Cinemorphosis

Tag: writing

  • When the Horsefault Sisters Tried to Lock Me in the Rabbit Cage

    When the Horsefault Sisters Tried to Lock Me in the Rabbit Cage

    One warm California afternoon in the spring of 1973, after sixth-grade classes had spit us out and the school bus rumbled off, leaving us at the corner of Crow Canyon Road, my friends and I followed our sacred ritual: a pilgrimage across the street to 7-Eleven to score a Slurpee before facing the long, punishing climb up Greenridge Road. Inside that air-conditioned oasis of fluorescent lights and sugar, “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl)” crackled from the tinny store radio, its chorus bouncing off the racks of bubble gum and beef jerky.

    That’s when the Horsefault sisters walked in like a blonde tornado.

    They were tall, freckled, and wild—sunburned Valkyries with tangled golden hair, mischievous blue eyes, and the kind of high cheekbones that made me momentarily forget I was twelve. One was an eighth grader; the other, a high school sophomore, already possessing the dangerous confidence of someone who knew she could upend your world with a glance. They lived on a rundown farmhouse just behind the store, surrounded by fields and mystery.

    “Wanna see a rabbit in a cage?” the younger one asked, her grin too wide to be trusted.

    I didn’t give two figs about rabbits, but the sisters had figures that awakened my dim childhood memories of Barbara Eden in I Dream of Jeannie—my first crush and the gold standard of unattainable beauty. So naturally, I replied, “Absolutely.”

    We left 7-Eleven, the door jingling behind us, and crossed into a sun-bleached field dotted with dry horse dung, the air sharp with the tang of manure and wild grass. A dirt trail wound past scrubby bushes and led to the edge of their sagging farmhouse. Behind a thicket of weeds sat a large iron cage with a rusted chain hanging off the latch. The door yawned slightly open like the maw of a trap.

    I peered inside. No rabbit. Just hay, a few feathers, and a faint smell of old alfalfa and chicken droppings. Before I could even register the absence of the promised bunny, the sisters attacked—howling with glee like feral imps. One grabbed my arms, the other lunged for my legs, and together they tried to wrestle me into the cage.

    It was clear: I had been duped by a pair of rural sirens, not into love, but into captivity.

    But they had underestimated me. I was stocky, wiry, and recently obsessed with Charles Atlas. I fought back with the desperation of a wrongfully accused man resisting a wrongful life sentence. We rolled in the tall grass, kicking up dust, hay, and chicken feathers as if auditioning for a Benny Hill episode shot on a farm. A nearby chicken coop exploded with chaos—panicked clucks and frantic wing flaps erupted like a poultry apocalypse.

    The sisters, now sweaty and streaked with dirt, were panting from their failed coup. Realizing they didn’t have the brute strength to imprison me, they collapsed in giggles and defeat. I seized my chance and bolted—running like a fugitive through the meadow, Slurpee long forgotten, heart pounding like a kettle drum.

    I got home, still breathless, still incensed by the attempted kidnapping, and turned on the TV to calm my frayed nerves. There she was: Barbara Eden, in her satin harem pants and cropped top, looking radiant and unbothered, stuck in her gilded bottle and waiting to be summoned. For the rest of the afternoon, I lay on the carpet in front of the television, sipping water from a mason jar and watching Jeannie coo and blink and call her master “darling.”

    Unlike me, she never had to wrestle two hormonal farm girls behind a convenience store to escape a rabbit-less cage.

  • Geekee and the Alligator: A Tragedy in Silk

    Geekee and the Alligator: A Tragedy in Silk

    When I was a toddler, I had an unhealthy attachment to a raggedy white blanket I’d christened Geekee—a silken square of heaven that clung to me like a second epidermis. Geekee was not merely a blanket. Geekee was a lifestyle. Tattered, stained, and reeking of a distinct sour-milk-meets-armpit funk, Geekee looked like it had been rescued from the wreckage of a shipwreck and then dragged behind a Greyhound bus. But to me, Geekee was spun moonlight. Its frayed corners were my talismans, which I rubbed obsessively against my cheek like a junkie chasing the next dopamine hit. The soft tickle of that threadbare fabric was my lullaby, my Xanax, my spiritual compass.

    To my parents, however, Geekee was a public disgrace—a dingy square of shame that broadcast to the world that they were too cheap or too neglectful to buy their son a clean blanket. “It smells,” they complained, pinching their noses. “It’s disgusting.” They said I was too old to drag Geekee around like Linus with a trust fund. At four, I was allegedly a grown man in preschool years, and Geekee, they insisted, was holding me back like an emotional parasite in silk form.

    Thus began the war: child versus parental regime. I defended Geekee’s honor with the righteous fury of a mother bear protecting her cubs. I refused to eat unless Geekee was in my lap. I screamed during bath time if Geekee wasn’t nearby, watching like a guardian angel woven by machinery. I slept only under the comforting weight of its matted threads.

    My parents, of course, resorted to psychological warfare.

    Then came the infamous cross-country move—from Florida to California, land of palm trees, broken dreams, and emotional betrayals. Somewhere in the swamplands of Louisiana or perhaps the desolate asphalt wasteland of Texas, my father, who I now believe was channeling Machiavelli, pulled the ultimate con.

    “Look!” he said, pointing out the opposite car window. “A baby alligator!”

    I took the bait. Like the sucker I was, I turned my head. In that moment, my father performed the sleight of hand that would make a Vegas illusionist weep with envy. With the dexterity of a pickpocket, he yanked Geekee from my clutches and flung it out his open window like yesterday’s trash.

    The wind, he told me with faux solemnity, had sucked Geekee away. My cries reached operatic levels. I screamed, sobbed, demanded we stop the car, mount a rescue operation, conduct a blanket-recovery SWAT mission.

    But my father kept driving. “We can’t stop,” he said flatly, as though reading from a war manual. “Besides, Geekee is now keeping the baby alligator warm.”

    A lesser con artist would’ve stopped there, but my father gilded the lily. “The poor little guy has no mother. Geekee’s keeping him company now.”

    And just like that, my grief was hijacked by empathy. The idea of a lonely orphaned reptile swaddled in my beloved Geekee soothed me in a way no logic could. I imagined the baby alligator curled beneath Geekee’s filthy folds, comforted by the scent of my skin, the ghost of my touch. Geekee had found a higher calling.

    It was a lie so cunning, so diabolically effective, that it’s now family lore.

    That was the day I learned that grief, properly manipulated, could be repurposed into myth. And that sometimes, the only thing crueler than losing your favorite blanket is realizing your dad could have written propaganda for a dictatorship.

  • Worst College Student Ever

    Worst College Student Ever

    I was the worst college student ever. But before we get to that, let’s roll back to the fall of 1979 when I began my illustriously doomed university career. I was seventeen, an Olympic weightlifting champ and a competitive bodybuilder, laser-focused on my singular dream: win Mr. Universe, crush Mr. Olympia, and then ride that shredded glory to a personal gym empire in the Bahamas. My priorities were crystalline: achieve a beautiful body, maintain that body in a setting conducive to permanent oil-and-Speedo living, and ensure that the only clothes I wore for the rest of my life were posing trunks.

    This goal, as impractical as it was narcissistically vivid, never impressed my recently divorced mother. She called me a nincompoop every time I talked about opening a tropical gym. When I insisted my friends — Frank Zane, Tom Platz, Robbie Robinson, and the rest of the pantheon I knew only from the glossy pages of Muscle & Fitness — would come visit, she replied, “Those aren’t your friends. They’re from your magazines. I’m not stupid.”

    Contrary to the meathead stereotype, I graduated high school with straight A’s. But that was less a testament to my intellect and more an indictment of a system that funneled students through a bureaucratic sleepwalk. One of my classes was called “Money Matters.” We learned how to write checks and keep a budget. This was first-grade math masquerading as life skills. Another gem was “Popular Lit,” in which we read any three books of our choosing and wrote one-page reports so lax, you could submit a fever dream scrawled in pencil and receive an A. Our teacher looked like she lived under a freeway overpass and had the hygiene regimen to match. I never saw her do anything other than read People magazine and clip her nails with industrial wire cutters.

    It was abundantly clear that we weren’t being educated. We were being warehoused until adulthood. A teacher once muttered to a colleague in the hallway, “We’re training them to flip burgers.” And I believed him.

    But I didn’t care. I wasn’t going to flip burgers or go to college. I was going to sculpt my body into a Greek god, win a shelf of trophies, and retire to an island where protein shakes flowed like wine. And I had evidence of my imminent glory: I trained at The Weight Room in Hayward alongside John Matuszak, a defensive end built like a mythological beast and known for body-slamming offensive linemen and the occasional jukebox. We bonded over T-Bar rows and cheesy radio duets. Once, during a particularly syrupy ballad, Matuszak curled his lip in disgust, growled, “Bullshit,” and rep-pounded 400 pounds like he was hammering nails into sentimentality’s coffin.

    Then there was Joe Corsi, local supplement tycoon and aged bodybuilder with a Dracula-meets-Jack-LaLanne aesthetic. Jet-black hair, dyed eyebrows, and a sleeveless jumpsuit that gave off the vibe of an aging lounge lizard hawking protein powder. He praised my “exceptional structure” and called me the next big thing. I waited for the sponsorship that never came.

    Mother, skeptical of the steak delivery sponsorship I kept promising her, finally cornered me in the kitchen where she was butchering a raw chicken like it had committed a felony. “College,” she said. “It’s your only option.”

    “What about Joe Corsi?”

    “What about him? Unless he’s showing up with T-bones, you’ve got nothing.”

    So I swallowed my Speedo-clad pride and applied to Cal State. Tuition was seventy-eight dollars a quarter. Cheaper than buying meat from Louie Corsi, Joe’s brother, who had offered me a pyramid scheme disguised as an entrepreneurial opportunity.

    I entered college with all the enthusiasm of a man being marched to the gallows. I had no respect for my professors. They were walking, talking resumes with gourmet cookware fetishes and tales of their African safaris. My Ethics professor — the Dean of Philosophy — had recently left his wife for his secretary and cruised into the parking lot in a Porsche convertible, his toupee flapping like a bat out of hell. I despised him on sight.

    Despite my straight A’s in high school, the university diagnosed me as an academic disgrace. I was unfit even for “Bonehead English” and was relegated to “Pre-Bonehead,” held in a boiler room next to maintenance. Janitors poked their heads in to laugh at us. And I deserved it.

    I lacked academic skill, yes, but I also lacked common sense. One day, a neighbor’s Siberian Husky licked me on the mouth. Panicked about AIDS, I called a local radio station and asked a doctor if canine kisses could transmit the disease. The doctor assured me I was safe. My mother, emerging from her bedroom after hearing the broadcast, said, “Was that you on the radio? You thought dog spit gave you AIDS? Cool it, buster.”

    It was a humbling moment. But not humbling enough to help me pick a major.

    Criminal justice bored me. The legalese read like a Choose Your Own Adventure designed by Kafka. Sociology and psychology books were impenetrable clouds of jargon. Reading them felt like slashing through kudzu with a machete. History had the narrative flair of a warehouse inventory list. Oceanography was fine until I developed a Pavlovian twitch to the professor’s favorite words: “viscosity,” “liminal zone,” and “denitrification.”

    Accounting nearly broke me. Ten minutes in, I walked out. The professor asked for my name. I said, “That won’t be necessary. You’ll never see me again.”

    I was failing, flailing, and officially on academic probation by spring. The university handed me a letter saying, in essence, “Shape up or ship out.”

    So I turned to my father.

    He invited me over for steaks. On the patio, he asked how school was going. I confessed everything. He listened, chewed, and finally said, “You can’t be a garbage man.”

    “Why not?”

    “You’re too vain. Imagine telling people at a party you’re a sanitation engineer. You’ll crack under the weight of social disapproval.”

    He was right. My ego wouldn’t allow me to collect trash. I needed a title with cachet. So I returned to campus, hat in hand, to pick a major. English it was. Why? Because the prose in other fields made me want to fling myself into traffic. Because I longed for writing that didn’t sound like it was composed by a committee of caffeinated consultants.

    And because I couldn’t learn in a room full of thirty-five people. My mind jittered like a squirrel on espresso. I taught myself grammar from a handbook. Syntax became my sanctuary. Grammar gave me what life hadn’t: structure, coherence, and rules that actually worked.

    Nietzsche once said we haven’t gotten rid of God because we still believe in grammar. He had a point. Grammar was my personal theology. It saved me.

    My grades rose. My confidence grew. The tutoring center hired me. Then I was offered a teaching gig.

    The university that once tried to boot me now wanted me at the helm.

    I had become, with astonishing irony, the worst college professor ever.

  • Confessions of a Muscled Impostor: How Not Knowing How to Teach Made Me a Better Teacher

    Confessions of a Muscled Impostor: How Not Knowing How to Teach Made Me a Better Teacher

    I was twenty-four, had zero pedagogical training, and was entirely unqualified to teach college writing. That, of course, made me the perfect hire for Merritt College’s emergency “bridge” program at Skyline High School, a gig none of the seasoned professors wanted. My only credential? A shiny new Master’s in English and a well-placed friend whose father was a desperate administrator. If nepotism were an Olympic sport, I’d have taken gold.

    Truthfully, I had no intention of ever teaching. I wanted to be a novelist, famous and feared, spinning tales about neurotics and grotesques while charming the world with my lexical brilliance. But the novels weren’t going anywhere except maybe the recycling bin, and I was making peanuts at a snooty Berkeley wine store, where all of us over-educated slackers pretended we were too brilliant for regular jobs.

    So, guilt-tripped by childhood memories of swimming in my friend’s pool, I took the job.

    Lacking any actual teaching chops, I improvised. I gave long, baroque vocabulary lectures, using Nabokovian polysyllables illustrated by grotesque anecdotes. “Sycophant” became the story of a vomit-covered airline lackey too deferential to wipe himself off. “Serendipitous” was illustrated by a teenager fishing a silver dollar out of a toilet during a disco brawl. “Lugubrious”? Richard Lewis, alone on Thanksgiving, eating turkey in a black armband. The kids loved it. And it ate up class time like a champ.

    When vocab stories weren’t enough, I filled the silence with tales from my bodybuilding days and recycled material from my failed novels. My biceps did the rest. I intimidated my way through teaching—jacking iron before class to maintain a physique that made other instructors mistake me for the wrestling coach. They kept their distance. Good. I didn’t want anyone close enough to realize I had no idea what I was doing.

    I became friends with my students, especially the ones who played basketball with me after school. We’d hoop at Merritt College with my boombox blaring The Cocteau Twins. So much for maintaining professional boundaries.

    We were all poor. I saw them at Laundry Land. We shared shameful nods while “Seasons Change” played on loop from the jukebox. I was no role model. Just a dude schlepping a mesh laundry bag and trying not to spill detergent on his Cocteau Twins T-shirt.

    Collaborative learning was a disaster. No one read the handouts. Group projects devolved into gossip-fests. Points meant nothing. I might as well have been offering them coupons for discounted paper towels.

    Yet, somehow, I kept getting hired. I was the adjunct version of a touring rock band, dragging my briefcases from one campus to another, mixing up lectures, and still receiving praise from students for being “brilliant.” I couldn’t believe it either.

    Eventually, I got a full-time lectureship in California’s Central Valley, where rent was cheap and I could finally trade in my Toyota Tercel for an Acura Integra, as any insecure man-child would. I thought I’d made it. I bought pirate shirts from mail-order catalogs and confused this consumer charade for fulfillment. I was, in short, a highly literate buffoon.

    And then—somewhere in that desert—I learned to shut up and listen.

    I met Kong, a pre-med student who told me how his father, a professor in Cambodia, had saved his life by pushing him on a raft into the river, seconds before being executed by the Khmer Rouge. Kong had survived, emigrated, and was now calmly acing my class while radiating a sense of gratitude and grit I couldn’t fake on my best day.

    I met Evelyn, whose South Korean parents had given up wealth and comfort so she and her sister could study in America. They worked a dry-cleaning job in obscurity so Evelyn could ace her papers in my class, all with grace and humility that made my “me me me” inner monologue shrink in shame.

    Then there was Kim, abandoned by her addict parents and raised in chaos, now a young mother herself. She told me something I’ll never forget: by loving her daughter, she became the mother she never had. I left my office that day, fell to my knees, and asked God to forgive me for being a colossal dumbass.

    These students—these warriors of resilience—taught me what no pedagogy seminar ever could. Teaching wasn’t about syllabi or academic jargon. It was about listening. Really listening.

    So yes, I was an impostor. But I was an impostor who learned. And that, I think, made all the difference.

  • Dumbbells and Demagogues: The Bizarre Battle for the Bros

    Dumbbells and Demagogues: The Bizarre Battle for the Bros

    In “The Battle for the Bros,” Andrew Marantz dons his flak vest and ventures into the testosterone-slicked minefield of online masculinity, where disenfranchised young men are drifting rightward faster than a Joe Rogan cold plunge. Bro culture, Marantz argues, isn’t just real—it’s a booming cottage industry of rage, raw meat, and red pills. It thrives on podcasts, YouTube channels, and Instagram feeds soaked in motivational bile, where carnivore diets, deadlifts, and conspiracy theories all count as self-improvement.

    At the center of this digital flex-off is the Rogan Industrial Complex, which has evolved from left-leaning curiosities like The Young Turks to its current stance of muttering about immigrants while gnawing on elk jerky and praising Vladimir Putin’s virility. Rogan isn’t just an influencer—he’s a cultural battering ram who can probably swing a presidential election with a few bro-ish shrugs and an anecdote about DMT. Meanwhile, the left is left blinking in the dust, coming off to many young men as smug, brittle, and somehow both humorless and condescending—like a human resources memo with a sociology degree.

    Marantz interviews Hasan Piker, a foul-mouthed socialist Twitch-streamer with cheekbones sharp enough to cut through the culture war. Piker wants to offer a leftist alternative to the Bro pipeline, but despite his 1.5 million subscribers, he’s still playing catch-up to Rogan’s podcast empire. Piker gets it: if you tell a broke 23-year-old living in his parents’ basement that he’s “privileged,” don’t be shocked when he rage-clicks his way into the arms of Andrew Tate.

    The tragedy—and farce—of this ecosystem is that much of it runs on ersatz authenticity. Grifters wear the costume of “real talk” while peddling warmed-over xenophobia and junk-science self-help. Marantz muses on whether the left can produce its own no-nonsense avatar of male angst—someone with enough swagger, wit, and working-class rage to compete. Though not mentioned in the essay, Bill Burr came to mind as I pondered a possible counterforce to the bro culture from the right. Burr is pissed off, principled, and perpetually exasperated—a man who could roast Elon Musk and filet toxic masculinity in the same breath. But Burr is sui generis, not a manufactured product. As Marantz rightly notes, you don’t summon authenticity with a PR team and a protein shake.

    The real kicker? In a post-truth world, what matters isn’t truth—it’s vibes. And right now, the right’s vibes are winning the war for the bros.

  • The Effort Mandate: Why Your Milkshake Scene Matters More Than Your Netflix Queue

    The Effort Mandate: Why Your Milkshake Scene Matters More Than Your Netflix Queue

    My students read Cal Newport, who argues—rightly—that happiness has less to do with basking in self-care rituals and more to do with rolling up your sleeves and pursuing a life of relentless, purpose-driven work. Newport, like a modern-day monk with a MacBook, insists that true contentment doesn’t come from “finding your passion” or retiring to some fantasy Airbnb with pizza in one hand and a remote in the other. Instead, happiness is built the old-fashioned way: through grit, sweat, and enough existential gumption to brave the storms of effort.

    Alex Hutchinson, in “The Paradox of Hard Work,” asks why we pursue brutal, bone-crunching tasks when our evolutionary wiring is supposedly set to “energy-saving mode.” He calls it puzzling. I don’t. The so-called “Effort Paradox” isn’t a mystery; it’s a truth so obvious we dress it up in academic hand-wringing to avoid confronting it: people crave hard things because without them, we rot.

    Whether it’s Peter Gabriel locking himself in a farmhouse to claw So into existence, or Isabel Wilkerson spending fifteen years writing The Warmth of Other Suns, meaningful work demands blood. Even weekend warriors know this. Ask a suburbanite about their yearlong bathroom renovation—listen to them swell with the pride of a soldier recounting a siege.

    And then there’s art. Cheap, glossy, instant-gratification art that evaporates from your mind before you reach the parking lot. You didn’t watch a movie—you consumed a content burrito and forgot the taste. Contrast that with There Will Be Blood: a cinematic ordeal so dense and punishing that it leaves claw marks on your psyche. I think of that milkshake scene more than I think of most people I went to college with. That’s not paradox. That’s payoff.

    So let’s stop calling it a paradox and start calling it what it is: The Effort Mandate. Meaning isn’t a gift; it’s a byproduct of voluntary suffering. You want happiness? Go earn it.

  • Fear, Fat, and the Fickle Gods of Appetite: A Diet Writer’s Tale

    Fear, Fat, and the Fickle Gods of Appetite: A Diet Writer’s Tale

    Rebecca Johns spent decades whispering sweet, slimming nothings into the ears of women’s magazine readers—low-fat gospel by day, seductive chocolate cake recipes by night. In her Atlantic essay, “A Diet Writer’s Regrets,” she confesses the irony that while readers gobbled up her diet advice like SnackWell’s cookies, she was losing the battle against her own body. At twenty-three, fresh out of college and desperate to shrink her waistline, Johns eagerly volunteered for the magazine’s diet beat. She got the gig—and with it, a front-row seat to her own unraveling.

    As her writing career expanded, so did she. The more she advised others on portion control, the more food tightened its psychological grip on her. She became the oracle of thinness while secretly bingeing and self-loathing. And her audience? They were just as eager to read about lemon-water detoxes as they were molten lava cakes for their next dinner party. The entire racket, she realized, was built on contradiction and fantasy.

    By 2017, she weighed 298 pounds, with a BMI in “Call the doctor” territory. She had tried every acronym on the dieting menu—WW, keto, IF, CICO—but none of them stuck. Then, like a miracle in an injector pen, came Mounjaro. Prescribed in 2023, this GLP-1 wonder drug rewired her hunger like a tech support call for the brain. No more food noise. No more gnawing obsession. Eighty pounds evaporated. At last, she became the kind of person she had written about for thirty years but never met—herself, only thinner.

    But here’s the twist: now that she’s tasted liberation, she’s terrified. Insurance may soon ghost her, and Mounjaro, priced like a luxury car lease, will slip from reach. She knows too much to let herself go back, and not enough to know how to stay the course without her miracle molecule. The horror? She might have to white-knuckle her way through celery sticks and willpower.

    Johns doesn’t mince words when she calls body acceptance a euphemism for surrender. “If skinny were truly optional,” she writes, “we’d all choose it.” And she’s not wrong. If college is driven by fear of poverty, maybe dieting is driven by fear of dying too soon—or worse, returning to a body you fought so hard to escape.

    If fear gets the job done, Johns suggests, then let it. After all, if love won’t keep you away from the donuts, maybe dread will.

  • The Great, on Hulu, is your TV Mount Everest

    The Great, on Hulu, is your TV Mount Everest

    So, you’ve just finished watching the complete 3 seasons of The Great on Hulu, and now you’re a broken shell of a human being. This “anti-historical” comedy about Empress Catherine the Great, penned by the devilishly talented Tony McNamara, is hands-down the best thing you’ve ever seen on television. And now, you’re plunged into a depression so deep that not even Elle Fanning’s radiant smirk or Nicholas Hoult’s glorious, sociopathic wit can pull you out of it. Why? Because you know, deep in your soul, that you’ll never see a script with such biting humor, impeccable cadence, and penetrating insight again. Ever.

    The Great is your TV Mount Everest, and the air up there is so thin that coming back down to the ground feels like an existential freefall. Desperate for solace, you decide to drown your sorrows in another “costume comedy,” because clearly, nothing soothes the soul like more ruffles and wigs.

    Enter The Decameron on Netflix—a comedy about the bubonic plague in 14th Century Italy. Yes, someone thought it would be a good idea to wring laughs out of a pandemic that killed a third of Europe. And the shocking part? They actually pulled it off. You’re impressed. Sort of. But at the same time, let’s not kid ourselves—the writing is not even in the same universe as The Great. It’s like comparing a Michelin-starred meal to the tastiest TV dinner you’ve ever had. Sure, it’s good, but come on—it’s not The Great. But here’s the kicker: you can’t trust your judgment anymore. You’ve entered a full-blown Post-Masterpiece Meltdown. On one hand, you’re bending over backward to be generous toward The Decameron, because you know deep down it’s unfair to compare anything to the sheer brilliance of The Great. On the other hand, you’re haunted by the suspicion that your generosity might be blinding you to the show’s actual merits—or lack thereof. You’re like someone who’s just lost the love of their life and is now attempting to date again by swiping right on Tinder with tears streaming down their face.

    Can you really trust your post-Great heart to judge anything properly? To make matters worse, The Decameron features the enigma that is Tanya Reynolds, an actress whose face is a bafflingly delightful conundrum—one moment goofy, the next serenely beautiful, as if she’s somehow tapped into a facial time machine that can travel between awkward adolescence and timeless beauty at will. Her intoxicating, elastic pulchritude is the final nail in the coffin of your short-circuited judgment. Your critical faculties, once sharp as a chef’s knife, now resemble a spoon trying to slice through steak. And you used to take pride in your TV criticism! Now you’re floundering in a sea of existential doubt, questioning everything—your taste, your standards, your very identity as a TV aficionado. So here you are, a once-confident critic, now reduced to a quivering mass of uncertainty, all because you stumbled upon Tony McNamara’s masterpiece, The Great. It’s like finding out you’ve been living in Plato’s cave all along, and now you’ve seen the light, you’re doomed to spend the rest of your days in the shadows, longing for the brilliance you can never unsee. Welcome to your new life in the Post-Masterpiece Meltdown. Enjoy the view—such as it is.

  • I found my true life purpose at a McDonald’s in Mojave

    I found my true life purpose at a McDonald’s in Mojave

    Coming home from Mammoth last summer, I had naively believed that my children would be sated from their breakfast at the McDonald’s in Bishop, allowing us to drive straight home without further interruptions.

    But by the time we reached Mojave around noon, my daughters swore they would perish on the spot if they didn’t have lunch immediately. So, we found ourselves pulling into yet another McDonald’s in Mojave. The thought of visiting two McDonald’s in a single day felt like a deep plunge into the abyss of self-debasement, a loss of dignity on par with other legendary acts of self-humiliation. I began to think this might be the modern-day equivalent of wearing a sandwich board that reads, “I have given up.” Yet, amid my indignation, I secretly thanked the universe for my daughters’ insatiable appetites because I desperately needed to use the bathroom.

    However, fate—or rather the cruel architects of this establishment—had installed combination locks on the bathroom doors, and the workers guarding these sacred numbers were about as generous with them as a dragon hoarding gold. I had to persuade them that my family of four would be forking over more than fifty dollars for the world’s most lackluster cuisine, and thus, I was surely deserving of the golden code.

    After securing the coveted combination, I made a beeline for the bathroom, practically kicking the door open like a cowboy in a saloon. The relief was so immense that it felt as if I had just liberated a small nation from tyranny. Afterward, I returned to the counter to wait for our food, feeling light as a feather. As I stood there, I observed dozens of men rattling the bathroom doorknob with the desperation of someone who had just spotted an oasis in the desert, only to find it locked. Their faces were contorted in pain, and their eyes begged for mercy but the cruel workers were unmoved.

    Seeing their plight, I realized I had the power to make a difference. I could be their savior. In an act of defiance against the oppressive bathroom code policy, I began shouting the combination with a gusto that could only be described as revolutionary. “Two-four-six-eight!” I bellowed, as if each digit was a bullet in the war against bladder injustice. The relief that spread across their faces was almost spiritual. I had become a mythical prophet, a modern-day Moses leading the oppressed to the Promised Land of Bladder Relief.

    Meanwhile, as I basked in the glory of my newfound role, my wife and daughters sank deeper into their chairs, their faces a mix of horror and embarrassment. They pretended not to know me, as if I were some wild-eyed lunatic who had wandered in from the Mojave Desert. But I didn’t care. I had found my spiritual calling, even if it was in the unlikeliest of places—shouting bathroom codes at a McDonald’s in Mojave.

  • The Los Angeles Wildfires Reconnected Me to Radio

    The Los Angeles Wildfires Reconnected Me to Radio

    The Los Angeles fires, blazing with apocalyptic fury, prompted me to do something I hadn’t done in years: dust off one of my radios and tune into live local news. The live broadcast brought with it not just updates but an epiphany. Two things, in fact. First, I realized that deep down, I despise my streaming devices—their algorithm-driven content is like an endless conveyor belt of lukewarm leftovers, a numbing backdrop of music and chatter that feels canned, impersonal, and incurably distant. Worst of all, these devices have pushed me into a solipsistic bubble, a navel-gazing universe where I am the sole inhabitant. Streaming has turned my listening into an isolating, insidious form of solitary confinement, and I haven’t even noticed.

    When I flipped on the radio in my kitchen, the warmth of its live immediacy hit me like a long-lost friend. My heart ached as memories of radio’s golden touch from my youth came flooding back. As a nine-year-old, after watching Diahann Carroll in Julia and Sally Field in The Flying Nun, I’d crawl into bed, armed with my trusty transistor radio and earbuds, ready for the night to truly begin. Tuned to KFRC 610 AM, I’d be transported into the shimmering world of Sly and the Family Stone’s “Hot Fun in the Summertime,” Tommy James and the Shondells’ “Crystal Blue Persuasion,” and The Friends of Distinction’s “Grazing in the Grass.” The knowledge that thousands of others in my community were swaying to the same beats made the experience electric, communal, alive—so unlike the deadening isolation of my curated streaming playlists.

    And then there was talk radio. Live conversations on KGO 810 AM with Jim Eason and Ronn Owens held a spellbinding charm. In the 70s, my mother and I would sit in the kitchen, enraptured, as they dissected controversies and gossip with the vigor of philosophers at a cocktail party. It was conversation as an art form, communal and vital, like cavemen telling stories around the fire. Contrast that with my podcasts: cherry-picked for my biases, carefully calibrated to affirm my tastes, locking me in an echo chamber so snug it could double as a straightjacket.

    The fires aren’t just devastating to the city—they’ve exposed the cracks in my own longing for connection. The nostalgic ache sent me down a rabbit hole of online research, hunting for a high-performance radio, convinced that it might resurrect the magic of my youth. But even as I clicked through reviews of antennas and AM clarity, a voice nagged at me: was this really about finding a better radio, or was it just another futile errand from a man in his sixties trying to outrun time? Could a supercharged radio transport me back to those transistor nights and kitchen conversations, or was I just tuning into the static of my own melancholia?