Cinemorphosis

Tag: writing

  • The Garage Door That Aged Me

    The Garage Door That Aged Me

    I miss my old Genie garage door opener and the vanished age of competence it represented. The old Genie operated according to a refreshingly primitive philosophy: electricity goes in, button gets pushed, garage door goes up. It demanded nothing more from its owner than a functioning thumb and a basic understanding of cause and effect. It belonged to a world where machines served human beings rather than requiring human beings to audition for the privilege of operating them.

    The new Genie belongs to a different civilization entirely. It greets you like a twenty-year-old Silicon Valley intern conducting a security clearance. Before the garage door will consent to rise six feet into the air, you must download an app, create an account, verify an email address, enable Bluetooth, grant permissions, update firmware, agree to seventeen pages of terms and conditions, and perhaps burn a small offering before the altar of the Cloud. The old Genie made you feel like the master of a machine. The new Genie makes you feel like a bewildered medieval peasant petitioning an invisible digital bureaucracy. Nothing reminds an aging homeowner of his mortality quite like discovering that the garage door now speaks fluent smartphone while he still speaks fluent button.

    Wanting buttons instead of apps is a sign of misalignment. The older I get, the more I recognize this condition. Misalignment occurs when the world quietly changes languages while you continue speaking the old one. It is one of the defining afflictions of the geriatric class. At sixty-four, I found myself replacing the Genie of Old with the Genie of New, and I required assistance from my wife. This was not a proud moment.

    Together we entered the garage. I watched as she climbed a ladder, removed the white plastic cover from the unit, located the Bluetooth button hidden somewhere in its technological intestines, and synchronized our phones. She programmed the second remote I had purchased from Amazon. She solved every problem that had defeated me. When I thanked her, she responded with the kind of observation only a spouse can deliver: gentle in tone, devastating in effect.

    I was, she explained, exactly like one of her sixth-graders. I had no patience. I wanted the universe to suspend operations until my problems were solved. Unfortunately, the universe had declined my request. New problems kept arriving. New technologies kept appearing. My misalignment with the world kept widening.

    At that moment, I realized I had entered a new phase of life. I was no longer merely impatient. I was becoming dependent. My brain still functioned perfectly well, but it no longer possessed the elasticity it once had. Technology evolved like a city rebuilding itself overnight. I evolved with the speed of continental drift.

    In that moment of horror, my thoughts turned to Moria.

    When you’re old, you must prepare for what I call Morian Drift: the gradual sensation that the world has moved on without you, leaving you to wander through the ruins of once-intuitive systems while younger people navigate effortlessly through technological labyrinths you barely understand.

    Moria was once the magnificent underground kingdom of the dwarves, a city of glittering halls, colossal pillars, and staggering wealth. But the dwarves delved too greedily and too deep. They awakened the Balrog, a primordial demon of shadow and fire, and their civilization collapsed into ruin. By the time the Fellowship arrives, Moria has become a haunted tomb filled with darkness, crumbling bridges, and the lingering memory of greatness.

    That is how aging sometimes feels.

    You find yourself standing on the Bridge of Khazad-dûm, staring at a technological Balrog that younger generations dismiss as a routine software update.

    The Balrog itself is one of Tolkien’s great monsters: a towering demon wrapped in shadow and flame, carrying a fiery whip and trailing a serpentine tail. It embodies chaos, power, and the consequences of pursuing progress without restraint. During the battle, Gandalf confronts the beast upon the bridge. He wins. The bridge shatters. The monster falls.

    Then comes the whip.

    As the Balrog plunges into the abyss, its fiery lash coils around Gandalf’s legs and drags him down into the darkness. The injury is not merely physical. It becomes a life-altering ordeal that carries him through the depths of Moria and up the Endless Stair. The battle ultimately kills him. Victory itself becomes the instrument of his destruction.

    That image stayed with me as I stared at the new Genie opener.

    The garage door was my Balrog.

    Not because it was especially difficult. Not because Bluetooth pairing is inherently terrifying. But because it revealed a truth I had been trying not to notice. My accumulated competence had encountered a new reality and failed. The problem was not the garage door. The problem was the widening gap between myself and the world I inhabited.

    The new Genie delivered what I now call a Balrog Moment: the sudden realization that one’s hard-earned expertise no longer guarantees mastery, forcing a confrontation with aging, obsolescence, and the necessity of reinvention.

    After defeating the Balrog, Gandalf dies. Later he explains his experience in a single haunting sentence:

    “I strayed out of thought and time.”

    That line has haunted me for years because it captures something profound about growing older. You wake up one day and discover that the culture, the technology, and the assumptions that once felt natural have drifted away from you. You have not left the world. The world has left you.

    Fortunately, Gandalf does not remain dead. He returns transformed. The old wizard gives way to a new one. He emerges wiser, stronger, and better suited to the task ahead.

    That is the lesson I took from my garage-door apocalypse.

    The new Genie showed me that I had strayed out of thought and time. But it also showed me that the answer is not surrender. The answer is reinvention. The alternative is permanent residence in Moria, wandering among the ruins while the rest of civilization marches onward without you.

  • The Everyday Vampires Who Feed on Chaos

    The Everyday Vampires Who Feed on Chaos

    Olga Khazan’s article “There’s a Name for the People Who Drain You” examines one of the unavoidable pests of human civilization: the hassler. Hasslers are the emotional pickpockets of everyday life. They drain those around them through relentless criticism, selfishness, bitterness, narcissism, cruelty, cynicism, and, in extreme cases, outright sociopathy. They appear everywhere—in workplaces, families, neighborhoods, and friend groups. No community is immune to them.

    The consequences of prolonged exposure are hardly trivial. To spend years trapped in the orbit of one or more hasslers is to live inside a low-grade psychological emergency. Anxiety rises. Cortisol surges. Depression follows. Autoimmune disorders become more likely. The body keeps score while the hassler keeps talking.

    One of the defining characteristics of the hassler is an appetite for friction. Hasslers are rarely content with peace and stability. They stir the pot, manufacture grievances, incite drama, and transform minor disagreements into theatrical productions. To ordinary people, conflict is exhausting. To the hassler, it is entertainment. The discomfort of others becomes a form of nourishment. Their preferred habitat is chaos because chaos guarantees attention, and attention is the oxygen they breathe.

    Unfortunately, hasslers cannot be avoided entirely. If you belong to a family, workplace, church, club, school, or neighborhood, you will eventually encounter one. They emerge with the reliability of weeds breaking through concrete.

    As I read Khazan’s article, I found myself thinking about the horror film Weapons and its sinister figure, Aunt Gladys. Gladys operates less like a conventional villain than a supernatural parasite. She feeds upon the misery of others with such potency that she seems less human than witch-like. Her power lies not in physical force but in her ability to infiltrate the emotional lives of her victims and convert their suffering into sustenance.

    Viewed through Khazan’s framework, Aunt Gladys may be the ultimate hassler.

    What fascinates me about figures like Gladys is that they often appear strangely hollow. They possess no stable center of their own. They are ciphers, vacuums, nonentities. Because they lack an inner life rich enough to sustain them, they must draw energy from the emotional resources of others. To feed, they must first weaken their prey. They create confusion, vulnerability, self-doubt, and dependency. Only then can they begin extracting what they need.

    In this sense, the hassler resembles a vampire. Not the elegant aristocrat in a velvet cape, but a psychological vampire who feeds not on blood but on attention, anxiety, and emotional exhaustion. The vampire drains the body. The hassler drains the spirit.

    Perhaps this is why hasslers appear so frequently in horror stories. They embody a fear that feels immediately recognizable. Most of us have never encountered a werewolf. Few of us have met a ghost. But nearly everyone has known someone who seemed to feed on conflict, manipulate relationships, and leave every room darker than they found it. Horror films merely give supernatural form to a creature we already know.

    The hassler, then, is not merely a difficult person. The hassler is an archetype. Long before horror movies invented monsters lurking in haunted houses, human beings were already living among people who fed on chaos and misery. The monsters came later. The hasslers came first.

  • How a Zip Code Became a Retirement Plan

    How a Zip Code Became a Retirement Plan

    When my students and I discuss wealth inequality in America, I tell them to stop looking at abstract charts and start looking at real estate. Wealth has many hiding places, but its favorite address is prime property in desirable zip codes. If you want to know who has money, look at who owns the houses everyone else wants but cannot afford.

    Some people inherit these advantages. Others stumble into them through timing. My wife and I are not rich, but in 2002 we purchased a house in Southern California for $450,000 in a neighborhood perpetually described by realtors with the same reverential phrase: “a shortage of inventory.” There are always more buyers than homes. The schools receive high ratings. The tax base is stable. Crime exists, as it does everywhere, but burglaries and auto thefts are footnotes rather than defining features of daily life.

    Over the years, that shortage of inventory became a wealth-generation machine. Today our house could sell for roughly three times what we paid for it. My wife is fifty. I am sixty-four. In about a year, our mortgage will disappear entirely. We did not achieve this outcome through extraordinary brilliance. We happened to buy at a particular moment in history and then stayed put. Age, timing, and geography worked together like silent business partners.

    That reality grants us a degree of financial power that younger generations often do not possess. We are not unusual. Millions of older Americans are sitting atop appreciating assets that have quietly transformed them into members of an accidental property aristocracy.

    The disparity between older and younger Americans has become so pronounced that it may represent the deepest fault line in contemporary American life. This tension forms the backdrop of Joshua Rothman’s essay “Are Americans Too Old?” in which he examines historian Samuel Moyn’s provocative argument that the defining conflict of our era is not between left and right, labor and capital, or urban and rural Americans, but between the young and the old.

    In Gerontocracy in America, Moyn argues that the nation’s character is increasingly shaped not by people in their youth or prime but by those in the final third of life. A less academic translation of the title might simply be: Rule of the Old.

    The demographic trends are difficult to ignore. Americans are having fewer children. People are living longer. The traditional age pyramid is slowly morphing into what Rothman describes as a “top-heavy trapezoid.” In 1920, fewer than five percent of Americans were over sixty-five. By 2060, roughly one-quarter of the population will be.

    Meanwhile, many of the most visible positions of political power remain occupied by people old enough to remember rotary phones, three-network television, and cigarette ads featuring physicians. Younger Americans often feel as though they have been handed a bill for a party they never attended.

    The American Dream once followed a familiar script: go to college, get a job, buy a house, build a family, accumulate wealth. For many Boomers, that script worked remarkably well. To younger generations, however, it can seem as though the ladder was pulled up immediately after the Boomers reached the roof. Young adults today face soaring housing costs, burdensome debt, delayed family formation, and a labor market that often demands far more while offering far less.

    Yet Rothman identifies an irony at the heart of this story. Economically, America increasingly resembles a gerontocracy. Culturally, however, it remains obsessed with youth. The people who hold much of the wealth spend billions attempting not to look old. Every wrinkle is treated as a design flaw. Every gray hair becomes a problem to be solved. We celebrate youthful energy, youthful innovation, youthful disruption, and youthful beauty while entrusting enormous economic and political power to people collecting Social Security.

    The contradiction is almost comic. The nation is governed by senior citizens while being marketed to adolescents.

    Still, Rothman is skeptical of reducing America’s problems to a generational battle. He points to writer Nathan J. Robinson, who argues that Moyn is making a category mistake. The true divide is not primarily between old people and young people. It is between rich people and everyone else.

    Robinson notes that a relatively small slice of older Americans controls a disproportionate share of the nation’s wealth. Most seniors are not oligarchs lounging atop mountains of stock certificates. Wealth is not concentrated among the elderly as a class. It is concentrated among the wealthy as a class.

    That distinction matters.

    The retired schoolteacher living on a modest pension has little in common economically with a billionaire hedge-fund manager, even if both qualify for senior discounts at Denny’s.

    In the end, Rothman lands somewhere between the two positions. He agrees that older generations wield disproportionate political influence and that this imbalance deserves scrutiny. Yet he rejects the idea that America’s future should be framed as a generational war.

    After all, every generation is heading in the same direction. The young become middle-aged. The middle-aged become old. Time drafts all of us into the same army eventually.

    The challenge, then, is not to pit generations against one another but to create a society in which each generation can realistically pursue the promises that define the American Dream: economic security, good health, meaningful work, and a hopeful future.

    Otherwise, the dream becomes something stranger and far less noble—a competition to see who can pull the ladder up fastest.

  • Waterbed Dreams (a short story)

    Waterbed Dreams (a short story)

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

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

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

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

    Splash.

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

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

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

    And so the party continued.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Children notice these things.

    We notice who gets to laugh.

    We notice who becomes the punchline.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    What I wanted instead was sensuality.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Unfortunately, every revolution contains its contradictions.

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

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

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

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

    The waterbed represented an entirely different cosmology.

    The spring mattress was Father.

    The waterbed was Mother.

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

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

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

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

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

    Eventually my parents surrendered to the pressure.

    For a brief moment, I believed paradise had arrived.

    Then reality arrived.

    The first warning sign was the algae.

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

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

    Waterbed enthusiasts described this as floating.

    In practice it felt more like wrestling a small ocean.

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

    The temperature was another ongoing adventure.

    The bed was either too cold or too hot.

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

    But the unforgivable sin was the leaking.

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

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

    My dreams of aquatic enlightenment collapsed.

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

    The waterbed was not Mother Ocean.

    It was not the Womb.

    It was not a portal to higher consciousness.

    It was a sea monster.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Yet one detail disturbed me.

    Everyone looked skinny.

    Not healthy skinny. Fragile skinny.

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

    Suddenly a terrifying possibility entered my mind.

    What if there were no gyms in space?

    What if the absence of gravity eliminated weight resistance altogether?

    What if there were protein shortages?

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

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

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

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

    “If It Feels Good, Do It!”

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

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

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

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

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

    This was my problem with life. Nothing stayed put.

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

    I longed for permanence.

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

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

    I kept thinking about that waterbed.

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

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

    Yet even weightlifting failed to provide the permanence I sought.

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

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

    And so the search for permanence continued.

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

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

  • The Greatness Trap

    The Greatness Trap

    At fourteen, after watching Pumping Iron, I stared at Arnold Schwarzenegger’s physique with the reverence medieval peasants reserved for cathedral stained glass. His muscles seemed less like anatomy than a supernatural event. I concluded, with the confidence available only to teenage boys, that all men should look like Arnold. Failure to do so was a form of degradation. You were not a man so much as a tomato with four toothpicks sticking out of it, wobbling through life in a state of preventable mediocrity.

    The disease did not stop with bodybuilding.

    In college, I encountered Franz Kafka and Vladimir Nabokov. Their prose represented another form of muscularity. Their sentences flexed. Their imaginations performed feats of strength. Later, listening to Sviatoslav Richter play Sergei Rachmaninoff, I experienced the same sensation. Arnold had built impossible muscles. Kafka built impossible stories. Richter built impossible beauty. All of them seemed to occupy a realm beyond the ordinary, and they inspired me to believe that I must do the same.

    Thus I spent much of my life trapped in what I call The Greatness Trap: the belief that happiness, self-respect, and fulfillment can only be earned through exceptional achievement. Under its spell, ordinary life appears not merely insufficient but vaguely shameful. A quiet existence becomes a form of failure. Every accomplishment must lead to a larger accomplishment. Every summit reveals another mountain. Every victory quickly curdles into dissatisfaction.

    Like Arnold, who once spoke of wanting to be remembered thousands of years after his death, I wanted to leave a mark. I wanted my existence to strike the world with such force that its impact could be called Clout Fist: the invisible power exerted by a person, institution, or cultural force that shapes the thoughts and behaviors of others. Without such influence, I feared my life would dissolve into obscurity. If I was not spectacular, what was I?

    This anxiety lies at the heart of Joshua Rothman’s essay, “Why Is It So Hard to Be Ordinary?” Rothman observes that excellence and ordinariness coexist uneasily because modern society relentlessly pressures us toward optimization. We are told to maximize everything: our careers, our bodies, our relationships, our finances, our hobbies, our personal brands. Existence itself becomes a self-improvement project. Unless we leave a mark, we fear we do not count.

    The result is a culture of hype. Everything must be bigger, faster, richer, more influential, more disruptive, and more unforgettable. We become trapped in an endless escalator of status. Climb one rung and another immediately appears above it. Achievement ceases to satisfy because satisfaction would end the game.

    Rothman points to philosopher Avram Alpert, who describes this condition as greatness thinking—the belief that greatness can somehow cure the disappointments and imperfections of life. Yet greatness, by definition, is rare. If everyone could be extraordinary, the word would lose its meaning. The pursuit therefore condemns most people to a perpetual feeling of insufficiency. We become disappointed not because our lives are inadequate but because our expectations are delusional.

    What, then, is the exit sign?

    Alpert’s answer is to abandon the obsession with being spectacular and embrace Aristotle’s concept of arete—the fulfillment of one’s potential. Under this view, the goal is not to transform yourself into someone else. It is to become the best version of the person you already are. You cultivate your moral and rational faculties. You seek integrity rather than applause. You pursue excellence not because you crave admiration but because you wish to live well.

    These ideas animate Alpert’s book The Good-Enough Life, though his argument collides with a long tradition of thinkers who demand more. Immanuel Kant viewed human beings as obligated to develop their capacities as fully as possible. Friedrich Nietzsche urged us to stretch ourselves toward the Übermensch, a higher form of human existence. Compared to these visions, Alpert’s philosophy can sound almost suspiciously modest.

    Yet Rothman points out that the greatness-oriented philosophies of Kant and Nietzsche often collide with our intuition that ordinary life possesses genuine value. What if greatness is not required? What if a life marked by decency, moderation, friendship, competence, and love is enough?

    I suspect the answer lies somewhere between these extremes. We should not surrender our aspirations. Human beings are built to grow, create, test themselves, and pursue excellence. Yet neither should we allow a culture saturated with dopamine, hype, vanity, and status anxiety to convince us that greatness and fame are synonymous. Alpert is correct that being “good enough” is often a worthy goal. But I am not convinced that the choice is binary.

    Perhaps the real challenge is to cherish ordinary life while still striving toward extraordinary achievement. Perhaps we can enjoy a family dinner and write a great novel. Perhaps we can appreciate a quiet walk and pursue ambitious goals. Perhaps we can cultivate arete without becoming addicted to applause.

    In that case, the true enemy is not greatness. The true enemy is the delusion that greatness alone can save us.

  • When Evil Goes Viral

    When Evil Goes Viral

    In “Andrew Tate’s Empire of Abuse,” Heidi Blake examines the disturbing world built by influencer Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan from their base in a wealthy enclave north of Bucharest known as the American Village. What emerges is not merely a pornography business but an entire ideology. According to Blake’s reporting, the Tate brothers are accused of recruiting and exploiting women while simultaneously constructing an online empire designed to sell young men a vision of unrestrained power. Through a private network called the War Room, Tate promises liberation from what he describes as the imprisonment of conventional morality. In its place, he offers a creed of domination in which women become trophies, commodities, or servants to male desire. One woman’s experience illustrates the cruelty of this worldview. After recruiting her, Tate reportedly subjected her to humiliation, financed cosmetic procedures, and had the words “Tate Owned” tattooed on her body, branding another human being as though she were property.

    Tate’s worldview is so grotesque that it often feels less like reality than an abandoned screenplay rejected for lacking subtlety. Hollywood villains are usually granted complexity, vulnerability, or redeeming traits. Tate seems determined to eliminate all such nuances. He openly cultivates the image of a man who views empathy as weakness and domination as virtue. Yet what makes him truly alarming is not the extremity of his beliefs but the enthusiasm with which he markets them. Tate does not hide from accusations of evil. Instead, he recasts himself as a prophet. To his followers, he presents himself as a shepherd leading lost men toward a promised land of wealth, sexual conquest, and absolute freedom from moral restraint.

    The nightmare grows darker when one considers the size of his audience. Tate possesses what our culture increasingly values above wisdom, character, or integrity: clout. He commands a vast social-media following and uses it to promote a lifestyle assembled from luxury watches, cigars, supercars, conspicuous wealth, and an aggressively performative version of masculinity. His genius, if one can call it that, lies in understanding the mechanics of attention. In an age where visibility often substitutes for virtue, influence itself becomes evidence of success. The result is that millions of young men encounter Tate not as a fringe extremist but as a glamorous symbol of aspiration.

    Tate is also intensely political. He boasts of shifting the Overton window, expanding the boundaries of what can be publicly said and tolerated. In his telling, this is a triumph. In reality, it often resembles an effort to normalize ideas that were once regarded as beyond the pale. The objective is not simply to win arguments but to redefine the moral landscape itself, widening the escape hatch through which cruelty, misogyny, and contempt can pass into public life disguised as courage or authenticity.

    When Tate faced arrest on human-trafficking charges, he was defended by a collection of prominent allies and media figures who viewed him as useful to broader political and cultural battles. In a polarized age, alliances are increasingly forged not through shared principles but through shared enemies. The question ceases to be whether a person is decent and becomes whether that person can help advance a cause. Under such conditions, moral judgment is replaced by strategic calculation.

    It has often been said that shamelessness is a superpower. There is truth in that observation. Shame restrains. Conscience hesitates. Moral reflection slows us down. The shameless suffer from none of these inconveniences. They can say anything, excuse anything, and justify anything. But if shamelessness is a superpower, it is one purchased at a tremendous cost. To embrace figures like Tate is to announce that power matters more than virtue and influence more than decency. It is to make one’s bargain with the devil publicly visible.

    What Blake’s article ultimately reveals is not merely the story of Andrew Tate but the story of a culture increasingly intoxicated by clout. In a society obsessed with metrics, followers, engagement, and influence, visibility itself becomes a moral credential. The result is a world in which people who openly celebrate cruelty can become celebrities while those who practice humility and integrity are rewarded with obscurity. Tate thrives because he understands this reality better than most. He has discovered that in the attention economy, notoriety often pays better than goodness. The tragedy is not simply that men like Andrew Tate exist. The tragedy is that so many people have decided he is worth following.

  • The Wellness Club

    The Wellness Club

    Lost in the rhythms of suburban hibernation and nightly true-crime binges inside my bat cave, I had gradually drifted away from my college friends. Like me, they had married, raised children, worried about healthcare costs, and stared nervously at college tuition calculators. What I didn’t know was that they had been gathering every summer for years at a luxury wellness resort on Coronado Island.

    I learned of these reunions from my daughter Maggie, who monitored my friends’ social-media activity with the diligence of an intelligence analyst tracking foreign adversaries. She discovered photographs of them lounging poolside at the Wellness Island Resort and seemed genuinely saddened that I had been excluded.

    The drive from Torrance was only a couple of hours. Somehow Maggie contacted Bart, one of my old college friends, and persuaded him to invite us. My wife Lara and Maggie’s twin sister Alison couldn’t attend because they had dance rehearsals all weekend.

    I didn’t question Maggie’s intervention. Partly because I was touched by her concern for my introverted condition, and partly because Maggie had inherited a taste for luxury that far exceeded her budgetary circumstances. She approached five-star experiences the way medieval knights approached the Holy Grail.

    When I asked about the cost of the resort, she informed me that Bart was placing our expenses on the group’s Action Account, a fund they had apparently maintained for years to finance these annual gatherings.

    This struck me as suspiciously generous.

    I couldn’t shake the feeling that my old friends were attempting to relieve themselves of decades of guilt. Perhaps they had looked at the guest list, noticed my absence, and decided that paying for Maggie and me was cheaper than confronting their consciences.

    The Wellness Island Resort was impressive in the way wellness resorts are always impressive. Everything appeared optimized. The pool gleamed with the artificial perfection of a pharmaceutical advertisement. Guests reclined beneath canopies and gazebos while drinking green smoothies whose ingredients sounded less like food than graduate-level botany. Men and women with improbably low body-fat percentages sipped cucumber water and projected the serene confidence of people who had never eaten a gas-station burrito at midnight. Servers circulated with trays of artisanal sandwich bites containing salmon, tofu, sprouts, and microgreens so delicate they looked as though they might require emotional support animals.

    The entire place smelled faintly of citrus, sunscreen, and self-improvement.

    I assumed Maggie and I would spend the afternoon lounging by the pool.

    Instead, we met Chase Rangeman.

    He materialized beside us moments after we checked in. Tall, angular, and radiating managerial hostility, he wore the expression of a man who regarded joy as a policy violation. His smile looked professionally installed.

    “You two are members of the Wellness Club,” he said.

    “We are?”

    “Of course.”

    “What does that mean?”

    “It means everyone contributes.”

    He proceeded to explain that club members rotated through various duties including mopping floors, serving coffee, preparing food, and performing other tasks one generally does not associate with a ten-thousand-dollar wellness retreat.

    “Where are my friends?” I asked.

    “Out and about,” he replied. “You’ll see them eventually. Meanwhile, you’re on sandwich duty.”

    Maggie looked at me and shrugged.

    “Do you realize how expensive your stay is?” Chase asked as he marched us toward the kitchen.

    “Actually, we’re covered by the Action Account.”

    His eyes narrowed.

    “I’m very aware of the Action Account.”

    He said the phrase the way a district attorney might refer to a criminal syndicate.

    “That doesn’t exempt you from your responsibilities.”

    The kitchen resembled a laboratory dedicated to extending human life by thirty years. Salmon rested on beds of ice like museum pieces. Whole-grain loaves cooled on wooden racks. Homemade organic mayonnaise occupied crystal bowls. Every avocado appeared individually selected by a committee of experts. Microgreens stood at attention in refrigerated displays like tiny green soldiers awaiting inspection.

    Chase surveyed the room with paternal pride.

    “You and your daughter will make sandwiches for the guests.”

    “What kind?”

    “I’ll leave that up to you.”

    Then he glanced at his phone, announced he had an urgent matter requiring his attention, and vanished.

    The responsibility seemed straightforward enough.

    I selected salmon.

    After all, what could possibly go wrong with salmon?

    I mixed it with mayonnaise, celery, onions, shallots, paprika, salt, pepper, and chopped gherkins. I spread the mixture onto tiny squares of whole-grain bread and arranged the sandwiches on polished trays.

    The servers carried them away.

    My work was done.

    Or so I thought.

    An hour later Maggie and I had finally settled into our room overlooking the pool. I had just removed my shoes when the black telephone beside the bed rang.

    It was Chase.

    “You made salmon sandwiches with mayonnaise.”

    His voice sounded as though he were reporting a homicide.

    “Yes.”

    A long silence followed.

    “That’s the one sandwich you don’t make.”

    “You never told me that.”

    “It should have been obvious.”

    “How?”

    “The mayonnaise will curdle in the sun.”

    I considered pointing out that every ingredient at this resort appeared capable of surviving atmospheric reentry, but Chase continued.

    “You’ve exposed us to liability.”

    “What liability?”

    “You’ve committed a violation.”

    He sounded pleased.

    “That violation voids your discount. You now owe the resort nine thousand dollars.”

    Nine thousand dollars.

    For salmon sandwiches.

    I informed Maggie that we were facing financial ruin.

    Moments later there was a knock at the door.

    It was Bart.

    He looked sunburned, exhausted, and mildly irritated by my existence.

    “So,” he said, “you made salmon sandwiches.”

    I explained the situation.

    Bart listened without surprise.

    “Don’t pay anything,” he said. “We’ll cover it.”

    I felt relieved.

    Then he added:

    “But you and your daughter should leave immediately.”

    “Why?”

    “Within an hour Chase will forget you were ever here.”

    He delivered this statement with the calm certainty of a man explaining local weather patterns.

    Maggie and I were packed before Bart reached the elevator.

    As I said goodbye, he regarded me with an expression that suggested twenty years of unresolved grievances.

    Then he left.

    We raced to the parking lot, threw our luggage into the car, and drove back to Torrance.

    That evening I settled into my recliner and resumed watching a true-crime documentary.

    I was back in my bat cave.

    Safe.

    Yet as I thought about my old friends, the annual vacations, the Action Account, Bart’s contempt, and Chase Rangeman’s vendetta, I felt a familiar ache of exclusion.

    Clearly they had not wanted me there.

    Clearly they had spent years gathering without me for a reason.

    Clearly I had become an interloper in my own past.

    Strangely, as these thoughts swirled through my mind, I developed an overwhelming craving for salmon.

  • P-1426

    P-1426

    There are two people inside me. I have known this since childhood while sitting in dentists’ waiting rooms, flipping through dog-eared copies of Highlights for Children and encountering the two boys who seemed to possess custody of my soul: Goofus and Gallant.

    They appeared in countless moral tableaux. The boys faced identical chores, temptations, conflicts, and dilemmas. Goofus was the patron saint of poor decisions—a sniveling malcontent drawn instinctively toward selfishness, slovenliness, dishonesty, and shortcuts. He seemed to regard the human condition as a personal insult. Gallant, by contrast, beamed with the radiant confidence of a child who had never once disappointed a guidance counselor. He was truthful, virtuous, punctual, generous, and relentlessly wholesome. If Goofus represented original sin, Gallant represented a Hallmark card come to life.

    My parents never subscribed to the magazine. I encountered it only in medical waiting rooms during the early 1970s, so for years I assumed Goofus and Gallant belonged exclusively to my own childhood fever dream. Decades later, I discovered that much had been written about them. Julie Beck, writing in The Atlantic, described the comic strip as a kind of Calvinist morality play in which “their essential nature was preordained by a higher power long ago—Goofus forever doomed to be a screwup, Gallant to be a smug little do-gooder.”

    I’m glad I read Beck’s article because it rescued Goofus and Gallant from the fog of my childhood and confirmed that they were not merely figures from some private fever dream. For years they seemed less like characters from a magazine than recurring visitors from a half-remembered mythology that had taken up residence in my imagination.

    I need that kind of verification because I am one of those unfortunate people whose dreams refuse to remain confined to sleep. They leak into waking life. I rise carrying their residue like smoke trapped in my clothes. Long after the dream has ended, I can still sense its lingering odors, feel its unpleasant film coating the day, and endure the emotional aftershocks of its dark allegories. Some dreams fade by breakfast. Mine can haunt me for days, leaving behind a vague but persistent conviction that I have witnessed something both absurd and deeply accusatory.

    In my dreams, however, I am neither Goofus nor Gallant.

    I am Condemned.

    I am not the villain. I am not the hero. I am merely the witness forced to watch his own downfall unfold. My dreams place me on trial, convict me, and then require me to sit through the sentencing.

    Of all the symbolic collapses I could describe, one stands above the others. To understand my predicament, we must travel to the 2002 Los Angeles Tofu Festival.

    There, I encountered a portable toilet.

    The remarkable thing is that I spent no more than five seconds inside it. I never actually used it. Yet those five seconds altered the trajectory of my life.

    The structure stood alone at the edge of the festival grounds like a forgotten monument to human overconfidence. Its blue plastic walls had faded beneath years of relentless California sun into the color of a bruised sky. Scratches, stains, and scars suggested it had survived several natural disasters and perhaps a minor military campaign. The door sagged slightly on its hinges as though exhausted by the burden of existence.

    Near the top was a peeling service sticker bearing its identity:

    ManCo Portable Solutions

    P-1426

    The designation carried the cold authority of a prison number or military serial code. This was not merely a portable toilet.

    This was P-1426.

    The moment I opened the door and felt the blast of hot air strike my face like the breath of an infernal beast, it became clear that certain human experiences were never meant to be endured.

    I will not describe what I saw. I have no wish to relive the trauma.

    Let us simply say that I appeared to witness a squadron of bat-demons conducting an emergency evacuation from the lower circles of hell. The atmosphere possessed the density of a hostile planet. Heat, stench, and oxygen deprivation united into a perfect storm of biological aggression.

    Then I heard it.

    A voice.

    A cry rising from somewhere deep within the abyss.

    “Help me.”

    The words were unmistakable.

    I staggered backward. I uttered a curse in a voice that did not sound like my own. Then I fled before my body could be officially declared a casualty.

    The experience injured me.

    I required convalescence.

    For nearly a year I lived like a Victorian invalid. I drank herbal tea with ceremonial solemnity. I listened to motivational speakers while lying motionless with my eyes closed and my lower lip trembling. Most of all, I read the Book of Psalms in search of reassurance that humanity had survived comparable ordeals.

    King David had his enemies.

    Job had his boils.

    Ahab had his white whale.

    I had P-1426.

    And the plea for help.

    That plea tormented me because Gallant would have answered it.

    Gallant would have descended into the darkness and rescued the lost soul.

    I did what Goofus would do.

    I fled.

    I abandoned the suffering stranger to whatever horrors lurked within the suffocating blue chamber. I crossed the Valley of the Shadow of Death and returned carrying not triumph but shame.

    I was forty years old at the time. I had endured heartbreak, financial anxiety, family crises, and professional disappointments. Yet standing now in my mid-sixties, I can say with complete confidence that the most transformative event of my life occurred inside a portable toilet during a five-second encounter at a tofu festival.

    I have given this trauma a name:

    The Latrine of No Return.

    A Latrine of No Return is a formative experience so grotesque and spiritually destabilizing that it divides existence into two eras: Before the Incident and After the Incident.

    Before the Incident, I possessed innocence. I trusted civilization. I believed progress was real. I assumed humanity had solved certain fundamental problems.

    After the Incident, those illusions were gone.

    The man who approached P-1426 still believed he might someday become Gallant.

    The man who emerged knew better.

    Being a college writing professor, I naturally attempted to intellectualize the matter. Goofus and Gallant sounded far too juvenile for a man of my sophistication. I therefore rebranded the struggle.

    Goofus became Egregious.

    Gallant became Unctuous.

    I hoped a little linguistic flourish might elevate me above my malaise.

    It did not.

    For twenty years I remained haunted by the cry for help.

    Far from fading, it grew louder.

    Year after year, dream after dream, the voice returned.

    Until one night I awoke with a horrifying realization.

    The soul was still there.

    And if redemption was possible, there was only one course of action left.

    I would have to return.

    I would have to locate P-1426, descend into whatever infernal dimension existed within its blue plastic walls, rescue the forgotten prisoner, and emerge from the depths not merely as a survivor, but as a redeemed man.

    At long last, I would have to become Gallant.

    Hidden in my bedroom one evening with a true crime show on in the background, I called the number for ManCo Portable Solutions while my family was watching TV in the living room. I talked to a man by the name of Manny about my desire to examine the inside of P-1426, but omitted the part where I’m trying to rescue a hostage or a survivor or something like that. Manny repeated P-1426 like it was a familiar utterance, a long-standing part of his world. He said I could come visit P-1426 the next morning, but I’d have to be there at seven. He had to go for a medical appointment at nine regarding kidney stones. 

    The next morning, I drove to an industrial district in Los Angeles. The warehouse stretched across the industrial lot like an aircraft hangar devoted to an unusually specific religion. Row after row of portable toilets stood at attention beneath fluorescent lights, their blue plastic walls reflecting a cold industrial glow. Hundreds of them filled the cavernous space in military formation, creating long corridors that disappeared into the distance. The faint scent of disinfectant hung in the air.  Forklifts sat idle in corners like mechanical beasts resting between campaigns.

    At the center of the warehouse, as if occupying the command post of a strange sanitation empire, sat Manny behind a battered metal desk. The desk looked absurdly small amid the vast kingdom of portable toilets surrounding him. On either side stood two of his newest models, gleaming under the overhead lights. Their plastic surfaces were immaculate, their doors perfectly aligned, their ventilation systems polished and modern. They looked less like portable toilets than luxury automobiles unveiled at a trade show. One could easily imagine Manny regarding them with paternal pride.

    Manny himself appeared less pristine than his products. He wore a blue jumpsuit with the company logo embroidered above the breast pocket. The fabric was clean but permanently wrinkled, as if no amount of laundering could erase decades spent in the sanitation business. His dark hair was combed straight back, and a thick, bushy mustache dominated the lower half of his face. Yet it was his eyes that commanded attention. They were sad eyes, ringed with dark bags and carrying the exhausted expression of a man who had spent a lifetime confronting aspects of human existence most people preferred not to acknowledge. Those eyes suggested that Manny knew things. He had witnessed things. Entire chapters of human history.

    He sat quietly behind his desk, surrounded by his gleaming fleet of state-of-the-art portable toilets, looking less like a businessman than the weary curator of one of civilization’s least celebrated institutions. The new models stood around him like luxury sedans at an auto show, their polished plastic surfaces glowing beneath the fluorescent lights. Manny studied me with a look that combined skepticism, friendliness, and the exhaustion of a man who had spent decades confronting aspects of humanity most people preferred not to think about.

    “What brings you to P-one-four-two-six?” he asked. “That’s an old model. I’ve got newer, much better ones.”

    “I had an encounter with P-one-four-two-six,” I said.

    Manny nodded with surprising seriousness.

    “That happens,” he said. “Some people go to Disneyland. Some people go inside a portable toilet and come out with a story they tell for the rest of their lives.”

    He squinted at me for a moment.

    “You have claustrophobia, don’t you?”

    I nodded.

    “I knew it.” He pointed toward one of the newer units. “Forget P-one-four-two-six. Go with the new Q Series. Far more spacious. Better ventilation. Interior comfort package. Practically a studio apartment compared to those old units. The luxury, my friend. Oh boy.”

    His enthusiasm failed to reassure me.

    “Is everything okay with P-one-four-two-six?” I asked. “Have you inspected it?”

    “Of course.” He nodded. “Clean as a whistle. As good as the day it rolled out of the factory.”

    Then, without warning, his face tightened. He grabbed his side and bent forward.

    “Kidney stones,” he muttered.

    The words came out like a confession.

    I asked him how he got them.

    Manny leaned back in his chair and stared toward the warehouse ceiling.

    “Spinach,” he said bitterly.

    “Spinach?”

    “Spinach. Kale. Spirulina. Green smoothies. The whole wellness cult.”

    He shook his head.

    “My wife got cancer. No insurance. One of the doctors who treated her wouldn’t accept payment plans. Sixty thousand dollars. Maybe more. I paid it. Every penny. I emptied accounts. Took loans. Did whatever I had to do.”

    His voice softened.

    “She got better.”

    He paused.

    “Then she left.”

    The fluorescent lights hummed above us.

    “After that, I figured maybe I should improve myself. Lose weight. Become one of those optimized people you read about. Every morning I drank a blender full of spinach, kale, and enough oxalates to pave a highway.”

    He laughed darkly.

    “Turns out I didn’t become healthy. I became geological.”

    At that moment another wave of pain hit him.

    He clutched his side and let out a cry.

    The sound froze my blood.

    I had heard that cry before.

    Not in this warehouse.

    Not in this city.

    Not even in this decade.

    I had heard it twenty years earlier.

    Inside P-one-four-two-six.

    The same desperate pitch. The same wounded note. The same plea rising from some place of suffering and abandonment.

    My pulse quickened.

    The years collapsed.

    The dream.

    The guilt.

    The voice begging for help.

    It had never come from the portable toilet.

    It had come from Manny.

    Manny was the lost soul.

    The realization struck with the force of divine revelation. For twenty years I had imagined descending into an infernal portable toilet to rescue a stranger trapped in darkness. The entire quest had been wrong. The soul I was searching for had been sitting in front of me all along, wearing a blue jumpsuit and suffering from kidney stones, heartbreak, and the accumulated disappointments of a hard life.

    At that moment I understood my purpose.

    I had not returned to find P-one-four-two-six.

    I had returned to find Manny.

    Manny and I became friends after that.

    At first we met for coffee. Then we played racquetball. Soon we were taking kettlebell classes and struggling through power yoga sessions together, two middle-aged men attempting to negotiate peace treaties with joints that had long ago declared independence. We launched a YouTube channel devoted to men over fifty dealing with loneliness, depression, regret, and the peculiar sensation of realizing that life had quietly become shorter than the road already traveled. We hosted livestreams for men who felt discarded by modern life. We exchanged our recurring nightmares like war veterans comparing old battle scars.

    Most of all, I listened.

    Manny possessed a gift.

    For thirty years he had delivered portable toilets to concerts, festivals, political rallies, county fairs, marathons, and public gatherings of every conceivable variety. In doing so, he had become an accidental anthropologist of human desperation. He had witnessed people lose their minds while waiting in restroom lines. He had watched drunken concertgoers engage in territorial disputes over portable toilets with the strategic intensity of military commanders defending a contested border. He had seen people vandalize his property, attempt athletic feats that defied both physics and common sense, and occasionally injure themselves in ways that seemed to require active imagination.

    Each story was more absurd than the last.

    A man who tried to crowd-surf into a portable toilet.

    A wedding guest who locked himself inside one to avoid dancing.

    A festival attendee who attempted to tip a unit over and succeeded only in tipping himself into a cactus.

    Manny told these stories with the solemn authority of a man delivering ancient wisdom.

    Before long, people couldn’t get enough of him.

    The channel grew.

    The livestream audience expanded.

    Viewers tuned in from around the country to hear Manny explain how portable toilets occupied a strange intersection between civilization and chaos. He could discuss sanitation logistics with the seriousness of a philosopher while describing a music festival toilet emergency with the pacing of a Hollywood action film. He somehow made human waste, loneliness, redemption, and rock concerts feel like chapters from the same grand narrative.

    People adored him.

    I watched as Manny became a minor celebrity.

    His stories were clipped and shared online. Viewers quoted him. Fans approached him after events. Some even asked for selfies with the man who had transformed portable sanitation into a lens for understanding the human condition.

    And I found that I didn’t mind.

    In fact, I was proud.

    For once, I did not feel the need to compete for attention, to claim authorship, or to stand at center stage. I stepped aside and watched Manny flourish. The spotlight suited him. The lonely man who had once sat in a warehouse surrounded by portable toilets now had an audience hanging on every word.

    My wife noticed the change.

    One evening she looked at me and smiled.

    “You know,” she said, “this might be the nicest thing you’ve ever done.”

    I knew what she meant.

    For decades I had worried about obscurity. I had measured myself against impossible standards and imagined success as some distant mountain peak crowned with applause, recognition, and glory. Yet here I was, helping another person find his voice and discovering that the experience brought a deeper satisfaction than any personal acclaim I had ever chased.

    Only then did I understand what had happened.

    I had spent twenty years searching for the lost soul trapped inside P-1426.

    I thought I was rescuing Manny.

    The truth was that Manny had rescued me.

    And in surrendering the spotlight, in helping another person become fully himself without demanding credit or recognition, I had finally achieved the impossible.

    After all these years, I had become Gallant.

  • The Death of the Sacred Bond Between Writer and Reader

    The Death of the Sacred Bond Between Writer and Reader

    Fiction instructor Walt Hunt’s essay “The Death of the Reader” begins with a development that would have sounded absurd only a few years ago: an AI-assisted short story winning a major literary prize. The winning story, Jamir Nazir’s “The Serpent in the Grove,” took home the Granta Commonwealth Short Story Prize, prompting the now-familiar debate about authenticity. Was the story really written by a human? How much AI was involved? Can anyone tell the difference anymore? Hunt acknowledges that AI-generated prose often leaves fingerprints—certain stylistic tics, tonal smoothness, and suspiciously frictionless sentences that alert attentive readers. But he argues that critics are fixated on the wrong problem. The true casualty of AI fiction is not the writer. It is the reader.

    Before the arrival of AI-generated literature, reading rested on a fragile but meaningful act of trust. A reader entered a private room where another consciousness was waiting. Across centuries, continents, and cultures, readers formed intimate relationships with authors they would never meet. The writer offered a distinctive voice, a recognizable sensibility, a particular way of seeing the world. Sometimes the writer was a provocateur. Sometimes a companion. Sometimes a guide carrying a lantern through the darker corridors of human experience. Whatever form the relationship took, readers believed there was another person on the other side of the page.

    Now there is Claude.

    Claude is not a novelist struggling with heartbreak, obsession, grief, jealousy, or longing. Claude has never stared at a hospital ceiling at three in the morning. Claude has never fallen in love, buried a parent, betrayed a friend, or sat alone with regret. Claude is not a presence. It is a process. And because readers know this, a corrosive uncertainty enters the reading experience.

    What am I reading?

    Who wrote this?

    Did anyone write this?

    Does it matter?

    The machine turns every page into a cross-examination.

    Hunt argues that this uncertainty damages the reader more profoundly than it damages the author. The old covenant between writer and reader begins to dissolve. In its place emerges suspicion. Instead of surrendering to a voice, readers interrogate it. Instead of entering solitude, they become detectives hunting for evidence of fraud. Every elegant sentence becomes a potential counterfeit. Every emotional insight becomes grounds for skepticism.

    As Hunt observes, readers increasingly adopt a style of reading that is “self-conscious, hyperaware, restless, and anxiety-driven.” The reading experience becomes less like entering a cathedral and more like passing through airport security. We no longer relax into the rhythm of a trusted voice. We remain on guard, scanning for contraband signs of machine authorship.

    This defensive posture may prove fatal to the deepest pleasures of literature. Great reading requires vulnerability. It requires a willingness to let another mind rearrange your own. It requires trust. If every text becomes a potential deception, then reading loses its sense of encounter and becomes an exercise in verification. The reader ceases to ask, “What is this work trying to tell me?” and begins asking, “Who—or what—wrote this?”

    That shift may be the most consequential literary event of the AI age. The danger is not merely that machines will write books. The danger is that they will transform readers into skeptics incapable of the very surrender that literature requires. Long after the arguments about authorship fade, the deeper loss may remain: the disappearance of the sacred bond between a solitary reader and a solitary voice.

  • Who Controls the Story Controls the People (college essay prompt)

    Who Controls the Story Controls the People (college essay prompt)

    The documentary We Beat the Dream Team suggests that history is not merely a collection of facts but a contest over narrative power. The film explores how individuals and groups compete to shape public memory, define legitimacy, claim symbolic victory, and control the stories that future generations will remember. Although the documentary focuses on sports, it demonstrates that struggles over narrative ownership extend far beyond athletics into race, education, art, film, and cultural identity.

    Using this idea as your conceptual framework, write a 1,200-word argumentative essay comparing two of the following works:

    • Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass
    • “Learning in the Shadow of Race and Class” by bell hooks
    • Summer of Soul directed by Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson
    • Is That Black Enough for You?!? directed by Elvis Mitchell

    In your essay, analyze the claim that controlling narrative, memory, and representation is one of the most powerful ways dominant groups maintain authority and one of the most important ways marginalized groups resist erasure.

    As you develop your argument, examine how the works portray struggles over literacy, education, historical memory, cultural visibility, artistic representation, and identity. How do powerful institutions shape public understanding of reality? How do marginalized individuals and communities reclaim the right to tell their own stories? To what extent do autobiography, education, music, film, and art function as tools of resistance against cultural invisibility?

    You should also analyze the rhetorical and artistic methods used by the creators. Consider how autobiography, storytelling, archival footage, music, imagery, editing, voice, and narrative structure influence audience perception and challenge dominant narratives.

    As part of your essay, address at least one counterargument. For example, some critics may argue that representation and cultural visibility are insufficient forms of resistance because they do not necessarily produce economic equality, political power, or institutional change. Others may argue that dominant cultures eventually absorb and commodify resistance movements, transforming them into marketable products. Evaluate these criticisms and explain the strengths and limitations of cultural expression as a form of resistance.

    As you conclude, consider the broader implications of narrative control. Why do individuals, institutions, and societies fight so fiercely over memory, legitimacy, and representation? What happens when people lose the ability to preserve and narrate their own histories? Finally, consider how social media, AI, and algorithm-driven platforms continue to shape who gets to tell the story and whose stories are forgotten.

    Requirements:

    • 1,200 words minimum
    • MLA format
    • Compare two of the four works
    • Include a clear thesis with mapping components
    • Include at least one counterargument and rebuttal
    • Analyze specific scenes, passages, or examples rather than merely summarizing
    • Develop a focused argument about narrative ownership, cultural memory, identity, and power