Cinemorphosis

Tag: travel

  • The Great 70s Oyster Feasts at Pt. Reyes

    The Great 70s Oyster Feasts at Pt. Reyes

    Every summer from 1975 to 1979, my family and a small oyster-guzzling army—ten other families and a battalion of friends—made the pilgrimage to Pt. Reyes Beach. Our sacred mission? To consume shellfish on a biblical scale.

    Johnson’s Oyster Farm supplied us with what felt like truckloads of oysters—so many that if the ocean had suddenly run dry, we wouldn’t have batted an eye. From noon to sunset, we devoured an obscene amount of barbecued oysters, each one bathed in garlic butter and an irresponsible amount of Tabasco. Thousands of loaves of garlic bread disappeared as though vaporized by our gluttony. The meal concluded with slices of chocolate cake so enormous they could have doubled as structural support beams.

    We punctuated this orgy of excess with reckless ocean dives, dismissing dire warnings of great white shark sightings because, in our teenage arrogance, we assumed the sharks would respect our dominance. Emerging from the waves, our pecs glistening with rivulets of saltwater like bronzed demigods, we returned to the picnic tables to resume our assault on the oyster supply.

    By the summer of ‘78, I had evolved into full teenage hedonist mode. That year, rather than going home with my parents, I hitchhiked in the back of a truck with a bunch of people I’d just met—because, clearly, nothing bad ever happened to sweaty, sunburned teenagers full of shellfish riding in the open bed of a moving vehicle. We were feral, fearless, and slightly delirious from a day of unchecked indulgence.

    Stuffed to the gills and feeling like King Neptune in a food coma, we stared at the stars with the vacant, glazed expressions of reptiles digesting a large meal. We swapped wild stories, unconcerned with documenting a single moment. No selfies. No calorie counting. No checking the time. Just a glorious, unrecorded blur of feasting, friendship, and youthful delusion.

    Those were happy days indeed—a time before food guilt, before social media, before adulthood ruined everything. And like all golden eras, it is gone forever.

  • Something Strange Happened to Me When I Saw My Childhood Home on Zillow

    Something Strange Happened to Me When I Saw My Childhood Home on Zillow

    When I was a kid, my dad worked at IBM in San Jose, and we lived at the very end of Venado Court—a cul-de-sac so serene it felt like a cosmic loophole in suburban chaos. I loved everything about it, especially the absence of cross-traffic.

    Cross-traffic was anarchy—it was second base in Little League, where the game unraveled into sheer bedlam: runners stealing, coaches screaming, fielders panicking. But Venado Court? It was home plate. Safe. Untouchable. The kind of place where nothing bad could happen—unless you count the existential horror of eventually having to leave it.

    The analogy reminds me of George Carlin’s classic bit contrasting baseball and football: Baseball is a pastoral dream, all about going home. Football is military conquest, where you march into enemy territory and get your spine realigned by a 300-pound lineman. Venado Court was baseball. It was safety. It was home.

    Recently, I stumbled onto a real estate site featuring my childhood house—5700 Venado Court, San Jose, California, where I lived from 1968 to 1971. The photos were unsettlingly familiar. My old bedroom. The bathroom where Mr. Bubble and Avon’s Sesame Street shampoo bottles once stood like sentinels of childhood innocence. The backyard, still lush with fruit trees—apricot, peach, plum, and walnut—a miniature Garden of Eden where my mother and the neighbor ladies, in some kind of euphoric domestic alchemy, canned preserves like their lives depended on it.

    The kicker? That house, my sacred childhood sanctuary, is now worth $1.3 million—the same price as my current home in Southern California. A deranged part of me toyed with the idea: sell my house, buy my childhood back, step through the front door like some time-traveling prodigal son.

    But then sanity prevailed.

    I know exactly how that story would end. Not in horror, but in ennui. I’d be trapped in a slow-moving nightmare of banality, watching my enchanted memories dissolve under the fluorescent hum of reality. The house wouldn’t feel like home. It would feel like a set piece in a dismantled dream.

    Thomas Wolfe was right—you can’t go home again. Not because it’s scary. But because it’s boring.

  • The First Cut is the Deepest: A Childhood Steeped in FOMO

    The First Cut is the Deepest: A Childhood Steeped in FOMO

    FOMO is never stronger than in childhood, when imagination stretches farther than reality can reach and the world feels just beyond our grasp. To a child, magic is real, enchantment is tangible, and some hidden paradise always seems just out of reach—close enough to see, impossible to touch. And nothing stings quite like realizing that somewhere, right now, a better world exists, and you are not in it.

    I learned this lesson in the summer of 1968 in San Jose, California, while riding bikes with my neighbor, Billy Cantambay. We were two six-year-olds, circling Venado Court as a fine mist of summer rain fell around us, making the streetlights glow and the air smell like wet pavement and possibility.

    Then we saw it:

    A single blue light flickering in the distance, hovering above the unfinished housing developments at the edge of the neighborhood. It twinkled through the fog like a Christmas bulb detached from time, a spectral glow that neither of us could explain.

    “Christmas lights!” one of us shouted.

    “Christmas lights!” the other echoed.

    But why was Christmas happening over there and not here? Whose house was that? What kind of people lived beneath that glow? In my mind, I pictured a lone man inside—not lonely, just content—waking up to Christmas every day.

    For a week, Billy and I worshipped the light, riding our bikes in endless circles, pointing, speculating, longing. Then one evening, it was gone. No explanation. No goodbye. Just a vanishing act, leaving behind nothing but an ache—an inexplicable sadness, as if we had been denied entry into something greater than ourselves.

    Four years later, another dream slipped through my fingers, and this time, I cried about it.

    My fifth-grade friend Marc Warren had invited me to Piper’s Smorgasbord in San Leandro, California—a kingdom of pizza, fried chicken, and blueberry pie, where gluttony was not just encouraged but a sacred ritual. By the time we left, we were bloated with triumph.

    Driving home, still drunk on sugar and grease, we talked about our flying dreams.

    Not figurative flying—not ambition, not success—actual flying. The kind where you jump off a cliff and just go, gliding over the ocean, effortless, weightless, free.

    The dreams were so vivid—we could remember the wind in our faces, the rush of air under our arms, the certainty that we would never fall.

    And then, reality crashed down.

    We weren’t flying. We would never fly.

    The grief was immediate, existential, crushing.

    Two fifth-graders, staring out the car window, weeping over the cosmic injustice of gravity.

    That’s the cruelty of FOMO—it isn’t just about missing an event. It’s about missing a world, a place so real inside your imagination that its absence hurts like a phantom limb.

    Every culture has its own version of this unreachable paradise—a place forever close but forever out of reach.

    For me, it was Bali Ha’i.

    The song, sung so hauntingly by Juanita Hall in South Pacific, tells of an island just across the water—visible, tantalizing, but never quite attainable.

    I first heard it as a toddler in the Flavet Villages—a cluster of old military barracks repurposed as student housing in Gainesville, Florida, where my family lived near an alligator swamp and a stretch of forest.

    Most people would have found the place bleak. I found it enchanted.

    At dusk, my father and I would walk to the edge of the forest to visit a Mynah bird, which perched on the same branch every evening, watching us with an intelligence I couldn’t explain.

    The swamp smelled of alligator dung, a rank, pungent stench that somehow filled me with a sense of cosmic belonging.

    One night, as we stood beneath the Mynah bird, a distant radio played “Bali Ha’i.”

    The melody wove itself into the moment, perfectly harmonizing with the humid night air, the bird’s quiet watchfulness, and the unseen creatures shifting in the darkness.

    For the first time, I understood the ache of paradise lost.

    In 1965, another world out of reach found me.

    Her name was Barbara Eden.

    She lived inside a genie bottle—a glowing jewel of a home, lined with pink and purple satin, circular sofas, and mother-of-pearl inlays.

    To five-year-old me, this was the peak of human civilization.

    I didn’t just want to watch I Dream of Jeannie. I wanted to live inside that bottle.

    I imagined myself curled up on the velvet cushions, bathed in the warm glow of genie magic, whispering secrets with Jeannie as the outside world became irrelevant.

    When it hit me—really hit me—that I would never live in that bottle, that the closest I’d ever get was a TV screen and my own relentless imagination, I felt crushed in a way I had no words for.

    Even crueler?

    That gorgeous genie home was just a painted Jim Beam whiskey decanter.

    That’s what FOMO really is: intoxication by illusion.

    And long before Instagram, long before airbrushed vacations and curated feeds, I was already intimately familiar with its sting.

  • Wrestling with an especially virulent case of “Influenza A”

    Wrestling with an especially virulent case of “Influenza A”

    In I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional: The Recovery Movement and Other Self-Help Fashions, Wendy Kaminer lays waste to the therapeutic fads of the 1990s, particularly the trend of “reclaiming the inner child”—a ritual that took infantilization to near-religious extremes.

    She describes John Bradshaw’s workshops, where grown adults with respectable careers arrived clutching teddy bears like traumatized toddlers, preparing to embark on a guided journey into the mansion of their past. There, as Bradshaw whispered encouragements, lower lips trembled, tears streamed, and a congregation of emotionally overqualified professionals sobbed into the polyester fur of their stuffed animals.

    What floored Kaminer wasn’t the unhinged emotionalism—it was the sheer, shameless conviction. These people weren’t just indulging in a saccharine, self-indulgent spectacle—they were true believers, convinced that squeezing a doll and reliving some long-buried playground trauma was nothing short of a spiritual awakening.

    Kaminer was not impressed. What others saw as self-reflection and healing, she saw as an infantilizing orgy of narcissism, a self-help séance in which grown-ups tried to resurrect their inner kindergartener, only to be possessed by a ghost that refused to leave.

    Now, I’d like to say that my bullshit detector is too finely tuned for me to cradle a stuffed animal and regress into baby talk. But the bitter irony is that writing this memoir has forced me into my own brand of infantilization—just without the teddy bear and group cry session.

    Nothing made this clearer than the pathetic spectacle of my post-Thanksgiving downfall, which started with a game of Russian roulette—except instead of a revolver, I played with rotting cabbage.

    It all began when I decided to make chicken tacos—a wholesome, adult dinner choice. Unfortunately, the bag of shredded cabbage I retrieved from the fridge had been marinating in its own decay for two weeks, slowly transforming into hell’s compost pile.

    The moment I tore open the bag, my wife recoiled with the dramatic flair of a crime scene detective stumbling upon a long-decomposed body. She clutched her nose, waved her hands like an exorcist warding off a demon, and issued a forensic report:

    “That smells like a mix of a latrine and a horse’s taint.”

    A normal person would have taken this as a warning. But, fueled by misplaced confidence and the hubris of someone who had survived worse, I dumped the cabbage on my tacos and dug in.

    Hours later, my immune system, weakened by the Thanksgiving marathon of forced hospitality, collapsed like a debt-ridden empire. The virus that had been lurking in the shadows seized its moment, and by the next morning, I was a feverish, shivering wreck, contemplating my life choices between bouts of violent gastrointestinal reckoning.

    It seems that you don’t need a stuffed animal and a therapy circle to regress into infancy. Sometimes, all it takes is spoiled cabbage and a ruinous lack of self-preservation.

    Naturally, instead of exercising common sense, I channeled my inner cheapskate prophet. “Cabbage by its very nature has a funky scent,” I proclaimed with the confidence of a man who regularly courts disaster. “A little fermentation won’t hurt anyone.” My wife frowned and said, “It’s smelling up the entire kitchen.”
    “We’ll be fine,” I insisted, scooping copious amounts of fetid-smelling cabbage onto my tacos like I was auditioning for a daredevil cooking show.

    At dinner, I was the only one brave—or foolish—enough to eat it. Within an hour, my body issued a resounding, “You absolute moron.” No GI issues, but I felt like I’d been hit by a truck, reversed over, and then hit again. My head throbbed, my eyes were so sensitive to light I had to drape a T-shirt over my face just to listen to a Netflix show, and my energy flatlined by eight p.m. I crawled into bed, feeling like a half-baked zombie.

    The next morning was worse. Still no GI problems, but the 101 fever and crushing fatigue made me question my will to live. I tried to eat some oatmeal and grapefruit, the culinary equivalent of punishment food, but even that felt like too much effort. 

    By day three, no improvement. I’d become a cautionary tale, researching induced vomiting and discovering it was far too late. Apparently, if you don’t purge immediately, the toxins settle in like an unwanted houseguest who insists on staying for five to seven days.

    Being sick in my family makes everyone else suffer. Our teenage twins require constant care, frequent snacks that generate endless dirty dishes, and someone breathing down their necks to ensure homework gets done. My wife had to shoulder it all while I languished in my misery. I apologized profusely for my reckless hubris and promised, at the age of sixty-three, to turn over a new leaf—or at least stop eating ones that reek like death.

    For decades, I’d treated eating old, moldy food like a badge of honor, quoting my dad’s immortal wisdom: “Pilgrims who ate blue cheese on the Mayflower survived disease while the mold-avoiders died.” It was as if I’d been brainwashed into believing spoiled food was a superfood. But this cabbage debacle—this hellish, cabbage-induced reckoning—put the fear of God in me. Never again would I be the fool who eats something that smells like a medieval torture chamber. This time, I mean it. The next funky bag of cabbage? Straight to the trash. May it ferment in peace.

    As the alleged food-borne illness dragged on and my fever turned my brain into a swamp, I found myself pondering a morbid yet painfully stupid thought: What if I died because I was too cheap to toss a two-dollar bag of cabbage? Imagine the headline: “Man Perishes Over Discount Vegetables.” How could I ever forgive myself for such world-class idiocy? Worse, how could my wife ever forget that I lectured her with the smug confidence of a food-safety guru right before scarfing down a fatal dose of rotting produce? I’d be immortalized as the kind of hapless buffoon who wouldn’t even get a name in a Chekhov short story—just “The Idiot Who Ate the Cabbage.”

    Then, because fever dreams and existential crises go hand in hand, another absurd thought hit me: How would my YouTube subscribers and Instagram followers know what happened to me? I’d be gone, but my accounts would still sit there, ghostlike, leaving them to wonder why the witty guy with the diver watches and snack obsession suddenly went dark. What a tragedy—I wouldn’t even get the chance to create a final piece of content documenting my own demise in comedic glory. A video titled, “How Cabbage Killed Me (And Why You Should Toss Yours)” would surely have gone viral.

    This realization struck me as profoundly twisted: content creators care more about producing “engaging material” than their own mortality. Forget self-preservation—I was more upset that my audience might miss out on the hilarity of my self-inflicted cabbage-related downfall. The pathology runs deep: we’re so hooked on being performative, we’d probably narrate our own deaths if we could. Imagine me, breathless and feverish, croaking out, “Don’t forget to like, comment, and subscribe—assuming I make it to tomorrow.” The absurdity of it all made me laugh, which hurt, because even my ribs were exhausted from this cabbage-induced purgatory.

    It was apparent I was so desperate to be relevant on social media that I had become a Gravefluencer–an influencer who extends his reach six feet under, ensuring even death is on-brand.

    After five days of relentless illness, I had a phone consultation with my doctor about what I was sure was self-inflicted food poisoning. I laid out the symptoms with the kind of detail you’d expect from someone auditioning for a medical drama. My doctor listened patiently, then unceremoniously popped my bubble of absurdity. “This isn’t food poisoning,” she said. “You’ve got the flu. It’s going around.”

    Just like that, my grand narrative of culinary hubris—the man who dared to defy rancid cabbage and paid the ultimate price—was dead. Instead, I was left with something far less glamorous: virulent flu. Part of me was relieved that I wasn’t poisoning myself with poisoned produce, but another part of me felt cheated. I’d lost the absurd, darkly comedic morality tale about a man so cheap he nearly killed himself over a two-dollar bag of cabbage. What a waste.

    The doctor wasn’t exactly brimming with solutions, either. “Rest and stay hydrated,” she advised, the way you might tell a child to eat their vegetables. That night, my fever spiked close to 104, launching me into a kaleidoscope of fever dreams where my brain decided to give me the full surrealist experience. Words from my podcasts took on physical forms—spiky, sticky, grotesque shapes—and suddenly, I was inside them. I wandered through caves of conversation, waded through cocoons of dialogue, and got tangled in thick spider webs spun from language. Each sentence wrapped around me, trapping me in its endless loops of nonsense.

    When I woke up, drenched in sweat and feeling like I’d wrestled a linguistically gifted tarantula, I realized the flu wasn’t just an illness—it was a full-blown avant-garde art installation happening in my own head. So no, I didn’t have food poisoning. I had performance art fever. And while it wasn’t the cabbage apocalypse I’d hoped for, it was plenty weird in its own way.

    For six days, I had been wrestling with the so-called “Thanksgiving Flu,” a charming little virus that kept my fever bouncing between 101 and 104, as if my body were auditioning for a medical melodrama. Being that sick wasn’t just about physical misery—it was a battering ram smashing through the cozy little mental structures I had built around my life. Aspirations? Pointless. Health goals? A cruel joke. My reading list? Forget it. Even my hunger for social belonging and validation had been knocked flat. What remained was a stripped-down nihilism so bleak it made Nietzsche look like an optimist.

    Sickness dragged me to a dark place where life felt like a cosmic prank. I could almost hear my 14-year-old self rolling his eyes as I remembered my Grandma Mildred’s wise words from one of her letters: “Illnesses bring out the doldrums.” No kidding, Grandma. That particular flu had brought out more than the doldrums—it had conjured a maudlin cocktail of despair and self-pity.

    In that state, I found myself spiraling into melodrama, muttering things like, “What’s the point? Just end the torment and let me meet my Maker already!” It was ridiculous, of course, but I couldn’t help but notice how flu-induced misery fed into a distinctly male flavor of narcissism. Egotism, after all, was a hallmark of the man-child: the guy who thought the universe should pause when he didn’t get his way.

    Men, it seemed, were uniquely gifted at turning minor discomforts into existential crises. While women powered through illness with a mix of stoicism and practicality, men turned their sickbeds into thrones of self-pity, proclaiming their impending doom to anyone who would listen. And me? I was no exception. With every feverish shiver, I became the star of my own overwrought drama, raging against the cruelty of a world that dared to continue spinning while I wallowed in flu-induced existential despair.

    Sure, Grandma Mildred, the doldrums were part of the package—but why did it feel like men turned those doldrums into an art form? Perhaps the real flu virus wasn’t in my body; it was in my ego, throwing a tantrum because life wasn’t bending to my fevered will.

    I appeared to be languishing in the Flu-tile State—a fever-fueled realization that all human endeavor was futile.

    On day 8 of this flu from hell, my doctor emailed me a cheerful little grenade: “Your symptoms are concerning. I need to see you today.” Fabulous. At 11 a.m., feverish, grouchy, and radiating the energy of a half-cooked zombie, I dragged myself to her office for the usual poking and prodding. COVID? Negative. Influenza? Oh yes, Influenza A—the viral overachiever of the season. My nurse, who’d had it two weeks earlier, gave me the kind of pep talk you’d expect from someone who survived a minor apocalypse. “Seven days of fever,” she chirped, “so you’ve probably got two more to go!” Like I’d won a spa weekend in purgatory.

    But the flu wasn’t the real sucker punch. No, that came when I stepped on the scale. At a soul-crushing 252 pounds, with blood pressure at 166 over 92, Dr. Okada laid it out with the dispassion of someone reading a menu: “You’re at high risk for a massive stroke or heart attack.” She might as well have handed me a shovel and a map to my future grave. Then, just to twist the knife, she added, “You need to lose fifty pounds in six months. Otherwise…” She trailed off, but I got the point: dead man waddling.

    Her final blow came with a steely gaze and a guilt grenade: “If not for yourself, lose weight for your wife and daughters.” Translation: stop being selfish and get your act together before they have to plan your funeral.

    Desperate for a cheat code, I asked about Mounjaro or Ozempic, those miracle weight-loss injectables I’d read about. She barely stifled a laugh. “We prescribe those for people with exclusive employer benefits.” I muttered something about how my college likely doesn’t cover luxury drugs, and her thin smile confirmed it. I’d be fighting this battle the old-fashioned way: with the DASH diet and restricted calories, not cutting-edge pharmaceuticals.

    And then there was the Motrin ban. Apparently, my go-to painkiller was a blood-pressure ticking time bomb. “No more Motrin. Tylenol only,” she said, with all the enthusiasm of a waiter recommending the tofu option. So now, my fevers would be accompanied by a dull, Tylenol-soaked march toward mortality. Fantastic.

    I thanked her—sincerely, I swear—because she wasn’t wrong. But the whole thing felt like I’d been blindsided by a particularly grim episode of The Biggest Loser: Medical Edition. On the drive home, Miley Cyrus’s “Flowers (Demo)” came on, and I—feverish, bloated, and thoroughly defeated—actually cried. Miley crooned about resilience and self-love, and all I could think about was how laxity, that slow, sneaky killer, had been working me over for years. Skipped workouts, mindless snacks, every excuse—it had all led to this: a middle-aged man sobbing in his car, mourning his dignity while stuck in traffic.

    Dr. Okada’s tough love landed like a wrecking ball. This was my moment—the kind where you either turn your life around or start drafting your obituary. Time to put down the Motrin, pick up some discipline, and drag myself back from the brink before I became the subject of one of those tragic lessons everyone ignores until it’s too late cautionary tales.

    I had entered the clinic expecting to get a quick flu diagnosis and maybe a lecture about rest and fluids. Instead, I walked out with the realization that my life wasn’t just off-track; it was an unmitigated dumpster fire rolling downhill. How had I missed it? The creeping wreckage of my existence had been unfolding right under my nose, like a slow-motion train derailment I refused to acknowledge. Denial, thy name is me.

    Dr. Okada, bless her clinical professionalism, had held up a mirror and forced me to see what I’d been expertly avoiding for years: that my life, much like my blood pressure, was a ticking time bomb. I’d been blind to my own unraveling, and now the blinders were off. The view wasn’t pretty, but at least now I knew what I was working with—a fixer-upper existence in desperate need of a renovation.

    My visit to the doctor turned into an unplanned catalyst for a long-overdue moral metamorphosis. I left not just diagnosed, but afflicted by a new condition I can only call the Scales of Justice (and Shame)—that peculiar state where the doctor’s scale transforms into the ultimate moral arbiter. Each number glaring back at me didn’t just measure pounds; it weighed my life choices, my discipline, my worthiness as a functioning adult. It was less a medical device and more a courtroom, and let’s just say I was found guilty on all counts.

    I was convinced that had I been ten years older, this bout of influenza would have finished me off. The first week felt less like an illness and more like the aftermath of a roadside bombing, with me as the unfortunate bystander left mangled in a ditch. My body was a buffet for phantom wolves and mosquitoes—every nerve ending seemed to host its own ravenous pest. Mentally, I spiraled into fever-induced madness, complete with hallucinatory jungle scenes: Gumby-esque AI bodybuilders, sculpted and sinewy yet gelatinous, painted the revolting hue of yellow sea slugs, slithered around me in an Amazonian hellscape.

    By Week Three, the influenza had mercifully downgraded its malevolence, though “mild” feels like an insult to language. I still shivered like a Victorian orphan in a snowstorm, my body temperature yoyoing between inferno and tundra. Aches gnawed at me persistently, like bad houseguests who don’t get the hint. And mentally? I was underwater—grasping at reality as it floats just out of reach. My brain felt stripped of a few critical screws, rattling around and threatening to unscrew the rest.

    At some point, I recalled, in the hazy, fevered way of someone stranded in a desert, that my daughter had lozenges in her room. Fueled by desperation, I shuffled to her door, knocked weakly, and thrust my trembling hands forward as if auditioning for a Dickens adaptation. “Please,” I croaked, my voice barely above a whisper, “fill my hands with lozenges for your poor ailing father.”

    The response? Hysterical laughter. Both of my daughters, cozied up watching TV, howled with the kind of delight usually reserved for viral cat videos. I caught a glimpse of myself in the hallway mirror: pajamas wrinkled like a bad alibi, beanie perched jauntily askew, my face the pallor of a sickly sailor. I was every bit the tragicomic figure they saw—a fevered street urchin begging for cough drops.

    My wife, ever the realist, stormed in to restore order. “We have plenty of lozenges in the kitchen,” she barked, clearly unimpressed by my Oscar-worthy theatrics. She led me, limping and pathetic, to the cupboard, where she proceeded to dump several bags of lozenges onto the table with all the ceremony of Santa Claus unloading his sleigh. My daughters, tears of laughter streaming down their faces, declared me Oliver Twist reincarnated.

    I retreated to bed clutching a handful of lozenges, humiliated but momentarily soothed, only to lie awake wondering when this fever would break—or if the AI bodybuilders would show up again to finish the job.

    Four weeks into my bout with influenza, I emerged bleary-eyed, fever-wrecked, and staring down my old nemesis: addiction. Not the sexy kind you’d brag about in a memoir—just the creeping, mundane kind that comes with a tendency to overindulge in things like self-pity, compulsive behaviors, and yes, an irrational attachment to writing books.

    And so, I emerged from this fever-ridden odyssey not as a transformed man, but as someone who had simply suffered enough to pause and reflect—until the next catastrophe beckoned. If John Bradshaw were leading my recovery workshop, he’d likely hand me a stuffed animal and instruct me to embrace my inner child, soothing my cabbage-traumatized soul with affirmations of self-love. But after weeks of sweating, hallucinating, and contemplating my own obituary over a bag of rotting vegetables, I didn’t need a teddy bear. I needed a referee, a financial adviser, and possibly an exorcist.

    The true lesson here? My inner child doesn’t need rescuing. He needs a restraining order. Because left to his own devices, he’ll continue to eat spoiled food out of spite, spiral into existential despair at the first sign of adversity, and demand that every brush with mortality be converted into premium content. So if I’m to move forward as a recovering writing addict, I have to acknowledge this truth: The inner child is not a sage. He’s a lunatic. And I should probably stop taking his advice.

    CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

    As part of my rehabilitation from writing novels I have no business writing, I remind myself of an uncomfortable truth: 95% of books—both fiction and nonfiction—are just bloated short stories and essays with unnecessary padding. How many times have I read a novel and thought, This would have been a killer short story, but as a novel, it’s a slog? How often have I powered through a nonfiction screed only to realize that everything I needed was in the first chapter, and the rest was just an echo chamber of diminishing returns?

    Perhaps someday, I’ll learn to write an exceptional short story—the kind that punches above its weight, the kind that leaves you feeling like you’ve just read a 400-page novel even though it barely clears 30. It takes a rare kind of genius to pull off this magic trick. I think of Alice Munro’s layered portraits of regret, Lorrie Moore’s razor-sharp wit, and John Cheever’s meticulous dissections of suburban despair. I flip through my extra-large edition of The Stories of John Cheever, and three stand out like glittering relics: “The Swimmer,” “The Country Husband,” and “The Jewels of the Cabots.” Each is a self-contained universe, a potent literary multivitamin that somehow delivers all the nourishment of a novel in a single, concentrated dose. Let’s call these rare works Stories That Ate a Novel—compact, ferocious, and packed with enough emotional and intellectual weight to render lesser novels redundant.

    As part of my rehabilitation, I must seek out such stories, study them, and attempt to write them. Not just as an artistic exercise, but as a safeguard against relapse—the last thing I need is another 300-page corpse of a novel stinking up my hard drive.

    But maybe this is more than just a recovery plan. Maybe this is a new mission—championing Stories That Eat Novels. The cultural winds are shifting in my favor. Attention spans, gnawed to the bone by social media, no longer tolerate literary excess. Even the New York Times has noted the rise of the short novel, reporting in “To the Point: Short Novels Dominate International Booker Prize Nominees” that books under 200 pages are taking center stage. We may be witnessing a tectonic shift, an age where brevity is not just a virtue but a necessity.

    For a failed novelist and an unapologetic literary wind-sprinter, this could be my moment. I can already see it—my sleek, ruthless 160-page collection, Stories That Eat Novels, four lapidary masterpieces gleaming like finely cut diamonds. Rehabilitation has never felt so good. Who says a man in his sixties can’t find his literary niche and stage an artistic rebirth? Maybe I wasn’t a failed novelist after all—maybe I was just a short-form assassin waiting for the right age to arrive.

  • Authenticity or Evolution? The Cultural Legacy of Mexican and Chinese Food in America

    Authenticity or Evolution? The Cultural Legacy of Mexican and Chinese Food in America

    This is the third essay prompt for my critical thinking class:

    Authenticity or Evolution? The Cultural Legacy of Mexican and Chinese Food in America

    For many, food is more than sustenance—it is tradition, identity, and history. But what happens when traditional dishes evolve to fit new cultural landscapes? Should Americanized versions of Mexican and Chinese cuisine—from General Tso’s chicken to Tex-Mex burritos—be embraced as a vibrant contribution to culinary history, or dismissed as inauthentic imitations?

    This 1,700-word argumentative essay (MLA format required) invites you to examine how cultural adaptation and survival shape food traditions. Using Gustavo Arellano’s essay “Let White People Appropriate Mexican Food” and Ian Cheney’s documentary The Search for General Tso as key references, along with additional essays on the subject, you will defend, refute, or complicate the claim that labeling these cuisines as “inauthentic” ignores the deeper realities of immigration, adaptation, and resilience.

    Key Questions to Explore:

    • How do American Chinese and modern Mexican cuisines reflect adaptation and survival rather than cultural betrayal?
    • In what ways have these culinary shifts helped immigrant communities overcome economic and social adversity?
    • Does the concept of “authenticity” erase the ingenuity and history behind these evolving dishes?
    • How does food innovation expand cultural influence, making ethnic cuisines more accessible and desirable to broader audiences?

    Required Sources:

    Use a minimum of four sources from the following list, cited in MLA format:

    • Gustavo Arellano – “Let White People Appropriate Mexican Food”
    • Ian Cheney’s documentary – The Search for General Tso
    • Charles W. Hayford – “Who’s Afraid of Chop Suey”
    • Cathy Erway – “More Than ‘Just Takeout’”
    • Kelley Kwok – “‘Not Real Chinese’: Why American Chinese Food Deserves Our Respect”
    • Jiayang Fan – “Searching for America with General Tso”

    Suggested Essay Structure:

    I. Introduction (200-300 words)

    • Introduce the debate over culinary authenticity and how it applies to Mexican and Chinese food in America.
    • Present your thesis—whether you believe these evolving cuisines should be celebrated, criticized, or viewed with a nuanced perspective.
    • Briefly mention the key sources you will use to support your argument.

    II. The Case for Culinary Evolution (400-500 words)

    • Use Arellano’s claim that Mexican cuisine thrives on adaptability to explore how tacos, burritos, and other dishes have been reshaped by cultural influences.
    • Reference The Search for General Tso to highlight how Chinese immigrants adapted their cuisine to American tastes while maintaining entrepreneurial success.
    • Use Erway’s essay to examine how evolving cuisines serve as a source of creativity and pride for immigrant communities.

    III. Overcoming Racism and Economic Hardship (400-500 words)

    • Draw on Jiayang Fan’s argument that Chinese food’s popularity in America is inseparable from immigrant struggles, where adaptation was a tool for survival.
    • Explore how Tex-Mex and Chop Suey—despite being dismissed as “inauthentic”—helped immigrant communities establish visibility and economic stability.

    IV. Challenging the Authenticity Argument (400-500 words)

    • Use Kelley Kwok’s essay to challenge the myth that American Chinese food is “not real Chinese food” and explore what “authentic” really means.
    • Argue that cuisine is never static—traditions themselves were once innovations, influenced by migration and cultural blending.
    • Acknowledge the importance of preserving traditional dishes but emphasize how adaptation allows for survival and cultural expansion.

    V. Counterargument and Rebuttal (300-400 words)

    • Address critics who argue that Americanized versions of ethnic cuisine dilute culture or exploit culinary traditions for profit.
    • Rebut by emphasizing that adaptation does not erase tradition but extends its cultural reach, making food a dynamic part of identity.

    VI. Conclusion (200-300 words)

    • Reaffirm your thesis, reflecting on how evolving cuisines shape multicultural identity and bridge cultural divides.
    • Highlight how food tells a larger story of resilience, creativity, and the blending of cultures in an interconnected world.

    Final Thoughts:

    This essay challenges you to rethink the definition of authenticity in cuisine. By exploring how food evolves through necessity, survival, and creativity, you will craft an argument that goes beyond simplistic debates and acknowledges both the importance of tradition and the power of adaptation.

  • The Day My Piano Playing Annoyed a Russian Commander

    The Day My Piano Playing Annoyed a Russian Commander

    After breakfast inside the newly-constructed Moscow Olympic Hotel, I spotted a grand piano in the lobby, and I began to play a sad piece that I had composed myself. My fellow tourists surrounded me and when I was done with my short piece, they asked me to play another song. Being a ham with an insatiable appetite for attention, I was happy to oblige.

    I could tell by my audience’s response that they were impressed, but to be honest, I am technically a subpar pianist, and worse I compensate for my lack of technical prowess by playing my compositions in a style that tends to be mawkish, self-indulgent, and lugubrious. 

    As my fellow tourists and other hotel guests surrounded me, there were at a distant table several Soviet military men sitting down to breakfast and room-temperature beer. They were watching me with curiosity. Most notably, the Commander, a tall husky man in his forties with thick eyebrows, dark hair, and a broad chin, was staring at me. I turned from him and continued to play my drawn-out piano ballade.

    In the middle of the piece, I saw out of the corner of my eye the same woman from the Moscow zoo, and like the day before she was dressed in the same elegant black outfit. She was standing over the piano’s soundboard and smiling at me. I was thinking of cutting my piece short so I could converse with her, but before I could do so, the slack-jawed Commander, his uniform festooned with medals and epaulets, approached the woman and gave her a lurid stare. His presence seemed to spook her. She abruptly exited the hotel, and the Commander was now staring at me with an amused smile. To make sure I knew that he was mocking me for my ham performance, he puckered his lips and placed his hand next to his chest, and waved his hand up and down while wiggling his fingers in an exaggerated fashion. His military subordinates at the nearby table were laughing. 

    When I was finished playing my composition, he invited me to sit with him and his fellow soldiers at the distant table. Listening to his heavy black military boots squeak as he walked, I followed him to the table and scanned the faces of jeering soldiers. The commander outstretched his arm toward an empty chair, his way of ordering me to sit. He then poured me a tall glass of warm beer. I was trying to construct a polite way of telling him that I didn’t care for any type of beer, especially warm beer, but before I could get out the words, the Commander shouted, “Drink!”

    Noticing my reluctance to take the warm beer, he repeated this command two more times. I could see now that I was being punished for being a piano dandy. I am convinced that the Commander knew that my piano playing was both vulgar and inferior. I say this because I know enough about musicianship to know that I am more of a piano poseur than a true musician. I also know that in Russia many children are forced to take rigorous piano and violin lessons with strict supervision so that the average Russian eight-year-old has better technical acquisition than I do. So I am convinced the officer and his fellow soldiers knew that I was a musical fraud. Also because I was deeply immersed in the novels and essays of Russian emigre Vladimir Nabokov, I knew that in Russia there was the concept of poshlost, the affectations and vulgarities of a charlatan who aspires to be grand but merely flops and reveals himself to be crass and pretentious. In other words, I was an American charlatan in Russia, and I would have to pay the penalty. The price I would pay would be to be forced to drink a pint of Russian warm beer at the behest of the Soviet military. The Commander surely knew that as an American I was accustomed to ice-cold beverages and that warm beer in the morning would not be to my liking. 

    I forced the entire glass of bitter hoppy beer down my throat. My grimacing sour face and my being overcome by nausea elated the soldiers who engaged in thigh-slapping laughter. Witnessing the American Charlatan reduced to size was cause for triumph and celebration. 

    After I was done with my beer, I thanked them for the refreshment and returned to my hotel room. I undressed, showered, then prepared to brush my teeth. When I twisted the cold-water knob, the entire sink came out of the wall and the sink’s sharp edge cut me in the chest so that I had a three-inch-long vertical cut down my torso. I was bleeding. A sink from a newly-constructed hotel in Moscow had just fallen out of the wall and cut me. 

    The cut wasn’t that deep, but I was angry that I had missed two opportunities with the mysterious Russian woman and that the Russian Commander and his soldiers had mocked me, so I spent the rest of the day lifting my shirt and showing my fellow travelers the “ugly cut” I had received as a way of venting my resentment at my perceived adversaries.

    That wasn’t the last I saw of the Commander and his coterie of soldiers. They were in a nearby cabin on the train to Novgorod. When the Commander was putting his duffel bag above his cabin bunk bed, he saw me, gave me a familiar nod, and laughed as if still feeding off my humiliation from drinking warm beer at the Moscow Olympic Hotel. Part of me was grateful that he found me to be a source of joyful entertainment because I could imagine worse alternatives. 

    Inside my own cabin, which I was sharing with Jerry Gold, I told him the Commander was nearby. 

    “He’s probably trailing us,” Jerry said.

    “Why?”

    “We’re on their radar. Or it just might be the protocol for them to keep close tabs on us.”

    “We’re just American tourists.”

    “That’s not what they think. For all they know, we’re CIA. Not to mention they saw you with a copy of A Clockwork Orange at the airport. Thanks to you, we’re all being followed.”

    “You’re paranoid.”

    “We’ll see.”

    By the time we got to Novgorod and Jerry and I were settled in our hotel room by Lake Ilmen, I had what felt like either a cold or the flu. Natasha came in to ask if I felt good enough to go on the tour of the museum. 

    “I’m not sure,” I said while lying on the bed.

    “We’ll get you a doctor,” Natasha said. 

    “I don’t need one,” I said.

    “But I insist.”

    Barely a half-hour had passed when a beautiful doctor with her light brown hair in a bun and a white medical coat came into my hotel. She was accompanied by two nurses holding leather apothecary bags. My fellow travelers, all twelve of them, were so curious they inched their way into the small hotel room to watch my examination.

    The unsmiling doctor had me sit in a chair and take off my shirt. She listened to my chest, looked inside my mouth, and proclaimed that I had a cold. 

    “Just a cold,” I announced to everyone standing in the room.

    But at that very moment, the doctor ordered me to lie face down on the bed and to pull down my pants. I was going to get a shot in the ass. 

    “In my country, we don’t get shots for the common cold,” I protested.

    “Shut up and do as you’re told,” Natasha said. 

    “If you insist.”

    No one cleared out. Watching me get a shot in the right butt cheek was apparently something everyone felt entitled to see. A Soviet-style shot in the ass was too good of an opportunity to miss, I guess. The shot hurt like hell as if some thick viscous molasses was being injected into my flesh.  

    Afterward, I went to the museum, and for some reason, we were standing in a barn surrounded by overgrown grass and weeds and Natasha was giving us a lecture about farming and trade routes in Russia. It was close to a hundred degrees, we were miserable, hungry, and impatient for Natasha to end her lecture. That’s when the Commander and his subordinates approached. They stood next to Natasha and watched us. The message was clear. We were to listen attentively to our tour guide.

    As Natasha walked around the barn and found a place that was in the shade, Jerry Gold found a long stalk of dried hay and positioned himself behind the Commander. Slyly, Jerry brushed the dry straw against the back of the Commander’s neck causing the officer to think he was besieged by a mosquito, and he gave his neck a mighty slap. After Jerry performed the prank three times successfully unnoticed by the Commander, about a half dozen of my fellow tourists had caught on and we were doing our best to stifle our laughter. 

    On one hand, I was terrified that Jerry would get caught. On the other, I was enjoying the spectacle of the Commander’s vexation.

    My good spirits were gone the next day when I woke up with a bruised ass from the mysterious “cold” shot. The pain and swelling were so bad that I had to walk with a severe limp. My fellow travelers said I walked like a Soviet soldier with a war injury.   

    Part of our itinerary that day was to visit a toy factory, which was located on the edge of a forest. I don’t know why it was so important to walk around a factory full of cheap plastic figurines. The factory was uninhabited by employees except for the attendant, but I looked out the factory window and saw several buses full of children between the ages of ten and fourteen. Some of the children were getting out of the buses and approaching the factory. I asked Natasha if the children were about to start a work shift at the factory. She consulted with the factory attendant and he whispered something into the ear of the security guard. The guard, a silver-haired man in his fifties, rushed outside and shepherded the children back into the buses. I even saw the guard give one boy a kick in the rear. It was clear to me and some of the others that Natasha and her cohorts didn’t want to create the impression that the Soviet Union violated child labor laws. 

    We returned to the hotel by the lake and had dinner in an affixed dining area that was crowded with other tour groups. The staff was so busy they had to stagger us inside the restaurant based on our status. We were at the bottom. The first tier was a group of North Korean children and teenagers dressed in blue uniforms with hats. They looked happy and confident that in the Soviet Union they were special and belonged. Their meals came first, were larger, and served by the staff with more enthusiasm. 

    We on the other hand were looked at as a painful obligation. Our portions were smaller, our food colder, and our service more perfunctory. They were throwing scraps to dogs. I was ready to leave Novgorod and go to Leningrad.

  • Reading A Clockwork Orange in Russia

    Reading A Clockwork Orange in Russia

    In my early twenties, I was holding a copy of A Clockwork Orange on an Aeroflot flight from New York to Moscow, and I was fairly certain I’d be arrested before I even touched Soviet soil. This was not the book I was supposed to be reading. My grandfather, a proud, card-carrying Communist, had made it clear that my in-flight reading should be Cities Without Crisis: The Soviet Union Through the Eyes of an American by Mike Davidow—a glowing, uncritical love letter to the USSR. According to Davidow, the Soviet Union was well on its way to utopia, a land where happy, apple-cheeked children played in clean, orderly cities, miraculously untouched by the crime, chaos, and moral decay of capitalist America.

    I had every intention of honoring my grandfather’s wishes. He had, after all, funded my spot on this Sputnik Peace Tour, a Cold War-era cultural exchange designed to showcase the Soviet Union’s superiority and convince impressionable American university students that their homeland was little more than a dilapidated shack compared to the Soviet skyscraper. My grandfather, who spent his golden years vacationing in Russia and Cuba and had personally befriended Fidel Castro, hoped I’d return to the States ready to sing the Soviet anthem on command, with a crimson hammer-and-sickle tattoo stretched across my chest.

    But try as I might, I couldn’t stomach Davidow’s propaganda. It read like an overlong infomercial scripted by a particularly humorless bureaucrat. Every page was predictable, every assertion dripping with a blind, almost devotional reverence for the Soviet system. By chapter three, my eyelids were growing heavier than a Soviet cement block. That’s when I ditched it for A Clockwork Orange, a novel that, in its satirical depiction of authoritarianism and mindless conformity, was just about the worst reading material one could bring on a goodwill trip to the USSR. My grandfather would have called it “reactionary,” but I wasn’t worried about him.

    No, my real concern was the Soviet customs officers waiting for us on the tarmac. They’d be rummaging through our luggage, sniffing out any hint of anti-Soviet subversion. And there I was, gripping a book that, if noticed, might earn me an all-expenses-paid trip to the kind of re-education program I had no interest in attending.

    When one of my fellow tourists, Jerry Gold, who was studying law at Brown University, saw me reading the subversive novel while sitting next to me on the plane, he warned me that the Soviet police would probably confiscate it when we got to the airport. “Not only will they take your book,” he said, “they will mark you as a troublemaker and keep tags on you throughout the entire trip. You must now constantly look over your shoulder for spies, my friend. And remember, if anyone wants to offer you good money for your jeans, it’s probably KGB. Selling Western commodities for the black market is a crime that could get you sent to a Soviet prison.”

    I’ll admit, I was a little anxious about some stern-faced Soviet officer confiscating A Clockwork Orange from my hands, but that concern quickly took a backseat to a far more immediate crisis: the inedible horrors being passed off as food on the Aeroflot flight. The demure flight attendants, clad in their stiff, no-nonsense uniforms, moved through the cabin with a grim efficiency, depositing onto our trays what could only be described as Cold War rations—waxy cheese triangles entombed in foil, anemic cold cuts that looked like they had lost a war of their own, limp lettuce gasping for dignity, and carrot slices so soggy they seemed to be pre-chewed. It was a meal that could single-handedly refute Mike Davidow’s utopian vision in Cities Without Crisis. His thesis—that the Soviet Union was building thriving cities free of strife—collapsed under the weight of this culinary travesty. Because if a nation’s food is a reflection of its prosperity, then a country that serves despair on a tray is, in fact, in crisis. And a man who fails to acknowledge that crisis is a fraud.

    Across the aisle, Jerry Gold, the kind of guy who exuded the unshakable self-assurance of someone who spent his summers at debate camp and his winters skiing in Vermont, curled his lip in disgust. A mop of reddish-brown hair and a constellation of freckles gave him the air of a scholarly leprechaun. He peeled back the foil on his cheese triangle with surgical precision, examined its plasticky surface like a jeweler appraising a fake diamond, and let out a slow, deliberate sigh. Then, in a display of Ivy League pragmatism, he took the industrial-grade brown napkin from his tray, folded it with the care of a man preparing for a high-stakes origami competition, and tucked it into the inner pocket of his coat. “You might want to do the same,” he advised me in a tone that suggested this was less a suggestion and more a survival strategy. I nodded, following suit, because when faced with Soviet airline cuisine, you learned to take advice from the man with a backup plan.

    “This could be the only toilet paper you’re going to have on this trip,” he said. “You would be wise to save all your napkins. They’re worth their weight in gold around here.”

    “That’s disgusting.”

    “Have you ever used an Eastern European toilet?”

    I shook my head.

    “A hole in the ground. An invitation to the deep knee bend. It’s a free Jack Lalanne workout every time you go to the shitter. Things can be rather primitive.”

    “For someone so hellbent on horrifying me on every aspect of this tour, can you please tell me why you decided to go on this trip?”

    “It’s college credit. It’s exotic. How many Americans can boast of having been inside the Soviet Union?” He forced down a bite of cheese and asked me why I was going on the tour. 

    “My grandfather is a card-carrying communist,” I said. “He’s trying to convert me.”

    “So he sent you to paradise.” He laughed, then pinched a cold cut, lifted it before his face, and scrutinized it carefully.

    “The food isn’t a winning argument,” I said. “Nor is the absence of toilet paper.”

    “There is a saying in the Soviet Union,” he said while tossing the uneaten cold cut on his tray. “If you see people standing in line, make sure you stand in it. People are always waiting in line for something.”

    His statement proved to be true. A week later when we were in a sweltering market in Kyiv, we saw forlorn citizens, mostly stoic-faced babushkas, standing in a long line to buy wrinkled room-temperature chickens with flies swarming over them. I kept thinking to myself, “Cities without crisis? Bullshit.” Little did I know, I was standing 62 miles from Chernobyl and that two years later the nuclear reactor would explode causing worldwide radioactive contamination. Cities without crisis indeed.

    But in 1984 as I witnessed long lines, food shortages, nonexistent toilet paper, and primitive toilets, I found something about the Soviet Union that struck me as almost admirable: Everywhere we went, markets, train stations, parks, and museums, there were government speakers playing classical music, much of it from Rachmaninoff, Shostakovich, and Prokofiev. I wanted to believe, as my grandfather would want me to, that the violin chamber pieces and piano sonatas were the Soviet Union’s idea of music for the masses based on the government cultivating sophisticated taste in its citizens. But a darker motive was that the music was part of the Soviet Union’s propaganda: Classical music from Russian composers was a way of rebuking the vulgarity and corruption of the West. 

  • Transforming into Mope-a-saurus Rex

    Transforming into Mope-a-saurus Rex

    There’s ongoing debate over whether boomers willingly morph into Mope-a-saurus Rex—the scowling relic pacing his lawn and muttering about “kids these days”—or if the transformation is as unavoidable as hair loss and rising cholesterol. Maybe it’s some grim milestone on the aging checklist, or maybe it sneaks up, the natural side effect of realizing your cultural currency has expired while the youth livestream their way into the future. I’ll leave that existential puzzle for the philosophers to untangle.

    What I do know is that by the time Thanksgiving rolled around, I was still carrying the weight of grief like an overstuffed holiday plate. I’d said goodbye to my mother during the pandemic, standing outside a nursing home window and offering her love through a mesh screen, as if I were visiting someone in solitary confinement. Two years later, I watched my father—a proud infantryman in his day—fade to 130 pounds, his body surrendering to cancer. Since their passing, the world felt quieter, smaller, like someone had dimmed the lights without warning.

    So, when hosting Thanksgiving fell squarely on my plate, it wasn’t some Norman Rockwell fantasy. It was more like getting crushed by a baby grand piano dropped from the second floor. And instead of gracefully stepping aside, I just let it hit me—because honestly, moving felt like too much effort.

    The guest list wasn’t exactly daunting—just my perpetually single brother, whose dating apps seemed better at generating cautionary tales than romantic prospects, and two of my wife’s teacher friends, both middle school band directors still recovering from clarinet-induced PTSD. The conversation was polite, though it had all the flavor of plain oatmeal.

    Stuffed to the gills but somehow still shoveling pie like our lives depended on it, we trudged through the ritual of TV show recommendations. Each suggestion was delivered with the gravitas of a public service announcement—skip this series at your own peril. Apparently, failing to watch that one obscure, eight-part masterpiece would leave me culturally destitute, wandering through a desolate landscape devoid of punchlines and plot twists.

    Honestly, I enjoyed the company. The real villain of Thanksgiving wasn’t the guests—it was the dishes. The endless scrubbing that left my hands raw, the dishwashing marathon that stretched into eternity, the mountain of dirty plates multiplying like gremlins in the sink. That’s where the wheels came off.

    My wife, meanwhile, glided through the chaos like some kind of culinary sorceress, humming softly as she orchestrated the entire meal with the grace of a Michelin-starred maestro. She didn’t grumble. Not a single passive-aggressive sigh escaped her lips. She was the picture of serene competence.

    I, on the other hand, hovered around the kitchen like a useless NPC in a video game—occasionally moving a plate from table to sink and acting as though I’d just conquered Everest. At one point, I genuinely felt winded after rearranging the silverware. My contribution was so meager it felt performative, like a child pretending to be tired after “helping” Dad mow the lawn by pushing a plastic toy mower ten feet behind him.

    Somewhere between rinsing the roasting pan and glaring at the pile of silverware, it hit me—I was teetering on the edge of a Mope-a-saurus moment. The only thing preventing my full transformation was the vague sense of shame that my wife, who had just cooked for hours, wasn’t grumbling about the aftermath. That’s when you know you’re in trouble—when someone else’s superior competence and good cheer makes you feel like a defective appliance, sputtering through life with a flickering power cord and a weak motor.

    I’m such a fragile soul that after surviving the harrowing gauntlet of Thanksgiving dishes and the Herculean task of small talk, I felt entitled to a months-long convalescence—something involving soft blankets, intravenous fluids, and a team of specialists monitoring my vitals like I’d just summited Kilimanjaro in flip-flops. Surely, I had earned the right to collapse melodramatically onto a fainting couch and demand chicken soup by candlelight.

  • When I Met the SpaghettiOs Overlord

    When I Met the SpaghettiOs Overlord

    In June of 1999, I did what a college professor cannot do: I lost the classroom key. Yes, the sacred, university-issued key that was supposedly worth more than its weight in gold and was meant to be guarded as if it were the last surviving relic of Atlantis. After a frantic week of turning my Redondo Beach condo upside down—searching under couch cushions, rifling through laundry baskets, and even interrogating the houseplants—I had to admit defeat. I was summoned to face the wrath of the university’s ice queen of administration, who greeted me with a glare that could freeze lava. “The one thing a college instructor does not do,” she said, as if reciting an ancient curse, “is lose his key.” She inspected me as if I were a criminal in a bad noir film, and then informed me that I had to make a pilgrimage to the edge of campus, to the mythical and dreaded realm known as Plant Ops, to pay for a key replacement with cash only. I felt like I was being sent to Mordor to drop off a pizza. 

    So, I embarked on this perilous quest, driving east from campus. At first, the road was a decent pavement. But soon, it disintegrated into a wasteland of dirt, rubble, and potholes the size of small craters. My car bucked and jolted over the rocky path, like an old west wagon on a treasure hunt, as I passed ghostly rows of cow skulls and tumbleweeds rolling by in the wind like some grim, dusty parade. Above me, buzzards circled, perhaps in anticipation of a fresh meal or merely to witness my impending doom.

    Just as despair was about to pull me under, a nauseating aroma of glue, pickles, and formaldehyde wafted through the air, signaling the arrival of my destination. I squinted through the gloom to see a structure emerge from the fog—a dilapidated hangar that looked like it had been plucked from a post-apocalyptic movie set. Inside was the world’s most disgruntled handyman, a short, rotund man with glasses thick enough to start a small library, a bushy mustache that looked like it was trying to escape his face, and a head bald enough to use as a landing strip for insects. He was hunched over a workbench, devouring SpaghettiOs straight from the can with the kind of focus usually reserved for nuclear codes. His irritation at being interrupted was palpable, like I’d crashed his private spaghetti party.

    “Twenty dollars cash,” he grunted, extending his hand with the authority of a toll collector in the underworld. I handed him the bill with the reverence of a pilgrim offering gold to a god. He stuffed it into his grease-splattered apron, took another spoonful of his cold, canned meal, and scowled at me like I’d personally betrayed him. With the wind howling through the thin steel walls of the hangar, I half expected the place to take off and join Dorothy’s house in the sky. The handyman delivered his parting words with the gravitas of a crypt keeper: I must never lose a key again, lest I face the incompetence of his replacement, who was, according to him, a veritable nincompoop with the locksmithing skills of a potato. I thanked him, exited the hangar, and raced straight to the nearest hardware store. I bought a keychain made of Kevlar, equipped with a tether reel and a high-density nylon belt loop—basically, a key-keeping apparatus that could survive a nuclear blast. It was clear I’d never let my keys out of my sight again, lest I face another odyssey to the land of a disgruntled Plant-Ops overlord.

  • Before Snack Times

    Before Snack Times

    In the Before Snack Times of the early 70s, we didn’t have helicopter parents hovering over us, micromanaging our every move with a suffocating schedule of dance classes, gymnastics, karate, swim lessons, math tutors, writing coaches, soccer practices, chess clubs, computer coding, mindfulness meditation, and Ashtanga Yoga. We didn’t have smartphones tracking us like we were secret agents with microchips implanted in our necks. For the entire day, our parents had absolutely no clue where we were or what we were up to. We’d saunter off after breakfast, either on foot or aboard our trusty bicycles, and were expected to return only by dinner. During that endless stretch of freedom, we’d navigate through construction sites strewn with lumber, nails, electrical wires, and bottomless ditches, all of which screamed, “Adventure awaits!” We gravitated toward mud, streams, and rivers like moths to a flame, setting up wooden ramps to perform Evel Knievel-level stunts over bodies of water. The messier and more perilous the terrain, the more irresistible it became. These hazardous playgrounds were usually bordered by rusty barbed-wire fences and “Do Not Enter” signs, which not only failed to deter us but ignited our rebellious spirits to trespass with even more gusto. Inside these danger zones, we’d be chased by furious steers, territorial cows, and muscle-bound guard dogs. Occasionally, a disgruntled landowner would fire warning shots at us with a pellet gun, a token gesture that barely fazed us. In the ravines behind our homes, we crafted forts, swung from vines, ignited firecrackers, and leaped into piles of poison oak. We encountered black widows, rattlesnakes, bobcats, coyotes, and even the occasional mountain lion. After a day of flouting every conceivable health and safety code, we’d trudge home at night, our bodies caked in filth, bruises, and scratches. But our parents, bless their oblivious hearts, never inquired about our whereabouts or escapades. As long as we took a bath and cleaned up, they were content to feed us hearty helpings of turkey pot pies, meatloaf, chili, and tacos. They knew we needed the energy to wake up the next morning and dive headfirst into another day of mayhem. Back then, we had little time for snacking. Our days were filled with wilderness adventures, where our imaginations ran wild. This level of playfulness, chaos, and enchantment is as extinct as the dinosaurs in today’s Snack Age, where parents meticulously micromanage their children’s activities and pacify their appetites with chips, juice boxes, chocolate chip granola bars, fruit rolls, and Happy Meals.