Tag: travel

I Am the Last Hands-Free Professor

The twins are home today—the high school’s closed for Veterans Day while my college closes for it tomorrow—so I left the house fifteen minutes early, a small luxury that spared me the traffic gauntlet. As I crossed campus, I spotted two young professors striding toward the Science Building. They could have been clones: mid-thirties, tall, lean, the same curated beard, and that monochrome uniform of urban intellect—black derby jackets, black jeans, black everything. It was as if an algorithm had dressed them.

Each hand was occupied. Their left hands dangled a thermos and a lunch case like matching luggage; their right hands gripped identical strapped tech bags, no doubt cradling laptops and a faint sense of self-importance. Watching their synchronized march, I realized something about myself. After thirty-five years of teaching, I’ve never once looked professorial. My fatal flaw? Free hands. I move from car to office unburdened, thanks to my trusty backpack—functional, roomy, and entirely devoid of aesthetic ambition. It says less “professor” than “Wyoming park ranger with tenure.” But practicality has its own dignity.

Until this morning, I’d never questioned my need to be unencumbered. Why not juggle a thermos, lunch case, and tech bag like everyone else? The answer reached back decades—to the zoo trips of childhood, when my mother insisted I bring a sweater “just in case.” I never needed it. I only needed freedom. That sweater haunted every outing, tied around my waist, falling in the dirt, collecting dust like a symbol of parental over-preparation. My whole day was spent managing it. Somewhere between those early years and now, the sweater evolved into the backpack—my lifelong protest against needless carrying.

I could, I suppose, upgrade to a minimalist tech-sleek backpack that would make me blend in with the black-jacket brigade. But I won’t. I’ve made peace with my pack. It’s my declaration of independence—my refusal to let adulthood turn into perpetual sweater management.

November 10, 2025
Thou Shalt Not Mistake Thy Biceps for Enlightenment

It was June, the last day of my sophomore year at Canyon High, and the temperature had staged a coup. The campus was no longer a school but a human sauna—heat shimmering off asphalt, the smell of suntan lotion and hormones hanging thick in the air. Education had fled.

Students drifted across the courtyard in various stages of undress: shorts, bikini tops, cutoffs, tank tops. The place looked less like an academic institution and more like a rehearsal for a Beach Boys video. Even the teachers had surrendered. Lesson plans were tossed aside like molting skin; the day was given over to signing yearbooks, gossip, and the open display of what could only be called collective infatuation disorder.

Love had broken out like a rash. Everywhere I looked, couples were holding hands, whispering into each other’s ears, stroking hair, rubbing shoulders, and gazing into each other’s eyes with the same expression of caffeinated bliss. Even the nerds—the pale, calculator-clutching tribe of outcasts—had been swept into the delirium. It was an egalitarian apocalypse of affection. Everyone was paired off, melting together in the heat.

Everyone except me.

Apparently, I hadn’t received the memo that June 12 was Love Day at Canyon High. While the rest of the student body was basking in hormonal radiance, I sat alone on a bench near the cafeteria, marinating in my solitude and trying to figure out how romance had managed to skip my ZIP code.

I sighed, stared at the ground, and summoned Master Po—the inner voice of my sarcastic conscience.

“Grasshopper,” he began, “your lonely condition should be obvious to you.”

“To you, maybe,” I said, “but to me, it’s as mysterious as algebra.”

“Let’s begin,” said Po. “First, you spend too much time staring into your own navel. You are self-centered.”

“Guilty,” I said. “Next?”

“You talk too much. You deliver speeches when you should be listening.”

“Double guilty.”

“If you wish to see the humanity in others, you must first see the humanity in yourself. True transformation begins within.”

“Master Po,” I said, “I’m already transforming. Six days a week in the gym, three hundred grams of protein a day. I’m practically evolving into another species.”

“I meant transformation of the soul,” he said.

“Oh. Right. The invisible muscle group.”

“Your self-deprecation is merely cowardice dressed as humility. You fear your own potential.”

“Maybe. But I’m warning you—every time I meditate, Raquel Welch rides through my mind on horseback in slow motion. I can’t stop her.”

“Your distractions,” said Po, “are the result of an undisciplined mind. Seek silence.”

“You mean meditate.”

“Yes, Grasshopper.”

“Then prepare yourself,” I said. “Because after Raquel Welch, the whole cast of Charlie’s Angels usually shows up.”

Po sighed, the eternal sound of a teacher realizing his student is hopeless.

And there I sat, the only unloved, unseduced, untransformed soul on the Canyon High campus—a bench-bound philosopher surrounded by teenage Aphrodites, sweating through his solitude while Raquel Welch galloped through his brain.

October 25, 2025
Do Not Trust the Smile of the Sea

When I was twelve, my family lived briefly in Nairobi, where my father worked for the Peace Corps. One school break, we headed to Mombasa, the coastal jewel of Kenya, where the Indian Ocean was as warm as bathwater and clear enough to read your reflection in. Leopard-spotted shells glimmered beneath the surface, and purple sea urchins decorated the shallows like jeweled land mines. I was a sunburned boy in blue terry-cloth trunks printed with white lilies—half Tarzan, half tourist—determined to conquer nature with curiosity alone.

At low tide, I discovered sea cucumbers: bulbous, indecently soft things that looked like props from a B-movie. I picked one up and chased my younger brother along the beach, brandishing it like a medieval mace, laughing so hard I forgot to breathe. Then, mid-laughter, the ocean answered back. I fell into the shallow surf, and my back erupted in white-hot agony. My father sprinted toward me, wielding a stick like an exorcist, shouting that I’d been wrapped by a Portuguese Man o’ War. By the time he peeled the translucent tentacles off my skin, the jellyfish had already written its signature in fire across my spine.

A local doctor, somber and leathery from the sun, told us a five-year-old boy had died from the same sting just a week earlier. He handed me pain medication and ordered a long, cold bath. As I soaked, trembling and pink, I asked Master Po why the most beautiful place I’d ever seen had tried to kill me.

“Grasshopper,” he said, “Heaven and Earth show no mercy. You thought yourself Tarzan, but you are a fragile boy—a straw dog—easily crushed by nature’s indifference. Do not be deceived by beauty. It will destroy you.”

“I’m not fooled,” I said, “but I still want to be close to it. Surfers in Santa Cruz watch their best friend get swallowed by a great white, and a year later they’re back in the same waves. Tomorrow my brother and I will be back in the Indian Ocean. Are we fools?”

“Foolishness,” Master Po said, “is closing your eyes to the lesson and calling it courage. Tomorrow, you may return to the sea—but this time, you’ll keep your eyes open.”

October 19, 2025
We All Wanted to be Adopted by The Brady Bunch

In the hellfire of the summer of 1971—sun like a coin press and every pine needle a tiny oven—I was nine and certain the world owed me a miracle. My family and four others had staked a two-week claim on a rugged patch of Mount Shasta: we fished, water-skied, swatted hornets, and lazed beneath the buzzing halo of a massive battery radio that vomited The Doors, Paul McCartney, Carole King, and Three Dog Night into the pines. It should have been Eden. It should have been bliss. Instead it felt like the production meeting for a childhood trauma.

One dawn I lay cocooned in my tent, not merely asleep but translating into the rarest dream of my short life. In that vivid pantomime I’d been plucked off our campsite and dropped into San Francisco, standing before a gleaming red cable car with the Brady Bunch beaming at me like a panel of missionary saints. Mike and Carol had already signed the papers. I was family now—promised the split-level, the avocado-green kitchen, my very own bunk. My brain supplied questions with the urgency of a petition: Would I get a room? Would Greg tolerate me? When would they shoot my induction episode?

Then Mark and Tosh—the twin saviors of sobriety—tore the dream away like a curtain ripped mid-scene. “C’mon, man, fishing,” they croaked, their voices the sound of gravestones being lowered. Fishing? Fishing?! I had been adopted by television perfection and now I was expected to sniff out worms like a commoner. I sulked with the theatricality of a miniature tyrant, trudging the rest of the day with the scowl of a man exiled from paradise, my secret grief lodged like a splinter under the skin of my soul. There was no way to explain. “Sorry, I can’t bait a hook—my new stepfamily needs me on stage.” Right. I bit my lip and chewed on humiliation.

My father barked like a sergeant and cut the melodrama down with a single order: “Get with the program. We’re living in the wild.” The wild, he meant, with its yellowjackets circling our biscuits and a lake full of indifferent fish. I wanted the Brady kitchen, not a fishing pole and a chorus of stings. The pointy little deaths of mosquito bites and the cheap tin of powdered pancake mix were the actualities. The dream stayed lodged; reality kept showing us its rough, unvarnished palm.

That sulking boy at Mount Shasta believed his fantasy was a portal out of chaos—a personal miracle nobody else would imagine. The joke is that it wasn’t original. Millions of American children were fed the same sedatives: thirty-minute morality plays in which family harmony was manufactured to lipstick level. While we bathed in their canned warmth, the actors backstage were burning through lives: addiction, affairs, fights that would make our own messy households look like spas. The dissonance between stage-gleam and soap-opera sludge is almost religious in its cruelty.

Should we expect actors’ private lives to line up with the squeaky-clean product they sell? Of course not. It would be as reasonable to expect Superman to sort his recycling. Hollywood is a factory of facades: glossy façades varnished over dysfunction. The Brady Bunch was the perfect exhibit—an engineered Eden whose actors were stuck inside their own human messes. Yet we kept praying to that televised altar because fantasy is sweet and often cheaper than facing the real family across your table.

Decades later, the fantasy will still sneak up on me. Sometimes I dream my face is a square in that opening montage—cheeks plump, grin kerchiefed to perfection—living, forever, inside a clapboard postcard where problems resolve in thirty minutes. In the dream I am blissfully ignorant of the backstage carnage. I wake up with that small, ridiculous ache—a taste for a world that never existed, an appetite for a comfort that, like cheap candy, rots faster than it satisfies.

September 25, 2025
Last Car Syndrome

I was nearly sixty-four, four decades of teaching college writing having corroded whatever patience I once had, and I found myself drowning in self-disgust. My life, once measured in lectures and essays, had narrowed to a single, grotesque question: Camry or Accord? I fretted over it as if I were choosing a confession—Catholic or Presbyterian—with my eternal soul dangling over the dealership lot. The absurdity didn’t escape me. I had real problems: blood markers creeping upward, a rotator-cuff tear ruining kettlebell workouts, bedrooms that needed painting, twin daughters who needed driver’s training, retirement forms stacked like little gravestones, and the scramble to joint bank accounts so my younger wife wouldn’t face probate nightmares. And yet I could not stop watching YouTube reviews and refreshing Reddit threads that compared the new Camry to the Accord.

I vacillated like a madman.

Driving to pick up the girls from high school, I’d spot an Accord and sigh: “Ah, the Accord EX-L in Canyon River Blue. Very peaceful. Not a bad car to die in.” A second voice—practical, bored—would snap back, “It’s a car, not a coffin, dummy!” So I’d argue with myself: “But this will be the last car I ever buy. Surely it is my Death Car.” “God, you’re morbid! How can I live with you? Get away from me!”

The next day I’d see a Camry SE in Heavy Metal and melt. “Look how it fits that color—everything’s right. Under thirty-three K and it feels Lexus-adjacent.” My inner realist would applaud the improvement: “At least you’re not talking about death. Progress.” Then the skeptic: “But the Accord is quieter. I need quiet. And the Accord dealership is walking distance—drop it off, walk home. That’s handy.” Followed by doubt: “Wait—people say the new Accord looks like a Ford Taurus. Can I live with that kind of ridicule?”

It went on and on. My wife learned to read my posture: the slight slump, the hand rubbing the back of my neck—the tell that I was about to launch into Camry-Accord hell. She would cut me off before I even opened my mouth: “Stop right there, buster. I don’t want to hear it. Just make your damn decision!”

For a while I wallowed alone in the torment.

Then one morning I woke up and declared I didn’t need a car at all. I’d driven, on average, three thousand miles a year for the last decade—hardly the mileage of a man who needed a shiny new vehicle. The decision felt radical: my daughters could take the older Accord, my wife the newer one, and I’d borrow a car when necessary. No purchase. No shiny new vehicle gathering dust like a suburban reliquary in the garage. Why buy something to admire between piano practice and Netflix binges? I told myself the choice was genius.

But after snacking on a virtuous bowl of buckwheat groats with unsweetened soy milk, banana slices, pumpkin seeds, cinnamon, and a dash of manuka honey, the energizing snack snapped me out of my delusion.. Suddenly the whole farce of my deliberation looked naked: I was suffering from Last-Car Syndrome: the unconscious understanding that in my mid-sixties, my next car purchase was essentially my Death Car, so I avoided the purchase like I avoided death.

Fortified by my power breakfast, I stood up, chest puffed like a man claiming moral clarity, and barked at the ceiling, “Who am I kidding? I’m buying a new car. I deserve it.”
So now it’s only a scheduling question—six months from now, or next week.

September 22, 2025
When It Comes to Swim Trunks the Size of a Hotel Mint, Maybe Opt Out

The New York Times article, titled “Skimpy Men’s Swimming Briefs Are Making a Splash,” offers a solemn dispatch from the front lines of GLP-1 drugs, but I would guess that men—having exhausted every form of visible self-optimization—are now expressing their Ozempic-enabled slenderness via tiny, Lycra-clad declarations of status. We’re talking male bikinis, or what I like to call the ego sling.

Apparently, if you’re dropping $18,000 a year to chemically suppress your appetite and shed your humanity one subcutaneous injection at a time, you deserve the privilege of looking like a Bond villain’s pool boy. I suppose this is the endgame: pay to waste away, then wrap what’s left in a luxury logoed banana peel.

Luxury underwear companies, never ones to miss a chance to monetize body dysmorphia, are now marketing these second-skin briefs not as mere swimwear, but as power statements. To wear them is to say: “I’ve defeated fat, joy, modesty, and comfort in one fell swoop.”

I’m almost 64. My aspirations remain high—ideally, I’d like to look like a special-ops operator on vacation in Sardinia. But I know my place. I wear boxer-style swim trunks, the cloth of the pragmatic and the semi-dignified. They’re not exciting, but neither is seeing a sun-leathered septuagenarian adjust a spandex slingshot over a suspicious tan line.

There’s a difference between being aspirational and being delusional. The former means striving for vitality, strength, and energy. The latter means stuffing yourself into a satirical undergarment and pretending you’re a twenty-two-year-old wide receiver with a sponsorship deal.

To my fellow older men: sculpt your body like it’s your spiritual obligation—but when it comes to swim briefs the size of a hotel mint, maybe opt out. Not every part of youth is worth reliving. Some of it deserves to be left in the chlorine-stained past, right next to Axe body spray and Ed Hardy tank tops.

September 21, 2025
The Road to Studio City Is Paved with Lane Closures

Yesterday I braved my cousin Pete’s 75th birthday blowout in Studio City, dragging my wife and one of my twin daughters along for the ordeal. Like a fool, I skipped the Google Maps pre-check. The punishment: three lane closures on the 405. What should have been a breezy forty-minute jaunt became a 95-minute death march in a metal box. I joked that Pete should’ve hired a therapist specifically for the traumatized survivors of Southern California traffic—“Welcome, let’s unpack your freeway PTSD before the cake is served.”

The party itself was bigger than I bargained for—150 guests orbiting around a swimming pool, lubricated by a taco bar, hummus hills, pita plains, and charcuterie slabs that could feed a small country. A band of four septuagenarians hacked out Beatles and Stones covers with the enthusiasm of men reliving their garage-band glory years.

I chatted with cousins and one of the guitarists, but inevitably the conversation veered into my professional life: “So, Jeff, what about AI in the classroom?” I gave them my stock answer: AI is a double-edged sword. It can turn us into lazy bots outsourcing our brains—or, on the bright side, it can make my grading life less of a grammar police beat. I explained that AI gives every student a free grammar tutor, a perk I never thought I’d live to see. And yes, I confessed my own guilty pleasure: I write a sprawling Nabokovian memo, feed it to the machine, and tell it, “Sharpen this. Add acid wit.” What comes back is so tight and sly that I want to light a candle in gratitude.

Left unsupervised, AI churns out limp, hollow paragraphs—Shakespeare’s “sound and fury, signifying nothing.” But with a solid draft and precise marching orders, it can take my word-bloated gasbaggery and spin it into crisp, surgical prose. The tool is neither angel nor demon; the sin or virtue belongs to the user.

Of course, I also sinned in the culinary department. My “moderation” consisted of three or four thick slabs of brie smothered with figs and crackers, plus a couple of carne asada tacos. I had a token bite of my daughter’s birthday cake, which was so sweet it could have stripped paint, but that was restraint by default, not discipline. I’m certain I left Pete’s bash two pounds heavier.

The drive home was mercifully shorter—just an hour—though Google still had the gall to insist the 405 was the “fast” route, lane closures and all. Let’s just say the 405 and I are on a trial separation for at least a year.

September 7, 2025
Blast from the Past: Telefunken Banjo Automatic

Six inches tall and barely ten inches across, the Telefunken Banjo Automatic delivers a lot of effortless sound for a radio its size. This vintage came in good shape as the seller had cleaned it up, even took it apart and did a “deep clean” to all the knobs. So there’s no static to speak of. This arrived with no AC. It’s feeding of six C batteries.

Don’t be fooled by the swanky yellow. This colorful radio has outstanding FM reception and while the AM is above average it cannot light a candle to my bigger, brawnier Telefunken Partner 700, which at $40, cost me about half of the Banjo price.

The Banjo’s controls are smooth, and this bright yellow Telefunken feels upscale through and through, but if you’re Telefunken hunting, I recommend the bigger Partner 700. As good as the spunky yellow Banjo is, its speaker sound and AM sound loses to its bigger, more serious cousin.

In some ways it’s not fair to compare the two Telefunkens. The Banjo is a smaller portable, the Partner a heavier table radio. If I compare the Banjo to the similar sized Sangean PR-D5, the Banjo wins in speaker sound. The PR-D5’s small stereo speakers are so tinny my ears have trouble picking up the sound. In contrast, the Banjo fills a room easily. The FM on the Banjo is better than the PR-D5 and AM sound is similar. Of course, the $80 PR-D5 is new and digital and has presets so the comparison doesn’t quite work either.

One strange quirk about the Banjo that I’ve never encountered before is that AM numbers are inverse to the FM numbers so that 103.1 FM, for example, is close to 640 AM. Strange, but no big deal.

If you’re looking for a small travel companion, the Banjo is high-end and will not disappoint. If you’re looking for the majesty of a Panasonic RF-3000 (one just sold for over $300) and want to save some dough, check out the Partner 700, which I stole for $40.

September 6, 2025
C.Crane Solar Radio: Attention to Details Makes It a Winner

The C. Crane Solar Radio, paired with the optional AC adapter, arrived on Day 9 of the Los Angeles fires—perfect timing for some disaster preparedness. My first impression? Surprisingly compact and, dare I say, stylish. Its buttons and controls are refreshingly intuitive, a rare quality in emergency gadgets that usually look like they were cobbled together by paranoid survivalists.

Then I met the battery door—a stubborn slab of plastic that wouldn’t budge. My fingers failed, so out came the Swiss Army knife, turning what should’ve been a simple battery swap into minor surgery.

Once powered up (on batteries, to avoid interference), I tested FM reception. Not bad. It’s sensitive, though slightly weaker than my Sangean PR-D12 when pulling in 89.3, a notoriously tricky station here in Torrance. Still, it handled it well. KUSC 91.5, though, was a lost cause—same as the PR-D12. Odd, since during my obsessive radio blogging days in the mid-2000s, 91.5 was crystal clear. Maybe it’s not the radios. Maybe it’s today’s electromagnetic smog choking the airwaves.

Later that evening, as I tackled the dishes, the FM sound impressed me. 89.3 came through loud and clear, delivering crisp voices on the news.

AM performance? Initially disappointing—distant, hollow, like voices echoing from a well. My friend Mark reminded me that modern homes are electronic war zones. Between Wi-Fi routers, smart devices, and God knows what else, AM hardly stands a chance.

But then I tweaked the settings. Switching the bandwidth filter from 2.5kHz to 4kHz transformed the AM performance. Suddenly, it shined.

The speaker is pleasant but modest. This is a small radio, after all. Luckily, the hidden High Power Audio Mode (press buttons 1 and 5) gives it a subtle boost—not exactly concert hall quality, but enough to rise above kitchen noise.

Where the C. Crane Solar Radio really excels is in its power versatility—two battery types, a solar panel, and a hand crank. Practical, yet it doesn’t scream apocalypse gear.

So, where does it fit in my collection? The PR-D12 stays in the garage for kettlebell workouts. The Solar Radio earns a spot over the kitchen sink, likely becoming my wife’s go-to. With solid FM performance, customizable AM tuning, and thoughtful design, the C. Crane Solar Radio gets the details right—and comes out a winner.

September 6, 2025
The Sandwich Shop of Eternal Regret

Last night, I dreamed I retired too early, lost my tenure, and found myself cobbling together two humiliating jobs to survive. By day I was a part-time writing instructor, hustling between second-rate colleges. By night I was reduced to a takeout delivery boy for the sandwich shop where my wife cheerfully worked.

If there was a silver lining, it was this: while waiting for her to assign me deliveries, I could pedal furiously on a stable of exercise bikes provided by the restaurant. Because, naturally, this wasn’t just a sandwich joint — it was part health club, part tourist mecca. At one point, a gaggle of Danish tourists descended, cackling in a booth for hours, treating the sandwich shop as though it were the Eiffel Tower of their itinerary.

My wife flourished. She collaborated with the shop’s original owners, a warm couple from Hong Kong, brainstorming new sandwiches and ambitious upgrades, while I sweated like a condemned man on the bikes. Fortunately, I had a secret weapon: a dark brown leather jacket with supernatural properties. Each time I donned it before a delivery, every bead of sweat, every impurity, vanished as though I’d been baptized anew.

But there was more. To scrape together a living, I also moonlighted in a third job — mysterious manual labor in a basement with a nameless partner. To reach this purgatory, I rode a bus into the “forbidden city,” a nightmare realm painted in muted oranges, where the architecture sulked in jagged, miserable shapes and its citizens were shackled to endless toil. It was a geometry lesson in despair.

I was heartsick, regretting my decision to retire early. Only when the bus carried me back to the sandwich shop did relief arrive. There, I could mingle with long-lost friends and international tourists, ride the exercise bikes, and cling to the reassuring thought that my leather jacket would always purge me of sweat and shame.

September 3, 2025