Cinemorphosis

Tag: short-story

  • The Go-Home Heat of Ordinary Life

    The Go-Home Heat of Ordinary Life

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

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

    “Have you ever bought the golden ones?”

    I nodded, already sensing the sermon.

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

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

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

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

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

    It did not end the exchange.

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

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

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

    “You can go first.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    A disturbance erupted in the frozen-food aisle.

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

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

    “Stop coughing on the food.”

    “Mind your own business.”

    Again.

    “Stop coughing on the food.”

    “Mind your own business.”

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

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

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

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

    His expression attempted righteous indignation, but something betrayed him.

    He looked around.

    No one was applauding.

    No one admired his courage.

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

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

    The go-home heat was overwhelming.

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

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

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

    I became wallpaper.

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

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

    He stood two lanes away.

    The entire store seemed aware of him.

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

    He knew.

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

    The whispers began.

    “What a jerk.”

    “One guy can ruin the whole atmosphere.”

    “He really overplayed his hand.”

    “That guy watches way too many Bro videos.”

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

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

  • The Gospel of the Golden Kiwi

    The Gospel of the Golden Kiwi

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

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

    “Have you ever bought the golden ones?”

    I nodded, already sensing the sermon.

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

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

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

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

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

    It did not end the exchange.

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

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

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

    “You can go first.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • The Woman Who Mistook Defiance for Freedom

    The Woman Who Mistook Defiance for Freedom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    She drank it.

    Nothing happened.

    The sadness remained exactly where it was.

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

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

    Then came the realization she had spent decades avoiding.

    Her life had become a nightmare.

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

    The admission did not diminish her. It clarified her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Waterbed Dreams (a short story)

    Waterbed Dreams (a short story)

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

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

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

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

    Splash.

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

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

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

    And so the party continued.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Children notice these things.

    We notice who gets to laugh.

    We notice who becomes the punchline.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    What I wanted instead was sensuality.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Unfortunately, every revolution contains its contradictions.

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

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

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

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

    The waterbed represented an entirely different cosmology.

    The spring mattress was Father.

    The waterbed was Mother.

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

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

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

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

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

    Eventually my parents surrendered to the pressure.

    For a brief moment, I believed paradise had arrived.

    Then reality arrived.

    The first warning sign was the algae.

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

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

    Waterbed enthusiasts described this as floating.

    In practice it felt more like wrestling a small ocean.

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

    The temperature was another ongoing adventure.

    The bed was either too cold or too hot.

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

    But the unforgivable sin was the leaking.

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

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

    My dreams of aquatic enlightenment collapsed.

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

    The waterbed was not Mother Ocean.

    It was not the Womb.

    It was not a portal to higher consciousness.

    It was a sea monster.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Yet one detail disturbed me.

    Everyone looked skinny.

    Not healthy skinny. Fragile skinny.

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

    Suddenly a terrifying possibility entered my mind.

    What if there were no gyms in space?

    What if the absence of gravity eliminated weight resistance altogether?

    What if there were protein shortages?

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

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

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

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

    “If It Feels Good, Do It!”

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

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

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

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

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

    This was my problem with life. Nothing stayed put.

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

    I longed for permanence.

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

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

    I kept thinking about that waterbed.

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

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

    Yet even weightlifting failed to provide the permanence I sought.

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

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

    And so the search for permanence continued.

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

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

  • 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.

  • What Does It Profit a Man to Gain the World and Lose His Soul?

    What Does It Profit a Man to Gain the World and Lose His Soul?

    On a bright spring afternoon in Southern California in 1998, my college writing class was dissecting evil with the clinical confidence of people who believed it could be contained in literature. We were discussing The Painted Bird, a novel so saturated with human cruelty that it feels less like fiction and more like a dare. The room hummed with theories—evil as social construct, evil as pathology—until my students quietly dismantled the abstraction. They believed in evil not as metaphor, but as presence. Ghosts. Demons. Things seen and not forgotten.

    One single mother spoke of something that crawled beneath her bed at night. She said it plainly, without theatrics, which made it worse. Another student, a nurse in her forties who worked long shifts at UCLA, waited until after class. “I have a story,” she said, as if announcing a diagnosis that required privacy.

    She didn’t look like someone given to fantasy. She was compact, practical, her thick glasses enlarging eyes worn down by long hours and human frailty. Her stories usually involved difficult patients or her childhood in rural Louisiana—earthbound things. But as she began, her voice shifted, acquiring a distant cadence, as if she were tuning into a frequency not meant for daylight.

    She was six or seven at the time, roaming the backwoods with her cousin Carmen. No supervision, no schedule, no adult intervention. Their days were filled with the idle cruelty of children left alone too long—tormenting small animals, inventing games that escalated from mischief into something darker. There were no witnesses, no consequences, and so no brakes.

    Until one afternoon.

    They were inside the farmhouse, a sagging structure with a porch that complained with every step. The screen door creaked open. A man walked in and sat down in the living room as if he owned the place.

    But he wasn’t a man.

    She struggled to describe him without sounding ridiculous. He wasn’t clothed, but that detail felt irrelevant. His body was covered in coarse, matted fur. His skin—if it could be called that—had the pallor and texture of a rodent. Behind him trailed a long, muscular tail that slid along the floor and flicked against the doorframe like a living whip. He looked like something assembled from nightmare logic: a giant rat that had decided to stand upright and enter a house.

    The girls didn’t run. They couldn’t. Fear locked them in place, as if the room itself had thickened.

    He began to speak.

    For hours—she was certain it lasted hours—he sat in that chair and talked. His voice was low and abrasive, as if it scraped its way into the room. He told stories about the things he had done, the damage he had caused, the harm he had perfected. Time lost its structure. The afternoon stretched into something shapeless and suffocating.

    Then he turned his attention to them.

    “I’ve seen how bad you girls are,” he said. “I’ve seen what you’ve been doing.”

    And then he began to list their offenses. Not generalities—details. Every small cruelty, every secret act they had committed when no one was around. Things no adult had witnessed. Things no one could have reported.

    “I’m going to recruit you,” he said. “I’m going to make you mine.”

    The threat didn’t rise in volume. It settled into the room, thick and toxic, like something you could breathe in and never fully expel. His eyes stayed on them the entire time, unblinking, patient, certain. He described what would happen if they continued, not in vague moral warnings, but in precise, almost administrative terms—consequences rendered as inevitabilities.

    The girls sat frozen, their bodies no longer their own.

    And then, as casually as he had entered, he stood up and left. The tail followed him out like an afterthought, sliding across the threshold and disappearing into the heat.

    Silence rushed back into the house.

    Carmen finally whispered, “Did you see that?”

    My student nodded. Speech had abandoned her.

    From that day forward, their lives snapped into alignment. No more cruelty. No more experimentation with harm. They went to church. They prayed. They obeyed. Not out of virtue, but out of fear sharpened into obedience. Whatever had visited them had not suggested a path—it had enforced one.

    I would have preferred to dismiss the story as delusion, but that option didn’t fit the teller. This was a woman trained to assess reality, to separate symptom from fabrication. She spoke without embellishment, without the slightest interest in persuading me. She wasn’t selling a story; she was reporting an event that had rearranged her life.

    It unsettled me more than I expected.

    At the time, I was living alone in a condo in Redondo Beach, the kind of place that feels harmless until night gives it edges. One evening, I had a dream about the Cowardly Lion from The Wizard of Oz. Only this version had shed all pretense of cowardice. He chased me, snarling, his face twisted into something feral and wrong.

    I woke up, but the dream didn’t fully release me.

    At the foot of my bed, I felt it—presence. Not a thought, not a leftover image, but something that occupied space. The lion-man sat there, immense, silent, undeniable. Fear pinned me in place. Breathing became an effort, as if the air itself had thickened in protest.

    In that moment of terror, the dumbest thought came over me: What does it profit a man to have tenure and live by the beach if he’s visited by an evil entity at 2 a.m.?

    After several long seconds of thinking about my rhetorical question, I forced movement into my body. I stood, walked up the stairs on unsteady legs, poured a glass of water like someone performing a ritual they barely believed in. When I returned, I flooded the room with light, turned on the television, filled the silence with noise until the presence thinned and finally dissolved.

    Like pain receding from a crushed hand—slow, stubborn, but eventually gone.

    What stayed was the recognition.

    This was not my first encounter with that particular demon. Ever since the age of five, I had carried a pathological terror of The Wizard of Oz’s Cowardly Lion, played by Bert Lahr with such unnerving desperation that the performance ceased to feel theatrical and crossed into something infernal. Every year when the movie aired on television, I experienced the same ritual dread: excitement curdled into panic. I wanted to watch the film because everyone watched it, because it was supposedly magical and wholesome and woven into the fabric of American childhood. But I could not look directly at the Lion’s face. Not for even a second.

    There was something about the grotesque architecture of that mask—the swollen cheeks, the creased forehead, the frantic eyes flickering through the narrow slits—that convinced me I was not looking at a costume but at a leak from another realm. To glimpse him was to receive unauthorized intelligence about what demons in hell actually looked like. Other children saw a lovable neurotic feline. I saw a panic-stricken emissary from the abyss.

    The Cowardly Lion colonized my dreams for years. I would wake in the middle of the night drenched in sweat, my heart jackhammering against my ribs. But waking up offered no relief. The nightmare did not end when consciousness returned; it merely changed venues. I could still feel the Lion in the room with me. Sometimes I sensed him sitting on the edge of my bed in the darkness while an icy current climbed my spine vertebra by vertebra. My chest tightened. My breathing became shallow and frantic. I was certain I would either suffocate, faint, or be dragged bodily into some spiritual sewer beyond childhood comprehension.

    Eventually I buried these terrors beneath the sediment of ordinary life. Or so I thought.

    Then came the summer of 1984. I was twenty-two years old and asleep one morning when I dreamed I was sprinting across a vast field toward a circle of flames. Beyond the fire stood an oasis shimmering with impossible beauty, a place radiating peace, love, and release from whatever unnamed anguish had dogged me since childhood. I knew with absolute certainty that if I could pass through the flames, I would arrive somewhere transformed.

    But just as I approached the burning circle, the Cowardly Lion stepped directly into my path.

    The effect was instantaneous. My body failed. Terror seized me with such total authority that I could no longer run. Worse, I could not scream. My mouth opened, but only muffled animal noises emerged while my lungs constricted so violently I thought I would suffocate inside the dream itself.

    Then came the truly impossible part.

    I awoke.

    At least I believed I awoke.

    I was lying flat on my back in bed, fully conscious, staring into the dim morning light of my room when I began to rise. Slowly. Smoothly. Silently. About a foot above the mattress.

    There was no drama to it. No spinning. No celestial music. Just the hideous calm of impossible physics.

    For what felt like ten seconds, perhaps longer, I floated there suspended above the bed in absolute terror before descending gradually back onto the mattress.

    I lay frozen afterward, unable to decide which possibility frightened me more: that I had actually levitated or that my mind had finally snapped under the pressure of its own private mythology.

    Naturally, I told no one.

    Who admits such things? Madmen? Cult leaders? Future occupants of padded rooms?

    So the experience became another sealed chamber inside me, another secret shoved into psychic storage beside the Lion himself.

    Then, years later, when I was thirty-seven, one of my nursing students casually described being visited in dreams by a grotesque rat-man figure. The moment she spoke, the old terror returned in full force. The Lion-Man rose from the graveyard of memory and stood before me again, and with him came the sickening recollection of floating above my bed in the summer of 1984 like some frightened counterfeit saint in a low-budget religious hallucination.

    Peeling back these memories feels less like reflection and more like excavating radioactive material. What occurs to me now is that humanity divides itself into two broad species. First are the literalists, the hard-material people who believe the physical world is the entire inventory of existence. What can be measured, photographed, weighed, biopsied, and touched is real. Everything else is sentimental fog generated by weak nerves and overheated imaginations. For these people, reality is a Home Depot aisle of concrete objects. No mystery. No metaphysical leakage. No shadows moving beneath the floorboards of ordinary life. What you see is what you get.

    I used to train with one of these specimens back in my teenage bodybuilding days, a granite-headed materialist named Falco Labroni. One evening we attended a church youth spaghetti dinner where a sweating youth pastor was passionately explaining salvation, heaven, hell, and eternal judgment between bites of garlic bread. Falco listened with the same skeptical expression he reserved for mail-order ab machines. Finally, he interrupted the sermon to announce that he would refuse to believe in heaven or hell unless Jacques Cousteau personally explored both places in a submarine and returned with film footage.

    Falco was what I now call a Film-in-Hand Absolutist.

    No footage, no faith.

    If Satan could not be captured on 16mm color film while smoking a cigar beside a lava pit, Falco wasn’t buying it. To him, metaphysics without documentation was merely indigestion wearing a choir robe.

    Then there is the other category of person—the unfortunate tribe to which I belong. These are the people cursed with imaginations porous enough to let other realities seep through. We sense shadows where others see empty rooms. We suspect hidden dimensions pressing faintly against ordinary life like faces against frosted glass. We dream vividly, feel presences, glimpse symbolic patterns, and occasionally become convinced the universe is leaking messages through nightmares, coincidences, music, illness, or memory. These people do not require film because the experience itself brands them from the inside.

    For us, life is never merely literal.

    It is layered.

    Ambiguous.

    Haunted.

    The world arrives wrapped in penumbra. Every object casts not just a shadow but the suggestion of another kingdom attached to it. A hallway at night is never just a hallway. A face can become an omen. A dream can feel more historically significant than an actual afternoon.

    Unfortunately, once you belong to this category, you never fully return to the clean reassuring geometry of materialism. You can pretend. You can teach freshman composition, pay your taxes, discuss cholesterol numbers, and shop for sensible shoes at Costco. But somewhere in the back chambers of your mind, the Lion-Man still breathes softly in the dark, waiting for the lights to go out.

    Looking back now, I see 1998 as my Lion-Man Year, the year the shadow world stopped politely knocking and simply let itself inside. My nerves were frayed, my concentration was dissolving, and my mind drifted through ordinary life as though half of it were trapped in some invisible underworld. Inevitably, this absentmindedness led me to commit one of academia’s unforgivable sins: I lost my university key.

    This catastrophe required me to report to a college administrator whose emotional warmth suggested she had once been rejected by both the priesthood and the prison system for being excessively severe. The moment I explained my predicament, her face hardened into a mask of institutional disgust.

    “The one thing,” she said slowly, as though speaking to a parole violator, “that a college instructor does not do is lose his key.”

    She looked me up and down not as a fellow employee but as a suspicious transient who had wandered onto campus carrying a forged faculty ID and a duffel bag full of stolen microscopes. Her lips curled with contempt as she informed me I would need to drive to a remote outpost on the edge of campus called Plant-Ops and pay cash for a replacement.

    Cash only.

    Naturally.

    Because nothing says “modern institution of higher learning” quite like a disciplinary pilgrimage to a bureaucratic wasteland requiring physical currency, shame, and emotional self-flagellation.

    Mortified, I drove eastward away from campus civilization. At first the road was paved, lined with ordinary buildings and signs of human order. But gradually the asphalt surrendered to dirt, potholes, rubble, and terrain better suited for Cold War tank exercises. My car bucked and lurched violently as though objecting to the mission itself.

    The landscape became increasingly apocalyptic.

    Tumbleweeds rolled across the path. Cow skulls appeared beside the road like decorations from a satanic rodeo. Buzzards circled lazily overhead, apparently alerted that some weakened academic had wandered too far from the faculty lounge and was nearing collapse.

    I no longer felt as though I were in Southern California.

    I felt I had crossed into a parallel dimension where failed instructors, cursed livestock, and bureaucratic shame went to die. The air itself seemed infected with rumors of evil.

    Then came the smell.

    As I approached Plant-Ops, a chemical stench engulfed the car—a nauseating cocktail of glue, industrial paint, mildew, overheated machinery, and cow manure baking beneath the sun. The odor struck me with such force that I became dizzy. My skin grew clammy. Sweat collected beneath my collar. I was convinced I either had a fever or had accidentally driven into the outer perimeter of hell’s maintenance department.

    Part of me wanted to turn the car around immediately, flee home, collapse into bed, and abandon the entire miserable enterprise. But I was too close now. The replacement key had become more than a key. It was absolution. Redemption stamped in metal.

    So I sat there gripping the steering wheel, breathing through waves of nausea, wiping sweat from my forehead like a condemned man approaching the gallows. Then I took a deep breath and drove forward into the wasteland.

    After driving for what felt like several geological eras, I finally saw Plant-Ops emerge from the heat shimmer like a hallucination summoned by exhaustion and institutional shame. The structure sat alone on a wasteland of gravel and dust, a dilapidated hangar that looked less like a university maintenance facility and more like the final headquarters of a collapsing dictatorship.

    The oversized shack had been assembled from enormous sheets of tin and aluminum that appeared to be barely holding together through a desperate alliance of rusted screws, crooked nails, and divine neglect. Every gust of wind threatened to peel the building apart and scatter it across the desert like the world’s saddest deck of cards. The metal walls were coated in a grotesque patina of stains, corrosion, and industrial runoff that resembled toxic sludge bubbling up from the underworld itself. It looked as though Satan’s HVAC department had subcontracted the job to the lowest bidder.

    The entire structure radiated bureaucratic doom.

    This was not a place where things were repaired. This was where broken things came to surrender.

    Reluctantly, I stepped out of my car and began trudging across the gravel toward the hangar. Each footstep felt ceremonial, as though I were approaching some punitive tribunal reserved for the absentminded and spiritually unwell. The smell intensified with every yard I crossed—a nauseating fusion of chemicals, mildew, scorched metal, industrial glue, wet dirt, and something faintly organic, as though livestock had died nearby and been left to ferment beneath the sun. My stomach pitched violently. I fought the urge to vomit, faint, or simply curl into the fetal position beside a tumbleweed and surrender to my fate.

    Inside, I encountered the caretaker of this infernal outpost.

    He was a short, hostile little man with thick glasses, a bushy gray mustache, and black wisps of hair clinging desperately to his bald scalp like spiders trapped in tar. He wore a grease-splattered work apron that looked as though it had absorbed forty years of mechanical despair. Standing over a scarred wooden workbench, he glared at me with bulging amphibian eyes while eating cold SpaghettiOs directly from the can. The fluorescent light above him cast a morgue-like glow across his cadaverous face. He looked less like a maintenance worker and more like a cemetery groundskeeper who moonlighted as an interrogator.

    I explained that I had lost my university key.

    Without sympathy or ceremony, he demanded twenty dollars in cash upfront. Then he grunted toward the key machine.

    “Don’t ever lose your key again,” he muttered.

    He paused, then gave a dry laugh.

    “And if you think dealing with me is bad, wait till the guy replacing me next week. He makes me look like a picnic at the beach.”

    The remark amused him enormously. He opened his mouth wide enough for me to glimpse rotten teeth stained the color of nicotine and despair. It was the laugh of a man whose personality had been slowly pickled in bitterness, isolation, and fluorescent lighting.

    Then his expression changed.

    He studied me more carefully now, concern pushing aside suspicion.

    “You don’t look so good,” he said.

    “The smell,” I blurted weakly.

    That made him laugh again.

    “I’m used to it,” he said. “But you better lie down. Cot’s over there.”

    He pointed toward a filthy army cot near the workbench with an index finger sporting a blackened fingernail thick as tortoise shell.

    I thanked him with the dazed politeness of a fever patient entering surgery and stumbled toward the cot. The canvas sagged beneath me as I collapsed onto it, drenched in clammy sweat, and watched him begin making my replacement key.

    The key-cutting machine crouched in the corner like a dormant execution device awaiting orders from the state. It was enormous, greasy, and coated with decades of metallic filth baked into its surface like industrial scar tissue. Iron filings glittered in the grime like black snow. Above it hung a single exposed bulb flickering weakly, as though even electricity struggled to survive inside Plant-Ops.

    The old man fed the blank key into the machine and yanked the lever.

    Instantly the contraption erupted awake.

    The sound was catastrophic.

    A metallic shriek tore through the hangar with such violence it felt capable of stripping paint from bone. The grinding wheel screamed against the brass with the tortured howl of some living creature being dissected alive. Sparks burst outward into the darkness while gears rattled and chattered with arthritic fury. The machine did not sound manufactured. It sounded enraged. Ancient. Biological.

    The noise penetrated my feverish skull until I no longer believed a key was being cut. It felt as though judgment itself was being engraved into metal.

    And then it happened.

    In the middle of that infernal screeching, my body began to rise.

    Slowly.

    Smoothly.

    I lifted a foot—perhaps two feet—above the cot.

    Terror detonated inside me. I tried to scream, but paralysis sealed my throat shut. I could neither move nor cry out. I floated there helplessly while the machine screamed like an industrial banshee beside me.

    In my terrified state, I mumbled, “What does it profit a man to have tenure and live by the beach if he’s levitating in some demon’s lair?”

    The old handyman glanced over casually.

    “Almost done,” he said.

    There was no shock in his voice. No alarm whatsoever. He regarded my levitation with the mild indifference of a mechanic watching a customer’s tire pressure fluctuate. It was as though hovering terrified college instructors were simply another routine inconvenience at Plant-Ops.

    “There,” he announced a moment later. “Finished.”

    At those words, my body slowly descended back onto the cot.

    The smell no longer bothered me. In fact, I suddenly felt calm—eerily calm—as though some fever had broken or some invisible tribunal had decided to spare me.

    The handyman handed me the new key.

    I thanked him, staggered back outside, and escaped the haunted hangar with the gratitude of a prisoner released from a penal colony.

    From there I drove directly to a hardware store and bought the most indestructible keychain apparatus I could find: Kevlar tether, reinforced reel, industrial belt loop, military-grade nylon. I clipped the thing to my belt like survival equipment for a man preparing to cross hostile terrain.

    Because by then the keychain no longer represented mere organization.

    It was a tether to reality itself.

    A safety line.

    A guarantee that I would remain anchored to the ordinary world and not drift loose again into those shadow realms waiting patiently beyond the edges of consciousness.

    What does it profit a man to have tenure and live by the beach if at any moment he can become untethered to faraway places from which he can never return? 

  • The Case of the Mudman with Missing Multiband

    The Case of the Mudman with Missing Multiband

    I bought a used Casio G-Shock G-9300 Mudman for $100, though I didn’t know that at the time. I thought I was buying its more sophisticated cousin—the Multiband-6 GW-9300—listed at $200. When the package arrived, the truth was stamped plainly on the caseback: G-9300. No atomic sync, no nightly communion with Colorado—just a solid, stubborn quartz soldier. My heart sank with the dull thud of a man who realizes he’s paid twice the price for half the feature set.

    I contacted the seller, assuming incompetence rather than malice. His inventory was 99% clothing; this was not a man who spent his evenings debating radio signal strength and solar charging rituals. I offered him a dignified exit: refund me $100 and I’ll keep the watch, or take it back for a full refund. His first move was to offer $80, which was optimistic in the way that a man hopes you won’t notice arithmetic. I declined gently and reiterated my willingness to return the watch. That sobered him. He apologized, agreed to refund the full $100, and we both avoided the bureaucratic headache of returns.

    I could have pressed harder. There’s always a way to extract a little more when the other party is off-balance. But squeezing a man who’s clearly trying to piece together a living from eBay listings feels less like savvy and more like moral corrosion. You squeeze out a few more dollars but lose your soul.

    In the end, I kept the watch, opened ChatGPT for a tutorial, and in two minutes had it set and behaving like the reliable instrument it is. No atomic precision, no midnight syncs—just time, ticking along with modest competence. The transaction, briefly absurd, resolved itself into something tolerable, even instructive. I paid for a mistake, corrected it, and walked away with a working watch and an untroubled conscience.

    Not every deal needs to be a conquest. Some are better as small acts of grace and kindness.

  • I Am Verbosaurus Rex

    I Am Verbosaurus Rex

    At exactly 8:00 a.m.—as reliably as a Swiss watch with a Costco membership—I entered my Torrance Trader Joe’s, continuing a ritual that has endured since 2005. Fifteen minutes in, I found myself in the pasta sauce aisle beside two sisters in their sixties, both with jet-black hair and the alert posture of women who have seen things. Then it came: a disturbance from the frozen food aisle.

    At first, I told myself it was the usual retail banter—clerks sparring, voices raised in mock aggression, the choreography of workplace camaraderie. That illusion lasted about three seconds. The tone sharpened. The volume climbed. This was no jovial joust. This was a kerfuffle in its purest, most unrefined form—the kind of word baseball announcers used when fists replaced fastballs.

    The dialogue, once decipherable, repeated itself with the stubborn clarity of a broken record:
    “Stop coughing on the food.”
    “Mind your own business.”

    Again.
    “Stop coughing on the food.”
    “Mind your own business.”

    The sisters and I exchanged a look of shared alarm—the silent agreement that this was not the sort of morning theater one expects while contemplating marinara. Around us, employees formed small, murmuring clusters, like villagers sensing a storm that rarely visits their town.

    I never saw the alleged cougher—the phantom menace—but I did see his accuser. He entered our aisle still simmering, muttering fragments of outrage like a man replaying his own highlight reel. He was a bodybuilder in his late twenties, performing that unmistakable gait: the lat-spread strut, shoulders flared as if perpetually stepping onstage. He carried a bag in each hand like ceremonial weights. Gray sweatpants. Turquoise T-shirt emblazoned with the word “Strong,” as if to remove all ambiguity.

    The shirt was soaked through, suggesting a recent campaign at the nearby UFC gym. He had not yet exited warrior mode. His face attempted a look of righteous fury, but it flickered—betrayed by the faintest hint of self-awareness. The room was not applauding. It was recoiling. The performance of dominance had misfired, and in its place lingered something less heroic: the spectacle of a man who had mistaken volume for authority and muscle for gravitas.

    For a moment, I caught a trace of chagrin in his expression, like a balloon losing air in slow motion. Still, he clung to a hardened stare, perhaps hoping to salvage dignity from the wreckage.

    As for me, I became invisible. I adopted the ancient survival tactic of the grocery store: benign neutrality. Eyes forward. No recognition. No acknowledgment. The last thing I needed was to be drafted into this man’s private war.

    At checkout, as the affable clerk scanned my items with the serenity of someone blissfully unaware of the morning’s drama, I felt the urge to recount the scene. It had all the ingredients of a fine anecdote—conflict, absurdity, a man yelling about respiratory etiquette in the frozen aisle. But I hesitated. The bodybuilder might still be somewhere in the store, prowling, listening, ready to defend his honor against anyone who dared narrate it.

    Perhaps next week, I’ll tell the story. Though by then, in a place like Trader Joe’s, the tale will have already spread—whispered from aisle to aisle, passed between cashiers, and filed away as one of those rare moments when civility briefly cracked, and the frozen peas bore witness.

    My opportunity to tell the story would be wasted because it would be old gossip by then. 

    I walked out of Trader Joe’s pushing ten canvas sacks of groceries and a quiet resentment: I was not the man who got to tell the story of the raging bodybuilder. That distinction had slipped through my fingers, and the loss exposed something less flattering than disappointment. It exposed me as a gasbag—a man who doesn’t merely enter a room but attempts to annex it, to colonize the airspace with stories, gossip, and one-man comedy routines delivered with the full-body enthusiasm of a failed vaudevillian.

    I don’t just want to tell a story. I want to stage it. I want gestures, timing, voice modulation—the whole theatrical apparatus. I want to leave scorch marks on the memory of my audience, to become, if only for a moment, the most vivid thing that has ever happened to them. Not a storyteller, but an event. Not a man, but a headline.

    Which is to say: I am Verbosaurus Rex. I am a  conversational apex predator that survives by devouring silence and leaving behind a trail of exhausted listeners. I do not speak so much as expand, inflating every passing thought into a full-bodied monologue with the confidence of a man who believes the room has been waiting all day for my commentary. Questions are merely launchpads, pauses are tactical errors, and other people’s sentences are polite suggestions to be overrun. The Verbosaur, such as myself, does not intend harm; I simply cannot imagine a world in which less of me would be an improvement.

    And that impulse, when examined in sober light, looks less like charisma and more like hunger. Primitive man told stories around the fire to make sense of the world and to warn others about the tiger in the tall grass. I, on the other hand, seem to be reenacting Barnum & Bailey in the produce aisle, hoping that if I juggle enough words and land enough laughs, I might briefly convince myself that I matter.

    As a Verbosaur, I resemble the great, haunted figure of Larry Sanders—the talk show host who, after basking in the glow of studio applause, goes home to watch himself on television, scanning his own performance for proof that he was enough, and finding, with grim consistency, that he was not.

  • A Close Fight by the Frozen Peas at Trader Joe’s

    A Close Fight by the Frozen Peas at Trader Joe’s

    At exactly 8:00 a.m.—as reliably as a Swiss watch with a Costco membership—I entered my Torrance Trader Joe’s, continuing a ritual that has endured since 2005. Fifteen minutes in, I found myself in the pasta sauce aisle beside two sisters in their sixties, both with jet-black hair and the alert posture of women who have seen things. Then it came: a disturbance from the frozen food aisle.

    At first, I told myself it was the usual retail banter—clerks sparring, voices raised in mock aggression, the choreography of workplace camaraderie. That illusion lasted about three seconds. The tone sharpened. The volume climbed. This was no jovial joust. This was a kerfuffle in its purest, most unrefined form—the kind of word baseball announcers used when fists replaced fastballs.

    The dialogue, once decipherable, repeated itself with the stubborn clarity of a broken record:
    “Stop coughing on the food.”
    “Mind your own business.”

    Again.
    “Stop coughing on the food.”
    “Mind your own business.”

    The sisters and I exchanged a look of shared alarm—the silent agreement that this was not the sort of morning theater one expects while contemplating marinara. Around us, employees formed small, murmuring clusters, like villagers sensing a storm that rarely visits their town.

    I never saw the alleged cougher—the phantom menace—but I did see his accuser. He entered our aisle still simmering, muttering fragments of outrage like a man replaying his own highlight reel. He was a bodybuilder in his late twenties, performing that unmistakable gait: the lat-spread strut, shoulders flared as if perpetually stepping onstage. He carried a bag in each hand like ceremonial weights. Gray sweatpants. Turquoise T-shirt emblazoned with the word “Strong,” as if to remove all ambiguity.

    The shirt was soaked through, suggesting a recent campaign at the nearby UFC gym. He had not yet exited warrior mode. His face attempted a look of righteous fury, but it flickered—betrayed by the faintest hint of self-awareness. The room was not applauding. It was recoiling. The performance of dominance had misfired, and in its place lingered something less heroic: the spectacle of a man who had mistaken volume for authority and muscle for gravitas.

    For a moment, I caught a trace of chagrin in his expression, like a balloon losing air in slow motion. Still, he clung to a hardened stare, perhaps hoping to salvage dignity from the wreckage.

    As for me, I became invisible. I adopted the ancient survival tactic of the grocery store: benign neutrality. Eyes forward. No recognition. No acknowledgment. The last thing I needed was to be drafted into this man’s private war.

    At checkout, as the affable clerk scanned my items with the serenity of someone blissfully unaware of the morning’s drama, I felt the urge to recount the scene. It had all the ingredients of a fine anecdote—conflict, absurdity, a man yelling about respiratory etiquette in the frozen aisle. But I hesitated. The bodybuilder might still be somewhere in the store, prowling, listening, ready to defend his honor against anyone who dared narrate it.

    Perhaps next week, I’ll tell the story. Though by then, in a place like Trader Joe’s, the tale will have already spread—whispered from aisle to aisle, passed between cashiers, and filed away as one of those rare moments when civility briefly cracked, and the frozen peas bore witness.

  • The Cologne, the Q-Tip, and the Bronzed Tyrant: A Memoir Without Euphemism

    The Cologne, the Q-Tip, and the Bronzed Tyrant: A Memoir Without Euphemism

    When Tom Junod discussed his memoir with Andrew Sullivan, he described a decision that feels almost subversive now: no contemporary therapy-speak. No “toxic masculinity,” no diagnostic shorthand, no tidy labels to anesthetize the mess. A book set in the ’60s and ’70s would speak in the idiom of those years. The wager is simple and risky: if you refuse the crutch of modern jargon, the character has to carry the weight. By that measure, Junod wins. He builds a father who does what Dashiell Hammett demanded of fiction—gets up, steps off the page, and stands there, unavoidable.

    The book—In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to be a Man—borrows its title from the Led Zeppelin song “Good Times Bad Times,” and the borrowing is apt. Junod’s father, Lou, is less a man than a doctrine delivered at high volume. He is a born pontificator with a salesman’s grin and a peacock’s vanity. He scents himself like a department store—colognes, sprays, balms layered into a cloud—and tans his body into a lacquered bronze that seems to announce itself before he enters a room. He sells handbags, favors turtlenecks, and at the beach reduces himself to a strip of fabric and a glare. He cleans his navel with a witch-hazel-dipped Q-tip and instructs his son to follow suit, as if hygiene were a moral philosophy.

    Compulsion runs through him like a live wire. If you prefer a term to describe his sexual compulsions, call it satyriasis and be done with it, but the word hardly captures the sprawl: gambling, philandering, bullying—habits that bloom into a personality. A man who cannot govern himself makes governance his obsession; he attempts to administer his household the way a tyrant administers a province—loudly, relentlessly, and with a curious conviction that control is the same thing as order. The result is a home pressurized to the point of fatigue, where even silence feels like a reprimand.

    Junod’s refusal to retrofit his childhood with modern language sharpens the pain rather than softening it. There’s a scene that lands like a held breath finally released: in Lou’s absence, the mother reappears as herself. Her face opens. Her voice steadies. When Tom reads her a poem, she brightens—really brightens—and offers the simplest, most generous counsel: read it aloud; the sound will teach you what the page cannot. It is a small moment, but it reveals the scale of what has been missing. When Lou is present, he occupies the air itself. He doesn’t just enter rooms; he consumes them, a man with a gift for turning oxygen into pressure.

    Listen to the audiobook—as Sullivan sensibly suggests—and Lou’s voice acquires a second life. You don’t merely read him; you hear the cadence, the certainty, the unearned authority. It is a performance you cannot switch off, which is precisely the point. The book’s power comes from that persistence. It is painful, yes, but the pain is disciplined into narrative momentum.

    If the experience feels familiar, it should. The era produced a certain model of man—postwar, unapologetic, loud as a virtue—who treated appetite as remedy and certainty as proof. He read “women’s magazines” out in the open, said things he couldn’t defend, and considered objection to his will a breach of etiquette. The code was simple: be emphatic, be unyielding, be right by volume. Junod doesn’t argue with that code; he incarnates it. He takes the template and gives it a name, a voice, a set of rituals so specific they become unforgettable.

    In doing so, he offers a quiet rebuke to our current habit of explanation. You don’t need a glossary to understand this man. You need a page, a room, and the patience to watch what happens when he walks in.