Cinemorphosis

Tag: travel

  • When It comes to Swim Briefs the Size of a Hotel Mint, Maybe Opt Out

    When It comes to Swim Briefs the Size of a Hotel Mint, Maybe Opt Out

    Today’s 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 houses, 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 28 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.

  • Safe at Home with Tofu: We Need George Carlin Now More Than Ever

    Safe at Home with Tofu: We Need George Carlin Now More Than Ever

    George Carlin once built a whole comedy bit around the contrast between football and baseball. Football, he said, is war—full of blitzes, bombs, and sudden death. Baseball, by contrast, is a pastoral game, a gentle journey home. Safe at home. He could’ve done an equally scathing bit on carnivores versus vegans.

    A carnivore is a Viking. He doesn’t eat dinner; he conquers it. He roasts slabs of meat over open flame, wears elk pelts in July, and believes the phrase “nose to tail” is less a philosophy than a moral imperative. He eats liver because it’s what his ancestors did, despite the fact that his ancestors also died at 38 from dysentery and wolf bites.

    The vegan? A minimalist monk who speaks in the tone one reserves for therapy dogs and endangered turtles. His kitchen smells like soaked lentils and moral superiority. He eats “greens,” plural, as though a vague handful of chlorophyll could power a biped. His hero is the neighborhood spider, which he refuses to squash. Instead, he names it Rumi, places it gently on a compostable bamboo plate, and ushers it into the wild with a whispered prayer and a single tear.

    The carnivore doesn’t own plates. He eats standing up. The vegan has three sets of reusable dishware, made from renewable bamboo and guilt. The carnivore fills his “power bowl” with yolks, red meat, and testosterone. The vegan fills his with quinoa, miso, and the sense that one day we’ll all live on floating gardens of kale, fueled by gratitude and biotin.

    The carnivore laughs when lightning strikes. The vegan winces when the microwave beeps.

    And yet—here’s the kicker—both think they’re saving the world. One by returning to primal wisdom, the other by transcending it. One believes in survival of the fittest; the other believes in surviving without harming a single sentient thing. They are, in essence, two sides of the same self-mythologizing coin: the ancient warrior and the futuristic monk, each clinging to their menu like it’s a worldview. And perhaps that’s what diet is now—a belief system, a theology served with a side of macro tracking. Eat, pray, posture.

  • Recycling in the Shadow of the End Times

    Recycling in the Shadow of the End Times

    Last night, my wife asked me to handle a sacred domestic rite of passage: haul a trunk-load of obsolete electronics to the Gaffey S.A.F.E. Recycle Collection Center in San Pedro. “They open at 9 a.m.,” she said, which is code for: Don’t sleep in.

    So I dutifully loaded my Honda Accord with a hall of shame—old radios, half-dead fans, ghosted iPads, prehistoric laptops, orphaned computer speakers, a humidifier that wheezed its last breath in 2018, and enough acid-leaking batteries to qualify as a small environmental disaster.

    By morning, I punched the address into my phone, merged onto the 110 South, and exited Pacific Avenue, driving through an industrial no-man’s-land of rusting warehouses, improvised shelters, and overgrown brush—a Stephen King set piece waiting to happen. After bouncing over railroad tracks and veering onto a gravel path flanked by nothing but dirt and faint regret, I arrived at 8:50.

    The “facility” was a glorified tarp tent squatting in front of a cinder-block warehouse. A small line of cars idled ahead of me like penitents outside a confessional. Signs warned against dumping poisons, spoiled crops, medical waste, firearms, and, refreshingly, detonation materials of any kind. A second sign warned against exiting your vehicle, eating, or drinking—because apparently the mere whiff of your lukewarm coffee might trigger a chemical reaction that could incinerate the South Bay.

    At one point, a confused driver from Washington state cut in front, realized he was in the wrong dystopian checkpoint, U-turned, and peeled off down the gravel road, leaving a dust plume that coated our windshields like nuclear ash.

    By nine o’clock, two dozen cars were idling behind me in what now resembled the opening act of an eco-thriller. A cheerful woman in an orange vest began making her rounds, clipboard in hand. She asked what I was dropping off, and I gave her the rundown—my sad parade of malfunctioning tech. I suspect her job was twofold: confirm I wasn’t smuggling Chernobyl-grade waste, and quietly profile whether I looked like the kind of guy who dumps bodies with his broken humidifiers. Somewhere nearby, I imagined, there was a man with a headset and a sidearm watching from a repurposed FEMA trailer.

    Finally, I popped the trunk. Uniformed workers retrieved my gadgets with grim efficiency. I thanked them. They returned my gratitude like seasoned pallbearers—calm, practiced, unfazed.

    Unburdened, I pulled away from the hazmat drive-thru, feeling 50 pounds lighter and slightly radioactive. I had fulfilled my civic duty to both my marriage and the planet.

  • One Day, One House, No Excuses

    One Day, One House, No Excuses

    This morning, I brewed a pot of delicious Stumptown French roast—molten, bitter, potent—and padded over to my computer feeling dangerously wholesome. A good man with good intentions. Which, of course, is always the start of a problem. I was toying with the idea of living more virtuously: dialing back the animal fat, leaning into tempeh and nutritional yeast, pretending a plant-based diet isn’t just a long goodbye to flavor. You know, the usual summer resolutions—less cheese, more clarity.

    Somewhere between the aroma of roasted beans and my first click of the mouse, I felt something resembling courage. Not the real, bare-knuckled kind, but the kind that sneaks in when the house is quiet and you haven’t yet sabotaged yourself with toast. I thought: Gird up thy loins like a man. (Who says that anymore? Besides prophets and people named Chet.) But still, the idea stuck. Maybe I was finally ready to stop flinching and start living with actual conviction—about food, fitness, morality, and cholesterol.

    And yet I know myself. Talk is cheap. I have spent years writing grocery lists for lives I never lived. What matters is performance.

    Which brings us to today. My summer has officially begun. My wife and teenage daughters are off to Disneyland—a place I regard with the same warmth I reserve for colonoscopies and TikTok. They know this, and mercifully leave me out of the Mouseketeer pilgrimage. Which means: the house is mine.

    I have made a pact with myself. Today, I will submit my final grades, mount the Schwinn Airdyne for a 60-minute sufferfest (estimated burn: 650-750 calories, depending on whether I channel Rocky Balboa or Mister Rogers), and I will rehearse my piano composition—tentatively titled Gene Wilder’s Prelude to Mischief and Madness. If all goes well, I’ll record it and upload it to my YouTube channel, where it will be watched by six people and a bot from Belarus.

    Alone time is rare in a house shared with twin teenage girls, a wife, and the occasional haunting presence of someone asking what’s for dinner. I daydream of a private studio—soundproofed, monk-like, adorned with a grand ebony Yamaha piano and maybe a faint aura of genius. Instead, I have today: a suburban cosplay fantasy in which I pretend to be a cloistered artist, instead of a middle-aged man in gym shorts wondering if tempeh is as bioavailable as the vegan influencers claim it is.

    And yet… it’s enough. Let the performance begin.

  • The Pilgrim, the Mansion, and the Flying Death Rig

    The Pilgrim, the Mansion, and the Flying Death Rig

    Last night, I dreamed I worked at a surreal hybrid of a college campus and an amusement park—the kind of place where tenured professors could file paperwork in one building and ride a log flume in another. Picture syllabus deadlines and cotton candy coexisting. Naturally, I was late for both.

    Meanwhile, several miles away in my old neighborhood, Marcus, a childhood friend, decided he’d had enough of modern civilization. His exit wasn’t dramatic—no manifesto, no angry blog post—just a quiet pilgrimage beginning in front of my house. The weather was unreasonably perfect. Sunlight filtered through air that smelled like rose petals and eternal spring. Think Garden of Eden meets Orange County real estate brochure.

    So why would Marcus leave paradise? We didn’t know. But my neighbors and I were offended by the sheer moral audacity of it. His journey felt like a judgment—like he’d stared into the hollow eyes of our HOA and whispered, “You people are dead inside.” Naturally, we chased him. Not to stop him, but to prove we were decent people too. We jogged after him, waving metaphysical CVs and shouting, “We recycle! We make our own salad dressing!”

    But Marcus was too far ahead. By the time I arrived at the college-amusement park, he was gone. I retreated to my professor’s office to catch up on what dreams insist professors do: paperwork. That’s when Mike arrived—a former student, Navy SEAL, and time-traveling spirit guide from the 1990s. He led me to a house in Buena Park, once his father’s, now transfigured by dream logic into a mansion of staggering beauty, where I apparently lived a life of joy and ease in another dimension. It was, quite simply, the life I never knew I had but now mourned like a phantom limb. I was flooded with regret. Why did I leave that parallel mansion where I was whole, radiant, and probably never had to grade a single freshman essay?

    Then the sun set, and—as dreams do—I stopped being a professor and morphed into some kind of blue-collar rig worker, one of four men hauling cargo across the freeways of this theme park universe. At breakneck speed, we clung to the roof of a truck, flying over the 5 freeway like a band of deluded daredevils. I alone had the courage (or sanity) to question this arrangement. “You know,” I said, wind slapping my face, “we don’t have to die tonight. There’s an interior cabin. With seats.”

    At first, they mocked me—because apparently, dreamland logic still includes workplace hazing—but eventually, they gave in. We climbed down into the safety of the rig, like cowards, or people who enjoy not being flung across asphalt.

    As I relaxed, I thought once more about that mansion in Buena Park, that shadow life where I wasn’t trying to prove my worth or cling to cargo. A life of belonging, not striving. Then I woke up, ate a bowl of buckwheat groats, drank my Sumatra coffee, and wondered what it all meant.

  • The Forgotten Fleet: Memoirs of a Honda Hoarder

    The Forgotten Fleet: Memoirs of a Honda Hoarder

    Last night, my subconscious staged an intervention.

    In the dream, my family and I had relocated to a sprawling house perched at the edge of a forest—idyllic at first glance, but the driveway told another story. It had become a graveyard of Honda Accords. Not just one or two, but an entire archaeological dig of them: gleaming new models barely broken in, others half-eaten by moss and mulch, some peeking out from decaying leaf piles like forgotten Easter eggs, and one—yes, really—buried in the earth like a pharaoh’s chariot. Another Accord had somehow washed up near the beach, sun-faded and abandoned like a bloated sea lion.

    A kindly messenger—part real estate agent, part archangel—told my daughter and me about the beach-stranded Accord. So we climbed into an older model, the color of a liver spot, and headed to the coast. Upon arrival, we ditched that old heap to rescue another Accord of the exact same jaundiced hue. Predictably, the beach Accord was dead on arrival. My daughter and I, summoning the brute strength of Greek demigods, pushed it across the sand, up a mountain, and across California at warp speed—from Orange County to Simi Valley—as if towing the sins of my consumer past behind us.

    We paused at a cousin’s house, where iced tea and human needs awaited. My cousin, ever the concerned parent, confided that his son was wilting from loneliness. Without missing a beat, my daughter rang up a stunning actress—someone so luminous she made Instagram filters seem redundant. She showed up. So did half the neighborhood, offering baked goods in exchange for a glimpse at the sun goddess. One woman brought a cherry pie, trembling with reverence.

    As we continued northward, my joy curdled into anxiety. How many Accords had I bought over the years? Were there more hidden somewhere—collector’s editions with leather interiors and forgotten potential—lost to my Swiss cheese memory? Had I turned into the automotive equivalent of a hoarder monk, stacking sacred relics of midlife crises in the forest of my own forgetfulness? I awoke not with peace, but with regret, soothed only slightly by a tall, steaming mug of Sumatra roast, which I drank like a sacrament to sanity.

  • Borderline Strauss Disorder: A Dream of Intellectual Despair

    Borderline Strauss Disorder: A Dream of Intellectual Despair

    Last night, around 2 a.m., just as Jonah Goldberg of The Remnant podcast was deep in philosophical flirtation with Yale’s Steven Smith over Leo Strauss, I passed out—headphones still in, brain still humming.

    And then the dream began.

    I found myself in my grandfather’s old house in San Pedro, a stuccoed mid-century bunker that always smelled faintly of pipe smoke and baked ziti. Inside the library—yes, he had a library—Goldberg and Smith were now with me, and the three of us were doing what all good podcasters and aging humanities majors dream of doing: pulling crumbly tomes off dusty shelves, quoting Epictetus, Hobbes, and Plato as if our curated selections might finally bring Western Civilization back from the brink.

    Each book we grabbed opened, magically, to the exact passage we were about to reference—as if we were wielding Philosopher’s Stones bound in cracked leather. This was not casual reading. It was apocalypse-proof intellectual spelunking.

    Then I noticed something troubling.

    Through the window, I saw a teenage blonde girl in a baby-blue station wagon idling at the curb. She looked like a cross between a cheerleader and a Bond villain’s niece—beautiful, yes, but with the dead-eyed calm of someone about to burn down your ideas with surgical precision. Turns out she was an operative, dispatched by some shadowy organization convinced that our late-night Straussian exegesis was a threat to human progress.

    Naturally, I sprinted outside, confronted her, and commandeered the station wagon—which, of course, was loaded with weapons. Jonah, ever the podcast professional, called “his people” to secure the contraband.

    But there was a cost.

    Simply standing too close to the weapons cache scrambled the circuitry of my brain. My synapses went sideways, and a mysterious doctor appeared—seemingly conjured from a BBC miniseries and a Jungian archetype—with a scroll. Not a Kindle, not a clipboard. A scroll.

    He began to read aloud. Stories, essays, fragments—some of it fiction, some of it possibly academic, none of it optional. He read in a solemn, droning cadence, pausing only to gesture that I join in. At times, we performed the text together like an absurd Socratic duet. This was not medicine. It was literary waterboarding.

    The treatment drew attention.

    Soon, Goldberg turned the whole ordeal into a dinner party. Somehow, he located several of my retired faculty colleagues and invited them, with their long-suffering wives, to my grandfather’s house. I wanted to talk to them—reconnect, reminisce—but the doctor stuck to me like a parasite with tenure. Wherever I went, he followed, reading, always reading.

    My colleagues grew irritated and drifted off one by one, muttering about boundaries and bad acoustics. I tried to hide in the bean bag room—yes, this house apparently had a bean bag room—but the doctor found me, unfurled his accursed scroll, and picked up where he left off.

    I realized, in that moment, I was trapped. Pinned inside a philosophical purgatory where the punishment wasn’t fire or ice, but relentless interpretation. Eternal footnotes. Bibliographic water torture. I would never leave. Not until I understood the real meaning of the text. Or until a full bladder awakened me.

    Thankfully, the latter came first.

  • Borderless Flavors: Food, Power, and the Collapse of Culinary Elitism (College Essay Prompt)

    Borderless Flavors: Food, Power, and the Collapse of Culinary Elitism (College Essay Prompt)

    Essay Prompt (1,700 words):

    In the Chef’s Table: Pizza episode featuring Ann Kim, food becomes a site of transformation, healing, and reinvention. Kim channels her failed acting career into culinary artistry, crafting dishes that express the multiplicity of her identity—as a Korean-American daughter, an artist, and an immigrant success story. Her pizzas become canvases for memory, rebellion, and gratitude, especially toward her parents. Her story is a microcosm of the broader immigrant narrative: negotiating identity, navigating cultural shame, and ultimately reversing the script as the very foods once mocked become culinary gold.

    In this essay, compare the themes in Ann Kim’s story with those in Ugly Delicious (Season 1, Episode “Tacos”) and selected episodes of The Taco Chronicles. How do these shows depict food as more than sustenance—as performance, identity, resistance, and love? In what ways do immigrant chefs and food workers subvert the shame once associated with their cultural foods and assert pride, creativity, and belonging through cuisine?

    Your essay must engage with the visual rhetoric of the shows (tone, music, imagery), analyze the role of food as narrative and identity, and include at least two secondary sources—these may include academic articles on food studies, identity, or immigrant narratives.

    Sample Thesis Statements:

    1. The Performance of the Plate
     Through Ann Kim’s story in Chef’s Table: Pizza, the taco discourse in Ugly Delicious, and the street-food heroism of The Taco Chronicles, we see food function as a performance of identity, where immigrant chefs use culinary artistry to reclaim scorned traditions, express hybrid selves, and find belonging in spaces that once excluded them.

    Mapping components:

    • Culinary performance as identity expression
    • Reversal of cultural shame into pride
    • Belonging through the craft of food

    2. From Shame to Reverence
     Ann Kim, David Chang, and the taqueros of The Taco Chronicles show how the foods once mocked in American lunchrooms are now celebrated on global stages, revealing that cuisine is a powerful tool of cultural revenge, emotional healing, and self-definition for immigrant communities.

    Mapping components:

    • Mockery and marginalization of immigrant food
    • Culinary revenge and cultural redemption
    • Healing and self-definition through cooking

    3. Food as Love, Labor, and Legacy
     While Chef’s Table: Pizza casts Ann Kim’s story as one of artistic reinvention and filial love, Ugly Delicious and The Taco Chronicles emphasize how food binds generations, builds communities, and becomes a labor of love that transforms trauma into legacy.

    Mapping components:

    • Culinary reinvention as personal and artistic legacy
    • Food as intergenerational bridge
    • Labor, love, and storytelling through cuisine

    Sample Outline:

    I. Introduction

    • Hook: A vivid scene from Ann Kim’s episode—placing gochujang on pizza as rebellion and homage.
    • Context: Rise of food documentaries as cultural texts.
    • Thesis: (Insert one of the thesis statements above.)

    II. Ann Kim: The Personal is Culinary

    • Acting failure and identity fragmentation
    • Food as theatrical medium: personas, freedom, risk
    • Immigrant shame turned into culinary power (Korean pizza)
    • Cooking for her parents as an act of redemption and gratitude

    III. Ugly Delicious: The Taco Episode and Cultural Inversion

    • David Chang’s exploration of authenticity and invention
    • The taco as a battleground of legitimacy (Mexican roots vs. American remix)
    • Use of celebrity chefs and taqueros to show class and cultural divides
    • Food once marginalized now used as a symbol of culinary innovation

    IV. The Taco Chronicles: Myth, Ritual, and Regional Pride

    • Focus on specific episodes (e.g., Suadero, Cochinita Pibil)
    • Tacos as sacred practice, generational labor, and social equalizer
    • Visual and musical rhetoric: the taco as folk hero
    • Repeated motif: taqueros breaking class and cultural boundaries with corn, fire, and steel

    V. Comparative Analysis

    • Immigrant identity in all three: reclaiming power through food
    • Emotional resonance: food as apology, tribute, rebellion
    • Different tones: Kim’s cinematic elegance vs. Chang’s irreverent inquiry vs. Chronicles’ reverent folklore

    VI. Counterargument Section

    • Some critics argue that food media romanticizes struggle or sanitizes labor conditions
    • Rebuttal: While these shows may aestheticize food, they also restore dignity to cuisines and cooks historically ignored by dominant culture

    VII. Conclusion

    • Reassert the thesis: food is not just fuel—it is metaphor, memoir, and medium
    • End with a return to a powerful image—perhaps Ann Kim in her pizzeria, cooking for her parents, feeding them not just dinner, but decades of unspoken love

  • Taco Nation: How a Humble Street Food Became Mexico’s Superpower (College Essay Prompt)

    Taco Nation: How a Humble Street Food Became Mexico’s Superpower (College Essay Prompt)

    Essay Prompt:

    In the Netflix docuseries The Taco Chronicles, the taco is not portrayed as a mere food item but as a cultural force—an edible emblem of Mexico’s resilience, creativity, and soul. The series argues that the taco is a kind of Mexican superfood—not only for its nutritional versatility, but also for its power to break down cultural and class barriers, foster community, and rejuvenate the communal spirit through the sacred staple of corn. It is both deeply traditional and endlessly innovative, enchanting the people who eat it and the taqueros who make it.

    Write a 1,700-word argumentative essay that responds to the claim that the taco functions as a Mexican superfood with transformative social and cultural power. Consider how the taco transcends boundaries—economic, racial, culinary, and geographic—while also preserving deep-rooted traditions. You may also explore counterarguments: Is the global popularity of the taco watering down its identity? Is the romanticization of street food masking deeper inequalities?

    Support your argument with examples from The Taco Chronicles and incorporate at least two additional sources (journalistic, scholarly, or culinary writing) that offer insights into food culture, globalization, or Mexican identity.

    Sample Thesis Statements:

    1. The Taco as Cultural Bridge
     While often seen as humble street food, the taco stands as a powerful symbol of cultural resilience, breaking barriers of class and race, rejuvenating communities through the ancestral force of corn, and reinventing itself across borders without losing its soul.

    Mapping components:

    • Symbol of cultural resilience
    • Rejuvenation through corn
    • Innovation without cultural loss

    2. A Superfood for the Soul
     Far from just a culinary trend, the taco operates as a Mexican superfood by nourishing the body, connecting diverse communities across social divides, and reviving cultural heritage through its balance of tradition and modern flair.

    Mapping components:

    • Nourishment and accessibility
    • Cross-class and cross-cultural unity
    • Reinvention of tradition

    3. Romantic or Real? Interrogating the Taco’s Power
     Though The Taco Chronicles portrays the taco as a superfood capable of healing social divisions and celebrating tradition, its growing global appeal risks cultural dilution, commodification, and the masking of labor inequities behind its charm.

    Mapping components:

    • Healing and communal unity
    • Risk of global commodification
    • Invisible labor and exploitation

    Here are three counterarguments with rebuttals, each addressing a core claim from the prompt about the taco’s cultural and communal power:

    Counterargument 1: “The Taco Has Been Commercialized Beyond Recognition”

    As the taco gains global popularity, it’s often stripped of its cultural context and repackaged as a trendy, overpriced novelty in upscale restaurants. The soul of the taco gets lost in translation, turning it into an Instagram prop rather than a communal or ancestral food.

    Rebuttal:
     While some global versions of the taco are divorced from tradition, The Taco Chronicles shows that innovation and authenticity can coexist. From suadero in Mexico City to cochinita pibil in Yucatán, the taco is continually reinvented without losing its cultural core. Rather than being erased, the taco’s story is being exported—sometimes imperfectly, but often with respect and curiosity.

    Counterargument 2: “Romanticizing the Taco Ignores Labor Exploitation”

    Celebrating the taco as a symbol of love and unity risks whitewashing the harsh labor realities faced by many taqueros, many of whom work long hours in informal economies with little pay or security.

    Rebuttal:
     Yes, romanticizing food can blur the realities of labor, but The Taco Chronicles doesn’t shy away from this. It honors the taquero not just as a cook but as a craftsman, keeper of tradition, and community anchor. Elevating their work brings visibility and dignity—not erasure. Recognizing tacos as cultural capital can be the first step toward advocating for fair labor practices in the food industry.

    Counterargument 3: “The Taco Doesn’t Break Class Barriers—It Reinforces Them”

    Although tacos are accessible, their new gourmet incarnations often exclude working-class eaters, turning a people’s food into a luxury experience and reinforcing class divides rather than dismantling them.

    Rebuttal:
     The taco’s genius lies in its dual identity. It can be both a 10-peso street meal and a $15 chef’s experiment without collapsing under the weight of either role. Its roots in affordability and improvisation mean that it retains its cultural identity even when elevated. More importantly, the street taco is still thriving—in Mexico and beyond—resisting erasure by holding its own against the forces of culinary elitism.

  • The Vegan That Lives in My Head (and Nowhere Else)

    The Vegan That Lives in My Head (and Nowhere Else)

    At six a.m., mug in hand, I sat down at my desk with the smug satisfaction of a man pretending to be in control of his day—only to be ambushed by a large brown spider launching itself from my desk drawer like it was fleeing the FBI. It vanished into the shadows, and I was left stewing in the indignity of defeat. I didn’t catch it. Worse, for the second morning in a row, I couldn’t remember my dream. Something about a car near the ocean, a faceless authority figure mumbling instructions, and then—blank. Freud would be disappointed. I’m more annoyed.

    My dreams often involve cars. They also often involve the ocean. I suspect this means I’m perpetually trying to get somewhere, while simultaneously wanting to be swallowed by the Great Womb of the Deep. Birth, Death, and the Cycle of Life.

    Midway through my coffee, my teenage daughter wandered into my office, eyebrows raised in alarm as I recounted the spider saga and my failed dream recall. She showed the appropriate amount of concern, then casually announced she was heading to Starbucks for a chai latte. It’s comforting how the rituals of youth persist, even as their fathers spiral existentially over arachnids and unconscious symbolism.

    I banged out a new essay prompt for next semester—something about manufactured authenticity and influencer FOMO—then drove the girls to school, came back, and burned 805 calories in 61 minutes on the Schwinn Airdyne. Or as I’ve come to call it: The Misery Machine. This isn’t exercise. This is penance. Only those seeking redemption or working through unresolved guilt buy these medieval contraptions. The bike doesn’t offer health—it offers absolution.

    Post-shower weigh-in: 231. Still twenty pounds away from my goal, but less disgusting than I was yesterday, so—progress.

    Later, I drifted into my usual morning fantasy: becoming a vegan. No, not a preachy zealot in hemp sandals, but a serene, plant-based domestic monk, stirring lentils and sipping soy lattes like some morally superior Miyagi of meal prep. In this fantasy, I don’t haul home slabs of meat leaking blood onto Trader Joe’s paper bags. No. I have evolved.

    In this alternate timeline, breakfast is steel-cut oatmeal or buckwheat groats with walnuts, berries, soy milk, and a dash of protein powder. Lunch and dinner are identical—because I’m disciplined, not boring—a sacred Le Creuset Dutch oven bubbling with a Caribbean rice-and-beans concoction: quinoa or white rice, black beans, cubes of tempeh, coconut milk, tomato sauce, and enough spice to remind me I’m still alive. The afternoon snack is a tall glass of soy milk with a scoop of vegan protein, because the aspirational me is nothing if not consistent.

    Of course, this will never happen.

    My wife and daughters won’t eat this way. Neither, frankly, will I. I’ve known student-athletes who withered into pale husks trying to go vegan. Others have thrived and glowed like enlightened celery sticks. I, on the other hand, turn into a foggy-headed anemic with the energy of a depressed manatee. But the fantasy persists. This vegan version of me—let’s call him “The Better Me”—exists only in the realm of self-mythology, filed away with other fictional selves: The Novelist Who Writes Before Dawn, The Man Who Loves Yoga, and The Guy Who Only Checks His Phone Twice a Day.

    They’re all gathering dust in the mental trophy case labeled Deferred Dreams. To catalogue them all would require another post—and a second pot of coffee.