Tag: writing

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

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

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

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

Splash.

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

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

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

And so the party continued.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Children notice these things.

We notice who gets to laugh.

We notice who becomes the punchline.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What I wanted instead was sensuality.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unfortunately, every revolution contains its contradictions.

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

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

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

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

The waterbed represented an entirely different cosmology.

The spring mattress was Father.

The waterbed was Mother.

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

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

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

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

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

Eventually my parents surrendered to the pressure.

For a brief moment, I believed paradise had arrived.

Then reality arrived.

The first warning sign was the algae.

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

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

Waterbed enthusiasts described this as floating.

In practice it felt more like wrestling a small ocean.

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

The temperature was another ongoing adventure.

The bed was either too cold or too hot.

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

But the unforgivable sin was the leaking.

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

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

My dreams of aquatic enlightenment collapsed.

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

The waterbed was not Mother Ocean.

It was not the Womb.

It was not a portal to higher consciousness.

It was a sea monster.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yet one detail disturbed me.

Everyone looked skinny.

Not healthy skinny. Fragile skinny.

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

Suddenly a terrifying possibility entered my mind.

What if there were no gyms in space?

What if the absence of gravity eliminated weight resistance altogether?

What if there were protein shortages?

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

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

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

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

“If It Feels Good, Do It!”

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

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

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

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

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

This was my problem with life. Nothing stayed put.

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

I longed for permanence.

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

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

I kept thinking about that waterbed.

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

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

Yet even weightlifting failed to provide the permanence I sought.

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

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

And so the search for permanence continued.

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

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