You can’t write about fitness without discussing fitness trends. They come. They go. Some stay for a while but few stand the test of time. In fact, you could argue that fitness as we know it now, is a trend. The health and fitness books, the profusion of companies hocking their products on every platform known to man are all capitalizing on one thing: a trend. Low carb. High protein. High Fiber. Vegan. The carnivore lifestyle. Training for longevity. Fitness itself, the concept of physical fitness that we take for granted today with gyms sitting in strip malls and crammed into dense city blocks, a never ending supply locations dedicated to those who aren’t training for anything in particular but just want to “stay fit” started as a trend. The trend being: that regular people should endeavor to stay in shape and not just let their bodies deteriorate at God’s will.

Jogging was little more than a fad in the 60s, something that people were skeptical of, that grew slowly over the decades and was eventually seen as a 100% socially acceptable activity in the 80s, an activity that is so beyond acceptable currently that thousands of people run marathons every year all over the world. Weightlifting was deemed dangerous until very recently, no more than a fringe pursuit for the massive, sweaty, arguably somewhat fat mullet dawning maniacs who drank a gallon of milk a day to keep their girth up (not the word that they used, but an appropriate word nonetheless) and huffed smelling salts to wake up for particularly heavy lifts. High school football teams seem to have always done some sort of weightlifting, but until very recently those athletes stopped lifting when they stopped playing. Now lifting weights is recommended for pregnant women. You know that exercise is on the table for everyone when they’re telling chicks in their third trimester to do it. Not only are women told to lift weights during pregnancy, there are whole fucking books published about safe weightlifting protocols for natal among us.

More recently CrossFit came, and basically, went in the 2010s. As the once great and now incarcerated Elizabeth Holmes once said—and stole from Ghandi of all people—“first they call you crazy, then they fight you, then you change the world.” What Holmes left out, in her case, not in Ghandi’s, was “and then they make a few gripping crime podcasts about you and pretty much forget you ever existed.” Why bring up Elizabeth Holmes when discussing fitness trends? Fitness trends other suffer a fate similar to Holmes. They aren’t sent to some metaphoric prison. Although I will argue in a second that the proprietors of a fitness trend might be heading toward some murky legal waters. They, instead, are hyped up and then forgotten. Remember when the CrossFit games were on ESPN? I never tuned in, but I do remember. CrossFit swept the globe, as far as I could tell, in the 2010s and is still around, but you don’t hear people talking about it the way they used to. Is that because of poor business management? In part. But, also, these things, these trends, just don’t last.

I don’t necessarily have my finger place square on fitness’ slow and steady pulse (it’s close, just not right on top of it), but I’d say that Hyrox is fitness’ newest mistress, fitness’ newest flavor of the month. Hyrox is the self-proclaimed “global world series of fitness racing.” What is it actually? Hyrox stands for Hybrid Rockstars, which means nothing. What is it actually? A series of relatively low impact predominantly anaerobic exercises parred together and performed in succession. It’s running and rowing and burpee broad jumps and sled pushing and wall balls and some other similar shit and smushed together in one nauseating circuit. It’s basically one very well branded and very well marketed CrossFit WOD (workout of the day). It’s basically Murph (if you’re familiar with CrossFit) performed over and over again by thousands of people in stadiums throughout the world. Why is it so popular? Aside from marketing tactics that I don’t understand (and wish I did, because I’d be much more successful). I think it’s the community, hybrid rockstars hybrid rockstarring together and loving every minute of it. But I’m not sure.

I’ve started posting some content on Instagram about Hyrox a couple of months ago, basically just making fun of it. Harmless stuff. Broad jokes that shouldn’t hurt any ultra tough Hybrid Rockstar’s feelings. Not only did the jokes ruffle Hyroxer feathers, I’ve actually received a handful of anecdotes from people regarding some of their cutthroat business practices. Namely that the “athletes” who had sign up for Hyrox competitions can’t cancel. No matter what. Even if they had a death in family or their kid has a brain tumor. One woman told me that she was able to get her flight to Sweden, for Hyrox competition, refunded when she found out that her son had a brain tumor, but that Hyrox would not refund her. Will the Hyrox CEOs face the same demise as Elizabeth Holmes? No, but it certainly could get ugly for them as word spreads. If they are so callous with their competitors regarding cancellations, is it possible that they are doing other heinous shit? I’d bet on it.

The craziest part of the whole Hyrox cancellation policy thing: the die hard Hyroxers are defending the no refund policy. I have some many comments under these posts about the flex package.“Why didn’t she get the flex package?” “Just get the flex package!” The flex package is just an added fee if you think you might cancel. Which seems like an oxymoron doesn’t it? Why would you sign up in the first place if you think you might cancel? The flex package defense is a level of commitment to fitness trend that I would have deemed unfathomable if I hadn’t seen it in my own IG comments.

And, like all trends, Hyrox will go away at some point. Whether it’s caused by their callous approach to brain cancer diagnoses or simply a slow dissipation of interest, Hyroxes popularity will wane, the way that all fitness trends do. What will the die-hard Hybrid Rockstars do? They’ll move on. They’ll find some other relatively straightforward well marketed regimen to get behind and apply their moronic fervor to.

When discussing said benefits all of the internet-wellness-community and, somewhat arbitrarily determined, Avengers of fitness podcasting (most notably Andrew Huberman a bright red neurobiologist, Arthur Brooks that bald Harvard happiness expert who won’t shut up, alternately, about his ultra-Christian marriage and his morning mega-dose of creatine ((20grams if I’m not mistaken)), and Thomas DeLauer, a muscle bound, once fat bound corporate recruiter, who either has a passion for making nutritional biochemistry more accessible to the masses or who only knows enough of the science to only put it in lay man’s terms—given his professional background I’d side with the latter) love to cite a longitudinal survey study conducted in Sweden. The results of a 20 plus year follow up with participants suggests a strong positive correlation between one’s health (i.e. not succumbing to cardiovascular disease and other maladies) and frequent sauna use. Meaning that the more often participants sauna-ed the less likely they were to die (measured as all-cause-mortality).

This is a compelling finding. Are there caveats? There always are. I’d argue that a guy who uses a sauna seven days a week might run into some financial problems, especially if he’s paying per use. If money isn’t a confound, time might be. Especially if the sauna he uses isn’t extremely close to or inside his home. So, we’ve narrowed the population that can benefit from high frequency sauna-ing down to people who own saunas. A very small very wealthy population in the United States, a much larger, I’d imagine more financially diverse one in Sweden (hence the oft cited, over extrapolated sauna study).

It’s hard to imagine that forming meaningful relationships doesn’t have a strong nullifying effect on all-cause mortality and that spending an inordinate chunk of your life commuting to and from saunas, might mitigate the forming and maintaining of these sorts of interpersonal relationships. Social support (i.e friendship) does actually seem to help you live longer. I just looked it up. In this study, that needs to be conducted more than once (i.e. tested and retested), as all studies should be and almost none are, they found that people who talked to 6 or 7 friends a week had a 24% reduction in mortality risk when compared to groups who talked to 1 or less (aka zero) friends a week. There was no health benefit associated with speaking with 2 to 5 or 8 or more friends a week. This study had a huge sample size (n = 12,709). There’s something there. Why did the 2 to 5 and 8 plus groups not see the same benefits as the 6 to 7 group? I’d rather you didn’t say “6, 7” out loud (See the tik tok trend) while reading this, but if you’re going to, do so quietly. 8 or more conversations a week with friends seems cumbersome, time consuming, maybe even exhausting and 2 seems pretty close to 1 and 1 seems pretty close to none. I don’t understand why the jump from five to six is so profound. I also don’t think it’s worthwhile to delve into this study any deeper aside from stating that it might have been useful to study a separate 4 to 5 group and a separate 2 to 3 group. What I will say is that is that it sounds like our hypothetical daily-commuter-sauna-user would benefit from doing so with six of his best friends (Compare with killing 7 birds with one insanely hot room). I also would argue that a guy who puts sauna use before other, more wholesome stuff, like picking his or her daughter up from school, whether or not it’s with his six best buds or not, is exhibiting a psycho-social disorder called orthorexia.

So, if it isn’t extremely easy and convenient to use a recovery method or exercise methodology that seems to be propagating all of these long-term benefits it’s always possible that the costs might outweigh the benefits. For example, this high frequency sauna user might be playing hooky at work, taking extra-long extra-sweaty lunches. Maybe his habit of coming in late to his afternoon meetings drenched in sweat drinking Nalgene after Nalgene of water cooler water and rapidly emptying the company water cooler will get this sauna guy fired. Does being out of work/broke/destitute lead to a quicker demise? It does, primarily if you lose your job in the beginning or middle of your career. Conversely, this seven day a week sauna’s user’s wife might get really annoyed with him when he’s home too often and likes it that he goes to the local bath house with his six-or-seven-life-preserving-friends and gives her some much-needed time to herself. Who knows?

I wrote all of the above to illustrate something pretty trite (i.e. there is a scientific ying to every scientific yang; an often unconducted to counter study to every conducted study). What I think is pertinent and what I think might possibly be useful to those attempting to optimize performance through things like cold exposure and saunas—I admittedly am one—is that just because somebody said something into a microphone while somebody else was recording that person, posted that footage on a widely used media distribution platform does not mean that it is gospel (even if the speaker teaches at Harvard), it doesn’t mean that it is not flawed and that it should be taken with a grain of salt (See something that you should ingest if you are sauna-ing with any frequency, much less a Swedish-frequency; not just one grain of salt, many grains of salt). For example, Arthur Brooks, the Harvard professor turned multi-millionaire podcaster, advertises himself or at least presents himself as a happiness expert, which would lead one to believe that he is a psychologist, neuroscientist or neurobiologist. He isn’t. He has a PhD in public policy analysis. Meaning that he’s studied how to analyze science, but does not run his own experiments. This might seem like nit picking. He does know how to read a study, well I’d imagine. But he doesn’t do research. I’m no Arthur Brooks aficionado, but I think this aspect of Brook’s expertise should be dispelled for those hanging on his every podcast.

A point that I heard Louis CK, who is no beckon of health or wellness, mental or otherwise, bring up on Joe Rogan’s podcast—Joe, is a guy who has become a beckon of health, despite his sole credentials being years of dedication to speaking into microphones and training martial arts and a notoriety originally derived from hosting a Japanese inspired game show where people ate cockroaches and various animal penises—is that all of this sauna-ing and cold exposure is a luxury, about as far from a necessary stimulus for self-improvement as one can experience. It’s actually something that, under normal circumstances, you need to be in a relatively high tax bracket to take part in at all, at least in America where saunas aren’t as abundant as they are in Scandinavia. Do wealthy people live longer? Yes.

Louis said something like the summary above in response to Rogan non-sequitoring his way into discussing the manner in which sitting in his really cold cold plunge and sauna-ing in his really hot sauna, on his really big Austin Texas compound (if the area where Rogan’s compound is situated hasn’t been renamed “Rogan Land” or something analogous) builds character (i.e. mental toughness). Louis basically said, what the fuck are you talking about? I think that what he actually said was that that extreme cold and heat are undeniably difficult to endure, but what’s more important is why you’re doing it in the first place. There are all sorts of things that are difficult, like having hard conversations with friends and family (ideally 6 or 7 of them a week), different forms of necessary hard work (from household chores to manual labor), getting up in the middle of the night to sit with your child who had a nightmare and is whaling in your ear. Those things all build character and are necessary aspects of a human experience (for those of us who don’t have enough money to hire people to everything for us; Louis isn’t necessarily this “normal guy” either ((he owns Babe Ruth’s old house)). Louis basically questioned whether a stress derived from a luxury like gutting it out in a 200 degree sauna is valuable at all. It also should be noted that Louis CK is a self-proclaimed over eater, over sleeper and sexual misconductor. Maybe he isn’t the go-to-guy regarding the socio-moral implications of anything, but regardless of pretty much everything I know about him as a person, I think he made a good point.

When I think about the hours, I have spent exercising and doing exercise related stuff in my life, I feel like a selfish piece of shit. That said exercise seems to reduce depression and anxiety and sauna can have similar effects. Maybe my “healthy-lifestyle-habits” make me a better husband, father, lover, and blah blah blah.

The answer probably lies somewhere between the CK and Rogan camps. Lessons learned from the real world and lessons learned under a barbell or in an over hot claustrophobia inducing box, are all at least kind of useful. For instance, I’ve learned that if you use the steam room in a gym, even a very nice one (namely Equinox) there might be a guy jerking it in there. That’s a sauna-life-lesson. A salient one, given the root cause of Louis’ 2017 cancellation. Oh, the irony. Louis thinks heat exposure is self-indulgent, meanwhile he admitted to doing the very thing that only the most self-indulgent sauna-ers do. Is it better or worse force someone to watch you masturbate inside a sauna or outside of one? I don’t think there’s a good answer for that. But I’m going to say that outside is worse. I don’t think either has an effect on all-cause mortality, at least not if you’re the one doing the masturbating. Maybe it will? Guilt doesn’t serve anyone well (I don’t have a study for this assertion though).

As is the case in all three-way intersections, the light was a long one. You had no choice but to wait it out. And during this pre-empt you had no choice but to stare at the empty rug store. Empty in patronage, there were plenty of rugs hanging from the ceiling, visible through the storefront’s large onion dome shaped windows. My parents, my dad primarily, used to call the onion dome shaped rug shop “a front” (See the entire store was onion dome shaped). It’s windows were the shape of smaller onion domes. Were there smaller onion domed shaped things inside? Was the entire Persian rug store a Russian onion dome doll of sorts? We’ll never know, because we, and as far as I know everyone else, never went inside and the storefront was recently purchased by a vintage clothing store that isn’t busy, but appears busier than the rug shop.

I have no idea if my dad was right. I couldn’t say for sure if the rug shop was owned by the Mill Valley mob, which if it existed, which it definitely doesn’t, would have been precured and operated by a group of Jerry Garcia look-a-likes (a softer rounder gentler hells angels type gang) Many people living in the area during in the 80s and 90s, at least, looked like Jerry Garcia and if I’m not mistaken, the real Jerry Garcia lived there too, or at least owned property there. Yes, it was like Where’s Waldo with round bearded guys in black t-shirts and flip flops.

The importance of this seemingly and arguably useless anecdote about a rug shop in Northern California is that it introduced me to the concept of a front. The notion that someone or something could pretend to serve one socially acceptable (and legal) purpose and function as a criminal operative. In 2016, when working at Equinox Hollywood, I met a personal trainer who was using her position at Equinox as a front.

Monica got hired when I did. We were “founding trainers” at the Equinox Hollywood location on Vine and Sunset. Founding trainer just means that we worked there when the gym or club, which ever descriptor you prefer, opened. There were no founding trainer perks, no benefits. If anything, there were many disadvantages to being hired by a gym that hadn’t opened yet. Namely, we had to wait months for the gym to open and therefore couldn’t earn a dime of commission (See the only real income derived from training at a gym like that) until “The Grand Opening.” This month’s long waiting period where some of my fellow trainers, myself included, seemed pretty fucked financially, had zero effect on Monica, because Monica was a prostitute.

She was an escort actually, a very upscale one from what I could tell. How did I know that Monica was an escort? She told me, point blank, over a meal at Tender Greens or Sweet Greens, one of those fast salad places with “Greens” in the name that had begun rapidly multiplying throughout the country. We both paid for our lunches separately, which under normal circumstances would be completely normal, if not the only option, but when a chick tells you that an Armenian guy paid her 1000 bucks to peg him the previous night, you might think that your dining counterpart would offer to pay for your 14-dollar slop bowl. Maybe not. It was her money. She definitely earned it. Armenians seem hairy, not to over generalize, but they do.

This, in hindsight made complete sense after Monica mentioned it. She didn’t seem to care much about accumulating a client base. She’d actually told me that she’d done comp sessions with people she didn’t want to train, meaning that she turned clients down. You train people because you need the money, not because you feel like it. Who wants to train anyone? I’d thought. But if Monica was performing peggings and analogous acts on a somewhat regular basis, she didn’t need to train anyone. Why then, you might wonder, was she working at Equinox at all? I don’t know. I’m not Monica, but, if I had to speculate, I’d say that she wanted what all people earning money illegally want: a front. She wanted an above-board taxable income. Monica also happened to live in The Camden, the luxury apartment building above the gym. She probably didn’t hate the idea of a free gym membership at the gym that was attached to her apartment building. I mean, Equinox charges ~400 dollars a month for a membership. That’s right, .4 peggings in Monica’s world. Who wants to give away nearly half of a pegging if they don’t have to? All in all, this was a pretty sweet deal for Monica. Equinox membership, real deal pay stubs, and a management staff that didn’t seem to give a shit that she had almost no clients.

Why did Monica tell me that she was an escort? I can’t really say, but I think she thought I wouldn’t bat an eye, which I didn’t really. She must have presumed that I didn’t give a fuck about much, which I also didn’t. Pretty soon after the Greens lunch with Monica, a trainer who had just opened a private training gym on Santa Monica Blvd “recruited” me to train my clients out of his facility. When he was trying to get in touch with me via another trainer he’d already poached from Equinox, he said, “Who’s the guy with the bed head and stains on his shirt. The guy who doesn’t give a fuck.” Maybe Monica thought that a guy who had so little respect for “an unrivaled experience,” “where Los Angeles’ performance driven achievers come to maximize their potential,” (See the description the Hollywood location on Equinox’s website), might not call the cops when she told him that she pegged a dude with a unibrow in and around his butthole for a rack (See yes, a uni-hole). I cannot confirm or die the existence of this John’s uni-hole, nor can I confirm the existence of uni-holes in general, nor can I confirm that Monica was telling me the truth about her moonlighting as a sex worker. I can confirm that Monica and I didn’t form a particularly strong bond after our lunch. She did come to a stand-up show that I was on, in Koreatown, once. She showed up almost an hour after the show ended. Was her tardiness the product of a uni-hole? Some mysteries are better left unsolved.

I don’t like personal training. I never have particularly liked it. But I did once, only once, train someone who I felt good about training, someone who made me want to pat myself on the back for “helping.” Once upon a time, deep in one of Los Angeles County’s most densely orthodox Jewish neighborhoods, I trained a holocaust survivor.

Her name was an old world one (Compare with Breina, Charna, and Genenneh). I’ll call her Charna. Charna attended the same synagogue as one of my clients and back in 2018 I was the trainer to the orthodox. Months prior to our introduction Charna fell outside of her apartment on a warped slab of sidewalk. She needed to rehab her knee. After every session Charna would tell me, “If anyone asks I’m not doing well.” Ok. Why? “I’m suing the city.” She’d say as a recurrent and therefore predicable follow up. She thought that the city of Los Angeles, the second most populated city in the country, was going to call me, her trainer, her off-the-books trainer no less and ask about the integrity of Charna Abram’s knee and her presumably her integrity as a whole (Yes, I added a culturally appropriate last name to her alias). This fear that Los Angeles, a city with an abundance of fish to fry seemed irrational, but Charna, in my humble opinion, was free to harbor whatever irrational fear she so chose. Why? Charna was a holocaust survivor.

The first time I trained Charna she wore a dress, a sweater, leggings and a kisui rosh, which is basically a Jewish bonnet (Compare with mix between an Amish bonnet and a middle eastern head dress, an admix, which in a way is not the worst description of orthodox Jewish culture as a whole ((orthodox Jews won’t love, but I don’t imagine that they are very active on Substack)). We were in LA. Charna was over dressed to go for a walk, much less formally exercise. I don’t think she walked much in her neighborhood given the poorly paved sidewalks, her fall, and her ongoing lawsuit with “the city.” The first exercise that I showed her was a wall sit. No you psycho. Not a 90-degree wall sit. A 120-degree (at most) wall sit at most (Compare with standing against a wall with slightly bent knees). Charna was not a fitness enthusiast and she wasn’t young. She’d never exercised formally. She’d never uttered the words workout in unison. Whenever she sweat even a little bit, which was quite often give her sweater and bonnet, she would pull tissue paper from her sleeve and dab her face. Did she store the tissue paper specifically for our PT sessions or was this a daily practice? (Compare with good questions that I didn’t have the gall to ask). The second she started her first 120-degree wall sit she removed the first of many tissues from her sleeve. It was like a magic trick performed by an extremely lazy magician. “Look what’s in my sleeve…tissue paper!”

Then she asked me in her thick eastern European accent, “Do you have parents?”

Does anyone not have parents? “Yes.”

“My parents died in the holocaust.”

“Do you have siblings?”

I saw where this was going, but what was I going to do? Change the subject? “No.”

“My siblings died in the holocaust.”

That’s how we started our first session and the conversation didn’t get much lighter. If I’d lived through the holocaust, it would be my all-purpose conversation starter too. When pulled over for a traffic violation:

“Do you know what you did wrong?”

“Do you know what they did wrong…” You get the idea.

I’d do my best to get a holocaust discount anywhere I could. Ross. Ralph’s. Other stores that do and don’t start with R. All I’m saying is that I get it as much as anyone can get anything they haven’t experienced firsthand. A Los Angeles County sidewalk fucked Charna over and so did a German dictator.

We rehabbed her knee with some success. She gained range of motion. She got stronger. She learned how to use a foam roller against a wall and appeared to like it, as much as she appeared to like anything.

Charna was old, but she wasn’t as old as you’d picture a survivor of the Holocaust being. She was 85 at most. She said that she escaped, with the help of other much older survivors, at two years old. The holocaust took place between 1933-1945. I trained her in 2018. The math works. Did she remember the holocaust? Most children don’t start forming memories until they are four, unless something traumatic happens. Trauma tends to get stored. So, by that logic, Charna might remember every second of it.

My other client, the one who introduced me to Charna, was paying for her sessions (in cash). A Jewish physical therapist certainly would have been a better fit for Charna than a Jewish personal trainer. As far as I could tell I was the only Jewish personal trainer in the greater Los Angeles area. Maybe Ronnie couldn’t find a Jewish physical therapist. Maybe he couldn’t find one. He had plenty of money and wanted to help Charna. Who wouldn’t? Some have the means and don’t help anyone, though. So, I think it’s important to acknowledge Ronnie’s kindness.

After most sessions Charna would ask “You want a bagel?” This wasn’t a euphemism for anything. Charna didn’t speak English well enough to dip into euphemisms and if she did, she would have avoided them. She wasn’t much for things done or said in jest. She wanted to know if I wanted to take a literal bagel and shmear for the road. I tried to turn the bagels down the first couple times she asked, but she wouldn’t take no for an answer. So, I would take the bagel and give it to a homeless guy. Where? Anywhere. It was LA.

I had to cancel a session once because I was sick. The next time I came to Charna’s apartment for a workout she asked, “Was it the bagel?” Meaning that she’d been giving me rancid bagels for months? Meaning that she’d be slow burn bagel poisoning me (i.e. some sort of Sharp Objects situation)? Maybe it was Charna’s attempt at a joke. Regardless, I’m glad I that I didn’t eat them and feel sorry for the homeless dudes who got stale possibly unsanitary bagels. Though, the word on the street is that homeless people rarely eat the food you give them. Why? Because they prefer alcohol and drugs and like true alcoholics and drug addicts, they aren’t foodies.

Charna and I stopped training during the pandemic, and I haven’t seen her since. It’s possible that she’s passed. It’s possible that she’s alive and well. Regardless, I hope she won a butt ton of money in her suit against the city.

“Looks aren’t everything.” People say that. They used to (See pre-social-media). It doesn’t necessarily feel like the exact opposite is true (Compare with looks are everything) in the post social media era, but it’s close. Something like looks, money, power and maybe the close bonds that we form along the way are, some, if not all, of which are derived from the aforementioned are everything.

I’m currently in my mid-thirties and aging like a president. My hairline is on a quest for a shogun topknot. My sideburns have turned silver. My gums are running for the hills and after years of gum recession and teeth grinding which seem to be correlated, I have developed pronounced dents in my two front teeth. Dents that are beyond amenable to coffee stains. It feels as if the weirder and older I look (Compare with the less I look the way I see myself in my mind’s eye) the easier it has become to be photographed and filmed and witness the horrifying results. I shoot front facing videos for Instagram (Compare with attempting to build my brand). There is no better way to isolate your aesthetic short comings than seeing footage captured inches away front your face. At a theoretical level none of this really bothers me. I’m not superficial. I don’t care what I look like. Preening and grooming is for Love Island contestants and I’m no Islander.

I know that it—my aging head and body—doesn’t matter all that much and that no one is paying all that much attention, but I ever now and then I’ll see my reflection and get bummed out (i.e. when my wife gave me an extra short hairline showcasing “summer cut”).

So, despite my humblest intentions I have an accumulating inventory of aesthetic insecurities. I never thought I would, but I do. Working in gyms throughout the majority of my adult life I’ve witnessed similar, much worse in many instances, insecurities in others that take the form of fake body parts (T and A and F ((faces)) and the other T ((teeth)). Some look passable, many don’t. The often unpassable results don’t appear to be scarring people away. If anything more people are “getting work done.” Are social media’s oft discussed beauty standards increasing rates of worldwide insecurity? Is cosmetic surgery simply more accessible? Less scary? Is the content found on looksmaxxing YouTube channels dedicated to exercise protocols and make up tutorials and loaves of bread made exclusively from whipped protein powder burrowing its way into our neural circuitry? I think…yeah…all of that.

I think that people have always been at least mildly interested in looking their best corsets and foot binding are the OGs, but now it’s too easy. Now we have more access to “information” and surgical interventions and syringe administered appetite suppressors (See Ozempic). Don’t forget Amazon. I can’t even imagine, nor accurately quantify, how much money Amazon must make off of our physical insecurities, between cosmetics, health and fitness products, and health and fitness books.

I’ve trained four women pre and post-natally in past two years and three of them have asked me if they should take Ozempic to help them lose the baby weight post-natum. My short answer is no. I don’t think they should. To which, some, not all of them, tell me that they are already taking it. Most of my male clients ask me if they should be taking creatine. And you guessed it, when I tell them my thoughts on creatine, which in most cases is that they should try it for 30 days and see how they feel, they tell me that they are already taking it. Yes. Conversations had during personal training sessions are a complete waste of time. Some (read as I) might argue that the entire monetary exchange, workout and all, is a complete waste of time.

What’s my point? As I’m writing this, I’m realizing that I might not have a very good one. I guess my point is that people, myself included, are insecure about how they look and the modern social media/ internet machine has pounced on this inclination. It wasn’t always so easy to promote a product or a remedy. It must have taken an eternity for word of the profound health benefits of metal corsets to spread. Now, if your ad spend is high enough, you can get the word out about a new, waste trainer (See the 21^st century’s metal corset) in milliseconds. I guess what I’m saying is that it’s too easy to see your flaws and too easy to attempt to fix them. And it’s pretty much diabolical that our life expectancy continues to increase in sync with this increased access to health, wellness and beauty products. It’s all a big horrific paradox. It’s a great time to be in the health/wellness/cosmetic “space” and a horrendous, exceedingly expensive, time to be attempting to improve your own health and wellness and appearance.

If I believe all of the above and I do, why do I pay my bills (not all of them, just some of them) through personal training? The short answer is that I already have clients who pay me a pretty good hourly rate to watch them workout and it would be significantly harder to find a comparable job. So I just keep doing this silly one.

It might sound trite, but the best “results” I’ve seen are the product of trying to feel better, not look better. The only tangible “health benefits” of diet and exercise that I’ve ever experienced have been derived from a desire to improve my appearance. They have come exclusively from a, not necessarily conscious, attempt to feel better. Strength training, running, rowing, biking, swimming different distances, meditating, Qi gonging, all feel good in the moment and tend to, in my experience, feel good afterward too. If I can meditate for 20 minutes, do a few minutes of qi gong and either lift or run in the same day, I feel better than I would have otherwise. Not just from the sense of accomplishment, which, of course, is easy to underestimate, but from the tangible physical and neurological effects of movement or lack thereof (meditation). I’m not a neuroscientist and I’ve never had my neurotransmitters measured during any of these activities, but I’d imagine that my brain (and yours) looks quite a bit different during and after exercise and meditation than it does before it (or without it). The same goes for writing. This little article will live on Substack, a place that seems to be mostly inhabited by writers. So, you will likely identify with this: Writing can be painful. If the end result is any good at all, it probably wasn’t easy to get there. What feels good is enduring that process. The creation and editing and subtle iterative improvement draft by draft. That’s how we should see all of this health/fitness/cosmetic gobbledygook: A means of eliciting personal daily progress, that doesn’t necessarily yield or result in anything tangible at all, aside from a body of work. I don’t think we should see our work as something that might blow people’s minds, but rather something that is deeply satisfying when performed assiduously.

In 2009 I was a 19-year-old CrossFit “coach” teaching classes and training clients out of a “box” called CrossFit Marin (Compare box with gym). CrossFit Marin was located, unsurprisingly, in Marin County. Marin is a very nice suburban sprawl that separates San Francisco from the wine country. Marin was never an inexpensive place to live, but its real estate has skyrocketed post tech boom. Does working in a suburban CrossFit box watching housewives struggle through a series of technically unsound burpee box jumps and kettlebell swings sound lame to you? If it does, you have a good ear.

In 2009 CrossFit boxes—warehouse functional group fitness gyms—were popping up all throughout the country. New members enrolled at CF Marin daily. CrossFit emphasized, and I think still does emphasize, the importance of competition and camaraderie. Most CrossFit WODs (Workouts of the Day) involved, and I think still do involve, a series of exercises completed as quickly as possible in an attempt to win the workout. Most of my friends at the time were attending colleges throughout the state and country, hanging out exclusively with people their age. I was not. I was hanging out with the coaching staff and members of my box, many of whom were in their 40s. I was pretty clueless at the time and never considered how odd it was that these 40-year-olds would want to hang out with someone who just graduated high school. I think they wanted to show me the ropes.

Friendships are mostly the product of propinquity and shared interests, so it wasn’t so insane that I was making friends with people twice my age. We all shared an interest in exercise, trained together and, this is an important and, wanted to get fucked up on the weekends—alcohol brings everyone together. It tends to hold true that people who like to do one activity in excess like to do others in excess, even when the activities are as disparate as exercising and partying. Adrenaline is adrenaline.

Carlos, a CF Marin member and nurse at Marin General was oddly large and tattooed and masculine presenting for a 40-plus male nurse and loved to party. I could get into most bars in Marin—the majority of them didn’t have bouncers. One night a handful of us went out in San Franciso and I got turned down everywhere. Carlos couldn’t believe that I didn’t have a fake ID. “I’ll get you one next week. We’ll go together.” I didn’t know what this meant or what it would necessarily entail. “It’ll cost like 150 bucks.” That was not an insignificant amount of money for me at the time (it still isn’t), but the prospect of getting into any bar I wanted at 19 hard to turn down.

Carlos picked me up at the gym on a Saturday afternoon, when the day’s classes were over, in his convertible, not a Chrysler Sebring, but something like a Chrysler Sebring. One of those convertibles that is so uncool that the wind doesn’t feel good in your hair, it feels uncomfortable, painful even. We drove off, Sebring tainted wind in our hair. We crossed the Golden Gate Bridge and descended into the Mission district. A once predominantly Hispanic and predominantly dangerous neighborhood. I have a distinct memory of eating a burrito next to a guy with a visible coke nail (an extra-long pinky nail grown solely for improved scooping and snorting) who told me and a friend about how he missed the way it used to be, with all the hydrolyzed low riders and all of the stabbings, before the gringos came in and starting turning the businesses into “gastro pubs” and the apartments into “lofts.”

When we parked on Mission and Valencia, the tech boom was in its nascency. The mission wasn’t as rough as it had once been, and it was nowhere near as soft as it would soon become. We got out and started walking around.

“Where do we go?” I asked.

“We just need to find the right guy.”

Carlos didn’t even know where the fuck we were supposed to go. He, who I assumed was a fake ID expert, was doing the exact opposite of what you’re supposed to in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood: Find the most criminal-presenting dude and strike up a conversation regarding a crime you would appreciate their help with.

Carlos stopped a guy in an Oakland Raiders jersey and mumbled something to him in Spanish. The guy mumbled something back and all of the sudden we were in the lobby of what appeared to be a defunct movie theater. Another guy in a different football jersey appeared.

“You guys look like cops.”

Carlos said something else in Spanish.

One of the football fans said something in Spanish.

Carlos responded in Spanish.

“Go to the photoshop across the street. Give him 200.” The price was already climbing.

For the youngsters, there used to be segments of drug stores and entire storefronts that developed photos and people used to pay to use public pay-per-use-phones that stood in booths on the street. Crazy right?

After stopping by an ATM to get the rest of the money, we went into the photo shop, which appeared to be a regular old store front dedicated to developing photos. The guy behind the counter who was aware of the arrangement snapped my picture and asked for the money. Carlos said something to him in Spanish and we left.

“It’ll be a couple of hours.” He said. “Let’s get a drink.”

We went to a sports bar restaurant off Mission and Carlos ordered us beers. The bartender didn’t ask for my ID, which of course forced me to contemplate whether or not all the fake-ID-related-criminal-activity was all that necessary.

“I used to make IDs. I made a killing.” Carlos said. Why couldn’t he make me one now? Why did we have to get all of these sketchy Spanish speaking guys involved? “But I had to stop.” I wondered what “had to” meant. “When I went to jail.” That’s what it meant.

I felt the room spin a little bit, not horribly, but I felt an immediate twinge of regret. I didn’t even know this guy and now I was committing a minor crime with him, more than one actually if you include the Blue Moon I’d been gulping down in fear that the bartender might renege the beverage.

“I used to make IDs. I used to rip credit cards. I was rolling in dough.” Other people’s dough? “I used to work at another hospital up in Santa Rosa. I’d rip a credit card and buy whatever I wanted.” I didn’t really know what “rip” meant. I still don’t, but I can take an educated guess. “I’d take girls out. Buy clothes. Nice shit. That’s how I got caught…I took a chick to Nordstroms. I was trying on suits, and I winked up at the security camera. Then I’m checking out and I’m surrounded by cops. They’d been tracking me for months.” So, the winking had absolutely nothing to do with it? “I spent a little under two years in jail and here I am. Working. Clean.” He said this as he ordered his 19-year-old friend a second Blue Moon as we waited for my completely illegal ID to be printed and laminated.

When we returned to the movie theater lobby. The guy in the Raider’s jersey handed me a paper lunch bag. I was too scared to look at the ID until we were in the car driving back to Marin. It felt flimsy (not good). You don’t know the role that weight plays in an ID or any card for that matter until you feel one that is either too light or too heavy (those platinum AMEX’s ((the bowling balls of credit cards)) for example). Worse yet, my Texas ID (not a great kind of ID to have in California, primarily because it just wasn’t believable—people from Texas don’t really move to the west coast and people from the west coast didn’t start moving to Texas until the pandemic, you can thank Joe Rogan and Elon Musk for that). Even worse yet, it said that I was 5’7”, which I am not. I’m 6’1”. The ID was a joke. I used it a few times successfully before driving down to Isla Vista, the beach town where the majority of the UCSB student body lives (consistently ranked one of the nation’s top party schools) for Halloween. Isla Vista goes ballistic for Halloween. As I was beginning to join in on the festivities, I went into a liquor store, asked for a 30 rack, whipped out my horrendous excuse for a Texas ID and was denied immediately. The clerk just said “No.” And when I asked for it back he said “no” again.

My “Training Day” afternoon with Carlos ended up being pretty harmless, but I kept my distance from him afterward. I don’t know where he is now. Hope he’s still “clean.”

Remember when steroids were this whispered about substance that magically made you hit home runs (and need to shop for larger hats) (See Barry Bonds)? Something that muscle bound guys in American flag parachute pants sold in the parking lots of your local gym? If you’re not a baseball fan or a bodybuilder or a bodybuilding fan (if those exist), you might not remember these sign posts of PED use. More recently you might have heard Joe Rogan discuss his own TRT (See Testosterone Replacement Therapy: code for doctor approved steroids) “protocol” (Compare with how much T he shoots in his ass and how often). Rogan’s honesty regarding his use of exogenous testosterone is undeniably disarming, refreshing even. That said, Joe Rogan’s openness on the topic, considering his massive listenership, indicates that the once vilified, congressional hearing worthy, group of substances once exclusively referred to as performance enhancing drugs—now more commonly referred to by name: Test, Deca, Anavar, Winstrol, and so on—have become so socially acceptable that they will be considered banal in the near future. Wherein dialogue like this will be more commonplace than not:

“That ruddy inflated looking 50-year-old dude must be on Test.”

“No shit.” Pause. “I’m on Test.”

Pause. “Me too.”

It’s difficult to argue that steroids don’t have the bitter-socio-cultural-after-taste they once did. Now that we are a more roid-friendly nation, globe (?), what’s next? What’s the next spooky substance to be boofed on mass (injected into one’s butt fat, not literally boofed)? Peptides. The next big performance enhancer is peptides. There’s no question. Peptides are the new steroids, the new fountain of youth, the new “panacea” syringed in excess.

What are peptides? I’ll do my best to explain below. All that I’ll say up here is that there are a lot of them, hundreds of thousands of them. They serve a lot of different purposes, and they appear to be very potent. What can you an innocent bystander to the upcoming peptide deluge expect? Chaos. Tumult. Excess. Gluttony. Avarice. If I were you, I would anticipate a wild injectable ride.

This is a bit of an aside but a worthwhile one: when it comes to substances that induce noticeable positive change in the human body—muscle growth, improved work output, weight loss—bodybuilders always get there first. Bodybuilders are the pioneers, if you will, of performance enhancing drugs. Why is this? There are a few reasons. Firstly, their sport isn’t regulated. If you’re competing in Mr. Olympia, you can take whatever the fuck you want. Secondly, you will lose if you don’t experiment with these substances. In fact, if you don’t take some very powerful shit, you will experience a fate worse than death (in the modern era at least), you will be laughed out of the building. Thirdly, bodybuilding is a sport of excess. It is a bodybuilder’s sole objective to get as huge and lean as possible (i.e. look fit in a way that frightens people). That’s it. That’s the whole sport. Cyclists, despite taking all sorts of PEDs during the Lance Armstrong era, need to stay aerodynamic to win a race. This precludes them from taking the majority of PEDs. Swimmers can’t get too bulky either. Basketball players need to respirate efficiently and jump high repeatedly. Bodybuilders don’t need to do a single thing other than get enormous, symmetrical, and lean, before waddling on stage in a Hyatt Regency Conference Center and flexing for the judges. These inherent elements of the sport make bodybuilders the trailblazers of exogenous substances. The guys and girls who do it are constantly on the lookout for the most effective ways to tweak their diets, exercise regimen and figure out what to take (street legal or not) to achieve a desired result. So, bodybuilders are the Christopher Columbus’ of PEDs (and yes, they are apt to make discoveries by accident just like Columbus). Bodybuilders were fucking around with steroids before you’d heard of them and, believe or not, they were fucking around with GLP1s (a form of peptide) way before you knew a thing about them, and they are currently fucking around with all sorts of other peptides before there will be mainstream interest, if any.

A definition of the substance in question seems appropriate: Peptides are short chains of amino acids, shorter than proteins. There are hundreds of thousands of them. They interact with proteins and other micro molecules and serve all sorts of functions in the body.

Examples of peptides:

GlP-1s—Ozempic and the link

Bp157—derived from human gastric juice; has been demonstrated to promote tissue healing, skin, muscle, bone, ligaments and tendons

GHK-Cu— a dermatological peptide; tells your skin to produce more collagen and elastin; delivers more blood flow through your skin and scalp

Epithalon—produced by the pineal gland; slows the natural course toward cell death by increasing the activity of an enzyme called telomerase, an enzyme that adds DNA to telomeres giving more length to promote healthy cell division; may support sleep; help you look, think, and feel younger

CJC-1295—stimulates growth hormone, supports energy, sleep, and lean mass

It’s speculated that the first dude to try to hock a peptide was Pavlov. Yep. The dog conditioning guy. Why would Pavlov, beard wearer, noble prize winner, and dog enthusiast even have peptides on his radar? Because he was just as much a dog conditioning guy as he was a dog saliva guy (and dog gastric juice guy). Don’t hold me to the fire on this but I think that this is gist of the story in layman’s terms: Pavlov not only made dogs salivate in his lab, he also studied their saliva and their bile and found it interesting that if their spittle and stomach fluids spilled out, that, when sick, that dog and/or surrounding dogs would lick the fluids up, which led Pavlov to believe that the short chain amino acids (peptides) in the bile could potentially restore their gut flora and likely served other restorative purposes. Pavlov then packaged and sold dog bile as a nutritional supplement for humans. This was pre-pro-body building (there were exogenous substance Columbus’ in 1904 too). This dog bile peptide supplement that Pavlov was pushing was basically BP157, which is a peptide (listed and briefly defined above) that is getting a lot of interest and might take off as a HGH booster and near instant injury rehabilitator.

If you, the person reading this, happen to be worth millions of dollars and happen to be looking for something to invest in, the peptide industry seems like a good option. It’s kind of scary. It’s kind of fucking insane, but it’s the future and as they (lame people) say “the future is now.” Would you have invested in an over-the-counter supplement company in ~2004? Would you have started packaging and selling creatine? You should have. I should have. We all should have. The major purveyors of nutritional supplements are worth hundreds of millions of dollars currently. Peptide companies could end up being worth more.

There are caveats to my armchair portfolio management. First of all, many peptides will get gobbled up by pharmaceutical companies and it is far far too late to get in at the ground floor of Pfizer. Also, the FDA is regulating the shit out of peptides, because they are classified as drugs, whereas supplements are not. Meaning that some peptides will be available for widespread use in America one day and unavailable the next.

Should you a weekend warrior, a Hyroxer perhaps, take peptides? I wouldn’t. Not until the explorers, the bodybuilders, the Joe Roganites and the self-experimenters, have been taking the stuff for decades and the long-term effects have been studied in lab settings in great depth. Second caveat: I’m just a doofus posting on Substack. Do your own research.

I was a few months into working as a personal trainer at Equinox and I’d just finished a Saturday morning and early afternoon of sessions. The majority of the remaining people in the gym were staff members (gyms are usually packed on weekend mornings and nearly empty in the afternoon). I was half assing a workout—something like dumbbell bench press with lots and lots of rest between sets. When a cracked-out David Sedaris, approached (i.e. David Sedaris mixed with Charles Manson). I don’t think that David Sedaris has ever smoked crack (he tried meth from what I remember, which is close enough). I would assume though, that the more crack and/or meth he smoked the more Manson-y he would appear. Charles Manson didn’t smoke crack either, not in his hay day which took place a decade before the advent of crack. You get the idea though. The little guy looked like a mix of the two more well known guys and didn’t give the impression that he was sane.

David Manson walked up to me said, “You work here, right?” I nodded hoping he didn’t want me to manually stretch his hamstrings, which members did demand from time to time. He didn’t. Thank God. Instead, he asked, “Do you want to be in a movie?” A phrase that I’m nearly certain no one has ever uttered outside of Hollywood. I weighed my options. Do another, not particularly necessary, set of presses or “be in a movie?” Hmmm…

After abandoning my workout, I found myself in the lobby of The Camden—the apartment complex that abutted the gym. The Camden, much like the Equinox it was connected to, was a self-proclaimed hub of luxuriousness (“luxury gym”; “luxury apartment complex”). What distinguishes luxury apartment complexes and luxury gyms from “regular” ones? The decision to use the word (luxury) as far as I can tell. One of my PT co-workers lived in The Camden. She was an upscale prostitute who wanted taxable income and a free Equinox membership. How do I know this? She told me point blank over Tender Greens once and basically never talked to me again. Needless to say, my other, fellow, monetarily challenged, co-workers would never have considered living there (the one undeniable unifying trait associated with all things’ luxury is cost). David Manson lived in the Camden and that’s why plebians the likes of yours truly were allowed in the lobby.

The lobby had a white board. I don’t know why. I haven’t been inside many luxury apartment buildings, but I doubt that whiteboards are a standby. Was the whiteboard there solely for tenants to story board film ideas? Possibly. We were in Hollywood after all.

One of the front desk guys, an effeminate gay dude, who Equinox performed in drag shows in West Hollywood, was next to me, along with a fitness competitor chick (fake tits, ripped abs, carrot colored skin) as I’m sure you guessed she was one of the other trainers, a much busier one than me. Why did she have more clients than me? She oozed fitness. Why did I have less than her? I did not. Looking at her for a moment one’s internal-scattegories-yelps were simply “gym,” “gym person,” “workout,” “person who workouts.” Joe was there too. Joe was the single most impressively ripped dude I’ve ever seen. He was maybe 5’8” and probably 240lbs and didn’t appear to have an ounce of body fat on him. He was trying to break into professional bodybuilding and, evidently, due to his presence at this “meeting,” he was also trying to break into film.

As mentioned, I didn’t look as fitness-y as the other trainers sitting next to me. I didn’t look fitness-y at all. I always wondered why a prospective client would train with me, a slovenly, 26-year-old with budding breast nubs busting through my TRAIN shirt (all Equinox trainers wear skintight dry fit company shirts that say TRAIN across the chest, it’s mandatory) and not choose to train with Joe (the physical embodiment of fitness) instead. Shockingly, some chose me. I think that they were intimidated by the more hormonally-enhanced-trainers (i.e. working out with Joe looked like it would be hard; working out with me looked like it would be easy).

David Manson is at the white board jotting indistinguishable notes down about the “film.”

“You!” He pointed at Joe. “My Vin Diesel!”

He scribbled Vin Diesel on the white board in a difficult to read yellow expo pen. It goes without saying that David Manson had frenetic, some might say manic, some might say frightening, energy. He seemed fucking crazy, but that, based on six years spent in LA, does reduce the likelihood of one’s legitimacy. It might increase it. Both the Bonafide movers and shakers and the phonies in LA are fucking crazy. Everyone in between tends to be more levelheaded.

“You!” He pointed at the fitness competitor. “Sandra Bullock!” Not a horrendous comparison give or take about 20 pounds of muscle and a beta-carotene hue.

“You!” He pointed at the greeter (the greeters wore shirts with GREET across the chest). “Chris Tucker.” Again, not the worst comp. More Fifth Element Chris Tucker than Rush Hour Chris Tucker, but a Chris Tucker-type, nonetheless.

“You!” He pointed at me. “Seth Rogan.” Insulting. Sure. Accurate. Yes. So accurate that it was insulting. At the time, I spent most of my non-workhours smoking weed, eating and doing stand-up. Why was I working at a gym? Stand-up wasn’t going the way I’d imagined. The way it went for Seth Rogan, who started as a stand-up comic and was forced to stop because he got too busy writing and acting, almost the exact opposite of the trajectory of my nascent career (i.e. desperately wanting more work as a stand-up comedian).

Despite the “meeting” lasting another hour or so. David Manson didn’t describe the movie in much depth at all. He basically just reiterated over and over again that we would shoot in LA, that he’d have to reach out last minute when he got his crew together and that we’d be filming guerilla style. All things that real filmmakers who make real movies are apt to really say. He also stated many times that the “film” would be action packed and that we would start shooting in the coming months and that he had made “a lot of films” and that we would start “the second” he “got enough funding.” We gave him our phone numbers and shuffled back into the gym. He never called. He never texted. I never saw him again, not in person that is.

A few months after our “pre-production” meeting, David Manson pointed a gun at two pedestrians outside of Equinox Hollywood, barricaded himself in his apartment and the police used tear gas to force him out and arrest him. I heard that there was a shootout, but there was no mention of it in the news coverage. Would we have made our film if David Manson hadn’t been arrested? Of course not. His arrest serves as further proof that he was clinically insane and that the movie was little more than an ideation that a few of us became somewhat entangled in one afternoon. All that I am left with is a series of questions: Did he actually work in the film industry before losing his mind (while losing his mind)? If not, how did he afford his apartment? Where is he now (9 years later)? Gathering “cast members” for more “pre-production meetings?” Cue spooky music…

A personal trainer, if you aren’t versed (and if you aren’t I envy you more than you can imagine), is someone who meets you in a gym at scheduled intervals, often more than once a week. He or she tells you what exercises to do, how to do them, watches and corrects mistakes (sometimes). Sounds like day care for the out of shape? It basically is. It’s closer to day care for the feeble (in mind and body), the perpetually tired, the immobile, and the lazy (these groups can, and tend to, overlap quite a bit). A less derogatory analogy might be: SAT tutor for the SAT fitness subject test. I hear that SAT subject tests no longer exist. Let’s pretend they do for the sake of this series of less and less necessary analogies. The rates are similar to SAT tutor rates (over 100 dollars an hour) and a staggering number of my clients are finance people (and the spouses of finance people: male or female) who are on Adderall. Both of which make the SAT tutor analogy pretty sound, not air tight, but sound.

Why in God’s name would someone pay a stranger to watch them workout two, three, even four times a week? They’re lazy. That’s basically it. They aren’t necessarily lazy in all aspects of their lives. In fact, they, unless they are married to someone wealthy or who come from boatloads of money, which as we all know does happen from time to time, are career oriented and do know how to work hard, just not how to apply their work ethic to their well-being. These 16 hour a day workaholic “I should try to squeeze a workout in” clients are the bread and butter of personal training. I am about to argue that personal training is for no one, but, if it’s for anyone it’s for the overworked VPs of the world.

This presents a palpable catch 22. If personal training, like the multi-month surf and/or ski trip, were just a trust fund kid luxury that would be one thing, that would be fine, trust fund kids waste their great grandparent’s money on all sorts of stupid shit, but the guy with an MBA who is relatively high up at Blackstone or BlackRock (or any similar multinational, predatory, investment company with Black in its name) is obviously capable of very high level critical thinking. So, why are these VPs of varying stature unable to YouTube and Chat GPT their way to a fitness regimen? The answer: The only thing that they love more than making money is spending it. They revel in throwing their hard-earned cash at all of their problems. When they are off the clock, their goal is: temporary lobotomy. They want to exist in an 8-to-10-hour vegetative state starting the second they leave work that ends the second they return to the office. Yes. Exactly like the TV Severance, only in reverse (aka a Reverse Severance).

They have dog walkers and nannies and therapists and acupuncturists and trainers. They have people do pretty much everything for them except work and they delegate, so they have people work for them too. One of my clients, a Blackstone employ, sees a second trainer. That’s right, a whole other personal trainer. These people are basically Fin Domers. Meaning that they are sexually aroused by wasting money/ being told how to waste their money. If you haven’t heard of financial domination, it’s the circumstance in which a man (it appears, not so shockingly, to be something that only men are interested in) is sexually attracted to giving money to people. Sounds fake? Look it up. It’s got its own Wikipedia and everything. Weird. Right? The way you feel about financial domination is the way I feel about personal training: it incredibly wasteful and should not exist.

You shouldn’t choose your career solely based on the respect it elicits in others, but choosing a career that no one respects doesn’t seem like the best idea either. When I tell people that I’m a personal trainer they look at me like I just farted. That’s when I tell them the truth. When I’m not in the mood to receive a fart glare, I tell people that I work in the search engine optimization space, which is amazingly consistent conversation ender. By the time I’ve finished the acronym they’ve already turned around and begun walking away or realized that something really interesting has just happened on their phone.

For the record, I don’t think exercise is stupid. Everyone should exercise. What I do think is stupid are long conversations about exercise and in-depth armchair analyses of exercise. As in “What’s the best way to target my chest? Is walking better than running? What are the pros and cons of one plan versus those of another?” These conversations are basically a waste of time if you aren’t training for something specific, in which case you should do that (i.e. run long distances, play pickle ball, do Hyrox, whatever stupid shit you’re into). All that you need to do is lift some weights, get your heart rate up and move for an extended period of time at a steady conversational pace. Most people don’t have time to overdo it. If you do you should see a therapist or get a job? Probably both.

The internet is littered with viable fitness resources. You can formulate a nearly fool proof workout plan for yourself in under 10 minutes online. You don’t even need to use Chat GPT. AI is a solid resource though.

Do you want some tangible advice? If you want to start a workout program from scratch, type ‘beginner strength training program’ into Google or Chat GPT. Both platforms will provide you with a series of exercises meant to be performed multiple times a week with short descriptions of each exercise. If the exercises still don’t make sense plug them into YouTube and a muscle-bound guy will show you how it’s done. Your Google results won’t be enlightening. They won’t be tailor made for you. They won’t be perfect. But I have a secret for you (said in whisper) they don’t have to be. What’s difficult about fitness, the only aspect of fitness that is even remotely challenging is valuing it and making time for it. Personal trainers are human alarm clocks for exercise, and the vast majority of people love to hit the fucking snooze button. Clients hit snooze (cancel) on their sessions constantly. I’ve had a client literally show up 45 minutes late for a session, enough said.

People hire personal trainers because they don’t believe that they have the will power to walk down to the gym in the basement of their apartment building and start moving their own body on their own volition without a guy in a sleeveless shirt gazing at them blankly for 60 minutes on end. I do kind of wonder how they show up for work in the morning, pour coffee down their throats’, urinate without a catheter, you get the idea.

Basically, what I’m saying is that trainers are dog walkers for humans. You hire them because you don’t want to move a body (your dog’s or your own). The difference: some people work (at Blackstone) all day figuring out which country to siphon cobalt from (something that I assume my Blackstone clients do) and can’t physically come home to give their dog a walk. So, they hire a debilitatingly high twenty something in a neon green company t-shirt (Rover, Wag, Swifto) to take their pet outside for a midday shit. Come to think of it, dog walkers are actually much more necessary than personal trainers. You use a dog walker if you’re away from home a lot. If you have the time to get yourself to the gym to meet your trainer you have the time to train yourself. You might actually be able to do it more efficiently. Scratch that. You will be able to.

I train myself (picture me patting myself on the back) and I haven’t spent over an hour in the gym in years. Yet, I spend an hour with the vast majority of my clients, most of whom are in bad shape and have non-existent work capacities. Why do I spend much more time in the gym than necessary with them? They’re paying me for the hour. If I don’t fill the time, they might conclude that I am not worth the money. How do I fill the hour? I, ironically, waste their time. We talk. We stretch. We watch (videos on YouTube, definitely not of bulky guys demonstrating exercise ((a genre that would render my “expertise” useless)), videos of families with quadruplets, football highlights, football games, murder trial verdicts, random shit). This is what you get when you pay for personal training. The non-sex-worker version of a clock watcher: someone—prostitute or not—who checks the time constantly through your session—sexual or not.

Want some cardio advice? Cardio is so fucking simple you don’t even need to spend time “researching” it. If you feel comfortable running, jog a few days a week for 20 to 40 minutes, if you don’t, walk for the same duration. If it’s hard to breathe slow down, if it’s easy to breathe speed up. That’s it.

Fitness is so simple it’s infuriating. All that you need to do is show up. If you think you think you need a trainer you are mistaken. What you need to do is stop throwing money at shit and hold yourself accountable.

I’ve worked in different gyms throughout the United States for going on 17 years now (yikes). I’ve gleaned that there are roughly three different types of trainers with roughly three different ambitions.

1) The Side Gig Trainer: Side gig trainers have a typical, often irrational career goal. The term career is used lightly here. These careers are often extremely unreliable sources of income and therefore, not careers at all (i.e. musician, actor, DJ ((a very common one in the personal training community)), stand-up comedian) These trainers are en route to a dream, not necessarily a dream job, just a dream. The side giggers want something flexible that doesn’t eat up their entire day. They have cords to practice, scenes to rehearse, jokes to write, and whatever DJs do (beats to blend(?)). Their clients get mad at them because they are not keeping an accurate record of previous training sessions and are occasionally late for sessions and generally don’t seem invested in their client’s progress, because they aren’t. This group of trainers, due to sheer negligence, has the highest rate of turn over, as in clients discontinuing training.

2) The Old Trainer/ Retiree Trainer: This is more common than one might think. They are in every gym. There are in their 50s, 60s, and sometimes 70s, and all of their clients are exactly the same age as them. Old clients want old trainers. It makes sense. They are always on time. They’re actually early, very early. They are incredibly nice. They care about their clients, which is way more than can be said of the side giggers. Why? They don’t have shit else going on. They are retired. They don’t hate earning money, most don’t, but they do not need training to pay their bills. They have chosen to pass some of their remaining time training 5 am clients. There are worse ways to pass time, but that’s all that they are doing: killing time. If they were in dire straits financially, say their adult child developed a horrendous decades long credit problem and forced them to come out of retirement to “help” pay it off, you would see them sitting in one of those bank kiosks in your local grocery store and not in your local gym wearing loose fitting leggings. Why do these wrinkly pleasant fitness enthusiasts do it? Maybe they just want to keep busy. Maybe they like the additional spending money stacked atop their savings. Maybe they’ve developed late onset orthorexia, and this career mildly justifies their health and exercise obsession. Maybe they have convinced themselves that they want to help people, something that is said about one’s professional inclination when one doesn’t have a passion and/or one’s passion bore no fruit (See the multitude of failed musician/artist/actor/athlete psychotherapists) (See also ask your therapist, if you see one, what they wanted to do before they resigned to a quiet room and your ruminations. I’m aware that they didn’t all want to be the next Kurt Cobain, but some of them did). These aged trainers wanted to be other things or were other things. Despite being arguably, the most conscientious of the three trainer types, they are not 100% invested in your fitness goals. I promise you.

3) The future gym owner: This is the only trainer type whose goal aligns with their ambition. These trainers are fitness buffs, and they want to turn that buff into a career in fitness. They are entrepreneurs and they either love fitness, or might just believe they understand the industry well enough to run a successful gym. If you have experience as a trainer and want to earn real money, not the 30ish dollars an hour that trainers make in commercial gyms, starting your own facility is a good idea. What does it say about your trainer if he or she is pursuing gym ownership? They have bigger fish to fry than your stubborn belly fat and they would much much rather outsource your training sessions to an employee, who they will pay 30ish dollars an hour.

Takes aways: If you just hired a personal trainer that person probably like to exercise and probably wants a free gym membership, but if they had a choice, unless they are quite old, they would rather not be training you. Is this different from most unlucrative careers. I’m no expert, but I don’t think so. Does the person checking you out at Kroger’s (roughly 30 feet from that only guy in the kiosk paying off his son’s credit debt) want to be there? Are barista’s passionate about pulling espresso shots? Most people work a job that they don’t love. Trainers are most people.

If you’re considering a membership at Equinox, Chelsea Piers, and the like and aren’t quite sure whether or not to pull the trigger, you’ve come to the right place. I’ll give you the low down. I’ll tell what they don’t tell you during the gym tour. Do you want the truth? The cold hard truth? Here’s the truth: They shit in the showers.

You read that right. They (the members) take big steamy dumps in the showers. This is not a typo (or a series of typos). I’m not getting it wrong. I’m not describing one of the “lower class” gyms: Planet Fitness, LA Fitness, Anytime Fitness. I’m only realizing now that they all have very similar names. Planet Fitness is obviously, the archetypal inexpensive gym (inexpensive is often a proxy for bad). PF refers to itself as a “judgement free zone.” The irony: the gym that considers itself a judgment free zone is not the gym where people repeatedly release the hounds in the showers.

Sounds outlandish? It without a doubt is. But I promise you this is a real phenomenon. Members at luxury gyms (wealthy people, at the very least relatively wealthy people) seem to recurrently use the, by all accounts, state of the art gym shower stalls as, not just as showers (which they do), but as bathrooms.

When I was working at Equinox Hollywood (2016-2018) I was in the GM’s office. I can’t really remember why. She might have been telling me about a member who she’d assigned to me for personal training. This happened often. Someone in management would meet a new member who was interested in personal training and the manager would pair said member with a compatible trainer. It’s also possible that I was complaining about a member. Maybe I was complaining about that guy who would wonder around the gym when it was quiet (lunch time on weekdays; afternoons and evenings on weekends) asking anyone in a TRAIN shirt to “stretch him,” meaning a manual table stretch (the kind that professional athletes get during pre-game warmups). Most trainers stretched their clients manually, but few, if any, stretched members who were not paying them for their time.

If I was complaining about the “stretch me” guy, the GM probably said something like, “yeah, yeah, you’re not the only one who has complained about him. He’s been running around asking everyone and spot him” and other analogs that involved physical closeness.

There might have been a pause or a break in conversation before the GM said, “the members here just think that they deserve special treatment, almost all of them. That’s who they are. They take what they want and do what they want. They steal towels constantly. There are no camera’s in the bathrooms, for obvious reasons, so we don’t know who is doing it. It’s a problem.”

I did my best not to reveal that I was contributing to the local towel shortage by stuffing a towel in my gym bag here and there. I received less than half of the money that I generated each session and I needed towels for my apartment. Was stealing a few towels such a crime? Yes. It was a literal crime. Is this the genesis of most theft? Person feels short changed. Person needs goods. Person pockets goods. Probably. But why were the wealthy members stealing towels. Entitlement (the other reason people steal).

“They go to the bathroom in the shower too.”

This didn’t seem that crazy to me. Who doesn’t pee in the shower from time to time?

“They poop in the shower.”

This did seem crazy. I’d never heard of behavior like this. Shower shitting? Toddlers don’t even do this. I have a 2 and half year old now and she’s never once unloaded during a bath much less shower. Knock on wood. Don’t want to jinx the streak.

“They’ve been doing it at Equinox’s forever. I used to be the GM at the Beverly Hills location. It was way worse over there. The members were even more entitled, if you can imagine.”

I could. Our membership base was chalk full of absolute pieces of shit (I have to state that this is not a pun, despite hating the phrase “no pun intended”), but Beverly Hills is a disgustingly affluent “neighborhood” if you can even call it that (a neighborhood, the affluence isn’t up for debate). BH is basically just a series of tall hedges and mansions and has its own police force, a good one. I drove through Beverly Hills quite a bit when heading to the westside or over the hill to the Valley and I never saw a single homeless person there, not once. If you know LA that doesn’t compute. What was Beverly Hills doing to rid their streets of the unhoused? Pulling a China? What’s pulling a China? Take a guess. They probably weren’t doing that. But their police forced was getting them the hell out of there.

“One of the janitors caught a lady doing it at the Beverly Hills location. I had meet with the lady, confronted her, and threaten to revoke her membership. Do you know what she said to me?”

Um...‘I’ll stop? I’m sorry. I like this gym and love the eucalyptus towels.’ Maybe that?

“She said, I pay four hundred dollars a month for my membership.” Implying that shitting in the showers should be considered, if it isn’t already, a perk, an amenity associated with the Beverly Hills Equinox experience.

“Can you believe that?”

I could not.

“We had to kick her out. Which wasn’t easy. Those people.” By those people she meant the criminally wealthy and therefore criminally spoiled. At least, I think that’s what she meant.

So, what’s the point here? If you think the shower at your 24-hour fitness is disgusting, you’re right it is. The showers at your local luxury gym will likely be pristine. Why is this? The members are gross in both scenarios as proven by the shower shitting. The difference is the janitorial staff. I think Equinox is a huge rip off and a silly place in many regards, but the janitors are saints, saints who are very good at their jobs.

The disgusting behavior didn’t end with shower shitting. One of the Equinox Hollywood janitors actually told me that he was constantly cleaning large quantities of c*m out of the shower drains. Well, that’s all I have time for here. Keep it locked or whatever people say.

I started training Sammy Cohen after I’d been working at Equinox Hollywood for about a year. That’s when Equinox trainers start getting itchy feet (Compare with looking for private clients). Why the itchy feet? The Nox and gyms like the Nox take the lion’s share of the income generated from each session. Commercial gyms are a great way to build a client base and a horrible way to make money. These gyms take the majority of the money generated by their (desperate) trainers, who will leave the second they are no longer desperate. This is why these gyms have so many fucking trainers on staff. They expect them to leave. They even expect them to take their clients with them. That’s just how the training game goes. The training game: one of the world’s least consequential games.

Sammy wasn’t able to do much physically. He had no actual injuries, just the maladies that come with underuse: no mobility, no strength, and no desire to move whatsoever. We did what we could, which was very little due both to his underwhelming physicality and the “space” that we trained in (See his bedroom). I think that we trained in his bedroom because he was embarrassed. He didn’t want anyone, even his children, to see him exercising.

Sammy was orthodox, which if you’re playing Jewish bingo at home that’s the second most devote group of Jews (See second to hasidic Jews). If you don’t know your Jews Sammy and his cohorts wear yamika’s everyday and do not do any work or use any appliances of any kind between sundown Friday and sundown Saturday. What’s the difference between the orthodox and hasids? The sideburns. Hasids have those long curly side burns and wear suit jackets everywhere regardless of temperature. I’m sure that there are other differences too, difference that I’m unaware of. Hasid means “pious one.” So I guess the Hasids believe just a little bit more, which is hard to believe given that Sammy studied Talmud in the morning and went back to synagogue every night.

Despite orthodox Jews not being quite as fervent as the hasids, they seemed to keep to themselves quite a bit, meaning that they only socialize with and employ other Jews. That’s where your boy comes in. If you generally don’t let goys (Compare with non-Jews) in your house, aside from on a rare sabbath night when you need a light turned on, and you want a personal trainer you need to find a Jewish one (See me). And, as previously mentioned there I met literally zero Jews who trained in LA when I lived there. So, I was Sammy’s Obie Kanobie (See his only hope).

Were there two separate beds in Sammy’s bedroom/gym, one for him and one for his wife? Yes. Did he and his wife procreate through a bedsheet? I think that’s a rumor, but possibly. They did have a shit ton of kids, at least six, because the devote among us (Compare with those who practice any and all religions with the most fervency) fuck quite a bit. It’s an irrefutable fact.

As mentioned, Sammy’s religion was nearly a full time job. Given that religion, if you’re not running a mega church generally isn’t remunerative, how did Sammy afford his massive house? He had gigantic fucking house in Hancock Park, the nicer of the two predominantly orthodox neighborhoods in Los Angeles. There are poor jews (See stereotype refuted). Do we control the weather? I sure don’t. It’s way too fucking hot for me right now. I would turn the thermometer down at least 10 degrees. The answer: Sammy was in real estate. He and his cohorts (See all Jews) bought and sold the land that convalesce homes were build on and the land that massive parking garages were built one (Compare with two incredible sources of income that do not require a full day in an office).

If you’re a trainer you’re well aware of this, but for those who aren’t, when you have a client who is in very bad shape you end up talking quite a bit, at least I do. Sammy and I did. We talked and talked for six months or so while I did my best to teach Sammy how to sit on chair and stand up (See a box squat).

Then Sammy out of nowhere, out of nowhere to me at least, told me that I was too smart to be a personal trainer and that I was wasting my time. A compliment shrouded in an insult? An insult shrouded in a compliment? Who is to say? I never told him that I was doing everything I could to be a professional stand-up comic, which is why I’d never used my masters degree that had nothing to do with personal training. Did I do this will all of my clients out of fear that they might come to the same conclusion that Sammy had (i.e. tell me that that was a waste of time too)? Kind of. I didn’t tell them that I did stand up every night because I didn’t want them to think that I concerns more pertinent than their training regimen and I didn’t tell them that I was over educated for the “job” because I didn’t want them to think that I believed the work was beneath me (See a thought that I tried not to dwell on, but still did quite a bit).

Sammy told me that I should be in real estate (See his field) and that he was sending me to an upcoming meeting. I didn’t know exactly what that meant, but I assumed that he would provide me with all of the necessary information that I needed beforehand. He didn’t. He sent me nothing. I showed up blind.

I showed up at an office building somewhere on Robertson (See the less nice predominantly orthodox neighborhood in LA), dressed in my best “meeting” clothing: oversized khakis, a button down, and a sweater that never really fit. Why were these my best dress clothes? Because I was a personal trainer who did open mics. I didn’t go anywhere nice. I didn’t do anything nice. I didn’t wear anything nice. I met a guy whose name and face I don’t remember at all—I do remember that he had a yamaka on—in front of the building. He shook my hand and led me into a boardroom. I sat in an ergonomic chair surrounded by a bunch of guys in yamakas who discussed contracts and studied blueprints. I didn’t say a word the entire time. If I had it would have been something completely manufactured (Compare with saying something solely so that I could say something) (Compare with adding one utterance to a scoreboard that didn’t exist).

The second Sammy met me at his front door for our next training session he said, “You blew it. They told me that you didn’t say anything.” I guess I was wrong. I guess I was supposed to say something for the sake of saying something. It would have been nice if Sammy had maybe debriefed me, forwarded me some pdfs that I could have leafed through before the meeting, or Yahweh forbid just flat out told me what the meeting was about how best to prepare, but he didn’t and I did not start a, yamaka non-negotiable, career in zoned commercial real estate. I continued training Sammy and we stopped discussing real estate. In fact, we never discussed my “career” or my “plans” ever again.

My 90-something-year-old-stepcousin with severe dementia, let’s call him Morrie— his name is Morrie, let’s definitely call him Morrie—was fast asleep at the dinner table when someone asked me something about stand up. “Where do you perform?” “Do you get nervous?” Or my absolute favorite: “Where do you get your ideas from?” (See Norm Macdonald Live). One of those nice trite things you ask your cousin over a very early very mushy dinner. We had Risotto and lemon pudding. One savory, one sweet, both the exact same color and texture. Morrie jolted out of his dementia nap and yelled, “You make a living doing that!?!” as if earning a living as a comedian were so patently impossible that a man whose brain has been declared a total loss understands just how unlikely it is.

The even-guys-with-Alzheimers-are-aware-that-comedy is impossible dinner took place a couple of years ago in New York. My “journey” as a comic started in Los Angeles—the debatable “journey” capital of the world and, at the very least, a place where people use the word “journey” a lot. I took everything I owned (Compare with not much) and drove my 91 Volvo down to LA in 2016. This scenario, the guy hopping out of a train car or regular car, hay in mouth, bindle over shoulder, outlandish dreams swimming around in his head, is so common in Hollywood, that he—the hay bindle guy—is more principle than person, more axiom than individual. So, I was yet another hay mouthed doofus hopping out of my car and hoping for the best. There was something missing though…something that most can’t survive without…a job.

I knew that I’d need to make money while in LA and I wanted the most flexible job possible. I had worked as a CrossFit coach and assistant strength coach for the men’s basketball team in college. Why reinvent the wheel? Why not find a job watching people exercise? In hindsight there are so many jobs more flexible than personal training. I refuse to list them here (See a bummer too far). At the time I thought that training all day and doing open mics all night made sense. Up at 5AM asleep at 2 AM. What a life!

I filled out job applications for a handful of the largest gym chains in the Hollywood area (See 24 Fitness, LA Fitness, Crunch, Equinox, the usual suspects). I was surprised at the time that the only chain that responded was the best one: Equinox. The best gym that I applied to, not “the best gym.” I don’t know what the “the best gym” is, but I’m pretty sure I’ve never been there. Why was Equinox the only chain to respond? Probably because Equinox locations have larger training staffs and therefore more turnover (Compare with more attrition) and more demand (Compare with more members who want personal trainers). Equinox is also a better company than the others mentioned solely because its business model is not negligence based, meaning not entirely reliant on its members not using the gym, meaning not entirely based on the member forgetting that fill in the blank chain has their card on file and that they have been paying for months if not years without going. This “I hope they don’t show up” revenue framework is Planet Fitness’ entire business model as far as I can tell and pizza Mondays. Lest we forget pizza Mondays.

At the time I was kind of excited. I’d never been to “luxury gym” before. In hindsight (See yes, more hindsight), the sole difference between a “regular gym” and a “luxury gym” is 300 dollars a month, minimum, in dues and the smell. Equinox smells like eucalyptus while most other chains smell like used football pads. That’s it. The equipment is identical. The lay out is similar. The clientele is just as creepy, albeit a different kind of creepy, but creepy, nonetheless. The only distinguishing factor between the two is that, at Equinox, you can’t smell every single person’s intermingling butt sweat and you can, ironically, get butt-ass-naked in the steam room. I don’t need to go into the obvious downsides of steam room nudity (Compare with frequent and visible human intercourse), but it can get gnarly in there. Don’t get me wrong. The wear-what-you-just-ran-three-miles-in and watch YouTube videos with no headphone’s saunas at 24hr fitness are gnarly too, but, much like the clientele, a different brand of gnarly. Pick your poison, I guess.

They invited me to interview for the Equinox Hollywood training staff. The interview was held at Equinox West Hollywood, their flagship location, because the Hollywood location didn’t exist yet (See they weren’t finished building it). I parked my clunker on the Sunset Strip and walked past a bunch of fancy looking restaurants full of fancy looking people. I saw more Botox, face lifts, fake butts, fill-in-the-blank invasive cosmetic procedure(s) during that five-to-seven-minute walk than I’d seen in my entire life. Everyone looked like The Joker with a Brazilian butt lift (Compare with unnerving). Every single person who I saw walking in and out of that gym was in better shape than me. Every single one. It seemed an utter impossibility that a gym whose entire membership was already in better shape than me would consider hiring me. What was I going to do? Make them look even better than me? To make matters worse I was sweating the way real sweaters sweat: profusely. Sure it was August and sure the Volvo didn’t have AC, but I was covered in profusion because I was in a panic. I was in the process of losing weight after a very fattening master’s degree, the fattest period of my life to date. We’ve all heard of the freshman 15. But have we heard of the master’s 40? I had visible man boobs and I was entering a gym where men, as far as I could tell, were not permitted to have boobs.

Marlon Wayans walked past me as I approached the concierge desk, where the employees in shirts with GREET across the chest smiled psychotically at everyone strutting in and out. The GREETers got way too excited to tell me that my interview was down the hall in the Group Fitness Studio. The GREETers got excited about everything. Empty enthusiasm, if that doesn’t typify an angeleno I don’t know what does. Side note: I never saw any major celebrities at any of the Equinox locations because they covet privacy (Compare with having their own gyms). B and C tier stars like Marlon, Jeremy Piven, and that guy in that new Rachel McAdams stuck-on-an-island-movie, on the other hand, have Equinox memberships and use the living shit out of their memberships, because they do not covet privacy. They covet exposure.

I strutted past Equinox’s Earth Bar (See the smoothie bar) into the Group Fitness Studio (See also no matter how badly you do not want to strut in an Equinox you will; the music is too loud, the beat too catchy, the social pressure too high) and sat down crisscross-applesauce surrounded by affable, muscle bound, CTE victims (Compare with personal trainers). And, yes, I kind of sort of wanted to kill myself.

I don’t imagine that the women, who didn’t have a background in competitive cheerleading or MMA, had CTE, but they—the male and female trainer hopefuls—were all even more jacked than the members I’d seen on the way in (See my climbing insecurity). The GMs and membership advisors all looked like Caroline Bissette. I, as alluded to, had been told that I reminded someone of Jack Black more than once in the last month. I wasn’t going to get this stupid job working with/for these stupid people. My tits grew sweatier.

I got up to find a bathroom, better yet, a locker room, where I could wash my face and blow dry my tit sweat. Note that I hadn’t discovered the wet, rolled, eucalyptus towels yet, which would have been my first sweat salve. If I had known that you could take any open locker and set your own combination I would have taken a full blown shower, but I was untrained in the innumerable disgust mitigants Equinox provides, so I just washed my face with some Kiehl’s citrus shit (See Equinox locker rooms have Kiehl’s products and only Kiehl’s products). To further compare the Nox with more inexpensive chains, 24hr Fitness has one perpetually empty soap dispenser in every shower stall and ~70% of the people who shower at 24hr Fitness’ are homeless (Compare with a gym that I, in my sweaty titted panic, would have felt at home in).

I returned to the mirror lined Group Fitness Studio. If you’re wondering whether all of these hots stared at themselves in the mirrors the whole time, they did. Mirrors are to hots as food is to fats. During my locker room sojourn everyone had grabbed a gym implement to sit on (i.e. medicine ball, aerobic step, sandbag) (Compare with making our cross-legged floor circle appear slightly less juvenile). I grabbed a medicine ball or something, plopped down and took in what I assumed was, and turned out to actually be, a room full of fledgling bodybuilders and fitness models, struggling actors, bartenders desiring a “lifestyle change” (Compare with an earlier bedtime). The typical high cheek boned Hollywood low-lives, who, when their body temp elevates, even slightly, take their shirts off, no matter where they are, or what they’re doing. These types can also be referred to as Tupperware Torpedos (Compare with people who bring “meal prep” everywhere they go and with no warning whatsoever will pop open a container of cold rice, cold meat, extra smelly veggies with no concern for those around them; the equivalent of an airplane tuna sandwich eater on land). They say “you need to find your people.” They are lame, but they are right. You do. Sitting in that circle I was certain that these were not my people.

Adam, the incumbent Hollywood location PT manager led us through a series of ice breakers (Compare with standard sales meeting shit). “Say your name, where you’re from,” and a ‘fun one’ like, “your favorite animal” (Compare with nearly too much ‘fun’ to handle). Eventually Adam had us say why we thought we’d fit in at Equinox. One guy flexed, as in, “My arms. I fit in because of my massive arms.” To Adam and the Bissettes’ credit this dude was not hired. When the circle made its way around to me, I said, “I don’t fit in here.” It would be fun, for the sake of this, albeit meandering, narrative, to say that I heard the proverbial record scratch, a deafening you-could-hear-a-pin-drop silence, but I didn’t. The managers kind of nodded and moved on to the next guy who showed us his abs. He didn’t but he might as well have. From my experience trainers and trainer adjacent people are so relentlessly positive that it’s almost as if they don’t register a single negative. Yes, exactly like denial.

We split our group interview off into even smaller groups of three or so, for the oral presentation portion of the interview. Were the presentations horrific? You bet your ass. They gave each little group a prompt like: “John likes to golf on the weekends and has had lower lumbar issues in the past. Provide programming for phase one of his training plan.” I can think of very few guys who I’ve trained in the past ~16 years who did not fall into this category. John, creative name by the way, is not just an everyman, he is every man, every single man. I gave my group’s horrific presentation on how to train the fake client because, after all but telling the managers that I didn’t want the job, I needed to make up some ground.

A week or so later they told me that I’d been hired. Why did they hire me? The boring answer: they hire all sorts of losers at all sorts of gyms. The likely truth: they probably weren’t really paying that much attention during the interview and hired me because I had some experience. The more interesting answer: it is possible that they, like many “people of power” in Hollywood were self-flagellating maniacs who want most what they can’t have. It’s a Hollywood troupe as old as time. I’ve heard countless stories about actors doing something crazy in an audition like completely re-writing a scene, getting naked, not showing up at all, telling a casting director that they don’t like the part or don’t think it’s right for them and getting the job. Why does this happen? It’s hard to say for sure. But one (Compare with I) might speculate that Hollywood is inhabited almost exclusively by egomaniacs with incredibly unstable self-esteem. If they have someone’s respect, especially someone of lower perceived status, that respectful guy is barely even a guy to them, he’s at best a pawn at worst a big hunk of nothing, a nonentity. Conversely, if they think that someone doesn’t respect them, they NEED to win that person over. Is that what happened? Is that why the Bissettes’ hired yours truly? Probably not. And who cares? The job sucked anyways. It was an ostensibly arbitrary hiring process for what on paper and in reality, was a very bad job.

Ask a sane person if they want to work for below minimum wage plus 20 to 50 percent commission per session. They will say no. Ask anyone working at Equinox and, you’ve asked the opposite of a sane person.

I opted not to attach the United Airlines cortex cords that pop out of the head rest during flights. They say that they sanitize them, but how thoroughly? Is it possible for two cords that have been directly shoved into some else’s occipital lobe to be considered clean ever again? I think that they go right into your occipital lobe. I’m not entirely sure how they work, nor do I want to be. We still have no idea what transmitting movies, TV, and shortform content directly into your brain will do long term. Just because it caught on five or six years ago, doesn’t mean it’s safe. Those wireless earbuds that my parents used to wear vanished. And Apple never said a word about it. They just stopped making them. I heard they had the same radiative effect as sticking your head in a microwave. Half the country went into a diabetic coma during the Ozempic shortage in the 30s. Before they outlawed those blood sugar meds for people who didn’t have diagnosed diabetes. This was obviously preceded by a Netflix documentary about the misuse of Ozempic. Film gets there first. That’s what I always say. And it’s still true, even in 2057.

I watched Mulholland Drive, a classic, on my tablet during the flight, in honor of, well, flying to LA, I guess. Call me old fashioned, but I still like to hold a tablet in front of my face, and watch a feature film start to finish, not in clips like my fellow Gen Z’s. I don’t even know what Betas and Gammas are watching or how. I guess that’s because I can’t see into their brains, but I hear that they’re watching everything in clips too. Even more abbreviated clips. So fast paced they’ll give people my age a migraine. It’s sad, seeing our patience for entertainment continue to deteriorate. Also, I heard that the cortex cords give you cancer. Who wants to go to an urgent med spa, and get prodded and zapped by those long robot arms and then be bed-ridden for two weeks? And that’s two-weeks minimum. I’ve read that it takes more like four weeks for the cancer cells to leave your body after treatment. Four weeks is a long time. We have lives to live.

I always fly into Los Angeles when I visit mom. That way I have the option of seeing dad before driving up to SLO. I’ve never chosen that option. The looking-my-selfish-fame-obsessed-primarily-absent-father-in-the-eyes-and-delivering-the-harangue-that-my-trauma-therapist-and-eastern-medicine-pracitioners-and-I-have-fine-tuned-over-the-course-of-the-last-15-years option. And I probably never will.

My Tibetan doctor, IMTET (Immersive Metacognitive Trauma Exposure Therapist) and acupuncturist all tell me that the only path to salvation and/or closure is to confront my father and err my grievances. I don’t entirely disagree with them. I love the idea of confronting him, forcing him to listen, to really hear me for once, but I know that I like the idea a lot more than I will enjoy it in actuality. It won’t work. He’s dissonance personified; impossible to have a meaningful conversation with. He’ll pull his bullshit. Some prank. Some gag. It won’t be satisfying. He’ll feel no remorse and I’ll feel empty. The one issue I have with my therapist (and acupuncturist and Tibetan doctor and all our amazing talented artist neighbors back in Poughkeepsie) is that they don’t seem to understand that there are people out there who aren’t willing to be vulnerable at the drop of a hat. People like my dad don’t greet everyone with 45 second hugs (I’m not making fun; I love 45 second hugs), but if my dad is forced to express anything resembling sincerity his head will explode.

I also fly into LAX because you can fly direct from JFK. If you want to land in San Luis Obispo you have to connect in Phoenix and I have no interest in setting foot in a state as red (and hot) as Arizona, even if it’s just in the airport.

Mom lives in Atascadero, on the border of Morro Bay, but no one knows either of those places, so I always say San Luis Obispo, which most Californians at least, are aware of. Unlike Los Angeles and San Francisco, which were both devastated by fires and mud slides and The Tiny Home Mental Wellness Encampment Disasters in the 40s, the sparsely populated Central Coast has retained its natural beauty, and visibility (unlike LA; the sky either is bright red or thick with gray smoke all day now). You can still see the Central Coast’s massive rock faces, deep valleys, of course the Pacific Ocean. The best part is it feels like no one knows about it, which yields its best quality in my opinion: 24/7 quiet. LA is a war zone by comparison, with all of its sirens and loudspeaker announcements and military helicopters overhead and the low moan of the hundreds of thousands of askers in the distance. I don’t want to bum you out. All I’m saying is that the Central Coast is amazing. Everyone goes to National Parks like Yosemite and Big Sur, but places like Morro Bay and Cambria and Atascabama (that’s what local lefties call it) are hidden gems. And from what mom tells me they always have been.

Despite the Central Coast being so awesome, the Atascabama moniker is accurate. There plenty of American flags, huge trucks, mom says some are stick shifts (a real throwback). They all have those disturbing nuts hanging from their back bumpers though, which have never been cool. The guys driving these nutted trucks wear camo for, as far as I know, no reason at all. Is there an enemy lurking behind their local gas pump that I don’t know about? But there are acres between properties in Atascadero, so as long as you do your Amazoning online and have your packages and groceries shot through your AMS (Amazon-Mail-Shoot), which mom always does, so that she doesn’t even have to open her front door to collect her shampoo and whatever she’s eating now. It’s easy to forget that these creepy camo guys are even there when you never leave your home. It kind of scares me how easy it is to forget that they’re there. Who wants a bunch of unnecessarily militant weirdos with semi-automatics hanging in their garages that they out fitted with those padded wrestling mats so they can train EMMMA (Even More Mixed Martial Arts) every day, living within a few acres of your property? Practicing those Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon moves, another classic. So much better than the 2035 sequel-mash-up Crouching Tigers Hidden Everywhere All at Once starring a 75-year-old Michelle Yeoh, mashed up of course with Everything Everywhere All at Once another Micelle Yeoh masterpiece. I’m glad I was able to see all three of the films before the Chinese Amusement Ban. All I’m saying is, knowing that these right-wing-truck-nut-psychos are probably all in their garage dojos down the street practicing their wall-runs and jump kicks and flying submissions, while they listen to their darknet conspiracy podcasts and dream of getting the call to go back overseas for World War 4 or defending the country from an alien attack or whatever they’re so obsessed with, is unnerving. But it’s still a tremendous place to hike, take a dip in the ocean, and get some writing done. Although I see it as more of a time for resting, recharging, and tonifying my Qi, which I’m always in desperate need of, after contracting Lyme back in the Hudson Valley.

It’s so good for me to give my mind a little vacation when I can. I always have new fresh ideas when I get back to New York. More important than anything these trips are for mom. She pretends she’s not lonely, but she is. She has her flaws and questionable taste in almost every regard, but she picked an amazing place to purchase a house with the divorce settlement.

Mom was sitting on the porch vaping and wearing her red-light-therapy-hat when I arrived. I sent her my ride code, so she knew when I’d get there. She would never sit on the porch like this otherwise.

It was the magic hour. The sky was clear. The sun was approaching a massive rock face a mile or so away from her property. The sun was the darkest shade of orange I’d ever seen, more rust than orange. A shade I can only remember seeing when I visited mom. You can’t see anything in LA anymore like I mentioned. Not after the lithium battery explosion, a chain reaction, that led to the pretty much on-going fires ever since. If there’s a mudslide warning, which there always is when I’m back in town, at least, you’re not even allowed within three miles of the PCH. LA has changed so much. It’s sad.

The car stopped silently, popped the trunk for me and zipped off to its next haul.

“JourNee. Honey. How was the flight? And the haul?” mom said, not bothering to stand up or stop taking deep, concerning inhales from her pink vape pen.

“I go by Jocelyn now. Which you know.”

“Yeah. Yeah. I was hoping you would go back to your real name.”

“I had it legally changed, mom. It’s permanent.”

“Yeah. Alright. How was the flight?” she squinted at the sunset and let the thick smoke fall out of her mouth, “It’s weird flying commercial isn’t it? Not having the plane to yourself. Seat belts and shit.”

“You need to stop vaping mom. You’ll get popcorn lung.”

“I’ve been vaping since before you were born JourNee. Jocelyn. Since I was 14. Back in the valley,” she took another drag, “The popcorn lung hasn’t got me yet. I think I’m good. No cap.” She still had a few lingering slang words that she’d let drift into her vocabulary, especially when discussing topics pertinent to those slang-heavy-years, like vaping and “the valley.”

I shook my head and set my bag down next to her. If she wasn’t moving, I wasn’t moving either. Why not experience the magic hour to completion? It was truly breath taking. I’d been meaning to shoot something there for years. Something panoramic. Something Malickesque. I had it in me. I had to write the script first of course.

“Pick that bag up. Let’s go inside. I made a roast.”

I stopped eating meat 10 years ago and had to remind mom every time I saw her. She knew. She, like all parents I was aware of, just wanted me to be the same as I’d always been, the way she’d idealized me. A way I never really was.

“You know that I don’t eat meat.”

She didn’t respond.

“I’ve been inside all day. Let’s stay out here. It’s the magic hour.” I said.

“It’s what?”

“Let’s watch the sunset. It’s beautiful.”

“You could see the sun from the plane. Couldn’t you?”

“Kind of.”

“You couldn’t see the sun all the way up there?”

“It’s not the same.”

“Suit yourself.”

I sat next to her and put my arm around her. She smelled like watermelon, vape watermelon. I hated that synthetic fruit smell and the vape smoke wasn’t doing my Qi any favors, but mom needed physical closeness. She needed me there. I rested my head on her shoulder and tried not to take deep breaths.

“Hello. Hello? Hello!” she yelled into the air in front of us and rolling her eyes back so I could only see the whites, “Jesus Christ. Hang up! Block! Restrict! All of it…Damn, these spam calls! Saying my name wrong and telling me I owe them money. I get 15 of these a day now. The ring tone is horrible too. Do you know how to change the ring tone in here?” she rolled her eyes back to their normal position and pointed at here brain, “Of course not. You’re anti-tech or whatever you call it. “Post-tech.” This ring tone is driving me up a wall Joce.”

It was inevitable that she would find a way to make my “new name” her own.

“I told you that you never should have gotten the NeuroLink. Especially the first model.”

“I didn’t know that Elon Musk was going to get shot in the face the second I got it.”

“Mark Zuckerberg got shot mom. Musk was sitting next to him. He’s still alive somehow.”

“Oh, Right. But, weren’t they trying to—”

“Some of those darknet lunatics think that they were trying to shoot Musk. Others think they were trying to shoot President Trump.”

“Donald J.?”

“Ivanka M.”

“Right…Well, I didn’t plan on your father divorcing me either. I haven’t had half-way decent insurance since.”

She got the NeuroLink well after the divorce, but that’s her excuse for everything. She guilted dad into the marriage after he knocked her up with me. I’ve seen the photos of her in her third trimester wearing the white wedding dress that she must have barely squeezed into. She was gorgeous back then, 19-years-old, and so pregnant. She looked like Uma Thurman in Kill Bill. The only difference was that hitmen weren’t coming to end her life. My father would end the marriage three weeks later, but I think that worked out as well as it could have for her. California divorce settlements were incredible for women back then.

Mom says that dad couldn’t handle it after the birth. Dad couldn’t handle much of anything and most likely still can’t. He probably liked the idea of a shotgun wedding with a chick he knocked up—instant viral footage. They filmed it of course and uploaded it to YouTube. I’ve watched it. Disturbing. An Elvis impersonator/ minister asks mom and dad if they promise to “love each other tender” and “not get all shook up” and few other Elvis vows, while his content creator buddies snicker behind the camera. It would be one thing if this was a private family content, but they uploaded it to YouTube—where every millisecond dad’s life is. When I was 10, I asked mom if they had a wedding album and she pulled up Dad’s YouTube channel. The Elvis video had 4 million views. It was beyond traumatizing to watch, which goes without saying, but reading the comments almost ruined me. “Shawn marrying a fatty.” “Is this a joke? He has abortion money.” “Prayers for this kid. (Prayer hands) It fucked.” “When a muscle-retard gets married to an underaged pregnant chick by The King. #trainwreck.” I’ve been in therapy ever since and spent the first two years on the “Shotgun Prego Vegas Wedding” post alone. After the wedding and my subsequent birth, I think reality set in and dad had to go. Mom told me that it was too late to get an abortion (I was three weeks old) and that he was too busy with his “extreme-stunts, pranks, and party-content” to start a family and filed for divorce.

“Dad didn’t have insurance.” I said, nestling against mom’s shoulder and doing my best to avoid her hat. The lights looked too powerful to be safe that close to one’s skull.

She took another deep inhale from her vape and let it out. I waved the thick mist away.

“But he was rich. It didn’t matter. You know him.” Mom dropped her voice and puffed her chest out and did a bro-ey and pretty accurate impression of dad, “Invest in new currencies. New products, new businesses, new ideas. Put your money in something that’s growing, and your money will grow. Don’t waste your time paying for something you don’t need. If you have money, you can spend it when you need it.”

“Said the guy who made his money doing keg stands and eating 50 popeyes chicken sandwiches in one sitting. Do you know how many hungry people he could have fed with those sandwiches?”

“50?”

“Maybe more.”

“He wasn’t wrong though, about the money stuff. He played dumb in his content, and seemed really dumb and acted like a fucking idiot, but he was always smart.”

“You can’t be as successful as he was and be a total doofus.”

“Did you see him in LA?”

“I haven’t seen dad in 12 years.”

“You should see him this trip.”

“You know I can’t do that.”

“You should see him”

“Mom.”

She took another long drag and blew watermelon-smoke in front of us, “Your sun is gone. Ready to eat some carrots?”

I picked up my bag and followed her inside the house.

The table was set with shiny utensils and those huge “fancy” clothe bibs with the sleeves that had been all over Instagram 20 years ago and mom got on sale 15 years ago. They’re just an adult sized rubber baby bib with a clothe napkin wrapped around it. The ads were funny though. Video montages of emaciated models, that was when it was cool to be skinny again (I think), eating messy burgers and ribs, foods they pretend to eat and enjoy like everyone else, their bib catching stray ketchup and barbeque sauce shrapnel. At the end of the ad the voiceover actor would say, “Eat in style. Start to finish.” and speed through a legal disclaimer, “Big Unicorn Clothe Bibs are meant for adults not babies. Babies are too small for Big Unicorn Clothe Bibs. Do not put Big Unicorn Clothe Bibs on babies. Big Unicorn Clothe Bibs may contain silicon core. Silicon exposure does not, but may be linked to Lupus. Please wear responsibly.” That was when they mandated that every ad, TV, streaming and social media, have a disclaimer. The ad should have been, “Are you 30, but still as much of a fucking mess as a 9-month-old? So, you’re a disgusting pig person? “Say I’m a disgusting pig of an adult who makes a mess every time I eat. Now that we covered that, you need this bib thing.” They were popular for second.

The ceiling lights were dim. Tall candles sat on the table. There was a bottle of wine out already.

“Wow mom. This looks amazing. You’ve out done yourself—”

She yelled into the kitchen, “You can bring out the roast Heidi!”

“So, Heidi out did herself.”

Mom’s Heidi OS, who looked like a voluptuous R2D2, wheeled itself into the dining room holding the Dutch oven in its animatronic arms.

“I thought that you said you were going to stop using Heidi.”

“Stop?” Heidi asked, “Ok. Heidi will stop,” the OS said before pivoting and wheeling back into the kitchen.

“No Heidi. Cancel out my daughter’s commands.” Mom said.

“Ok. Izzie. Cancelling out other female commands.”

“Bring the roast out. She won’t eat it, but you should still bring it out and set it on the table.”

Mom’s Heidi pivoted back towards the dining room and setting the Dutch Oven down on the table and said, “The roast that your daughter won’t eat.”

“And the potatoes. Could you make my daughter a salad too? We have everything in the fridge.”

“Potatoes and salad for Jour-Nee. No problem, Izzie.”

“It’s Jocelyn now,” mom said.

“Joc-e-lyn it is Izzie.” She murmured, “Substituting Joc-e-lyn for JourNee,” as she wheeled back into the kitchen.

Mom must have just been making conversation when she told me that she was going to sell her Heidi because she wanted to be more active around the house. Heidi wasn’t going anywhere. She was abbreviating mom’s name for God’s sake. Maybe it was good. Mom was alone so often. She needed company. She needed to someone to talk to. Human company would have been a better obviously, a new boyfriend or a just a friend-friend.

Heidi set the potatoes on the table.

“And now, salad,” Heidi said in her staccato before drifting back into the kitchen.

“You’ll have some mashed potatoes right?” mom asked ready to spoon me some.

“Do you they have dairy in them?” I asked.

“Jesus Christ. You don’t eat dairy either?”

“I’m a vegan mom. You are aware of this.”

She rolled her eyes. “Carrots and salad it is.”

Now she was talking like her Heidi. Fantastic.

Heidi wheeled back into the dining room holding a large wooden salad bowl. “One salad for Joc-e-lyn.”

“Jocelyn,” my mom said pronouncing it properly.

“Substituting pronunciation,” Heidi said.

“I told her you were coming earlier. I should have asked what you were going by and what you were still eating.”

She knew.

“Do you need anything else Jocelyn?”

“You still drink?” Mom asked.

I nodded.

“Just pour us some of that cab and take a load off Heidi.”

“Wine for Izzie and Jocelyn,” Heidi said holding one of her hands over the wine bottle and presumably sucking the wrapper off and cork out of the bottle. They disappeared into Heidi’s arm, I think.

Heidi poured mom a taste. Mom swirled it, smelled it, and took a sip.

“It slaps. Thank you, Heidi.”

“Thank you, Izzie,” Heidi poured us both glasses of the wine and began moving away, “Let me know if you gals need anything.”

“Bet,” my mom said.

I said that mom only used her old slang when she was doing the stuff she did as a kid, but she never really outgrew it. She’d was a millionaire, by proxy, at 20. She never fully matured. They say that you stay the same age that you are when you get famous. I think it’s true for getting rich too, especially if it’s for almost no reason. The world doesn’t need you to grow and mature, so why should you? Maybe to raise your daughter and teach her what she needs to know, but neither of my parents were particularly concerned with that. Mom was 20 when she had me and Dad was 22. It felt like we were all siblings. I used to resent them for this, but I’ve worked through it. I can see it from their perspective now. We were so close in age that it made would have made it hard for them to parent me if they wanted to.

“It’s a Pino from just over the hill, Paso Robles,” mom said.

“You just said it was a cab.”

“Cab sorry. I have the Pinos in the basement.”

She took a big gulp, most of the glass.

“That’s good that you buy local.”

Mom didn’t react to this. I’m not even sure if she knew what it meant. She tilted her head forward so that she could see me under the brim of her hat.

“Are you going to take your hat off? I can barely see your eyes.” I said.

Mom titled her head back and looked up to check with her internal hardware.

“I have 7 minutes of red-light therapy left.”

Wearing a hair growth hat everyday was obviously insane, but I understood the motivation. It’s embarrassing to have a receding hairline as a woman. What do you do? Wear your hair in a ponytail that keeps moving further and further back, until you look like a samurai. Bangs? There’s only so much that wispy bangs can do.

“Is it working?” I asked.

“I think so.” She said.

“Why don’t you treat yourself to a hair transplant at the Urgent Spa in SLO? It’ll take 30 minutes.”

“I don’t want people to see me in one of those places.”

She didn’t interact with anyone ever. Who cared? She could program her Heidi to be judgement free.

“There’s a check-in. You can get a private room.”

“But people might see me walk in.”

“Who?”

“People from the gym. I don’t know.”

“When’s the last time you went to LuxNox?”

“I don’t know. I like the red-light therapy. It feels good.”

I had looked up red-light therapy when mom started wearing her hat all the time. It was pretty common back east, not the hat, but the therapy, especially in the colder climates up north. It was considered a good replacement for sunlight and supposedly improves one’s mood. It can damage your retina if you stare at it too long. It didn’t seem like mom spent much time looking into her hat.

Mom needed to go outside though. She needed real sunlight, real human interaction, real air and real empathy (as opposed to robot empathy). I’d tried to get her to spend more time outside in the past and it never worked. She lived five miles from the beach and all she did was watch Kardashian re-runs with her eyes rolled up in her skull.

Mom handed me the salad bowl.

“That’s yours. Take as much of that as you want. I’ll just have a few bites. Heidi makes the best dressing.”

Mom served me some carrots out of the Dutch oven as I lifted salad onto my plate.

“Will that be enough food?” she asked, “I have some other stuff too. Let’s see. I have yogurt.”

“Dairy yogurt?”

“Right—”

“It’s completely fine mom. The salad looks great,” I scrapped as much of the meat juice off the carrots as I could with my knife and took a bite, “and the carrots are delicious.”

“I have some good news. Wanted to tell you in person.” Mom said.

I couldn’t imagine what this was going to be. But good news is good news, right?

“Is it about dad?”

“No, I actually have some not so good news about your father.”

She stood over the dutch oven struggling to cut the roast. She was getting so old, so weak. I imagined the meat juice gushing out. Disgusting. When she was done, most likely scraping the shit out of the Dutch Oven, she transferred a chunk of meat to her plate and sat down.

“What do you want to hear first? The good news or the bad news?”

What an unnecessary cliched preempt. Tell me whatever you want to tell me. Can we just have a conversation? Can we just listen to each other actively and respond? She’d probably adopted this from the Kardashians. Reality show producers were obsessed with soft cliffhangers. They would have preferred severe cliffhangers of course, but nothing ever happened in reality shows, back when they still made them.

Mom took a large bite of the meat and starred at me while she chewed and swallowed.

“Let’s cheers first.”

I couldn’t remember her performing a formal, wine glass in hand toast, my entire life, which was pretty much her entire life. It was kind of nice. It added an air of decor to a lifetime of none. Granted we’d already messed it up by starting the meal, but I was there for it. I raised my glass.

She raised hers, “I love you, honey. Journee.” She shook her head, “Jocelyn. You’ve been so kind to fly across the country as often as you have to spend time with me over the years. Making sure that I’m ok out here. You’re my only child and you’ve been so good to me.” She closed her eyes. A tear ran down her cheek. I teared up too. “But you don’t have to worry about me anymore. I’m seeing someone and we’re engaged…” she started crying, “I guess I started with the good news.”

She rolled her eyes up in her head.

“Oh. Times up.” We both watched the bright red lights shut off as she set her hat on the table. The hat had left a red imprint around her prominent upper forehead. “I should charge it.” I gave her a look. “I’ll charge it later.” We clinked glasses and sipped our wine.

“That’s great mom. Engaged huh? How long have you been dating?”

“A year.”

“Wow. That’s a long time. I’m surprised that you didn’t mention it sooner.”

“I didn’t want to jinx it or scare you. I know how kids can be about their parents dating.”

She pulled her vape pen out and took a long inhale. Taking watermelon vape pulls while eating a pot roast was psychotic, but this wasn’t the time to chastise her.

“Mom. You and dad haven’t been together for more than 30 years.” 38 years exactly. I just didn’t want to acknowledge my age. “I’m so happy for you. I mean, it’s been so long. You’ve never had a boyfriend since dad,” who wasn’t really a boyfriend or much of a husband.

“I’ve had boyfriends. Or you know, dated here and there.”

I gave her a surprised, “you have?” look. It was a relieved look too. I was beginning to worry that that she was in an AI relationship with her Heidi, which had become somewhat common. “Banging the help,” as the kids say.

“It was never that serious, until this one, and I didn’t want to freak you out. I know how difficult these things can be for children of divorce.” She said.

Children? I was almost 40. I would have been so happy to know that my mom was dating. Where did she get this stuff? The Kardashian again? Or some of that Hallmark streaming service nonsense that she loves almost as much?

“This is great mom. I can’t believe it. Tell me about him. He lives nearby?”

She paused and craned her neck, surprised that I wanted any more information, “Well. He lives in Atascadero.”

“Convenient. Great.”

“He’s in his fifties.”

“A younger man. You’re a cougar mom…that’s amazing mom.”

“He’s a veteran.”

“Mom.”

Of course, I thought, he lives in Atascabama. I pictured him with camo face paint on, in night-vision goggles, hiding in a tree beside mom’s house as we spoke. Reading our lips through government sanctioned binoculars.

“I know. I know. I don’t like war either, but he’s a really great guy. We have so much fun. You’re going to like him. I promise. As long as you can look past his body count.”

“He’s killed people?”

“I was thinking about a different body count, but yes. He’s probably killed people. He’s a sweet man. You’re going to like him. I promise. He’s on a hunting trip, but he’ll come over for dinner the next time you visit if it’s ok with you.”

I had to meet this guy, just to make sure my mom wasn’t putting herself in harm’s way with some Rambo nutjob. I was glad that mom finally had some consistent companionship though. I wished that it was with someone who didn’t kill people for a living, but I was still glad.

“I’m excited to meet him.”

“That’s awesome sweetie. His name is Bill. He lives down the hill.”

A romance straight out of a children’s book.

She looked down at the meat.

“He shot this a few weeks ago. It’s elk. I think,” she said pointing at the roast with her knife, “Cleaned it, cured it, whatever they do. He’s amazing.”

Lovely. He kills innocent people and elk.

“And the bad news.” Mom said, still looking at the poor elk’s remains. “Your dad is sick. Like really sick. It’s terminal.”

“With what? Are you sure?”

“We talked on the phone for a long time yesterday. It’s been years since we talked. And he’s almost never serious. He was dead serious about this.”

“What does he have?”

“His liver is failing, which makes sense. You know how he drank.”

This did seem possible. He’d pretty much destroyed his internal organs doing all of those “drinking challenges.” Mimosa races, Edward 80 hands, etc, etc. His handle was @SayYesShawn for a reason.

“You have to go see him in LA on your way back home. He says this is the last time.” She started crying again. “You’ll ever seen him.”

I took the rickety freight elevator up to dad’s penthouse. For such a weird man, who made such tasteless videos he lived on the top floor very nice pre-war building. A penthouse? Mom said that he lost a lot of money in the 40s. Not that much, I guess. As I walked up to the door a stocky bald ham-colored OS answered.

“Hello, JourNee.” It said.

“It’s Jocelyn.”

“Oh wow. My people said it was JourNee. I’m so sorry I got that wrong. It’s Jocelyn?”

“Yes.”

Dad’s OS was a much more advanced model than mom’s. It looked like a real person, but plastic. Like the wax figures at Madame Tussauds. Teff and I had sworn off of them. We like to get our hands dirty. We do a lot of our own housework. We also hired a living housekeeper. A rescue actually. I know, pretty old school. But we love Olga. She makes a great borscht. It’s like she’s part of the family. She eats with us when she’s done cleaning the kitchen and isn’t started video conferencing her family back in Moldova (what used to be Moldova) like she often does. We told her when we brought her here that she could talk to her family as much as she wanted, but we didn’t think it would be four hours a day, at such odd times too. Screaming in her squeezed and gargled vowels at her cousins at 2 in morning. But we’re happy, if she’s happy.

“Jocelyn. I’m so sorry. Thanks for being here.” The little OS man said before shutting the door behind us.

“Thank you,” I said.

He wore a black button down tucked into black slacks. He looked like a mixture of a waiter, some sort of presidential bodyguard, and a muscle-dwarf attending a Great Gatsby party, perhaps there to perform some feats of dwarf-strength.

I heard my father. His voice came out soft and raspy, like those clips I’d seen of RFK Jr, when researching for an allegorical short. “Stand down Joe!”

“No problem, Shawn. You don’t want me to take her to you?”

“No need Joe. She’ll be able to find me.”

“Do you need a Liquid Death or anything?” Joe asked me.

“No thanks,” I said.

“Maybe an edible or a Black Rifle Coffee? My friend Evan makes the coffee. He’s like super, super into coffee. Those are my favorite people to be around. People who are really into stuff. And he’s got this laboratory at his factory. He took us to the Black Rifle warehouses. They do all of their roasting there—”

“I’m ok.”

“No worries.” Joe said as he walked towards the front door and froze. Creepy.

“Come here sweetie,” dad growled.

I followed the voice down a long hallway that opened up into the master bedroom. He laid there in bed, with the covers up to his neck and his eyes barely open. He had little zits all over his neck and a bright red nose. This was what the end looked like.

“You’re going by Jocelyn now?”

“Yes. How’d you know?”

He tapped his head. “My Joe Rogan transfers pertinent information to me.”

“Who?”

“My Joe Rogan-OS.”

“That robot that met me at the door?”

“You didn’t recognize him?”

“Recognize who? Who is Joe Rogan?”

“I forget how young you are sometimes. Joe Rogan is long dead, from, well, lots of stuff. He had the biggest podcast in the world. He used to interview presidents, actors, comedians, all sorts of people. I thought you’d be into it. Since you love old Hollywood so much.”

“Podcasts aren’t old Hollywood.”

Dad had jogged my memory though. I’d seen some clips of his interviews.

“They are to me,” he said, “Come sit.”

He pointed at a chair next to his bed that was big enough for seven people.

“Mom told me how bad it is. I’m so sorry dad.”

“Oh, you know. Things happen. I never thought I’d make it to 60.” He shrugged under the blanket, “And look at me now.”

He reached his hand out from under the covers and realized that he was too far away for us to reach each other. He scooted over and held my hand. His hands were still large, but his grip felt weak.

“You pretty much poisoned yourself for a living.” I said.

“That’s true.” He said, looking ashamed for the first time I’d ever witnessed.

“I thought you’d have more nurses and IV drips and medical equipment.”

“That’s a good observation. It’s all automated now though. You’re post-tech.” He dropped his crackly voice to mock my stance of technology, “I like it. It’s refreshing.”

He coughed and squeezed my hand tighter.

“My treatment is over with now. It’s too far along, the liver failure. This is my hospice. Just me and Joe. Countdown to kablamo.”

“Your liver is going to explode?” From gas build-up like a decomposing beached whale?

“No. I just mean the end. Countdown to not being here anymore.”

“You don’t have a hospice nurse at least?”

“Joe Rogan takes care of all of that stuff. He lifts me up and cleans me, all the gross stuff. He’s really strong. Do you want to see him kick a heavy bag? It’s just in the other room.”

“No thanks.”

We looked at each other for a moment, maybe the longest stretch of eye contact I’d ever had with my dad. As much as I detested him as much damage as he’d done, there was still a lot of love there. It’s genetically hardwired. No matter how shitty your father is, there’s always love there. You can’t avoid it.

“How’s everything? I want to hear about you. How’s New York? How’s Teff?”

I looked at him perplexed. I don’t think he’d ever asked me a question in my entire life either. And I couldn’t believe that he was calling Teff by his actual name. Mom said that he called him Sorghum, another gluten-free grain, to make fun of him. Yes, my life-partner Teff is named after an Ethiopian grain and no he is not Ethiopian.

“I know. My Joe Rogan has been teaching me a lot about talking to people. Becoming a better listener.”

Maybe this meathead podcast robot wasn’t such a bad thing.

“I love you Jocelyn. I always have. Do you remember when I used to let you break stuff in the mansion, in the hills.”

He tried to bring up every time I’d seen him over the last 30 years (five or six times), and I always said that I didn’t remember doing this. I didn’t remember my dad being around much at all. Most of what I remember about my dad are probably false memories and things mom told me he did. She’d been able to stay in touch with him the entire time somehow.

“You used to love it. You’d go in the closet, pull out a vacuum cleaner and throw it down a flight of stairs and you’d laugh and laugh. Then run down, drag it up the stairs and do it again.”

“What would happen to the vacuum?”

“It would be destroyed. A fucking mess. We’d throw it out and I’d just send one of my guys out for a new one.”

“That’s disgusting. Beyond wasteful. Why didn’t you tell me not to do that?”

“You were so happy, sweetie. I loved seeing you giggle like that. It was amazing to watch. It was beautiful really.”

He looked like he was on the brink of tears. I couldn’t believe, but I felt like I might cry too. It was one thing to cry with mom, but I never pictured this happening.

“This is exactly how I want to spend my remaining time. Reminiscing with you and your brother. Have you seen him?”

“I haven’t seen my step-brother in years.”

“Ari, I think that’s what he’s going by now, is in Highland Park. 15 minutes away. He’s doing really well. Go say hi. You’re family. You should see him.”

I guess I was on the you should see him tour.

“You’re still teaching movies?”

“Film. At Stony Brook. Yes.”

“Are you missing class for this?”

I shook my head. I was off that semester.

“Teaching and film. Two things that I thought would be dead by now.”

“Well, they’re not. I love my work.”

“They studied Latin and Greek forever. That fizzled out.”

“Every major University still teaches classics.”

“Agree to disagree.”

I let go of his hand.

“You’re still making movies?”

“I’m revising a script right now.”

“Revising.” He rolled his eyes. “Just shoot it. We used to run and gun all day long. No scripts. No revisions. Just shoot it. If it’s crap throw it out.”

It was always crap.

“I’m sorry that you’re sick, but I’m going to leave.”

I stood up.

“No, no,” he patted the chair.

I sat. He looked me in the eyes again.

“What’s the prognosis?” I asked.

He stared at me not knowing what that meant.

“How much time do you have left?”

“Oh. It’s hard to say. Not long.”

He tried to push himself up from under the covers and couldn’t.

“Let me help dad.”

“No. It’s ok. Joe can help. Joe! Joe!”

“I can help dad.”

I placed my hands under his arm pits. He was weirdly heavy for a sick person.

“I just want to sit up.” He said.

Joe came bounding into the room.

“Shawn. What do you need man?”

“Nothing. Sorry Joe. False alarm.”

Dad finished pushing himself up and against the bed frame. He actually didn’t look as emaciated as I thought he would. He was still buff, really buff for a 60 year old.

“Thanks Jocelyn. Will you pray with me?” He said.

“Umm. Sure.” I said.

“Ok. I’ll start.” He placed his hands together. “In the name of the father, son, holy spirit.”

He’d found Catholicism evidently.

“Um, well, we’re all gathered here today, because um, I love my daughter and I’m so glad that she came here in my time of need. This means so fucking much to me.”

Maybe not.

“And I just want to praise Jesus. Because it’s been so long since I’ve even seen my baby.”

A siren went off. Was there a fire? Of course there was we were in the disaster capital of America. Was I going to have to carry him out of the building? That was Joe Rogan’s job.

Before I knew it Dad had whipped the covers off and was break dancing on the hardwood floor. MC Hammer’s “Can’t Touch This,” which I only knew from its near flagrant use in turn of the century movies, blared through dad’s powerful sound system. He was doing the worm, expertly, and spinning on his head. I noticed the thimble sized lens of a camera in corner of the room and another one above his bed. Joe Rogan was standing in the doorway smiling. It was a prank. Dad wasn’t sick at all.

I told dad that I would sue him if he posted the video from that afternoon in his downtown penthouse. Teff said that he checked and he hadn’t yet. A few months later Teff and I flew out to San Luis Obispo, with a layover in Phoenix and had dinner with Mom and Bill. Bill had small face and a big beard and barely spoke. They ate something he killed, and we ate a mushroom hummus that Heidi prepared.

Although I’m sure that girls with Stanford tattoos exist, this story, unlike that Swedish novel turned American movie, is not about a mysterious tattooed woman. This story is about a girl who feigned admission to one of the best universities in the country. A story that I heard after it happened. A story that I, never having confirmed its veracity, have told many times. I thought it possible that whoever told me the story in first place might have fudged the details. I thought it equally possible that I might have misremembered it or made it up completely. Spoiler: I didn’t.

Background: I grew up in San Francisco, a city where status and accomplishments are prized. More than in other cities? With the exception of New York, I believe so. Consequently, as a child, academic success was paramount. I never thought beyond it in adolescence. I never considered that there were frontiers beyond the academic, which might explain why after finishing my undergrad degree I didn’t see a viable path outside of school. My pursuit was a one-year accelerated master’s program, the shortest academic pursuit known to man, but a pursuit, nonetheless. I mention this only to illustrate the academic pressure that I experienced was the norm where I and our protagonist ripened, as they say (they don’t really say that, but it applies). We grew up in different, but similarly oriented parts of California. Places where you’re not cool if you don’t do well in school, which I’m told is rare.

Azia Kim was a hard-working high school student attending Troy High School in Fullerton, one of California’s top ranked public high schools and she really really wanted to go to Stanford, like more than most people have ever wanted anything. Stanford did not accept her, but, like people who really really want things, she went anyways. She told her immigrant parents, who probably did not speak impeccable English, that she had received a full scholarship. When she arrived on campus she told two sophomores in the Asian American themed dorm—Stanford’s description of the dormitory, not mine—that, due to some sort of technical glitch that she had not received a housing placement. The “technical glitch,” a blast from the past, a phrase that could get you quite far in 2006, which worked out well for our protagonist because this is exactly when our story takes place. The two sophomores let Azia sleep in their room but eventually asked her to find new housing. Implying: her own key, closet, bed, etc.

Before the spring quarter Azia met a student whose roommate would be studying abroad. Azia moved in with her. She told the student that housing had approved the move. Kim, having no university administered key, would leave the window ajar so that she could climb in as she pleased. She somehow managed to get this past her roommate, who, when interviewed the following year, had no idea that Azia had been jewel heisting her way into their room every day. Azia snuck into university dining halls to eat, sat in on lectures, even joined the ROTC program. She even forged her own transcript and made the ROTC dean’s list. What was her fake major? Biology. She faked it well too. When asked she knew her course load each quarter, where her labs where, and where her midterms would take place.

Later in the spring quarter an RA caught her in a lie about what dorm she lived in. Azia hacked into that RA’s email and forged an email to housing department reneging the previous email regarding her questionable housing situation. If this chick isn’t the James Bond of pretending to go to Stanford, I don’t know who is. The RA eventually noticed the forged email, and you would think that that’s when the con came to an end, but it didn’t. When caught, Kim pretended to move out, but if we know Azia Kim at this point, and we do, she wasn’t going anywhere. Azia stuffed her clothes in her roommate’s closet and didn’t mention the eviction. Chains were then placed on the dorm windows, charges were pressed, and the con came to its true end. Kim was charged a year’s tuition in liabilities by the university, which seems pretty fair, almost too fair. A university not up charging…spooky…I think they felt sorry for her. As we all should, because her rouse had no actual upside, no potential return. It could only set her back from the very outset.

What came of Azia Kim? Did her rouse follow her the rest of her life? Was she able to attend a different university? I don’t know. I’m not sure if anyone knows, aside from Azia and her parents. I couldn’t find a single written record of her anywhere after the various journalistic accounts of her con in 2007.

Take away(s): This is a sad situation that it appears was brought on by familial pressure to succeed academically. It could have been as simple as her parents saying off handedly that they wanted her to go to the best school in California. It might not have been so off handed. It might have been a demand. It might have been an obsession that Azia conducted all on her own. I read in a Stanford forum thread on Azia Kim that she was admitted to UC Berkeley, a comparable school, which makes the story even more sad. Her parents probably would have been thrilled if she went to Berkeley, but for whatever reason, it had to be Stanford and she Jason Bourned her way in only to be Jefferey Epsteined out (not exactly, not even close, but you get the idea).

Where is she now? I don’t know. I hope that she changed her name and went to Berkeley the next semester. I doubt that that’s what happened, but regardless I hope she’s ok. I hope that she got whatever psychiatric help she needs, figured shit out with her parents and moved on with her life, but I bet this was a major setback, if not a lifelong derailment, I bet this messed her and her family up for a long time.

Lesson(s): In the era of viral college decision reaction videos, this story is more pertinent than ever. College admission, if anything, has gotten more rigorous, more competitive. Motherfuckers of a certain socio-economic status massively over value what university their soon to be adult children attend and this might shock some people, but in many cases it doesn’t really matter. There are certainly connections that can be made at great universities, head starts that can be had, bottom rungs of ladders than can climbed, but I know plenty of people who went to schools with very high acceptance rates (i.e. “bad schools”) who are massively successful (mostly digital marketing people, but they make a shit ton of money) and I know guys, two guys to be exact, who went to Harvard (and one guy who went to Cornell—the community college of the Ivies) who have very unimpressive sales jobs. We all know the adage: “Those who can’t do, teach. Those who can’t teach, teach gym.” Here’s a new one: Those who can’t think, sell. Those who can’t sell, sell gym memberships. The two Harvard grads, don’t sell gym memberships, but it must be disheartening to attend, debatably, the best college in the world only to find yourself reciting a sales script into a Bluetooth earpiece 100 times a day.

What’s my point? The college admissions process can be daunting, namely because its 18-year-old participants have so little life experience and such myopic world views, which only inflates its perceived importance. The Azia Kims of the world, the high school seniors who think that they’ll have to Romeo and Juliet themselves (I understand that Romeo and Juliet are two people, but, as far as I can tell, algorithms of all kinds don’t take kindly to the “s” word and its many permutations) if they don’t get into the school that they EDed (Early Decisioned, not erectile disfunctioned—a phrase that, as far as I can tell, algorithms greatly approve of). You don’t have to Romeo and Juliet yourself, you don’t have to Jason Bourne your university of choice, you don’t even have to go to college. Isn’t that what Elon Musk and all of the tech billionaires say? Azia should have pretended to drop out of Stanford. She could have started Airbnb, gotten their before Airbnb did. Rich tech rubes were putting money down on pretty much anything a Stanford dropout came up with back in 2007. Weren’t they? She could have literally used her experience struggling to find housing (on a university campus to which she had not been admitted) to pitch and found a fortune 500 company. 2007! The year before the housing crisis for God’s sake! When money did grow on trees! Hindsight is obviously 20/20, but she should have started Airbnb. Verbose South Bay satires aside, I think the lesson for anyone who has yet to apply to college is do your best. Get in where you can get in. Get a scholarship if you can, but in the end, what actually matters is how hard you work during and after college (mostly after), and who you know, which I’m learning far too late in life, is more important than anything, and can be hard work in it of itself. College is basically a merit badge. A very very small percentage of the population really really cares about it and no one else gives shit.

I diagnose people all the time. Of what? Sociopathy, usually. How? Is yelling “He’s a sociopath!” at a TV, computer, or phone, any screen really, a firm clinical diagnosis. Of course not. Who am I “diagnosing”? Generally, those—coworkers, friends, foes—who tend to act so selfish, entitled, malevolent that they appear, to me at least, to deserve a clinical diagnosis. Am I a doctor? Uh…are you?

I diagnose famous people too. Celebrities, politicians, musician, occasionally athletes. Athletes don’t bother me as much for some reason. Is that because it feels like they’ve earned their insanity? Do their genetic gifts and work ethic afford them more leeway than others? Does this apply to all talented people? Can a mental illness be earned? If you are a crazy genius (intellectual, kinesthetic, musical, etc), are you still crazy? Answer: yes. Possibly more crazy (See not in order of malevolence, Cosby, Kanye, Batali—yes, there are geniuses of corpulence).

Asides aside, if you haven’t surmised, this entire article is basically an inflated aside, the end result was completely unintended, a detour taken while attempting to write an article much less interesting, believe it or not, than this one. What’s better than an aside? What’s worse than a straight line? What’s worse than zero detours? These path-followers are narcissists, boring ones. The gems are the side notes. Aren’t they? Planned linear ascertains obviously have a purpose. Are they fun though? Are rules fun? If you think rules are fun you are the living embodiment of an oxymoron and I think a strong argument can be made that you don’t actually exist.

Why dole out rash diagnoses so often? Because people are crazy. Why yell “Your boss is a sociopath!” across the room while your wife is telling her sister a work story over the phone? Because he is, at least in the colloquial sense exhibiting sociopathic behavior. I don’t think he’s a clinically diagnosable sociopath. Psychologists and psychiatrics opt for antisocial personality disorder now instead of sociopath anyways, so it turns out that clinically speaking in 2026 no one is a sociopath. Sociopath rolls off the tongue though. Doesn’t it? It at the very least sounds a hell of a lot better than anti-social personality disorder. Is sociopath the new R word? Are we really trying not to offend a group that can’t be offended? If this is the case and people in the field haven’t just gotten bored with the name, a social scientific concern for the well-being of sociopaths is a sign that we’ve taken it—whatever it is—too far. It’s also, possible (read as: likely) that it’s simply a more accurate description of the disorder.

It turns out that, after a not particularly impressive amount of google research, most of the people I’ve been calling sociopaths are just narcissists, which actually does not preclude these people from having anti-social personality disorder, but does make me sound a little “crazy” myself. Narcissism, based on my far from laser focused perusing of studies and write ups, appears to be the gateway drug to more significant disorders like the aforementioned sociopathy and psychopathy. The weed to anti-social personality disorder’s heroin, the nicotine to its cocaine. You can be a narcissistic psychopath, but you cannot be a psychopath who is not a narcissist and as we all know some people just smoke a shit ton of weed and don’t touch the strong stuff. Some people are as malignant as any malignant narcissist but still don’t qualify as one of the –paths (socio/psycho).

There are five kinds of narcissists that most clinicians can agree on: Overt, covert, malignant, antagonistic and communal. Overts are the classic narcissists. They believe that should be talking at all times. They believe that they are more interesting than every single living person and consequently don’t believe in listening, unless possibly to show off the furrowed brow, pursed lipped, and wrapped glance of their extra-intent (over-intent) listening face. There is, in my opinion, nothing more self-indulgent than a demonstrative listening face, because there is no worse listener than someone who is mustering up everything they have to try to look like they are listening really well. Overts might also say that they have ADHD in an effort to remedy their inability to listen. Are narcissism and ADHD correlated? It appears so. Maybe some of these narcissists do have ADHD, but co-existing disorders do not eradicate each other, if anything they exacerbate them. Translation: an overt with ADHD is a pain in the ass. Examples of overts: Madonna, Paris Hilton, Andy Warhol, and every Kardashian ever. Please feel free to factor my armchair laymen’s bias into these selections and the entire article for that matter. There are many many more great examples of overts in pop-culture, but if you’re looking for overlong lists you should peruse the internet (the leading purveyor of inordinately long lists).

Covert narcissists are interesting to me because I might be one. How narcissistic of me to be interested in a condition I might have. My dad definitely is one and we don’t need to delve into that any deeper, at least while he’s still alive, which I hope will be for a very long time despite his grandiose fantasies about himself while simultaneously being plagued by unworthiness and shame for having fantasized in the first place (and his big old house that I’ll inherit when he does end up passing). Now that I’m seeing a description of covert narcissistic behavior on the page it might describe me better than my dad. “Woe is me,” a classic covert-ism. I’m not so sure that my dad feels any shame. Does that make him an overt? A shameless covert? Do shameless coverts exist? These categories, if subcategorized would be endless (For more information look to internet listicles). Legitimately diagnosing my dad would require that he see a clinical professional, which he won’t do for any normal purpose (read as: a person who received his first colonoscopy in his 70s). Does denial factor into a narcissistic personality disorder diagnoses? Is there a correlation between believing that you are not a narcissist and being one? There must be. Self-awareness is narcissistic kryptonite. Is it not? Or am I just trying to, as someone who identities as self-aware, get out of this article unscathed? Should I take this whole bit about me and my dad out of the article? Probably. Will I? If you’re reading this I went against my better judgement.

Covert narcissists bemoan. They are the great bemoaners among us. They bemoan their lack of success, being misunderstood, their undiscovered greatness that never was, which according to them is due to bad luck or bad timing and has nothing to do with lack of skill or effort. Covert narcissists do not understand why they aren’t more respected, revered, worshipped. This hits close to home, humiliatingly close.x Examples: Van Gogh and Marc Maron. That’s all I have. Take a long look at these two names, Vincent Van Gogh and Marc Maron, because they never have never appeared and will never appear in the same sentence again.

Malignant narcissists are the most aggressive, most volatile, most abusive, etc. They revel in other people’s discomfort, the distress of others. They enjoy inflicting pain. This goes beyond extreme self-absorption, far beyond it. They’re evil fucked up people. They hurt others emotionally and physically. They love literal and figurative poison, death, fire and brimstone (all of that shit). They seem, to me at least, most likely to get slapped with the dual diagnosis—Narcissist/sociopath, narcissist/psychopath. Who typifies the malignant narcissist? The classics. The mount Rushmore of Personality Disorders: Hitler, Stalin, Khan (Ghengis, not Chaka).

Antagonistic narcissists are the fourth type. They are what they sound like competitive, adversarial, assholes. Assholes who revel in pissing people off. A longitudinal study found that antagonistic narcissists make friends easily early in life and struggle to maintain friendships later in life. Is this because a natural bi-product of their instinctive abrasiveness is that they are outgoing? Do their friends only discover over time that they are horrible people? I’ll say what they say at the end of every study, “more research is needed.” Examples of antagonistic narcissists: Ari Emanuel (Ari Gold for those who prefer Entourage to the real world), Bill Maher, Alex Jones. Not shocking that one antagonistic narcissist is a lawyer and the other two should be.

The fifth and final narcissist is the communal narcissist. A tricky one to catch if you’re looking to ascribe narcissism to the self-obsessed. These narcissists are not outwardly selfish, in fact they consider themselves extremely unselfish and boy do they want to tell you about it. These narcissists will tell anyone who will listen how charitable, giving, grateful and, most ironically, how selfless they are. How do they tell people? They post. Post what? Selfless protest selfies, selfless puppy shelters selfies, lots of selfless benefit selfies, causes they’re involved with, local businesses they are supporting, GoFundMe’s, so many GoFundMe’s. These narcissists need you to know when they’ve done a good thing and they need you to know every time they’ve done a good thing. Altruism be damned! Examples: Bono, the occupants of Occupy Wall Street, those celebrities who sang “Imagine” during the pandemic, people who wear “Ban Billionaire” t-shirts, white people who attended BLM marches, and anyone who owns a three-legged dog.

Do these five types of narcissists and their related traits seem familiar? Traits you might ascribe to people you know? Many people you know? Is narcissism on the rise? According to a pop psych article on Psych Today that attributes the population wide rise in narcissism to an increase in social isolation, which at face value seems like a strong hypothesis, it is. Can you be two types of narcissist at once? According to the Mayo Clinic: yes. According to me: yikes.

Are you, the reader, a narcissist? If you read this to the very end, as Jeff Foxworthy would say, “you might be a narcissist.”

I went college with Alex Hormozi. What happened after college? He became a cadrillionaire and I’m well, I’m writing this article.

If you don’t know who Alex Hormozi is. He has grown an enormous social media following creating content about making money, salesy stuff and working really really hard.

It doesn’t hurt that he looks like a Hollywood-Paul-Bunyon.

By that I mean that he is jacked out of his mind, wears flannels, and is under 5’7”. By that I mean that his height is the Hollywood part.

How well did I know him? He wasn’t my roommate. He wasn’t my frat brother. We didn’t Eiffel tower anyone together (from what I remember). But I did hang out with him. We were friends. Not close friends, not Eiffel tower friends, but friends.

During the first month of classes I was in the weightroom doing barbell snatches with 100kgs on the bar. I should mention that the guys who aren’t division 1 athletes at a preppy Ivy league sized (~7,000 undergrad students) school like the one we went to are all physically very weak, not all of them, but many of them. They are doing just fine mentally. How could they not be? They are attending an ivy league sized private school. I think part of the reason they did well mentally, a proxy for “in school,” is because they weren’t distracted by sports. They are kind of skinny fat with parted hair. You know the type. They at the very least look like they use summer as a verb. Where do they summer? The Hamptons, Gulf Shores, maybe Mikinos if they’re feeling rowdy. They know how to sail too, well. As stated above, you know the type. Will soon work at a hedge fund. Will soon commit a financial crime. Will soon marry an inexplicably hot and/or plain or inexplicably both hot and plain woman. Will meet their children when they graduate high school before sending them off to a similar ivy league sized university, ideally an actual Ivy.

Back to Alex: He walked up to me in the weightroom and said, “I like your snatch.” He didn’t. I think he just introduced himself. He did tell someone later that he introduced himself because he “liked my snatch.” Which is a vagina innuendo and weird and confusing. Alex is many things to many people, but he’s not hilarious.

Then…three months later…he diddled me.

Just kidding.

Alex was a good guy.

Is he still a good guy? I haven’t talked to him in more than 10 years. Fame does weird things to people who were by all accounts normal beforehand. So I have no idea. I bet he’s still a nice guy.

Side note: I did DM him a while back and thought we were talking before it became obvious that it was one of his employees or a bot on the other end. “No, it’s really me. I’m Alex! No. I remember you!” Creepy.

How could anyone worth over 100 million dollars not be a tiny bit obsessed with their own power?

It’s so fucking much money. I wouldn’t blame him for using his employees as foot stools or whatever near billionaires do.

Based on his YouTube shorts that I get bombarded with now because I searched his full name on Google once, it sounds like he’s a workaholic, which he always was.

He’s built an entire brand out of it and it doesn’t look like bad stuff entirely. I personally have no interest in waking up at 3AM everyday so that I can get a full workday in before noon, but if that’s your thing have at it.

He’s basically the David Goggins of productivity.

He says things like “Work hard at all costs. If it feels like you’re hitting a wall you’ve reached the point of the journey where most people quit and if you persevere good things can happen.” I think he’s onto something with that. I actually love it. Maybe speaking his name into Google wasn’t the worst thing I ever did.

Does he eat three Ruth Chris Filet Minon before entering sleep paralysis at 7PM every night? Probably.

Is the plural of filet minion the same as the singular, like deer, or is it filets mignons? I prefer the deer version.

Alex and I became friends after meeting in the gym. It was his last year of college. He was the president of his frat. I spelled it fart in the first draft and I will never write anything funnier.

Ever since playing high school basketball and rowing in college, I’ve avoided groups of all kinds. I believe to my detriment.

In hindsight if I had joined Pike—Alex’s frat—I would have had access to test files (for cheating), would have been able to send my pledges to take notes during lectures for me (is that cheating?), and I would have been able to date some gorgeous sorority girls (who I would have inevitably cheated on during countless coke binges—I imagine that I would have done quite a bit of coke).

It didn’t seem like Alex did much coke, but he definitely sent notetakers to class for him. I don’t know anything about pledging or frats, but it seems like when you join one you pay annual dues to be a slave for a year and become a slave owner the next. An underheard of practice in actual slavery but a way of life in the serfdom that is Greek life.

As far as I could tell being a frat brother at a school like that is a great way to get a job working at JP Morgan or fill in whatever bank or consulting firm you like and start the cycle over again. Slave (junior analyst) to slave owner (director). Endure the subjugation long enough and you will become the master. At least analysts get paid. The starting salary at JP Morgan is around 100k and I’m told rich people, the few who I talk to, that “100k in Manhattan is a slave wage.” See! The analogy works!

I work as a personal trainer. Is that because I didn’t join a frat? No, but it’s an excuse.

Alex’s frat was in the process of being disbanded from the university. Maybe that’s why he wasn’t too worried about his frat duties. I think he was just kind of bored of it. And I’d imagine that they wanted him to be the president because he got things done.

I’m pretty sure that he graduated magna cum laude in three years and I know that he worked a full-time consulting job his senior year. The test files and note taking chattel helped but Alex was smart and always working.

It seems like he downplays his education now. Like it was some pretentious bullshit, and it was, but back then he had a little bit of a complex about not getting in off the waitlist at an Ivy league sized Ivy as opposed to our aforementioned Ivy league sized non-ivy.

He wanted to go to an Ivy League school and didn’t.

Do super successful people have an uncanny ability to manufacture enemies, vendettas and chips on their shoulder out thin air (e.g. Michael Jordan)? It seems so. It seems like Alex has been doing that for quite a while.

We talked a lot about Pavel Tsatsouline training programs over chicken breasts in the dining halls. Yep, that’s some real meat head shit. I did some Olympic lifting competitions in California before going to college. He was curious about that of course.

I worked as an assistant trainer for the men’s basketball team, which he actually didn’t have much interest in.

It seemed like he had a problem with athletes. Especially our basketball team because they were good and people respected them. Three guys on the team that year (2012) went to the NBA. I remember him being proud of kicking Jefferey Taylor, who was drafted by the Charlotte Bobcats, out of his frat for no reason at all.

Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but I think Alex had a competitive problem with elite athletes and possibly famous people in general.

Alex wanted to and still wants to win. Well, I guess he has won, but he wanted to badly.

If he doesn’t move a muscle the rest of his life—goes full vegetable—he has won.

But he didn’t seem to like sports or movies, at all.

He didn’t seem particularly interested in pop-culture. This was before pop-culture included gorilla embossed kettlebells. There was a time before Joe Rogan, if you can believe it.

Alex didn’t need internet fame as a source of income.

He sold his company Gym Launch for 40 million dollars before he exploded on the socials.

My guess is that Alex got involved with social media to prove his superiority, to prove that he could be famous too.

His ex who joined my psychology lab my senior year left him for his best friend.

Does everyone get their heart broken?

I don’t think so. Not that badly at least.

I think this also fueled his desire to prove himself.

Does it sound like I’m talking shit?

Maybe I am. Why not say something vaguely positive?

Fine. I will. I enjoyed hanging out with him. He was good friend for that year or so. I have no idea, in hindsight, why he wanted to hang out with me. This might sound a little weird, but it made me feel good. It felt good to be friends with the president of one of the “good frats.” It felt like people gave a shit that I was eating lunch with him. Was that his infectious personality or the tiny bump in social status that I attributed to him willfully sitting with me? Both?

I lifted weights with Alex and his buddy, whose name I can’t remember. What can I remember? I can remember that the other guy could deadlift 700 pounds and had done at least a cycle of steroids. Maybe that prompted Alex to consider enhancing his T, which he has. I am not at all shocked that his legs are so muscular now that he can no longer walk, he now waddles, and that he can’t fit his arms into normal shirts, which, I think, is why he’s isolated the torn flannel look first popularized by 90s lesbians.

I don’t think that’s a huge deal. I mean, if you’re roiding out in your 30s, you’ve turned your body into a science experiment, but you’re doing the same thing if you take Ozempic. So, what’s the difference?

Do you want to be muscular or emaciated? Pick your poison.

I printed out books about lifting weights with him in the Medical Library. The one that hadn’t figured out how to charge their students to print yet. I sure they have by now. If students still print things out. We shot gunned beers in his frat. We ate like bodybuilders and that was about it.

I thought he’d be successful, as far as I was concerned, he already was. He had a consulting job while still attending school. I don’t know anyone else who did that.

We talked about intermittent fasting before it got popular.

We talked about kettlebells before they got popular.

He had his finger on the pulse and worked his ass off, as already beaten to death. He partied, but it seemed like it was just for show. He had one foot out the door. He seemed like an adult humoring child, a man amongst boys (for those who prefer the most cliched cliches). He had his priorities straight at 22, something that I still can’t wrap my head around.

I’m not at all surprised that he made tons of money. Did I think he’d be worth 100s of millions? No, but no one predicts that for anyone.

I sure as shit didn’t think that I’d be getting targeted ads for his fourth book about…you guessed it…making shit tons of money.

If I sound bitter or jealous, I am. Just kidding. I wish I was set financially. Shit. That would be awesome. I don’t think I’m physically capable of doing what he’s done thought. It is beyond impressive. And I’m not alone. Millions of people, known as followers in our contemporary cultural, are impressed too.

A friend of mine let’s call him Tadg, that’s not his name, it’s very few people’s name, but it is a name, came over to my apartment in Astoria last year to see my kid. Meet my kid? Visit my kid? No that’s what you do when someone is dying. Whatever people do when you’ve just had a kid. More social gesture than social event. A substantive gesture, a nice gesture, a gesture nonetheless.

I paid for our lunch with my wife’s money. So, neither of us paid for our lunch. My wife is the bread winner. Which makes me the bread loser? I stay home with our, now, one-year-old daughter during the day and drive into Manhattan every night to see my personal training clients and do stand-up comedy. Yes. I’m personal trainer/stand-up comic/ father. In other words, humiliation embodied. My slashes might not be as humiliating as the valet/DJ/father slashes, but they’re close. My valet/DJ/father has a horrifying spray tan, a paunch and Pauly D hair. What does your valet/DJ/dad look like?

I walked Tadg to the train after lunch pushing my daughter in her stroller, Tadg ambling along beside us, childless and alone.

“When do you think you’ll have to pack it in and get a real job?” He asked. “When do you think you’ll stop doing stand-up?”

I hadn’t paid the idea much thought at that point. Never? Stand up was just something that I did. Something that I’d done for 8 years at the time and short of going viral on an Instagram account that I wasn’t devoting much time to; I had zero shot at stand up becoming a source of income.

It pissed me off that he would even ask. My wife and I were making do, paying our bills, “making it work” as people say so often that it comes across less statement of fact and more cry for help. I could have let him know then and there that he’d insulted me (i.e. road rage in real life). “Why don’t you believe in me!?” Roundhouse kick to the chest (belly button, most likely hip or leg, due to extremely poor mobility). “You piece of shit!” He’s crying now, in my fantasy that I’m embarrassed to even be relaying to you, doing his best to take deep breaths and get his wind back. “Go! Get on that train and never come back…”

What I actually said was, that “I’ll keep going until she’s five,” said with little certainty and “reassess” and “then, if stand up isn’t working, I’ll get a real job.” I’m not sure what kidn of real jobs are available to tech-illiterate 38-year-old with a concave resumes, but we’ll have to wait and see won’t we.

Why was my friend asking me when I’d get over this silly dream, man up, and help my family? Because I pursued a fulfilling career. Because I sought the fun job.

I should give you some more context huh? Outside of a decade old blockbuster-murder-porn quote and an anecdote? I’m a stand-up comedian and writer is about as far from as household name as possible. Translation: as of now I have failed, at the very least I have not succeeded. I’ve been doing stand up for 8 years (almost nine ((wincing)). I wrote short fiction in college, some TV pilots a handful of years ago and more recently I wrote a novel that I haven’t found an agent to represent. I’m in the middle of a second one now, because I enjoy the writing process. As my wife say exceedingly often to anyone who will listen “Ben loves pain.”

I get paid here and there to do stand up. I’m not bad at it and debate whether or not I’m better suited to be writer quite often, something that I’ve never been paid to do and question whether I ever will be.

Also, I’m an elitist. Not a great thing to be when you’ve accomplished so little. How does one think they’re better than everyone, when they’re not? Well, (clears throat), I went to Vanderbilt University for my undergrad degree. Did honors research in Psychology—a field the best and brightest tend not to pursue (sorry Jordan Peterson, but it’s true; the competition is slim). I had the coolest academic advisor ever who let me do whatever I wanted and did his best to help me clean up my mess when necessary. I ran a mixed methods study (two studies in one) as an undergrad. I had lab techs working for me. I had unrealistic expectations of how things actually worked in the field. Most undergrads help their advisor with data entry and write a paper about it for their thesis. In hindsight my advisor was very depressed. I’d meet with him and he’d just nod his head and let me go. He is a good person though. He’s actually dead now. He was a good person. He died of cancer. My plan was to wait until I was a big comedian come back to visit him, triumphant. I wish I’d stayed in touch.

I won one of the Vanderbilt Psychology awards in 2013. They gave out two of the awards to the two top undergrad honors research theses. There were only seven of us doing honors research. It felt like an accomplishment at the time, but I had a 30% shot at winning. I applied to a handful of PhD programs where I isolated professors conducting research pertinent to mine. I was turned down by all of the PhD programs, but the University of Chicago accepted me as a master’s student. A consolation acceptance that came with a partial scholarship. I didn’t want to go.

The acceptance letter literally said “This is a difficult program. Many students will not finish.” Can you imagine anyone wanting to enroll in a program that took pride in breaking people? At the time, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to devote my entire life to Psychology. Why in God’s name, would I want to sign up for the pseudointellectual Hunger Games? My parents asked me what my plan was otherwise. Fiction? Stand-up comedy? Something creative? So, no plan. So, onto the master’s program.

It wasn’t hyperbole. The program actually did break people. At a pub night one of the PhD students in the social sciences, said that a master’s student in the program the previous year had had a psychotic break and hammered his door shut to “work” on his thesis. Again, I was pretty sure that I wanted out of academia because it didn’t interest me enough. I was 100 percent sure that I didn’t want to Shining myself working on a fucking paper. It turned out that I ended up losing my mind in a different way. Less panic-induced psychosis, more angsty early-twenties bullshit. More drug abuse, binge drinking, a middling to serious sex addiction and plenty of crying alone in my pre-war bathtub that I rapidly got too big for as I put on somewhere between 40 and 50 pounds in a year. Everyone knows the freshman 15. Ever heard of the master’s 50? No, it’s not a tournament for semi-retired golfers. It’s how fat I got. I found a back entrance to the main dining hall. I ate for free often. I couldn’t be stopped.

I’d started writing short fiction in an introductory fiction workshop the second semester of my senior year and decided then that I either wanted to pursue that or stand-up comedy because one guy who I had lunch with on campus once a week or so (remember being petrified of being seen eating alone?) told me a few times that he thought I’d be good at stand up. It turned out that that was all it took to embolden me.

I should let you know that I’m a privileged only child. I had it pretty good. I’d only ever worked at summer camps before going to college and only made money getting summer research grants and doing some personal training when I was in college. I was taken care of. I had no sense of financial urgency. I didn’t know how anything was going to work in the real world. Mortgage, 401k, kids, nannies, these were just words, concepts that other people dealt with, not something that I had any idea how desperately I’d want or need over the course of the next twenty years. So, if you want to blame my long-term short sightedness on my upbringing and tell me that I deserve the stagnancy that I’ve experienced for the last ten years, fine. And that this is what all overly optimistic straight white millennials deserve. You’re probably right. And that this is a stupid essay or post or whatever people call these things. Fine. But you’ve read this far. Why not keep going?

I went to U Chicago for a one year accelerated masters called MAPSS (Master’s in Arts Program in the Social Sciences). What was it like? Lots of Foucault talk. Students and professors in every discipline—history, anthropology, sociology, psychology— “Foucault, Foucault, Foucault.” I had no idea what they were even referring to. It took me the better part of quarter one to figure out that Foucault was a French Historian and not a practice like Fung shui. It took me even longer to learn the spelling: Foucault. Not“Fuko” as I assumed. I was out of place. Lost. Massively depressed. Coming off of some drugs that I’d self-medicated with in undergrad—maybe a topic for a different post. If you’re thinking Adderall, you’re not even close. It was a hormone. Not anabolics, but you’re getting warmer. I had them shipped to my apartment from Thailand for next to nothing and they fucked me up. I also did LSD about four more times than I recommend the summer before the masters. I don’t think that helped either. It took me more than three years to recover from the mixture. By recover, do I mean feel myself again? No. I never felt like the person I was before tripping and moning (?) (Is there a colloquialized gerund for taking hormones?) again.

I was so fucked up mentally that it took me three tries to start doing stand-up. I went to a few open mics in Chicago when I lived there and started getting such bad stage fright that I stopped doing it. Then I did the same thing when I moved back home to finish thesis number two, got panic attacks again, felt like I needed to be drunk to get on stage. I stopped again before eventually moving to LA and committing to it.

When I facetime my parents now, as a new parent, they are overjoyed to see my daughter. But I can tell they’re disappointed in me. How could they not shutter at the notion that I’m available for a one-hour Facetimes during the workday. I’ve got nothing going on. No meetings, no emails, no calls. Nothing other than meals, naps, trips to the park, and their Facetimes. This isn’t what they saw me doing with my life. They don’t understand a single choice I’ve made since graduating college. They invested time and money, but mostly money, in my education, in me becoming a contributing member of society—someone with a pre-professional degree and eventually a career. An expert. Somebody making a stable income. They didn’t do all of that investing so I could pursue an art form (or a craft form depending on who you ask). And they told me, often. “This is stupid. You are wasting your education.” And I basically said “Fuck that. I’m gonna make it.” Then I didn’t. Currently, I’m raising my daughter. That’s great. I am contributing member of society in that regard, sure. But no one sends their child to 21 years of private school so that they can read the shit out of Good Night Moon.

And people who say they respect stay-at-home-dads just as much as stay-at-home-moms are lying. Maybe not all men, who stay at home with their newborns while their wives go to work and pump milk in a fancy porta potty, are complete losers. Maybe some men in my situation have perfectly good reasons why they can’t support their families. I can’t think of one, but, as demonstrated, I not amazing at thinking. I’m humiliated to be a stay-at-home-dad. I feel like a failure. It’s not conclusive yet. I haven’t outright failed but no man who can’t support his family is a success.

When I was about four years in to stand up (the time that I actually committed to it and didn’t give up after a few months). I was talking to Thomas, the guy who told me to pursue stand up, on the phone, standing outside of Equinox DTLA, where I was working at the time. Probably wearing my skintight uniform that said, “TRAIN,” across the chest, puffy nipples protruding. He was in South Bend getting his MD. I don’t think it was at Notre Dame. Is there another school in South Bend? He was a very smart guy, but he had his own issues. I think he went through a hard break up in college and kind of checked out for a year. I’m not sure. But that’s why he was at South Bend Poly Tech instead of the famous school down the street. I told him how stand up was going. Maybe I complained about little opportunities, that felt like huge opportunities at the time, that fell through. I got recruited to do a podcast, which ended up being very short lived—it’s called Hating on Everything; check it out if you want to toe the line between being underwhelmed and offended—with the guys who produce Bobby Lee’s podcast(s). I never met Bobby. The show never went anywhere. I went in for one meeting at Gersch with one agent: William Rodriguez. Maybe I wasn’t even talking about the stuff that could have been. Maybe I was telling him about an open mic where a clinically insane guy perched on the stool, jumped off and body slammed the empty stage, all while holding the mic and managing to not break it or get tangled up. Maybe I was telling him about almost getting into a fist fight with a soap opera star, more of a character actor than a star, who had shot himself in the foot with a pistol during a “target practice for stage and screen class” or some such shit, then went on stage and literally said, “I guess I shot myself in the foot” like it was a brilliant. I called him a hack afterward, from stage. He charged me. Well, hobbled at me with his crutches. Someone held him back. Nothing happened. You can say a lot of horrible stuff about people at the lowest level of stand-up comedy, but they will throw down. Open micers do not shy away from getting in the middle of some really fucked up situations. The soap guy was a retired pro boxer too. If he hadn’t “shot himself in the foot,” he would have killed me.

After I’d told Thomas whatever story I’d told him, he said, “You need to stop doing stand-up. This isn’t healthy. You need to think about your future. This isn’t a career path.” All of the stuff that my parents had been saying for years.

I disassociated. Left my body. The only guy in my life, who told me that he thought I should pursue stand-up comedy told me to quit 6 years later. Had I made the wrong choice? Had I wasted the majority of my 20s pursuing something that I had no shot at? This was the nadir of my adulthood at that point. If you can even call doing standup in Los Angeles an adulthood.

There was no argument. I didn’t push back at all. I felt no malice. But I never called him again and he never called me again. I haven’t thought about that conversation since it happened. I obviously didn’t quit. I didn’t pursue anything more stable. I plowed ahead, assuming that he meant well, but was ultimately wrong.

The early years of stand up are brutal. Everyone says that. “You just have to tough it out.” I did and not much good has come from it. Other than meeting my wife doing stand-up. That was great, obviously. But the career part has yielded nothing beyond intangible growth: getting in touch with my emotions, depth of perspective, confidence all of that stuff that makes you a better comic but doesn’t yield much “stability.”

I don’t want to give you the wrong impression. Comedy is fun. You bomb and humiliate yourself working on new material and for the first few years it’s pretty much a nightmare. It feels like you’re speaking a different language up there, but most people who get on stage consistently (more than once a night) for years will get pretty good at it. The question is how good and whether or not they will be able to develop an audience. Although I’m more of novice writer, I’d imagine that fiction is similar. If you work at it like it’s a professional sport. Writing 1000 words a day minimum every day, reading a book or more a week, you will improve. Can you guarantee that you’ll make money writing books? Based on my somewhat limited research you can almost guarantee that you won’t.

I’ve been going through LSAT practice tests while my daughter eats breakfast for a week or so now. Is that the right path? Starting as an associate attorney in my forties? So that I can be the source of stability when my daughter is forming explicit memories and telling her friends what her dad does for work. It would be kind of nice if she didn’t say “nothing,” when asked. So that my wife can finally take a break and let me bear the load for a while. Forever? My concern is that I have wasted the last decade of my life obsessing over something that will bear no fruit. Was pursuing a “fun” (and fulfilling) career the wrong choice? If I give up now, it was.

To give you sense of what our life was like, we were living in an efficiency apartment in Hollywood when we got pregnant. People say we right? Even though she is the one who shot the zygote down her fallopian tube and grew a human being and I just, well, we know what I did (not much). What’s an efficiency apartment? It’s a studio without a kitchen. Yep. We lived together in a 400 square foot apartment and cooked our meals on a cook top by the bathroom.

Our rent was a stabilized 1050 a month, unheard of in a major city. But we were stagnant. Pursuing what we were pursuing, but also, falling into the trap that I believe quite a few people devoid of real consequences and real responsibilities run into. We hung out…a lot. We took it easy…a lot. We had all the time in the world and didn’t use most of it. We went surfing. We went hiking. We watched TV. We smoked weed. And don’t get me wrong. Getting high and watching 30 Rock after a day of shredding gnar is pretty sick or rad or bomb or whatever. Side note: by shredding gnar I mean having the Velcro that kept my board attached to my ankle come undone causing the board to drift toward the shore and not drowning solely because a little man paddled over and brought me in to shore. The little man turned out to be a 13-year-old boy. A very competent surfer and swimmer, but a eighth grader nonetheless. That’s what I mean by shredding gnar.

But the crazy thing that happened after we found out about the zygote was that things started moving fast…and furious. Bad word play? Yes. Bad movie(s). I believe so. Accurate description. Definitely. I was fucking pissed off and scared. Note to self: anger and fear come from a similar place, although I was disappointed to discover that it is not the exact same place, which would have served my assertion in a much neater fashion. I thought my life was over. I thought I’d have to give up on everything that I was pursuing that was unrealistic—stand-up comedy, writing, the podcasts—and find a stable, family supporting, income. I fought it. Saying “Why me? Why me?” Over and over again in my head. Why do I have to fall on this fallopian shaped sword?

Then, something amazing happened. We had to get our shit together. Immediately. We had to start planning for our future and take action as the ultra-motivated say and stop hoping and start doing. This sounds like Tony Robbins nonsense but stick with me. We had to pursue our dreams in the way that most behooved our family. It wasn’t just about us anymore. There was a mouth that was about to come out of my wife’s you-know-what and we were going to have to feed it.

How were we going to afford diapers and weed? Just kidding. We both stopped smoking a little bit before my wife got pregnant because we were beginning to realize the sheer volume of time we were wasting every night watching stuff that we didn’t remember the next day. I was watching a Tyler Sherdian movie (I watch some of his stuff—shoot me—he would, in a script) a couple of weeks ago and three quarters of the way through it I realized that I’d already seen the movie while painfully high. That’s what THC does to your brain. It’s elective sleepwalking. Choosing a lack of awareness. You’re doing stuff. You’re laughing you’re eating. You’re staring at a screen, but it’s not really you. You’re not really there. It’s the zombie you.

I’m not saying that no one should smoke pot or eat shake shack or watch TV. The issue is that when you have nothing but time for braindead gluttony, you waste opportunities to strive and provide. If I had less self-respect I’d be writing strive and provide on a white board somewhere (i.e. Tony R). A much less successful Tony R. I’m picturing the Greg Kinnear’s character like that guy in Little Miss Sunshine. Are you picturing something different?

Within a week of the positive pregnancy test, a friend texted and asked if me and my wife wanted to live in her apartment in New York for two months, free of charge. We had always wanted to move to New York but thought it impractical. Did I mention that we were lazy? Now we had a free place to stay and no more excuses.

So…we packed what we needed in our car and drove across the country. Hollywood to Brooklyn. I was out doing a show in Manhattan and started talking to a comic who recommended a temp agency. I told my wife who was still working the job she had in LA long distance in case we had to go back. She contacted the agency and they found her a an office manager work at a hedge fund. She worked there up until our daughter was born. She took maternity leave and works there full time now. It’s what has made the move across the country and raising our daughter possible. Maybe this was kismet. Or dumb luck? Maybe it’s what happens when shit gets real.

I am not where I want to be yet, obviously. See my Substack anti-following. My goal is to get at least 30 subscribers before I die. No. I want a literary agent. Readers. A stand-up comedy audience. My wife is pregnant again with our second. Did I mention that? Maybe the second kid will be the kick in the ass that I need to start to finally realize my dream of growing this Substack. One day! (Shaking fist in air. At who? The Gods of Subscription-Based-Platforms? The CEO? All CEOs? Myself?)

And now for the point of all of this…

The major major difference that I’ve noticed pre and post baby is that I don’t waste time anymore. All of that weed smoking and almost dying in Malibu, and extensive chilling is no longer an option. I have goals and I need to make time to work towards them. When I have the time I can’t doom scroll or doom Wikipedia. Doom Wikipediaing is a thing. I’ve done it. A lot. In a past life. When I have time now, I have to either do something that makes me money now or will make money in the near future, I don’t waste it. I don’t procrastinate, because there’s no time to procrastinate. I’m with my daughter from 8-5 Monday through Friday and when my wife gets home I train personal training clients and then I go do stand-up comedy sets. On Fridays and Saturdays I’m home from shows at 12 or 1 in the morning and often wake up before 7 the next day to train clients. In my previous, chill-as-fuck-life, I would have said “screw that.” I’m tired. I either don’t need the money or don’t need the stage time. Today I suck it up.

Today, this literal afternoon, I’m with my daughter and she is napping. When she naps, I write. She might give me 45 minutes. She might give me three hours. That’s how much time I have to write and edit this article—a nap. So, if it’s bad blame it on my daughter. Don’t. But, if it’s good thank her, because without her I wouldn’t be writing at all.

Well, let’s see…I’m a mother, a daughter, a sister, a lover, an embodiment of the resilience of the human spirit, a reiki instructor. Oh wait. That’s someone else.

I’m just a guy. A guy, who lives in Queens, in a two-bedroom apartment with my wife, two-year-old daughter and three-month-old son. I watch my kids during the day while my wife goes to work in Manhattan. I’m a stay-at-home-dad. That’s something that I am. Something I never thought I’d be. Something that I don’t hate being, as embarrassed as I feel to not be the family’s top earner.

When my wife gets home from work I go into the city, where I perform stand-up comedy. That’s something else that I am. A stand-up comedian, obviously not a high achieving one, not yet at least. If I was my wife wouldn’t be working as an office manager for a hedge fund — the middle person between the vicious, blood thirsty sociopaths that you’ve seen represented in Billions and The Big Short and the outside world.

If you would like to see some stand up clips, feel free to search my name wherever you search names. If you’re more of a reader than a watcher, then for the love of God keep reading. That’s another thing that I am — a reader. Unlike most men I prefer fiction to non-fiction. Based on the market research that I’ve done, men prefer non-fiction, books about wars and battles and collapses and triumphs and John D. Rockefeller for some reason. Men stereotypically and statistically like books about real people and real things that really happened. I can’t imagine reading a 700-page biography of Ulysses S. Grant. In fact, if that was all that was out there, verbose Wikipedia pages about great men, I don’t think I‘d read anything at all. What would I do with my time? Finally get my back flip? Collect those oft infomercialed and I assume oft collected rare coins? I’m not sure what I’d do, but I don’t think it would be very cool.

What are my three favorite books? “Isolating three is hard. Can I just list my top three from the last few months?” said the pretentious asshole. “Sure,” said the person humoring the pretentious asshole. For now, I’ll say, 1) Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth 2) You by Caroline Kepnes 3) The Netanyahaus by Joshua Cohen.

I wrote a novel last year, a handful of short stories, a play, and I’m working on a second novel right now. So, I guess that makes me a writer. Not a published writer. Just someone who writes a lot. Which I think could be said of most insane people. As far as I can tell crazy people love to write and write a lot. What do they write? Stories, books, documents, manifestos, you name it. The one thing that unites the scribblings and musings of the insane: they don’t get published. A person who writes TONS of unpublished work is either the most in tune mentally healthy person ever, diving deep within themselves, dealing with every intricacy of their internal monologue, processing their emotions down to their deepest depths (i.e. a rabid journaler) or the Unabomber, Charles Manson, and that guy who handed me a copy of his hand written novel on Chestnut Street in San Francisco 15 years ago and told me to tell people about it, “As many as I could” (i.e. a rabid person). I hope that my work will be published someday and I can avoid entering one of these two archetypes: 1) the prolific emotional wellness writer or (2) the prolific emotionally unwell writer.

People love to tell me, and probably you too if you’re a writer, about all of the writers who succeeded after they died. Emily Dickinson, Kafka and John Kennedy Toole. They died, someone close to them discovered their work, got it published and turned them into literary juggernauts. The sexiest, most mysterious kinds of literary juggernauts — dead ones. What if your work sells after you are dead? I’d rather it didn’t. If something good happens, I’d like to be here to enjoy it for a millisecond. Even if that joy presents itself when my son and/or daughter run sit beside my death bed, and whisper “Harper Collins is going to publish your 30^th novel,” title still unknown, “500 thousand dollar advance,” in this hypothetical, I pass, as my child, now an adult, finishes the “ce” in advance and I pass a happy man. The truth is that my my children say this to me as I’m dying no matter what. Even if there’s no Harper Collins deal. Especially if there’s no Harper Collins deal. That would be a good way to go. Wouldn’t it? Feeling like everyone finally gets it. The bliss of being understood.

I’m sorry to end this, my first post, on such a morose note, but this is my About Me, isn’t it? And I can get morose. Maybe you get a little dark too. Maybe we are one in the same. Maybe you have to “know the darkness before you can appreciate the light,” or whatever people say. I also have a graduate degree in psychology, so I might end up writing some stuff about the social sciences. Probably not, but who knows? Is it true that all psychiatrists are deeply depressed? I’m not a psychiatrist so I wouldn’t know. Not from experience. But yes, based on the findings in this study, psychiatrists are exceptionally depressed. So if you’re seeing one, they’re probably not doing great.

Well…uh…Toodaloo. The study referenced above was conducted in the UK. So toodaloo is beyond appropriate here.

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