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.
