Cinemorphosis

Tag: writing

  • David Letterman Killed Disco, But Can He Save My Class?

    David Letterman Killed Disco, But Can He Save My Class?

    In one fell swoop, David Letterman killed disco. Not just the music, but the entire polyester empire of rhinestone smarm and sweat-drenched earnestness. Letterman wasn’t seduced by mirror balls. He walked on stage with his arctic deadpan, and with irony as his weapon, executed disco in front of a live studio audience.

    I was just starting college then—a lifelong bodybuilder and Olympic weightlifter who could hoist a barbell but couldn’t hoist a personality. Muscles, yes. Presence, no.

    I didn’t just want to be David Letterman. I wanted to graft his sardonic detachment onto the icy brilliance of Vladimir Nabokov—a cocktail of late-night sarcasm and literary menace. I didn’t know what I wanted to be, exactly, only that it had to involve confidence, storytelling, performance—something that allowed me to “give a presentation.”

    By accident, I stumbled into teaching. In 1987, the chancellor of Humanities at Merritt College launched a pilot program to deliver classes at Skyline High School in Oakland, and none of the full-time faculty wanted the job. My neighbor, Felix Elizalde, whose kids went to school with me, threw me a lifeline. One gig snowballed into another, and soon I was a full-time college writing instructor.

    That was thirty-eight years ago. For most of them, I would have told you the hardest part of the job was grading essays—an endless swamp of half-baked theses and misplaced commas. But now, in 2025, grading essays is only the second hardest task. The first? Something educators and administrators alike love to call “student engagement.”

    I don’t know if it’s the black hole of smartphones or the simple math of age—I’m nearly forty-five years older than my students. Probably both. Either way, I can no longer stand in front of a classroom, channel my inner Letterman, and spin stories until the room vibrates with attention. Instead, I stand beside a giant screen plastered with Google Slides. My students are “visual learners,” raised on swipes and emojis.

    I could go back to the Letterman Method, earn some laughs, maybe even spike engagement for a few minutes. But at what cost? The Google Slides aren’t as funny as my comedy routine, but they do hit the sacred “core concepts” and “Student Learning Outcomes.”

    I’ve become a ghost haunting the pedagogy manuals. Occasionally I slip, crack a joke, earn some chuckles, channel my younger self—but then I reel myself back in, because the templates for counterarguments and rebuttals won’t teach themselves.

    The students aren’t fooled. A few of the candid ones smirk: “Don’t worry, McMahon, ChatGPT will do it for us.”

    And so, as I enter my mid-sixties, I keep trying to stay aligned with the modern world. Yet every step forward feels like five steps backward, as if I’m not teaching writing anymore but rehearsing my own obsolescence.

  • Speedos at Sunset

    Speedos at Sunset

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

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

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

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

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

    To my fellow older men: sculpt your body like it’s your spiritual obligation—but when it comes to swim briefs the size of a hotel mint, maybe opt out. Not every part of youth is worth reliving. 

    When I think of old guys clinging to their youth by wearing undersized swim trunks, I often think back to the summer of 2019 when my wife and twin daughters were in Maui and I was treated to one of life’s great grotesques: a compact man in his mid-seventies parading the beach in dark-blue Speedos with a woman young enough to be his granddaughter. She was Mediterranean gorgeous, twenty-something, and clearly imported as the ultimate accessory. He was trim, shaved, strutting across the sand like a hedge-fund satyr who believed that constant motion kept the Grim Reaper wheezing in his wake. He dove into the surf not like a man swimming, but like a man negotiating—bargaining with Time.

    You could smell his wealth before you could smell the salt air. A CEO, no doubt—half his life in boardrooms, the other half clawing at immortality. His creed was Hefner’s: work hard, play harder, and Botox anything that betrays the passage of time. I’m not here to moralize about his May-December arrangement. What fascinated me was the fantasy: money, discipline, and a bit of manscaping as talismans against entropy, as if youth could be distilled into a cologne.

    But the tableau reeked of mismatch—two puzzle pieces jammed together with superglue. Forced smiles, awkward touches: every moment chipped another sliver from the illusion until they looked less like lovers and more like hostages. This was not youth preserved; this was youth taxidermied. His confidence read as terror. His curated life, meant to inspire envy, collapsed into a sad performance—a tuxedo on a traffic cone.

    He reminded me of Joe Ferraro from Netflix’s Mafia: Most Wanted: born in Ecuador in ’62, raised in Toronto, obsessed with bodybuilding, crime, and women. He had it all—the Rolex Daytona, gold chains, sunglasses so huge they had their own weather system. Then came prison and deportation. Now in his sixties, Ferraro is a sculpted parody: sport coat draped like a cape, tight black jeans, hipster boots, eyes full of melancholy. He wants his life back, but he knows the casino is closed. Like the Speedo satyr, Ferraro can’t stop looking back, calcifying into a monument of salt.

    And salt is the right metaphor: Lot’s wife glancing back until she froze mid-regret. Neither Ferraro nor Speedo Man could let go of their “youth identities.” Without them, death feels too close. With them, they look embalmed while still breathing.

    I understand how hard it is to let go of the life you think you deserve. Spend a week in Hawaii, and you step into a parallel universe—Sacred Time. You board a $400-million jet, dehydrate for five hours, and land convinced you’re immortal. Within 24 hours you’re marinating in mai tais, demolishing lilikoi pies, and basking under sunsets scripted by God to flatter your ego. Clocks stop. Deadlines vanish. Sacred Time whispers: Death can’t find you here.

    Which is why leaving Hawaii feels like a cosmic eviction notice. You board the plane and return not just to California but to Profane Time, where bills, emails, and mortality resume their tyranny. For weeks after, you’re sun-drunk and disoriented, still hearing waves in your ears while the neighbor’s leaf blower revs like a dentist drill. Sacred Time is an opiate; reentry is cold turkey.

    Nostalgia is the next fix. For me, it’s the summer of 1977 at Don Castro Swim Lagoon. I was fifteen—half-boy, half-bicep—sunbathing like a pagan sacrifice to the gods of narcissism, The Happy Hooker hidden in my gym bag, my skin baptized in banana-scented cocoa butter. That lagoon was my Eden: the girls in bikinis, the musk of suntan oil, the hormone haze of adolescence. That era hardwired me to believe pleasure was a birthright.

    But nostalgia curdles. Today I’m older, paler, a few Adonis fragments left in the rearview. What once felt like a creed now feels like a rerun of Fantasy Island with bad lighting. The boy in me still demands his sunlit altar, but now he feels like a squatter. Am I still bronzing in Eden—or am I frozen in salt, looking back too long at a self that no longer exists?

    Enter the “Return to the Womb.” Aging produces this primal regression: a desire not just for beaches, but for obliteration of responsibility. For me, it smells like Florida—the state of my birth, equal parts Eden and punchline. Mango air, coconut breezes, sultry rain: a fetal simulation with Wi-Fi. But even I know it’s not vitality; it’s paralysis. It’s not Life Force—it’s brain rot in Tommy Bahama.

    During lockdown, I tasted this desire to return to the womb. Pajamas at noon, Zillow scrolling barrier islands, buckwheat groats as immortality. My body synced with the rhythm of a hot tub. I didn’t want to emerge. I still don’t. Which terrifies me—because Father Time is no cuddly mascot. He’s a cosmic accountant, and he wants receipts. What did you do with your time?

    Meanwhile, I’m bicep-curling nostalgia like it’s protein powder. For five years, I hounded my wife about Florida. She countered with Some Kind of Heaven, the documentary about The Villages. Watching geriatric Parrotheads do water ballet to Neil Sedaka was enough to kill the fantasy. It wasn’t Eden—it was a gulag of shuffleboard and scheduled fun. Leisure not as freedom, but as occupation.

    The film’s standout was Dennis Dean, an octogenarian grifter prowling bingo halls for rich widows. Watching him lie catatonic under a ceiling fan after another failed con, I realized my wife had played me like a Stradivarius. My Florida obsession died in that moment.

    So now I’ve scaled back. No more eternal-Adonis-in-the-tropics delusions. No Speedos. Just a week vacation in Maui or Miami, then back to Profane Time with my Costco protein powder and kettlebells. Still chasing immortality—but with at least a fig leaf of self-awareness.

  • His Last Words: “Too Much Trouble”

    His Last Words: “Too Much Trouble”

    No one wants the following carved into their headstone:
    “He really liked convenience.”
    Or:
    “He really knew how to wind down after a long day.”
    Or the ultimate in mediocrity:
    “He was quite the expert at calmly not answering the door when strangers knocked.”

    Yet I can’t lie—those epitaphs could summarize me with cruel efficiency. I should be ashamed. If the highlight reel of my life is craving convenience and dodging conflict, then I’m a sloth, a coward, and a comfort-zone junkie. Guilty as charged.

    Of course, apologists for my particular brand of laziness will insist there’s wisdom in centering life on convenience: you save time, conserve resources, and maximize efficiency. But let’s not kid ourselves. “Optimization” is just a euphemism for avoiding reality. And then come the even shinier euphemisms: “life hacks.” If all you’ve done is engineer a way to dodge effort, that’s not a hack—it’s a confession.

    Not that every convenience is unworthy. I won’t step foot in a gym: too expensive, too crowded, too germy, and far too drenched in bad pop music. I prefer my garage—cheap iron, good podcasts, and zero chance of catching COVID off the lat pulldown machine. That’s not clever; it’s survival.

    Same with my diet: when I’m home alone, dinner is steel-cut oats or buckwheat groats with protein powder and soy milk. It’s not innovation; it’s five minutes of apathy in a bowl. To call it a “hack” would be grandiose.

    The pandemic hardened this streak. Three-fourths of my classes went online in 2020, and they’ve never returned to campus. Everything lives on Canvas now. I barely drive 3,000 miles a year. Efficiency became narcotic. Once you’ve tasted it, going back to inefficiency feels like shoving rocks in your shoes for nostalgia’s sake.

    Even my piano habit has become infected. Cecil, my seventy-eight-year-old tuner, has warned me: when he’s gone, so is my piano’s soul. Skilled tuners are rare. My solution? Buy an electric keyboard. Sure, the sound won’t have the magical sound of my acoustic Yamaha, but it’ll move easily from room to room and never need Cecil. Convenience conquers music too.

    I’m also a poor excuse for a parent in the Uber era. Driving my teen daughters to football games, birthday parties, and amusement parks feels like sacrilege to my convenience creed. Honestly, if I were truly committed to convenience, I never would’ve had children. Or cats. Litter boxes, flea treatments, vet visits—each one an affront to my principles of time-saving and efficiency.

    Convenience can metastasize into pathology. Violations of my “policies” breed resentment. Aging itself infuriates me because it’s inconvenient. Doctor appointments and funerals snarl my schedule. Death doesn’t just terrify; it inconveniences.

    Routine is the bride to the groom of convenience, and together they dominate. 

    Even my relationship to religion is seen through the lens of convenience. I wish I could slam the door on doubt and join the ranks of militant atheists—or zealous believers. Either extreme would be neat, clean, convenient. Instead, I’m stuck in agnostic purgatory, forced to read philosopher Elizabeth Anderson’s critiques of scripture, Saint Paul, and every thinker in between. Anderson reduces morality to evolution; Paul calls us fractured, fallen souls, a mirror I dislike but recognize. I want a bow on the present of certainty, but instead, I get the knot of doubt.

    Jesus, of course, preached a gospel of uncompromising inconvenience. His very life was a rebuke to comfort. Following him means picking up a cross, not a La-Z-Boy. For disciples of the gospel of ease, his way is impossible—requiring nothing less than a Damascus-level conversion to set a new course.

    When I think of convenience, I think of Chris Grossman, my co-worker at a Berkeley wine shop in the 1980s. He was the store’s golden boy—popular with customers, armed with quick wit and easy charm—and utterly allergic to human entanglements. Girlfriends, he explained, weren’t worth the trouble. Not because of their flaws, but because the whole enterprise of romance reeked of inconvenience: compromise, obligation, scheduling. He lived alone, ate the same meals on repeat, and once a year drove his Triumph to Carmel for a car show. I adored him. He was my kind: a fellow monk in the Church of Convenience.

    Some of us are more diseased than others, and the infection corrodes standards. I loathe factory farming, dream of veganism, but recoil at the social cost. Every vegan I’ve spoken with admits the hardest part isn’t the kale; it’s the cold shoulder. I already wear the family badge of black sheep. If I imposed tofu bakes on my wife and daughters, I’d be ostracized. They want meat; I want peace. When I mention plant-based dinners, they shoot me a side-eye sharp enough to slice seitan. Push it further, and I can see my tenuous connection with them unravel thread by thread until exile is complete. And clawing my way back into their good graces would be the most inconvenient penance imaginable.

    I’m already a neurotic who alienates people more often than I’d like. Rebuilding broken ties is grueling work—humiliating, exhausting, inconvenient. So I stay walled up in my fortress of convenience, half-proud, half-ashamed, imagining my epitaph chiseled in granite: He preferred the easy way.

  • Out of Alignment

    Out of Alignment

    The following is an expansion from yesterday’s short post about old age into a full-blown chapter:

    No one warned me, but I should have seen it coming: creeping toward your mid-sixties is less a rite of passage than a crisis of competence. Or, to be precise, it’s a progressive misalignment with the modern world. You drop references to Danish Go-Rounds, Screaming Yellow Zonkers, Tooter Turtle, Super Chicken, and All in the Family and watch blank faces stare back at you. You still assume that appliances are built with the sturdiness of yesteryear, only to find that today’s models disintegrate if you breathe on them sideways. This misalignment breeds a special kind of incompetence—egregious, preventable, humiliating.

    You can swallow vats of triglyceride omega-3 fish oil, but the short-term memory still slips away without mercy. You forget where you parked your socks (on the couch), that you meant to watch the final episode of that crime docuseries on Netflix, that a Costco-sized case of 12-gallon trash bags lurks in the garage, or that you already ground tomorrow’s coffee beans. The indignities pile up like unopened mail.

    These lapses, coupled with your fossilized references to extinct foods and beloved TV shows, render you a creature out of phase with the universe—an alien with wrinkles, blinking in confusion, flashing your unearned senior discount at the box office like it’s a badge of relevance.

    You can flex all you want against this verdict. Wolf down 200 grams of protein daily, clang kettlebells in the garage, and polish yourself into the semblance of a beaming bodybuilder who could pass for forty-four instead of sixty-four. But that delusion ends the second you get behind the wheel at night. Your depth perception is a cruel joke. The glare of headlights and streetlamps slices into your worn irises like laser beams, reminding you that biology—not discipline—is running the show.

    Like it or not, you’re aging in real time, a public spectacle of decline, the unwelcome prophet of mortality who shatters the younger generation’s illusion that time is indefinite. To them, you are as pleasant a presence as a neighbor’s dog barking at a squirrel at six a.m.—loud, unnecessary, and impossible to ignore.

    Congratulations–you’ve become the world’s unwanted alarm clock.

    My sense of misalignment with the world—along with the creeping incompetence that tags along with it—hit me square in the jaw in late September 2025, one month shy of my sixty-fourth birthday.

    It happened on a Saturday evening. My wife, a spring chicken at fifty, had night-driving duty, which now includes chauffeuring our teen daughters to and from Knott’s Berry Farm at closing time. She can handle glare and depth perception; my irises, however, are shot, so I stay home.

    Before leaving, she reminded me she’d be back in ninety minutes with not only our daughters but two of their friends, who would pile into the living room for a horror movie called Weapons. My task was humble: BLTs for the horde. She had assembled the sourdough, bibb lettuce, mayonnaise, and beefsteak tomatoes. All I had to do was bake two packages of turkey bacon. I asked when to start. She told me: cook it at five, eat my dinner alone, and she’d prep sandwiches for herself and the kids when they returned. And, since the girls had dibs on the living room, she and I would retreat to the bedroom to watch TV.

    So I dutifully cooked the bacon (in one tray, but we’ll get to that), made myself a sandwich, and felt ridiculously proud. I had suggested adding BLTs to our dinner rotation and here was proof that my idea, embraced by my family, tethered me—however briefly—into alignment with them.

    I capped off the meal with apple slices and mission figs, then decided to test the three-year-old Samsung QLED in our bedroom, which hadn’t been turned on since I’d moved it from the living room. That spot had been usurped by our new LG OLED. The LG was fine, except its remote summoned a ghastly leaf cursor on-screen, forcing you to point and shoot instead of just pressing buttons. A tremor in the hand and you’d select the wrong thing. Still, we had it tuned to Cinema Mode to dodge the dreaded “soap opera effect,” and the LG performed well enough.

    Around six p.m., I plopped on the bed and powered up the Samsung. To my horror, half the screen was draped in black vertical lines, like a digital funeral shroud. The likely culprit? My solo clean-and-jerk onto the dresser—an Olympic lift without chalk, belt, or applause. The impact probably fractured internal circuits invisible to the eye. Or perhaps a ribbon cable had shaken loose from the T-Con board, the kind of thing you might fix if you were comfortable performing micro-surgery with tweezers. I am not. That Samsung was marched to my office and exiled to the growing eWaste Waiting Area, a mausoleum for electronics that had lost their duel with me.

    But I was not done failing. I headed to my daughter’s room for Samsung Number Two—a two-year-old set I’d given her after last week’s reshuffling. The plan: reclaim the Samsung, and saddle her with the eleven-year-old 43-inch LG, which weighs twice as much as the supposedly bigger Samsungs.

    Hubris, however, is a loyal companion. Samsung Number Two sat high on her dresser. I approached like a gorilla in a hurry, arms eagle-spread. My right thumb betrayed me: it pressed into the panel with a sickening crackle, leaving a dent in the digital flesh. In a fit of magical thinking, I told myself, “It probably bounced back.” Reality arrived the moment I powered it on: fresh black lines glared from the wound, precisely where my Hulk thumb had struck.

    Two lessons seared themselves into my brain in those five minutes. First: modern TVs are absurdly fragile, delicate to the point of parody compared to their beefy ancestors. Second: I am unspeakably stupid.

    When my wife came home, the girls claimed the living room. She inspected the bacon and recoiled. “You didn’t spread it out,” she scolded. “You piled it on one tray. You should have used two.”

    “But two trays don’t fit in the toaster oven,” I countered.

    “Use the big oven.”

    “The bacon was fine,” I insisted, noting how transcendent my sandwich had been. She remained unmoved, cooked another batch herself, and then I broke the news about the TVs. She immediately texted her friends, who replied with the rolling-eye emoji. She rarely shares the emojis her friends lob back at my antics, but even she couldn’t suppress this one.

    The next morning, I texted my engineering friend Pedro, who invited me to lug the broken Samsungs to his place. He loaded them into his car and promised to take them to his jobsite’s eWaste disposal. That act of disappearance soothed my wife. For closure, I bought a $300 Roku TV for the bedroom. This time, no clean-and-jerks—just white velvet gloves.

    And no grunting.

    But the adjustments keep coming. I’ve learned not to talk too loudly in the morning while the twins sleep. I remember to rest my thumb on the bathroom lock so the door doesn’t fire off a pistol-crack at 2 a.m. during a bladder run.

    Still, no matter how many tweaks I make, I feel perpetually out of alignment. I am an old car with bald tires: once-grippy treads worn down to slick rubber, skidding across every patch of life. Just as a car with crooked alignment wobbles down the road, tugging against the driver’s will, so too does an old soul with fading memory and fossilized references lurch out of sync with the modern world. Both make unsettling noises, both grind themselves into uneven wear, and both provoke the same grim thought in bystanders: maybe it’s time for a realignment—or at least a new set of wheels.

  • The World’s Unwanted Alarm Clock

    The World’s Unwanted Alarm Clock

    No one warned me, but I should have seen it coming: creeping toward your mid-sixties is less a rite of passage than a crisis of competence. Or, to be precise, it’s a progressive misalignment with the modern world. You drop references to Danish Go-Rounds, Screaming Yellow Zonkers, Tooter Turtle, and All in the Family and watch blank faces stare back at you. You still assume that appliances are built with the sturdiness of yesteryear, only to find that today’s models disintegrate if you breathe on them sideways. This misalignment breeds a special kind of incompetence—egregious, preventable, humiliating.

    You can swallow vats of triglyceride omega-3 fish oil, but the short-term memory still slips away without mercy. You forget where you parked your socks (on the couch), that you meant to watch the final episode of that crime docuseries on Netflix, that a Costco-sized case of 12-gallon trash bags lurks in the garage, or that you already ground tomorrow’s coffee beans. The indignities pile up like unopened mail.

    These lapses, coupled with your fossilized references to extinct foods and beloved TV shows, render you a creature out of phase with the universe—an alien with wrinkles, blinking in confusion, flashing your unearned senior discount at the box office like it’s a badge of relevance.

    You can flex all you want against this verdict. Wolf down 200 grams of protein daily, clang kettlebells in the garage, and polish yourself into the semblance of a beaming bodybuilder who could pass for forty-four instead of sixty-four. But that delusion ends the second you get behind the wheel at night. Your depth perception is a cruel joke. The glare of headlights and streetlamps slices into your worn irises like laser beams, reminding you that biology—not discipline—is running the show.

    Like it or not, you’re aging in real time, a public spectacle of decline, the unwelcome prophet of mortality who shatters the younger generation’s illusion that time is indefinite. To them, you are as pleasant a presence as a neighbor’s dog barking at a squirrel at six a.m.—loud, unnecessary, and impossible to ignore.

    Congratulations–you’ve become the world’s unwanted alarm clock. 

  • Death by Clean-and-Jerk: a TV Tragedy

    Death by Clean-and-Jerk: a TV Tragedy

    In the span of five minutes yesterday, I managed to destroy not one but two Samsung QLED smart TVs, each a 55-inch, three-year-old, $700 reminder of my own idiocy.

    Samsung Number One had been sulking in the bedroom, untouched for a week. I had banished it there after splurging on a $1,500 LG OLED for the living room. Last night I flicked it on and found half the screen swallowed in black vertical lines, like a funeral shroud. The culprit? Most likely my own heroic attempt to hoist it solo onto a dresser—an Olympic clean-and-jerk without the chalk or the applause. The impact probably jarred the LCD panel, cracking delicate circuits invisible to the eye but fatal to the image. Maybe a ribbon cable came loose from the T-Con board, which can sometimes be reseated if you’re the kind of person who enjoys performing surgery with tweezers and a magnifying glass. I am not. That Samsung was escorted to my office, where it joined the growing eWaste Waiting Area, a sort of graveyard for gadgets that lost their duel with me.

    Undeterred, I marched into my daughter’s room for Samsung Number Two—the TV I’d lent her after moving things around the previous week. She was at Knott’s Berry Farm with her friends, which seemed like a merciful stroke of timing. My plan: reclaim the Samsung, and let her inherit the old 43-inch LG, a relic from 11 years ago that weighs twice as much as the newer, bigger Samsungs.

    But hubris is a loyal companion. Samsung Number Two sat high on her dresser, and I went at it like a gorilla in a hurry. I spread my arms wide to span its edges, but my right thumb betrayed me—it dug into the panel with a sickening crackle, leaving a dent in the digital flesh. In a feat of magical thinking, I told myself, “The panel probably bounced back.” Reality arrived the moment I powered it on: fresh black lines stood exactly where my Hulk thumb had pressed, like a signed confession of my clumsiness.

    Two lessons were carved into my soul in those catastrophic five minutes. First, modern TVs are absurdly fragile, delicate to the point of parody compared to their beefy ancestors. Second, I am unspeakably stupid.

    Now I must cram two cadaverous Samsungs into my car for their last ride to the eWaste center and figure out how to replace my bedroom screen. My daughter, surprisingly pliant, agreed to keep the old LG. As for my bedroom, I’m buying cheap: a $259 Roku 50-incher with deliberately low expectations. And from now on, I will follow the Prime Directive of Television Handling: any set larger than 40 inches must be carried upright by two people, no exceptions. This is not a powerlifting meet. There is no medal stand. A modern TV is a wafer-thin, brittle-screened diva.

    So: velvet gloves. And no grunting.

  • How The Monkees Taught Me That the Intellectual Can Beat the Bodybuilder and Inspired a Song

    How The Monkees Taught Me That the Intellectual Can Beat the Bodybuilder and Inspired a Song

    October 16, 1967, was a victory for the writers of cynicism. It was the day I learned the universe doesn’t give a damn. This was the day the veil was lifted. I was five, just shy of my sixth birthday, watching The Monkees, blissfully unaware that my entire worldview was about to be wrecked. The episode? “I Was a 99-lb. Weakling.” The plot? Micky Dolenz, the Monkee I admired most, gets metaphorically pancaked by Bulk, a human monument of muscle played by Mr. Universe Dave Draper. Bulk was no ordinary gym rat; he was a colossus in Speedos, the prototype Schwarzenegger. Worse, he stole Brenda, the beach goddess, right out from under Micky’s nose.

    Micky, desperate to win her back, did what any of us would: he signed up for Weaklings Anonymous. Their solution? Hoisting weights the size of small cars and downing fermented goat milk curd—an elixir I can only assume tasted like liquid despair. He even sold his drum set, jeopardizing the band’s future, all to build enough brawn to challenge Bulk.

    And for what? Brenda, fickle as fate, had a sudden epiphany—muscles were passé. She ditched Bulk for a scrawny intellectual buried in Remembrance of Things Past. Apparently, Proust’s multivolume exploration of memory and ennui was hotter than biceps.

    There, in front of my Zenith TV, I watched Micky’s heart crumple, and with it, mine. The moral of the story was clear and soul-crushing: hard work guarantees nothing. You could sacrifice, sweat, and sip goat curd until you resembled a Greco-Roman statue, only to find the universe had other plans—plans that favored nerds with library cards.

    The Monkees changed everything. The show taught me the brutal truth of irony: things don’t go the way as planned. I didn’t have the word for irony as a five-year-old, but I could feel it sending an existential chill through my bones. 

    As the decades passed, I finally processed that childhood memory into a piano song I wrote, titled “The Heartbreak of Micky Dolenz”:

  • We All Wanted to be Adopted by The Brady Bunch

    We All Wanted to be Adopted by The Brady Bunch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Tooter Turtle Goes to Gold’s Gym

    Tooter Turtle Goes to Gold’s Gym

    When you’re old, you burn daylight running stupid counterfactuals. Forty years of teaching college writing and now I mutter to myself, “You were never meant to be a professor. You were meant to be a personal trainer.” This fantasy is less revelation than acid reflux—I can’t keep it down no matter how hard I try.

    But let’s be honest about the personal trainer gig. Path A: you scrape together rent money coaching half-motivated clients through limp triceps pushdowns while they whine about kale. Path B: you cater to narcissistic celebrities who want you to count their lunges in a whisper, until their self-absorption has hollowed you out like a dry coconut.

    In this farce, I’m no different than Tooter Turtle, that cartoon sad sack from my childhood. Every week he begged Mr. Wizard to reinvent him as a lumberjack, a detective, a gladiator, a football star. And every week he proved that no matter how much you change the costume, you can’t change the pratfall. His new career always ended in humiliation, panic, and the desperate cry: “Help me, Mr. Wizard!”

    That’s us: eternal college freshmen, forever switching majors, convinced that the next “out there” will be our deliverance. But when the magic portal opens, we loathe ourselves for asking.

    Me, a personal trainer? Please. Within a week I’d be rolling my eyes at clients’ flabby excuses, pawning my kettlebells to cover insurance premiums I don’t have, and slinging creatine tubs from the trunk of my Honda. I wouldn’t be a coach—I’d be a sidewalk prophet of six-pack abs, half-broke, half-starved, and wholly ridiculous.

    Punchline: In short, I’d be Tooter Turtle in gym shorts—begging Mr. Wizard to zap me back to the classroom, where at least the only thing I’m destroying is a freshman’s thesis statement.

  • The Intruder from the Cypress Gloom

    The Intruder from the Cypress Gloom

    Sometimes you hear stories of horror and the supernatural, and you don’t know what to do with them, especially if the person telling the story seems sane and credible. As a result, the story lingers and haunts you for all your life. For example, I’ve never forgotten a story one of my college students told me back in the fall of 1998. She was a re-entry student—a nurse in her early forties—juggling coursework at UCLA with overnight hospital shifts. The kind of woman who sticks in your memory: short, sturdy, glasses perched low on her nose, with the weary, perceptive eyes of someone who’d seen too much and lips that knew how to pace a punchline.

    Most afternoons, after class let out, she’d linger by my desk and recount episodes from her Louisiana backwoods childhood or from the fluorescent netherworld of her hospital’s VIP wing. Her stories ricocheted between absurdity and horror—tales told with the calm authority of someone who could handle arterial spray with one hand and chart notes with the other.

    But one story gripped me by the spine and never let go. It wasn’t about dying celebrities or ER gore. It was about something far worse. A visitation. A monster.

    She and her cousin Carmen were feral children, raised in the lawless heat of rural Louisiana, where school attendance was optional and adult supervision was more myth than fact. Left to their own devices, the two girls invented what she called “mean games”—they tortured frogs, pulled wings off insects, and hinted at darker cruelties she refused to name. Lord of the Flies in sundresses.

    And then one afternoon, the visitor arrived.

    They were holed up in a decaying house, conspiring over their next cruelty, when the porch door creaked open and something stepped inside. It looked like a man. But it wasn’t. Over six feet tall, it had a tail—thick, muscled, and disturbingly animate. It moved with a will of its own, curling and flicking behind him like a fleshy metronome. His body was bristled with wiry hair. His voice? Low, hoarse, and calm in the most terrifying way. He didn’t threaten. He simply listed.

    Sitting in a rocking chair, the creature, a sort of rat-man, described, in brutal detail, everything the girls had done—every frog mutilated, every insect dissected. Nothing vague. He named the acts like he had them on file. And then he made his offer: Keep going, he said, and I’ll recruit you.

    He stayed for three hours. Just sat there. Breathing. Flicking that tail. Describing their path toward damnation with the steady tone of a bureaucrat explaining retirement benefits. When he finally left, dissolving into the heat shimmer of the Louisiana dusk, the girls were too stunned to move. Carmen whispered, “Did you see that?” My student just nodded.

    They never spoke of it again. But they changed. Overnight. Sunday school. Prayer. Kindness, enforced not by conscience but by fear. The kind that settles in your bones and never leaves. Whatever that thing was, it did its job.

    And this is the part that haunts me: she wasn’t a kook. She wasn’t mystical, manic, or given to exaggeration. She was a nurse—clear-eyed, grounded, more familiar with death than most people are with taxes. She wasn’t telling a ghost story. She was giving a deposition.

    To this day, I see those two girls, wide-eyed and paralyzed, staring down a thing that knew them intimately and promised them a future in hell’s apprenticeship program. Whether it was a demon, a shared psychotic break, or some mythological construct formed by childhood guilt and Southern humidity, I don’t know. But I do know what it meant.

    The creature’s message was brutal in its simplicity: Keep practicing cruelty, and you’ll lose the ability to stop. You’ll become it.

    That’s not just folklore. That’s biblical. The idea that if you repeat your wickedness long enough, God—or whatever you believe in—stops interrupting you. He doesn’t smite you. He simply steps aside and says, Go ahead. This is the life you’ve chosen.

    No wonder Kierkegaard was obsessed with working out your salvation with fear and trembling. There’s nothing more terrifying than the idea that damnation is self-inflicted, not by a thunderbolt, but by repetition. That the road to hell is paved with muscle memory.