Leaving Anhedonia

Why I Teach Jim Crow in My College Composition Class

In today’s political polarization and troll culture, there is a popular thought propagated by political opportunists that teaching about racism, slavery, and Jim Crow is in all its forms is Critical Race Theory: radical indoctrination into the wrong-headed belief that America is a hellscape and the CRT minions are obsessed with rubbing our faces in the racist stains of American history. Such a grotesque oversimplification and caricature of what it means to teach racism is a Straw Man, a misrepresentation of the aims of teaching racism in a classroom. For example, for the last decade in my college composition class, we have a unit on Jim Crow. I do not teach Jim Crow to rub people’s faces in exaggerated notions of America’s original sin or to promote some radical political agenda. I teach Jim Crow as a countervailing measure to the revisionist mythologies that replace its real history. Such revisionism leads to immoral acts. For example, the revisionist history of The Lost Cause, which outlandishly claims slavery was a good thing, results in over 200 public schools being named after America's worst racist Jefferson Davis, and today revisionism has caused millions of Americans to praise the criminals involved with the January 6 Insurrection as "American Patriots." I teach Jim Crow because the racist ideas that fueled Jim Crow are alive today in the form of social media white nationalists who are spreading weaponized misinformation. I teach Jim Crow because Jim Crow gave inspiration and instruction to racists throughout the world, for example, Hitler learned segregation techniques from America’s Confederacy creator Jefferson Davis. Finally, I teach Jim Crow because a moral inventory is essential for society’s moral reform, a process that the post-World War II Germans have successfully done in a form of soul-searching and atonement for the sins of the past, a process they call Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung. 

A Defense of My Writing Class

I’ve taught writing at El Camino College in Southern California for nearly thirty years. One of the welcome surprises of my job is that the overwhelming majority of you are kind and affable. This surprises me because you must feel like fish out of water for several reasons. For one, my writing courses are not electives; they’re requirements, so you have to be here the way someone with a speeding ticket is forced to attend traffic school. Secondly, most of you are on some kind of financial aid and work full- or part-time jobs, so you are not exactly showing up to class with a surplus of sleep and free time. A small number of you are international students who often don’t work but have serious challenges with the English language. As a result, you come to class with an understandable amount of anxiety. 

Another factor that makes you feel out of place is that you have spent most of your lives on smartphones. A life of texting, looking at video clips, and reading only writing fragments, never book-length works, makes your brains maladapted to dissecting a nonfiction book, a novel, and a 5,000-word argumentative essay. 

To add to the strain on your brains, you are being asked to learn a brand new language to help you conceptualize argumentation and informed opinions such as ethos, logos, pathos, counterargument, rebuttal, irony, bias, active voice, passive voice, correlation, causation, inductive reasoning, deductive reasoning, and ad hominem. The way a beginning piano student has to learn chords, scales, and arpeggios, you have to learn the basic pillars of logic and argumentation.  

English majors in my composition classes were rare in previous decades. Now with the popularity of STEM majors in our hypercompetitive job market and underpaid teaching careers about as appealing as steak gristle, I don’t get English majors anymore. 

I would be remiss not to mention the cost of education. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, a college education when I attended in 1980 has skyrocketed 173% today. I didn’t live in an age when college debt and living with my parents well into my thirties was a serious possibility. 

And yet in spite of all these hurdles you face, you are for the most part kind, intellectually curious, and eager to learn. In spite of all the doomsday prophets who say America is turning into the movie Idiocracy, you have always been a living rebuttal of that claim.  

Not only are you eager to learn, but you are also as tough as nails. Many of you drive great distances to get to class, work long hours, take care of children, live on a modest income, and claw your way up the economic ladder. Your courage and fortitude humble me. 

But being humble before you is not enough. I feel compelled to persuade you, with the zeal of a hungry vacuum cleaner salesman, why learning the tools to develop informed opinions and credible arguments requires an overall metamorphosis of your personality, a moral core, and a strongly-defined identity that is essential to success and happiness. So indeed, that is precisely what I will do. 

Trying to persuade you that my required writing class is as vital as the oxygen you breathe and likely one of the best things that ever happened to you is not an easy task. There are several challenges I face when presenting such an argument. The first challenge is that of sanctimonious cliches. When people defend writing classes and the humanities in general, they too often rely on lazy cliches: The humanities enrich your soul, make you cultured, make you literate, give you critical thinking skills, and help you find a life purpose. Even if all these cliches are true, they are so overused, pompous, saccharine, self-indulgent, and vague as to be useless. 

The second challenge is the absence of objective measurement. In the sciences, you can objectively show your proficiency in calculus, computer coding, chemistry, biology, and physics. In contrast, in a writing class, we don’t have objective measures for things like “enrichment of the soul,” “meaning,” “purpose,” “literacy,” “linguistic acquisition,” “self-expression,” and “authorial presence.” We can all agree that well-articulated self-expression, literacy, and life purpose are essential and desirable; however, there is disagreement over whether or not college is the place to develop these qualities. There is a sentiment that says, “Find meaning and self-expression in your own free time but don’t waste your time and money in college developing those qualities. College is for real subject matter, and we all know the only real subject matter that counts is STEM.”

This sentiment speaks to the third challenge about my writing class and that is the charge that my writing class is irrelevant. Whereas STEM courses can be tested objectively and result in financially-rewarding careers, humanities courses such as my writing classes are considered at best luxuries for the privileged class and deadends for careers. Many will say, “If you want to improve your writing and grammar, study a few YouTube videos, but meanwhile, take real college courses that will be worth your time and money.”

This sentiment speaks to my fourth challenge: The subtle or flagrant contempt for writing and humanities courses. When students tell people they’re majoring in a humanities subject, they are often looked upon as second-class college students and fakers. “Real students major in STEM. The pretend students major in everything else, and the proof is in the kind of jobs they land after they graduate.”  

This adulation of STEM majors combined with a disdain for humanities majors speaks to my fifth challenge: The notion that studying writing and humanities is not cost-effective. “Why waste your time working on the intangibles of writing when you can focus your energy on the STEM courses that will bring you real money?”

So my writing class appears to have much against it. Champions of the humanities may feebly defend my class with lazy cliches, a lack of objective ways to measure literacy, an inability to prove my course’s relevance, powerlessness in the face of mass disdain for humanities courses in general, and what looks like a failed cost-benefit analysis. But this perception of my writing class as a Loser Course is rooted in ignorance and a superficial grasp of what my writing course truly is. To grasp the essence of my writing class and the very way I teach it, we must look to perhaps the greatest American in American history--Frederick Douglass. By studying the arduous literacy, writing, and oratory journey Douglass embarked upon, we can see that Douglass embodies the kind of person who undergoes a dramatic metamorphosis from his exceptional literacy and intellectual prowess. Even if we don’t come close to attaining the literary genius of Frederick Douglass, we can look to him as the correct path to developing an appropriate orientation and philosophy that life’s conflicts demand. To study the kind of intellect Frederick Douglass became is to understand the benefits of a humanities course such as my writing class. 

Born a slave and forbidden to read and write, Frederick Douglass was a genius who saw that the white man was withholding literacy from him as a weapon to deny him his humanity. He would have none of it. As a child, he taught himself to read and write by studying scraps of discarded newspapers and magazines from trash bins. He was so committed to developing literacy, he preferred to starve, giving his food to poor white children in exchange for reading and writing lessons. Even as a child, he was a living lesson of the principle that it is wiser to enjoy long-term gain over short-term gratification.

Over time, Douglass became the country’s greatest orator, traveled the world, and became an international hero for championing human rights. As a writer, orator, and abolitionist, Douglass lived from the beginning to the end of the 19th century, a span that made him a witness to slavery, Reconstruction, Redemption, and Jim Crow. The forces that would enslave, emasculate, and dehumanize him were from a cesspool of bad ideas. Douglass realized that he had to counteract these malignant forces with the only power he had--language and his power of persuasion. For Frederick Douglass, learning to read and write and to give his communication the highest levels of oratory and rhetoric was not a luxury or an indulgence; it was a matter of life and death, not just for him but for all the oppressed people he represented.  

Part of his resistance to the dark forces of dehumanization was the cultivation of his persona. This cultivation was largely achieved through his use of language. Language is the mother of invention. We read in David W. Blight’s magisterial biography Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom that as a child hanging out with the master’s son on the plantation, Douglass used his wits and insights to grasp that he could use words to transform himself. In the words of Blight: “In afternoon competitive repartee, the future Douglass may have first experimented with the magic of words and unwittingly wielded the tools by which he would invent his life.” 

Most people sleepwalk through life, but Douglass had no such luxury. He learned at a young age that invention and reinvention were essential to survival and that the bricks of invention were words, language, rhetoric, and argumentation. Word by word, Douglass began to use language to create his persona. 

His cultivated persona was not limited to his linguistic acquisition. He was also photogenic, handsome, and by many accounts the most photographed man of his time. It is also true that Douglass had no illusions about the power of image and he refused to let white people “touch up” his photographs, for fear that they would distort his features to make his visage conform to ugly Jim Crow stereotypes. What’s most true of all is that Douglass knew the power of media long before the age of social media, and he used his language, his strong identity, and his image to create what in today’s parlance is called “a brand.” While the term is too often crassly used, the word brand is an accurate way to describe the maturity we go through by embarking upon an intellectual journey and refining our notion of self the way a machinist uses molten metal to refine steel. 

How important is language when it comes to forming and defining the self? Douglass’ biographer David Blight observed that slaves owned nothing: tools, clothes, beds, not even their own children, but they did own one thing: language. The slaves could create rhythms of speech, certain tonalities in their speaking and singing, and idiosyncratic expressions that belonged to them. Their use of language, poetry, and song became who they were at their very essence. They had nothing else to define them. Frederick Douglass grasped the importance of language as a child and embarked upon an obsessive quest to develop his own and to use it as a sword against the forces of injustice. 

If you admire Frederick Douglass and you think his attributes are worth emulating, then you will be motivated to learn reading and writing to be like him: To have a strong personality, to have strong writing and oratory skills, have a strong moral core that hungers for justice, and a desire to make a lasting impact on this world. 

But let us not have any delusions. Not everyone wants to be like Frederick Douglass. Some people just want to get by and live a provisional, self-insulated existence. They want to make enough money and live a life of fine eating and fine entertainment, what the ancient Romans called a life of bread and circuses. If we want to distract ourselves with tasty morsels and scintillating entertainment, then all we need is enough money to quench those appetites. In that case, we will define our existence by the quality of our consumerism. To devote our lives to consumerism is to eventually become Philistines. 

It is very likely that the Philistine Mindset is in direct opposition to the Frederick Douglass mindset. It is also very likely that the pressures of society to conform to lifestyles that appeal to others so that we are popular and attractive to others will create a gravitational pull to the Philistine Mindset and repel us from the Frederick Douglass Mindset.  

In a writing class like mine, it is not my place to tell you which mindset to embrace. I can only give you the lay of the land, so to speak, define the landscape, and argue that the Frederick Douglass Way is the True Way, but ultimately let you decide which path to take. 

Having said that, I would be less than honest if I didn’t make the case that if you reject the Frederick Douglass mindset, it is most likely that you will choose the alternative--the Philistine’s Mindset. And here I must make a warning: Even if you find materialistic success, if you adopt the Philistine’s Mindset, as most people do, you’ll find that such an orientation will result in misery, self-complacent mediocrity, low self-regard, self-induced bondage, and moral entropy. 

What is so dangerous about the Philistine Mindset? Such a mindset rests on mindless consumerism, which leads to addictive behavior. We eventually become attenuated to the pleasures of consumerism until we become numb. Psychologists call this the “anhedonic response” or the “anhedonic treadmill.” 

A life of consumerism is a life built on short-term gratification. Feeding on confectionary pleasures, we will always be malnourished and hungry, waiting for the next shiny object. 

A life of meaning and struggle, the kind of life embodied by perhaps the greatest American, Frederick Douglass, is a life that looks at the long game, is more mature, more philosophical, and more rooted in language, philosophy, and history. It is the more desirable life, but I can’t force you to believe that. The choice is for you to make. 

The Brawler Vs. the Peacemaker

I tell my college writing students that we achieve an emotional connection with the reader by having a strong tone or voice. This tone or voice is often called a rhetorical style. 

We adopt a writing style the way a musician adopts a musical genre: jazz, classical baroque, rock, pop, bossa nova, hip hop, country, folk, psychedelic, underground, rave, indie dream pop, etc. 

However, if we are beginning writers, the above analogy doesn't work because we don't have expertise in all the writing genres. 

What is the solution? Be yourself. If you don't know who you are as a writer, I suggest you look at two basic writing tones: The Brawler and the Peacemaker. 

The Brawler is dramatic, bold, bombastic, and powerful. They "take no prisoners." The advantages of being a Brawler are that you will be more entertaining and you are more likely to win the readers' attention. Some famous Brawlers over the last several decades are H.L. Mencken, Gore Vidal, Christopher Hitchens, Stanley Crouch, and Molly Ivins. 

However, there are disadvantages. You may come across as pompous and arrogant. Your writing may lack fairness and nuance, and your ego may cause your self-aggrandizement to eclipse clarity and attention to the subject at hand. A Brawler can too often become a needy navel-gazer, a grenade-thrower thirsty for attention. You find that many on Twitter and other social media platforms are attention-addicted Brawlers. Over time, their act wears thin. 

On balance, a disciplined expression of the Brawler can make for effective, entertaining writing. 

The Peacemaker is a writer who is self-possessed, demure, calm, clear-eyed, reasonable, polite, and fairminded. Their security and confidence prevent them from lobbing bombs and grenades at others and this self-confidence gives them quiet power and wins our credibility. 

However, the Peacemakers have their own traps: They can come across as meek, mealy-mouthed, insipid, prevaricating, inscrutable, and cagey. Their calm and reserve can make their arguments come across as weak tea. We may lose patience with the Peacemaker whose politeness strikes us as just plain boring. 

On balance, a writer who combines cogent insights with calm reason and nuance can be a persuasive Peacemaker.  Notable writers of the Peacemaker variety include A.N. Wilson, Hua Hsu, Jill Lepore, and Elizabeth Kolbert. 

Which style is better, the Brawler or the Peacemaker? Neither. What’s important is that your style is an authentic expression of self. Brawlers shouldn’t bend themselves out of shape to be Peacemakers and vice versa. In a world teeming with BS and chicanery, finding your authentic voice will go a long way with the reader. 

 

George Packer Warns Against Being Seduced by the New Fatalism

George Packer has written a wise and instructive essay, “A View of American History That Leads to One Conclusion,” published in The Atlantic. 

He remembers as a child learning that history was “taught as a series of triumphs over wrongs that belonged to the past.” Racism was bad, a sinful stain on America’s past, but racist institutions were abolished as America marched forward. Additionally, America was worthy of exceptionalism with its spread of democracy throughout the world. Its “mistakes” didn’t disqualify America from being the Shining City on a Hill. 

But this story of America’s progress has been replaced with a new narrative, Packer argues, a gloomy narrative mired in fatalism. 

The “golden age of fatalism” is welcomed with the fervor of virtue signaling and self-flagellation. There is a publishing industry devoted to it.

What’s most striking about this type of fatalism is that it “draws a straight line from the past to present.” 

Packer argues that fatalism is a claim against the idea of change. Nothing really changes. The sins of racism persist. Jim Crow lives on in different iterations. America is not a “flawed experiment.” It is an irredeemable hellscape. 

Packer concedes that there are understandable causes of this fatalism: inequality, police brutality, and Trumpist authoritarianism, to name a few. 

What Packer will not concede, though, is the eagerness and zeal that fuels this fatalism, which “crosses from empiricism into metaphysics.” Such zeal compromises the search for truth. Historians search for facts that support their preconceived biases. 

Packer gives us an example of such zealous fatalism in Jefferson Cowie’s book Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power. The book is “a gem of the new fatalism,” and I interpret rebuke in Packer’s praise. The book is a chronicle of white racism and greed from the 19th century to the current day. Packer writes: “Cowie’s theme is how the sacred American creed of freedom serves to justify racial domination.” The very tissue of America is saturated with racial sin to the point that redemption is impossible or if it is, mountains would have to be moved. 

Packer is skeptical of this damning of America. Cowie chose or cherry-picked, the most virulently racist and brutal area on the United States map to rub evil in our faces.  Cowie could have chosen a cosmopolitan or diverse city where there are examples of the American experiment working well, but to do so would be an inconvenient cog thrown into Cowie’s fatalist mythology. 

Packer reminds us that “Politics is a competition between stories--and it’s as politics that the new fatalism leads to a dead end.” Cowie is painting an ugly moral identity to push his fatalist mythology. He wants us to experience shame, but Packer writes: “Shame is a shaky foundation for any project of renewal. You can’t tell someone that he’s made a mess of his life because of his own bad character and then expect him to change.” Quoting the philosopher Richard Rorty, Packer reminds us that we need self-respect for self-improvement. 

But the danger of the new fatalism, Packer argues, is that there is no self-improvement, only hopelessness. The new fatalist writers are earning relevance and fanfare for their gloomy dives into America’s original sin and the price we pay is one of learned helplessness and stagnation.

Packer wisely wants us to go through the slow process of redeeming ourselves from our past sins, not through a masochistic deep diver into fatalism but through “organization and persuasion.” We need to see the tangled web of American history. Packer cites Timothy Shenk, author of Realigners. America is a place of contradictions. There are no easy mythologies that can ascribe America as good or evil. We must neither be cheerleaders for American exceptionalism nor champions of the new fatalism. We must look forward. The new fatalism is a step backward. 

Who Stole My Smiths Poster?

Who Stole My Smiths Poster?

Today I received an email from my twelve-year-old daughter’s teacher in which he is pleading with “no questions asked” to all the parents to get his Spiderman doll, which was recently stolen from his classroom, returned to him. My wife teaches the same level at a different middle school and she gets things stolen in her classroom or there is vandalism like some kid or other putting chewing gum in the pencil sharpener or tearing out pages from the young adult fiction collection. When I receive an email about a stolen Spiderman doll or hear my wife tell some barbaric tale of students defacing her classroom property, I find myself imagining the kind of kid who does these types of acts. What does he look like? What kind of malevolent spirit animates him? How does he treat other people and animals in general? Is he decent in most regards of his life but finds himself becoming an impish fiend when he’s at school? Do people compartmentalize, being good in some roles and evil in others, or does evil have the kind of integrity that makes its evil known in all endeavors? 

 The email about the stolen Spiderman doll reminded me of when I got my Smith’s “How Soon Is Now” poster stolen from the front of my office door at the university in 1990. I was less depressed about the stolen poster and more depressed that a Smiths fan could commit such an act and still nourish himself on the beautiful melancholic music of Morrissey and Johnny Marr. I thought such nourishment required some baseline of morality and learning that my assumption was an erroneous one created a deep injury inside me that of course will never heal and somehow seems appropriate for a Smiths song. 

Over thirty years have passed since my Smiths poster was stolen, and I still find myself asking what became of the thief. Was he a fraudulent Smiths fan who repented of his thievery and in the process became an authentic lover of The Smiths? Was his 1990 thievery an evil seed that grew worse over time and now he rots in some squalid apartment somewhere succumbing to his own moral disintegration? Is he now a successful, well-groomed businessman living a conventional life in the suburbs with both his conscience and memory free of any guilt for having stolen my Smiths poster? 

This last scenario bugs me a lot--the idea that he did something that wounded me and not only did he take something that wasn’t his, but he also left me with an emotional scar while he gets to go on with his life in a state of grace and impunity. 

But that is the nature of evil--hurting others and not caring about it. That I could be so naive as to obsess over this obvious state of affairs speaks to my unreasonable expectations about this world. 

 

A War I Could Not Win

On January 21, 2023, I was sixty-one years old and inside my garage doing my kettlebell workout. I was trying to perform kettlebell exercises with as heavy weight as I could. I figured the more strength and muscle I had, the more I could defy old age. Aging pisses me off. I find it insulting that I’ve been an Olympic Weightlifter and a bodybuilder since my teens and that I’ve relied on muscle-building exercise as a free form of psychotherapy for all these years and soon I’ll either have to cut down or stop altogether. Entering my sixties threatens my hold on this happy workout arrangement I’ve enjoyed for decades. I work out and I feel good. That’s the deal. I don’t work out and I fall into a rabbit hole of anxiety and depression. That’s part of the deal, too. In other words, weightlifting of some sort has been my therapist and faithful companion all these years. You take away my therapist and where does that leave me? And who or what is going to take away my faithful companion? Old age. That’s why I have to fight it by putting myself in the garage to hit the kettlebells rain or shine. 

I was in the garage that winter morning. It was a cool sixty degrees, but the workout had heated me up. I was assessing my condition. My back, knees, and shoulders felt good. I was waging war with old age. It’s a stupid war on my part because I know old age is going to win, but I’m both stubborn and stupid. I’m so dumb to think I can win the battle against age through sheer will and effort. 

In this spirit of kicking old age in the balls, I was doing deep-knee goblet squats with an eighty-pound kettlebell. My thighs, quads, glutes, and knees felt strong. I figured I’d get at least twenty reps, but coming up I felt my inguinal abdominal area in my lower left side cave in. I collapsed to the mat and knew I was in trouble. I was thinking I had a hernia or had torn a muscle. I remember professional athletes with torn groins and abdominals missing entire seasons. I had attempted to kick old age in the balls, but instead, the opposite had happened; old age had kicked me in the balls and I was writhing on the workout mat in intense abdominal pain. 

The rest of the day I obsessed over my pain, popped Motrin, and worried that just getting up from the couch would cause my guts to spill out of my torn muscles. 

The next day I awoke to helicopters flying overhead. The seventy-two-year-old person being pursued by police for the mass killing in Monterey Park dance studio was inside his van about two blocks from my home. With helicopters roaring overhead and my abdominal wall hurting, I couldn’t sit around the house. I called Urgent Care and drove to Harbor City Kaiser to get an ultrasound. The good news is that it was negative. The bad news is that I had elevated blood pressure. I am now forbidden to eat kimchi and turkey jerky. And my kettlebell workouts are lighter and no longer performed every day. I alternate my kettlebell days with yoga. I lost the war against old age, but I’m smarter today than I was less than two weeks ago. 

 

Welcome to the Shame Dungeon

Welcome to the Shame Dungeon

I was pleased recently to digitally submit my college students’ grades and attendance rosters to the college. The method of delivery is a far cry from when I was first hired many decades ago and I would have to drive to the campus during the semester break with hard copies of my grades and attendance, yellowed dog-eared pages covered with my illegible chicken scratch, White-Out revisions, mustard, coffee stains, and smeared ink. There’d be a line out the door of the Office of Records. 

After interminably standing outside the building, I’d sit in the foyer for Part 2 of The Great Wait. Beyond the foyer were several desks with attendants looking at instructors’ grade and attendance records. Behind the attendants were rows and rows of filing boxes stacked to the ceiling. They were veritable towers of grading and attendance rosters amassed since the beginning of time. One sneeze could topple the towering boxes into a plume of dust and asbestos. 

I’d sit for what felt like hours before I was summoned to one of the available desks and my attendance and grading rosters were scrutinized by an eagle-eyed Attendance Priestess, licking her fingertips while turning the pages, and occasionally raising her head to study me and assess my moral character. She crinkled her nose at me like I was a smelly dishrag before looking down at my attendance and grading records. 

Once the pinch-faced administrator stamped my records and gave me permission to go, I felt like St. Peter was being given the keys to the Pearly Gates. I did not walk away from the Office of Records. I wind-sprinted to my car, hoping that soon I would be out of ears’ reach in the event I was called back to address some last-second discovery of an irregularity that was deemed so egregious that I would have to be sent to some ghastly penal colony where I would be subject to endless drills in the finer points of record keeping. 

Teaching writing at various colleges and universities over the decades had taught me that there were infractions that could result in being transported to some kind of penal colony or other. One experience of note is when I lost my classroom key at a university, so I had to report my loss to a frosty college administrator who berated me for my negligence. The one thing a college instructor does not do, she said, is lose his key. She looked me up and down like I was a criminal and curtly told me I needed to drive to a place on the outskirts of campus called Plant-Ops and pay for a key replacement with cash only. 

Mortified, I drove east from the campus. For a while, the road was paved, but then it was dirt, rubble, and potholes. My car lurched and jarred over the rocky path as I passed rows of cow skulls and tumbleweeds while buzzards flew overhead. 

I finally arrived at Plant-Ops, a dilapidated hangar, inside of which was a short grouchy man with glasses, a bushy mustache, spidery black wisps on his bald pate, and a work apron with splattered grease. The wind rustled loudly through the hangar's corrugated thin steel walls and at any moment I feared the insignificant structure would become airborne and go into hyperdrive before I looked out the window to see flying alongside me the Wicked Witch of the East. 

Standing over a wooden work table and glowering at me with his bulging eyes, the cadaverous handyman was eating cold SpaghettiOs out of a can, and he seemed resentful of my presence. I told him about my lost key. He demanded that I give him twenty dollars in cash upfront, made me a key, and warned me that I must never lose a key again because he was soon retiring and that his replacement was an incompetent nincompoop who did not know how to make functional replacements for lost keys. 

I heeded the man's warning, escaped the haunted hanger with my life, and drove straight to a hardware store where I bought a heavy-duty Kevlar keychain with a tether reel and a high-density nylon belt loop so I could attach my keys to my belt and never let them out of my sight. Never again did I want a lost key to result in my humiliation and being sentenced to the Shame Dungeon.

When it comes to my personal hobbies, I am also vulnerable to the Shame Dungeon. This is because of my tendency to become so obsessive as to become unhinged. My most consuming hobby is my love of watches, especially Japanese diver watches. I can’t seem to get enough of these divers even though my wife says they all look the same. I also suffer from anxiety from not having enough time to wear and bond with the watches that I have, so I’m constantly selling some to minimize my collection only to miss them and rebuy them over and over. This buying and rebuying is an endless cycle that causes great self-doubt and shame. 

My watch addiction is worsened by the fact that I constantly think and talk about watches, and if people give me the opportunity to overwhelm them with my watch obsession, by God I will do so. Sometimes I don’t even wait for them to give me the opportunity. For example, in 2010 I had a college writing student from Korea who wore an expensive U-Boat with a mechanical Swiss movement to class, and we bonded over his love of the watch followed by his troubles with getting the mechanical movement to work properly. When I saw him on campus three years later and I immediately started talking about watches, he recoiled in disgust, screamed, and walked away from me. He could tell that I was a man trapped in my addiction, and he didn’t want to see his instructor, a man for whom he had at one time a certain amount of admiration, to be so conspicuously crippled by his watch obsession. I still think about that moment and cringe as I descend several tiers into my personal Shame Dungeon. 

For another example of how my watch addiction has shamed me, we have to fast-forward to 2022 and discuss my frequent visits to Watch City at the Del Amo Mall in Torrance. I have purchased a few watches there for my wife, but mainly I go there for bracelet adjustments or bracelet swaps because I never learned to be proficient with a spring-bar pusher tool and the like. For over seventeen years, Raffi, the owner, and his second-in-command Matt have been kind, friendly, and helpful in my quest to get the ultimate bracelet fit. I am no doubt addicted to going to Watch City, not just for a bracelet adjustment but to commiserate with Raffi and Matt about watches. 

Recently, however, when I bought an expensive Seiko limited edition diver and could not decide which strap to put on it, compelling me to frequent Watch City several times in one week for three weeks straight, I became a pest. My increasingly frequent visits began to chafe at Matt, and he could no longer conceal his annoyance. When I thanked him for doing what was probably the twelfth strap swap on my Seiko and told him that I was at last at peace with my strap decision, Matt said would a certain derision in his voice, “See you tomorrow.” 

I need to make it clear that I harbor no animosity for Matt. I want to make it clear that had I been in his shoes, I would have had the same contempt for a customer who almost every day shows up to the store with the need for a strap swap the way a drug addict is waiting for his next fix. Matt could not help but see that I was in the throes of addiction, and it pained him to see a man in his early sixties so debilitated, so lost in the turmoil of his own making. 

I became acutely aware that Matt saw in me a man who was like a crack addict and this brought me shame. I could never unsee Matt seeing me in this fashion, so I bought a professional-grade spring bar tool, watched several YouTube videos, and forced myself to learn how to do my own strap swaps. For pride’s sake, I no longer wanted to be an annoyance to Matt. He is a kind and generous man who did my strap swaps for seventeen years. I had become less of a customer to him and more of a mentally deranged asylum escapee looking for my next strap fix.

This state of affairs was unacceptable, not the least of which was the deep shame and awkwardness I felt went entering Watch City. Something had to be done:  I have now equipped all my watches with several rubber straps and no longer wear bracelets, which are more difficult for me to work on. I know how to swap the various Tropic, Isofrane, Waffle, Chaffle,  and FKM rubber straps myself, so I can do all the strap switches I want in the privacy of my own home and preserve perhaps a shred of dignity. 

Learning a bit of self-reliance in the realm of changing my own watch straps has helped me manage my shame. But there are other areas of my life that are much more difficult to manage. One is fear. Or to be more specific, I have a very acute case of claustrophobia.  To give you an understanding of this affliction, and how my claustrophobia can get the best of me during a variety of dental procedures, I’ll briefly recount a humiliating event that happened to me in 2018 at Universal Studios in Studio City. I should have avoided going there in the first place owing to a natural phobia of amusement parks, but for the sake of my twin daughters and wife, I decided to bite the bullet. It was a decision I will forever regret. The 2018 incarnation of the park reeked of Las Vegas money-grabbing, subpar overpriced restaurants, wannabe boat cruise entertainers donned in epaulets and moth-ball-smelling wool gaucherie who constantly massaged their handlebar mustaches and spoke in fake French accents. Worst of all, I stood in line for over an hour to go on the Harry Potter Forbidden Journey, a ride in which adults sit in undersized airplane seats and are pinned in by a metal harness before entering a narrow tunnel that leads to hell. As I sat in the cramped seat, a metal bar lowered and clamped down on my 52-inch chest, resulting in shortness of breath and a full-blown claustrophobia attack. While I was struggling to breathe, the conveyor belt ushered me and the other passengers toward the tunnel of darkness as I feebly cried for the engineer to stop the ride. Unhinged, I screamed louder and louder for someone to stop me from entering the tunnel so I could be saved from cardiac arrest. Complete madness, heart attack, or both surely awaited me, as no one in charge seemed to hear my cries for help. But fellow passengers nearby, observing my hysterical state, screamed in unison on my behalf so that the engineer was at last alerted that a maniac needed to get off the ride. The conveyor belt stopped, and a tall burly usher in a gray FBI sport coat approached me. I sheepishly smiled at him and said, “Do you need to speak to me in the debriefing room?” The wizened security officer chuckled, offered me his hand, and with an ashen spirit I exited the park knowing I had thrown a wrench in Universal Studios’ well-oiled ride machine all the while knowing that regardless of all my kettlebell circuit training, wheat-grass smoothies, and high-protein diet, I would never be able to overcome my fear of closed spaces. 

Around the same time as the Universal Studios debacle, I was in Dr. Tom’s dental office when I had a similar panic attack while getting a tooth drilled. The problem wasn’t the Novocain shots or the ear-splitting drill pulverizing a decayed tooth. The problem was the dense rubber bite block, also called a mouth prop. The block prevents not only my mouth from closing but gives me a strong sense that I cannot swallow and this inability to swallow makes it impossible for me to breathe, which in turn makes me distressed. During the drilling in question, I had a flashback to that Harry Potter Forbidden Journey Ride. I felt I was trapped underneath the tight chest harness and was surrounded by spooky Harry Potter character holograms, and I had a Defcon-1 panic attack causing me to spring up from the dental chair, tear off my flannel shirt, and hyperventilate with sweat dripping from my forehead.

“Are you going to be okay, Jeff?” Dr. Tom asked. 

“I can’t have this rubber thing in my mouth,” I explained, standing up while facing the dentist and the surprised, mouth-gaping dental assistant. I was holding the rubber bite block in my trembling open palm.  Disoriented, I was trying to place my location. Was I back at Universal Studios or in the dental office?

Dr. Tom calmly told me to take some deep breaths and sit back on the chair. He would do this procedure and all subsequent procedures without the block and we resumed the drilling with no more mishaps. 

In addition to suffering from claustrophobic episodes during dental work, I also am challenged by the fact that I am what you might call a “super smeller.” As I’m reclined on the dental chaise lounge with numerous sharp instruments scraping and penetrating my mouth and “easy listening” music blaring through the office speakers, I find myself marinating in a bouillabaisse of unpleasant smells. The mix of clove oil, acrylic, formaldehyde, glutaraldehyde, isopropyl alcohol, latex gloves, and the voluminous mass of patients’ tooth dust makes me feel less like a dental patient and more like a cadaver. 

I don’t intend to give you the impression that my trips to the dentist are some kind of overwhelming ordeal. There are actually a lot of pleasantries that I so far have failed to mention. For one, the teeth cleanings, which involve the hygienist scaping off the tarter from my teeth, actually relax me. The whole experience makes me feel like a bear rubbing his itchy back against an oak tree. Sometimes I catch myself being lulled to sleep. Then there is the very sociable Marissa, a newlywed, who is always asking me about my twin daughters, my challenges of being a father, and my thirty-year teaching career in the English Department at my college. Marissa also shares secrets about some of the other patients. She won’t give me names but some are celebrities with egregious teeth problems. She says these actors care more about having a perfect white smile than true dental care, that when in fact, owing to their lapses in oral hygiene, they have a rotting cesspool for an orifice.

Perhaps her most grotesque example is this one patient, a cantankerous widower in his sixties, who she said had periodontitis. When she removed the source of the infection from his gums, she found that he had inordinate amounts of beef jerky and chewing tobacco trapped inside his inflamed gums, which had developed giant pouches or pockets trapping the jerky and tobacco. 

Showing up to the dentist with trapped food in one’s teeth and showing signs of general hygienic neglect is a source of shame. My lack of consistent flossing results in making the dental hygienist work much harder to clean my teeth. I didn’t do my job and now she has to work harder to compensate for my deficits. This is a cause of shame that, unlike claustrophobia, I can control. Practicing good oral habits can keep me out of the Shame Dungeon. 

When discussing the various forms of shame, it’s impossible to neglect childhood. There are ordeals in elementary school that leave a permanent imprint. 

I remember one day when I was six years old and walking with my friends to Katherine R. Smith Elementary in San Jose, California. My companions kept nagging me because the smell of rotten tuna was wafting from my Captain Kangaroo lunch box. They wanted to know what was inside. Finally, I relented and stopped in a field that separated the Stop & Go Market from the school. To appease their curiosity I opened the lunch box and the rotten tuna sandwich, slimy and mixed with the mayonnaise, had escaped its plastic baggie and had splattered throughout the insides of the tin pail. The boys and I gaped at the impossibly malodorous, black tuna juices, black ink streaks, and odious chunks smeared all over the pail's lining like an exploded brain. The rancid tuna had splattered over my apple, my orange, my Hostess pie, and whatever else Mother had put inside for me that day.

"How could you eat that?" one of the boys asked and I shrugged. I assumed I had no choice. It was my lunch after all. So I closed the lunch box and we continued our way to school where I put my lunch box alongside everyone else's in the designated coat closet.

Before lunch, the piercing alarm sounded, and we crawled under our desks in what was called The Duck-and-Cover Drill. Still under our desks and waiting for the principal to end the drill through the school's PA system, Mrs. Corey sniffed along with the other students as everyone tried to detect the source of a hellish stench. Crinkling her forehead and flaring her nostrils, she demanded to know if someone had soiled their pants or if someone had brought a dead creature into her classroom. All of the students were squeezing their noses and making mock gagging noises. It was clear Mrs. Corey could not teach until the matter of the rancid fish smell had been solved.

With the drill now over, the boys I had walked to school with pointed at my offending lunch box upon which Mrs. Corey walked cautiously toward it as if approaching a landmine. She slowly opened the box and stared at its contents as if witnessing an abomination from the bowels of hell. Then looking at me, she said, "Did your mom pack this?"

I nodded and Mrs. Corey winced in a way that seemed to castigate my parents, my extended family, and my ancient ancestors. With a sour expression, she then closed the lunch box, gave it to the teacher's aid to place outside, and announced to the class that my food was unfit for eating and that she needed volunteers to take one thing out of their lunch and give it to me so that I would have something to eat during lunchtime.

During the lunch break, I was too mortified and ashamed to have an appetite and I remained on my blanket while avoiding the odd stares from my classmates. I had committed a huge violation: Bringing something to class that smelled like hell. Shame was inevitable. 

Another source of shame was to be revealed as being physically defective. This happened to me in the fifth grade. I was a student at Independent Elementary in Castro Valley, California, when our class visited the nurse's office to take the Ishihara Color Blind Test. This was in 1971, three years before FERPA laws were established to protect a student's privacy regarding all health, physical fitness, and psychological issues. Since privacy was not a high premium in that era, all the students from my class looked into an illuminated lens to discern shapes and numbers. My classmates breezed through the test, but I discerned no shapes or numbers. Growing impatient, the nurse yelled at me. "Can't you see anything?" My classmates laughed. I was declared hopelessly color-blind and was a leper for the rest of the morning. 

Fortunately, during lunch recess during a kickball game, I kicked the ball over everyone's heads, kicking the equivalent of a home run, and my color blindness had become irrelevant. I learned a valuable lesson that day. You can be teased for thinking that peanut butter is green, but all will be forgotten if your tree trunk of a leg kicks the ball over the school's fence, Herman Munster style, and into the swimming pool of a house several blocks away. You can be the hero. But before you even have time to marinate in the glory, you could lose your ranking again. Lady Fortuna was constantly spinning the Great Wheel of Chance and your fickle classmates could love you one moment and throw you in the Shame Dungeon the next.

 My father, too, imparted valuable shame lessons to me. For example, when I was five in 1967, my father took me to the grand opening of a Taco Bell in San Jose, California, where for the first time I saw teenagers working behind the registers with unsightly spots all over their faces. I asked my dad about the spots and he explained that they were called pimples. I asked why these teens had pimples and my father said, "According to Aristotle, God gives pimples to teenagers to shame them in order that they don’t suffer excessive pride." I wondered if I could preemptively repel the pimples by becoming humble, and if my humility could please the Divine sufficiently, I might be spared the plague of facial eruptions. 

One thing I did not question was my father's dubious explanation for teenage acne. I was at the age when I believed everything my father told me to be gospel truth. For example, during that same year, my father took me to a Greek deli, bought us baklava, and told me that baklava is the best dessert in the world. When I sat down with him and at the flaky pastry, it was quite clear that my father was correct on this point. 

My confidence in my father's infallible expertise in all matters was largely due to his executive position at IBM where his colleagues referred to him as "The Big Cheese." His brown leather briefcase had the pleasing smell of pipe tobacco and was full of mechanical pencils, slide rules, drafting rulers, and protractors, all of which were signs of his important engineering work. At one of the IBM science exhibits, there was a robot that shook people's hands. This was more evidence that my father was a pioneer of science and on the cutting edge of technology. 

On the day we drove home from the Greek deli in my father's British sports car, a 1965 red MGB, I asked my father how far the sun is from Planet Earth. 

"Ninety million miles."

"How did you know that?"

"I'm your father, son. Fathers know everything."

To believe that my father was a sort of infallible god had its benefits. For example, one day after playing outside and climbing over a wooden fence, I came home with a splinter embedded in my index finger. When my father could not remove the splinter with tweezers, he said he was going to have to get it out with a needle. I told him, no thanks, I'll just live with the splinter inside my finger for the rest of my life, upon which he said he had to remove the splinter. Failure to do so would result in an infection that would kill me. Believing my life was at stake, I gritted my teeth and allowed him to remove the splinter with a needle.

It was around this time that I started boasting to the other kids at the Royal Lanai apartments playground that my father was an IBM engineer who could do anything and to support my claim, I pointed at the giant spaceship and told my friends that when my father got home from work, he would attach rocket launchers on it and we would all fly to Mars. Believing me, we all ran to the carport where there was a space reserved for my father's red MGB. Like Linus waiting for the Great Pumpkin, we waited for several hours for him to arrive. When the bright red MGB with its growling engine drove over the speed bumps and into the carport, we all erupted with cheers. Finally, we were going to fly to Mars. But upon hearing my request, my father said that the project couldn't get off the ground, so to speak, because flying the playground rocketship to Mars would be a violation of United States airspace. 

"Without FAA clearance," he said, standing over us in his dark grey suit, "I could get arrested and go to prison."

Our jaws dropped at the idea that my father could fly the playground rocket ship into outer space, but could not do so because he had to comply with the United States government airspace laws. Realizing we were obeying the law by not flying to Mars made us feel important. We could have flown to Mars if we wanted to, but we were good citizens who obeyed the law, so we decided not to do it. Our decision to not fly to Mars was almost as exciting as being able to fly to Mars. 

What disavowed me from notions of my father's omnipotence wasn't his refusal to fly my friends and me to Mars. It was his red MGB. It didn't like warm weather and the engine was always overheating. Growing tired of the mechanical problems, my father gave up on the sexy red convertible and traded it in for a more practical turquoise Chrysler Newport. That the red MGB's mechanical unreliability had frustrated my father was a sign that there were engineering problems too great for him to handle and his relinquishing himself of the MGB made me doubtful of his supreme powers. 

Once I no longer believed my father to be a demigod, I began to see his weaknesses more clearly.  For example, one morning while attempting to spread the butter on his toast, he tore a hole in it and said, "The three things I hate in life are death, taxes, and hard butter."

On another occasion, he attempted to make chicken cacciatore and there was so much smoke in the kitchen that the fire department paid us a visit. That my father could not manage the kitchen fire was another sign that he was a mere mortal. 

My father's fallibility also showed up in the disruption he caused me and my family. One thing I learned from watching television is that fathers should bring harmony, not disruption, to the domestic unit. Hazel, Leave It to Beaver, Dennis the Menace, Lassie, Family Affair, My Three Sons, The Brady Bunch, and The Partridge Family dramatized the manner in which the forces of chaos wage war against domestic serenity. I knew that harmony would always win and that in that regard these shows were a form of comfort food. The orderlies of domestic harmony were sure to triumph and prove that America was an exceptional country worthy of its infatuation with its own myth of innocence and natural order. 

This myth of innocence was prevalent in the suburbs where I lived. We all curated houses with well-manicured lawns, flowers, and oversized mailboxes. Between 1968 and 1971, I lived on Venado Court in San Jose, California. In our cul-de-sac, we had Avon Ladies, Tupperware parties, communal gatherings for the Fourth of July, and making fruit preserves from the bounty of peach and apricot trees that grew in our backyards. 

I wanted nothing more than for my family to fit in with this ideal image. But my father would have no part in this. He was a corporate IBM executive on the outside but a country boy on the inside. Born on a farm in Michigan, my father moved to Hollywood, Florida, when he was in the third grade. He said everyone who attended the school in Hollywood, including himself, was so poor that they didn't wear shirts or shoes. This was just the way he liked it. In his teens, he joined the Boy Scouts, collected venomous snakes, which he delivered to a herpetology research center, and was featured in the local newspaper for catching the world's largest water moccasin. Wading through the mud in the Florida alligator swamps was his Happy Place.  In spite of growing up to be an army infantryman and then an engineering executive, he had a lifelong love of informality, irreverence, and hilarity. Mixing with the rich was never his cup of tea. Once he was attending a buffet at an old-school country club, and after getting up for a second helping, he gave a stranger a friendly slap on the back and said, "We need to get some more grub in here, pronto."  The stranger looked at my father in shock, but my father was already on the move, piling food on his plate, and joking with yet another country club member. 

My father was true to his inner farm boy, and this created tension between him and me. For example, at home my father preferred informal attire more suitable for the alligator swamps. In the summers he would do yard work without a shirt and wear a pair of faded green jeans. You could see his Army tattoo, scribbled on his formidable upper arm when he was nineteen and in a state of drunk oblivion. The shoddy tattoo didn't bother me much. What did bother me, though, was that my father would squat in the front yard while picking weeds from the rows of juniper bushes. Squatting in his low-rise jeans, he exposed his butt crack to every pedestrian passing by and they were afforded a glimpse of my father's bare ass. I would tell him repeatedly that his butt crack was showing, but he dismissed my warnings with a low mumble as if my concern were of no consequence and was surely the misguided anxiety of a confused youth. 

Having failed to persuade him that his public moonshot was a scandal threatening the dignity of our family, I tried a different tact. I stood behind him and blocked anyone's view of my father's buttocks. I feared my father would tell me to stop standing uselessly nearby and help him pick weeds, but he allowed me to stand over him. I assume my shadow afforded him shade and relief from the hot California sun.  

Over time, it became clear to me that my dominant role in life was to be the Guardian of the Butt Crack. 

It was tedious tracking my father's movements and making sure I had positioned myself to provide maximum blockage from the trajectory of anyone's line of vision, but I performed my task with urgency as if to fail would cause us to foreclose our home and force us into a state of homeless destitution.

I found myself both exhausted and sunburned from my efforts, and eventually, I realized my father was a grown man set in his ways. The sooner I let go and stopped trying to control him the sooner I would find peace. 

Eventuanally, I would have to learn that it is impossible to control others and that it is far better to focus on covering our own butt cracks instead of wasting our time trying to cover the asses of others. 

My shame over my father's impropriety was accompanied by the recognition that he was not a god but an imperfect human being, and this recognition was part of my ongoing struggle to leave my childhood and my innocence behind me. 

As I became an adult and experienced the slowing down of my metabolism, I suffered a common malady: Shame for being overweight. I say this in an era when fat shaming is a subject of great controversy. One camp says media images of svelte bodies are unrealistic and we must accept our bodies in all their chubby glory. Another camp says our fat bodies are a sign of moral lapses, laziness, and failure to perform our due diligence. Making generalizations about the public to take a side with either camp will result in an oversimplification. I can only judge myself and what being overweight means to me. In 1981, I was runner-up in Mr. Teenage San Francisco, and I really enjoyed being a lean, muscular bodybuilder. The diet I was on combined with the heavy training was not sustainable. I was tired all the time. When I wasn’t working out and eating high-protein meals, I was napping. However, in the last twenty years, I have managed my calorie intake a couple of times so that my usual weight of about 235 has gone closer to 200, and I not only enjoyed weighing 200, the diet and exercise program (five kettlebell workouts a week) was sustainable and even enjoyable. 

The fattest I’ve been is about a year after my marriage to Carrie. This would be 2003. I got up to 255 pounds. Carrie took a photograph of me at this weight. I’m sitting on the living room couch. There is this empty popcorn bowl next to me. Why is it empty? Because I just finished it. But the real disgust of the photo is that my fleshy chin and my hands are covered with melted chocolate because I had tossed chocolate kisses over the freshly popped popcorn and the chocolate had smeared all over me. I have what appears to be a thick chocolate beard on my face and my hands are covered with chocolate gloves. But we’re not even done with this image of self-abasement: Not only am I fat with a huge face and chocolate all over my face and hands; my eyes are half closed, and I have that dumb-grinned, sleepy look of relief and self-indulgence you experience when you just ate a bucket of popcorn slathered with melted chocolate: Something very specific happens to your eyes when you indulge like this. I call it Lizard Eyes. If you’re not familiar with Lizard Eyes, it's the glazed-over effect with the eyes half shut. You’ve essentially lost your humanity and become a lizard. Your reptile brain has taken over your humanity. So I’ve got the Lizard Eyes thing going. So I’ve lost my humanity, and I’ve become a fat, overfed reptile, and I hate it. Seeing the photograph to this day puts me in the Shame Dungeon, not just because I can’t stand looking at the Outer Man but because I can’t stand knowing who the Inner Man is that allowed the Outer Man to look like that. For me, self-fat-shaming is an appropriate response to moral laxity. 

Recently, my daughters, Julia and Natalie, uncovered the unflattering photograph. Rather than be repulsed by it as I believe they should be, they take great delight in it and look at it over and over. I discourage them from wallowing in my fatness. I say, “There is the disintegration of a human being right there. That is someone who’s lost his way. That is someone whose soul is wasting away in his personal hell of self-indulgence.”

My self-castigation only makes them laugh harder. My daughters are enchanted with this mythical Fat Father who has thrown care to the wind and allowed himself to eat a giant bowl of popcorn and chocolate kisses. 

I’ve been wracking my brain trying to figure out why my daughters are so enamored by Lizard Eye Daddy. One day I asked them. Natalie said, “Because it looks like you’re so much fun, having a good time. You look so happy.”

“Happy?” I said. “I've lost my humanity. I’ve become a Fat Reptile.”

We’ve never come to an agreement over what the photograph represents. I try to explain to them the psychological breakdown reflected in Lizard Eye Daddy and the moral superiority of Discipline Daddy, but my daughters will have no part in it. They want the Lizard, and this reminds me that as their father I have responsibilities to lead not with words but with actions. I have to be a good role model who manages my weight out of responsibility. I can only hope that I don’t ever become Lizard Man again, that I become more like Adonis. Failure to do so will be an abnegation of my parental responsibilities, an infraction that surely will make me deserving of being sentenced to the Shame Dungeon where I will have to reform myself and once again become worthy of being a free man. 

 

Cereal--an Essay

When I was a child, my mother indulged my appetite for my favorite sugary cereal, Cap ‘N Crunch, in all its variations: Cap 'N Crunch plain, 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. 

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 fromagier would sample different types of Camembert 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 preadolescent 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 hope for 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 disappearing into my chosen comfort zone. There I found pleasure and oblivion. 

In middle school, I knew a guy whose mother worked for one of the big cereal companies. She’d take home dozens and dozens of test brands of cereal and her son would show them to me. These cereals were of the sugary variety and reminded me of Count Chocula, Franken Berry and such but their names and characters were different. Sick of all the cereals his mother took home every day, the boy would give me as many boxes home as I’d like, and the cereals tasted like the ones you could buy at the store; however, they had different names, mascots, and cereal shapes. 

Having these cereals in my home was like living in a bizarro parallel universe where everything seemed the same but was a little off. That period of my life still feels like a dream in which I felt I possessed potent powers that allowed me to enter a strange universe that was denied by everyone else. 

Objectively speaking, there was nothing about this cereal that had the power to transport me to some enchanted universe. But cereal was more than a grain; it was an idea about happiness and the comfort of Mother. It was a story about how we lived our lives. I was thinking about cereal as a psychological state while teaching Yuval Noah Harari’s best-seller Sapiens to my college students. The class is called Critical Thinking.  Sapiens helped me understand my fascination with cereal. According to the book, I would not be obsessed with cereal if not for the Cognitive Revolution, which according to Harari developed from 70,000 to 30,000 years ago. This Revolution created “supple” language to form advanced communications: storytelling to create myths and legends which created self-identity, morality systems, alliances, enemies, legal systems, religions, art, gossip, collective beliefs, and social cooperation. 

As children, we weren’t just eating cereal. We were connecting with characters who lived in a mythical world of boundless delights. We were playing board games that were written on the back of the box. We were looking for free prizes, which we search for like buried treasure, inside the cereal box. We were sending box tops to get submarines, shirts, hats, and other merchandise. 

I was so enamored by cereal as a kid that I fantasized about growing up to be a Major League baseball star and choosing only to eat cereal for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I envisioned myself at the grocery store with my shopping cart crammed with boxes of all the varieties of Cap’n Crunch, Franken Berry, Count Chocula, Froot Loops, and Lucky Charms. Clearly, cereal was a form of mindless self-gratification and a potent way of teleporting us with Pinocchio to Paradise Island where we would lose our minds, grow donkey ears, and bray like beasts. 

In spite of the dark side of cereal, the breakfast food was part of the broad tapestry of stories 1970s America told us about living the good life and achieving success. We ate enormous amounts of granola, wheat germ, Wheaties, and Special K to promote health, fitness, and domestic tranquility.

To sell cereal, you had to choose a story. One story was about the quest for good health. One of the most famous storytellers about cereal was the outdoor enthusiast Euell Gibbons, who was featured in Grape-Nuts ads in the 1970s.  Walking in a forest, Gibbons asked us: “Ever eat a pine tree? Many parts are edible.” He was telling us a powerful story about Grape-Nuts: This cereal would connect us to the Earth, make us whole, and deliver a strong, healthy life. Eating Grape-Nuts would give us superpowers and endow us with the kind of survival skills that would allow us to go off the grid, get dumped into a rainforest, and live the rest of our days with nothing but a buck knife and a loincloth. In truth, eating the gravel-like cereal was responsible for thousands of trips to the dentist for chipped teeth and for making a crunch that was so loud we couldn't even hear the radio when we ate our breakfast. 

Of all the cereals that I ate as a youngster, I still eat Grape-Nuts today. I may be addicted to the crunch and I like the malty flavor. I’ve also read that Grape-Nuts is the only store-bought cereal that hasn’t gone through extrusion, a heating process that kills nutrients. Grape-Nuts, on the other hand, is baked like a loaf of bread. 

I tried to quit eating boxed cereal for two years, between 2016 and 2018. During that time, I cooked buckwheat, making a week’s supply at a time. I did this in honor of my most beloved family member, my great-grandmother Edna. 

From January through June of 1968, I spent some time with Edna when my mother was hospitalized in an institution for people who suffered from clinical depression. My father lived with my baby brother and a nanny in our San Jose apartment while I moved to Long Beach to live with my grandparents and attend first grade. During Easter vacation of that year, I spent a week with Edna who, like my mother, had been institutionalized. But Edna was not in a hospital for depression. She lived in a senior citizen home called Seal Beach Leisure World. 

My great-grandmother had lived a hard life. As a little girl in Poland around the 1880s after the assassination of the Russian Tsar Alexander II, anti-Jewish pogroms raged across Poland, Edna lost her family, and she somehow made it to another part of Poland where she lived with an "evil stepmother." She did not attend school so she could earn her keep as a house servant. In her teens, she immigrated to New York, got married, and spent most of her married life caring for her invalid husband who suffered from severe arthritis, which worsened when he took a popular yet unproven and dangerous treatment of gold injections. 

By the time I met her, she was a widow. Even though her English was broken and spoken with a heavy Polish accent, I felt a deep connection with her, and I felt the plaintiveness and longing in every word that she spoke. During my stay with her, she made me traditional Polish meals, all of which I loved, especially her kasha, also referred to as buckwheat. 

In the late morning, she and I would watch her favorite soap operas, The Guiding Light and As the World Turns. While I didn't understand the plots, I loved watching my great-grandmother gesticulate in front of the TV. She would shake her fist at the screen and ask why so and so was wasting her life on such a bad man or why so and so had not found love when her beautiful spirit deserved love more than anyone else or why some villain or other was able to manipulate people so easily. 

Those days of watching soap operas with Edna seem like a hazy sunlit dream. I can remember my great-grandmother standing in front of the TV making her emotional commentary while I ate my bowl of kasha and stared beyond the living room's sliding glass doors, which led to a giant garden with rose bushes blowing in the wind and dozens of rabbits hopping on the lawn.

Eating Edna's home cooking was partaking in a feast. But I also learned that immersing myself in the great melodramas of The Guiding Light and As the World Turns was its own kind of feast. To partake in grand bouts of passion, love, betrayal, loss, despair, and anguish was a cathartic event that nourished the soul and provided a much-needed ritual to mend the pain and brokenness one feels from life's daily sorrows. 

When I think of my great-grandmother and me watching soap operas and their never-ending parade of hopeless romantics, heart-sick fools, back-stabbers, and charlatans, I'm reminded of the great comedian George Carlin who said that when we live in this world we're born with free front-row tickets to the Freak Show. I would only add that it's important to have a good companion while watching the show and that watching that show with my great-grandmother Edna was like being in the best VIP seats available.

In 2016, I felt this powerful impulse to reconnect with Edna, so I started purchasing Ukrainian-grown bulgar wheat online in bulk. I’d cook a big pot every Sunday, and my wife and daughters complained of the sharp smell that wafted through the house and the way the big glass bowl of buckwheat in the fridge would take up too much space. I’d eat a cold bowl of buckwheat cereal topped with blueberries and chia seeds every morning for two years, but eventually, I started to miss crunchy cereals like Shredded Wheat and Grape-Nuts, so to my family’s relief, I abandoned the buckwheat. 

Though I got my fill of cereal in the morning, I was resentful that I couldn’t eat cereal for all three meals. I wanted to have my cold store-bought cereal for breakfast, oatmeal for lunch, and buckwheat for dinner. Of course, the cereals would have added peanut butter, walnuts, hemp seeds, and berries to make them more nutrient- and calorie-dense. But my plan wouldn’t work because my wife and twin daughters would never go through with it. No normal person would. I had some kind of eating disorder perhaps, or my unconscious was seeking something I couldn’t quite grasp, most likely the comfort and convenience of eating cereal. 

Yuval Noah Harari has much to say about the self-destructive quest for comfort and convenience in Sapiens. He argues that when we were foragers, killing animals and gathering fruits during our treks across the land, we were sharp, alert, physically fit like Special-Ops fighters, and generally happy. But then when we decided to gather forces, settle down, and control a few animal and plant species in designated lands, we believed we were making our lives easier. We believed this pivot from Forager to Farmer was in our best interests. However, we had been fooled. We had made a deal with the devil. Ushering in the Agricultural Revolution, Harari writes, we perpetrated “history’s biggest fraud.” Agriculture, which brought us giant storage bins of grains and cereals, was the beginning of obesity, tooth decay, impotence, arthritis, hernias, scoliosis, rampant thievery, lopsided economic stratification, starvation, infectious disease, mass-scale animal cruelty, and misogyny.  Who duped us? No person, Harari tells us, but rather three plant-based entities: wheat, rice, and potatoes. They manipulated us to cultivate them and to rely on them and in doing so they mastered us, made us slaves to the irregularities of the harvest, and did more to inflict misery upon us than any human being ever could. We got played by plants.

Perhaps I was getting played by cereal. It had wormed its way into my brain and hijacked my thoughts, and made me so obsessed that I couldn’t watch TV with my wife in the evening without getting up from the couch, no later than 7 p.m., to pour myself a bowl of cold cereal and experience the soothing sensation of digesting it as I sat with lizard eyes in front of the TV set. 

Perhaps cereal was a curse on several levels. It wasn’t just an additional 500-calorie nighttime snack, which added about a pound of body weight a week and accounted for why I weighed 235 pounds when my fighting weight is 200. Cereal was a curse on a deeper level. Eating it and succumbing to its temptation, I was telling a story about myself, a story about how it was okay for a man in his early sixties to succumb to weakness and self-indulgence over strength and discipline. I was placating my Man-Baby and abasing myself with the comfort of immediate gratification. 

The famous psychiatrist Phil Stutz who tends to the needs of Hollywood screenwriters and actors, also the subject of a Jonah Hill Netflix documentary, Stutz, has much to say about comfort and immediate gratification. After being impressed with Dr. Stutz in the documentary, I purchased his two books and learned a lot about myself and the human condition in general. 

I can tell you after watching the documentary and reading Stutz’s two books, co-authored by Barry Michels, that committing yourself to a life of comfort by trying to carve out a stress-free zone abundant with pleasures will backfire, kick your ass, and turn your life into a raging dumpster fire. Or a more demure way of putting it: Your quest for living in the comfort zone will open a portal to laziness, complacency, and mediocrity. Regardless of how I express it, I know firsthand that dedicating one’s life to living inside the comfort zone is an act of self-betrayal. 

I’ve longed for such a comfort zone all my life. I grew up in VA housing, transplanted army barracks rebadged "Flavet Villages," in Gainesville, Florida. My parents were poor. They sold their blood to feed me Cheerios and Cream of Wheat. Our apartment was infested with oversized cockroaches. 

To find relief from our squalor, my father would take me out of the barracks, which 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 anguish and 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 hit me hard when I discovered the TV series 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 avoid life’s challenges, and to live forever in the womb with my first love. 

This impulse to never grow up, avoid life’s responsibilities, and eat sugary cereal all day would be in Phil Stutz’s terminology the drive to repel the Life Force. Stutz refers to this drive as Part X, the name for my anti-self. In Stutz’s world, we must wrestle with Part X and keep it at bay by summoning the Life Force. We connect with the Life Force by committing to a higher ideal and repelling self-induglence. We have the power and free will to do so.

This heroic story spoke to me. As a man in the relentless search for comfort and pleasure, a man whose earliest memories are of filling up on sweet cereal, I could very well see that I was possessed with Part X. Seeing my Part X allowed me to see that I was at war with myself. This internal division was normal. 

What wasn’t normal was a culture that gave Part X the green light to take over and encourage guilt-free self-indulgence. According to Phil Stutz, self-indulgence will kill our dreams. Rather than challenge ourselves and summon the Life Force, Stutz warns us that we have a strong drive to regress into our personal Comfort Zone because most of us are running away from what ails us and by running away from our misery, we seek two things: comfort and pleasure. He writes that “we weave addictive activities into our routine” to pack them with hedonistic delights. 

But growing up in the 60s and 70s, hedonistic delights were the end-all of existence. I witnessed the chaos at Woodstock and ogled at Hugh Hefner's Pleasure Cave, sardine-packed with drunken satyrs and nymphs. I can personally attest to the fact that the popularity of the musical Hair and its soundtrack had a transforming effect on my squeaky-clean suburban neighborhood in San Jose, California. One day our backyards were full of wholesome gatherings of neighbors getting together to make peach and apricot preserves while drinking Florence Henderson-approved Tang. Then in the blink of an eye, those backyards were furnished with hot tubs and mini-bars, and they became attractions for nudists and swingers. "The Age of Aquarius" was an era when divorces in my neighborhood multiplied like toadstools. 

I can’t talk about the 1970s without pointing out that the water bed became for me the symbol of ultimate comfort and luxury. This would have been 1974. I visited several friends and neighbors who had recently purchased waterbeds. Envious of their exotic sleeping arrangements, I became convinced that waterbeds would afford me a life of opulence, 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 feculent alligator swamp. I remember if I moved my body in attempt to get more comfortable, there would be a counterreaction, like some invisible wave force that was so strong on one occasion I almost dislocated my shoulder. One day the waterbed leaked so badly that the floorboards were damaged and my bedroom looked like the flotsam and jetsam of Hurricane Katrina. What was supposed to be a revolution in sleep proved to be a nightmare, and my quest to find the ultimate comfort made me abandon waterbeds and pointed me toward giant bedtime bowls of cereal full of granola, wheat germ, and clover honey. 

As a kid in the 60s and 70s, addictive activities were a normal part of my childhood. We were oblivious to nutritional concerns like grams of sugar and carbohydrates. On weekend mornings, for example, my parents would sometimes take me to a local pancake house and I'd always order the apple pancakes. The stack of ten flapjacks served before me was so big that sitting next to it, I looked like a helpless Lilliputian, and the question had to be asked: Was I going to eat the pancakes, or were they going to eat me? Of course, I ate the pancakes, every last one of them. They were delicious--drowning in apple pie filling, smothered in creamy-soft butter, and then finally doused with a half-gallon of maple syrup. I would wash the pancakes down with several tall glasses of orange juice. The amount of insulin-spiking sugars I consumed during these breakfasts were so high that my morning indulgence would have given a modern-day endocrinologist a cerebral hemorrhage. Not surprisingly, I would go home, and rather than spend time with my friends who could be heard outside playing, I would be catatonic and nauseous in my bed for several hours in what could be called a Carbohydrate Coma. The abuse my pancreas suffered is immeasurable. From Phil Stutz’s perspective, I was acclimating to a life of instant gratification, and worse, I was learning to medicate myself with sugary foods while ignoring the awful insulin-crashing hangover. 

Studying the worldview of Stutz, I learned that the quest for comfort and pleasure was pursuing “a way of life that avoids anything that might be painful.” We avoid challenges in our Comfort Zone and seek pleasure in our Warm Bath. The end result is that we cripple ourselves. Without the Life Force, we are subject to moral dissolution and entropy. 

This state of affairs was evident to me in the 1980s. I funded my college education by working at Jackson's Wine & Spirits in Berkeley, close to the posh Claremont Hotel. All my coworkers were overeducated for the job. They had advanced degrees in literature, linguistics, anthropology, chemistry, physics, philosophy, and musicology. They shared an attitude that working for a corporation or institution that micromanaged their working life was beneath them. Selling wines and imported beers, they all cultivated an arch sense of elitism, had contempt for the customers and the human race in general, and shared the belief that cultivating a sense of irony was the only appropriate orientation to this absurd world. Their work ethic was summed up with their favorite expression: "Service with a smirk."

During slow hours, we would stand by the cash registers and discuss the philosophical curiosities of Nietzsche, the musical excesses of Wagner, and the literary conundrums of Kafka. In many ways, the job had become my Warm Bath. It offered me no challenges, yet at the same time, it afforded me the delusion that I was smarter than most people. Over time, it became clear to me that the longer I worked alongside these proud misfits, the more certain I would become incurably unemployable. 

I was drawn to the idea of becoming part of my co-workers' misanthropic tribe. Though I had nearly completed my master's degree in English, I never felt like a good fit for academia. I rarely read what professors had on their syllabi. Instead, I would read what I wanted to read, regardless of its relevance to the class content. I could barely sit still during class. I found myself restless, fidgety, self-conscious, and prone to social anxieties. It was rare that I ever listened to the professors' lectures. My mind tended to wander about random worries--my bleak romantic prospects, the lack of airflow inside the classroom, my loathing of driving in traffic to get to the gym after classes, and the absence of high-protein food in my house. I didn't even like the physical presence of the university with its modern sculptures on the lawns, plaques dedicated to a variety of stodgy luminaries, and the fluorescent-lit classrooms reeking of industrial disinfectants. When people asked me what I majored in, I told them, half-seriously, that I was majoring in "Get the Hell Out" because my discomfort with college compelled me to rid myself of academic life as soon as possible. 

In contrast, I was comfortable being a professional slacker at the wine store. Cultivating my irony and sarcasm with my coworkers and the regular customers was my Happy Place. In the lax work environment, I was confident I could go on indefinitely. My paycheck would be too small to buy new cars or pay for medical insurance, but the superior physical and spiritual health I could enjoy from "not selling out to the mainstream" would be worth the risk of having to pay out of pocket for the occasional dose of antibiotics. 

In my mid-twenties, I was content to spend the rest of my life being a slacker clerk at the wine store, throwing a Nerf football ball to my co-workers through the aisles of Chianti and Beaujolais, and expounding on the mysterious writings of Jorge Luis Borges, Alberto Moravia, and Miguel de Unamuno. 

Then one day in the late summer of 1987 I was kicked out of my Warm Bath and became the Accidental Professor when my friend Mike Elizalde's father, Felix Elizalde, a top administrator at Merrit College, begged me to teach for his college when none of his real English professors would get off their asses and teach a special Bridge Program at Skyline High School.  "But Mr. Elizalde, I don't know anything about teaching. I don't even have a credential." The chancellor of community colleges said, "No problem," and I heard his dot matrix printer in his office churning out my California Community College Teaching Credential. I stared at the document like Luke Skywalker seeing for the first time the glowing saber. In the blink of an eye, I had become a college writing instructor. 

Of course, I new little about the profession. This became evident one afternoon while working at the wine store in Berkeley and pouring Braren Pauli merlot to a Cal professor in the wine bar on Ashby Avenue. I anxiously confided with him about my new job as a college professor. With a mane of gray lion's hair and matching beard, the scholar sipped his merlot, studied me carefully, and told me, "There will be many occasions when the students won't want to be in the classroom and they will resist everything you say. Though silent, their collective presence will create an air of hostility in the room. You will have the strong impression that you are talking to yourself and a part of you will die inside. This is where your professionalism kicks in. Through sheer ego and professionalism that demands that you get through the course objectives, you have to ignore their indifference and execute your craft the way a carpenter would build a house."

Thirty-five years later, I would like to tell him that I took his advice, but I would not tell him the part where on some occasions I would plow through a lecture that was received by the students with implacable indifference, drive home questioning the purpose of my existence, collapse on my bed, curl into the fetal position, and cry myself to sleep.

The Berkeley scholar proved to be right. The best philosophy was to show up to class prepared, brimming with the confidence from that preparation, but be prepared for the students to be disaffected and disengaged at times for reasons that had nothing to do with me but everything to do with their personal concerns: a distressing romance, an aching hunger, money problems, family disputes. Forces were affecting my students' interest levels that I could not control. If I were to survive as an instructor, I had to acknowledge this brutal fact; on some occasions, I had to be prepared for the ego sting of disengagement and feeling I was talking to myself in a room of thirty-five people, then power my way through the class objectives even when I didn't feel popular and "loved." The sooner I realized the classroom was about them and their concerns, and not mine, the better off I would be.

I was someone whose default setting was Selfish, so it was a radical proposition to consider that I was not put on Earth to be loved, but rather to be of service to others. But to be successful at a job that almost came to me as a freak accident, I would have to struggle to remove my default setting to be a navel-gazing narcissist and a professional slacker. Had Felix Elizalde not kicked me in the pants to teach for him at Merrit College in 1987, I would have been a professional bum, working part-time at Jackson’s, playing the role of the know-it-all, and self-imprisoned in my own Comfort Zone. Working at Jackson’s would have been a life sentence to eating Cap ‘N Crunch in all its variations. Things could have gone that way too easily. Extinction in this world is all too possible. 

I Am a Recovering Baby Boomer

I Am a Recovering Baby Boomer

I am a recovering Baby Boomer, a man whose adult life is spent convalescing over my generation's excesses, betrayals, misconceptions, and failures. We are a gullible generation that got duped by the self-proclaimed psychic Uri Geller, who could alter the shape of spoons and coins to a rapt audience on The Merv Griffin Show, and the author Peter Tompkins who in the best-selling The Secret Life of Plants claimed flowers and other plants had “feelings” so we had better nourish their self-esteem by showering them not only with water but with love ballades. We read comics promoting worthless Charles Atlas bodybuilding programs, X-Ray-Vision glasses, and Sea Monkeys. We were titillated by TV ads showing Farrah Fawcett and other eager-to-please blondes rubbing shaving cream on football star Joe Namath’s dimpled cheeks. We were inculcated with consumer morality lessons by witnessing exhausted housewives shamed for failing to remove “ring around the collar” from their husbands’ work shirts and watching with horror and disgust as members of the educated class compromised their perfectly-curated lives by coming home from a long day of work to greet their spouses with nasty cases of halitosis. We witnessed the chaos at Woodstock and ogled at Hugh Hefner’s Pleasure Cave, sardine-packed with drunken satyrs and nymphs. I can personally attest to the fact that the popularity of the musical Hair and its soundtrack had a transforming effect on my squeaky-clean suburban neighborhood in San Jose, California. One day our backyards were full of wholesome gatherings of neighbors getting together to make peach and apricot preserves while drinking Florence Henderson-approved Tang. Then in the blink of an eye, those backyards were furnished with hot tubs and mini-bars, and they became attractions for nudists and swingers. “The Age of Aquarius” was an era when divorces in my neighborhood multiplied like toadstools. 

The net sum of these experiences is that Boomers like myself became afflicted with juvenile notions of freedom as a consumer lifestyle offering unlimited pleasure-seeking resulting in a multitude of disturbing behaviors, which included relentless tanning without sunscreen, the need to fortify all of our meals with organic wheat germ, the unbridled veneration of Peter Max, and an inexplicable longing to go on tour with The Partridge Family. 

To this day, not only are Boomers saddled with a Hydra Head of addictions and bizarre behaviors, but we are a selfish lot. Taking advantage of an affordable college education, a generous job market, and housing, we are overcome by a sense of entitlement to an easy life of materialistic success, yet we are too narcissistic and self-absorbed to give a damn about the fact that we didn’t pave the way for subsequent generations to enjoy the same affordable education and housing. 

Speaking of narcissism, we are navel-gazers repelled by any kind of life purpose that would cause us to transcend the limitations of our self-centeredness. When we retire, rather than do volunteer work to make a difference in our community, we will indulge our nostalgia and delusions of grandeur by enrolling in summer baseball camps where Hall of Fame baseball players will coach us on the finer points of bunting and throwing a curveball; we will venture on African safaris and then bore to death anyone within ear-range by regaling friends and family of our adventures by channeling the voice of our childhood cartoon hero Commander McBragg; and we will attend Rolling Stones concerts so that the frenzied hip gyrations of an octogenarian will encourage us to believe that we will never die. 

Much has been written about how loathsome, repugnant, and irredeemable my generation is. Gen-X author Bruce Cannon Gibney castigates us as morally bankrupt and empathy-deprived in his book A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America. The Atlantic writer Lyman Stone has equal loathing of my generation as he observes we enjoy a stranglehold on public policies that benefit our interests but no other generation’s in his essay “The Boomers Ruined Everything.” Washington Post writer Jim Tankersley excoriates us as miscreants and pariahs in his article “Baby Boomers are what’s wrong with America’s economy.” He writes that “They chewed up resources, ran up the debt, and escaped responsibility.” In Joe Queenan’s Balsamic Dreams: A Short but Self-Important History of the Baby Boomer Generation, the irascible author accuses us of being so vainglorious that we have to hype up the most ordinary events to affirm our significance in this world: “By turning spectacularly humdrum occurrences into formal rites, Baby Boomers have transmuted even the most banal activities into ‘events’ requiring reflection, planning, research, underwriting and staggering masses of data.” Clearly, these writers would have us believe that Boomers are, in their worst form, the world’s pestilence and on good days a reliable irritant, having infected the culture with such annoyances as The Seqway, the Chia Pet, and the Starland Vocal Band. 

But I would like to offer a rebuttal to these scathing judgments. While it is true that the “Me Generation” has much to account for, it is also true that our self-indulgence and moral lapses have forced many of us into a state of lifelong recovery, and with that recovery, we have gleaned life lessons that can bear fruit to others. 

So please let me present a Baby Boomer’s autobiography that chronicles some of those life lessons, not just to redeem myself but to blunt the sharp edge of judgment against my generation. Please let me offer these tidbits of wisdom, not just so that you might not repeat my mistakes but to afford me relief from a guilty conscience. 

I am in recovery, after all, and it has been said that confession is good for the soul. 

The Claustrophobia Ride at Universal Studios

I’ll briefly recount a humiliating event that happened to me in 2018 at Universal Studios in Studio City. I should have avoided going there in the first place owing to a natural phobia of amusement parks, but for the sake of my twin daughters and wife, I decided to bite the bullet. It was a decision I will forever regret. The 2018 incarnation of the park reeked of Las Vegas money-grabbing, subpar overpriced restaurants, wannabe boat cruise entertainers donned in epaulets and moth-ball-smelling wool gaucherie who constantly massaged their handlebar mustaches and spoke in fake French accents. Worst of all, I stood in line for over an hour to go on the Harry Potter Forbidden Journey, a ride in which adults sit in undersized airplane seats and are pinned in by a metal harness before entering a narrow tunnel that leads to hell.

As I sat in the cramped seat, a metal bar lowered and clamped down on my 52-inch chest, resulting in shortness of breath and a full-blown claustrophobia attack. While I was struggling to breathe, the conveyor belt ushered me and the other passengers toward the tunnel of darkness as I feebly cried for the engineer to stop the ride. Unhinged, I screamed louder and louder for someone to stop me from entering the tunnel so I could be saved from cardiac arrest. Complete madness, heart attack, or both surely awaited me, as no one in charge seemed to hear my cries for help. But fellow passengers nearby, observing my hysterical state, screamed in unison on my behalf so that the engineer was at last alerted that a maniac needed to get off the ride.

The conveyor belt stopped, and a tall burly usher in a gray FBI sport coat approached me. I sheepishly smiled at him and said, “Do you need to speak to me in the debriefing room?” The wizened security officer chuckled, offered me his hand, and with an ashen spirit I exited the park knowing I had thrown a wrench in Universal Studios’ well-oiled ride machine all the while knowing that regardless of all my kettlebell circuit training, wheat-grass smoothies, and high-protein diet, I would never be able to overcome my fear of closed spaces.