Cinemorphosis

Tag: writing

  • FOMO and the Mythical Past Can Ruin You

    FOMO and the Mythical Past Can Ruin You

    I remain haunted by three men who, decades later, are still gnashing their teeth over a squandered romantic encounter so catastrophic in their minds, it may as well be their personal Waterloo.

    It was the summer of their senior year, a time when testosterone and bad decisions flowed freely. Driving from Bakersfield to Los Angeles for a Dodgers game, they were winding through the Grapevine when fate, wearing a tie-dye bikini, waved them down. On the side of the road, an overheated vintage Volkswagen van—a sunbaked shade of decayed orange—coughed its last breath. Standing next to it? Four radiant, sun-kissed Grateful Dead followers, fresh from a concert and still floating on a psychedelic afterglow.

    These weren’t just women. These were ethereal, free-spirited nymphs, perfumed in the intoxicating mix of patchouli, wild musk, and possibility. Their laughter tinkled like wind chimes in an ocean breeze, their sun-bronzed shoulders glistening as they waved their bikinis and spaghetti-strap tops in the air like celestial signals guiding sailors to shore.

    My friends, handy with an engine but fatally clueless in the ways of the universe, leaped to action. With grease-stained heroism, they nursed the van back to health, coaxing it into a purring submission. Their reward? An invitation to abandon their pedestrian baseball game and join the Deadhead goddesses at the Santa Barbara Summer Solstice Festival—an offer so dripping with hedonistic promise that even a monk would’ve paused to consider.

    But my friends? Naïve. Stupid. Shackled to their Dodgers tickets as if they were golden keys to Valhalla. With profuse thanks (and, one imagines, the self-awareness of a plank of wood), they declined. They drove off, leaving behind the road-worn sirens who, even now, are probably still dancing barefoot somewhere, oblivious to the tragedy they unwittingly inflicted.

    Decades later, my friends can’t recall a single play from that Dodgers game, but they can describe—down to the last bead of sweat—the precise moment they drove away from paradise. Bring it up, and they revert into snarling, feral beasts, snapping at each other over whose fault it was that they abandoned the best opportunity of their pathetic young lives. Their girlfriends, beautiful and present, might as well be holograms. After all, these men are still spiritually chained to that sun-scorched highway, watching the tie-dye bikini tops flutter in the wind like banners of a lost kingdom.

    Insomnia haunts them. Their nights are riddled with fever dreams of sun-drenched bacchanals that never happened. They wake in cold sweats, whispering the names of women they never actually kissed. Their relationships suffer, their souls remain malnourished, and all because, on that fateful day, they chose baseball over Dionysian bliss.

  • Dealing with ChatGPT Essays That Are “Good Enough”

    Dealing with ChatGPT Essays That Are “Good Enough”

    Standing in front of thirty bleary-eyed college students, I was deep into a lesson on how to distinguish a ChatGPT-generated essay from one written by an actual human—primarily by the AI’s habit of spitting out the same bland, overused phrases like a malfunctioning inspirational calendar. That’s when a business major casually raised his hand and said, “I can guarantee you everyone on this campus is using ChatGPT. We don’t use it straight-up. We just tweak a few sentences, paraphrase a bit, and boom—no one can tell the difference.”

    Cue the follow-up from a computer science student: “ChatGPT isn’t just for essays. It’s my life coach. I ask it about everything—career moves, investments, even dating advice.” Dating advice. From ChatGPT. Let that sink in. Somewhere out there is a romance blossoming because of AI-generated pillow talk.

    At that moment, I realized I was facing the biggest educational disruption of my thirty-year teaching career. AI platforms like ChatGPT have three superpowers: insane convenience, instant accessibility, and lightning-fast speed. In a world where time is money and business documents don’t need to channel the spirit of James Baldwin, ChatGPT is already “good enough” for 95% of professional writing. And therein lies the rub—good enough.

    “Good enough” is the siren call of convenience. Picture this: You’ve just rolled out of bed, and you’re faced with two breakfast options. Breakfast #1 is a premade smoothie. It’s mediocre at best—mystery berries, more foam than a frat boy’s beer, and nutritional value that’s probably overstated. But hey, it’s there. No work required.

    Breakfast #2? Oh, it’s gourmet bliss—organic fruits and berries, rich Greek yogurt, chia seeds, almond milk, the works. But to get there, you’ll need to fend off orb spiders in your backyard, pick peaches and blackberries, endure the incessant barking of your neighbor’s demonic Rottweiler, and then spend precious time blending and cleaning a Vitamix. Which option do most people choose?

    Exactly. Breakfast #1. The pre-packaged sludge wins, because who has the time for spider-wrangling and kitchen chemistry before braving rush-hour traffic? This is how convenience lures us into complacency. Sure, you sacrificed quality, but look how much time you saved! Eventually, you stop even missing the better option. This process—adjusting to mediocrity until you no longer care—is called attenuation.

    Now apply that to writing. Writing takes effort—a lot more than making a smoothie—and millions of people have begun lowering their standards thanks to AI. Why spend hours refining your prose when the world is perfectly happy to settle for algorithmically generated mediocrity? Polished writing is becoming the artisanal smoothie of communication—too much work for most, when AI can churn out passable content at the click of a button.

    But this is a nightmare for anyone in education. You didn’t sign up for teaching to coach your students into becoming connoisseurs of mediocrity. You had lofty ambitions—cultivating critical thinkers, wordsmiths, and rhetoricians with prose so sharp it could cut glass. But now? You’re stuck in a dystopia where “good enough” is the new gospel, and you’re about as on-brand as a poet peddling protein shakes at a multilevel marketing seminar.

    And there you are, staring into the abyss of AI-generated essays, each more lifeless than the last, wondering if anyone still remembers the taste of good writing—let alone craves it.

    This is your challenge, the struggle life has so graciously dumped in your lap. So, what’s it going to be? You could curl into the fetal position and sob, sure. Or you could square your shoulders, channel your inner battle cry, and start fighting like hell for the craft you once believed in. Either way, the abyss is watching.

  • 95% of books are just bloated short stories and essays with unnecessary padding

    95% of books are just bloated short stories and essays with unnecessary padding

    As part of my rehabilitation from writing novels I have no business writing, I remind myself of an uncomfortable truth: 95% of books—both fiction and nonfiction—are just bloated short stories and essays with unnecessary padding. How many times have I read a novel and thought, This would have been a killer short story, but as a novel, it’s a slog? How often have I powered through a nonfiction screed only to realize that everything I needed was in the first chapter, and the rest was just an echo chamber of diminishing returns?

    Perhaps someday, I’ll learn to write an exceptional short story—the kind that punches above its weight, the kind that leaves you feeling like you’ve just read a 400-page novel even though it barely clears 30. It takes a rare kind of genius to pull off this magic trick. I think of Alice Munro’s layered portraits of regret, Lorrie Moore’s razor-sharp wit, and John Cheever’s meticulous dissections of suburban despair. I flip through my extra-large edition of The Stories of John Cheever, and three stand out like glittering relics: “The Swimmer,” “The Country Husband,” and “The Jewels of the Cabots.” Each is a self-contained universe, a potent literary multivitamin that somehow delivers all the nourishment of a novel in a single, concentrated dose. Let’s call these rare works Stories That Ate a Novel—compact, ferocious, and packed with enough emotional and intellectual weight to render lesser novels redundant.

    As part of my rehabilitation, I must seek out such stories, study them, and attempt to write them. Not just as an artistic exercise, but as a safeguard against relapse—the last thing I need is another 300-page corpse of a novel stinking up my hard drive.

    But maybe this is more than just a recovery plan. Maybe this is a new mission—championing Stories That Eat Novels. The cultural winds are shifting in my favor. Attention spans, gnawed to the bone by social media, no longer tolerate literary excess. Even the New York Times has noted the rise of the short novel, reporting in “To the Point: Short Novels Dominate International Booker Prize Nominees” that books under 200 pages are taking center stage. We may be witnessing a tectonic shift, an age where brevity is not just a virtue but a necessity.

    For a failed novelist and an unapologetic literary wind-sprinter, this could be my moment. I can already see it—my sleek, ruthless 160-page collection, Stories That Eat Novels, four lapidary masterpieces gleaming like finely cut diamonds. Rehabilitation has never felt so good. Who says a man in his sixties can’t find his literary niche and stage an artistic rebirth? Maybe I wasn’t a failed novelist after all—maybe I was just a short-form assassin waiting for the right age to arrive.

  • How Poorly-Written Textbooks Turned Me into an English Major

    How Poorly-Written Textbooks Turned Me into an English Major

    For my first two years of college, I leapfrogged from major to major like a deranged amphibian with commitment issues.

    First stop: Criminal Justice. Sounded cool. Maybe I’d end up solving high-stakes crimes or unraveling some Kafkaesque legal conundrum. Instead, I found myself buried under a mountain of legalese so bloated with provisos, caveats, and contingencies that the independent clause was held hostage somewhere deep in the sentence, gasping for air. Every paragraph felt like a hostage negotiation with words like “notwithstanding” and “heretofore.” It drove me to the brink of syntactical madness.

    Next up: Sociology and Psychology—where common sense observations were drenched in enough self-important jargon to make a cult leader blush. Every sentence oozed the smug satisfaction of someone who thought they had just cracked the meaning of life. Instead of learning anything useful, I was forced to machete my way through a linguistic swamp of words like codependency, interconnectivity, dichotomy, marginalization, and facilitate. I clenched my body so tightly while reading these textbooks that I was convinced I would give myself a self-induced inguinal hernia.

    Desperate for clarity, I gave history a shot. But history textbooks—perhaps fearing the sheer tonnage of facts, dates, and places—responded by stripping the prose of all personality. No rhythm, no opinion, no soul—just a flatline of remedial drudgery. If legal writing was a labyrinth and psychology was a swamp, history was a beige waiting room with no exit.

    Then, an epiphany: I wasn’t rejecting these subjects—I was rejecting their horrendous writing.

    I craved something—something crisp, something electric, something that didn’t feel like linguistic waterboarding. That hunger led me, almost involuntarily, to the English major. There, for the first time, I met grammar—not as a dry set of rules, but as a cosmic force.

    Grammar wasn’t just necessary—it was alive. It was the invisible scaffolding that made human expression possible. It was breathing, movement, structure, music. I marveled at the fact that even small children, with no formal training, could construct intricate, nuanced sentences. This wasn’t just mechanics—this was the architecture of thought itself.

    When I thought of grammar, I didn’t think of dull worksheets. I saw rivulets flowing into streams, streams merging into great rivers, rivers pouring into the ocean. I saw harmony, inevitability, the relentless beauty of structure.

    So, in the end, it wasn’t a love of books or storytelling that made me an English major. It was the sheer, visceral disgust at bad writing that left me no other choice.

  • The Day I Failed the Ishihara Color Blindness Test

    The Day I Failed the Ishihara Color Blindness Test

    For years, I harbored a vague but nagging suspicion that peanut butter was green. Why? No clue—until 1971, when the grim truth revealed itself under the fluorescent doom of Independent Elementary’s nurse’s office.

    It was the day of the Ishihara Color Blindness Test, a supposedly routine exercise in humiliation where each fifth grader took turns peering into an illuminated contraption to identify numbers and shapes hidden in a field of colored dots. My classmates breezed through it like game show contestants, rattling off answers with the breezy confidence of children who’d never questioned their own eyesight.

    Then it was my turn.

    I stared into the glowing abyss. Saw nothing. Blinked. Still nothing.

    The nurse grew impatient. “Well? Can’t you see anything?”

    I could not.

    The room erupted in laughter. Congratulations—I was officially hopelessly color-blind, a medical outcast, a social leper. For the remainder of the morning, my classmates regarded me like a rare museum specimen. This boy thinks peanut butter is green. Proceed with caution.

    But fate, as it turns out, is not without a sense of humor.

    During lunch recess, the hierarchy of fifth-grade cruelty shifted. Kickball—a sport where raw physical dominance could overwrite even the most damning personal defect—offered me an unexpected shot at redemption. As the ball rolled toward me, I summoned the might of my tree-trunk leg, swung with the force of a caffeinated mule, and launched that red rubber sphere over everyone’s heads. It sailed past the outfield, past the schoolyard, and over the fence—finally splashing down into the backyard swimming pool of a bewildered suburbanite several blocks away.

    For a brief, glorious moment, I was no longer the kid who saw peanut butter in the wrong spectrum. I was a legend. The freakishly strong fifth grader with the foot of an Olympian and the trajectory of a human cannon.

    Lesson learned: You may be ridiculed for believing peanut butter is green, but if you channel your inner Herman Munster and kick a ball into another ZIP code, nobody gives a damn about your defective eyeballs. Heroism comes in many shades—even if you can’t see them.

  • The FOMO Frequency: How I Tried to Tune Back into Real Life

    The FOMO Frequency: How I Tried to Tune Back into Real Life

    As I clawed my way out of my addiction to writing doomed novels (which were really short stories in disguise), a strange thing happened: buried emotions clawed back. It wasn’t pleasant. It was like peeling off a bandage only to discover that underneath was raw, exposed nerve endings. Turns out, the grandiose fever dream of writing had insulated me from reality. Now, stripped of that delusion, I was left unprotected, vulnerable, and completely awake to the world.

    And the world, in 2025, was on fire.

    Literally. The Los Angeles wildfires turned the sky into an apocalyptic hellscape—a choking haze of smoke and fury. The inferno forced me into an act I hadn’t performed in years: I dusted off a radio and tuned into live news.

    That’s when I had two epiphanies.

    First, I realized I despise my streaming devices. Their algorithm-fed content is an endless conveyor belt of lukewarm leftovers, a numbing backdrop of curated noise that feels canned, impersonal, and utterly devoid of gezelligheid, a sense of shared enjoyment. Worst of all, streaming had turned me into a passive listener, a zombie locked inside a walled garden of predictability. I spent my days warning my college students about AI flattening human expression, yet here I was, letting an algorithm flatten my own relationship with music.

    But the moment I switched on the radio, its warmth hit me like an old friend I hadn’t seen in decades. A visceral ache spread through my chest as memories of radio’s golden spell came rushing back—memories of being nine years old, crawling into bed after watching Julia and The Flying Nun, slipping an earbud into my transistor radio, and being transported to another world.

    Tuned to KFRC 610 AM, I was no longer just a kid in the suburbs—I was part of something bigger. The shimmering sounds of Sly and the Family Stone’s “Hot Fun in the Summertime” or Tommy James and the Shondells’ “Crystal Blue Persuasion” weren’t just songs; they were shared experiences. Thousands of others were listening at that same moment, swaying to the same rhythms, caught in the same invisible current of sound.

    And then I realized—that connection was gone.

    The wildfires didn’t just incinerate acres of land; they exposed the gaping fault lines in my craving for something real. Nostalgia hit like a sucker punch, and before I knew it, I was tumbling down an online rabbit hole, obsessively researching high-performance radios, convinced that the right one could resurrect the magic of my youth.

    But was this really about better reception?

    Or was it just another pathetic attempt to outrun mortality?

    Streaming didn’t just change my relationship with music; it hollowed it out.

    I had been living in a frictionless digital utopia, where effort was obsolete and everything was available on demand—and I was miserable. Streaming devices optimized convenience at the cost of discovery, flattening music into algorithmic predictability, stripping it of its spontaneity, and reducing me to a passive consumer scrolling through pre-packaged soundscapes.

    It was ironic. I had let technology lull me into the very state of mediocrity I warned my students about.

    Kyle Chayka’s Flatworld spells out the horror in precise terms: when you optimize everything, you kill everything that makes life rich and rewarding. Just as Ozempic flattens hunger, technology flattens culture into a pre-digested slurry of lifeless efficiency.

    I didn’t need Flatworld to tell me this. I had lived it.

    The day I flipped on a real radio again, I didn’t just hear a broadcast—I heard my brain rebooting. The warmth, the spontaneity, the realness of people talking in real time—it was the sonic equivalent of quitting Soylent and biting into a perfectly seared ribeye.

    If Flatworld taught me anything, it’s that aliveness is exactly what convenience culture is designed to eradicate.

    Once I abandoned streaming, I filled every room in my house with a high-performance multiband radio. My love of music returned. A strange peace settled over me.

    The problem? My addictive personality latched onto radios with a zeal that bordered on the irrational.

    I began gazing at them with the kind of reverence normally reserved for religious icons. When I spotted a Tecsun PL-990, PL-880, PL-680, or PL-660, something in my brain short-circuited. I was instantly enchanted, as if I had just glimpsed an old friend across a crowded room. At the same time, I was comforted, as if that friend had handed me a warm cup of coffee and told me everything was going to be alright.

    But a radio isn’t just a device. It’s a symbol, though I’m still working out of what exactly.

    Maybe it represents the lost art of slowing down—of sitting in a quiet room, wrapped in a cocoon of music or familiar voices. Or maybe it’s something deeper, a sanctuary against the relentless noise of modern life, a frequency through which I can tune out the profane and tune into something sacred.

    The word that comes to mind when I hold a radio is cozy—but not in the scented-candle, novelty-mug kind of way. This is something deeper, something akin to the Dutch word gezelligheid—a feeling of warmth, belonging, and ineffable connection to the present moment.

    Radios don’t just play sound; they create atmosphere. They transport me back to Hollywood, Florida, sitting on the porch with my grandfather, the air thick with the scent of an impending tropical storm, the crackle of a ball game playing in the background like the heartbeat of another era.

    That’s the thing about gezelligheid—it isn’t something you can program into an algorithm. It isn’t something you can optimize. It’s a byproduct of presence, community, and shared experience—the very things convenience culture erodes.

    Many have abandoned radio for the cold efficiency of streaming and smartphones.

    I tried to do the same for over a decade.

    I failed.

    Because some things, no matter how old-fashioned, still hum with life.

    And maybe that’s what replacing streaming devices with radios is about—not just recovering from my addiction to writing abysmal novels, but recovering life itself from the grip of Flatworld.

  • Magical Thinking #7: The Laws of Time Don’t Apply to Me

    Magical Thinking #7: The Laws of Time Don’t Apply to Me

    (or, The Fool’s Gamble Against Father Time)

    There’s a special kind of delusion that whispers in our ears: You’re different. You’re special. The rules don’t apply to you. Other people? Sure, they age, they lose opportunities, they watch time slip through their fingers. But you—you will defy time. You will live in a perpetual Now, a beautiful, untouchable bubble where youth, dreams, and endless possibility never fade.

    Phil Stutz has a name for the figure who shatters this illusion: Father Time—that grizzled old man with the hourglass, reminding us that our only real power lies in discipline, structure, and engagement with reality. Ignore him at your peril, because his wrath is merciless. Just ask Dexter Green, the tragic dreamer of Winter Dreams, who spends his life avoiding reality, chasing pleasure, and worshiping an illusion named Judy Jones.

    Dexter believes he can live outside the real world, feeding off the fantasy of Judy rather than engaging with anything substantial. And for a while, this works. But Father Time is patient, and when Dexter finally wakes up, it’s too late.

    Time Will Have Its Revenge

    At thirty-two, long past his days of chasing the unattainable Judy, Dexter sits in a business meeting with a man named Devlin—a conversation that will destroy his last illusions.

    Devlin delivers the blow: Judy is married now. Her name is Judy Simms, and her once dazzling, untouchable existence has collapsed into something horrifyingly mundane. Her husband is a drunk, an abuser, a tyrant. She is trapped in a miserable marriage to a man who beats her, then gets forgiven every time.

    The once invincible, radiant Judy Jones, breaker of hearts, goddess of his dreams, is now an exhausted, aging housewife living under the rule of a man who treats her like dirt.

    And just like that, Dexter’s winter dream crumbles into dust.

    The Ultimate Betrayal: Time Wins, Beauty Fades, Illusions Die

    The final insult comes when Devlin, with casual indifference, describes Judy as not all that special anymore—her once-mesmerizing beauty faded, her magic gone.

    “She was a pretty girl when she first came to Detroit,” he says, as if commenting on an old piece of furniture.

    For Dexter, this is not just a shock—it is the ultimate existential gut-punch.

    For two decades, he has nourished his soul on the fantasy of Judy Jones, believing that she was something otherworldly, untouchable, worth sacrificing real life for. Now, in a single afternoon, he learns she was never a goddess, never unique, never even particularly remarkable.

    Imagine having a high school crush, the Homecoming Queen, frozen in your memory as perfection itself. Then one day, you look her up on Facebook and she looks like Meat Loaf. That’s Dexter’s moment of reckoning.

    His fantasy was never real. His youth is gone. His life has been wasted chasing an illusion. And now, standing in the wreckage, he feels the full force of Father Time’s judgment.

    The “Butt on a Stick” Moment

    In America, we have a phrase for the soul-crushing moment when reality smacks you so hard you can’t even breathe:

    “Your butt has been handed to you on a stick.”

    Dexter’s life has collapsed in on itself, and his first instinct is the same as anyone caught in the throes of devastation: This shouldn’t be happening to me.

    But as Phil Stutz warns, that thought is pure insanity.

    It is happening. It already happened. The more you protest, the more stuck you become. Stutz calls this victim mentality, the psychological quicksand that keeps people from ever moving forward. Dexter has two choices:

    1. Wallow in his misery, trapped in the wreckage of his illusions.
    2. Learn from his suffering and use it as a tool for transformation.

    Breaking Free from the Winter Dream

    And here’s where things get interesting: now that Dexter’s fantasy has been obliterated, he is free.

    Yes, the truth is bitter. Yes, he wasted years chasing a ghost. But he is no longer chained to the illusion. The question now is: What does he do with that freedom?

    Does he just find another “winter dream” to chase, another illusion to waste his life on? Or does he finally grow up and engage with reality?

    What Would Phil Stutz Tell Dexter?

    Stutz, co-author of The Tools, has a philosophy: Pain is a tool, not a punishment.

    Most people, like Dexter, already know their problems. They just don’t know how to stop repeating them.

    • Dexter knows he was obsessed with Judy Jones.
    • Watch collectors know they keep rebuying the same watches they swore they’d never buy again.
    • Food addicts know they shouldn’t be devouring that entire pizza at 11 p.m.

    But knowing isn’t enough. You need tools to fight your worst instincts.

    The Tools: How to Stop Wasting Your Life

    Stutz realized that traditional therapy was useless—all it did was force people to dig deeper into their childhood wounds without ever giving them real solutions.

    So he created The Tools—specific actions that force people to break free from their psychological traps.

    Stutz doesn’t waste time on introspection without action. He knows that change happens when you move, engage, and disrupt your patterns.

    • Stop trying to “think” your way out of your misery. Take action.
    • Stop believing your problems are unique. They aren’t.
    • Stop assuming time will wait for you. It won’t.

    Part X: The Enemy Inside Your Head

    The biggest enemy to change is what Stutz calls Part X—the part of you that wants to stay stuck, wants to keep wallowing in old habits, wants to keep clinging to comforting fantasies instead of engaging with reality.

    And if you don’t fight Part X, you’ll waste your life exactly like Dexter did.

    Final Lesson: Get Out of the Maze

    If Dexter keeps fixating on his past, he will stay lost in the Maze—that endless loop of regret, nostalgia, and what-ifs that locks people in place while the world moves on without them.

    If he accepts reality, uses his pain as a tool, and engages with life, then he has a chance at something real.

    Because here’s the truth:

    Father Time will take everything from you—except the lessons you learn and the actions you take.

    Use them, or lose everything.

  • Magical Thinking #2: If You Fantasize Hard Enough, Reality Will Magically Obey

    Magical Thinking #2: If You Fantasize Hard Enough, Reality Will Magically Obey

    (or, The Art of Procrastinating in Style)

    One of the great lies we tell ourselves is that thinking about something long enough is basically the same as doing it. This is a core tenet of magical thinking—the belief that if you mentally marinate in a fantasy long enough, the sheer force of your yearning will bend the universe to your will.

    It won’t.

    Take, for example, the 10-year hostage situation between me and a pair of skinny jeans. For a full decade, those pants lurked in my closet, whispering false hope: One day, you’ll fit into us. Just wait. And so I did. I waited. I waited through countless failed diets, through the betrayal of metabolism, through years of magical thinking that the mere presence of those jeans in my home would, somehow, sculpt my body into compliance.

    Eventually, I accepted the truth: those jeans weren’t a beacon of future success—they were a fabric monument to my delusion. I finally threw them away, but not before they had spent ten years mocking me from the hanger.

    This same delusion infects all sorts of people in all sorts of ways.

    • A man keeps a fisherman’s hat tucked away in a drawer, convinced that someday he’ll own a boat, sail through the Caribbean, and live off the sea. Never mind that he gets seasick on ferries and can’t tell port from starboard. The hat is proof of intent, and that’s enough—for now.
    • A woman buys an aspirational vegan cookbook, proudly displaying it on her shelf. She has never gone a single day without cheese, but surely, just owning the book puts her on the path to righteousness.
    • I strap a big, chunky superhero-esque watch to my wrist, as if its sheer presence will one day grant me the power to save myself. It won’t. It just makes my wrist hurt.

    Magical thinking is the art of replacing action with aesthetics. It’s an elegant way to do nothing while convincing yourself you’re making progress. And it works—right up until the moment reality finally calls your bluff.

  • Claustrophobia Reveals Your True Soul to the World

    Claustrophobia Reveals Your True Soul to the World

    There are many ways to expose your raw, unfiltered self to the world. Some people achieve this through a near-death experience, a public meltdown, or a bout of food poisoning on an international flight. For me, claustrophobia is the great revealer, an unrelenting force that strips away every ounce of composure and leaves me flailing like a man trapped in quicksand. It doesn’t matter if I’m in a dentist’s chair or strapped into a sadistic amusement park ride—when the walls start closing in, I become the star of my own public humiliation showcase.

    The first great revelation of my soul came at Universal Studios, where I made the tragic miscalculation of sacrificing my personal comfort for my wife and twin daughters. A father’s love is boundless, but so, unfortunately, was my terror. The very air of the place reeked of Las Vegas grift, stale churros, and desperate cash grabs. Every corner had some overenthusiastic performer in mothball-scented epaulets or a handlebar-mustached imposter butchering a French accent for a paycheck. But nothing could have prepared me for the medieval horror that awaited on the Harry Potter Forbidden Journey ride.

    After standing in line for an eternity, I found myself wedged into an airplane seat designed for a malnourished Victorian child. A heavy metal harness slammed down on my 52-inch chest like a bear trap, and within seconds, my body entered full-blown rebellion mode. My lungs went on strike, my heart pounded out an emergency evacuation order, and my brain whispered, You are about to die in the most embarrassing way possible. As the conveyor belt dragged me toward a dark, swirling vortex of Hogwarts-themed doom, I did what any reasonable person would do—I began screaming like a man being lowered into a pit of snakes.

    “STOP THE RIDE! I’M HAVING A HEART ATTACK!” I wailed, flailing like an air dancer outside a used car lot.

    At first, no one in charge seemed to care, but the fellow prisoners trapped beside me picked up on my panic and began chanting my cause like a medieval mob: “STOP THE RIDE! STOP THE RIDE!” Finally, a burly security officer in an FBI-grade sport coat emerged, walkie-talkie in hand, and surveyed my meltdown with the practiced patience of a man who had seen worse. I looked up at him, sheepish and sweaty, and asked, “Do you need to take me to a debriefing room?” He chuckled, helped me out of my restraints, and sent me shuffling out of Universal Studios, a broken man.

    But the universe was not done exposing my fragility.

    The Dentist’s Chair: A Torture Chamber Disguised as Healthcare

    Around the same time as the Universal Studios fiasco, I had a similarly catastrophic loss of dignity at Dr. Howard Chen’s dental office. The appointment started out fine—numbing shots, ear-splitting drills, the usual dance with mortality. But then the bite block came out. For those blissfully unaware, a bite block is a rubber wedge designed to keep your mouth open during dental procedures, but in my case, it may as well have been a medieval jaw clamp designed by Torquemada himself.

    The second it locked my mouth open, my brain fired off the same claustrophobic distress signal as it had on the Harry Potter ride. I couldn’t swallow, which meant I couldn’t breathe, which meant I was about to die, right there, in a flannel shirt, under a fluorescent light, to the soft rock stylings of The Carpenters.

    Before I could stop myself, I ripped off my shirt, launched myself out of the dental chair, and began gasping like a shipwreck survivor.

    “Are you going to be okay, Jeff?” Dr. Chen asked, his voice dripping with the calm patience of a man who has dealt with neurotics before.

    “I CAN’T HAVE THIS RUBBER THING IN MY MOUTH,” I announced, holding the bite block aloft like a relic from an exorcism.

    Dr. Chen nodded, his eyes a mix of concern and professional detachment. “Okay, we’ll do it without the bite block.” He gestured toward the chair. “Go ahead and sit back down.”

    I obeyed, heart pounding, and the rest of the drilling continued without further catastrophe. But the damage to my dignity was irreversible.

    Sensory Hell: The Dentist’s Office Smells Like Death

    The claustrophobia is bad enough, but what really pushes me over the edge is that I am what some might call a “super smeller.” Lying in the dental chair, I am forced to marinate in an unholy stew of:

    • Clove oil
    • Formaldehyde
    • Acrylic
    • Glutaraldehyde
    • Latex gloves
    • The lingering decay of other patients’ tooth dust

    It is the aroma of death itself. I am not a dental patient—I am a cadaver in the early stages of embalming.

    And while I fight off nausea, my mind spirals into a full existential crisis. Something about lying prone, mouth pried open, surgical tools scraping at my enamel, makes me contemplate my soul more than any other moment in my life. The sheer vulnerability of the position mimics some prelude to the afterlife, and I am left with only my own morbid thoughts for company.

    Morbidity Hits Different with 1970s Soft Rock

    As if my anxiety needed any further provocation, Dr. Chen’s office plays 1970s easy listening on a continuous loop. The Carpenters, Neil Diamond, John Denver—songs that transport me straight back to my early years as a melancholic prepubescent. Suddenly, I am ten years old again, scribbling dramatic diary entries about my unrequited love for Patty Wilson, the rosy-cheeked blonde girl from fourth grade who never knew I existed.

    But before I can fully dissolve into a puddle of nostalgic despair, Dr. Chen interrupts.

    “You’re brushing too hard,” he warns. “You’re murdering your gum line.”

    “But I don’t trust the Sonicare to do the job!” I protest.

    “You need to have faith in the Sonicare, Jeff.”

    “But I am a man of doubt.”

    Dr. Chen sighs, shaking his head. “I can see that.”

    Final Humiliation: The Dentist Knows I’m Crazy

    During my latest visit, he threw a new horror into the mix: the possibility of a root canal.

    “What can I do to avoid it?” I asked, racked with dread.

    “Relax, Jeff,” he said. “All this stress is hurting your immune system. You need a strong immune system to fight decay.”

    Great. Now I have to worry about stress-induced tooth rot.

    As I staggered out of the office, I nearly reversed into an angry SUV driver, who honked with the force of a nuclear siren. But what truly shattered me was the sight of Dr. Chen, peering through his office window, watching the entire debacle unfold.

    And in that moment, as our eyes met, I knew—I was, without a doubt, the most unhinged patient he had ever seen. There would be no coming back from this.

    Claustrophobia, once again, had revealed my true soul to the world.

  • Bill Burr’s Drop Dead Years: Rage, Reflection, and the Long Road to Emotional Literacy

    Bill Burr’s Drop Dead Years: Rage, Reflection, and the Long Road to Emotional Literacy

    At 56 years old, Bill Burr strides onto the stage looking like a man who hasn’t just survived middle age but has trained for it—lean, sharp, and decked out in a blue sweatshirt, jeans, and sneakers, the unofficial uniform of a guy who’s seen some things but hasn’t yet gone full sweatpants. His latest special, Drop Dead Years (streaming on Hulu), finds him at a crossroads: He’s entered the danger zone—the phase of life where men his age can drop dead at any second. And so, standing before a Seattle crowd, a city he awards first prize in rain-soaked despair, he does what any man staring down mortality would do—he takes stock of his life.

    Burr has baggage, and he knows it. Anger issues? Check. Outdated, offensive language? His wife is on him about it. Emotionally repressed male conditioning? Oh, absolutely. For decades, he’s kept his demons on a leash by staying busy, but when the work stops, his personal hellscape begins. He decides to test a theory: After returning from a tour, instead of distracting himself with projects, he sits in a corner, stares at the TV, and marinates in his own misery. His wife, alarmed, asks if he’s okay. For the first time in his life, he admits the truth: I’m sad. A historic moment for a man raised on the doctrine of shut up and push through.

    But does Burr actually offer any solutions for his emotional demolition derby? Not really—at least not in the special. While he drops breadcrumbs in radio interviews about his self-improvement quest, including the occasional reference to psilocybin therapy, the special mostly stays in the realm of self-awareness rather than self-help. And don’t worry—the fangs are still sharp. Burr unloads on racist conservatives and hypocritical, self-congratulatory liberals with equal fervor, and despite the obvious political leanings of his Seattle audience, no one seems too offended. Maybe that’s part of Burr’s charm—he’s an equal-opportunity agitator, and the crowd knows they’re getting a sermon with a punchline, not a TED Talk.

    Here’s the thing: While I love Burr, I found Drop Dead Years a little… safe. The premise—that wisdom comes with age, that unchecked emotions can consume us, and that kindness and patience improve relationships—is undeniably true but hardly groundbreaking. The performance is solid, his honesty is refreshing, and his intelligence undeniable, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that he was more compelling when I heard him on Terry Gross’ Fresh Air a couple of weeks earlier. There, in a rare good-natured sparring match with the NPR icon, Burr revealed more of himself—and in funnier ways—than he did in his actual special.

    That said, Bill Burr is always worth watching. Even when he’s not at his absolute peak, he’s still one of the sharpest, most brutally honest voices in comedy. So, do I recommend Drop Dead Years? Absolutely. But if you want peak Burr, you might want to queue up that Fresh Air interview right after.