingling with an endless parade of beautiful women. However, my dreams of disco glory were dashed when I encountered a cruel concept I’d later learn about in my college Abnormal Psychology class: the anhedonic response. This phenomenon numbs the brain to repeated stimulation, leading to a state of anhedonia, where happiness and pleasure are but distant memories. Thinking about anhedonia took me back to the moment when I stopped enjoying my beloved cartoon, The Flintstones. One day, as Fred and Barney drove their caveman car down the highway, I noticed the background—a series of trees, boulders, and buildings—repeating over and over. This revelation shattered the show’s illusion of reality, much like seeing how the sausage is made. Watching The Flintstones was never the same again. Maverick’s Disco was my Flintstones moment. Night after night, I watched customers flood the club with faces lit up with high expectations of excitement, glamour, and romantic connections. By closing time, those same faces were glazed over, tired, and disappointed. Yet, like clockwork, they returned the next weekend, ready to repeat the cycle. My life at the disco had become the monotonous wraparound background of The Flintstones. It was a sign that I needed to quit. Like Arnold Schwarzenegger, I needed to break out of a limited situation, spread my wings, and fly.
Tag: life
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WALTER CRONKITE AND FRANK SINATRA WERE THE TRUSTED PROPHETS OF MY YOUTH
At four years old, a pocket-sized philosopher in footie pajamas, I’d often find myself stationed in the living room like a tiny sentinel, transfixed by the glow of our hulking television set. The air was thick with the comforting aroma of my mother’s lasagna or spaghetti, a scent that promised warmth and stability, while my father and I tuned in to the evening sermon of Walter Cronkite. Cronkite, that square-jawed oracle of truth, delivered the news with the gravitas of a benevolent yet exhausted deity. His voice—measured, slightly weary—wrapped around the day’s events like a woolen blanket, equal parts reassurance and obligation, as necessary as a nightly dose of cod liver oil or a reluctant gulp of Ovaltine.
But Cronkite, for all his journalistic divinity, did not hold the title of Supreme Voice in our household. That honor belonged to Frank Sinatra, whose velvet baritone floated from our Fischer Hi-Fi console stereo with the omnipresence of a household deity. Sinatra wasn’t merely a singer—he was a prophet, a sage in a sharp suit, the Cronkite of melody, issuing dispatches on love, loss, and longing with a conviction that made it clear: this was the stuff of life. His voice had the eerie authority of a celestial news anchor, forewarning me of adulthood’s looming weather patterns—storms of responsibility, gales of regret, hurricanes of heartbreak.
At an age when my greatest concern should have been whether I got the last Nilla Wafer, I found myself drowning in premature nostalgia, gripped by the weight of Sinatra’s melancholic musings. “It Was a Very Good Year” hit my preschool psyche like an existential anvil—suddenly, I was an ancient soul trapped in a toddler’s body, debating whether to pair my Triscuits with a port wine cheddar spread or just give in and sip on some prune juice like a man resigned to his fate. Sinatra had me feeling so prematurely adult, I half-expected a cigar to materialize in my hand or to receive a personal invitation to an exclusive stockholder’s meeting.
I wasn’t just waiting for dinner. I was reckoning with life’s grand metaphysical dilemmas, wrestling with the realization that the world was vast, unknowable, and, worst of all, drenched in longing. And yet, as I sat there, absorbing the gospel of Ol’ Blue Eyes, I couldn’t help but suspect that Sinatra had the answers—the ones I wouldn’t fully understand until I was old enough to toast my regrets with a stiff drink and a knowing smirk.
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NOT THE GREATEST AMERICAN HERO
When I was a nineteen-year-old bodybuilder in Northern California, I stumbled into a gig at UPS, where they transformed the likes of me into over-caffeinated parcel gladiators. Picture this: UPS, the coliseum of cardboard where bubble wrap is revered like a deity. My mission? To load 1,200 boxes an hour, stacking them into trailer walls so precise you’d think I was defending a Tetris championship title. Five nights a week, from eleven p.m. to three a.m., I morphed into a nocturnal legend of the loading dock. Unintentionally, I shed ten pounds and saw my muscles morph into something straight out of a comic book—like the ones where the hero’s biceps could bench-press a car.
I had a chance to redeem myself from the embarrassment of two previous bodybuilding fiascos. At sixteen, I competed in the Mr. Teenage Golden State in Sacramento, appearing as smooth as a marble statue without the necessary cuts. I repeated the folly a year later at the Mr. Teenage California in San Jose. I refused to let my early bodybuilding career be tarnished by these debacles. With a major competition looming, I noticed my cuts sharpening from the relentless cardio at UPS. Redemption seemed not only possible but inevitable.
Naturally, I did what any self-respecting bodybuilder would do: I slashed my carbs to near starvation levels and set my sights on the 1981 Mr. Teenage San Francisco contest at Mission High School. My physique transformed into a sculpted masterpiece—180 pounds of perfectly bronzed beefcake. The downside? My clothes draped off me like a sad, deflated costume. Cue an emergency shopping trip to a Pleasanton mall, where I found myself in a fitting room that felt like a shrine to Joey Scarbury’s “Theme from The Greatest American Hero,” the ultimate heroic anthem of 1981.
As I tried on pants behind a curtain so flimsy it could’ve been mistaken for a fogged-up windshield, I overheard two young women employees outside arguing about which one should ask me out. Their voices escalated, each vying for the honor of basking in my bronzed splendor. As I slid a tanned, shaved calf through a pants leg, I pictured the cute young women outside my dressing room engaged in a WWE smackdown right there on the store floor, complete with body slams and flying elbows, all for a dinner date with me. This was it—the ultimate validation of my sweat-drenched hours in the gym. And what did I do? I froze like a deer in headlights, donning an aloof expression so potent it was like tossing a wet blanket on a fireworks show. They scattered, muttering about my stuck-up demeanor, while I stood there in my Calvin Kleins, paralyzed by the attention I had so craved.
For a brief, shining moment—from my mid-teens to my early twenties—I possessed the kind of looks that could make a Cosmopolitan “Bachelor of the Month” seem like the “Before” picture in a self-help book. But my personality? Stuck in the same developmental phase as a slab of walking protein powder with the social finesse of a half-melted wax figure.
I had sculpted the body of a Greek god but inhabited it with the poise of a toddler wearing his dad’s shoes. In this regrettable state, I found that dozens of attractive women threw themselves at me, and I responded with the enthusiasm of a tax auditor on Xanax. Look past the Herculean exterior, and you’d find a hollow shell—a construction site abandoned mid-project, complete with rusted scaffolding and a sign that said, “Sorry, we’re closed.”
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NOTHING TRIGGERED CHILDHOOD FOMO MORE THAN THE BRADY BUNCH
In the scorching summer of 1971, when I was nine and convinced that destiny owed me something spectacular, my family and four others carved out a rugged paradise on Mount Shasta. For two weeks, we fished, water-skied, dodged hornets, and lounged beneath the hypnotic drone of a massive battery-powered radio blasting The Doors, Paul McCartney, Carole King, and Three Dog Night. It should have been idyllic. It should have been.
One morning, while the other families fried pancakes, prepped their fishing gear, and reveled in their pioneer fantasies, I was still wrapped in my sleeping bag, immersed in the most transcendent dream of my life. This wasn’t just a dream—it was a divine calling. I had met The Brady Bunch in downtown San Francisco, right beside a gleaming red cable car. Their smiles were radiant, practically angelic, and their body language said it all: I had been chosen. The adoption papers had already been signed in some conveniently located government office, and it was official—I was now a Brady.
Questions swirled in my nine-year-old mind: Would I get my own room in their split-level suburban utopia, or would I have to bunk with Greg? More importantly, how soon would I appear on the show? Just as I was about to find out, reality crashed in like a wrecking ball. Mark and Tosh, my so-called friends, yanked me out of my blissful state, insisting it was time to go fishing. Fishing? Fishing?! I had just been welcomed into America’s most wholesome sitcom family, and now I was expected to slum it with worms and hooks?
I sulked like a deposed prince. All day, I stomped around Mount Shasta, scowling like a kid exiled from paradise, my Brady Bunch dream stuck inside me like a splinter. I couldn’t tell anyone. What was I supposed to say? “Sorry, I can’t go fishing; I was about to move into a Technicolor utopia where the biggest problem is whether Marcia gets a date to the dance.” Yeah, that would go over well.
“Get with the program!” my dad barked in his military tone. “We’re living in the wild!” The wild? I didn’t want the wild. I wanted avocado-green appliances, shag carpeting, and Alice the maid serving pork chops and applesauce. Instead, I got yellowjackets hovering over our food, a fishing pole, and a cold dose of reality. I was not a Brady, and the sting of it lingered longer than the mosquito bites.
But here’s the punchline—my Brady Bunch fantasy wasn’t some rare stroke of delusion. Millions of kids across America were staring at that pastel-hued utopia, convinced that salvation came in the form of avocado-colored kitchens and polyester bell-bottoms. Creator Sherwood Schwartz was practically running a cult without knowing it—he received hundreds of letters from kids in broken homes, willing to renounce their possessions, hitchhike cross-country, and pledge fealty just for a shot at joining the sacred Brady fold. The show had become a sitcom Mecca, and nothing triggered childhood FOMO quite like realizing you weren’t born into that family.
And here’s the cosmic joke—while we were glued to those 30-minute morality plays, dreaming of a world where even a busted nose got a feel-good resolution, the actors’ real lives were flaming train wrecks. Addiction, affairs, infighting—the Bradys weren’t living in a sitcom, they were trapped in a full-blown soap opera. Turns out, while America was fantasizing about swapping families, the actual Bradys probably wished they could swap out of their own.
Should we have expected the actors to live the squeaky-clean fantasy they sold us? Of course not. Expecting that is like assuming Superman pays his taxes. Hollywood doesn’t run on truth—it runs on glossy façades, and The Brady Bunch was one of the greatest of them all. They spoon-fed us choreographed family bliss while drowning in off-screen dysfunction. And yet, we still crave that fantasy. Once you’ve had a taste of Brady-level wholesomeness, it’s like emotional junk food—artificial, saccharine, and utterly addictive.
To this day, I still have dreams that I’m in that opening theme song, my face glowing in one of the squares, beaming at my Brady siblings. In that dream, I am forever young, forever safe, basking in the manufactured warmth of a world that never really existed.
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THE ALPHA MALES OF COLD WAR TV
As a small child, I had a surprisingly sharp grasp of the Cold War, thanks in no small part to my relentless viewing of The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. Russian spies Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale were my first introduction to geopolitical villainy, their cartoonish skullduggery revolving around stealing U.S. military secrets and pilfering jet fuel for nefarious purposes. These two Soviet saboteurs lurked on American soil, risking their lives for the Motherland, making it clear to me that the United States and Russia were locked in a high-stakes global chess match—one where espionage, sabotage, and suspiciously bad Russian accents were the order of the day.
But it wasn’t just Rocky and Bullwinkle feeding my young mind a steady diet of American military might. TV shows across the board hammered home the same lesson: the true Goalkeepers of Dominance weren’t politicians or businessmen; they were highly decorated military officers, soaring through the skies and beyond. Exhibit A: I Dream of Jeannie.
Major Anthony Nelson, astronaut, and all-American heartthrob, was living the dream—piloting spacecraft, rubbing shoulders with generals, and, most importantly, stumbling upon a genie in a bottle who just happened to be Barbara Eden in a sheer harem outfit. As far as my prepubescent brain was concerned, this was a direct confirmation of how the universe worked: the smartest, most disciplined men—those with military and scientific prowess—got the most beautiful women. If you weren’t a decorated officer or a NASA golden boy, good luck summoning a blonde bombshell out of a lamp.
This hierarchy of Alpha Males wasn’t just something television taught me—it was practically family doctrine. My father, an infantryman turned engineer, was living proof. In fact, without his sheer resourcefulness and competitive streak, I wouldn’t exist.
In the early 1960s, my father was stationed in Anchorage, where he and another army suitor, a certain John Shalikashvili (who would later become a U.S. General and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), found themselves locked in a battle for the romantic affections of my teenage mother. Their duel was temporarily paused over Christmas—Shalikashvili went home to Peoria, Illinois, while my father visited his family in Hollywood, Florida. But my father, ever the tactician, decided to cut his holiday short, determined to beat Shalikashvili back to Alaska and win the girl.
The problem? His cream-colored 1959 Morris Minor was suffering from a faulty Lucas fuel filter, and the auto parts store was fresh out of replacements. Undeterred, my father—who would later become a top engineer at IBM—rigged a temporary fix using a prophylactic and a paperclip, fashioning a makeshift spring to keep the fuel pump from locking up. It was a ludicrously desperate, MacGyver-esque solution, but somehow, it worked. He made it to Seattle, caught the ferry to Alaska, and reunited with my mother a full 48 hours before Shalikashvili arrived.
Nine months later, I was born. In the great Cold War of romance, my father had won the ultimate victory—not through military rank, but through sheer ingenuity, timing, and, apparently, latex-based automotive engineering.
Cinemorphosis 