Tag: writing

LARRY SANDERS: WHEN YOUR ONLY MEASURE OF SELF-WORTH IS THE NIELSEN RATING

The Larry Sanders Show is, at its core, a study in impoverishment—not financial, mind you, but emotional, existential, and spiritual. It’s a bleak yet hilarious portrait of men so starved for validation that their only measure of self-worth is the Nielsen rating. Without it, they might as well not exist. The three principals—Larry Sanders, Hank Kingsley, and Artie the producer—are all flailing in different shades of desperation, their egos so fragile they make pre-teen TikTok influencers look well-adjusted.

What’s astonishing is that these men are emotional dumpster fires in a pre-social media era. Had they been forced to navigate Instagram, they’d have suffered full mental collapse long before season six. Larry, in particular, embodies this fragile insecurity perfectly: there he is, night after night, lying in bed with some beautiful woman, but his true lover is the TV screen, where he watches his own performance with a mix of self-loathing and obsessive scrutiny. His actual partner—flesh, blood, and pleading for his attention—might as well be a houseplant.

Hank Kingsley, meanwhile, is a slow-motion trainwreck of envy and delusion. He loathes Larry with the fire of a thousand suns, seeing his role as sidekick as a cosmic insult to a man of his alleged grandeur. His existence is a never-ending, one-man King Lear, with far more Rogaine and far less dignity.

Then there’s Artie, the producer, the closest thing the show has to a functional adult. He wrangles chaos with a cigarette in one hand and a whiskey in the other, managing to keep the circus running even as its ringleader is in freefall. But Artie, too, is an emotional casualty. He can juggle Larry’s neuroses and Hank’s tantrums with military precision, yet his own life is a shipwreck, his ability to maintain order confined strictly to the world of late-night television.

Yet for all its cynicism, the show doesn’t just leave us gawking at these wrecked souls—it makes us care. We want them to wake up, to claw their way out of their vanity-driven stupor, to abandon the mirage of celebrity and seek something real. But they won’t. They can’t. They are too drunk on the high of public approval, too lost in the spectacle of show business, too incapable of self-awareness to change course. And so we watch them burn out in real time, laughing through the tragedy, absorbing its lessons like a cautionary tale wrapped in razor-sharp wit.

In the end, The Larry Sanders Show is the perfect showbiz fable: hilarious, cutting, deeply sad, and just self-aware enough to let us laugh at the madness while secretly wondering if we, too, are addicted to the same empty validation.

March 12, 2025
NOT THE GREATEST AMERICAN HERO

When I was a nineteen-year-old bodybuilder in Northern California, I stumbled into a gig at UPS, where they transformed the likes of me into over-caffeinated parcel gladiators. Picture this: UPS, the coliseum of cardboard where bubble wrap is revered like a deity. My mission? To load 1,200 boxes an hour, stacking them into trailer walls so precise you’d think I was defending a Tetris championship title. Five nights a week, from eleven p.m. to three a.m., I morphed into a nocturnal legend of the loading dock. Unintentionally, I shed ten pounds and saw my muscles morph into something straight out of a comic book—like the ones where the hero’s biceps could bench-press a car.

I had a chance to redeem myself from the embarrassment of two previous bodybuilding fiascos. At sixteen, I competed in the Mr. Teenage Golden State in Sacramento, appearing as smooth as a marble statue without the necessary cuts. I repeated the folly a year later at the Mr. Teenage California in San Jose. I refused to let my early bodybuilding career be tarnished by these debacles. With a major competition looming, I noticed my cuts sharpening from the relentless cardio at UPS. Redemption seemed not only possible but inevitable.

Naturally, I did what any self-respecting bodybuilder would do: I slashed my carbs to near starvation levels and set my sights on the 1981 Mr. Teenage San Francisco contest at Mission High School. My physique transformed into a sculpted masterpiece—180 pounds of perfectly bronzed beefcake. The downside? My clothes draped off me like a sad, deflated costume. Cue an emergency shopping trip to a Pleasanton mall, where I found myself in a fitting room that felt like a shrine to Joey Scarbury’s “Theme from The Greatest American Hero,” the ultimate heroic anthem of 1981.

As I tried on pants behind a curtain so flimsy it could’ve been mistaken for a fogged-up windshield, I overheard two young women employees outside arguing about which one should ask me out. Their voices escalated, each vying for the honor of basking in my bronzed splendor. As I slid a tanned, shaved calf through a pants leg, I pictured the cute young women outside my dressing room engaged in a WWE smackdown right there on the store floor, complete with body slams and flying elbows, all for a dinner date with me. This was it—the ultimate validation of my sweat-drenched hours in the gym. And what did I do? I froze like a deer in headlights, donning an aloof expression so potent it was like tossing a wet blanket on a fireworks show. They scattered, muttering about my stuck-up demeanor, while I stood there in my Calvin Kleins, paralyzed by the attention I had so craved.

For a brief, shining moment—from my mid-teens to my early twenties—I possessed the kind of looks that could make a Cosmopolitan “Bachelor of the Month” seem like the “Before” picture in a self-help book. But my personality? Stuck in the same developmental phase as a slab of walking protein powder with the social finesse of a half-melted wax figure.

I had sculpted the body of a Greek god but inhabited it with the poise of a toddler wearing his dad’s shoes. In this regrettable state, I found that dozens of attractive women threw themselves at me, and I responded with the enthusiasm of a tax auditor on Xanax. Look past the Herculean exterior, and you’d find a hollow shell—a construction site abandoned mid-project, complete with rusted scaffolding and a sign that said, “Sorry, we’re closed.”

March 12, 2025
TRAINING WITH THE WRESTLING STARS ON TV FELT LIKE A FEVER DREAM

Training at Walt’s Gym in the mid-70s wasn’t just about lifting weights—it was an unfiltered, sweat-drenched fever dream where my adolescent reality collided head first with the muscle-bound mythology of Big Time Wrestling. For two years in the early 70s, I had religiously watched Big Time Wrestling on Channel 44, glued to my TV screen, captivated by the larger-than-life personas of Pat Patterson, Rocky Johnson, Kinji Shibuya, Pedro Morales, and Hector Cruz. Then, as if fate had decided to prank me, a few years later I found myself sharing dumbbells with these very same legends as a clueless, starstruck thirteen-year-old Olympic weightlifter.

At first, it was thrilling—until my big mouth turned the dream into a farce. Despite carrying a respectable amount of muscle for my age, I had the survival instincts of a gazelle on tranquilizers. Take, for example, the time I was doing cable lat rows next to Hector Cruz, a man whose forehead looked like a war zone of scar tissue. In a stunning act of idiocy, I casually mentioned that I’d heard rumors that wrestling might, gasp, be fake.

Cruz, mid-rep, snapped his head toward me with the kind of stare that could curdle milk. “Look at these scars on my face! Do they look fake to you?” he growled, his voice carrying the weight of a man who had spent years being thrown into turnbuckles for a living. I nodded solemnly, silently wondering if plastic surgery had advanced to the point of replicating decades of chair shots and steel cage matches.

Then there was the Great Towel Incident, in which my ignorance of gym etiquette nearly got me suplexed into another dimension. Spotting a towel draped over the calf raise machine, I assumed—like a naive idiot—that it was communal property, perfect for mopping my sweat-drenched forehead. A fraction of a second later, a mountain of muscle erupted from a nearby bench press, veins bulging, eyes locked onto me like a heat-seeking missile.

“That YOUR towel, kid?” he snarled, his biceps twitching in a way that suggested he resolved most disputes with his fists. Before I could sputter out an excuse, he made it abundantly clear that swiping another man’s gym towel was the equivalent of stealing his car, his wife, and his dog in one fell swoop. Lesson learned: gym towels are sacred artifacts, and touching one without permission is an offense punishable by immediate death or, worse, public humiliation.

But the crowning jewel of my social missteps at Walt’s Gym was my commitment to primal, theatrical grunting—a misguided attempt to add some dramatic flair to my workouts. I thought my earth-shaking screams made me sound like a warrior; in reality, they made me sound like someone having an exorcism mid-bench press.

One day, my sound effects finally pushed a competitive bodybuilder—who looked like a bronze statue of vengeance—to his breaking point. He pulled me aside, his stare filled with enough hostility to burn a hole through my skull. “Kid,” he said, his voice dangerously low, “if you don’t cut the screaming, someone’s going to shut you up permanently. And trust me, they’ll get a standing ovation for it.”

That was my wake-up call. Surviving Walt’s Gym wasn’t just about lifting heavy—it was about mastering the unspoken social codes that separated the seasoned warriors from the clueless rookies. The iron jungle had rules, and I was learning them one near-death experience at a time.

March 12, 2025
LIZA TREYGER BELONGS ON STAGE

In her Netflix stand-up special Night Owl, Liza Treyger unleashes an hour of manic brilliance, slicing through life’s absurdities with the gleeful energy of a woman who has long accepted—if not fully embraced—her own chaos. Smiling, effervescent, and naturally sarcastic, she delivers a rapid-fire confessional that feels less like a polished comedy routine and more like an open mic night inside her own hyperactive brain.

She tells us she was born near the Chernobyl meltdown and now has a lifelong thyroid condition, that her attention span has been obliterated by her smartphone, that she’s forfeited all privacy in exchange for algorithm-curated animal videos, and that her Russian father has an uncanny ability to humiliate her by showing up to formal events in wildly inappropriate T-shirts. She doubts she has the temperament for marriage, children, or any relationship that lasts longer than a Bravo reality show season. She adores living in New York, even though she’s been mugged three times. She got an oversized butterfly tattoo—not because she wanted one, but because she was avoiding the soul-crushing task of changing her printer’s toner cartridge. She’s hungry for applause about losing forty pounds, even though she’s gained it all back. She’s openly critical of her therapist for being judgmental, yet she happily judges everyone around her. She has an encyclopedic knowledge of The Real Housewives franchise, capable of reciting random episodes in disturbingly granular detail. And, above all, she might be a bit of a misfit—too addicted to salacious gossip to maintain deep, lasting friendships.

Treyger is intimidatingly sharp. I like to think I have a respectable level of intelligence, but I’m fairly certain she would find me basic and tedious—a conclusion I’ve already reached about myself, so no harm done. Watching Night Owl felt like a vacation from my own dullness, a thrilling rollercoaster ride through the mind of someone far wittier, sharper, and quicker than I could ever hope to be.

For someone who claims to be a misfit, she fits perfectly on a comedy stage. The very qualities that alienate her in real life—her inability to stop talking, her obsession with gossip, her unfiltered, razor-sharp takes—are her greatest gifts in front of an audience. I’d listen to her anywhere.

March 12, 2025
WATCHING PRESTIGE TV IN THE PRE-ALGORITHM DAYS

Between 2002 and 2010, my wife and I lived in the golden age of unfiltered, algorithm-free television consumption—a fleeting, pre-social media era when discovery felt organic, unmanipulated by streaming services shoving their “curated” picks down our throats. We had no children yet, which meant our evenings weren’t dictated by bedtime battles or the soul-crushing exhaustion of parenting twins. Instead, we devoured TV with the kind of single-minded intensity usually reserved for law students cramming for the bar. This was our time, our indulgence, our untamed expedition into the wilderness of prestige television.

The years between 2002 and 2010 had a peculiar aftertaste, like the lingering fizz of a decade that refused to fully dissolve. The glow of ’90s perpetual adolescence still clung to the air, a warm haze of dial-up nostalgia and post-ironic optimism. Blogs, those digital soapboxes for the unpublished and the deluded, sprouted like toadstools after a storm, each one feeding the fantasy that we were just one viral post away from literary immortality.

Social media existed, but it had yet to metastasize into the roiling cesspool of disinformation and rage farming it would become. Back then, the Internet still wore the mask of a utopian dream—an egalitarian promised land where access to knowledge would liberate us all. The idea that democracy could be strengthened through connectivity wasn’t yet the punchline to a cruel joke.

And then there was television, freshly anointed with the label of “prestige,” its best offerings treated like high art. To binge a drama wasn’t an act of sloth but a cultural event, akin to devouring a novel in a single fevered sitting. It was the golden age of TV, before algorithms herded us like cattle into the content farms of endless, joyless streaming. We watched with reverence, believing that television had finally transcended its popcorn past and entered the realm of literature. Little did we know, the binge model we worshipped would soon turn us all into passive, glassy-eyed gluttons, gorging on content as if it might fill the growing void.

Back then, finding a new show felt like a voyage of discovery, an expedition guided not by an algorithm but by word-of-mouth and gut instinct. Watching TV was like perusing a farmer’s market, sampling the produce ourselves, choosing what looked freshest, most intriguing, most promising—rather than having some all-knowing digital overlord shove a preselected “Because You Watched” playlist in our faces. My wife and I felt like Magellan charting unknown waters, sailing into TV’s vast, uncharted depths, unsure if we would encounter sea monsters, mermaids, or islands teeming with enchantment. It was thrilling. It was dangerous. And most importantly, it was ours.

Of all the shows we binged, three stood out as cultural gold mines we felt like we alone had unearthed: Six Feet Under, The Wire, and Lost. Each had its own gravitational pull. Six Feet Under wasn’t just about a dysfunctional funeral home—it was about risks of individual freedom in a family that disregarded societal conventions. The Wire was a sprawling, devastating essay on the fight for dignity in a rigged system. And Lost? It was Gilligan’s Island meets Sartrean nihilism, a fever dream of redemption and existential dread where the only certainty was uncertainty itself.

Then came 2010—and with it, the seismic shift of having twins. Overnight, TV ceased to be a grand expedition and became a survival mechanism, a warm bath to sink into after the daily combat of child-rearing. Gone was the immersive, existential drama-watching experience. Now, TV became a battlefield medic, stitching us back together, offering temporary relief before the next round of exhaustion. We weren’t discovering new worlds anymore. We were licking our wounds, bracing for tomorrow.

March 12, 2025
DREAMING OF BARBARA EDEN

I grew up in VA housing, transplanted army barracks rebadged “Flavet Villages,” in Gainesville, Florida. The barracks were close to an alligator swamp and a forest where a Mynah bird was always perched on the same tree branch so it was a favorite pastime before bedtime for my father and me to visit the bird on the edge of the forest and converse with it. At dusk, there was a low tide so the alligator dung was particularly pungent. While the smell repelled most, I found the strong aroma strangely soothing and stimulating in a way that made me feel connected to the universe. One evening while my father and I visited the Mynah bird, we could hear a distant radio playing “Bali Ha’i,” sung so beautifully by Juanita Hall. From the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific, “Bali Ha’i” is about an island paradise that seems so close but always remains just out of reach by those who are tantalized by it, causing great melancholy. But I suffered no such melancholy. Paradise was in my presence as my father and I stood by the enchanted forest and spoke to the talking Mynah bird.

The ache of an elusive paradise didn’t afflict me until I discovered I Dream of Jeannie in 1965. The blonde goddess Barbara Eden lived in her genie bottle, a luxurious enclosure with a purple circular sofa lined with pink and purple satin brocade pillows and the inner wall lining of glass jewels shining like mother of pearl. More than anything, I wanted to live inside the bottle with Jeannie. To be denied that wish crushed me with a pang of sadness as deeply as Juanita Hall’s rendition of “Bali Ha’i.” That Jeannie’s bottle was in reality a painted Jim Beam Scotch Whiskey decanter speaks to the intoxication I suffered from my incessant dreams of Barbara Eden.

Living in the bottle with Barbara Eden was my unconscious wish to never grow up, to live forever in the womb with my first crush. I realized I had the personality of a man-child who never wanted to enter the adult world in 1974 when as a thirteen-year-old bodybuilder, I had started my training at Walt’s Gym in Hayward, California. Converted from a chicken coop in the 1950s, the gym was a swamp of fungus and bacteria. Members complained of incurable athlete’s foot and some claimed there were strains of fungus and mold that had not yet been identified in scientific journals. Making a home in the fungal shower stalls was an oversized frog. The pro wrestlers had nicknamed the old-timer frog Charlie. The locker always had a bankrupt divorcee or other in a velour top and gold chain hogging the payphone while having a two-hour-long talk with his attorney about his bleak life choices. There was an unused outdoor swimming pool in the back with murky water black with plague and dead rats. A lonely octogenarian named Wally, who claimed to be a model for human anatomy textbooks, worked out for several hours before spending an equal time in the sauna and shower, completing his grooming with a complete-body talcum powder treatment so that when he spoke to you, he did so embalmed in a giant talcum cloud. The radio played the same hits over and over: Elvin Bishop’s “Fooled Around and Fell in Love” and The Eagles’ “New Kid in Town.” What stood out to me was that I was just a kid navigating in an adult world, and the gym, like the barbershop, was a public square that allowed me to hear adult conversations about divorces, hangovers, gambling addictions, financial ruin, the cost of sending kids to college, the burdens of taking care of elderly parents. I realized then that I was at the perfect age: Old enough to grow big and strong but young enough to be saved from the drudgery and tedium of adult life. It became clear to me then that I never wanted to grow up. I wanted to spend my life luxuriating inside the mother of pearl bottle with Barbara Eden in a condition of perpetual adolescence.

Wanting to live in Jeannie’s bottle wasn’t just about being joined to the hip with the one I loved. It was about protection from evil. This became apparent in 1972 when I was ten, and I watched an ABC Movie of the Week, The Screaming Woman. Based on a Ray Bradbury short story, the movie was about a woman buried alive. Her screams haunted me so much that I could not sleep for two weeks as I imagined the mud-covered lady under my bed crying for my help. I swore I would never watch a scary movie again, but a year later when my parents had left for a party, I was bored, so I watched Night of the Living Dead. What I learned from watching these scary movies is that when you see depictions of evil, you can’t “unsee” them. Those visions leave a permanent mark so that nothing is ever the same again. What was once the happy, innocent sound of the neighborhood jingle of the ice cream truck is now a jalopy full of devil-clowns ready to exit the vehicle and kidnap me from my room. I tried to remedy my trauma by watching The Waltons and Little House on the Prairie, but these wholesome depictions of family life could not bring back the innocence that was lost forever, so at age eleven, I was already conceiving my elaborate bunker for the Great Zombie Apocalypse. And that bunker, of course, was Jeannie’s bottle.

In my early teens, my life became a futile quest to find substitutes for living inside Jeannie’s bottle. For example, in 1974 I visited several friends and neighbors who had recently purchased waterbeds, tried them out, and became convinced that waterbeds would afford me a life of luxury, unimagined pleasures, and relaxation that life had so far denied me. I persuaded my parents to buy me one. My love affair with the contraption proved to be short-lived. Its temperature was either too hot or too cold. It leaked. It often smelled like a frog swamp. I remember if I moved my body, there would be a counterreaction, like some invisible wave force fighting me as I tried to get comfortable. One day the waterbed leaked so badly that the floorboards were damaged and my bedroom looked like something out of Hurricane Katrina. What was supposed to be a revolution in sleep proved to be a nightmare, and my quest to find a substitute for Jeannie’s bottle had to be started afresh.

The longing to be inside Jeannie’s bottle is a regression impulse, and I can’t talk about regression without mentioning Cap ‘N Crunch. My mother indulged my appetite for this sugary cereal and bought me all its variations: Cap ‘N Crunch with Crunch Berries, Peanut Butter Cap ‘N Crunch, and then the renamed versions of the same-tasting cereal: Quisp, Quake, and King Vitamin. Quaker cereals took their winning formula of corn and brown sugar flavors and sold several variations with different mascots and names.

As a kid watching these cereals being advertised on TV, it was clear that too much of a good thing was not a problem. On the contrary, I felt compelled to taste-test all these cereal varieties the way a sommelier would taste dozens of Zinfandel wines from the same region or a musicologist would listen to hundreds of different versions of Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony.

Eating six versions of Cap ‘N Crunch afforded me the illusion of variety while eating the same cereal over and over. I was a seven-year-old boy who wanted to believe I had choices but at the same time didn’t want any choices.

You will sometimes hear about the man who is in his sixth marriage and his wives in terms of appearance, temperament, and personality are all more or less the same. The man keeps going back to the same woman but wants to believe he has “found someone new” to give him the hope of a new life.

That was essentially my relationship with Cap ‘N Crunch. Not only was I stagnant in my food tastes, but I was also regressing into sugar-coated pablum. My love of cereal, which endures to this day, was the equivalent of finding comfort in Jeannie’s bottle.

In addition to sweetened cereal as evidence of my emotional stagnation was my choice of damaged role models. While I was fixated on I Dream of Jeannie, my bodybuilding partner Bull was fixated on Gilligan’s Island. Choosing Bull as my role model must have prolonged my delayed development. Bull was not known for his social decorum and gallantry. One example that stands out is that one night we were swimming at the Tanglewood apartments swimming pool when Bull found a giant orange fluorescent bra hanging by its strap on the diving board. It practically glowed in the dark. Bull grabbed the bra and twirled it above his head as if he were going to fling it. Then he stopped and said it was his sister’s birthday the next day, and he had forgotten to buy her a present. He didn’t even wrap it. He just gave his sister this orange bra, and she wasn’t even shocked. For her, it was just another day in the life of having a crazy brother. When I think back to my delayed development in the world of dating and relationships, I have to attribute much of that delay to my misguided choices of male role models. It would be unfair, after all, to lay all the blame on Jeannie. The fact was that I was in love with Jeannie as a fantasy, but as a real woman she terrified me.

This was evident on one warm California spring afternoon in 1973. After sixth-grade classes were over and the bus dropped us off at Crow Canyon Road, we would often walk across the street to 7-Eleven to get a Slurpee before trekking up the steep hill that was Greenridge Road. I was standing inside 7-Eleven with my friends listening to “Brandy, You’re a Fine Girl” playing on the store radio when the Horsefault sisters, both freckled with long blonde hair and beaming, mischievous blue eyes, came into the store and asked me if I wanted to see a rabbit inside their cage. One was an eighth-grader and the other a high school sophomore. They lived in a farmhouse behind the 7-Eleven. I had no interest in seeing a rabbit inside a cage, but the girls had high cheekbones and figures that reminded me of my first crush, Barbara Eden, so I told them I was very interested in seeing their caged rabbit. I exited 7-Eleven with the girls, and we walked about a hundred yards on a trail that was covered with dry horse dung and surrounded by a field of grass before we reached the outskirts of their farmhouse. Behind a thicket of bushes was a large cage, with the door slightly ajar. A heavy chain lock hung on the door latch. I looked inside the cage, but I saw that there was no rabbit. At this point, the sisters, cackling like witches, grabbed me and tried to drag me into the cage. It was clear that they were attempting to prank me, put me inside the cage, lock the door, and make me their prisoner. But I was too strong for them, and as we wrestled outside the cage and rolled on the grass, we became enveloped in a cloud of dust and hay. In a nearby coop, chickens were clucking and flapping their wings with great alarm and alacrity. When the sisters, now covered in sweat, realized they did not have the strength to carry on with their mission, I fled them and rushed home. I was outraged that they had tried to steal my freedom, and I diverted myself by watching my favorite TV show, I Dream of Jeannie, starring the gorgeous Barbara Eden, who played a lovelorn genie trapped in a bottle except when summoned by her master. Clearly, I was still too young to understand the exquisite pleasures of irony.

March 12, 2025
WHY WE PREFERRED THE BRADY BUNCH OVER THE BUGALOOS

Airing from 1969 to 1974, The Brady Bunch parachuted into a world where psychedelic counterculture wasn’t just in the streets—it was infiltrating children’s television like an unsupervised batch of bad acid. This was the golden age of Sid and Marty Krofft, the demented puppet masters behind some of the trippiest, most hallucinatory shows ever greenlit for kids who just wanted to eat their Froot Loops in peace.

Take The Bugaloos, for instance. A gang of groovy humanoid insects pranced around Tranquility Forest, looking like Woodstock refugees who had lost a bet with Mother Nature. I.Q. the grasshopper, Harmony the bumblebee, and Joy the butterfly flitted through a kaleidoscopic fever dream, their wings flapping to the rhythm of some drugged-out sitar riff.

Then there was H.R. Pufnstuf, a show that didn’t even pretend to hide its narcotic inspiration. The premise? A boy named Jimmy, possibly the first recorded victim of child abduction via talking boat, washes up on an island ruled by a towering, lisping dragon in a sash. He’s relentlessly hunted by a witch named Wilhelmina W. Witchiepoo, who cackles and screeches like she just took a bad hit of something cooked up in Timothy Leary’s basement. It was a surrealist nightmare wrapped in felt, and we just accepted it as part of our Saturday morning routine.

And let’s not forget Lidsville, the unholy love child of Alice in Wonderland and a mescaline bender. A kid falls into a magician’s oversized hat and enters a world where—stay with me here—the hats are alive. Sentient bowler hats, deranged cowboy hats, and scheming top hats all vying for dominance in a dystopian headwear hierarchy. It was a concept so bizarre that it made H.R. Pufnstuf look like a Ken Burns documentary.

Meanwhile, our parents had no idea what we were watching. They assumed we were parked in front of harmless Saturday morning cartoons, blissfully unaware that we were being force-fed a psychedelic trip disguised as children’s programming. Looking back, it’s no wonder an entire generation grew up with a slightly warped sense of reality—half of our formative years were spent under the subconscious influence of a neon-soaked acid carnival.

But The Brady Bunch wanted no part of this trippy circus. Instead, Sherwood Schwartz’s creation pressed the rewind button, bypassing the counterculture entirely to resurrect a 1950s fantasyland straight out of Leave It to Beaver and Dennis the Menace. This was a world where no one dropped acid, but plenty of people dropped wholesome life lessons over dinner. ABC executives were spooked by the show’s aggressively retro vibe—after all, this was the era of protest marches and free love, not avocado-colored appliances and canned moral epiphanies. Yet America couldn’t resist the lure of a sanitized, hyper-organized utopia where the biggest crisis was Jan losing her glasses. The Brady home became a saccharine oasis, offering the myth of innocence to a country drowning in cultural upheaval. It was a fantasy so potent that, decades later, it would be skewered in Pleasantville—a reminder that even the shiniest mirage of perfection can’t hide the cracks in the human condition.

I still remember a conversation from middle school that stuck like gum to the bottom of my brain. We were confessing how much we envied the kids with curfews. That’s right—curfews. Rules. Structure. While their parents were saying things like, “Be home by 9,” ours were basically saying, “Don’t set the house on fire.” The culture we grew up in was simple: adults did their thing (drink, argue, vanish), and we kids were left to figure out life on our own, like feral cats with no boundaries.

Sure, we flirted with chaos, captivated for a hot minute by the surreal carnival of Sid and Marty Krofft’s fever-dream creations. Watching The Bugaloos or H.R. Pufnstuf was like peeking into a world designed by someone who’d eaten a bad batch of brownies. But the novelty wore off fast. You can only handle so many psychedelic forests and talking hats before you crave something—anything—that makes sense. That’s why we kept returning to The Brady Bunch and later Happy Days. Deep down, we knew that life imitating a bad acid trip wasn’t sustainable. Chaos might be entertaining, but it doesn’t tuck you in at night or teach you that everything can be neatly resolved in 30 minutes.

March 12, 2025
THE TRIUMPH OF CAPTAIN KANGAROO

I was five years old when I learned my first brutal lesson about the arms race of dominance. It happened in the treacherous, high-stakes jungle of the Flavet Villages Apartments in Gainesville, Florida—more specifically, in my treehouse. It wasn’t much, just a few wooden slats nailed to an old tree, but I ruled it like a king. One day, hoping to impress Tammy Whitmire, I dangled before her what I believed to be the ultimate prize: a box of Sun-Maid Raisins.

And not just any raisins—these came in that iconic red box featuring the beaming Sun-Maid girl, her cherubic face framed by a halo of golden light, a bonnet perched on her head like a saintly crown. She cradled a bounty of grapes in her arms, promising sweetness, purity, and divine nourishment. I flashed that box like a high roller showing off a wad of cash. “Come up,” I told Tammy, “and these are all yours.”

She was halfway up the wooden slats, eyes locked on my offering, when the unthinkable happened. From a rival treehouse, Zane Johnson’s smug little face emerged from a cluster of leaves. “Raisins?” he scoffed. “I’ve got Captain Kangaroo Cookies.”

And just like that, I was dethroned. Tammy froze mid-climb, her expression shifting from hopeful delight to naked contempt. My raisins, once a gleaming beacon of temptation, now looked like a sad handful of shriveled failure. I watched, helpless, as she abandoned my tree and scrambled toward Zane’s perch with the urgency of a stockbroker chasing a hot tip. Within minutes, she and Zane were nestled together, giggling and feasting on his double-fudge, cream-filled cookie sandwiches—confections so decadent they made my raisins look like rations for an ascetic monk.

As they licked chocolate from their fingers and cast pitying glances in my direction, I slumped in my treehouse, a rejected monarch in exile. At some point, I drifted into the sleep of the vanquished, only to be jolted awake by a fiery agony. Red ants—drawn, no doubt, by the scent of my untouched raisins—had swarmed my body, turning my sanctuary into a writhing hellscape. Screaming, I fled to my apartment, where my mother plunged me into a scalding bath, drowning dozens of ants still clinging to my welt-covered skin.

As I soaked in that tub, covered in welts and drowning in existential despair, the brutal truth smacked me harder than a Captain Kangaroo cookie to the face: I was a loser. Not just in the Tammy Sweepstakes, but in the grander, merciless war of seduction and social dominance. The game wasn’t about charm, wit, or even strategic treehouse placement—it was about bait. And I had shown up to the high-stakes poker table of childhood courtship with a pathetic handful of raisins, while Zane waltzed in with a royal flush of double-fudge, cream-filled supremacy.

That was the day the cold, reptilian logic of the universe seared itself into my brain: Raisins are for chumps. Cookies are for kings. And in the arms race of attraction, Captain Kangaroo doesn’t just win—he conquers.

March 12, 2025
BREAKING BAD: AN ADDICTION TO BEAUTIFUL SADNESS

Watching Breaking Bad twice isn’t just recommended—it’s a moral obligation. It’s also required to declare it the greatest TV show of all time, even if it’s only in your top three, because the fanboys won’t tolerate anything less. And, honestly, they might be right. I devoured Breaking Bad in the full religious fervor its converts describe, an experience that felt almost biblical in scope. Yes, the show is a masterclass in plotting, character arcs, reversals, and edge-of-your-seat suspense. But at its core, Breaking Bad isn’t about meth, morality, or even power. It’s about Walter White’s eyes—those cavernous, haunted wells of defeat. Without them, the show collapses.

What makes those eyes so tragic? A single, crushing word: demoralization. Walter White begins as a good man, fighting tooth and nail to support his family, only to be rewarded with a Job-like curse—a terminal illness and a society that treats educators like disposable placeholders. Stripped of dignity, forced to work a humiliating second job washing cars for the very students who mock him, he finally breaks bad—cashing in his chemistry genius for a descent into meth-laced perdition. Breaking Bad is a tragedy in the classical sense, charting the fall of a man who was never evil, just desperate, and in his desperation, damns his own soul.

But here’s the thing: Breaking Bad isn’t just about whether Walter White loses his soul. It’s about whether we can bear to watch him do it. And that takes me back to those eyes—deep pools of melancholy that remind me of another doomed wanderer from TV history: Bill Bixby’s Dr. David Banner in The Incredible Hulk. Like Walter White, Banner is a man crushed under the weight of a world that doesn’t understand him. Like Walter, he transforms into a monster, not because he wants to, but because he must. And like Walter, he walks alone.

Nothing captures that loneliness quite like The Incredible Hulk’s “Lonely Man” piano theme, composed by Joe Harnell—a piece so heartbreaking, so drenched in sorrow, it practically seeps through the screen. Every episode ends the same way: Banner, shoulders slumped, hitchhiking down an endless road to nowhere, forever exiled from a world that fears him. Swap out Banner’s tattered duffel bag for Walter White’s grim smirk in the show’s final scene, and you’ll see they’re walking the same road.

Looking back, I realize that my love for The Incredible Hulk in my teens and Breaking Bad in my middle age isn’t a coincidence. It’s an addiction—to beautiful sadness. I’m drawn to characters whose sorrow is so vast, so overwhelming, that it takes on a tragic elegance. They aren’t just suffering; they’re symphonies of suffering, played in minor keys. And I can’t stop listening.

March 12, 2025