Cinemorphosis

Tag: writing

  • The Pitt: A Baptism by Fire in Plato’s Cave

    The Pitt: A Baptism by Fire in Plato’s Cave

    The Pitt is less a hospital drama and more a relentless, fluorescent-lit purgatory where bodies materialize and vanish like restless spirits. It is Plato’s Cave with a heart monitor, a place where suffering is both immediate and endless, and where every decision carries the weight of life and death. At the center of this beautiful chaos stands Robby, played with raw, bruising complexity by Noah Wyle. Robby doesn’t just run the ER—he absorbs it. His darting, anxious eyes scan the ward like a battlefield general, cataloging the wounded, the dying, and the barely surviving.

    Robby is an enigma—both maternal and paternal, a protector and a disciplinarian. His underlings fear and revere him in equal measure. His bedside manner shifts unpredictably: one moment a wellspring of compassion, the next a storm of exasperation. He can soothe, scold, or shatter, but his presence is undeniable. At times, he seems on the verge of simultaneously breaking down, lashing out, and achieving enlightenment. He is less of a boss and more of a priest, a confessor of secrets, a reluctant oracle whose wisdom carries the weight of his own flaws. In a world where suffering is currency, his counsel is invaluable precisely because he is not perfect—he is simply the one who endures.

    At the heart of The Pitt is fatigue—not just the bone-deep exhaustion of long shifts and too many bodies, but the existential fatigue of staring into a bottomless abyss of suffering and death. How does Robby keep going? How does he drag himself out of the wreckage of his own depletion and continue to fight for those who can’t fight for themselves? He is not just the hospital’s flawed hero—he is its high priest, a force of nature holding together new doctors, overwhelmed nurses, and the terrified patients who see him as their last hope.

    But The Pitt doesn’t just immerse us in Robby’s world—it traps us inside it. Like the flickering shadows in Plato’s Cave, the hospital’s chaos and claustrophobia force us to confront the very nature of entertainment. Watching the ER through Robby’s weary, battle-worn eyes becomes more than just storytelling—it is a disorienting reminder of how fragile, how fleeting, and how utterly real the world outside the screen truly is.

  • I Was the Worst College Student Ever

    I Was the Worst College Student Ever

    I was the worst college student ever. But before we get to that, let’s start at the beginning. I attended the university in the fall of 1979. I was seventeen. I was an Olympic Weightlifting champion and a competitive bodybuilder with aspirations of going big–winning the Mr. Universe and Mr. Olympia titles and leveraging my fame to open a gym in the Bahamas. My goals were as clear as they were simple: I would have a beautiful body and my work environment would optimize my ability to maintain my beautiful body. As an added perk, I was comforted by the thought that living in the tropics would ensure that I would never have to wear clothes, only Speedos. Clothes made me so claustrophobic that the first thing I wanted to do after getting dressed was to rip my clothes off. The solution? Spend the rest of my life on an island in bodybuilder briefs with tanning oil slathered all over my shaved body. 

    Whenever I’d share my dream with my recently-divorced mother, she would say, “Don’t be a nincompoop. You can’t isolate yourself from the world on some tropical island.”

    And I’d say, “Don’t worry, Mom. I’ll be well connected. I’ll invite my friends–Frank Zane, Tom Platz, Robbie Robinson, Kalman Szkalak, Danny Padilla, Ron Teufel, Pete Grymkowski, and Rudy Hermosillo–to hang out with me. I’ll give them pineapple protein shakes and tell them how bodybuilding became a catalyst for my personal metamorphosis.”

    “You sound ridiculous. For one thing, those aren’t your friends. They’re from your muscle magazines. I’m not stupid.”

    Contradicting the stereotype of being a musclehead, I got straight As in high school, but my high school, like most public schools, was dumbed down to the point that getting a 4.0 GPA was meaningless. One of my classes, for example,  was called “Money Matters.” We learned how to balance a checkbook and plan a budget so that we were saving more than we were spending. At best, you’re looking at first-grade math, a workbook full of simple percentages and fractions. Busy work like this was proof that our school didn’t want to educate us so much as keep us contained all day in an institution so our parents could take a breather from us. Public schools were part of society’s unwritten social contract with adults. Send your children to our schools so you can work enough to live in the suburbs and get a break from the headaches of parenting.

    Another class was called “Popular Lit.” There were no lectures or tests. For the semester, we read any three books we wanted from the library and wrote three one-page book reports. You didn’t have to read the book. You could present chicken scratch on the book report form or make up some crazy dream you had. It didn’t matter. As long as you turned in the book report, you got an A. The teacher was a woman in her sixties who seemed determined to never engage with us. She told us to do “quiet reading” while she sat at her desk reading magazines, paying her bills, and clipping her fingernails. She was ghoulishly pale, she had long, uncombed dyed black hair, overly dark lipstick, and puffy bags under her eyes. No matter the weather, she wore wool coats that smelled of old sweat and bodily decay. Had you not told me she was a teacher, I would have assumed she was a homeless person scavenging the school for discarded cafeteria food from the high school’s trash cans.

    My classes were so dumb I felt like I was in continuation school for juvenile delinquents. Clearly, the teachers weren’t preparing us to become members of the professional class. They wanted us to learn to follow rules so we’d stay out of prison and be satisfied with a blue-collar job or some minimum-wage gig in the service industry. As I heard one teacher say out of the side of his mouth in the corridor to one of his colleagues: “We’re training them to become burger-flippers.”

    The teachers’ contempt for us and their pessimistic belief that only a small remnant of us would attend college meant nothing to me because college was not part of my master plan. Becoming an international bodybuilding sensation and operating a lucrative health club in the Bahamas was. 

    Signs of my imminent success were abundant. Not only was my muscular physique well developed for a seventeen-year-old, but I also had extraordinary networking skills that spoke well of my future business prospects. For example, at The Weight Room in Hayward, I was working out with NFL defensive end star John Matusak who had taken a liking to me. Between sets of bench presses, T-Bar rows, and seated behind-the-neck presses, we would sing along with the songs blaring from the gym’s radio. Watching the Tooz and I sing along with Nicollette Larson doing a cover of Neil Simon’s “Lotta Love” was a sight to behold. People spoke of the defensive end’s ill temper, but when Matusak and I trained, it was a constant Kumbaya moment. 

     You may have seen Matuszak on TV many times, but that would not have prepared you for what you would have seen in person. He was close to seven feet and 300 pounds. His long limbs made him appear slender yet huge at the same time. He had a beard, wild long hair, and the predatory eyes of a hawk. 

    One afternoon, Matuszak was sitting on the bench while the gym’s speakers played England Dan and John Ford Coley’s “Love Is the Answer.” Matuszak seemed offended by the song’s sentimentality. He curled his lips, looked at me, and said, “Bullshit,” before proceeding to rep 400 pounds while repeating his curse as if energized by it.

    In addition to networking with Matuszak, I established a strong bond with fitness salesman and local legend Joe Corsi. In addition to being the number-one salesman of bodybuilding supplements and fitness equipment in the San Francisco East Bay, Corsi had appeared with Arnold Schwarzenegger on an episode of Streets of San Francisco. Corsi’s fitness store was next to The Weight Room and he would often stop by to pay his respects to me. He was in his late sixties. He wore a black single-piece Jack Lalanne-style jumpsuit with no sleeves and a gold zipper, unzipped to reveal his black hairy chest. His biceps were full, round, and veiny for a man his age though showing a bit of sagginess. His hair was dyed jet black. His eyebrows were black, thick, and shiny. His overall appearance was that of a former bodybuilder who had aged into a geriatric Dracula. Whenever he saw me training with the Tooz at the gym, he praised my amazing potential, said I had exceptional physical structure, and was a young man who clearly had the drive to become a world champion. I imagined it would not be long before Corsi would sponsor me the way Joe Weider sponsored Arnold Schwarzenegger. Soon, Corsi would have his people deliver an array of supplements, protein powders, and butcher-paper-wrapped T-bone steaks to my front door. When that happened, my mother would know that I wasn’t joking about becoming a professional bodybuilder for whom going to college was a big waste of time. 

    After I graduated high school, my mom bugged me every day about what I was going to do with my future. I told her I had a clear plan and that Joe Corsi would be my sponsor. She’d say, “This morning I got up, opened the front door to get the newspaper and I didn’t see a bunch of T-bone steaks on the front porch. You sure you’ve got a lock on this?”

    In August, I came home one afternoon from my workout. I entered the  kitchen and saw on the counter a yellow, slimy chicken. The plucked bird looked forlorn, a leper sulking on the cutting board. Mother was standing next to the chicken holding a cleaver. She scowled at the chicken like it was an adversary that needed to be put in its place. 

    “You need to learn to clean out this chicken,” she said, puffing on a cigarette.

    “I don’t want to touch it. It’s disgusting.”

    “You better learn to handle a raw chicken. Otherwise, you’ll never be able to achieve intimacy with a woman.”

    “That’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever heard, Mother.” 

    “You can worry about that later. Have you made plans for the fall?”

    “What do you mean?”

    “College. I’m thinking that’s your best option.”

    I stormed out of the kitchen, walked into my room, turned on my clock radio full blast to the rock station, KYA-FM, and did some finishing-touch dumbbell curls.  Listening to Roxy Music’s “Love Is the Drug,” I visualized myself being a world-famous bodybuilder living on a tropical island and drinking mango juice from halved coconuts while surrounded by hordes of beautiful women helplessly drawn to my masculine allure. 

    I was bathed in sweat when Mother walked into the room with an envelope. 

    “Your high school counselor sent you something. I think you should open it.”

    She tossed the letter on my bed. I wiped off my sweat and tore open the letter. My counselor Mrs. Toscher congratulated me for my 4.0 GPA during my senior year and said it was a certainty that I could attend one of the local Cal States. I told Mother and she said, “Unless you’ve got other options, this is all you got.”

    “What about Joe Corsi?”

    “What about him?”

    “He could be my ticket to bodybuilding greatness.”

    “Unless you’ve got something in writing, you’ve got nothing.”

    I figured I had one last chance with Corsi. The next day after my workout with Matusak, I paid Corsi a visit at his fitness store. He was sitting at his desk when I approached him. 

    “I hear you offer professional guidance to up-and-coming bodybuilders,” I said.

    “Yes, I offer the best supplements in Northern California. I’ve got everything you need.”

    “I’m only seventeen and I’ve come a long way.”

    “You’re big for your age.”

    “When Arnold Schwarzenegger moved from Austria to America, Joe Weider promoted him. They essentially made each other famous.”

    “Yes, it’s a great story. I know both of them, by the way. Great guys.”

    “Well, that’s where you come in. I’m available for promotion.”

    “I see. I’ll tell you what I can do. Young man, do you have a valid California driver’s license?”

    I nodded.

    “Excellent. Here’s the deal. My brother Louie runs a meat business. Best cuts of meat you can get. Steaks, ground sirloin, turkey legs, Cornish game hens, prime rib, all-beef hot dogs. He even sells Philadelphia cheesecake, a big hit with customers. You sell them door to door, and you typically get a fifteen percent commission, but because you know me and because I want to support the local bodybuilding community, I’ll have Louie jack up your commission to twenty percent. I can say with the utmost confidence that if you show some hustle, you’ll pocket close to five hundred a week. You’ll have all the money you need for supplements and then some.”

    “That’s a lot of money,” I said.

    “Yes, but bear in mind, you’ll have to pay for the meat up front. But with profits being what they are, you’ll double your money in a week.”

    “Did you say upfront costs?” 

    “You’ll need to come up with a grand to get into this opportunity. But because I like you, I may be able to talk Louie down to seven hundred. Mind you, he’s providing the van and the meat freezers.” Corsi leaned toward me and whispered, “I’d essentially be helping you to steal my brother’s money, but, hey, you’re young. I’d like to lend a helping hand.”

    “I’ll have to think about it.”

    “Let me know soon. My brother is interviewing several people who already have sales experience. This opportunity isn’t going to last much longer. And remember, everyone eats meat. Everyone loves barbecue. This is an opportunity of a lifetime.”

    As I drove home, I was thinking that going to college would be less taxing physically and less of a financial burden than selling butchered meats door to door. The cost of attending college at Cal State in 1979 was seventy-eight dollars a quarter. That was far cheaper than paying Joe Corsi’s brother a minimum of seven hundred dollars. In addition, I could use my title as a “college student” as a front while I continued my bodybuilding. Going to college would essentially be a delay tactic I could use until I achieved bodybuilding greatness. I would capitulate to Mother’s demand to attend college, but I knew I didn’t belong there. I knew I would be the worst college student ever. 

    I was a terrible student in part because I could not regardless of their achievements admire my professors. I envied them because they were so educated and appeared to have everything I didn’t. They had impressive credentials, world travels, including African safaris, to provide scintillating stories while lecturing; nice clothes, not store-bought but made by celebrity tailors; a well-curated persona enhanced by professional voice lessons; an impressive zip code that made them neighbors of politicians and socialites; membership to various tennis, bird-watching, and yoga clubs and intellectual committees; literacy in multiple languages, mastery of at least three musical instruments, and fluency in gourmet cooking. During lectures, they talked about how they prepared extravagant meals that required lemon zest, capers, and ice baths, and they beamed with pride as they rhapsodized over the pleasures of making homemade puttanesca. I had never met a group of people from one profession who were so in love with themselves. 

    My Ethics professor, who was also the Dean of Philosophy, had recently dumped his wife for his young secretary. He seemed rather oblivious to the rich irony of his life choices and rode his Porsche convertible over the faculty parking lot, apparently unaware of the way his toupee would flop off his bald head like a flying squirrel every time his Porsche caromed over a speed bump. A lack of self-awareness seemed to serve my Ethics professor rather well. I despised him. 

    My bitter envy for my professors was only matched by my spectacular ignorance. I was deemed so illiterate that the university was not content with demoting me from Freshman Composition class into the remedial class, more commonly referred to at the time as Bonehead English. To let me know my place in this world, the university made it clear that even Bonehead English was too advanced for a pariah like myself. I was quickly demoted from Bonehead and placed in the Pre-Bonehead class, a level held in such contempt that the classroom was in the Humanities Building basement next to the boiler room. Broad-shouldered maintenance men wearing denim overalls would frequently peek into the room and cackle at us for being at a level of remediation that was such an embarrassment as to be the equivalent of leprosy. 

    Being envious of my professors and feeling like a college outcast, I was in a constant state of depression and demoralization. This did not bode well as a predictor for my academic success. To add another nail to my coffin, I may have just been plain stupid. I was stupid to judge my professors for having everything I lacked. Had I been smart, I would have humbled myself before them and looked at them as role models so that someday with lots of hard work I would become just like them. I was also stupid for feeling insulted for being placed in the Pre-Bonehead English class. Had I been smart, I would have been grateful for the fact that the university had provided resources for hopeless cases like mine rather than expel me from the university altogether. 

    There were also signs that I was stupid, not just on an academic level but in terms of lacking common sense and what would later be known as “emotional intelligence.” A case in point is that during my first two years of college, there was a lot of distressing news about AIDS and its devastation throughout the world. As a straight person who had not yet entered the world of dating and romance, I was not exactly what you would call high-risk, but that did not stop me from being terrified of getting AIDS. One afternoon, a neighbor’s Siberian Husky greeted me by licking me all over my face and I remember the dog’s wet tongue brushing over my lips. Could I get AIDS from a dog’s kiss? For several days, I couldn’t get the thought out of my mind. Then a week later, KGO Talk Radio had a segment in which a doctor would answer callers’ questions about AIDS. I think I was the first caller. I told the doctor about my neighbor’s dog kissing me on the lips. Was I in danger of getting AIDS? In a very sweet voice, the doctor told me that I was completely safe and that I could kiss dogs to my heart’s content. 

    After the call, I stood in the kitchen almost in tears with a great sense of relief. But then shortly after, my mother came out of her bedroom and said, “Was that you on the radio?”

    I nodded.

    She said, “You thought a dog licking your face could give you AIDS? You need to cool it, buster.”

    Hearing my mother admonish me allowed me at that moment to see how hopelessly stupid I was. I couldn’t believe I had survived so long on this planet. I couldn’t believe I had gotten accepted into a university. Clearly, I was on my way to becoming the worst college student ever. 

    My failings as a college student were rooted in part in my inability to find a major, and my indecision made me miserable. I took a criminal justice class, but the books were mired in lawyer-speak. As a result, the sentences were larded with provisos, caveats, and contingencies reflected in elongated sentences in which I had to wade through several dependent clauses before I reached the independent clause. These sentences were so tedious and convoluted that I felt I had to go through the obstacle course on American Gladiators before I got to the sentence’s main idea. This drove me into a state of madness.

    Then I tried sociology and psychology, but the books were immersed in self-satisfied academic jargon in which self-evident observations were made to look sophisticated and authoritative by virtue of the indecipherable, pretentious and self-indulgent verbiage. Being forced to read these textbooks, I imagined brandishing a machete and slashing through a jungle thick with words like positivity, codependency, external validation, inner child, interconnectivity, facilitate, mindset, marginalization, multi-faceted, dichotomy, and contemporaneously. Hacking my way through this forest of phony language made me tighten my body with so much hostility that I feared I would suffer a self-induced inguinal hernia. 

    Then I gave history a crack. The sheer volume of facts, dates, and places seemed to have compelled the authors to write in a mundane, almost remedial prose style with no distinctive point of view. The result was that I was bored out of my mind. 

    Oceanography was mildly interesting; however, the oceanography professor seemed to have a pathological fixation on the words “denitrification,” “liminal zone,” and “viscosity” so that it reached the point that every time he repeated those words I would skyrocket off my seat like a lab rat receiving an electrical shock. 

    Accounting was even worse. On the first day, the professor bombarded us with algebraic equations, the Index Matrix, the Nullspace, and homogeneous linear systems. Within ten minutes, I made an exit for the door. The professor asked me my name.

    “That won’t be necessary,” I said at the doorway. “You’ll never see me again.”

    In my first year of college, I dropped accounting, criminal justice, and sociology. I also failed a remedial algebra class. In the late spring of my first year, the university sent me a letter explaining that I was officially on academic probation. I could not drop any more classes and I would need to improve my GPA. Otherwise, I would be expelled.

    For me, the letter was more than just a warning. It was an indictment of my entire existence. You hear about struggling writers bearing the repeated pain of rejection slips as they are told their stories and books cannot be, for a variety of reasons, published. The academic letter of probation was a sort of rejection slip, but not for something I had produced. Rather, it was a censure against me as a dysfunctional human being. The university had handed me my ass on a stick. 

    In moments of hitting rock bottom, we must find some kind of strategy or other to climb out of our hole, but my prospects were bleak. I had no college major, no purpose, and no self-confidence. I wasn’t making any money as a bodybuilder. I did not have any romances on the horizon so I could not be energized by the hope of be transformed by the powers of love. I was a young man who, having nothing, was eager for a quick solution. I found myself grasping for straws. I could get a tech degree in refrigeration, become a piano mover, or join the military. There was also a guy at the gym whom we jokingly referred to as The Garbologist who said he could get me a job as a garbage man. The way he described the job to me, working from 5 to 10:30 in the morning, becoming a garbage man seemed like my best bet. 

    I was eager to tell my father about my new plan. He had moved into an apartment about a half-hour away from our home since the divorce, and once a month he’d pick me up, take me to his apartment, and make me a barbecued steak dinner. One evening, we were eating on his patio, and he asked me how I was doing in college. I told him about the probation letter and my lack of interest in higher education. What I wanted was a job that paid well and had good hours so I’d have time to go to the gym.  I had made friends at the gym who worked in sanitation, and one guy said he could get me full-time work as a sanitation engineer.

    My father laughed at me and said, “You can’t be a garbage man.”

    “Why not?”

    “Because you’re too vain.”

    “What’s that supposed to mean?”

    “Imagine this. You’re at a cocktail party and everyone is introducing themselves. Doctor, engineer, lawyer, computer programmer, business executive. Then they get to you. You’re going to tell them you’re a garbage man? Bullshit.”

    “I’m vain?”

    “Of course you are. I’ve never seen a kid check himself out in the mirror as often as you do.”

    “Oh my God, I’m driven by vanity and social status.”

    “You’re finally waking up to the obvious. Now finish your steak and make things right with your college before they expel you.”

    Driving home, it occurred to me that I had rejected criminal justice, sociology, psychology, and history because the books I had to read in those classes were so poorly written that they offended me. It occurred to me that I hungered for a certain quality of writing and that this hunger pointed me to the English major.

    It also occurred to me that my fidgety personality did not learn well in the classroom. My anxieties made it impossible for me to sit inside a classroom with thirty-five other students and comprehend the professors’ lectures. I knew that I would have to be self-taught if I were to get any kind of meaningful education. Therefore, the best thing to do was to purchase my own grammar handbook. From that day on, I resolved to teach myself grammar. 

    Once I learned the basics of grammar, it seemed as essential to life as breathing. I considered that small children without any formal learning were already fluent in the most elaborate sentences. Grammar was proof that life had a clear structure, order, and harmony. To learn all the names of the grammatical parts was to understand the harmony of the universe. When I thought of grammar, I saw rivulets flowing into the streams, streams flowing into the great rivers, and the great rivers flowing into the ocean. 

    For the first time, I understood what Nietzsche meant in Twilight of the Gods where he writes that “I am afraid we are not getting rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.” What he meant is that by studying grammar, I could find order and convalescence from nearly two decades of mainlining the glorification of selfish pleasure-seeking and chaos. Part of my recovery as a probationary student was enlisting in a Twelve-Step Program, and one of the steps was grammar. 

    My recovery was swift and relentless with my GPA spiking to close to 4.0. The university seemed impressed with my reformation. Shortly after hiring me in the Tutoring Center, they offered me teaching positions for freshman composition. The university that had once threatened to expel me had now hired me to teach. I was on my way to becoming the worst college professor ever. 

  • Selling Out, Buying In: The Savage Brilliance of Matt LeBlanc in Episodes

    Selling Out, Buying In: The Savage Brilliance of Matt LeBlanc in Episodes

    Originally unleashed on Showtime in 2011, Episodes ran for five seasons of razor-sharp satire, skewering the soulless machinery of Hollywood with a precision so brutal it felt like watching a vivisection—if vivisections were hilarious. It remains one of my all-time favorite comedies, a savage yet oddly affectionate takedown of the industry’s relentless appetite for mediocrity.

    The setup is fiendishly simple: Sean and Beverly Lincoln, a charmingly acerbic British writing duo, are lured to Los Angeles with promises of creative control and prestige. What they get instead is an artistic hostage situation. Their critically beloved, whip-smart series is promptly shoved through the Hollywood meat grinder, emerging as an insipid, laugh-tracked monstrosity. Worse, they are forced to resurrect the career of Matt LeBlanc, who plays a delightfully monstrous version of himself—a washed-up sitcom relic clinging to his former Friends glory.

    LeBlanc, padding around in a haze of regret, is a masterclass in self-loathing charisma. He’s paunchier, jowlier, and carries the heavy-lidded exhaustion of a man who has realized, too late, that charm has an expiration date. The sad creases around his eyes whisper, How come the world doesn’t love me the way it used to? He’s a man-child accustomed to zero boundaries, collateral damage in his wake—including an estranged wife and an industry that has moved on. His interactions with the Lincolns are electric: he resents their moral standards, mocks their dignity, and yet, slowly, insidiously, starts craving their approval like a lost toddler looking for parental validation.

    The Lincolns, meanwhile, aren’t just losing creative control—they’re losing themselves. Forced to dumb down their art while simultaneously parenting an emotionally stunted former sitcom star, they begin to absorb some of LeBlanc’s gleeful nihilism, just as he, in turn, starts to thaw under their reluctant affection. The show’s central tension becomes a delicious question: Who will corrupt whom first? By the end, they’ve all been irrevocably changed, bound by a bizarre, dysfunctional, and strangely touching camaraderie.

    LeBlanc’s slow, grudging evolution is nothing short of a masterpiece. Stephen Mangan and Tamsin Greig, as Sean and Beverly, deliver a spectacular performance of unrelenting exasperation, their bewildered expressions a constant gauge of Hollywood’s never-ending barrage of crassness. The result is a show so brilliant, so deftly written, that watching it once wasn’t enough—I devoured it twice, only to appreciate it even more the second time around. Beneath its cynical wit and industry grotesquerie, Episodes is ultimately about the absurd yet undeniable bonds that form when people are forced to suffer together. And in that suffering, something close to love—however warped—takes shape.

  • Shifting from literary delusion to real work

    Shifting from literary delusion to real work

    Much of my so-called rehabilitation boiled down to admitting the humiliating truth: I wasn’t just a failed writer—I was the lowest form of literary life, a wannabe. A person who didn’t write so much as perform the idea of being a writer. A cosplay novelist, strutting around in the costume of a tortured genius while producing little more than pretentious drivel and a growing pile of abandoned manuscripts. It wasn’t just about impressing others; it was about impressing myself, clinging to the illusion that I was part of some grand tradition of suffering scribes.

    True rehab meant ditching the farce, but not the writing itself. That would have been its own brand of self-sabotage—flipping the table and storming off because I couldn’t be Tolstoy. No, the real challenge wasn’t quitting writing; it was quitting the wrong kind of writing, the one that had wasted decades of my life. What that left me with, I wasn’t sure. But I knew one thing: I had to approach writing with a level of honesty and discipline my past posturing had never allowed.

    To guide this shift from literary delusion to something resembling actual work, I turned to Steven Pressfield’s manifesto The War of Art: Break Through the Block and Win Your Inner Creative Battles. If anyone understood the difference between real work and creative self-deception, it was him. And if I was going to claw my way out of my own nonsense, I needed a drill sergeant, not another enabler.

    Steven Pressfield does not sugarcoat the reality of writing. Sit down at the keyboard, and you’re not just typing—you’re waging a spiritual war. The enemy? A malevolent, shape-shifting force hellbent on keeping you from producing anything meaningful. It doesn’t want you to write. It doesn’t want you to create. It doesn’t even want you to try. Instead, it wants you lulled into the soft coma of complacency, soothed by self-indulgence, and sedated by excuses. Pressfield has a name for this insidious saboteur: Resistance.

    And Resistance isn’t just out to destroy your writing career. It’s an all-purpose wrecking ball, ready to demolish anything of value in your life. Want to exercise? Resistance whispers, “Tomorrow.” Want to eat healthy? Resistance hands you a menu and points at the nachos. Thinking of saving your marriage, reconnecting with an old friend, or simply being a functional human being? Resistance assures you that Netflix is easier. Resistance thrives on inertia, feeding off your lowest instincts until your grand ambitions are reduced to doomscrolling and DoorDash. As far as Resistance is concerned, there is no higher self—only Bread and Circus, perpetual comfort, and a well-padded existential void.

    But then Pressfield throws a curveball, one that had me stop mid-page, coffee cup hovering in midair. He insists that each of us has been gifted by the divine with “our own unique genius.” A talent, a calling, something only we can do. A mission we’re supposed to fulfill.

    Which led me to a harsh realization: If I wasn’t the brilliant comic novelist I had once deluded myself into believing I was—if my grand literary dreams had been little more than feverish cosplay—then what the hell was my so-called genius? Because, according to Pressfield, if I wasn’t meant to write the next Confederacy of Dunces, then surely I had something up my sleeve. Right?

    Unless, of course, Resistance had already won.

    As I read Pressfield’s case studies in human self-sabotage, it dawns on me: Resistance isn’t just some minor inconvenience—it’s a full-blown existential heist, engineered to ensure we squander our brief time on this planet in a haze of cheap dopamine and deferred dreams. It doesn’t just want us to fail; it wants us to fail happily, lulled into a state of passive indulgence, too numbed by distraction to notice the slow-motion car wreck of our own potential.

    The real danger? Not taking it seriously. Resistance thrives on skepticism. It wants you to roll your eyes, to dismiss it as some overblown metaphor. Pressfield, however, has a blunt rebuttal for the doubters: “You think Resistance isn’t real? Resistance will bury you.” And judging by the graveyard of abandoned projects and untapped ambitions littering my past, I’d say he’s got a point.

    Pressfield doesn’t tiptoe around Resistance—he paints it as nothing short of a demonic force hellbent on sabotaging your higher self. It doesn’t just nudge you toward procrastination; it actively conspires to keep you from doing anything meaningful. It thrives on your fear, swells with power whenever you’re on the cusp of finishing something worthwhile, and works tirelessly to convince you that life is a low-stakes game of distractions and indulgence.

    Interestingly, therapist Phil Stutz arrives at the same conclusion, albeit with a different branding. He calls this malevolent force Part X, but the function remains identical: an invisible saboteur that keeps you stuck in mediocrity, endlessly scrolling, doom-looping, and putting off your real work until tomorrow—which, of course, never arrives. Like Pressfield, Stutz insists that Resistance is baked into the human condition and that pretending it doesn’t exist is the surest way to let it consume you.

    In this sense, Pressfield and Stutz aren’t just self-help gurus; they’re high priests of a secular, no-nonsense religion: You are broken. The world is against you. And your only path to salvation is relentless discipline. Where many pop psychologists coddle their audiences with affirmations and vague pep talks about “self-care,” these two take a more Calvinist approach: Get to work. Expect suffering. Resist Resistance. The stakes, as they present them, are nothing short of existential—fail to fight back, and you risk not only losing your dreams but your very humanity.

    While Stutz takes a broader view, Pressfield zeros in on the artist, especially the writer. According to him, Resistance manifests in a litany of self-destructive behaviors: compulsive procrastination, fixation on meaningless relationships, and a penchant for creating unnecessary chaos—all to avoid sitting down and doing the real work. He argues that many of us invite drama into our lives simply because it provides an excuse not to write. The more absurd, the better.

    Case in point: Pressfield would have a field day with the stories I see on the medical drama The Pitt, where patients flood the ER for spectacularly self-inflicted disasters. One woman flew across the country to let a TikTok stranger inject industrial-grade silicone into her backside—only to end up fighting for her life. Another, a social media influencer, poisoned herself with black-market beauty products laced with mercury, resulting in a psychotic break. These people didn’t just stumble into chaos; they practically RSVP’d to it. Pressfield would argue that their tragicomic misfortunes weren’t just poor decisions but acts of subconscious sabotage—distractions from the real, difficult work of self-improvement.

    And if I’m being honest, I see shades of my own dysfunction in these cautionary tales. For years, I convinced myself I was a comic novelist, spinning out unreadable manuscripts like a literary assembly line worker with no quality control. But was I really writing novels? Or was I just using the idea of writing as a nervous tic, a way to avoid more meaningful work? The answer is painfully clear.

    By Pressfield’s definition, I wasn’t an artist—I was a graphomaniac. If trichotillomania is the compulsive need to pluck out your own hair, Graphomania Nervosa is the compulsive need to churn out unpublishable novels, deluding yourself into thinking you’re “making progress” while really just spinning your wheels. The symptoms? Excessive keyboard abuse, delusions of literary grandeur, and an uncanny ability to ignore decades of failure. I wasn’t battling Resistance; I was collaborating with it. And that, I now realize, was the ultimate act of self-sabotage.

    How insidious is Resistance? According to Pressfield, it’s the invisible puppet master behind an entire industry of syndromes, disorders, and afflictions—many of which, he argues, are little more than theatrical productions staged by our own subconscious. It’s so pervasive that most people don’t miss work because of actual illness, but because of what he calls self-dramatized ailments. In other words, Resistance isn’t just an obstacle; it’s a world-builder. It conjures up entire pathologies, complete with a supporting cast of “experts,” a library of bestselling self-help books, and a pharmaceutical buffet of magic pills designed to “treat” the very conditions it invents.

    These manufactured miseries feed into a culture of victimhood, where suffering—real or imagined—becomes a lifestyle brand. The narcissist doesn’t just endure their personal afflictions; they curate them, transforming their burdens into a kind of tragic, self-congratulatory art. Pressfield published The War of Art in 2002, long before TikTok turned self-diagnosis into an Olympic sport. But if he were writing it today, he’d have a field day watching an entire generation swap productivity for performative ailments, trading ambition for an endless loop of “What obscure mental illness do you have?” quizzes. Resistance has upgraded—now it comes with filters, hashtags, and a monetization strategy.

    The passage in The War of Art that truly floored me—the one that made me put the book down and stare into the abyss—was Pressfield’s take on choosing a mate. He writes: “Sometimes, if we’re not conscious of our own Resistance, we’ll pick as a mate someone who has or is successfully overcoming Resistance.” He admits he’s not entirely sure why this happens, but speculates that perhaps we’re drawn to those who radiate the strength we so conspicuously lack, as if their sheer competence might rub off on us through prolonged exposure.

    That hit a little too close to home. My wife, for example, is a master of keeping Resistance at bay. She doesn’t get derailed by distractions, doesn’t spiral into existential meltdowns over minor inconveniences, and certainly doesn’t spend years chasing some ill-fated literary delusion. She’s disciplined, focused, and—here’s the real kicker—consistently gets things done. Meanwhile, I have the emotional resilience of a soufflé in an earthquake. One unexpected hiccup in my day, and I’m either catastrophizing or indulging in some elaborate form of procrastination disguised as “creative struggle.”

    Pressfield argues that when an underachiever pairs up with an overachiever, the real villain isn’t just personal inadequacy—it’s Resistance itself, warping love into a lopsided power dynamic. He writes: “This is how Resistance disfigures love. The stew it creates is rich, it’s colorful; Tennessee Williams could work it up into a trilogy. But is it love? If we’re the supporting partner, shouldn’t we face our own failure to pursue our unlived life, rather than hitchhike on our spouse’s coattails?”

    Translation: if you’re the slacker in the relationship, maybe instead of basking in your partner’s competence like a freeloading houseplant, you should actually do something with your life. The hard truth is, Pressfield doesn’t just suggest that people like me might be hitchhiking on our spouse’s ambition—he flat-out states it. And honestly? He’s right. Maybe instead of cranking out unreadable novels no one asked for, I should grab a ladder and start clearing the rain gutters.

    Facing the reality of my failed novelist career doesn’t mean I should retire my keyboard and resign myself to a life of watching my rain gutters fill with leaves. Yes, I lingered in the fiction world like an uninvited guest at a dinner party, well past the point where someone should have taken my coat and quietly ushered me to the door. But if Pressfield’s The War of Art has taught me anything, it’s that surrendering to Resistance—believing its insidious whisper that I have nothing to contribute—is the fastest way to irrelevance.

    Resistance tried to pull the same trick on Pressfield himself. It told him he was a novelist, not a self-help guru, and had no business writing a manifesto on creativity and spiritual stamina. But he ignored that voice, wrote The War of Art anyway, and watched it outsell every other book he’d ever written. Resistance took a brutal loss that day—but like a bad ex, it never really disappears. It always circles back, lurking in the shadows, waiting for the perfect moment to convince you that quitting is the rational choice. The trick is seeing it for what it is: a con artist with the same tired sales pitch. And I, for one, refuse to buy in.

  • Wrestling with an especially virulent case of “Influenza A”

    Wrestling with an especially virulent case of “Influenza A”

    In I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional: The Recovery Movement and Other Self-Help Fashions, Wendy Kaminer lays waste to the therapeutic fads of the 1990s, particularly the trend of “reclaiming the inner child”—a ritual that took infantilization to near-religious extremes.

    She describes John Bradshaw’s workshops, where grown adults with respectable careers arrived clutching teddy bears like traumatized toddlers, preparing to embark on a guided journey into the mansion of their past. There, as Bradshaw whispered encouragements, lower lips trembled, tears streamed, and a congregation of emotionally overqualified professionals sobbed into the polyester fur of their stuffed animals.

    What floored Kaminer wasn’t the unhinged emotionalism—it was the sheer, shameless conviction. These people weren’t just indulging in a saccharine, self-indulgent spectacle—they were true believers, convinced that squeezing a doll and reliving some long-buried playground trauma was nothing short of a spiritual awakening.

    Kaminer was not impressed. What others saw as self-reflection and healing, she saw as an infantilizing orgy of narcissism, a self-help séance in which grown-ups tried to resurrect their inner kindergartener, only to be possessed by a ghost that refused to leave.

    Now, I’d like to say that my bullshit detector is too finely tuned for me to cradle a stuffed animal and regress into baby talk. But the bitter irony is that writing this memoir has forced me into my own brand of infantilization—just without the teddy bear and group cry session.

    Nothing made this clearer than the pathetic spectacle of my post-Thanksgiving downfall, which started with a game of Russian roulette—except instead of a revolver, I played with rotting cabbage.

    It all began when I decided to make chicken tacos—a wholesome, adult dinner choice. Unfortunately, the bag of shredded cabbage I retrieved from the fridge had been marinating in its own decay for two weeks, slowly transforming into hell’s compost pile.

    The moment I tore open the bag, my wife recoiled with the dramatic flair of a crime scene detective stumbling upon a long-decomposed body. She clutched her nose, waved her hands like an exorcist warding off a demon, and issued a forensic report:

    “That smells like a mix of a latrine and a horse’s taint.”

    A normal person would have taken this as a warning. But, fueled by misplaced confidence and the hubris of someone who had survived worse, I dumped the cabbage on my tacos and dug in.

    Hours later, my immune system, weakened by the Thanksgiving marathon of forced hospitality, collapsed like a debt-ridden empire. The virus that had been lurking in the shadows seized its moment, and by the next morning, I was a feverish, shivering wreck, contemplating my life choices between bouts of violent gastrointestinal reckoning.

    It seems that you don’t need a stuffed animal and a therapy circle to regress into infancy. Sometimes, all it takes is spoiled cabbage and a ruinous lack of self-preservation.

    Naturally, instead of exercising common sense, I channeled my inner cheapskate prophet. “Cabbage by its very nature has a funky scent,” I proclaimed with the confidence of a man who regularly courts disaster. “A little fermentation won’t hurt anyone.” My wife frowned and said, “It’s smelling up the entire kitchen.”
    “We’ll be fine,” I insisted, scooping copious amounts of fetid-smelling cabbage onto my tacos like I was auditioning for a daredevil cooking show.

    At dinner, I was the only one brave—or foolish—enough to eat it. Within an hour, my body issued a resounding, “You absolute moron.” No GI issues, but I felt like I’d been hit by a truck, reversed over, and then hit again. My head throbbed, my eyes were so sensitive to light I had to drape a T-shirt over my face just to listen to a Netflix show, and my energy flatlined by eight p.m. I crawled into bed, feeling like a half-baked zombie.

    The next morning was worse. Still no GI problems, but the 101 fever and crushing fatigue made me question my will to live. I tried to eat some oatmeal and grapefruit, the culinary equivalent of punishment food, but even that felt like too much effort. 

    By day three, no improvement. I’d become a cautionary tale, researching induced vomiting and discovering it was far too late. Apparently, if you don’t purge immediately, the toxins settle in like an unwanted houseguest who insists on staying for five to seven days.

    Being sick in my family makes everyone else suffer. Our teenage twins require constant care, frequent snacks that generate endless dirty dishes, and someone breathing down their necks to ensure homework gets done. My wife had to shoulder it all while I languished in my misery. I apologized profusely for my reckless hubris and promised, at the age of sixty-three, to turn over a new leaf—or at least stop eating ones that reek like death.

    For decades, I’d treated eating old, moldy food like a badge of honor, quoting my dad’s immortal wisdom: “Pilgrims who ate blue cheese on the Mayflower survived disease while the mold-avoiders died.” It was as if I’d been brainwashed into believing spoiled food was a superfood. But this cabbage debacle—this hellish, cabbage-induced reckoning—put the fear of God in me. Never again would I be the fool who eats something that smells like a medieval torture chamber. This time, I mean it. The next funky bag of cabbage? Straight to the trash. May it ferment in peace.

    As the alleged food-borne illness dragged on and my fever turned my brain into a swamp, I found myself pondering a morbid yet painfully stupid thought: What if I died because I was too cheap to toss a two-dollar bag of cabbage? Imagine the headline: “Man Perishes Over Discount Vegetables.” How could I ever forgive myself for such world-class idiocy? Worse, how could my wife ever forget that I lectured her with the smug confidence of a food-safety guru right before scarfing down a fatal dose of rotting produce? I’d be immortalized as the kind of hapless buffoon who wouldn’t even get a name in a Chekhov short story—just “The Idiot Who Ate the Cabbage.”

    Then, because fever dreams and existential crises go hand in hand, another absurd thought hit me: How would my YouTube subscribers and Instagram followers know what happened to me? I’d be gone, but my accounts would still sit there, ghostlike, leaving them to wonder why the witty guy with the diver watches and snack obsession suddenly went dark. What a tragedy—I wouldn’t even get the chance to create a final piece of content documenting my own demise in comedic glory. A video titled, “How Cabbage Killed Me (And Why You Should Toss Yours)” would surely have gone viral.

    This realization struck me as profoundly twisted: content creators care more about producing “engaging material” than their own mortality. Forget self-preservation—I was more upset that my audience might miss out on the hilarity of my self-inflicted cabbage-related downfall. The pathology runs deep: we’re so hooked on being performative, we’d probably narrate our own deaths if we could. Imagine me, breathless and feverish, croaking out, “Don’t forget to like, comment, and subscribe—assuming I make it to tomorrow.” The absurdity of it all made me laugh, which hurt, because even my ribs were exhausted from this cabbage-induced purgatory.

    It was apparent I was so desperate to be relevant on social media that I had become a Gravefluencer–an influencer who extends his reach six feet under, ensuring even death is on-brand.

    After five days of relentless illness, I had a phone consultation with my doctor about what I was sure was self-inflicted food poisoning. I laid out the symptoms with the kind of detail you’d expect from someone auditioning for a medical drama. My doctor listened patiently, then unceremoniously popped my bubble of absurdity. “This isn’t food poisoning,” she said. “You’ve got the flu. It’s going around.”

    Just like that, my grand narrative of culinary hubris—the man who dared to defy rancid cabbage and paid the ultimate price—was dead. Instead, I was left with something far less glamorous: virulent flu. Part of me was relieved that I wasn’t poisoning myself with poisoned produce, but another part of me felt cheated. I’d lost the absurd, darkly comedic morality tale about a man so cheap he nearly killed himself over a two-dollar bag of cabbage. What a waste.

    The doctor wasn’t exactly brimming with solutions, either. “Rest and stay hydrated,” she advised, the way you might tell a child to eat their vegetables. That night, my fever spiked close to 104, launching me into a kaleidoscope of fever dreams where my brain decided to give me the full surrealist experience. Words from my podcasts took on physical forms—spiky, sticky, grotesque shapes—and suddenly, I was inside them. I wandered through caves of conversation, waded through cocoons of dialogue, and got tangled in thick spider webs spun from language. Each sentence wrapped around me, trapping me in its endless loops of nonsense.

    When I woke up, drenched in sweat and feeling like I’d wrestled a linguistically gifted tarantula, I realized the flu wasn’t just an illness—it was a full-blown avant-garde art installation happening in my own head. So no, I didn’t have food poisoning. I had performance art fever. And while it wasn’t the cabbage apocalypse I’d hoped for, it was plenty weird in its own way.

    For six days, I had been wrestling with the so-called “Thanksgiving Flu,” a charming little virus that kept my fever bouncing between 101 and 104, as if my body were auditioning for a medical melodrama. Being that sick wasn’t just about physical misery—it was a battering ram smashing through the cozy little mental structures I had built around my life. Aspirations? Pointless. Health goals? A cruel joke. My reading list? Forget it. Even my hunger for social belonging and validation had been knocked flat. What remained was a stripped-down nihilism so bleak it made Nietzsche look like an optimist.

    Sickness dragged me to a dark place where life felt like a cosmic prank. I could almost hear my 14-year-old self rolling his eyes as I remembered my Grandma Mildred’s wise words from one of her letters: “Illnesses bring out the doldrums.” No kidding, Grandma. That particular flu had brought out more than the doldrums—it had conjured a maudlin cocktail of despair and self-pity.

    In that state, I found myself spiraling into melodrama, muttering things like, “What’s the point? Just end the torment and let me meet my Maker already!” It was ridiculous, of course, but I couldn’t help but notice how flu-induced misery fed into a distinctly male flavor of narcissism. Egotism, after all, was a hallmark of the man-child: the guy who thought the universe should pause when he didn’t get his way.

    Men, it seemed, were uniquely gifted at turning minor discomforts into existential crises. While women powered through illness with a mix of stoicism and practicality, men turned their sickbeds into thrones of self-pity, proclaiming their impending doom to anyone who would listen. And me? I was no exception. With every feverish shiver, I became the star of my own overwrought drama, raging against the cruelty of a world that dared to continue spinning while I wallowed in flu-induced existential despair.

    Sure, Grandma Mildred, the doldrums were part of the package—but why did it feel like men turned those doldrums into an art form? Perhaps the real flu virus wasn’t in my body; it was in my ego, throwing a tantrum because life wasn’t bending to my fevered will.

    I appeared to be languishing in the Flu-tile State—a fever-fueled realization that all human endeavor was futile.

    On day 8 of this flu from hell, my doctor emailed me a cheerful little grenade: “Your symptoms are concerning. I need to see you today.” Fabulous. At 11 a.m., feverish, grouchy, and radiating the energy of a half-cooked zombie, I dragged myself to her office for the usual poking and prodding. COVID? Negative. Influenza? Oh yes, Influenza A—the viral overachiever of the season. My nurse, who’d had it two weeks earlier, gave me the kind of pep talk you’d expect from someone who survived a minor apocalypse. “Seven days of fever,” she chirped, “so you’ve probably got two more to go!” Like I’d won a spa weekend in purgatory.

    But the flu wasn’t the real sucker punch. No, that came when I stepped on the scale. At a soul-crushing 252 pounds, with blood pressure at 166 over 92, Dr. Okada laid it out with the dispassion of someone reading a menu: “You’re at high risk for a massive stroke or heart attack.” She might as well have handed me a shovel and a map to my future grave. Then, just to twist the knife, she added, “You need to lose fifty pounds in six months. Otherwise…” She trailed off, but I got the point: dead man waddling.

    Her final blow came with a steely gaze and a guilt grenade: “If not for yourself, lose weight for your wife and daughters.” Translation: stop being selfish and get your act together before they have to plan your funeral.

    Desperate for a cheat code, I asked about Mounjaro or Ozempic, those miracle weight-loss injectables I’d read about. She barely stifled a laugh. “We prescribe those for people with exclusive employer benefits.” I muttered something about how my college likely doesn’t cover luxury drugs, and her thin smile confirmed it. I’d be fighting this battle the old-fashioned way: with the DASH diet and restricted calories, not cutting-edge pharmaceuticals.

    And then there was the Motrin ban. Apparently, my go-to painkiller was a blood-pressure ticking time bomb. “No more Motrin. Tylenol only,” she said, with all the enthusiasm of a waiter recommending the tofu option. So now, my fevers would be accompanied by a dull, Tylenol-soaked march toward mortality. Fantastic.

    I thanked her—sincerely, I swear—because she wasn’t wrong. But the whole thing felt like I’d been blindsided by a particularly grim episode of The Biggest Loser: Medical Edition. On the drive home, Miley Cyrus’s “Flowers (Demo)” came on, and I—feverish, bloated, and thoroughly defeated—actually cried. Miley crooned about resilience and self-love, and all I could think about was how laxity, that slow, sneaky killer, had been working me over for years. Skipped workouts, mindless snacks, every excuse—it had all led to this: a middle-aged man sobbing in his car, mourning his dignity while stuck in traffic.

    Dr. Okada’s tough love landed like a wrecking ball. This was my moment—the kind where you either turn your life around or start drafting your obituary. Time to put down the Motrin, pick up some discipline, and drag myself back from the brink before I became the subject of one of those tragic lessons everyone ignores until it’s too late cautionary tales.

    I had entered the clinic expecting to get a quick flu diagnosis and maybe a lecture about rest and fluids. Instead, I walked out with the realization that my life wasn’t just off-track; it was an unmitigated dumpster fire rolling downhill. How had I missed it? The creeping wreckage of my existence had been unfolding right under my nose, like a slow-motion train derailment I refused to acknowledge. Denial, thy name is me.

    Dr. Okada, bless her clinical professionalism, had held up a mirror and forced me to see what I’d been expertly avoiding for years: that my life, much like my blood pressure, was a ticking time bomb. I’d been blind to my own unraveling, and now the blinders were off. The view wasn’t pretty, but at least now I knew what I was working with—a fixer-upper existence in desperate need of a renovation.

    My visit to the doctor turned into an unplanned catalyst for a long-overdue moral metamorphosis. I left not just diagnosed, but afflicted by a new condition I can only call the Scales of Justice (and Shame)—that peculiar state where the doctor’s scale transforms into the ultimate moral arbiter. Each number glaring back at me didn’t just measure pounds; it weighed my life choices, my discipline, my worthiness as a functioning adult. It was less a medical device and more a courtroom, and let’s just say I was found guilty on all counts.

    I was convinced that had I been ten years older, this bout of influenza would have finished me off. The first week felt less like an illness and more like the aftermath of a roadside bombing, with me as the unfortunate bystander left mangled in a ditch. My body was a buffet for phantom wolves and mosquitoes—every nerve ending seemed to host its own ravenous pest. Mentally, I spiraled into fever-induced madness, complete with hallucinatory jungle scenes: Gumby-esque AI bodybuilders, sculpted and sinewy yet gelatinous, painted the revolting hue of yellow sea slugs, slithered around me in an Amazonian hellscape.

    By Week Three, the influenza had mercifully downgraded its malevolence, though “mild” feels like an insult to language. I still shivered like a Victorian orphan in a snowstorm, my body temperature yoyoing between inferno and tundra. Aches gnawed at me persistently, like bad houseguests who don’t get the hint. And mentally? I was underwater—grasping at reality as it floats just out of reach. My brain felt stripped of a few critical screws, rattling around and threatening to unscrew the rest.

    At some point, I recalled, in the hazy, fevered way of someone stranded in a desert, that my daughter had lozenges in her room. Fueled by desperation, I shuffled to her door, knocked weakly, and thrust my trembling hands forward as if auditioning for a Dickens adaptation. “Please,” I croaked, my voice barely above a whisper, “fill my hands with lozenges for your poor ailing father.”

    The response? Hysterical laughter. Both of my daughters, cozied up watching TV, howled with the kind of delight usually reserved for viral cat videos. I caught a glimpse of myself in the hallway mirror: pajamas wrinkled like a bad alibi, beanie perched jauntily askew, my face the pallor of a sickly sailor. I was every bit the tragicomic figure they saw—a fevered street urchin begging for cough drops.

    My wife, ever the realist, stormed in to restore order. “We have plenty of lozenges in the kitchen,” she barked, clearly unimpressed by my Oscar-worthy theatrics. She led me, limping and pathetic, to the cupboard, where she proceeded to dump several bags of lozenges onto the table with all the ceremony of Santa Claus unloading his sleigh. My daughters, tears of laughter streaming down their faces, declared me Oliver Twist reincarnated.

    I retreated to bed clutching a handful of lozenges, humiliated but momentarily soothed, only to lie awake wondering when this fever would break—or if the AI bodybuilders would show up again to finish the job.

    Four weeks into my bout with influenza, I emerged bleary-eyed, fever-wrecked, and staring down my old nemesis: addiction. Not the sexy kind you’d brag about in a memoir—just the creeping, mundane kind that comes with a tendency to overindulge in things like self-pity, compulsive behaviors, and yes, an irrational attachment to writing books.

    And so, I emerged from this fever-ridden odyssey not as a transformed man, but as someone who had simply suffered enough to pause and reflect—until the next catastrophe beckoned. If John Bradshaw were leading my recovery workshop, he’d likely hand me a stuffed animal and instruct me to embrace my inner child, soothing my cabbage-traumatized soul with affirmations of self-love. But after weeks of sweating, hallucinating, and contemplating my own obituary over a bag of rotting vegetables, I didn’t need a teddy bear. I needed a referee, a financial adviser, and possibly an exorcist.

    The true lesson here? My inner child doesn’t need rescuing. He needs a restraining order. Because left to his own devices, he’ll continue to eat spoiled food out of spite, spiral into existential despair at the first sign of adversity, and demand that every brush with mortality be converted into premium content. So if I’m to move forward as a recovering writing addict, I have to acknowledge this truth: The inner child is not a sage. He’s a lunatic. And I should probably stop taking his advice.

    CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

    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.

  • What does it feel like to be crushed beneath decades of writing addiction?

    What does it feel like to be crushed beneath decades of writing addiction?

    What does it mean to be pinned down for decades by some vast, crushing force, an unmovable, soul-flattening monolith that convinces you of your own helplessness? More importantly, do we even want to be free from it, or is that liberation its own special kind of agony?

    This takes me back to 1970, watching Adam-12, one of my favorite TV shows, though I only remember one episode. A man was trapped under a fallen telephone pole, the weight pressing into his ribs. When paramedics arrived, they informed him they’d be using a crane to lift it off. “Funny,” the man remarked. “I don’t even feel any pain.” The paramedic’s response? You don’t feel pain now—but once we lift it, you will.

    That moment lodged itself in my brain like a splinter. Because, really, what is breaking free from an addiction if not having a telephone pole lifted off your chest? You think you’re ready for freedom, but then the weight is gone, and suddenly, every nerve in your body starts screaming. You had learned to live with the oppression, adapted to its limits, made peace with your own captivity. And now, you have to face everything that weight once shielded you from—all the wounds you ignored, all the realities you deferred, all the choices you never had to make because you were conveniently immobilized.

    That’s where I am now. My recovery means staying in my lane, so I have to admit that I will never write A Confederacy of Dunces. I don’t have the genius to write something like The Ginger Man. I won’t be crafting an autofictional masterwork à la Emmanuel Carrère’s Kingdom. What I do have is a lifetime spent crushed under the telephone pole of writing addiction, a weight that once gave my life structure—even as it kept me from actually living it.

    So, I had to be the crane operator, the paramedic, and the doctor all at once. I had to lift the damn pole, endure the pain, and figure out how to move forward. 

    Lifting the telephone pole off my ribs did indeed hurt like hell. By the time the 2024 Thanksgiving rolled around, I could feel the weight of grief like an overstuffed holiday plate. I’d said goodbye to my mother during the pandemic, standing outside a nursing home window and offering her love through a mesh screen, as if I were visiting someone in solitary confinement. Two years later, I watched my father—a proud infantryman in his day—fade to 130 pounds, his body surrendering to cancer. Since their passing, the world felt quieter, smaller, like someone had dimmed the lights without warning.

    So, when hosting Thanksgiving fell squarely on my plate, it wasn’t some Norman Rockwell fantasy. It was more like getting crushed by a baby grand piano dropped from the second floor. And instead of gracefully stepping aside, I just let it hit me—because honestly, moving felt like too much effort.

    The guest list wasn’t exactly daunting—just my perpetually single brother, whose dating apps seemed better at generating cautionary tales than romantic prospects, and two of my wife’s teacher friends, both middle school band directors still recovering from clarinet-induced PTSD. The conversation was polite, though it had all the flavor of plain oatmeal.

    Stuffed to the gills but somehow still shoveling pie like our lives depended on it, we trudged through the ritual of TV show recommendations. Each suggestion was delivered with the gravitas of a public service announcement—skip this series at your own peril. Apparently, failing to watch that one obscure, eight-part masterpiece would leave me culturally destitute, wandering through a desolate landscape devoid of punchlines and plot twists.

    Honestly, I enjoyed the company. The real villain of Thanksgiving wasn’t the guests—it was the dishes. The endless scrubbing that left my hands raw, the dishwashing marathon that stretched into eternity, the mountain of dirty plates multiplying like gremlins in the sink. That’s where the wheels came off.

    My wife, meanwhile, glided through the chaos like some kind of culinary sorceress, humming softly as she orchestrated the entire meal with the grace of a Michelin-starred maestro. She didn’t grumble. Not a single passive-aggressive sigh escaped her lips. She was the picture of serene competence.

    I, on the other hand, hovered around the kitchen like a useless NPC in a video game—occasionally moving a plate from table to sink and acting as though I’d just conquered Everest. At one point, I genuinely felt winded after rearranging the silverware. My contribution was so meager it felt performative, like a child pretending to be tired after “helping” Dad mow the lawn by pushing a plastic toy mower ten feet behind him.

    Somewhere between rinsing the roasting pan and glaring at the pile of silverware, it hit me—I was teetering on the edge of a Mope-a-saurus moment. The only thing preventing my full transformation was the vague sense of shame that my wife, who had just cooked for hours, wasn’t grumbling about the aftermath. That’s when you know you’re in trouble—when someone else’s superior competence and good cheer makes you feel like a defective appliance, sputtering through life with a flickering power cord and a weak motor.

    The lethal cocktail of self-loathing and forced sociability had drained me to the marrow. By the time the guests finally took their leave, I should have collapsed straight into bed, preferably into a coma-level sleep.

    But as a writing addict, I stayed up deep into the night and wrote a book proposal. 

    Surviving Thanksgiving: The Essential Guide

    A Memoir of Grief, Dysfunction, and the Existential Terror of Dishes

    Author: Jeff McMahon, recovering member of Write-a-holics Anonymous, part-time Manuscriptus Rex, full-time over-thinker.

    Overview:
    The holidays are supposed to be about gratitude, togetherness, and the warm glow of familial love. But let’s be honest—Thanksgiving is a psychological endurance test wrapped in a turkey-scented mirage of Norman Rockwell propaganda. You either come out of it spiritually enriched or barely clinging to sanity, drowning in a sea of gravy-stained regrets.

    This book is for those of us who, instead of basking in holiday joy, find ourselves staring into the abyss of mashed potatoes, contemplating the futility of existence while our hands prune in dishwater. It’s for the people who, somewhere between the third helping of stuffing and the forced enthusiasm over TV show recommendations, realize they are hurtling toward their final transformation: a hollow version of their former selves.

    Through dark humor, painfully relatable anecdotes, and some uncomfortably personal self-reflection, Surviving Thanksgiving: The Essential Guide will navigate the holiday’s perils—family dysfunction, grief-laden nostalgia, the crushing disappointment of dry turkey, and the passive-aggressive Olympics that inevitably break out over pie. Along the way, I’ll explore the psychology of holiday meltdowns, the delusions of tradition, and why washing dishes can trigger a full existential crisis.

    Target Audience:
    This book is for:

    • Burnt-out hosts who wonder why they agreed to this in the first place.
    • Perpetually single siblings trapped in the “Any Special Someone?” interrogation.
    • Grief-stricken folks realizing the empty chairs at the table hurt more than expected.
    • Introverts who barely survived the social gauntlet.
    • Writing addicts who turn all their misery into book proposals.

    Tone & Style:
    Think David Sedaris meets Kitchen Confidential with a side of A Confederacy of Dunces. It’s part memoir, part cultural critique, and entirely fueled by existential dread and too much pie.

    Managing my anxieties over Thanksgiving, I had conceived a preposterous memoir, a premise clearly more suitable for an essay than a book, but I couldn’t help it. Conceiving of these “comic memoirs” and providing a book proposal was a compulsion. Stopping one addiction didn’t make my compulsions disappear. They simply rerouted, popping up in new, mutated forms, like a literary game of whack-a-mole.

    Now, instead of writing doomed novels, I found myself obsessing over my own struggles, crafting fractured hero tales where I was the comic fool, perpetually failing forward, stumbling through existence like a man who just had a telephone pole yanked off his chest—and is still waiting for his ribs to stop throbbing.

  • If you want to lose all your friends, write a memoir

    If you want to lose all your friends, write a memoir

    Things didn’t get off to a great start with Meredith Maran’s Why We Write About Ourselves, a collection of essays on memoir writing. She kicks things off with a dire warning: if you want to lose your friends and nuke your marriage, just go ahead and write a memoir. I had been hoping for a beacon to guide me out of my existential writing crisis and into the Promised Land, but instead, I found myself in a flashing red-light district of Proceed at Your Own Peril.

    Maran dives deep into the murky waters of writerly motivation and resurfaces with the least flattering answer possible: we’re all a bunch of nosy, voyeuristic gossip hounds who want the dirt—preferably dished out in the raw, unfiltered voice of the first-person narrator. It reminds me of Truman Capote’s observation that all literature is just well-dressed gossip, and in the world of memoir, it seems the clothes are optional.

    With the motivations for reading memoirs sufficiently dragged into the light, Maran turns to the reasons people write them. She notes that some see the memoir as nothing more than a narcissistic circus—a playing field where “attention-craving, sensationalistic, crass, and craven” egomaniacs head-butt and navel-gaze their way onto the bestseller list. It’s a bleak portrait, and one that left me momentarily concerned that I, too, might just be another sideshow act in this literary funhouse.

    Fortunately, the writers in Maran’s book offer more redeeming perspectives. Not everyone approaches memoir as a vehicle for public self-adoration or a passive-aggressive airing of grievances. Some actually—brace yourself—write for reasons that are noble, even sympathetic.

    Ayelet Waldman, for instance, delivers a reality check: a memoir cannot simply be a glorified diary, a raw and unfiltered regurgitation of emotions. It must be processed—shaped by craft, analysis, and a clear point of view. In other words, if your memoir reads like the fevered pages of a high school journal, you’re doing it wrong. Writing may be therapeutic, but unless it’s been refined into something resembling art, it has no business being read by anyone who isn’t legally obligated to love you.

    As I devoured the memoirists’ writing advice, one truth became undeniable: The elements that make a great memoir are the same ones that make a great novel—world-building, fearless truth-telling, a well-defined character arc, an engaging narrative, a distinct point of view, and above all, a damn good story.

    But memoir comes with a steeper price. In fiction, a character’s deepest secrets are spilled without hesitation—because, after all, they’re not real. A memoir, however, deals in cold, hard reality, which means that privacy is collateral damage. That’s the rub of memoir: The death of discretion. In a world where people already complain about “too much sharing,” a memoirist must trample that boundary without apology. No holds barred, no skeletons left in the closet.

    So why not just slap a fictional label on it and dodge the ethical landmines? Why not camouflage the truth in a novel and spare yourself (and others) the public exposure? Sometimes, that’s the smarter move. But not always.

    There’s a reason we say, “You can’t make this stuff up.” Some real-life events have an organic absurdity, a cosmic cruelty, or an accidental genius that fiction could never replicate. In some cases, stranger than fiction isn’t just a phrase—it’s a mandate. If a story loses its raw power by being fictionalized, then you have no choice but to write it as it happened, bruises and all.

    Then things get even messier. What happens when you dress a memoir in fictional clothing—using an unreliable narrator, injecting autobiographical flourishes, blending novelistic techniques into something that isn’t quite memoir, isn’t quite novel, but floats in that murky realm of autofiction?

    I considered all of this and still chose memoir. Because for me, writing about a young man whose life was warped, reshaped, and essentially hijacked by comic novels—especially A Confederacy of Dunces—wasn’t just an artistic decision. It was the spine of my existence. It wasn’t just about paying the bills, meeting obligations, or navigating life’s banal logistics. It was about inhabiting two parallel universes at once, toggling between reality and the kind of aspiring literary dream world Steely Dan’s melancholy narrator longs for as a musician in “Deacon Blues.”

    Because for some of us, living in two worlds is the only way to manage ourselves.

  • Mr. Peabody Was My Role Model

    Mr. Peabody Was My Role Model

    In my early teens in the 1970s, I toured the waterbed revolution like a true believer. Friends, neighbors—everyone seemed to have one, and after test-driving these vinyl oceans, I became convinced that a waterbed would deliver me into a life of unimaginable luxury, decadent pleasure, and deep, undisturbed sleep. Reality had other plans.

    I badgered my parents into buying me one, fully expecting a nirvana of relaxation. Instead, I got a glorified swamp. The temperature was either scalding lava or Arctic frost, the thin vinyl leaked like a punctured raft, and the whole thing smelled like a frog orgy in a Louisiana bayou. Worse, any movement triggered an equal and opposite reaction, as if I were engaged in battle with some unseen aquatic force.

    The final insult? A biblical flood. One morning, my leaking disaster destroyed the floorboards, turning my bedroom into a post-hurricane FEMA zone. My dreams of floating into the future of sleep innovation had instead capsized, and I was left with the cold, hard truth: the quest for the ultimate bed would have to begin anew.

    Of course, I couldn’t let this tragedy go undocumented. Some people move on—I, on the other hand, have a compulsion to turn every misadventure into a cautionary tale.

    I blame my childhood TV habits. I was obsessed with The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, particularly the history lessons from Mr. Peabody and Sherman. With their time-traveling escapades, they examined history through Mr. Peabody’s smug brilliance, making sense of human folly. I can picture them now, entering their time machine, visiting me as my waterbed catastrophe unfolds, and filing the entire debacle under “Lessons in Bad Decision-Making.”

    For me, this is what writing is—a time machine, a way to travel through memory, make sense of chaos, and leave behind an indelible mark. It’s a compulsion, an illness, a disease.

    Trying to understand this affliction, I turned to Anne Lamott for rehabilitation. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life is mercifully free of false hope. A veteran of countless writing workshops, Lamott tells her students the truth: writing will not bring peace, joy, or serenity. Instead, their lives will be a mess—ruin, hysteria, bad skin, unsightly tics, financial catastrophe—but not peace of mind.

    And yet, she urges them to embrace the suffering, because to suffer for writing is a privilege—a sign that they have “finally arrived.”

    Translation: Writing isn’t a craft. It’s a storm you never escape from, a bad investment you refuse to cut loose, a waterbed that just won’t stop leaking—but you keep lying on it anyway.

    To take up writing is to choose obsession—to engage with ideas, people, and the world with an intensity otherwise unattainable. The alternative? A life of flatline existence, tranquilized and convalescent, a kind of slow-motion death. Writing is a self-inflicted challenge, a constant state of creative warfare, but that’s the point. You’ve chosen a mission as high-stakes as Vikings raiding distant shores because you’re not content to sedate yourself with the comfort of a reliable, unchallenging routine. 

    Yes, you can walk away, consume food, entertainment, and dopamine-rich distractions, and let your mind dissolve into cultural sludge. But the price of that escape is worse than the struggle—an existence marked by vapidity, emptiness, and a soul-draining sense of futility.

    I was reminded of this during a conversation with a Trader Joe’s cashier about her twenty-four-year-old daughter. At nineteen, the girl dropped out of college during COVID and never returned. Now she works at a dispensary, detached and listless, selling products to customers just as zoned out as she is. A perfect circle of disengagement.

    Writing is the opposite: an act of defiance against entropy—a way to make discoveries, clarify the chaos, and refine that clarity into a persona and a voice that matters. Once you get a taste of this life, there is no going back.

    Lamott puts it best: writing is like milking a cow—”the milk is so rich and delicious, and the cow is so glad you did it.” Her goal is not just to teach writing but to make sure that once you’ve milked the cow, you’ll never want to stop.

    I never wanted to stop. Writing isn’t the problem—staying in my lane is.

    I don’t want to burden my wife, friends, or unsuspecting literary agents with yet another unreadable novel, churned out from a delusional obsession, an addiction, a brain warp induced by too many readings of A Confederacy of Dunces. Some might say I should write for therapy, keep a journal for mental hygiene, treating my office like a literary spa where I purge the toxins from my overactive brain.

    That’s not how I operate.

    Writing only feels real if I imagine other people reading it. To write only for myself feels repulsive, deranged—what philosophers call solipsism, where the self becomes the only reality. If I’m the only audience, then I might as well be shouting into a void, a lunatic locked in a room, talking to no one but his own reflection.

    And yet, there’s something almost hopeful in my need for an audience. Strip away the ego factor, and what remains is connection—the belief that words should travel, that they should land inside someone else’s head and stir something awake. For all my curmudgeonly tendencies, I’m no misanthrope. In my darkest moments, I still believe that deep human connections—through writing, music, and art—prove that we haven’t entirely given up on each other.

    I think of George Carlin, who, for all his nihilistic rants, never hid in a cave. He famously said that being born is like getting a front-row ticket to the freak show—but instead of watching in silence, he grabbed a mic and talked about it for hours.

    I can’t write for no one. The thrill of writing is imagining that someone, somewhere, is reading.

    Last night, I listened to Dvořák’s Sixth Symphony on the radio, and it felt electric. Had I streamed it alone, the experience would have been diminished—background noise rather than something shared. Knowing that thousands of others were listening at the same moment made the music more alive, more urgent.

    I can’t tell if this compulsion to share my stories is a normal human impulse or the delusion of a narcissist. I want people to know about my misadventures, my catastrophes, my brief flirtations with transcendence. I want people to see history the way I saw it, the way I lived it. I believe in marking things down for posterity, but I also suspect that if I don’t immortalize my past in print, it might evaporate into the void like it never happened at all.

    Lurking beneath all this is a deeper fear—that something essential to our humanity is slipping away. So I climb into Mr. Peabody’s time machine and set the dial to the summers of 1975 through 1979, when my family and a small army of friends made the annual pilgrimage to Pt. Reyes Beach. Johnson’s Oyster Farm was our temple, and its truck beds overflowed with what seemed like an infinite supply of oysters. From noon to sunset, we ate like gods in exile—barbecued oysters drowning in garlic butter and Tabasco, bottomless baskets of garlic bread, and colossal slabs of moist chocolate cake.

    Ignoring the ominous great white shark warnings, we punctuated our feasting with reckless dives into the waves, emerging from the ocean with our pecs glistening in the sunlight, ready for another round of oysters. In the summer of ’78, I decided not to ride home with my parents. Instead, I hitched a ride in the back of a stranger’s truck, surrounded by a ragtag group of new acquaintances—full-bellied, sun-dazed, and staring up at the stars with our glazed lizard eyes, swapping wild stories like ancient mariners.

    And here’s the thing: nobody took a single picture. There were no selfies, no curated posts to induce FOMO, no frantic attempts to manufacture nostalgia in real time. We were too deep inside the moment to think about how it might look on a screen later. Today, we don’t experience moments—we package them for consumption.

    And maybe that’s why I can’t not write about it. I can’t store my stories in some damp, echoing cave, streaming them to an audience of one. I need them broadcasted, carried on the airwaves, felt in real time by others.

    My disease is incurable.

  • “I am not a novelist. I am a caveman.”

    “I am not a novelist. I am a caveman.”

    I am not a novelist. I am a caveman, a storyteller hunched by the fire, gesturing wildly, my face contorting into grotesque expressions as I spin cautionary tales. My stories warn the tribe of those who lost themselves—souls swallowed by obsessions, passions twisted beyond recognition. I feed off their reaction, stretching the truth, inflating reality with hyperbole to keep their eyes locked on me.

    This caveman energy has defined my forty years of teaching college writing. The classroom’s laughter and gasps convinced me I had the chops to be a comic novelist, but I failed to see the obvious: a twenty-minute monologue is not War and Peace. And yet, I clung to the fantasy of being a novelist-in-waiting, a delusion that only crumbled when I finally took stock of my work.

    What did I find? No One Hundred Years of Solitude, no grand literary masterpiece. Instead, I had a collection of vignettes, sharp, compact, brimming with cautionary tales of the fallen, the delusional, the broken—people lost in fever dreams from which they could not escape. I obsessed over them because they were me—walking, talking omens of my own unraveling, flashing neon signs warning me to correct course before it was too late.

    For years, I mistook my ability to capture madness with clarity and drama as proof I was meant to write novels. But the truth? I was never built for the big circus tent of the novel. My writing came in violent bursts—a torrential downpour of inspiration followed by silence. A flash flood, wreaking havoc for one glorious moment before I moved on to another city, another storm.

    As part of my rehabilitation, I had to accept my nature, not fight it. I had to catalog my flash floods, embrace the writing I was actually designed for, and banish the novelist delusion once and for all. I needed a name that reflected my true form—something fitting for a writer who thrives in short, explosive bursts.

    I had to become Maxwell Shortform, a proud subspecies of Manuscriptus Rex.

    As Maxwell Shortform, I am capable of presenting a ghost story masquerading as regret. Not the cheap, chain-rattling kind of ghost story, but the deeper, more insidious variety—the kind where the specters aren’t dead, just eternally trapped in the past, doomed to replay their moment of ruin over and over like a broken film reel. Regret, after all, is the cruelest kind of haunting. It doesn’t just linger in the shadows; it moves in, redecorates, and turns your soul into its permanent residence. Regret doesn’t just trap people in the past—it embalms them in it, like a fly in amber, forever twitching with regret. As Maxwell Shortform, I have been able to capture the fate of three men I know 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.

    Regret couldn’t have orchestrated a better long-term psychological prison if it tried. It’s been forty years, but they still can’t forgive themselves. They never will. And in their minds, somewhere on that dusty stretch of highway, a rusted-out orange van still sits, idling in the sun, filled with the ghosts of what could have been.

    Humans have always craved stories of folly, and for good reason. First, there’s the guilty pleasure of witnessing someone else’s spectacular downfall—our inner schadenfreude finds comfort in knowing it wasn’t us who tumbled into the abyss of human madness. Second, these stories hold up a mirror to our own vulnerability, reminding us that we’re all just one bad decision away from disaster.

    Finally, this tale of missed hedonism, of men forever ensnared in the amber of their own foolishness, is biblical writing in its purest form. Not because it involves scripture or saints, but because it operates on a grand, mythic scale. Here, regret isn’t just an emotion—it’s a cosmic punishment, an exile from paradise so severe it echoes through decades. Like Lot’s wife turning to salt, these men made the fatal error of looking back too late, realizing only in hindsight that they had forsaken a divine gift. Their sorrow is eternal, their torment unrelenting. Even now, they wander through the wasteland of their own remorse, spiritually marooned on that sun-scorched highway, the spectral van idling in their subconscious like a rusted-out relic of their squandered youth. 

    There is no novel here, no book deal, no confetti raining down in celebration. No literary parade in my honor, no breathless NPR interview, not even a sad little short story to be mumbled at a hipster café over oat-milk lattes.

    As Maxwell Shortform, I drift above the world like storm clouds, unleash a torrential downpour of words, and then vanish before anyone can open an umbrella. That is my fate. And accepting my fate is a vital stage of my rehabilitation—learning to embrace the flash flood over the slow, steady river, the brilliant spark over the eternal flame.

  • Joan Didion Was Correct: Writing Is an Aggressive Act

    Joan Didion Was Correct: Writing Is an Aggressive Act

    In my quest to diagnose the writing demon that refuses to release me from its grip, I turned to Why We Write: 20 Acclaimed Authors on How and Why They Do What They Do, edited by Meredith Maran. In her introduction, Maran paints a bleak portrait of the literary life: writers waking before dawn, shackling themselves to their craft with grim determination, all while the odds of success hover somewhere between laughable and nonexistent.

    She lays out the statistics like a funeral director preparing the bereaved: out of a million manuscripts, only 1% will find a home. And if that doesn’t crush your soul, she follows up with another gut punch: only 30% of published books turn a profit. Clearly, materialism isn’t the primary motivator here. Perhaps masochism plays a role—some deep-seated desire for rejection that outstrips the mere thrill of self-rejection. Or maybe it’s just pathology, an exorcism waiting to happen.

    For those unwilling to embrace despair, Maran brings in George Orwell’s “four great motives for writing”: egotism, the pleasures of good prose, the need for historical clarity, and the urge to make a political argument. Sensible enough. No surprises.

    Where things get interesting is Joan Didion’s take. Didion, never one for sentimentality, strips the writer’s motives bare: “In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even hostile act.”

    Reading that, my eyes lit up with recognition. Didion had just sketched Manuscriptus Rex in perfect detail—the secret bully, the compulsive brain-hijacker who isn’t content to write in solitude but needs to occupy the minds of others, to install his worldview in their most private spaces.

    Terry Tempest Williams, on the other hand, writes to confront her ghosts, a sentiment that deeply appeals to me. The idea of the writer as a haunted creature, forever pursued by stories that demand exorcism, feels not only true but inescapable.

    But here’s the kicker—Maran makes it clear that the twenty writers in her book aren’t failures like me. They’re not Manuscriptus Rexes, howling into the void. No, they are the anointed ones, welcomed by publishers with open arms, bathed in the golden light of editorial gratitude.

    And yet, they didn’t land on Mount Olympus by accident. They fought. They clawed their way up, word by painful word, which means they have something to teach—not just to their fans but to me, a self-aware Manuscriptus Rex still trying to understand what, exactly, makes him tick.

    There is no shortage of delicious tidbits in Why We Write. Isabel Allende talks about the necessity of writing like a growing tumor that has to be dealt with or will simply grow out of control. She adds that even if she begins with a germ of an idea, the book has a life of its own. It grows from her unconscious obsessions and preoccupations, so that in the beginning she has not yet discovered what story she is going to tell. Also, she is a writer of ritual and routine. Every January seventh is the day before she starts writing a new book. She gathers all her materials in her “little pool house,” which she uses as her office. It is her sacred space to work, just “seventeen steps” from her home. 

    The idea of having two separate spaces—one for writing, one for everything else—fascinates me. It reminds me of something Martin Amis once told Charlie Rose: he needed to be a writer because toggling between the world of the novel and the earthly world created a kind of necessary duality, a parallel existence where imagination could thrive. For someone wired for storytelling, living between those two realities wasn’t just a luxury—it was a survival mechanism.

    At home, Isabel Allende straddles two universes, one sacred, the other profane. And it calls to mind the lesson my college fiction professor, N.V.M. Gonzalez, drilled into us: a fiction writer must know the difference between sacred and profane time.

    A great writer conducts these two temporal forces like an orchestra. Sacred time—mythic, timeless, symbolic—stretches beyond the clock, charging pivotal moments with fate, destiny, and the weight of history. It’s the crossroads where a single decision echoes through eternity. Profane time, by contrast, is the ticking metronome of daily existence—the coffee that goes cold, the unpaid bills, the search for a parking spot.

    A great novel moves between the two—one moment steeped in cosmic significance, the next trapped in the drudgery of real life. A character might wrestle with divine purpose—but that won’t stop their Wi-Fi from cutting out mid-revelation.

    Allende enters her writing enclave in a state of terror and exhilaration, grappling with ideas—some brilliant, some best left in the trash bin—while navigating stress, disappointment, and suspense. Her process feels high-stakes, and really, what is life without high stakes? A slow, numbing descent into low expectations, inertia, and existential boredom—a fate worse than failure.

    Maybe writing addiction is just the relentless drive to keep the stakes high. Without it, life shrinks into a provisional existence, where survival boils down to the next meal, the next fleeting pleasure, the next song that momentarily sends a tingle up your spine—a desperate Morse code from the universe to confirm you’re still alive.

    The writers in this book all share the same unshakable compulsion to write. For them, writing isn’t just a craft; it’s therapy, oxygen, a way to make sense of chaos. They write because they can’t not write—because failure to do so would send them spiraling into an existential crisis too dark to contemplate. Writing gives them self-worth, wards off insanity, and serves as the only acceptable coping mechanism for their undying curiosities. It isn’t a choice—it’s a chronic condition.

    These successful authors write relentlessly, enduring the agony of writer’s block, self-loathing, and the horror of their own bad prose, all while clawing their way toward something better. And while I share their compulsions, I lack their stamina and focus. Reading about Isabel Allende’s fourteen-hour writing binges was my moment of clarity: I am not a literary gladiator. These novelists can paint vast landscapes of story without crapping out halfway. I, on the other hand, am a wind-sprinter—a lunatic exploding off the starting block, only to collapse in a gasping heap a hundred yards later, curl into the fetal position, and slip into a creative coma.

    And this, I suspect, is the great torment of Manuscriptus Rex—an insatiable hunger to write the big book, clashing violently with a temperament built for sprints, not marathons. This misalignment fuels much of my artistic misery, my chronic dissatisfaction, and my ever-expanding graveyard of unfinished masterpieces.

    Still, whatever envy and despair I felt reading about these elite warriors of the written word, this book offered a cure—I will never again attempt a novel unless divine intervention forces my hand. I’ve seen too many of my failed attempts, the work of a man pretending to be a novelist rather than one willing to endure the necessary rigor. But I do have another calling: identifying unhinged, demonic states in others.

    Like a literary taxidermist, I want to capture these wild, self-destructive compulsions, mount them for display, and present them with maximum drama—not for amusement, but as cautionary tales. This is my work, my rehabilitation, the writing I was meant to do. And unlike novel-writing, it actually feels like a necessity, not a delusion.