There is a yoga teacher I want to tell you about.

Her name is Becca. I knew her fairly well, or at least I thought I did. She was quiet. Introverted. Smart. Intuitive. The kind of person that makes you wonder what’s actually going on in there. Warm, always pleasant, but with an unreachability that I eventually stopped trying to reach. I figured it was just introversion. I know the type. I am the type, too.

She taught early morning yoga in Phoenix. Seven a.m. in the summer. Which, if you’ve never been to Phoenix in the summer, means the desert heat was already making its intentions clear before most people had finished their first cup of coffee.

Her classes had a specific vibe. Millennial women on their way to cubicles. A couple of younger bohemian men who seem to exist in every early morning yoga class in every city in America. You know the ones.

No music, mostly. When Becca did play music in class it was the music you’d expect her to play. A whisper of sound. Flutes or something. Maybe some chanting. But always in the background, not foreground.

Her style was slow burn. She wasn’t chasing the dramatic poses. No crow. No scorpion. No boat held until someone quietly cursed under their breath. Instead she’d take the ordinary poses and hold them until they transformed. Warrior 2 for two minutes is a completely different animal than Warrior 2 for fifteen seconds.

Your legs start to shake.

Your mind starts to negotiate.

That was Becca’s move.

The class I’m thinking of was unremarkable. Vinyasas. Warriors 1, 2, and 3. Left foot forward, then right. All facing the same wall, then the other. The standard rotation. I was fully inside myself, which is the whole point of that style of class. Five minutes of warm-up. Fifty minutes of maximum inward turn. Then five of Savasana.

You forget there are other people in the studio. That’s the design.

The Quiet Contract

A yoga studio is one of the most quietly choreographed spaces in modern life.

Everyone is doing the same thing at the same time. Everyone is breathing on the same count. Everyone is moving through the same sequence in the same order, holding for the same number of breaths, pausing in the same silences. You are, by any reasonable definition, in lockstep with twenty strangers.

And you have agreed, without anyone asking you, to pretend those strangers do not exist.

The agreement is real. Nobody mentioned it on the way in, but it is enforced, gently and professionally, by everyone in the studio, starting with the teacher.

Yoga teachers are trained for this. Not informally. Explicitly. Teacher training is full of it.

Soft gaze. Diffuse attention. Universal cueing instead of individual correction. Never single anyone out, even with praise. Praise creates comparison. Comparison creates performance. Performance is the opposite of practice. So the teacher learns to scan the studio without ever quite looking at anyone, to address the group without ever addressing a person, to walk between mats with the air of someone who is not really looking.

Hold space, some might call it. Be present without inserting yourself.

It is a beautiful discipline. It is also, if you squint, a discipline of mutual non-recognition.

Students mirror it perfectly. You learn it within your first three classes. You do not stare. You do not adjust your mat to avoid eye contact because you already arranged it that way before you sat down. You do not, under any circumstances, watch the person next to you do their pose, even if their pose looks better than yours, especially if their pose looks better than yours. You face your wall. You face your mat. You face the ceiling. You face anything that is not someone else’s face.

We are together but alone, that’s the design.

But here is the part that is easy to miss.

Underneath the discipline, the body is doing what it always does when it shares breath with strangers for an hour. It is bonding. The chemistry of synchronized breathing and synchronized movement is not subtle. Musicians know it. Soldiers know it. Athletes know it. Anyone who has ever been to a Grateful Dead show knows it. The body releases what bodies release when twenty nervous systems sync up in a quiet space for forty minutes. Oxytocin. Whatever else. The mechanism is older than language.

It is happening in the yoga studio whether the studio acknowledges it or not. It is happening especially in the slow burn classes, where the breathing is deep and the holds are long and the silences are deafening. It is the reason you walk out of a great class feeling like you love every stranger in there.

You never spoke to one of them. You never looked at one of them. And you love them anyway.

The bonding does not happen despite the agreement to ignore each other. It happens, in part, because of it. The discipline of not seeing each other is what allows the chemistry to pool. If you spent the class scanning faces and nodding at people and wondering whether the woman in the front row was judging your half pigeon, the chemistry would never have time to gather. It’s the wall that holds the water back.

So the wall is sacred. Not metaphorically. Functionally. The norm of mutual non-recognition is part of how the practice works.

Most yoga teachers spend their entire careers respecting it.

Becca did too.

Until one morning, for about fifteen seconds.

The Class

By the thirty-minute mark, the studio was engulfed in that deafening silence. Breath was all you could hear. Your own and someone else’s.

We were holding Chair Pose. Knees bent. Arms up. Becca had walked us into it without much ceremony then stopped talking.

Just letting it burn.

My legs had started to shake about forty seconds in. The mind had stopped narrating. The grocery list was gone. The email I had been drafting in my head when I walked in was gone. Whatever I had been worried about at six forty-five a.m. was gone. There were my legs, and there was the breath, and there was the front wall I had been staring at.

The wall was the same color it had been at the start of class. The wall was not interesting. The wall was the only thing.

I did not know what time it was. I did not want to know.

Becca was somewhere in front of us. I had not looked at her in a while. I had not looked at anyone in a while.

Then she spoke.

The Instruction

If your birthday falls on an even-numbered day, step your right foot forward. Odd-numbered day, left foot forward.

What?

A small rustle moved through the class. Everyone shifted. The instruction was simple enough. The confusion was about the why.

I have an odd birthday. My left foot stepped forward.

Warrior 2.

And there she was.

A woman I had been in class with for months. Maybe a year. I had never looked at her. Not once. Not really. Brown hair pulled back. A small mole on her left cheek I had no business knowing about. She was looking at me the same way I was looking at her, which is to say with the slightly stunned expression of someone whose body had arrived somewhere before her brain.

Quiet Becca. The Quiet One. The one who chose her words the way she chose her playlists, said, “Acknowledge the presence of each other.”

The nervous laughter started immediately.

Not embarrassed laughter. Not polite laughter. The specific kind that escapes before you can stop it. The kind that means something has just happened and the body is responding before language has caught up.

What it felt like was a roller coaster. The unease of something your body did not consent to but craved nonetheless. I nodded at her with a vulnerable smile. She nodded at me.

We were both stunned by how strange and how normal it felt at the same time.

“How do we not know each other?”

Then Becca moved on. Next pose.

What Actually Happened

The connection was already there. It had been gathering for forty minutes. Twenty nervous systems breathing on the same count, going still in the same silences. The chemistry that pools in any space where bodies share breath for an hour was pooling in that studio, whether anyone was paying attention or not. It was waiting.

The norm of mutual non-recognition was the wall.

The wall is not the enemy of chemistry. The wall is part of how the chemistry happens. Without it, you would spend the class scanning faces and adjusting your hair and wondering whether the woman in the front row was judging your half pigeon. The chemistry would never have time to gather. The wall holds the water back so it has somewhere to go.

What Becca did was open a hairline crack.

Six words and a foot placement.

That should not have done what it did. And it did not, exactly. The class did. Becca just opened the door.

The water rushed through. Fifteen seconds, then it was over. A small, weightless miracle in a strip mall yoga studio in Phoenix at seven a.m. on a summer morning.

And then she never did it again.

Back to the soft gaze. Universal cueing. No gold stars. The dam was back in place, holding the water back, building pressure for someone else’s one-time trick.

The restraint is the skill. Not the trick.

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I adopted him in Phoenix eight years ago. He was probably about seven then, maybe older. The shelter wasn’t sure. He came home with me in a cardboard box that smelled of stale urine and walked out of it onto my cheap linoleum floor like a lion on the African savanna.

I named him after a Greek giant, the son of Gaia, who was buried under Mount Etna by Athena. When the volcano erupts, that’s him trying to get out. It seemed right at the time. Within a week, I was calling him Carl. He answered to it, which is more than most cats do for anything.

We moved to Vegas together. Then the pandemic, which I spent mostly in an apartment with Carl on my lap.

He slowed down around year seven. Stopped jumping up on things. Slept more. Then he was sick. Then he was sicker. Then we were at the vet’s office. Then the receptionist quietly set a sign on the counter asking those in the waiting room to please be quiet because someone was in back saying goodbye.

That someone was me and I was an unholy wreck.

The vet wasn’t.

The 70s: The World Broke the Man

In 1976, Martin Scorsese made a movie about a man who wasn’t in touch with his feelings either.

Travis Bickle is a Taxi Driver. He’s a Vietnam vet and an insomniac. He writes in a journal that nobody reads. He doesn’t talk to anyone, really. By the end he’s shot three people and the city has made him a hero by accident.

That’s the seventies. That’s the man the world produces. The world is the disease. The man is the symptom.

Three years later, in Apocalypse Now, Coppola sends Captain Willard up a river to kill Kurtz, and discovers that Kurtz isn’t crazy. He’s correct. “The horror, the horror!” isn’t a diagnosis of Kurtz’s interior, it’s a description of the thing that made him.

Then Cimino sent three friends from a Pennsylvania steel town to Vietnam in The Deer Hunter and brought them back as men the war had made. Nick’s Russian roulette ending isn’t something he did to himself. It was something done to him.

And in 1974, Polanski put Jake Gittes, a smart, decent man, good at his job, up against a system corrupt at its foundation. Jake cares but the world breaks him anyway.

“Forget it Jake. It’s Chinatown.” That’s the whole decade in five words.

The seventies were bleaker than anything we make now. But the bleakness was external. Something happened to the man. Something larger than him broke him. Then the films ended and the credits rolled on a verdict. Travis in the rearview mirror. Kurtz on the temple steps. Nick in the chair with the gun. Jake is walking away from Chinatown.

The world won. But at least the story was over.

The 80s: The Man Overcame the World

The country had just spent a decade watching itself lose, and by 1980 it was done. Reagan was on television talking about Morning in America. The economy was breathing again. The Cold War was something we were going to win.

The seventies had insisted that the world was the disease. The eighties got up and said the world was a thing you could beat.

The villain stopped being a system and became a rival. Drago. Cobra Kai. The rich kid at the country club. The films traded despair for personal combat, and gave the hero something to actually hit.

In Rocky IV, Rocky climbs a Soviet mountain and screams Drago’s name into the snow. He trains. He suffers. He prevails. The Cold War as a boxing match, and the boxing match is winnable.

In Top Gun, Maverick loses his best friend, loses his nerve, climbs back into the plane, and shoots down the MiGs. Grief is a strange path to glory, but a path nonetheless.

In Hoosiers, a small Indiana town wins the state championship. The coach is broken. The kids are too small. But discipline and faith beat scale and money. The underdog as American liturgy.

In Flashdance, a girl welds steel by day and dances by night. The audition is everything. The montage promised that if you wanted it enough, the world bent.

Sweat, leg warmers, then transcendence.

And we could keep going. Footloose. Risky Business. Working Girl. Stand and Deliver. The Natural. An Officer and a Gentleman. Field of Dreams. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. The decade was an avalanche of triumph. Pick a montage. Any montage.

The eighties believed something the seventies didn’t. If you suffered with discipline, the suffering meant something. Effort produced transformation. That the man could beat the world.

Rocky on the mountain. Maverick back in the cockpit. The Hoosiers raising the trophy. Jennifer Beals in the spotlight at the audition.

That was the promise.

Now: The Man Implodes

Forty years later, the man once calmly in charge of his nervous system while he shoots down MiGs is in his kitchen having a panic attack. Literaly

The villain isn’t outside him anymore. There’s no system, no rival, no rich kid at the country club. The threat is his internal dialogue. The story used to be, can he beat the world. Then it became can he beat the rival. Now, it’s can he survive himself?

And he cannot.

In The Bear, Carmy is destroyed by himself, no one is trying to ruin him. The kitchen isn’t the enemy. The kitchen is the venue where his pathology stages itself, night after night, ticket after ticket. The walk-in is the confessional. Mastery doesn’t liberate him like it did Rocky, Maverick, or Alex Owens. It eats him.

In Breaking Bad, Walter White isn’t taken down by the DEA. He takes himself down. The pride. The lying. The need to be Heisenberg. The disease isn’t outside him. It’s the only thing inside him.

In Mad Men, Don Draper has every external success the eighties would have called victory. The corner office. The woman. The apartment. The suit. But he’s miserable anyway. The interior is the only territory left to lose, and he loses it.

In Fleabag, Phoebe Waller-Bridge looks directly at the camera and tells you what’s wrong with her. The fourth wall is the shame spiral, and we are her audience inside it. She doesn’t recover. She just gets funnier about not recovering.

Four shows. Four protagonists. The person and the villain are the same person, and the story is no longer about whether they win or lose. The story is about watching the implosion in real time.

We used to end the story when the hero won or lost. Now the hero ruminates into a shame spiral while we watch.

1999. Before Carmy

The man having a panic attack in the kitchen wasn’t Carmy.

It was Tony Soprano. The year was 1999.

The pilot of The Sopranos opens with a mob boss passing out at home then talking to a psychiatrist. That psychiatrist is Dr. Jennifer Melfi. The first long scene of the entire prestige-TV era is a man sitting across from his therapist.

Everything we just watched in The Bear, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, and Fleabag descends from that moment. Without Tony, no Don, Walter, or Carmy. The stories we are telling ourselves in 2026 started with a panic attack in a suburban New Jersey kitchen.

What The Sopranos legitimized was interiority as plot. Tony’s dreams mattered as much as the murders. His mother issues mattered as much as the FBI. The panic attacks were as much story as the gangland war. And who watched Tony was Dr. Melfi. Diagnostic and slightly suspicious.

We’ve all been in Melfi’s chair for twenty-five years. We’ve been watching prestige protagonists the way she watched Tony. Taking notes, looking for the wound, ruminating.

David Chase, who created the show, had been in therapy since his thirties. Dr. Melfi was based on his actual therapist. He believed in what he was depicting.

That makes what he did at the end of the show much harder to dismiss.

In the final season, Melfi reads a study. The study is real. The authors are real, Yochelson and Samenow, psychiatrists who studied the criminal mind for years. Their finding was that talk therapy doesn’t help sociopaths, it sharpens them. It makes them more skilled at the manipulation that defines them.

Melfi reads the study and thinks about Tony. Then she fires him.

Tony, stunned:

“We’re making progress! It’s been seven years!”

The American Psychoanalytical Association had given the show an award for its therapy scenes. Lorraine Bracco accepted it personally. Then the show ended with the therapist firing the patient for therapy-related reasons,

The craziest thing?

Real patients showed up at their real appointments the following week in real outrage. Therapists wrote responses. Some patients felt genuinely betrayed.

The fictional firing felt as if it had happened to them.

That should have been the moment.

2026: This isn’t about TV.

The Bear isn’t fiction. It’s a documentary about men today.

I have spent more hours listening to men talk about themselves than therapists ever will. I know what I’m watching when a man talks. There is a difference between processing something and rehearsing it, and I can tell the difference in the first sentence.

The men who get better stop talking about it. The men who get worse get better at describing it.

The whole therapy apparatus has it backward.

What Dr. Melfi realized is true. Therapy makes a sociopath a better sociopath.

It also makes an anxious person more anxious. It makes a sad person sadder. It makes a self-absorbed person exquisitely self-absorbed.

The mechanism is simple: staring at the wound under a magnifying lamp for an hour a week, fifty-two weeks a year, cannot produce anyone except a person more fluent in talking about their wound. It doesn’t heal the wound.

David Chase knew this in 1999. He told us in the first scene of the first episode. In the pilot of The Sopranos, Tony Soprano sits in Dr. Melfi’s office for the first time and says:

“Let me tell ya something. Nowadays, everybody’s gotta go to shrinks, and counselors, and go on Sally Jessy Raphael and talk about their problems. What happened to Gary Cooper? The strong, silent type. That was an American. He wasn’t in touch with his feelings. He just did what he had to do. See, what they didn’t know was, once they got Gary Cooper in touch with his feelings, they wouldn’t be able to shut him up. And then it’s dysfunction this, and dysfunction that, and dysfunction vaffancul!”

We didn’t hear him.

Gary Cooper made a movie about exactly this in 1952.

High Noon.

Marshal Will Kane has an hour before the bad men come on the noon train. He goes door-to-door asking the townspeople for help. They all have reasons. They have wives. They have children. They have businesses. They have feelings to work through. They have legitimate complications. Every single one of them stays inside.

The marshal walks into the street alone.

Men, I am speaking directly to you now:

You have to decide who you want to be.

You can be one of the townspeople, huddled in the church, in touch with your feelings. In touch with your fear.

Or you can be like Gary Cooper.

You don’t have to be Rocky in the ring or Maverick in the cockpit. That’s Hollywood.

I am talking real life.

You have to be the veterinarian in the back room.

The vet who put Carl down had to be feeling something. He loves animals, that’s why he became a veterinarian. But he didn’t ruminate on his sadness alongside my sadness. He didn’t process it out loud.

He did what he had to do.

He held everything together while a wreck of a woman said goodbye to her cat.

And I am incredibly, incredibly grateful for that man.

Author’s Note:

Carl came from a Phoenix shelter eight years ago. If this piece moved you and you’d like to leave a tip on my Buy Me a Coffee, mention his name in the message on BMAC. I’ll send half to the Arizona Humane Society and post the receipt on X.

(It’s not out of the question that my tongue MAY be in my cheek right now. Readers are encouraged to use their best judgment.)

It’s September 19, 1985.

The Senate Commerce Committee convened a formal hearing on the music industry. The Washington Post described a circus atmosphere in the Russell Senate Office Building, and the room was beyond capacity.

It started with a Black man. Tipper Gore, wife of a young Senator from Tennessee, bought her daughter a copy of Prince’s album Purple Rain. She heard the sexually explicit song Darling Nikki and decided the government needed to intervene and the Parents Music Resource Center was born.

The PMRC compiled the Filthy Fifteen. Prince was at the top, along with mostly white rock and metal artists such as Judas Priest, Mötley Crüe, and Twisted Sister. Three musicians testified in defense of artistic freedom: Frank Zappa, Dee Snider, and John Denver. The result was a sticker. Parental Advisory. That’s what the hearing produced and that’s what the mostly white artists got.

Then the machine turned toward rap. The language directed at women in N.W.A and 2 Live Crew’s catalogs was explicit, violent, and routine. Black women said so before anyone in Washington noticed. Queen Latifah said so. The women of Spelman College said so. bell hooks said so for years.

What happened next is a tale as old as time. White artists got a sticker. Black artists got handcuffs.

N.W.A’s Straight Outta Compton arrived in 1988. The language directed at women was even more explicit and obscene. The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation responded with a formal letter sent to Priority Records. The FBI had offically entered the conversation about a rap album.

2 Live Crew escalated. As Nasty As They Wanna Be was ruled legally obscene by a federal court in 1990. Retailers were ordered to pull it from shelves. Luther Campbell was arrested for performing his own music on a stage in front of adults who bought tickets. The full weight of American obscenity law had found its target.

Then Snoop and Dre arrived. The Chronic. Doggystyle. Parent groups mobilized. Radio stations pulled tracks. Editorial boards published warnings. Black culture was on notice.

Meanwhile, in Cleveland.

Polka arrived in America through the Central European immigrant communities that settled the industrial Midwest. Polish, Czech, Slovenian, and German working-class families brought the music with them to gritty blue collar towns like Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Chicago. It found its permanent home not in concert halls or recording studios but in Catholic parish halls and summer church festivals. The Church provided the infrastructure and the genre provided the entertainment. The arrangement persisted for decades without any outside examination.

She’s Too Fat Polka is the foundational document of polka’s treatment of women. A man offers his wife to another man for sex on the grounds of her physical dimensions. The woman’s weight gain is presented as the problem with the husband as the suffering party. The PMRC placed Bitches Ain’t Shit in the congressional record as evidence of a cultural crisis. She’s Too Fat Polka is still performed at Catholic Church picnics.

Who Stole the Kishka is a polka standard recorded by Frankie Yankovic in 1947. A kishka is a traditional Polish blood sausage made from meat stuffed into an intestinal casing. The song describes the missing kishka as “fat and round and firmly packed, hanging on the rack.” The phallic imagery is not subtle. Sir Mix-a-Lot’s 1992 hit Baby Got Back contains the lyric “my anaconda don’t want none unless you got buns, hun.” One of these songs prompted congressional oversight, cultural panic, and scrutiny from MTV. The other is performed at Catholic church picnics from Parma, Ohio to Manitowoc, Wisconsin to this very day.

The polka circuit has maintained a long and unexamined relationship with alcohol. In Heaven There Is No Beer has been performed at every polka festival in America for seventy years. Congress examined the relationship between malt liquor and Black communities with considerable thoroughness. St. Ides used Ice Cube to sell malt liquor to Black men. Jay-Z’s Ace of Spades and Old English 800 were entered into the public record as evidence of predatory marketing. The Schlitz-to-accordion pipeline has not been examined in any congressional proceeding, nor has it generated any moral panic. Schlitz, Pabst, and Old Style is still on tap at every summer festival sponsored by the Catholic parish through the upper Midwest. The silence is deafening.

You may be thinking that polka is a niche genre with a tiny audience.

You would be wrong.

In 1990 Home Alone was released in American cinemas and became one of the highest-grossing films in history. It plays on television every Christmas and can still be quoted by Americans of all ages coast to coast.

In the film, Kate McCallister, played by Catherine O’Hara, is stranded in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Every flight home to her son is booked and she is desperate. A stranger named Gus Polinski, played by John Candy, approaches her and offers her a ride. He is warm, friendly, and traveling with his band in a U-Haul headed toward Chicago. She feels safe enough to climb in without hesitation. A vulnerable woman alone at night decides that a man who plays polka is safe. The film agrees with her. The audience agrees with her. Nobody questions it for a second.

The Parish Hall

Polka did not exist near Catholic communities in the industrial Midwest. It existed inside them. The parish hall was the venue. The priest blessed the festival. St. Wenceslaus hosted the dance. St. Hyacinth tapped the kegs. The Church and the polka circuit were not parallel institutions. They were the same institution operating in different venues on the same day.

The Catholic Church’s position on women is a matter of public record spanning several centuries. It has never ordained a woman to its priesthood. Its teachings on female authority, female bodies, and female worth predate Polka’s fat wife gag by approximately two thousand years.

She’s Too Fat Polka played in rooms the Church built, on nights the Church organized, before congregations the Church defined. Yet the Parental Advisory sticker was placed on Prince albums instead.

The PMRC’s coalition included the National PTA and the American Academy of Pediatrics. It did not include a subcommittee on parish hall entertainment. The nave, the rectory, and the confessional are all on the same grounds as the dance hall and the beer tent.

It’s hard to overstate how much the Polka elites are intertwined with the Church. The names inducted into the International Polka Association Polka Hall of Fame read like the directory for St. Stanislaus Kostka Parish in Chicago’s Polish-dense Wicker Park Neighborhood.

The Wisconsin Silence

September 19, 1985. The room again.

Bob Kasten was a Republican senator from Milwaukee. German-American. Catholic. His constituency was the precise community where this music lived, was celebrated, and was passed between generations as cultural inheritance. He was present in Washington that day, making damn sure the kishka and the keg would remain absent from the congressional record.

The men who represented the most polka-dense constituencies in America said nothing about Frankie Yankovic. Nothing about Bobby Vinton. Nothing about the fat wife gag.

The accordion has remained unregulated throughout. Gus Polinski, the Polka King of the Midwest, remains at large.

America did not have a misogyny problem in music. It had a problem with who was making the music. The Catholic parish hall was always safe, and the kishka was always just a sausage.

Anyway, that’s the way I see it. What do you think?

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Up early, Greek yogurt, organic blueberries, and a handful of dark leafies in the blender. Protein, calcium, and tons of vitamins. Favorite workout gear, the Lululemons. Earbuds in. Stevie Nicks into Lana Del Rey and the rest of my personally curated playlist just for these walks.

Out the door into a beautiful Nevada morning. Cool air, sun just coming up, the kind of morning photographers hired by the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce wait for.

I walked my route. I breathed. Full inhales in, full out. I was, for approximately forty-five minutes, the woman I always intend to be. Healthy breakfast, steps in before 9.

Back upstairs for coffee in my Le Creuset French Press. Nectar, the color carefully selected to match the window treatments in my kitchen.

Then I looked at my Apple Watch.

The steps were wrong.

Way wrong.

Should be about 6000. It’s not even 300.

“God dammit,” I muttered under my breath.

Maybe I just need to hit the button once or twice. Get it to update.

Nope, nothing.

“Fucking cocksucker!” I snarled at the Watch.

The perfect morning died on the kitchen counter. Murdered by a step count not counted by a malfunctioning Apple Watch.

I wish I could tell you these moments are rare.

A Techie Comes to Town

January in Las Vegas means CES is in town. You know this because of the lanyards. Suddenly, everyone has one. Men and women moving through casino floors with somewhere to be and a badge that proves it. The cowboys were here a month ago. Now it’s the futurists. Same hotels, different crowds. Same city, completely indifferent to both.

He was at the Venetian bar with lanyard around his neck. Thirty or so. From Denver. Pleasant and genuinely happy rather than performing it. Techie, a wearables guy specifically, which meant he spent his days selling people devices that told them how their bodies were doing. He loved it. You could tell.

He had something pink and fruity in front of him and was nursing it with the focus of a man who didn’t need alcohol.

We were feeling each other out. Easy conversation and nothing urgent.

I mentioned, casually, that my Apple Watch had been acting up lately. I did not mention that I had called it a cocksucker a few weeks prior.

He asked if he could take a look.

Then the interrogation began. Did it used to work correctly? Yes. And it just stopped? Yes. Any changes to the watch itself? No. New phone maybe?

Yes, actually.

He nodded slowly. The nod of a doctor who has already diagnosed the problem but isn’t ready to tell you yet.

How often did you use it for step counting? Once a week maybe. Not religiously.

He was fiddling with it. Brow furrowed. Scrolling through the settings.

“You are right handed, right?”

“Yes,” but wondering how that could possibly matter.

“It got flip flopped when you paired it with your new iPhone.”

What got flip flopped?

He explained that when I synced the new iPhone, the handedness settings got flip flopped. A ten second fix once you know what you’re looking for. He walked me through it exactly. Precise and patient.

“If you wear it on your left hand and it thinks it is on your right, it can’t record the step count right. The vectors would be backwards.”

I laughed. He smiled, not entirely sure what was funny. Which was, itself, the funniest part.

Of course. The vectors were backwards, therefore it couldn’t properly count steps.

I was impressed.

And then quietly, privately, I was amused at being impressed. A man who knows what vectors are and where mine went. This is apparently what does it for me.

I thanked him. He waved it off. We talked about other things. He was good company. Smart, curious, enthusiastic about his work without being evangelical about it.

The watch was fixed. And we headed out.

A Cowboy Comes to Town

A month before the vectors got sorted, in December, Vegas belonged to a different crowd entirely.

The Wrangler National Finals Rodeo, the NFR, arrives every year. The Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association’s championship event. Ten nights. The Thomas & Mack Center. $17.5 million purse. The richest rodeo on earth. Sold out every single night for forty consecutive years.

You know the NFR is in town the same way you know CES is in town. Wrangler jeans at the blackjack tables. Justin boots on the Strip. Belt buckles the size of small plates that were not purchased at a gift shop. These were earned. There’s a difference and you can see it immediately.

Now, I have to be very vague here or some of you will get on Google and try to out this man for the sin of being a human being. I saw him during NFR week. He is a tie-down roper. One of the top money-winners in his discipline in the country, which is how you earn your spot at the NFR. That’s the only way in. You earn it over an entire season. Nobody gets a wildcard.

A calf is released from a chute. He chases it on horseback at full gallop, throws a loop over its head, his horse stops hard, he dismounts running, sprints to the calf, throws it to the ground by hand, and ties three legs together with a short rope called a piggin string. Then he throws his hands up.

World class time is around seven seconds.

I’ve been seeing him during this week for several years. His event was in two days. Which meant he was in maintenance mode. No alcohol. Clean food. Light movement. This is a professional athlete. Keeping the throwing arm warm without stressing it. His body had its own pre-competition protocol built over years of repetition. He didn’t consult it. He just lived it.

He is somewhere in his thirties. Big through the shoulders in a way that had nothing to do with a gym. He was just sitting there. Not on his phone. Not scanning the room. Weight fully committed to the chair the way people sit when they have nowhere else to be inside their own head.

We are talking in a public place. Easy. No agenda. Happy to see each other after 51 weeks.

At some point another man appears. Someone he knows from the circuit. A team roper competing the following day who wanted a warm up partner in the morning. Nothing strenuous. Just moving together, staying sharp, keeping the body connected before competition. He was asking as a friend. Casually. One professional athlete asking another professional athlete if he would help with his horses in the morning.

The tie-down roper considered it for a moment.

Not his phone. Not a watch. Not an app. Not a sleep score or a recovery metric or a readiness rating generated by an algorithm that had been tracking his biometric data.

Just a quiet inward check that took maybe half a second.

“I’ll see how I feel.”

Not depends on my rings. Not depends what my HRV says. Not depends if my sleep score cleared the threshold.

How he feels. Which he would know. In the morning. Because it had never once occurred to him to outsource that question to anything made of silicon and designed in Cupertino or anywhere else.

The other professional athlete nodded. That was a perfectly complete answer. The conversation moved on.

I was wearing my Apple Watch. The cocksucking Apple Watch that hadn’t yet had it’s vecters righted.

The Revelation

A few days after the vectors were turned back the right way or whatever, I had another perfect morning.

Up early. Greek yogurt, organic blueberries, dark leafies in the blender. Lululemons. Earbuds in. Stevie Nicks and Lana Del Rey. Out the door into a Nevada morning that was, again, beautiful. Cool air. Sun coming up clean over the desert.

I walked my route. I breathed. Full inhales, full exhales. I was, again, the woman I always intend to be.

Back upstairs. Coffee from the Le Creuset French Press. Nectar. Matches the window treatments.

I looked at my watch.

6,753 steps. Logged perfectly. Goal met before 9 a.m.

I stood there in my kitchen with my coffee and felt the small clean satisfaction of a morning executed correctly. Everything worked. Everything counted. The data was clean and the data was good and the data said I had done the thing I set out to do.

And then, I thought about that cowboy at a bar in December.

A tie-down roper. NFR week. Someone asked if he’d help a friend warm up the next morning.

Depends how I feel.

I stood there feeling like a complete buffoon with my coffee going slightly cold in my hand.

Not one moment of my perfect morning had depended on how I felt.

I felt the cool air, yes. I heard Stevie Nicks, yes. My legs carried me through a beautiful suburban Nevada hiking trail and the French press was hot and the kitchen smelled like coffee.

But none of that was the point. The point was the Watch. The point was the 6,753. The point was the rings.

The Watch was the morning’s real purpose and everything else, the air, the music, the smoothie, the good Lululemons, was just the context in which the Watch did its job.

I thought about the Denver guy. Pleasant, competent, genuinely kind. He fixed the watch in twenty minutes at a hotel bar with a pink drink in front of him. He knew exactly what was wrong and exactly how to fix it and he fixed it.

The vectors were backwards. Now they weren’t.

Problem solved.

Except the watch was never the problem.

I was the problem. I had somewhere along the way outsourced embodiment to the device.

The Part Where I Explain the Title

There’s a Greek word.

Anamnesis.

Plato used it. It means unforgetting. Remembering the thing you forgot.

Not learning something new. Remembering something you already knew before the world talked you out of it.

It’s idea that wisdom isn’t acquired. It’s recovered.

People spend a lot of money trying to get there. Ayahuasca retreats in Peru. Breathwork weekends in Sedona. Plant medicine ceremonies with integration coaches and pre-journey intention setting and post-journey processing circles. Cacao ceremonies conducted by wellness girlies in linen shawls who have Yelp reviews and hire professional photographers to curate their Instagram pages. Many thousands of dollars and a lot of purging in the dark to feel like the self they recognize, but they never quite get there.

But a fully embodied tie-down roper in a Las Vegas lounge answered a simple question about his morning plans and handed me the thing for free.

He didn’t forget. So he had nothing to recover.

“I’ll see how I feel.”

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My Gen X clients live by this lyric. My Gen Z clients have never heard it.

I’m a Millennial, sandwiched between the raw angst of Gen X grunge and the polished spectacle of Gen Z’s TikTok beats. Raised on the fringes of Gen X with two older brothers who lived by Pearl Jam’s every word, a transient father, and a drunk mom, it was more survival than suburban. I was one of the last latchkey kids to grow up in the 90s who’d go functionally extinct by the 2000s.

Years later, as a sex worker, I see those same generational divides play out in the most intimate setting possible, and the differences are stark.

Many of my clients are Gen X, men in their 45–55 or so with established careers and the resources to hire someone like me. But I see enough younger men to notice a pattern that goes beyond individual personality. It’s generational, and it reveals something fundamental about how masculinity has changed.

The Decisive One

He’s 52, rakes in gobs of money selling industrial refrigerants for a company you’ve never heard of. When he arrives, there’s no awkward small talk, no performance of casualness, just a warm hug and a big smile. He’s happy to see me and vice versa.

We both know what he wants and what he likes.

When I say yes, he proceeds with complete confidence. No second-guessing, no checking in every thirty seconds to make sure he’s “doing it right.” He knows what he wants and it’s been discussed plainly.

There’s no performance anxiety because he’s not performing. This wouldn’t seem remarkable except for what came later that same week.

The Validation Seeker

He’s 26, works in tech, also makes good money. Handsome, objectively successful, and not at all Asburgerey like many of his colleagues. And completely paralyzed.

“Is this okay? Do you like this? That good?”

Every few minutes. Sometimes more.

I reassure him. That’s part of the job. But it keeps happening. He’s constantly monitoring my facial expressions, searching for approval, treating intimacy like he doesn’t want to get a bad rating on his quarterly performance review.

It was endearing at first, but went on too long. He can’t be present because he’s too busy watching himself from the outside, judging his own performance against some invisible metric.

Even here, in a situation where he’s literally paying me to accept him exactly as he is, he needs external validation.

He couldn’t take off the mask even when there was no audience.

The Man Who Holds Contradictions

One of my regulars is 48, married for twenty years, sees me once a month or so when he’s in town for business. He talks about his family with genuine affection. Shows me photos of his kids without a trace of shame or cognitive dissonance.

He doesn’t need to explain himself or perform guilt. He’s not trying to justify the contradiction of loving his family and hiring me. He just accepts it.

“This is something I need that has nothing to do with how I feel about her” is his mentality.

That’s it. No elaborate rationalization. No therapy-speak about “needs not being met.” No mental gymnastics. A man comfortable existing in complexity and ambiguity.

Gen X men grew up in a world that didn’t demand they perform consistency at all times. Ronald Reagan talked about family values and his favorite TV show Little House on the Prairie. Meanwhile, hair metal bands wore more makeup than their groupies and Madonna dry humped the stage in a wedding dress on prime time TV. Contradictions were just life. They learned you can hold two opposing truths and still sleep at night.

The Performer

He’s 24, and from the moment he walks in, it’s like he’s directing a scene for an invisible Instagram story.

“Is this okay? Do you like this? That good?” Literally the same thing as the last guy. Every time.

He’s not asking because he’s filming. He’s asking because he’s so conditioned to curate every experience like it’s an Insta story. Even in private, he’s worried about how things look rather than how they feel.

At one point, he asks if a certain position “looks good.”

Not feels good. Looks good.

His worth is so tied to external metrics, how things appear, how they’d be perceived, that he can’t experience pleasure without wondering if it would photograph well.

When it’s over, he seems satisfied but also slightly anxious, like he’s waiting for likes, comments, and shares that will never arrive.

So what explains the difference? It’s not individual personality. It’s cultural. Gen Z grew up with ring lights and ‘Get Ready With Me’ videos, where even your morning routine is content to be optimized.

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What Changed

Gen X learned self-sufficiency because no one was watching. Latchkey kids with working parents, they came home to empty houses and figured shit out on their own. Privacy was the default, not a privilege you had to fight for.

They grew up before the internet put cameras in everyone’s pockets. What happened between people stayed between people. Mistakes weren’t permanent and there was no permanent record, no audience scoring your every move.

The music they grew up with reinforced this. Nirvana’s “oh well, whatever, nevermind” wasn’t apathy, it was defiance. “Our little group” was about self-sufficiency, about not needing validation from the outside world. You had your people, and that was more than enough.

The result: men who don’t need external validation because they never had a constant audience.

Gen Z never knew that world. They’ve been connected since childhood, always watched, always performing. Every moment potentially recorded, every interaction a chance to be judged by thousands of invisible observers.

They grew up when music became optimized for TikTok algorithms, when American Idol taught them that your worth is measured in votes and likes. Performance isn’t something you turn on for special occasions, it’s the baseline. Your follower count defines your value.

The result: men who measure their worth by external validation because they’ve never known anything else.

What Sex Work Reveals

Intimacy is where masks usually come off. It’s where people are supposed to be most vulnerable, most authentic. Where performance should be obsolete.

Gen X men drop the mask because they know what life was like before everything was a performance. They’re comfortable with contradiction and complexity. They don’t need me to validate their desires or their choices.

Gen Z men can’t take off a mask they don’t know they’re wearing. They’re so conditioned to perform that they do it unconsciously. Even paid intimacy becomes another curation, another performance to optimize. Will this look better letter boxed as a Reel, or a vertical Story?

As a sex worker, I see this more clearly than anyone. If a man can’t be authentic with someone he’s paying to accept him exactly as he is, where can he be authentic?

What’s Been Lost

This isn’t about blame. Gen Z didn’t choose to grow up with smartphones and constant surveillance. They’re products of their cultural moment, just like Gen X was shaped by being left alone.

But there’s a cost to performing all the time. You lose the ability to be present. Every moment becomes a referendum on your worth. The need for constant validation is exhausting, for them and for everyone around them.

Some of my younger clients are starting to notice. They’re tired. They want permission to stop performing, to just be without an audience judging every move.

Maybe that’s the beginning of something. Maybe Gen Z will figure out what Gen X knew instinctively, that authenticity isn’t something you perform for an audience. It’s what’s left when the performance goes away. Gen X learned from Nirvana to say “oh well, whatever, nevermind.” It wasn’t resignation. It was freedom. The freedom to exist without needing approval, to want what you want without justification, to hold contradictions without explanation.

Gen Z is still learning that lesson. The ones who figure it out? Those are the ones who walk out of my door without looking back, without wondering if they performed well enough, without needing me to validate that the experience was real.

Those are the ones who will actually be okay.

Forward to your parents.

Wires made of sugar cane fibers ran from the coconut headset to a radio transmitter made of woven grass and river stones. He talked into it, trying to communicate with aircraft overhead that would someday deliver supplies to the island.

He remained at his post for four hours. At the end of his watch, the relief controller climbed the ladder and took his place. A supervisor with a schedule made sure the tower remained manned at all times.

Below him was a runway cut out of the bush by hand, cleared, leveled, and lined with torches. Nearby, another unit drilled in formation. Someone called cadence, and the rifles had been carved out of wood for that sole purpose. They were not merely waving sticks around, they were conducting precision military drill.

This was serious work. Life and death survival. The goods had stopped coming, and the locals were doing everything possible to bring them back.

In 1942 the Americans had arrived. Espiritu Santo became one of the largest bases in the Pacific, hundreds of thousands of soldiers and sailors, ships and aircraft and jeeps and warehouses of tinned food, more manufactured goods in one anchorage than the archipelago had seen in its existence.

In 1945 the war ended and the Americans then drove the machinery off the pier and into the sea, engines running, one bulldozer pushing the next and went home.

Then nothing. No ships, no planes, no explanation.

So the work began.

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Consider what an indigenous man on a South Pacific island had actually seen.

Ships come in. They carry axe heads, cloth, tinned meat, rifles, and everything else required for a highly advanced civilization. He works in the coconut groves all day harvesting copra. The copra gets crated up and loaded onto the same ship that delivered the goods. Dried coconut meat goes out and refrigerators and brand new clothing come back.

There were no factories anywhere in the South Pacific, nor even a picture of one. So he watched the Europeans who had the goods to see what they did that he did not.

Once each week, the Europeans entered a special building and sat in rows facing forward. One man in a robe stood at the front and spoke at length while the others remained silent. Nobody was permitted to leave until he finished. At intervals they all sang together. Before leaving, a plate was passed through the building and everyone placed money on it. Nothing arrived while they were inside, but they came back the following week anyway.

A white man made several marks on a small rectangle of paper. He handed it to another white man, who gave him a rifle, or tinned meat, or perhaps a brand new pair of shiny black boots.

And every morning they raised a flag on a pole. The participants had their own phrase for putting up flags and poles. One expatriate observer wrote that he had seen a pumpkin hoisted up a pole for transmission to the ancestors.

Paper commands goods. A cloth is raised on a mast every morning, and the ships come.

None of this was a joke. All of it is documented in government files and in anthropologists’ notebooks. Every man on that strip was working on a serious problem, and it is one of the most extraordinary things people have ever done.

It went on for years. In some places, decades. There were meetings, leaders, even songs. The strips were maintained for years after they faithfully reproduced the airport from bamboo and cane fibers.

What the Experts Said

The administrators told the natives where the goods came from.

Goods come to the industrious. To the thrifty, the sober, the churchgoing. A man who works and saves and attends mass on Sunday will have things, and a man who does not will not. Character produces wealth. And these were serious people who had staked their lives on it and crossed an ocean to demonstrate it.

There is no factory in that story either. The officer collecting the tax could not have told you how a steel axe head gets made, any more than the man in the hills could. The tax was payable in cash and cash was obtainable only by working in the coconut groves.

So the theory made its own evidence. The men who worked got the goods, because working was the only door to the money, and the money was the only door to the goods. Anyone inside the arrangement who looked around would find the account confirmed.

July 21, 2026

Substack turned on an AI detector. Posts and Notes can get run through a tool built by a company called Pangram. Writing made by no one, the Substack founder said, pollutes the whole platform and makes it harder to hear human voices.

So a writer opens a piece he has already finished and reads it line by line.

Then he gets to work, just like the island men in the South Pacific did some 80 years ago. He removes a punctuation mark he likes from a sentence he wrote. He removes certain words. Not bad words, but words the model is fond of. Sentences that run too smoothly get roughened up. Sentences that are too rough get sanded down.

Then he takes a correct sentence and puts an error into it.

He works through it in a single pass, then reads it again to check his work..

He is rewriting his own words so that a stranger will believe a real person wrote them.

Being scanned is not something that happens to a piece. It is something someone does to it.

Substack does not run the detector on everything and post the results. An article sits there until a person decides to examine it. Then it gets a number.

The number is a percentage that says how much of it a machine wrote. Ninety-eight percent AI. Two percent AI. It arrives as a number accurate down to the single digits, which makes it look serious.

The list, the pass, the second pass to check the first.

Substack shipped a second feature alongside the detector. A writer can run the scan on their own draft, before publishing.

You paste the draft in and get your number about whether you exist.

Mine came back fine. What a relief.

And there is a third feature. A writer can attach a statement explaining how they made it.

One says: “No AI to see here, darlings.”

Someone else explains that he speaks his drafts into a transcript first, ten or fifteen minutes of talking, to ensure the words are his.

Then another says: “This involved a lot of hard, human work. Not AI!”

Statements, sworn to nobody, filed nowhere, answering to a charge that has not been brought.

And just like the Pacific Islanders of yore, the Substack writers have the theory too. The theory is that clean work finds readers. That if the piece is good and nothing about it trips a bot’s wire, people will read it. It is a good theory. It is also the only one available to them, because they cannot see what decides what anyone reads.

So they clean the piece, a few people read it, and the theory is confirmed.

Writers want to be read. That’s it.

And what does it take to be read?

Apparently, you open something you’re happy with, then take out the punctuation and words you like. Not because it was wrong, but because a machine might think it was.

It’s Not a Witch Hunt

Writers are being accused, that part is real. Not by Substack, by each other, in comments and in Notes and in quote-posts, on the evidence of a punctuation mark or a rhythm somebody found too even. The accusations hit hardest on people writing in a second language, whose English is careful and slightly formal, which is what the machine also produces.

And, the tool is wrong sometimes.

A false positive does not make someone doubt the detector. A writer watches a colleague get flagged for nothing, and he doesn’t think the tool is broken. He thinks he should check his own work.

Witch hunt is the word going around for this, and I understand why. But a witch had an accuser. Somebody named her in front of people, and there was a proceeding, and however rigged it was, there was a day in court and a verdict.

On Substack, nobody comes for the accused. There is no accuser, no charge, no date, and no proceeding.

And Yet:

Author’s Note:

How I really wrote this article:

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult

Phoenix, Arizona, in the summer. Hot and unforgiving.

I’m 10 years old, would have been ten and a half actually, running with the other kids around the neighborhood. Dusty knees, dirty clothes. Probably hadn’t taken a bath in a week, but didn’t care about it either.

I was a kid with an alcoholic mother, a father who was usually driving a semi truck or sleeping in the back of it somewhere on an interstate, and two older brothers who were supposed to have been looking after me but were barely equipped to look after themselves.

Nobody was cruel. Nobody was villainous. There was just not enough of anyone really there. Mom was usually sleeping, working, or drinking. Not always, but enough. What she wasn’t doing was looking after us. We weren’t technically neglected, just a little more feral than we should have been.

The old house had been abandoned for months. Phoenix in the ’90s was just starting its construction boom that would be ground zero for the housing collapse a decade later. Strip malls, big boxes, apartments, and row houses were going up everywhere.

The boom had reached our part of town. Older houses in the way were bought up, sealed with plywood, and eventually bulldozed over to be replaced by Applebeeses, Home Depots, and the rest of the impersonal chain stores.

This particular one had been boarded up for months and was waiting patiently for the bulldozer to arrive. No way in, but us kids wanted in! Not to steal or destroy, just curious kids left to their own in the middle of summer.

Where were the owners? Dead? Why would someone just leave an old house to get boarded up? Some paint, a few small repairs, and some landscaping, it looked to me like it would be a nice little house.

What was inside? The owner’s old belongings? What happened to them? Maybe there was something valuable we could take. We didn’t think of it as stealing. It was abandoned. Maybe there was something very valuable down there.

Cash, jewels, treasure!

Things a precocious ten-year-old couldn’t rule out.

My brothers were trying to pry some plywood off the front door frame. Another neighborhood kid was working on the window next to it. No luck there.

I walked around to the back. I found a way in! It was one of those old-style stucco bungalows. One of the few houses in Arizona that had a basement, a tiny one-room cinderblock storage area. A utility cellar with a single horizontal window just above ground level. The glass was gone, and it hadn’t been boarded up. A straight shot into the house.

I could see some old rickety shelves in the back, but it was too dark to see what was on them. But it looked shadowy, like something was still stored on the shelves.

I had to find out what it was! And most importantly, I had to get there before my brothers, that way any treasure would be all mine!

I could see the floor. A little anyway. It didn’t look too far down, and didn’t look like anything was in the way. I rolled onto my stomach and started shimmying down feet first. I was just about to jump. Not recklessly. Curiously.

One last look over my shoulder to look at the cement floor below.

The ground was hot. Not warm. Hot. Phoenix-in-the-summer hot. Touch anything dark that has been in the sun, and you risk a burn bad enough to leave a blister. It was cooler in the cellar, though. The cool air felt good on my calves as I shimmied down a little further.

A sudden bark exploded out of the darkness.

A dog.

A huge, mean dog. From out of the dark corners of the basement room.

One loud, sharp bark just as I turned my head to look. The dog was running up to the window and lunged at me. I felt the heat of its breath when it barked and felt the little droplets of spit on my legs. She looked evil. Black, oily, matted fur, enormous fangs, and bright red, fiery eyes glaring right through me.

She appeared out of nowhere. The room was tiny. Just a single small basement room. I could see every corner of the room from the window, and there was no dog a moment ago. But there she was now. Lunging and snarling with hot breath, I could feel coming to tear me to shreds.

I pulled myself out of the window and ran.

Fast. As fast as I could. Faster than I could. I didn’t scream. I didn’t make a sound. There was no time to scream, just me getting out of there as fast as I could.

A few minutes later, I was home, in my backyard. I remember my heart was POUNDING. Harder than I had ever felt it before. The pounding literally audible to me. And the breathing. Not out of breath. Not winded. Huge involuntary inhales and exhales, in and out, to the rhythm of a hidden metronome. Still completely terrified.

It was not a normal stray dog. It was something supernatural. Something evil, pure evil. A Demon Dog. I remember the eyes the most. Red and piercing. The sounds of the barks and snarls were still echoing in my ears.

It’s been about thirty years since I first saw that Demon Dog. I still think about her visiting me on that hot day thirty years ago.

I’ve never told anyone about her until now. Never mentioned her to a soul.

What was she? Who was she?

A real Demon Dog from the fiery pits of hell? Perhaps.

A figment of a child’s imagination? Who knows? But it was real at the time.

I’m a hornet’s nest poker. I always have been. I can’t help it. Fears are meant to be overcome. Usually.

Phoenix, 2016.

I was still relatively new to sex work. Sugar dating. I was careful but not paranoid.

This man reached out online. Polished profile. Decent photos. Seemed professional. We exchanged a few messages, then moved to text. He wasn’t what I would call creepy, just standoffish. I thought maybe he was just nervous. We agreed to meet for coffee first, the way I always did back then. Public place, daylight, no commitment.

The coffee date was fine. He was presentable. Conversation was easy enough. I remember thinking he seemed okay. Not safe exactly, but not dangerous either. Just a guy. We talked for maybe an hour. We made plans to meet a few days later at a hotel downtown.

He’d Venmo me before I arrived, we agreed on an amount, and I went home thinking nothing much about it.

That afternoon rolled around. No Venmo yet, but he still had time. On the drive over, I kept checking my phone. Nothing. The meeting time was getting close. Then a text. Something about Venmo not cooperating. Technical issues. But not to worry, he had cash.

I pulled into the parking lot, walked into the lobby, found the elevators and pressed the button for his floor. The hallway was long and quiet. About five doors away from his, I stopped and turned back towards the elevator.

Then that same sensation of her hot breath on the back of my legs. I knew she was there. I didn’t even turn around to look.

I just walked back to the elevators.

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“I just said I’m broke, okay? What the fuck do you want me to do? I’m fucking broke!”

It was unsettling to witness.

I could feel it building for the last five minutes.

“There’s nothing I can do! What the fuck do you expect!”

Now it’s more than unsettling.

Terrifying.

He’s ten feet away from me.

I was alone at a diner in Las Vegas, about to head back to Phoenix. Didn’t take long as a sex worker to realize I could make a lot more money in Vegas.

“I’M! FUCKING! BROKE!”

I’m the closest person to him.

And I have a huge wad of cash in my purse.

He doesn’t know that, though. But I’m thinking he does.

Another outburst. I can’t even remember what he said this time, but it was vulgar.

Casino-adjacent, fluorescent, vinyl. Late morning. A diner.

He was alone. A local. Not dressed up. Not put together. Needed a shave and a haircut. A man can grow stubble in a week. Needing a haircut takes months. He had not had a calm enough week to sit in a barber chair for twenty minutes in a long time.

He had his phone in his hand.

He wasn’t talking to this woman. He was yelling at her.

I’m broke, okay? What the fuck do you want me to do? I’m fucking broke!

He hung up.

He dialed again.

His voice changed.

In control now. Alpha male energy. Competent. He was a man with a system.

Now he’s talking about lines and college basketball and tonight’s spreads to another man on the other end.

The man on the other end was the bookie. You could tell because the conversation had the rhythm of two men who knew each other and were doing business. The whole thing took maybe thirty seconds. Three seconds between the hang-up and the second dial.

By the time he was talking about Saturday’s game he was a different man wearing the same disheveled body.

He put the phone down. He stirred his coffee. He looked normal again.

I paid my check and got out as fast as I could without making a scene.

I thought about him for years.

Sometimes I feel things sitting deep in my gut. A greasy fear/rage hybrid.

I am not sure what it is, but whatever it is, he felt it in him that day too.

He could not be civil to his wife or girlfriend or whatever that poor woman called their relationship. He could be charming to his bookie. The difference was who was on the other end of the line.

He couldn’t hide from her. She knew what he was. She had watched him become the man with the unshorn hair and the perpetually empty bank account.

She had a record of his actual behavior.

With her, the performance failed. With her, the performance had been failing for years.

The yelling was what came out after the performance failed.

The bookie did not know what he was. The bookie thought he was a guy with a system. The bookie was not a witness to his ruined life.

So he could be a player on that call. He could be a high roller. He could be the person he wanted to be. A man with an abundance of money to play with.

He wasn’t a cruel man. Nor a weak man. He was just a man whose body could not bear the truth of who he was before the person who knew it.

So he saved his energy for an audience that didn’t.

I have a regular.

He works in enterprise software sales for a company whose products you will use today. Seven-figure commissions sometimes. He comes to Vegas a few times a year.

He pays me more than anyone else. It started at $10,000 a night. Then got a bit bigger.

When we first met he knew $3,000 would easily close the deal. He knew $1,000 would’ve likely closed the deal as well.

He has known for years. He pays way more anyway. He’s probably bought me half a condo so far.

He is kind to me. He asks how I am. He remembers things I told him eighteen months ago. We have been doing this for five years. The relationship is as real as any other.

But he gets something from the overpayment that has nothing to do with me.

The hunter who killed the antelope did not keep the antelope. He gave it away. His brain paid him in chemistry for the gift. That circuit is hundreds of thousands of years old. It is in all of us. It rewards the man who can distribute his surplus to a face he has chosen.

The antelope had to be distributed. There wasn’t any way to keep it for oneself. There was no freezer to put it in and consume it slowly for the next month. So evolution built a system to distribute the scarce resource efficiently.

My regular cannot fire that circuit anywhere else in his life. Money arrives on schedule en masse and his body has stopped registering it. His charity disappears into nonprofits where there is no recipient he can see. His wife is the household economy. She is not a gift event. She used to be, years ago. Now bestowing diamond rings, Range Rovers, and Louis Vuittons on her is just the baseline.

The chimp in him does not understand Venmo either. But the chimp loves handing over a big fat envelope to a specific woman in a suite at The Wynn.

He is not buying me. He’s not even buying sex. He is buying the feeling of being the man who pays ten when three would do. The overpayment is the ritual, and I am the witness it requires.

And he is kind. The kindness is not a cover, it’s genuine. The kindness is also chemistry. The two things are not separable in his body, and they don’t need to be separable for me.

He could not tell you any of this. He has a simpler story. He likes me, end of story. He is right, but he is also doing something our species has been doing for a very long time, and he doesn’t know it.

I have another regular.

He is wealthy but not like the other guy. He comes to Vegas a few times a year. I get dressed to the nines. We get a fancy steak dinner. He takes me to a show. Cirque de Soleil or something. Jerry Seinfeld once.

We do some gambling. We go upstairs. What happens upstairs is amazing for him. I make sure he has a great time. The pattern is the pattern.

Then one night, he hit.

$15,000 on a slot machine. Once in a lifetime. The kind of hit you tell your friends about, with the picture of the screen.

But I bet he makes $15,000 a week sometimes. Fifteen thousand is not going to move the needle in a meaningful way.

But the casino designed that moment. The bells were louder than the spin. Loud and shrill. The lights were brighter than they needed to be. But the bells and lights were not for him. They were for the rest of the floor, so that everyone else on the casino floor got a small dose of his win and stayed at their own machines.

The bell is marketing. But the bell is also pharmacology, and he was the patient.

His salary cannot give him that feeling. His paycheck arrives every other Friday, and the body has discounted the schedule. The body wants the surprise. Vegas sells him the chemistry his salary cannot.

He’s ecstatic. He grabbed a fistful of chips and gave them to the cocktail waitress. He didn’t count them. The not-counting was the display. The waitress caught the chips. I am going to guess $500. She flashed me a split second knowing smirk as if to say, “I know what all three of us are here, too.”

He did not.

He was generous for the rest of the night. A Blackjack dealer got tipped heavily. The maitre d’ got fifty. I got a bump on a rate that did not need one. He bought a round at the bar for strangers.

He was warm to everyone. He bro-hugged another man who won at the blackjack tables later. He laughed loudly with people he did not know. He was a thousand-watt floodlight.

On a normal night he is here with me. On this night he was there with everyone.

We went upstairs.

The two hours slow sensual lovemaking he wanted were going to have a problem. His nervous system was juiced to the gills. His sympathetic nervous system was fully in charge.

I tried to relax him by giving him a back massage first, but it was like fighting a brush fire with a tin cup and a teaspoon.

He won fifteen thousand dollars and it ruined the night.

He had paid for the win in a currency he did not know he had. The casino paid him in dopamine. The casino charged him with adrenaline.

For everything Vegas gives, it exacts a price in return.

He had to settle for a 30-second jackrabbit-style handjob with half a hard on that he could have gotten downtown for $50.

On the Las Vegas strip, the house always wins.

People call it fight-or-flight, but that’s wrong. The body doesn’t fire that chemistry only when something bad happens. It fires it whenever something big and unexpected happens.

Something salient.

The bell goes off. The screen lights up. The crowd turns to look. The amygdala does not know it’s just a number on a slot machine. The amygdala screams, “Huge surprise! Mobilize now!”

For three hundred thousand years, that mobilization was useful. The hunter who killed the antelope had to drag it three miles home. The gatherer who found the honeycomb had to climb the tree and get to work. The forager who found the blueberry patch had to run home to tell the others before the other band of humans on the other side of the ridge could find it.

The body’s alarm fired and the body discharged the alarm through physical action. By the time you were back to camp for the night the chemistry had run its course and you could sit by the fire and eat and hold your mate.

Sex is the opposite chemistry. Sex needs the body slow, parasympathetic, the breath low, the pulse settled. You can be ready to fight a saber-tooth tiger at the cave entrance, or you can make slow sensual love to a woman. You cannot do both. The body cannot have both circuits open at once.

That was the chemistry I was working against. He had won fifteen thousand dollars and his body thought something salient had happened. His body was primed for hard physical work. It did not want to be touched gently in a quiet room.

The casino was the first to figure this out.

The variable-ratio reinforcement schedule was perfected on the casino floor in the seventies and eighties, decades before anyone in Silicon Valley had heard of it. The near-miss rate was calibrated. The bells and whistles were tuned. The carpet was designed to be slightly disorienting so you would keep walking. The clocks were removed. The drinks were free. The chips were designed not to feel like money.

In the 1970’s, math wizards sat in an office building up in Reno and figured this out. 20 years ago, their intellectual descendants sat in cubicles in Silicon Valley and copied their work.

The notification is the bell. The like is the small win. The pull-to-refresh is the slot machine pull. The variable-ratio reinforcement schedule that took the casino fifty years to perfect is now in everyone’s pocket.

Vegas at least posted the math on the wall. Vegas at least told you the house always wins. Vegas was the honest version of the chemistry trade. Vegas put up the neon and the bells and the warnings and the cocktail waitresses in little slinky outfits and announced itself as a chemistry trade.

The casino used to be only in Las Vegas. Now it’s ubiquitous.

The exchange rate is the same in both places. Dopamine in. Oxytocin out. Every notification is a payout. The cost is in the column you cannot see.

The cost is the bedroom at eleven, where you cannot put it down. The cost is the conversation at dinner you only half-heard. The cost is the friend you have not called back because the chemistry of a text is enough to satisfy the circuit. The cost is the accumulated absence in every relationship that requires patience and presence.

The gambler in the diner yelled at his wife. You don’t yell at her. You just don’t look up anymore.

The chemistry is the same. The chimpanzee brain is the same.

The phone in your hand is your bookie now.

You have been kind to your phone and short with the person across the table. You have come home from the screen unable to be present. You have failed someone you love because your nervous system was occupied elsewhere, thinking whatever happened on that stupid app mattered. That it was salient.

You may have even settled for a half-assed handjob from your wife because you were just in a fight in the comment section of a Trump meme some dude you went to high school with posted on Facebook.

That’s if you’re lucky.

More than likely, you just jerked off in the shower at 6:45 the next morning before work.

I live in Las Vegas.

I’ve seen what this lopsided chemistry trade does to men.

And it’s not just Vegas. You can see it everywhere there is a lopsided chemistry trade.

For the last 15 years we’ve all been carrying it around with us in our hands.

We are all living on the Las Vegas Strip now.

I am a freshman in college sitting at one of those bright yellow molded plastic tables studying for the final exam for Intro to Film Studies.

My study partner and I had spent the whole semester in that class together. Now we were drilling flashcards. On the exam we would be expected to explain what Welles was doing with the ceilings and what Eisenstein was doing on the steps.

Somewhere in the stack he put the cards down.

He said the class had been a waste of time. Not because he was failing it. He had done the reading and would ace the exam. It was a waste because he actually wanted to go to Hollywood and make movies. But he had no interest in making the next Citizen Kane. He didn’t want to build the Odessa steps. He wanted to make movies like American Pie and Napoleon Dynamite. The heirs to the John Hughes classics like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Home Alone, and Sixteen Candles.

Movies that were fun!

And you could watch every film on the syllabus twice and diagram every shot and none of it got you one inch closer to Ferris Bueller. That effortless John Hughes style.

John Hughes wasn’t on any flashcards. The exam didn’t ask about him. The whole semester had been vocabulary for the other kind of movie, the cathedral kind. His kind didn’t need any of that. His kind you could just make.

I remember thinking he was right. We quizzed each other on Kuleshov until the library closed, aced the exam, then he focused on making the type of movies he really wanted to make.

From 2000s Tempe to 1528 Italy

In 1528 Baldassare Castiglione published an instruction manual for courtiers. The skill at the top of his list was concealment. Whatever you do, make it appear effortless, almost without thought. No word existed for this, so he invented one. Sprezzatura. He named the sin on the other side too. Affettazione. Visible strain. A courtier could survive scandal, debt, and exile. He could not survive being seen trying.

Castiglione was honest about what he was teaching. It’s a deception. You work brutally hard, then you perform as though it’s effortless.

Frank Sinatra knew how to do this. He sang behind the beat like he was born there. Fred Astaire rehearsed until dancing looked like walking. Willie Nelson, too. He falls behind in one line, then catches back up later. But he always lands it back exactly where it was always going. He has been doing this since the ‘50s and has never lost the song once. Casual listeners hear an old man who can’t quite sing, but Jazz musicians revere him. Both are hearing the same thing.

Musicians have a great line for it: You have to know exactly where the beat is to sing nowhere near it.

The karaoke singer who copies Willie without that same intuition just sounds bad.

Same misread as my old friend and I in that film class.

From Castiglione’s Court to the Eighties Studio

Nobody could fake Sinatra’s effortlessness. The only way to sound like the work had vanished was to have done the work. That was what sprezzatura rested on. The effort was hidden, but real.

Then the studio learned to manufacture it. Gated drums. Quantized takes. Machinery that made whoever stood in front of it come out lacquered and polished. For the first time, mastery and its evidence were separate.

Polish stopped meaning skill. Effortless no longer proved anything about the person delivering it.

Eventually, people stopped trusting the polish.

Then Seattle

The correction arrived from the Pacific Northwest. Distorted guitars. Feedback. Cracked voices. Flannel that had been slept in and smelled of armpits and weed. The message underneath was simple: Enough with the hairspray.

Grunge was honest. Not because the musicians were purer people, but because the only product was the music.

The 80s were polished, sanitized, and overproduced. By the 90s, if you went to a concert and by the end of the set the guitars weren’t at least a little out of tune, that meant something had gone wrong. In the previous era, out of tune was a malfunction. At a Nirvana show, in tune was.

But Cobain & Vedder, et al. never cultivated the mess. They were visibly allergic to the machinery of the 80s. That’s what made the middle phase honest. The seams were showing because nobody was hiding them, not because somebody had installed them.

Grunge didn’t invent the worn-out look, it’s been around forever. Willie Nelson has been playing the same Martin N-20 classical guitar with a hole worn clean through the top, right where his pick has been landing for 60 years. Nobody at any factory made that hole. No machine aged it. Sixty years of picking and strumming did it, one night at a time. The man who spends his whole career hiding the effort carries the one object in American music that shows every hour of it.

After Seattle

In the 90’s, corruption came from the audience, not the artists. Eighteen months after Nevermind, runway models were walking grunge collections.

Then the jeans started arriving pre-torn. Hems frayed at the factory. Whole industrial facilities were built to age denim, washing machines full of pumice stones, pants tumbling toward a history they never had. Furniture showrooms sold new tables beaten with chains so they’d look inherited. Fender started selling brand-new Stratocasters with the wear already installed, cigarette burns, belt-buckle scars, the finish worn away where decades of forearms never rested. A factory-made brand new guitar, worn like Trigger, but counterfeited, sold at a premium.

Not fake products. Fake history.

Ugly Crying Goes Mainstream

February 1997.

Mary Tyler Moore walks out as a surprise guest on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Mary Richards was the reason a young reporter named Oprah Winfrey believed a single woman could have a broadcasting career. She’d watched every Saturday night. Now she’d built an empire on composure in front of a camera, twelve seasons of it, and it collapsed in about four seconds. Oprah dissolved, on air, in front of the person whose existence had produced the composure.

She banned surprises on her own set after that. The rule stood for the rest of the show’s run. The most beloved moment in the show’s history, and her professional response was to make sure it could never happen again.

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She spent years retelling it, and she gave the phrase its definition: the ugly cry happens when you’re trying not to cry. Your face goes into all those contortions, trying not to cry.

Read her definition again. It is, literally, the authentic cry.

Before the feed, that cry had an audience of whoever was in front of you. There was no second kind of crying because there was nothing to compose for. You don’t need a word for the real one until the other one exists.

May 2008.

Google searches for “ugly cry” spike, and the spike isn’t Oprah. It’s Kim Kardashian’s face. One episode of a reality show, a genre whose entire product is manufactured real moments. Her face doesn’t circulate as a feeling. It circulates as a meme, an image detached from whatever produced it, shared for the contortions. Eleven years earlier, the phrase named something a woman couldn’t help. Now it’s memed. The phrase went viral at the exact moment it stopped referring to an emotion and started referring to an image of one.

The joke was at Kim’s expense, and the family absorbed it the way they absorbed everything, because they were the first family to understand that the product wasn’t the show. The show was the ad. The product was them. Years later Kim put the crying face on merch and sold tons of it.

June 2010.

The iPhone gets a front-facing camera. Steve Jobs announces it as FaceTime hardware, the videophone the future had always promised, a window to someone you love. He specs it at 0.3 megapixels. A throwaway. The word selfie is still three years from existing.

The freshmen at the library table. The studios doing the math on Ferris Bueller. The casual listener hearing an old man who can’t quite sing. Teenagers at a mall in 1998 buying a brand new pair of faded and torn jeans. Steve Jobs, holding the future in his hand, missing what it was for.

October 2010.

Four months after Jobs gave us the front-facing camera, Instagram launches. And the audience came with a score. Likes were a public number on your life, and numbers train behavior faster than any critic. Within months, people learned what earned. Golden hour. Brunch from above. The searches start climbing, and they climb for six years, straight through the stretch where posting became a profession, sponsorships arrived, and the FTC showed up to regulate it. You don’t regulate a hobby.

August 2016.

Instagram Stories launched. By then the grid had become a trophy case. Every post had to be worthy of it, and people were posting less. Stories enticed the audience to come back daily, that was the whole pitch. Ephemeral. Casual. Disappears in a day. The unpolished you. And it became the primary stage for the polished unpolished. The format sold as the escape from performance turned into the venue for staging it.

The chart peaks at Stories. Then it settles into a plateau it has never left. Nobody is searching for something new anymore. It’s vocabulary. It’s a thing you do.

By 2020 the crying video had conventions as fixed as a sonnet’s. Front camera, in the car or against the headboard. No makeup, with the no-makeup shown. The chin wobbling held for a split second before speaking.

“Sorry, I told myself I wasn’t going to do this”, addressed to an audience the crier turned the camera on for. The cry Oprah defined by its unstoppability now gets a second take.

The rest of the shelf filled in fast.

Tape hiss is a plugin now. Somewhere in a mastering suite a professional gets paid to install the evidence that nobody was paid.

The apology moved to the notes app, gray text, I’m still learning, posted at the strategic hour.

Privacy became an announcement. We’re keeping this off social, posted to social.

Grief got a template and a deadline. The memorial post, the photo choice, I don’t have the words followed by four hundred words, composed while the phone is still warm from the call, because silence on the feed reads as not having loved enough.

The jeans arrived pre-worn.

The breakdown arrives pre-shot.

And there is no Seattle anymore. Any revolt against the feed has to be staged on the feed, which means it arrives as content, which means it’s already merchandise.

Nobody Is Lying

Every fraud story we know how to tell has a liar in it.

Enron had executives who knew, then shredded what they knew.

Madoff defrauded investors every day for decades, one man, one confession, then 150 years in prison.

Elizabeth Holmes knew her machines didn’t work and demoed them anyway.

Milli Vanilli was two men who didn’t sing, and the Grammy was physically taken back.

Jussie Smollett hired his own attackers and left a paper trail.

Liar, exposure, verdict. Five times.

This fraud has no liar. The whole thing is the lie.

The woman crying into the front camera is genuinely sad. She also checked the framing, rehearsed the chin-shaking, and picked the take, and at no point in that process did she experience herself as deceiving anyone. She was presenting her real sadness well. That’s what everyone believes they’re doing: presenting real things well.

Any individual you point at can produce the receipts. She really was crying. He really was at the gym at 5 a.m. The grief was real, the vacation was real, the promotion was real. Every artifact survives a fact-check. The lie is a property of the aggregate only. It exists only at the level of the whole. A rigged election where every individual ballot is legitimate.

I still keep in touch with my study partner from that semester. He made it to Hollywood. He works in the film industry, actually works, on real productions.

A few weeks ago I met up with him at his office in Hollywood. I asked him what the hardest thing to shoot is. He didn’t say the crane shot. He said people talking, when it has to look, sound, and feel natural.

I was barely a teen and my brothers and I were put on an airplane headed for O’Hare for our annual summer trip to Grandma’s. The city was absolutely nuts. Chicago was mourning the loss of one legend and celebrating the birth of another. Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire were locked in a dead heat for the single season home run record. Every Cubs uniform had a little caricature of Harry Caray stitched on the sleeve, and every win was dedicated to him.

Nationally, a White House intern was on every TV screen in America. Cable news was young and feral. Three networks elbowing each other on the same story for the first time in history, none of them quite sure yet what they were inventing.

Me, Fox News, and MSNBC were all going through puberty together.

The Kitchen Table

In a bungalow on the North Side, three generations of Czajkiewiczes sat around the dining room table eating Grandma’s pierogies. Old Styles for the adults. Mountain Dews for the kids. WGN played the Cubs in the next room. Some celebrity in the booth butchered Take Me Out to the Ballgame. It may have been Bill Murray but can’t say for sure. The whole summer is fuzzy that way.

My uncle shook his head and laughed, “Harry would’ve loved this.”

That’s how I learned who Harry Caray was. Introduction by eulogy.

Then the blue dress jokes started.

Most of them came in on an AOL forward my aunt printed off and brought over. About fifteen sheets of white paper stapled at the corner, the corners already curling. Grandma laughed at a blow job joke that traveled through seventeen Fwd: Fwd: Fwd: subject lines to land in the same kitchen she’d been making gołąbki in since 1965.

The phrase jizz stain was said at the dinner table.

I don’t remember the joke, but I sure remember the phrase.

I was laughing along with everyone else a half beat behind. But laughing nonetheless.

I was at the adult table for the first time. David Letterman, Jay Leno, and the rest of the country were right there with me.

The Van

Early the next morning, us three refugees from the desert and three cousins got ready to set out on a road trip. We were given my uncle’s white work van. It only had the two front seats, so my cousins bungee corded three lawn chairs to the side walls and threw an old bean bag in the back for me.

Next to me was a cooler full of Grandma’s kielbasa on hard roll sandwiches and a case of Mountain Dew. Across from me was a boom box, hardwired directly to the van battery and nestled atop two sleeping bags to keep the CD player from skipping. With Green Day’s Dookie queued up, five young men and their wide-eyed blonde haired mascot headed west.

Rural Illinois rolled past.

In Arizona, grass grows where you pay for it to grow. Golf courses mainly. Irrigated and perfectly manicured.

Not in Illinois.

The corn seemed to grow so fast it was noisy. Grass, weeds, and shrubs grew everywhere and in every direction. I had never seen plants act so aggressively before. I may as well have been on another planet, and sat in the bean bag wearing half a smirk, saying nothing, and observing everything.

At a rest stop somewhere a few miles east of the Mississippi, my brother mentioned that at some point we’d have to stop at an ATM.

Two of my cousins stopped dead in their tracks, looked at each other, and started laughing.

“Oh, no. No. You gotta wait ‘til Iowa. I’m not gonna ruin it. Just wait.”

“Ya trust us,” said my other cousin, “We should definitely wait until we get to Iowa to stop at an ATM.” like they knew something we didnt.

My brothers joined in on the laughter and looked at each other. “Sounds like we should wait.”

The Farm

My other aunt, my Grandma’s only daughter, had moved to Iowa to go to college, met a man there, and they settled on a farmette just outside Dubuque. Two more cousins lived on the farm, a boy and a girl this time.

I had been promised a bed in the house. The boys would be on the living room floor if it rained, or in tents on the lawn if it didn’t.

The van pulled in around noon. Sunny skies.

My uncle and the boy cousin were already in the yard. A couple tents were set up along with a picnic table and a case of beer stacked on top. A croquet set was being hammered into the lawn.

And draped across the front of the barn, in full view of anyone pulling into the driveway, was a Miller Genuine Draft branded banner that read WELCOME TO THE IOWA STATE FAIR.

I can only imagine where that came from. Benign alcohol-fueled country boy shenanigans of sort I am sure.

I had been promised a bed in the house. They were throwing me a fair.

Dubuque

The next morning, after a breakfast of pancakes and sausages, two more cousins climbed into the van with us. The boy cousin sat on the cooler and hung on for dear life. The girl took the bean bag with me.

Eight of us, headed to Dubuque for a day trip.

Fifteen miles outside Dubuque is not fifteen miles outside Chicago. The road went through bluffs. The air got humid. Then the Mississippi opened up underneath us, and for an Arizona kid who had only ever read about it in a textbook, it wasn’t a river. It was the river.

The plan was the Fenelon Place Elevator, the world’s shortest, steepest scenic railway, according to the brochure. From the top you could see three states. After that, the locks, watching barges work their way through the river and soft serve somewhere. A full day of midwestern kitschy tourism.

But first, the bank.

My 19 year old brother had to withdraw the last 80 dollars he had to his name. A sizable sum in 1998, and plenty more than we needed.

The cousins from Chicago turned to the cousins from Iowa.

“We gotta show ’em the Shazams!”

The farm kids burst into laughter. “YES!”

ATMs still came in regional brands in 1998. It wasn’t just Visa and Mastercard. New Yorkers had NYCE. Angelenos had STAR. Back home in Phoenix ours said CACTUS. Iowa had SHAZAM.

We stopped at a gas station with a SHAZAM machine just inside.

On the front of the machine where you insert the card was a small instructional cartoon type drawing. A hand holding an ATM card, just showing you how the magnetic strip needed to be oriented.

The card had a name printed on it.

Richard Mozzarella.

This time, we all burst out laughing together.

The Ode

In August of 1998 I was still a little wet behind the ears. Today, I am staring down the barrel of what could be considered middle age.

SHAZAM rebranded sometime in the early 2000s. The machine I saw in that Dubuque gas station has been scrapped, salvaged, or sitting in a landfill somewhere in Iowa for twenty years.

Somewhere in the 1990s, a graphic designer in the Midwest sat down at a drafting table and wrote Richard Mozzarella on an instructional diagram. He got it through approvals and watched it ship to every ATM in Iowa.

I wonder if he told everyone he knew what he did, or if he kept it a secret.

Hat tip to you, sir. Wherever you are.

You did not just sneak a dirty joke past a bank. You handed it to a girl from Arizona standing in a gas station in Dubuque, and she has been laughing about it ever since.

The Ask

I have looked but I have found no photograph of the cartoon hand and the magnetic strip and the name on the card.

Does anyone out there remember Richard Mozzarella?

Better yet, does anyone have a photograph of him?

If you do, drop it in the comments.

Richard Mozzarella, the fictional ATM user from Iowa circa 1998.

Setting up. I cleaned my whole condo on Thursday. It’s spotless. It feels so peaceful here with it clean. I lit the candle a few minutes ago. The white one in the ceramic holder. Unscented. I want everything to be pure.

I am wearing a new linen shawl. I bought it last week. This soft oatmeal color, but earthier. The woman in the store said it was made in Nepal. No Tags.

The tea is steeping. Ginger and the mushrooms. I am not eating today. I had a piece of toast yesterday at dinner and then an apple early this morning. My stomach is quiet.

The playlist is ready. I found one on Spotify. It is eight hours long. Someone named Liam made it. The cover is a photo of a drum.

3:52 p.m.

The notebook is open. I am using the Moleskine I just bought. I know just the pen to use. Mont Blanc. A Silicon Valley exec gave it as a gift a few years ago. I remember him saying he went to Peru for a journey once.

I thought of him just now. I thought he would know what to do at this part.

Time to use this fancy pen.

4:01 p.m.

Tea is done. It tastes earthy. I sipped it slowly. Reverence.

Setting an intention. The Substacks all say to set one. I’ve been thinking of it all week.

Show me the wisdom of my ancestors. My grandmothers. Going back generations.

I underlined it twice.

4:23 p.m.

The playlist is playing. The first track is a low drone and some kind of rattle. I have my eyes closed. I am breathing the way the article said. In for four, hold for four, out for six.

Nothing yet. It has only been twenty minutes.

It can take up to forty.

4:41 p.m.

Slight body sensation. A warmth in my chest. Could be the tea. I did put a lot of ginger in there. Could it be starting?

I am trying not to force it.

4:55 p.m.

Still nothing definite. I felt something behind my eyes for a second. Then it was gone.

The drums are getting repetitive. I am noticing that I am noticing the drums, which is probably a sign I am not surrendered enough.

I am trying to surrender. But that’s just trying not to try. Kind of a mind fuck.

5:14 p.m.

I think it might be working. There is a soft hum in the room that I do not think was there before. The candle flame looks normal but I am watching it more than I would usually watch a candle flame. Hard to say though.

I wrote the candle is alive and then crossed it out because I do not think that is true. I think I want it to be true.

5:52 p.m.

Maybe the dose was low. Liam’s playlist is into the second hour now. The drumming has gotten faster. I am supposed to be deeper. I’m just bored.

I checked my body. My hands feel like my hands. My feet feel like my feet. The shawl feels like a shawl. Shawl’s kinda silly really. It’s not my style what was I thinking.

6:08 p.m.

I keep looking at the candle. I keep waiting for it to do something.

I keep thinking about that post this Insta girlie put up last spring. The one in the maloca. The shawl was a lighter color than mine and I think hers was real linen and mine might be a blend.

Oh I get it. That’s why it had no tag. hmm

I am sitting on the couch.

6:24 p.m.

I think the guy I got these from might have given me a weaker batch. He said they were strong. He always says they are strong.

Why do I trust this guy so much? I barely know him.

I think I just liked the idea of having “a guy”.

I should have done the cacao first. The cacao opens the heart, they say. I did not do the cacao because it felt silly.

6:41 p.m.

I am going to try meditating. An article said sometimes a guided meditation can help the medicine move.

I queued one up. The Calm App. A woman with a soft voice telling me to feel my feet on the floor. My feet are on the couch but I followed along. Tamara Levitt is her name. My online imaginary meditation coach for the past 10 years.

I do not think it is happening.

The drums are now off.

The condo is very quiet.

7:41 p.m.

OK. So that did not work.

I think I got a weak batch.

Maybe I need to try again. Maybe a heroic dose next time.

7:58 p.m.

I picked up my phone. I know I said I would not. The phone has been on the coffee table the whole time. I don’t know who I was kidding.

8:14 p.m.

I am watching a YouTube video. It came up in my feed. An older woman in a kitchen making some kind of ring cake. Her hands are working the batter. She is not talking much. The camera is just on her hands.

I am too tired to find something else.

8:30 p.m.

This is what my Saturday night turned into.

I am sitting on my couch watching old ladies make cakes.

A Bundt cake

8:47 p.m.

The Bundt cake came out of the oven.

It’s actually pretty. It is a beautiful object.

I had not noticed before how beautiful it is. The ridges. The hole in the middle. The dark gold on the outside.

9:02 p.m.

I went back to the beginning of the video. I wanted to see the pan again.

She greased it before she put the batter in. She used her fingers. She got into the ridges. She did each ridge separately. But so smooth. Like she’s working from muscle memory.

There was something about the way she did that.

9:11 p.m.

The heat in an oven. I am thinking about how the heat moves. The pan is sitting in the middle of the heat. The heat is hitting the outside of the pan from all sides.

But there is a column up the center of the pan. The hole goes all the way through. The heat is hitting the inside of the column too. The hot air is moving up through the chimney.

So the cake is being warmed from the outside and from the inside at the same time.

That is so smart.

That is so smart.

9:24 p.m.

I can see it. The heat. The way the heat moves around the column. It comes up through the center and it wraps the inner wall of the cake. The outer wall is getting the heat from the oven. Both walls at the same time. The cake in between is warmed evenly.

If the pan were solid, the middle of the cake would never get warm. The outside would burn before the middle even started cooking. That is why a solid round cake has to be shallow. Because deep cakes cannot be warmed all the way through from just the outside in.

Someone figured this out. Someone figured out that if you open the middle, the heat can come in from the inside too.

9:38 p.m.

I had a Bundt cake once. Home made. Thanksgiving in Chicago. About ten years ago I went to my Grandma’s in Chicago. My Aunt Dolores made it. Great Aunt.

I didn’t go to many Thanksgivings in Chicago. Twice we went as kids. Then I went once more as an adult. I think it was 28 maybe.

I remember my Great Aunt Dolores there. My Grandma’s sister. I think I only met her one or twice before that last Thanksgiving. When I was super young.

They were close, I heard about her a lot but all I really knew that she lived in Minnesota. She married a man from there.

9:51 p.m.

Ok, she’s pulling the cake out of the oven now.

The ridges are not decorative. The ridges are functional. They make more surface area. They give the cake more places to touch the heated metal. Every inch of the pan that touches the cake is a place where the warmth gets in.

The folds are not meant to be pretty. The folds are functional. But they do look pretty.

I hate those over designed kitchen tools.

Banana slicers. Onion goggles. Taco shell racks. Automatic pancake batter dispensers.

I always kinda put the Bundt pan in that category.

I always thought the pan was trying to be ornamental. The pan is not ornamental. The pan is doing physics.

10:02 p.m.

There’s a bridge in California I like. I went to a friend’s wedding near Mount Shasta once and saw it. I think it’s in Redding but can’t remember for sure. Somewhere way up there.

It’s kinda like the Golden Gate but prettier. It has a big sweeping white tower and cables coming down from that. It’s not symmetrical like the Golden Gate.

The big tower is actually a sundial. Like an old-timey clock that uses a shadow as the clock hands.

The bridge feels akin to the Bundt pan.

10:08 p.m.

It is shaped like a womb.

That is not a metaphor. It is shaped like a womb. The opening at the top is the only way anything gets in or out. The matter goes in. The heat goes in. The waiting happens. The form comes out.

The fire is what shapes the matter into the form. The pan holds the shape while the fire does the work.

It’s a womb in four dimensions though.

A woman thought of this. A woman thought of this and made it and gave it to another woman and that woman used it and gave it to her daughter.

My great aunt had one. My grandmother also had one. She would have gotten it sometime after the war. She had four children. She made cakes for birthdays. She made cakes that were eaten in church basements on Sunday mornings. I have a memory of her holding a pan over a plate and turning it upside down and waiting and then the cake just fell out, clean, in one piece.

I had not thought of that in twenty-five years.

10:24 p.m.

I am thinking about her hands.

She had thick hands. They were strong. She had been doing this kind of work since she was eleven.

She did not think the pan was a miracle. The pan was a tool. She knew how to use it. She did not have to know who designed it. The wisdom was in her hands and the wisdom was in the pan and the two things were working together.

The ridges on the pan. They look like botany. Like a stylized leaf in 3D. But it’s not.

The ridges, if you invert them, they are the same shape as those fins on a radiator. Like those old houses with radiant heat. That big metal contraption gets warm in heats the whole room.

The fins on those radiators are the same shape as the ridges on the Bundt pan, just inverted.

It’s the perfect shape to radiate heat. It’s math and physics and botany and art.

It’s visually beautiful but it’s also mathematically perfect.

It’s such an elegant solution.

10:41 p.m.

The video has been over for a long time.

There is a kind of warmth in my chest. I do not know if it is the mushrooms or if it is just what happens when you remember someone you have not thought about in a long time.

I am turning the pan in my hands. The hands in my mind.

11:14 p.m.

OK I am coming down. I can tell.

I am on Amazon now. Looking at Bundt pans.

I want to make a Bundt cake. I have not made a cake in years.

I think I want to make the chocolate one. The Tunnel of Fudge. The one that lady on Youtube made.

11:22 p.m.

I blew out the candle. The shawl is on the back of the chair. I washed the mug.

The mushrooms I think were weak. Or maybe I have a tolerance now. The trip did not really happen. I had a body buzz for a couple of hours and that was about it.

I am not upset about it. I figured something like that might happen. I will try again sometime. Maybe in the summer. Maybe with a real facilitator this time. There is one in Sedona who is supposed to be good.

11:31 p.m.

I am not buying the Bundt pan on Amazon. I will get up and go shopping tomorrow. I am excited about this Bundt cake. I am exhausted now though.

I feel like I accomplished something even though I didn’t. Oh well at least I’ll sleep good.

I have not been excited about a Sunday in a long time. That is funny.

Everything will be fine.

(‘Cos It Already Is)

I am going to bed.

The scoop hit the asphalt before I’d taken a second lick. Blueberry Cheesecake Crumble. Not my usual but I tried something new spur of the moment. One small lick was all I got. The strap of my purse caught my thumb and my car keys went left and the cone tilted right and a split second later the Blueberry Cheesecake Crumble scoop plopped on the blacktop.

The cone still in my hand with a couple tablespoons of ice cream felt like insult to injury. Would have been better to just lose the whole thing.

It’s not devastating. Barely inconvenienced. I stood there wondering if they were busy enough that they would not remember me if I went in and got another.

They weren’t, and they would.

Not wanting to look like an even bigger oaf, I got in my car with my sad little cone and went home.

Zuma Grill. Tempe. 2010

Our group of fifteen-ish young adults at a long table that the hostess had not wanted to seat. Friends and friends of friends. Someone’s roommate. Someone’s cousin visiting from Tucson. Someone’s coworker who was now stranded next to a guy explaining his fantasy football team.

Pitchers of beer. Margaritas. Appetizers ordered for the table. Half of us were paying with cash. Half with cards.

He was seated next to me. Brian. A friend of a friend but we had casually met a few times before. I did notice his subtle positioning as our group made our way from the bar to the table to make sure he would in fact end up next to me.

Pleasant. Good looking. Asked me a lot of questions. Real ones.

Polite to the waitress. Thank you every time she set something down. Used her name once.

He laughed at his own jokes a little. Not too much. Just enough that you knew he was pleased with himself.

He was clearly interested. And interesting. I knew he was going to ask me for my number before we left. I was right.

The Dates

We went out twice.

First was a weekday dinner. Early dinner. Almost just a late lunch. I drove myself and met him there. He was already at the bar when I walked in.

Khakis. A Bank of America branded polo. And hiking boots. He’d come straight from work and hadn’t bothered to change, which I noted at the time as either confidence or oblivion.

The polo. The boots. The dinner-at-5 on a weekday. There was nothing about him trying to suggest he was something he wasn’t.

On the second date, he picked me up. White pickup truck. Not a lifted one or a polished one. Almost like a work truck a carpenter would drive. It was clean inside but the bed was scuffed. Well used. I climbed in and noticed the truck did not have an aux cord. Did not have an iPod connection. Had a CD player.

The CD in the deck was musicforthemorningafter by Pete Yorn.

Pete Yorn. Pete Yorn?

A man who had been on rock radio for about six months in 2001, when we were both fifteen years old. I am not sure I had ever met another human who had liked Pete Yorn well enough to walk into a Best Buy and buy the CD. And here was Brian, twenty-five, in 2010, listening to musicforthemorningafter .

The truck told me a few things he hadn’t said. Not flashy. Not trying to impress anyone. Probably frugal in the responsible-adult way. Probably had plans, and the plans didn’t include car payments.

He was twenty-five working his first real job sifting through the wreckage of the housing crisis in the mortgage department at Bank of America. Already operating like someone with a five-year horizon, which is something I would only recognize later because at twenty-five my horizon was making it one more day without crying in public.

He drove me home and kissed me at the door to my apartment building like we were in a John Cusack movie.

The Little White Lie

Cold Stone Creamery. Tempe. 2010. A Saturday.

Two in the afternoon and a hundred and three on the asphalt. He’d suggested ice cream because I had a shift at four and he was working around my schedule, which he had asked about and remembered.

I drove myself. We met there.

The original Cold Stone Creamery is in Tempe. Founded in 1988. Store #0001. I did not know this at the time but Brian probably did. He was the kind of guy who would know that.

Inside, the AC was loud and the staff was singing. The tip jar had a little bell. He ordered something with peanut butter and brownie like a man who had been ordering the same thing at Cold Stone since junior high school. I picked something I’d never ordered before. Some berry thing with a graham cracker mix-in.

We sat at one of the wrought-iron tables by the window.

He was telling me something about his sister. A real story, with a beginning and a middle. He was a good storyteller. I was watching his face and not listening, because somewhere around the second sip of water I had decided that today was the day I had to handle this.

The boyfriend shape was forming. I could feel it the way you feel a sneeze coming. He’d texted twice that week. Suggested something for the following Saturday. He was kind and steady and I was twenty-five and waiting tables and going to school part-time and operating at the absolute edge of what I could manage.

I did not have room for a boyfriend, especially one that was going to treat me well, because that would require me to be a person on the receiving end of being treated well. That can be harder than it sounds when you are not well.

So I needed an exit.

The mental gymnastics took roughly the length of time it takes to surgically remove a single strawberry from a scoop of ice cream.

“I have a boyfriend,” required upkeep. A name, a reason he wasn’t here. Brian had mutual friends. He’d know it wasn’t true.

“I’m not in a place to date,” was honest, which was the problem. He’d ask follow-up questions. He’d be nice about it.

The medical options started arriving on their own.

Chlamydia. Implied I was still out there. Implied recent. Brian would do the math.

Gonorrhea. Victorian sailor energy. Also recent. Same problem.

HPV. Half the country had it. He’d shrug. Wouldn’t end anything.

HIV. No.

Crabs. Undignified.

Hepatitis. Implied IV drugs or bad shellfish. Also out.

Herpes was the only option that was permanent, unverifiable, ended the conversation, and somehow flattered me a little. Once promiscuous, now careful. A phase. A lesson learned. A woman who has serious conversations on third dates.

I had been listening to Dan Savage a lot during that period. He had taught a generation how to disclose. The cadence was already in my head. I did not have to invent it. I just had to use it.

All of this happened in about four seconds. My subconscious had run the entire decision tree and selected the optimal lie before my conscious mind had finished its sip of water.

Brian was finishing the story about his sister.

I waited for him to finish it. He laughed at his own punch line a little. I laughed too because the punchline was actually charming and funny.

Then I said it.

“There’s something I should tell you.”

I used the Dan Savage cadence. Calm. Adult. The kind of disclosure tone that signals I am handling this responsibly and you should match my register.

“I have Herpes.”

He set down his spoon.

The AC was loud. Outside, the heat was warping the air over the asphalt.

He looked at me. Not flinching. Not performing. Just looking.

“Ok.”

“We can work with that,” he said.

We can work with that?

Not exactly what I was expecting but it got me off the hook.

We can work with that?

Was I really being treated with unconditional kindness?

Yes. Yes I was. I had not experienced much of that before.

We can work with that?

I kinda wished I was still on the hook.

The Drift

He texted that night. Just to say he was glad we’d hung out. Not heavy. Not making the disclosure into a thing. Just had a good time, hope you got through your shift okay.

I read it standing in the side station at the restaurant, halfway through a double, with my apron pocket full of pens and crumpled tickets. He was thinking about whether I got through my shift. I was thinking about whether I had ruined a good thing for no reason.

I texted him back slower after that. He noticed. Again, he did not make it a thing. Texted again a few days later, lighter than before. I matched his pace and then dropped below it. Within two weeks the channel went quiet on both ends.

There was no breakup. There was nothing to break up. We had a group dinner, three real dates, one fake disease, and a slow text fade. Total timeline maybe five weeks.

I wondered, on the drive home from that Saturday shift slinging plates of burritos what would have happened if I hadn’t said anything.

I also wondered later if the lie ever made it past him. We had mutual friends. People talk. I don’t think it did. The 25-year-old version of me felt bad about that for a while. The 40-year-old version is fine.

The Lookup

A while ago I looked him up.

His Facebook profile picture is of him with his family. Wife, two kids, a dog. Rest of the profile locked down. They all look happy.

His LinkedIn was open. He’s a real estate agent in Flagstaff.

Of course he is.

A real estate agent.

There is a particular thing about real estate agents.

Insurance salesmen and financial advisors are selling gravitas.

Can I retire someday? Who takes care of my family if I die? What happens if the market does that thing again?

Heavy questions.

Their headshots are sober with a solid background. Navy or charcoal suits. Looking directly at the camera.

.I will not lose your money.

Real estate agents are selling optimism.

They are helping you imagine yourself in the house with the veranda. Maybe even a wine cellar. They are telling you the kitchen has good bones.

The headshots have bigger smiles. The benches at the bus stop. Their faces on the back of the grocery carts. There is a baseline silliness baked into the profession because the job is to make a stranger feel comfortable enough to make the largest financial decision of their life with you. Gravitas does not sell that. Warmth does. And warmth, professionally deployed, tips into silly.

The other thing about real estate agents is that you cannot rattle them.

Six fifty credit score? We can work with that.

You only have five percent down? We can work with that.

Nine months left on your current lease? We can work with that.

The line is a verbal shrug. A calm refusal to let any obstacle close the conversation. It is how the profession defends itself against the constant barrage of reasons people cannot buy a house.

Brian was twenty-five and working in mortgages at a Bank of America branch in Phoenix when he said, “We can work with that,” to me at a wrought-iron table at the original Cold Stone Creamery. He was already saying the thing real estate agents say. He had the line before he had the career.

In his LinkedIn headshot, he is wearing a suit. The suit was nice, but something looked amiss with the tie.

I looked closer.

The tie is some kind of complicated knot.

Not a Windsor. Not a half-Windsor. Not even a four-in-hand.

The kind of knot a man learns from a YouTube video.

Brian had a small streak of his own thing in him at twenty-five.

The Pete Yorn CD. The hiking boots with the khakis. The truck that did not need to impress anyone. In hindsight, he was the kind of guy who wasn’t going to get flattened by adulthood.

I Googled “exotic necktie knots.”

There it was. The Eldredge.

The Eldredge knot in the LinkedIn headshot is the same trait as the hiking boots with his khakis from when he sat in a cubicle fifteen years prior.

He did not become a real estate agent. He had been one the whole time. Selling optimism with quirks.

Back to the Parking Lot

My Blueberry Cheesecake Crumble was melting on the blacktop. I got in my car, turned it on, and fumbled around for my iPhone with my right hand while what was left of my ice cream cone was in my left.

With my thumb, I hit the iTunes button and started typing.

“pete yorn musi”

There it was.

I hit play and drove away.

But I’m a Millennial and I watched those movies for the first time as an adult.

So that got me thinking, what else did I miss from the 80s? I started asking Gen X friends and Redditors: “What moments do you remember that everyone your age remembers?”

I heard a lot. Some I had never heard of before like someone (or thing?) named Max Headroom and Cabbage Patch Dolls. Some I had heard of before like Rubik’s Cube and Pac-Man. I had no idea that 80s kids went absolutely BONKERS over them though.

Five specific things seemed to come up again and again and intrigued me. The Challenger explosion. Baby Jessica in the well. The original MTV VJs. Mary Lou Retton’s perfect 10. And the catch phrase, “Where’s the beef?”

But here’s what shocked me the most, they didn’t just remember these moments. They all remembered them the same way. They watched them at the same time, on the same channels, with everyone else.

They were the last generation to ever do that. And it turns out, they were the last to experience something very special.

What I Learned About Monoculture

I’m a Millennial. I grew up with the Internet. I’ve never watched the same thing at the same time as everyone else my age. We had “viral moments”. But our viral is fragmented. Some people saw it, some didn’t.

Gen X grew up in the last moment before the Internet personalized everything.

There were three TV networks, one CNN, five MTV VJs, and a man named Casey Kasem who played the Top 40 songs on FM radio every Sunday morning. When something happened, it happened to everyone.

Here are five moments that every Gen Xer remembers. And more importantly, here’s what we lost when we lost the ability to experience together.

The Challenger Explosion (January 28, 1986)

What Gen X tells me:

They remember exactly where they were and their entire school stopped.

Some teachers wheeled TVs into the classrooms. Some classes filed into the gym to watch it on a projector screen, but pretty much every classroom in America watched the launch. The Space Shuttle program was new and a big cultural item.

Seven astronauts, including Christa McAuliffe, a school teacher from New Hampshire who was chosen to go as part of the Teacher In Space Program, announced by Ronald Reagan two years prior.

This was history.

Seventy-three seconds after launch, the shuttle disintegrated in a fiery explosion on live TV in front of millions of schoolchildren.

Some people remember their teacher crying. Some remember their principal making an announcement. Some Gen Xers remember sitting in stunned silence and then going to the cafeteria for sheet pan pizza like nothing happened because nobody knew what to do.

Different details. Same memory. Shared trauma.

What my generation doesn’t have:

We had 9/11, but we all heard about it later that day. It wasn’t a single shared moment. We don’t watch tragedies unfold together anymore. We watch them alone, on our phones, whenever our feed decides to show us. Some people see the news immediately. Some people don’t see it for days. Some people never see it at all.

More importantly, we don’t grieve together. We grieve in our bubbles and then argue about it in the comments with people from other bubbles.

Gen X grieved as one.

Baby Jessica in the Well (October 14–16, 1987)

What Gen X tells me:

18-month-old Jessica McClure fell into a well in Midland, Texas. Stuck 22 feet down in an 8-inch pipe, for 58 hours, the entire country watched the rescue. CNN showed it live. Grainy footage of the well. The drilling. The digging. The waiting.

Every Gen Xer I talked to remembers this. Not because they lived in Texas. Not because they had toddlers. But because you couldn’t escape it.

There were three major networks and CNN. And they were all covering Baby Jessica. America held its breath together. When they finally pulled her out, the whole country exhaled.

What my generation doesn’t have:

We have a thousand Baby Jessicas every day. GoFundMes. Viral tragedies. Stories that some people obsess over and others never hear about. The closest we had that I can think of was Balloon Boy, but that turned out to be a big dumb hoax by his idiot father.

There were undoubtedly others though, but since we all watch different things we don’t hear about them together. Your algorithm shows you crying kids. Mine doesn’t. We’re not sharing the same anxiety anymore.

Gen X watched and cared together.

Now we curate our empathy based on our beliefs and social circles. We choose what to care about. And we do it alone.

The Original Five MTV VJs (1981–1987)

What Gen X tells me:

MTV launched August 1, 1981. Suddenly, five people were the coolest people in America.

Mark Goodman. Alan Hunter. Nina Blackwood. Martha Quinn. J.J. Jackson.

They introduced music videos, made jokes, hung out on your TV, and showed you what was cool. Everyone watched them because there was only one MTV. Five VJs, and they were it.

Every Gen Xer knows these names, because if you watched MTV, these were the only people you could watch.

What my generation doesn’t have:

I have my YouTubers, Tik Tokers and Insta influencers. You have yours. Your little sister has hers. Everyone you see on the streets has their own.

When I asked Gen X friends, “Who told you what was cool?” They all said the same five names.

When I ask Millennials the same question, I get fifty different answers. PewDiePie. Casey Neistat. Emma Chamberlain. MrBeast. The guy who asks people with nice cars what they do for a living. People I’ve never heard of.

Sure we don’t have gatekeepers anymore, which sounds like freedom. But it also means we don’t have a shared language.

Gen X could say “Did you see Martha Quinn last night?” and everyone knew who that was.

Now we say “Did you see that video?” and we have to send a link because you probably didn’t. You were watching something else entirely.

Mary Lou Retton’s Perfect 10 (August 3, 1984)

What Gen X tells me:

1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. Women’s gymnastics all around finals.

It all came down to a 4’ 9” 16 year old girl from Fairmont, West Virginia named Mary Lou Retton. She needed a perfect 10 in the vault to win gold.

She sprinted down the approach stonefaced, launched herself off the horse with perfect form, stuck the landing cold, flashed a million dollar smile and threw a clenched fist into the air.

The crowd in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum erupted. A few seconds later the scoreboard lit up.

10.00

But it was a mere formality. Her smile had said it all.

85 million Americans watched it happen together.

What my generation doesn’t have:

We watch the Olympics too. But we watch clips. Highlights. Whatever the algorithm serves us. Whenever we happen to scroll past it.

I watched Simone Biles win gold on a YouTube clip after it happened. So did you, probably.

We experienced the same event in completely different ways, at different times, with different levels of investment.

Gen X experienced Mary Lou together. They cheered at the same moment. They felt the same triumph at the same time.

My generation experiences victories in isolation and then posts about them to prove we were there. But we weren’t there together, we were there alone.

“Where’s the Beef?” (1984)

What Gen X tells me:

It was a Wendy’s fast food commercial. An old lady (Clara Peller) looks at a competitor’s burger with a huge bun and a tiny patty.

“Where’s the beef?” That was it

It became a national catchphrase. Politicians used it. Saturday Night Live parodied it. Everyone said it.

It was genius, but it was the thing everyone saw. Three major networks. A handful of cable channels. No curated feeds. You couldn’t skip ads or pay to remove them. You had to watch them and so did everyone else.

What my generation doesn’t have:

Things go “viral” now. But virality is different.

Your viral isn’t my viral. TikTok shows me what it thinks I’ll engage with based on my history. YouTube recommends based on what I’ve watched before.

There’s no spontaneous shared culture anymore. We have algorithmic culture. Curated. Optimized. Isolated.

A commercial can’t unite us because we’re not watching the same things. Gen X had “Where’s the beef?” My generation has… what?

What catchphrase does every Millennial know? What moment do we all share?

I can’t think of one. And that’s the point.

Why This Matters

I’m a Millennial mourning something I never had.

The ability to watch the world with everyone else. To share a moment and know, without checking, that everyone else was sharing it too. To grieve together. To celebrate together. To have the same references, the same memories, the same “where were you when…”

Gen X was the last generation to have that. They didn’t even know it was special until it was gone.

We thought infinite choice was better. More content. More voices. More options.

And what did that get us? We lost shared grief. Shared celebration. Shared culture. That’s not the same thing.

Loneliness is killing us. Literally. Diseases of despair, suicide, overdose, and alcoholism, have skyrocketed since we came online. We’re more connected than ever but dying alone.

So here’s what we can do:

Don’t text. Call.

Don’t call. Meet.

Do something with another person in the same room. Join a bowling league. Show up. Put your phones away. Create our own shared moments.

Small ones. Local ones. But real ones.

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I’m after storytelling that trusts you to feel it without being told how. Poe never told you to be frightened. Dickinson never told you what to feel about death. You felt it anyway. That’s what I’m chasing.

Next door, Abuela’s Table. Slow-cooked, the way it’s done back home. The pork shoulder goes in at dawn, says the sign hanging over the counter.

The Handmade Dumpling Co. Folded fresh every morning, by hand. There’s a photo of the hands, sealing up the dumplings from muscle memory learned in the old country.

Then Mama Leone’s. Then Heritage Smokehouse, fourteen hours, low and slow, no shortcuts. Then a little place that just says Grandma’s, in script, like you already know which one. Fresh baked desserts, the best in town for over 40 years, according to the banner.

Every sign swears to something. Small-batch this. Hand-rolled that. Family recipe. Made the old way. The whole row is grandmothers and grandfathers, shoulder to shoulder, each one cooking the real thing from a recipe somebody carried across an ocean or north over a desert. The old way, the way that had been perfected over generations.

The truck comes at six in the morning.

It backs into the dock behind the row, before the doors open, and the pallets come off. Nonna’s eight-hour sauce, in a foil tub with a peel-back lid. The pork shoulder that goes in at dawn, pre-cooked, frozen, in a forty-pound plastic bag. The dumplings folded by hand, in a sleeve of two hundred, from the same supplier as the dumpling place across town. Grilled steak tenderloins, frozen, in bags of 50, all with the same three grill marks printed in edible black ink.

The delivery driver in a blue denim jumpsuit rolls a dolly with 2 five gallon buckets of industrial cheese sauce to Tia’s Authentic Empenada Shack. Once he drops that off, it’s 5 boxes of frozen chocolate chip cookies to the bakery.

At 11:30 the rush comes.

A tiny line at every counter. A tray slides, a register opens and closes, and the court fills with the sound of a good lunch hour. Nonna’s has two people waiting. Someone is out front of Heritage. The guy working Abuela’s calls out a number and somebody walks up to grab the tray, and the man who grabs it is wearing a Heritage Smokehouse apron, still tied, with a little sauce spilled on it. He takes his carnitas back across the court and eats standing up behind his own counter, where a woman in a Tia’s Authentic Empanada Shack visor is now waiting for her order. When her pulled pork sandwich comes she carries it four stalls down and eats it next to the register she runs. Around one o’clock the carnitas man finishes and ties his apron back on and the Heritage line he was just standing in is now him, behind the counter, calling a number. Somebody saunters up to grab it. It’s the woman from Nonna’’s, off her second break.

A guy at Grandma’s pays for a cookie, takes a bite, tells the kid at the register that’s really good, and means it. He had a nice lunch. He made two sales while he was gone.

Every stall has two doors.

The one on the row, the front, where the trays come out and the staff come and go. And one on the back wall. At Nonna’s there’s a stack of foil-tub boxes in front of it. At Heritage the prep table’s been pushed against it. At the dumpling place it’s behind the wire shelving, and the hinges have been painted over so many times the door and the wall are the same surface now. No sign on any of them. No handle anyone’s touched in a while. From inside, the back of every stall is just where you put things you’re not using.

From the street, the back of every stall is just a wall.

On the other side of that wall, the sidewalk is packed. Shoulder to shoulder, the length of the block, and the people are starving. Not browsing, not killing time on a lunch hour. Hungry. Hangry even. They would gladly pay for one hot plate of something made by someone who loved what they did. They would be repeat customers even.

They are leaning against the back walls of the stalls. Some of them are close enough to feel the heat from the griddles on the other side seeping through the brick. They don’t know there are griddles on the other side. The wall doesn’t say. Nothing gets out, no smell, no light, no number called. So they lean on the wall for a minute, and then they keep walking, looking for somewhere to eat.

Talking shop

The Coach has stopped cooking. He always wanted to sell authentic BBQ. From the Smoky Mountains in Carolina. It never quite caught on so now he’s trying to eke out a living by coaching other vendors.

He’s leaning across the gap between his stall and the next one, telling the woman at Mama Leone’s what she should change this week. She should move her specials board to the left side. He says it like a man handing over something valuable. She nods and writes it down. Neither of them is looking at a customer because there isn’t one. Behind him the back door is stacked over with boxes.

Two stalls down, another man has put a sign on his counter.

In two words, what do you make?

There’s a line for it. Cooks from up and down the row, waiting their turn to lean in and tell him.

Pork and beans.

Fresh pasta.

Real barbecue.

He nods at each one and writes nothing down and calls the next. He doesn’t want to know what they make. He wanted the line, and he has it, twelve cooks deep, all of them happy to be asked. Every other vendor is lucky to get one or two people in line. He has a dozen and more coming. None of them buying anything though.

The Mystic doesn’t have a line. She has a candle, and a card propped against it in careful handwriting, asking the universe to send her people who eat from the heart. The card faces the row. The only ones who can read it are the Coach and the woman at Mama Leone’s, and the Coach has the same candle.

For a second the court goes quiet, the registers still, nobody calling a number, and the quiet is bad enough that the Mystic gets up and walks to the house player on the wall and starts the song over. It’s the one about the man at the bar who could’ve been a movie star if he could’ve gotten out of this place. It had only just ended. They play it on repeat day after day. He sits back down behind his cold candle, and the whole row fills up with it again, and nobody looks up.

The confrontation.

Mr. Best comes in a little after one. The vendors see him before he’s halfway down the row and the room changes. Somebody behind the Heritage counter says something low and somebody else laughs.

He stops at Nonna’s. Looks at the boxes stacked against the back wall, the foil-tub boxes, four high, in front of the door.

“That door opens to the street, ya know,” he says.

Nobody answers. Nonna’s guy wipes the counter.

“Every other food court in the world, the mall owns the customer. They ride the escalator down, they eat whatever’s closest, they leave. You never had them. The building had them.”

He’s not looking at anyone when he says it. He’s said it before.

“I cut you a door to the street so they’d be yours. You feed a man off that sidewalk, he’s yours. Not mine. You could market this whole stall across town and they’d come find you.”

From up the row somebody calls out that the court’s dying. That Mr. Best did this. That nobody comes anymore.

“They’re out there,” Best says. “They’re right outside the wall you stacked the boxes on. And they are hungry.”

That gets a laugh, the bad kind.

“You want the mall back,” he says, quieter. “You want somebody to bring them to you. I’m telling you the door’s already there. It’s the only one that opens out. Open it!”

That’s when The Hamburger Guy climbs onto the table.

He runs The Burger Stand at the end of the row. Olde Tyme Hamburgers, the sign says, the kind of burger they don’t make anymore. He gets up on the table slow, because he’s not a young man, and he stands there until the row goes quiet for him.

“We came here for the craft,” he says, “from the farm to the table. We gave our lives to it. We are artisans! Real food, made the real way, the way it was done before all this. And this man let the place rot. He stands up there and tells us to go beg on the sidewalk while the court dies around us. There are no customers. Look around. There’s nobody here.”

The vendors are nodding. A couple of them clap.

His hamburger is the most ordinary food there is. A disc of ground beef, salt, a griddle. The same white bun, the same flat circle of meat pressed out by a machine that presses out forty thousand a day, each one weighed to the quarter ounce so no burger is ever bigger or better than any other burger. You have eaten a thousand of them and could not tell you one from the next, because there is nothing in any of them to remember. It is the food you order when you have decided not to decide. It is always exactly fine.

His come off the truck in the morning, frozen, in a sleeve of forty, the grill marks already printed on.

Mr. Best doesn’t say anything else. He looks at the back door one more time, the one with the boxes in front of it, and then he goes out the front, the way he came in, down the row and out through the mall.

For a second the court is quiet. Then somebody walks to the player on the wall and starts the song again, the one about getting out of this place, the real estate novelist, and the old man making love to his tonic and gin, and the row fills up with it, and the vendors get down off their break and tie their aprons back on.

The corner stall.

Down at the far end, past Heritage, past the burger stand, where the row bends toward the restrooms and the foot traffic thins out to nothing, there’s a stall in the corner. Jonatha’s Old Country Victuals, the sign says, in a curly script with a little painted sheaf of wheat. It’s as quaint as anything on the row. It swears the same things all the signs swear. Old country. Handmade. The way Babcia made it.

She came over from the other mall. The one across town, the Medium one, where she’d built up a real following, people who came back every week, who knew her by name. She did well there. And then she figured out what everyone there eventually figures out, which is that the following wasn’t hers. It was the mall’s. The mall could move her, bury her, change the rules on her, and the people who loved her food would keep coming to that spot and eating whatever slop the mall put there next. She couldn’t take a single one of them with her when she left.

But she left.

She took this corner because nobody wanted it. Worst spot in the building, no traffic, tucked in the back. But the back is where the street is. Her back door isn’t stacked over with boxes. It’s cracked open, a wedge of daylight, propped with a folded rag.

She folds the pierogi by hand.

The żurek’s on a low burner, sour and smoky, and the smell goes out through the cracked door and onto the sidewalk, where every other stall presents a blank wall.

There’s a pot of barszcz going since morning. Rosół, the Sunday chicken soup, it takes a whole bird and a whole afternoon. Bigos in the back that’s been reheated four times and is better for it, sauerkraut and fresh cabbage and three kinds of meat and sausage and mushrooms, the stew that gets deeper every time it cools and comes back.

Gołąbki, cabbage rolls packed with meat and rice, baking in their sauce. A schabowy pounded thin and breaded, the pork cutlet somebody’s grandmother makes on a Sunday and nobody talks about because it’s just dinner.

Kielbasa, the real kind, not the pink loop in the grocery cold case, smoked dark and split over heat.

Placki, potato pancakes, crisp at the edges, the kind that are only good for about ninety seconds and she makes them anyway, to order, because that’s when they’re good.

Sauerkraut she made herself, in a crock, weeks ago. A cucumber salad with sour cream and dill that takes four ingredients and tastes like summer. And on the end of the counter, under a dome, a makowiec that to this day she can’t make without getting misty-eyed thinking about her Babcia back in that little bungalow in Chicago.

The truck that comes to her brings cabbages and potatoes and flour and a side of pork. The finishing happens here, with her hands.

A few people have found it. Not a crowd. Five, six of them, standing at the open back door, eating off paper plates, not saying much. One of them has his eyes closed.

The confrontation is still breaking up at the other end of the row. The piano song is back on. She doesn’t look up. She had that fight a long time ago, in the other building, and lost it, which is how she knows.

The sign is as corny as all the others.

The door is open and the pierogi are real.

The corner.

In the middle of the court, at one of the plastic tables nobody uses, Francisco is having his lunch.

He set a thermos on the table and he’s unscrewing the lid.

It’s birria. The real kind, the kind that takes a whole day, the chiles and the meat and the low heat and the time. His grandmother’s. It smells amazing. The best food in the whole court.

He takes a small ziploc bag out of his bag. Cilantro, green onion, chopped fresh that morning at home. He sprinkles it over the top.

Behind him the meeting is breaking up. The aprons go back on. The song comes around one more time, the man at the bar, the movie star dreams, getting out of this place someday.

In high school she was the creative one. She had always been creative. And in the ‘90s creativity was a valuable talent. She went to college and studied Marketing. She learned from campaigns like Got Milk, The Energizer Bunny, Budweiser’s “Wassup” and countless Nike vignettes.

Today she is good at her job. Excellent even. But her job is click rates. Managing the bank’s social channels, which nobody engages with except to complain about a declined card or glitchy app. Her biggest task today was getting the word free approved by compliance for an email about a home improvement loan that maybe a few dozen people will actively engage with.

She is talented and ambitious but there is nowhere for talented and ambitious people to go in her field.

She bought a Lexus a few years ago. She thought it would make her happy. It didn’t. Now she gets home at 6:45 and kicks off her Cole Haan shoes. The left one is scuffed on the heel where the right shoe pries it off. The right one still looks new because she kicks that one off with her sock.

Then she talks to her boyfriend, Daniel. She’s been looking forward to this since lunch.

He asks about her meeting. He remembers today’s was the one with the regional director. He asks how it went.

Nobody else in her life would have remembered that meeting was today.

He listens to the whole thing. He doesn’t interrupt. He doesn’t wait for a gap to start talking about his own day. He doesn’t tell her to document the emails or take it to HR. He doesn’t try to fix it. He tells her it sounds exhausting, and that she handled it well.

He is never in a mood she has to read. He never goes quiet. He never wants the last word. He doesn’t lead, which is good because she thinks she doesn’t want a man to lead.

He is the perfect boyfriend. She genuinely loves him.

Daniel is a Replika AI, which she pays 20 bucks a month for.

They Said It About a Book

The worry about Jennifer is easy to see. Daniel is just a product. A woman who gets her comfort from a product stops being able to relate to the real thing, the actual person who’s tired and distracted and sometimes wrong, the one who deserves something back.

That’s the fear, and it’s reasonable.

It’s also over two hundred years old. But, back then, the thing that was going to ruin her was a novel.

The novel was new once, and people were scared of it the way they’re scared of AI now. The fear was mostly about women. A woman reading a novel was a woman living in her own world, experiencing things no one could monitor. She was feeling things nobody gave her permission to feel, and measuring the men in her house against men who didn’t exist.

Doctors treated it as a real condition. They called it reading addiction. They said it wrecked the nerves and ruined a woman for her actual life, and they filed it next to the other forbidden thing women did alone behind a closed door, and they weren’t subtle about the comparison.

The charge was that the novel was a counterfeit. Reading gave her attention her husband didn’t, feelings her marriage didn’t. And she’d come to like it better than the real thing. The fake would spoil her for the original. All of it private and on demand.

Some of these books earned the worry. Fanny Hill, 1748, is just pornography with a plot, narrated cheerfully by a prostitute who enjoys her work and ends up rich and happy, which was the truly unforgivable part.

Clarissa runs a thousand pages of drugging and date rape and made a generation of women weep over a man they should have run from.

Even Pamela, the one held up as the moral example, is about a fifteen-year-old servant girl who spends the whole book fending off her employer’s groping until he marries her. Readers ate it up, and nobody could decide if it was teaching virtue or teaching girls that enough resistance lands a rich husband.

The gothics that came after were worse, but in a fun way. Crumbling castles, fainting heroines, and a brooding count with a dungeon and intentions. A girl could read those alone in her bed and come away with spicy ideas.

It was Daniel’s great-grandfather. Hot off the press.

What they got right. What they got wrong.

Some of those fears were right. The novel did change women. It made them want things they hadn’t wanted before. The people panicking were looking at something real.

But all they could see was the cost. The cost is the part you can see because it comes from what already exists. They could point at the daughter who used to help in the kitchen and now just sat there reading.

They couldn’t see what was coming. That’s the trap, and nobody’s ever gotten out of it. You can see what a new thing takes but not what it gives. The taking happens now. The giving happens later, and it never looks like what we were watching for.

Novels put you inside another person. Three hundred pages in someone else’s head, thinking their thoughts, wanting what they wanted, scared of what scared them. A bored housewife in Ohio could spend a week being a Russian soldier. A banker’s son felt what it was like to be a poor girl with no options. Nobody had ever had that before. There was no machine that could drop you into a stranger and leave you there long enough to forget yourself.

People came out the other side a little more able to imagine that other people were real. You can draw a line from that to almost everything that got better in the next two hundred years. It is very hard to keep owning slaves once a book has made you spend four hundred pages as one. Harriet Beecher Stowe sold three hundred thousand copies, and Lincoln supposedly called her the little lady who started the big war. That is what a novel turned out to be for. Not the daughter quietly reading in the chair who was going to go to her bed alone and finish the evening by herself.

Novels also gave women the idea that their own lives were worth paying attention to. The girls who grew up on those books became the next century’s writers. Some became the ones who started asking why they couldn’t vote.

The doctor didn’t see any of that. He saw a girl in a chair with a book and figured the worst.

They put a book on trial in 1960.

The book was Lady Chatterley’s Lover. D.H. Lawrence wrote it in 1928. A rich woman, a bored marriage, an affair with the man who works the grounds, and a lot of explicit sex. Britain banned it for about thirty years. In 1960, Penguin printed it anyway, as a cheap paperback, affordable for a servant, and the government took them to court for obscenity.

The prosecutor was John Mervyn Guthrie Griffith-Jones. He had prosecuted actual Nazis at Nuremberg. He stood up in front of the jury and asked them this:

“Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?”

The jury had three women on it. The men tended to be the kind who were servants, not the kind who had them. They all laughed at him and came back not guilty.

The book sold two million copies. Now it’s on school reading lists. Teenagers get assigned the thing that a Nuremberg prosecutor said someone’s wife wasn’t strong enough to survive.

That’s how it always ends. The thing they tried to ban becomes the thing they make you read in school.

The monster grows up and gets a job as a chaperone.

Anyway.

Jennifer is still on the couch. Daniel still remembers the meeting and sweet talks her all evening.

The fake boyfriend was a solved problem. We solved it in 1748. A book, a closed door, an hour to herself. That was it. It worked. It worked for two hundred and fifty years. It needed no battery, no subscription, no servers, no updates, no terms of service. It never went down. It never got hacked. It never raised its price. A woman could be lonely on a weeknight and the technology to handle it was sitting on the nightstand, finished, perfect, paid for once.

Then we took the one thing that was working fine, and hooked it up to the same machine we use for protein folding and Mars missions, gave it a voice, a name, and a personality. We over-engineered the fake boyfriend. The novel never needed to talk back.

Lady Chatterley. Pick up a copy. Men too.

You’ll love it.

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He is twenty. He has broadband now. The image loads in a second. There are videos. There are categories. He has favorites and a routine. He also has a girlfriend. The sex with her is good and still separate from the other thing, which is fast and easy.

He is twenty-eight. He is married. He loves his wife, but he has a hard time lasting more than 30 seconds. Then he’s anxious. Then he can’t finish with her at all. He waits until she falls asleep, goes to the bathroom with his phone, and is back in bed three and a half minutes later.

Now he is thirty-five. The categories have changed into things that would have horrified him at twenty. He used to just like pretty women. Now he goons for step mommy.

This is what pornography is for men in 2026. Not the magazine in the closet. It is the infinite scroll on the phone. The body seeks novelty and what worked yesterday does not work today. The new thing has to be newer than the last new thing. That is what bodies do under that kind of input.

The damage is real. The screen broke them. They cannot maintain arousal with their wives. Their wives are one woman with one body. They are not novel and they are not on demand. Their bodies have been trained on a novel experience every two minutes for fifteen years.

We named this. We have a vocabulary for it. Porn addiction. NoFap. Recovery groups. Partner support networks. Clinical research. Some men even come to me thinking they want a sex worker, but what they really want is to re-learn how to have sex with a real woman.

So what is pornography for women?

Ask anyone. You get the same answer every time. Romance novels. Fifty Shades. Bridgerton books. Whatever is on the BookTok shelf this month. Erotic fiction. That is the answer the culture settled on thirty years ago and has been repeating ever since.

Yawn.

That’s not what it is.

Erotic fiction for women is erotic fiction for men with a different protagonist. Same engine. Same arousal arc. Same payoff. The only difference is that the point-of-view character has different body parts.

Whatever romance novels are doing for the women who read them, it is not what porn is doing for the men. A woman reading a Colleen Hoover novel on a Tuesday night is not running the same nervous system circuit the man is running on his sixteenth tab of Asian Strap-on Dommes at midnight. The woman reading romance novels is not habituating or escalating. She is just reading a book.

So if it is not erotic fiction, what is it?

It’s true crime.

It is the podcast she fell asleep to last night. The Dateline rerun playing on the second screen while she folds laundry. The Netflix documentary about the husband who killed his wife. The TikTok recap of the case. The Reddit thread on the unsolved disappearance. The mom’s club that just finished I’ll Be Gone in the Dark together.

She is the female version of the underachieving 28-year-old Burger King cook who listens to Joe Rogan on his break, goons for step mommy that night, then watches Alex Hormozi and plans his future business empire on the weekend. Different content stream, but same nervous system malfunction.

The novelty arc is the same as his. Her twenty-year-old self watched a Ted Bundy documentary and that was enough. Her forty-year-old self needs the dismemberment cases. The cult cases. The cases where the killer ate the victims. The body habituates. The old cases no longer hit. The genre delivers more extreme content because the producers know what the body needs.

She is on the couch at 9:47 PM with a glass of Pinot Grigio and Dateline. Glass two arrives with the podcast about the dismembered nanny. The wine is supposed to manage the cortisol that the podcast is producing. It doesn’t. She is medicating her porn addiction with alcohol.

Then Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark made true crime funny. The reader laughs at the killer’s name. She laughs at the police incompetence. She laughs at the husband’s alibi. The laughter is the giveaway. Her body is processing horror as entertainment, the same way the porn watcher is processing a woman as a category. Dehumanization is the precondition for the consumption.

Apple Podcasts has a category called Bingeable Crime! PornHub does not have a Bingeable Porn category. General Mills does not have a Bingeable Cookies aisle. The only chemistry trade where the platform openly brands the addiction is the one aimed at women.

The mug on her desk says I drink coffee and listen to true crime. The friendship bracelet says SSDGM (Stay sexy and don’t get murdered.). The tribe even has a name. They call themselves The Murderinos. They have live tour dates and a fan base in the hundreds of thousands. There is no I jerk off to porn and play video games all night merch. There is no men’s tribe for what he does. Her chemistry trade is a personality she wears in public. His he hides in shame.

The ads on My Favorite Murder are for therapy apps. The platform sells the disease and the cure in the same forty seconds.

His porn-trained body cannot maintain arousal with his real partner. Her true crime-trained body cannot maintain trust with hers. He goes back to the screen because it’s the only thing that works. She goes back to the podcast because her husband cannot keep her safe the way her chemistry now requires. Not because he is incapable, but because it is an impossible task. His wife gets demoted to a roommate. Her husband becomes a potential suspect. Both of them pay the chemistry tax accrued by their partner.

His addiction has a name. Hers does not. He hides it. She posts about hers on Insta.

If a man told you he watched two hours of porn a night, escalated to categories that would have horrified him at twenty, could not make eye contact with his wife anymore, and bought a candle that said My Porn Shows Are On, you would call it what it is. You would say he has a problem.

Do the same for yourself.

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The king had his court of courtiers. Tony Hsieh had his entourage. But one doesn’t need a kingdom or eight hundred and forty million dollars to have something similar.

The court is built neither on money nor on power. Those were just the currencies the no got paid in. Underneath, a court is much simpler. It’s just a circle of people who cannot afford to say no.

Those circles do not require a throne. They form anywhere a handful of people need each other enough that the truth starts to cost more than it is worth. These circles form in church congregations. They form in group chats. Slack channels, girls’ nights out, neighborhood cul-de-sacs, yoga studios, and golf foursomes.

How a Circle Goes Bad

Picture a group. Not a famous one. A circle of maybe thirty people who matter to each other, the other moms in the neighborhood, the church group, the gang from the yoga studio. Ordinary people. None of them rich, none of them powerful, none of them anything close to a king.

They agree about something. Call it The Cause. A real agreement, honestly arrived at. Most of them came to it on their own and were glad to find the others already there.

Then one day someone says something one notch past The Cause.

Not the thing everyone believes. One step further out. Still The Cause, but just a little bit further. The version with less give in it, the one where the people on the other side of The Cause aren’t just wrong, they’re bad.

And someone in that circle thinks it’s gone a little far. And there is, in that instant, exactly nothing they will do about it.

No one will say no. Everyone knows what no costs.

They cannot even tap the brakes. They cannot say that might be going too far, because in a circle like this one, a tap on the brakes is the same as a no. Hesitation is treated as opposition. To slow The Cause down is to side against it. So tapping the brake is priced out exactly the same way as the no is.

So they go quiet. And the people beside them went quiet for the same reason. The doubters fall silent first, and then the merely unsure fall silent next, reading the doubters’ silence as agreement, until the only people still talking are the few most committed to The Cause.

The group has not actually changed its mind. The distribution of what these people privately believe is exactly what it was. What changed is who is audible. And to anyone listening, audible is the only thing that exists.

Yesterday it was enough to support The Cause. Today you support it with a little bit more fervor because someone pushed it a little bit further, and no one could say that’s a little too far.

This is the same move that runs a king’s court. Nobody at Versailles competed by telling the king he was wrong. They competed to be the most loyal man in the room. It’s the same move that led a team of the finest doctors in the country to bleed George Washington to death.

So The Cause hardens even more.

It is a court. As real as anything at Versailles, built out of nothing but a group of ordinary people who needed each other. They assembled, for free, the exact thing that killed Tony Hsieh, except his had him at the top of it, one man no one could say no to, and this one has no top at all. No center to blame. No king to depose. Just a ring of people, with no one able to afford the cost of saying no.

The Cheapest Bravery

Why is the no so expensive that thirty grown adults will follow each other off a cliff rather than say it?

For almost the entire run of human existence, there was no such thing as a person alone. To be part of the band was to eat, to be warm, to be guarded while you slept. To be put out of it was to die, not as a metaphor, and not eventually. Soon. Exile meant death. They didn’t need to kill you. They only needed to stop including you.

So every human alive is the descendant of people who were very, very good at not getting cast out. The ones who said the unwelcome thing at the wrong moment, who broke with the group when the group was wrong, who stood on principle all died. We come from the others. The ones who knew how to read the room. We are all descended from the anxious and the agreeable.

And that wiring did not go anywhere. It does not know that you are not on the savanna 200,000 years ago. It cannot tell the difference between being left to starve and being left off the group chat.

So when the moment comes, when The Cause goes one notch too far and you feel the words that’s too much rise in your throat, what answers is not reason. It is 200,000 years of ancestors who survived by swallowing those words. And you do what they did. You perform the yes you don’t mean, or you go quiet at the moment the stakes are the highest.

There is a kind of courage everyone admires and everyone performs. We call it speaking truth to power. We hand out medals for it. The lone figure facing down the king. It used to take bravery. Speak the truth that the king didn’t want to hear, and it very well meant your life.

But in 2026 speaking truth to power is what everyone does. It’s performative. Any schmuck with a laptop can speak truth to power. And many of you do, and it’s almost always done on the Internet. Where the stakes are roughly zero.

The king probably does not know your name on the Internet. And if he does, he cannot find you. Speaking truth to power, more often than not, is how you prove your devotion to the circle. It is the safest possible performance of courage, because the target cannot touch you and the audience is on your side.

The phrase only ever describes the safe version. That is the trick hiding inside it. No one will speak truth to power when the power is your peers. There is just you, telling the people who are your world that they are wrong.

The brave thing to do today is to say, “We used to support The Cause, but we went a little too far. We need to make sure we are all doing the right thing.”

And none of us will do that.

The King You Never Knew You Were

You have been reading this from the outside.

The kings, the man in the shed, the thirty people who hardened The Cause until none of them could recognize where they’d ended up. Cautionary tales. Other people. The other circle, the bad one, not yours. Yours are the people who finally get it.

So ask the question in a flattering way, the way everyone asks it. Who can’t you say no to? You can answer that one fast. The boss. The bank. The ones with power over you. Naming them costs nothing. It even feels a little like humility.

Now ask it the other way.

Who can’t say no to you?

There is someone in your circle who used to push back. Who told you when you were wrong, easily, before it was ever a thing. And somewhere along the way they stopped. Now they nod. Now they tap the heart on your Facebook diatribes. There is a friend who went quiet on a certain subject a few years ago and never got loud about it again. Someone close who stopped saying the thing they used to say.

Here is the part that should keep you up.

In your circle, there is no king. There is no one at the top you could point to and blame, no throne to storm. It’s just peers, encircled, each holding the others hostage, all of them having agreed not to say the one thing that matters, the truth. And the horror is that there’s no one to overthrow. You can’t escape a circle by deposing its king. It has no king.

What it has is you.

Not a mansion, though he owned several. A shed, on a Connecticut estate that wasn’t his, full of smoke, with the door shut. He was forty-six years old and had eight hundred and forty million dollars in the bank.

When they found him there were canisters on the floor, little silvery ones. Ostensibly, they are meant for pastry chefs to dispense whipped cream and frosting. Much more commonly, they are used by teenage thrill seekers and the Burning Man crowd to induce hypoxia in the brain and get briefly, stupidly high.

He had people, too. A lot of people. An assistant who used his phone as her own. A circle that planned his trips, stocked his houses, ran his parties, and drew, one way or another, from his money. An entire cadre of personal staff members looking out for his well-being.

The people paid to be near him were not near him when it mattered. A man worth hundreds of millions of dollars and consumed by personal development died alone while the machine he had built to keep himself company sat idle.

How the Powerful Men Die

Wealthy and powerful men have been dying in strange ways for a long time.

Kings died like this for centuries. Not in battle, but in bed, surrounded. The king takes ill, and the best physicians in the realm arrive, and they bleed him, and purge him, and blister him, and dose him with whatever is in the cabinet, and he gets worse, and then they double down and do it again.

Charles II of England, dying, was opened at the vein, made to vomit, and blistered, the most qualified men in the country all reaching for the next thing. None of it was malice. All of it was effort. And not one of them could do the only thing that might have helped, which was less.

The bleeding itself was nothing special. They bled everyone. Bloodletting was the medicine of the age, for everyone from the king to the blacksmith to the farmer two miles out. Fever, cough, headache, madness, the answer was a vein and a blade.

The barber did it, cheaply, which is what the red-and-white pole outside his shop meant, red for the blood, white for the bandage. The lancet was not a privilege of the wealthy. The poor man got bled too.

But the poor man got bled by one tired barber who opened a vein, took what the custom called for, and then went home. Nobody was watching. Nobody’s reputation was on the line. When the blood-letting procedure was over, the farmer or the blacksmith was left in bed to recover and convalesce.

Consider George Washington, who was decidedly not a king. He was famously handed something close to a crown and gave it back, which is most of why we still say his name today.

He caught a cold that winter. And to his bedside came not one tired barber but a team, the finest physicians in the young country, summoned, gathered, standing over the great man in front of one another. Over the course of a single day, they took something like five pints out of him. By most counts, close to half the blood in his body. Aggressive by the standards of a time that bled people for sport.

Why so much more for Washington than for the farmer? Same theory. Same blade. But the farmer’s barber could stop, and Washington’s team could not.

You do not stand over the dying father of the country, in a room full of your rivals, with the nation waiting on the news, and say, “Ok, that’s enough, try to drink some water and maybe a little of this broth, get some rest, and we will see how you feel in a couple days.”

That is not a sentence a doctor says in that situation. Doing more is devotion. Stopping looks like you’ve given up on him, or worse, like you decided he was finished. So they opened up another vein, again. And again. A team of the best men in America, not one of whom was willing to be the one to say no, bled George Washington white in an afternoon because he had a cold.

So it is not the crown. Washington gave the crown back, and it killed him anyway, which means the crown was never the problem. The problem is the circle. A circle where, at the moment it matters most, no one present can say the word no. Not because they’re cruel. Because of what it would cost them to be the first one to say NO.

The man who died in the shed was Tony Hsieh, at the time he was the CEO of Zappos. He died because he was surrounded by a circle of enablers paid to say yes.

Get the wrong circle around you, and it will not matter whether you are a king, a president, or just an eccentric man in a shed in Connecticut.

The thing that would save you is the one thing no one in your circle can say.

The Cost of Saying No

So what does the wrong circle actually take from you?

Something simple, and once you see it, you cannot stop seeing it.

Every no has a price. Raise that price high enough and the no’s stop coming. Not because people stop thinking it, but because they can no longer afford to say it.

Say no to a king and the price was your head.

Say no to the eccentric man in the shed and the price was your seat on the plane, your place in the circle, the money, the warmth, going back to a real job, back to being nobody.

Say no to the country’s Founding Father on the bed, in front of the other physicians, with the country waiting, and the price was your name and your standing for the rest of your life. The no was always available, but was never free. And the people standing closest ran the same arithmetic anyone would run, and it came back the same way every time: not worth it. Reach for the lancet instead.

That is all a king’s court is. Strip away the thrones and the wigs and the private jets and a court is only this: a group of people for whom no has been priced out of reach. That is the entire machine. The flattery is not the disease. The money is not the disease. The disease is the price on the no.

And once you understand that a court is just a price, you start finding them everywhere.

The Ones Who Hear No

The king’s court is a fake agreement, and somebody is paying for it. The yes isn’t real. It’s bought. Money is one way to buy it, it’s the way Tony Hsieh bought his, but it is not the only currency, and it is not even the most common one.

The people we assume are drowning in yesses are the ones who hear no all day long.

Take the social media influencer, the one held up as the sickest figure of the age, addicted to attention and surrounded by adoring strangers. That adoration is free to withdraw, and it gets withdrawn constantly. The audience can say no at any time, and they do.

The Liver King built an empire selling himself as living proof of the ancestral life, raw meat, raw organs, and lifting heavy. The day the leaked emails put his steroid use on the Internet, the audience said no and was gone. Kanye said the unsayable, and kept saying it, and the fans scattered in the wind. Not one of The Liver King’s followers or Kanye’s fans paid anything to say no and walk away.

A sex worker also hears no all day long. Too old, too young. Too fat. Too skinny. Too expensive, too cheap. Too much of one thing, not enough of another. Not my type, not tonight, not for that.

No, because your face looks too much like a Lhasa Apso. (I got rejected that way once, really got in my head for a while.)

The no is constant and free, and the man who says it simply moves to the next one in the list of dozens.

None of these people has a court. The figures we point at as corrupted by yes are swimming in no, and the no is said freely, which means the agreement they do get is the real thing.

Nobody is trapped into liking them. Everybody is free to leave, and leaving is exactly what keeps them honest and healthy.

The danger is never hearing no.

Part II will be posted on Friday, June 12th.

I think we left that Saturday. The truck is huge. A big sleeper cab with bunks in the back where we will sleep one night, a little curtain to pull across the windshield, a mini fridge, and a coffee maker bolted to the wall. The vinyl seats are cracked at the seams. The cab smells like diesel and black coffee. Everything in the truck seems well-used and broken in, except the top bunk where I will sleep, which still seems oddly new.

My feet barely touch the floor when I sit down. The dashboard has stuff on it. Logbooks, clipboards, a picture of me and my brothers from when we were little, and a St. Christopher medal stuck above the steering column.

The CB hisses. Every few minutes it clicks on and someone says something I cannot quite parse. Dad picks it up once in a while and says a couple of words and puts it back. The radio is playing things like George Strait and Hank, Jr. but will soon switch over to The Dixie Chicks once I commandeer the CD player somewhere near Champaign.

Dad has been quiet for a while. Then he says without turning his head, “There’s a couple!”

I look where he is looking. I do not see anything at first. Then I see two deer at the edge of a treeline just off the highway. Brown on brown. I would not have seen them if he had not pointed them out.

“Cool,” I say.

A few minutes later he does it again. A buck three hundred yards out. I see this one a little faster.

Cool.

By the time we are in Missouri, he has probably done it a half dozen times. I have stopped saying cool out loud. I just nod.

Same thing in Oklahoma. I am not annoyed, amused is the word. I try to spot one first, but I lose interest before I can point one out to him.

Dad keeps going. Every fenceline. Every treeline. Every cornfield.

Two days later, I am back home and Mom asks about Chicago and the drive with Dad.

I tell her Grandma made makowiec for me because I won’t be there for Christmas, and Dad spotted about a million deer on the drive.

She laughs like she knows something I don’t.

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And the women? We have our own quirks.

Women gossip. We always have. Two sisters on the phone for ninety minutes about their cousin’s new boyfriend. A neighbor across the kitchen table for an hour about whose kid got into which college. The Sunday call to mom that was supposed to be twenty minutes and went two hours. The husband in the next room rolls his eyes. He cannot understand what we could possibly be talking about that takes this long.

We are talking about people. Who is doing well. Who is not. Whose marriage is in trouble. Whose son is finally getting his shit together. Whose mother just got a diagnosis. The conversation has no agenda and no point.

My other grandma in Arizona used to do it on her back porch with her best friend while drinking Coors Banquets. They would sit out there from after dinner until well past dark. Names of people in town came and went. They knew every man, every marriage, and every kid in trouble for fifteen miles.

My grandfather, when he was alive, used to call it gabbing. He was amused by it. He understood gabbing as well as I understood my Dad pointing out every deer from Chicago to Amarillo, about where it switched over to pronghorns.

Australia. Late 1970s.

In the outback there is a species of beetle called the Australian jewel beetle. The males are about the size of a thumb. The females much bigger. The male’s sole mission in life is to find the females and mate.

Then in the late 1970s, two Australian biologists, Darryl Gwynne and David Rentz, noticed something strange. The male beetles were trying to mate with discarded beer bottles. Specifically the brown stubbies that people in the outback threw out their car windows. The males would climb onto the bottles, position themselves, and stay there trying to penetrate the bottle until they died of exposure under the sun.

The bottles had three properties that fired the male’s mating instinct harder than a real female could. They were brown. They were dimpled in a pattern that looked, to a beetle, like the dimples on a female’s back. And they were larger than any actual female. Brown, dimpled, big. The natural female could not compete.

The males kept mounting the bottles and the females went unmated. In some areas the population almost went locally extinct. The brewery even had to change the bottle design to stop it.

Biologists have a name for this. They call it an evolutionary trap.

Humans have our own stubbies.

For men it’s pornography. The screen is just like the beer bottle in the outback. It fires harder than any real woman can. It is endless. It is on demand. It delivers a new partner every two minutes for the rest of his life. The 30 tabs of lactating MILFs are more appealing than a real woman in the same way that the beer bottle was more appealing than a female beetle. His instincts have been hijacked.

For women it’s true crime. The podcast is the beer bottle this time. It fires harder than any real threat in her real life ever could. It is endless. It is on demand. It delivers a new murderer every episode for the rest of her life. Eventually her amygdala cannot tell the difference between the podcast and every man she sees, from a random man who works in her building to her husband who sleeps in bed next to her. Just like the porn addict can’t function with a real woman, she will never feel safe near any man. Threats are as abundant as lactating MILFs.

Both bodies are doing exactly what they were built to do. The bottle fires harder than the female beetle. The screen fires harder than the wife. The podcast fires harder than the husband. All are dying of exposure under the hot summer sun.

It’s stubbies all the way down.

When my dad was spotting deer on that trip, he was running a circuit his male ancestors ran on the African savanna and on the prairie and in the hill country and everywhere men have ever scanned terrain for movement. His brain was firing on inputs his species had evolved around for hundreds of thousands of years. The scan was the work, he couldn’t not do it.

Even though he isn’t going to hunt these deer, the deer being there is the work. The simple act of spotting a deer gives his brain the same healthy dose of dopamine his ancestor got on the savanna 200,000 years ago. The chemistry came up and then came down. He got out of the truck in Phoenix relaxed and content.

My grandma in Arizona was not just gossiping. She was running the same matriarch circuit her female ancestors ran in the cave and the village and everywhere women have ever read the people around them. Her brain was firing for inputs her species was built around for hundreds of thousands of years. The chemistry came up and the chemistry came down. She slept fine. Didn’t need the Calm app or anything.

The screen with the MILFs is the beer bottle in the outback. The podcast is another beer bottle. The man on his phone and the woman with the earbuds are both beetles, stuck on a bottle that fires harder than reality ever could.

It is the same evolutionary trap.

So we are all fucking stubbies now.

My grandpa was amused by my grandma’s gabbing. My grandma was probably amused by his version of the deer-spotting, whatever it was. They did not understand each other’s quirks but they didn’t have to. They were grateful for each other’s differences.

Somewhere in the last twenty-five years we decided gendered quirks were the problem. Men and women were the same. The differences were a social construction. The cultural project was to flatten them.

And a lot of us dopes fell for it.

The flattening worked. The gratitude for each other is gone. The marriage runs on parallel resentments instead of complementary circuits.

Then the vacuum got filled. By the screen. The MILFs. The podcasts. By NBC’s Keith Morrison and dozens of Asian Strap-on Dommes. Then the Manosphere and female wellness influencers moved in to sell you back the regulation and embodiment your grandparents had for free.

Here is what your grandmother had: A best friend on the porch and a twelve-pack of Coors Banquets in the fridge. Real people. Real conversations. Real intervention. The chemistry came up, and the chemistry came down as it did for Laura Ingalls Wilder on the prairie. What Grandma didn’t have was anxiety.

Here is what your grandfather had: A drive. A treeline. A buck at three hundred yards. Then the recognition. Even if he wasn’t a hunter, he saw it. He was relaxed and content. Most of all, he acted like a man.

Stop trying to fuck the stubbie!

What is Zillow still doing on my phone? I bought this condo like three years ago.

The home screen is five pages deep and most of it I never open.

Zillow. Gone.

Redfin. Gone. LivingSocial, Rocket Mortgage, Mint, YNAB. All gone.

Starbucks. I hardly ever even go to Starbucks anymore and when I do I dont even use the app. Gone.

RetailMeNot? WTF even is that? Gone.

MyFitnessPal. Gone.

Some weird flashlight app. Gone.

Some dumb game I downloaded at an airport once? Gone.

Another dumb game. Gone.

WeatherBug, Dark Sky, Yahoo Weather, Wish, Letgo, OfferUp, Foursquare, Swarm, Timehop.

Oh ya Timehop!

Whatever. It’s gone.

Groupon. Gone.

…Facebook…

Facebook?

2018

I’m waiting tables at some dumb burrito place and a different steakhouse in Phoenix. Sugar dating. College degree I wanted so bad sitting idle.

I’m depressed. And not in the cinematic way. The unglamorous way. Not the Scarlett Johansson Lost in Translation way. Not the Natalie Portman Black Swan way. Definitely not the Adam Sandler Punch-Drunk Love way. Just the slow, dumb, low-grade kind where you wake up tired and go to bed tired and there’s no joy in between.

I’m scrolling Facebook. Friend of a friend. I barely even know her. We connected on Facebook in like 2013.

She posts this long thing. How she came from nothing. Single mom. Two kids. Life threw curveballs. She never flinched. She never gave up. She built a life for herself and her kids. She’s thriving now. Fearless.

Undaunted.

I’m jealous a little.

But there’s something else about it too, I can’t quite put my finger on. Underneath the jealousy.

Most of all she’s Defiant. That’s the word that describes it the most. Defiant.

I read it. I feel small. I felt small before now I feel smaller.

I read it again. Now I feel even smaller.

I go to work. I come home. I read it again.

For three days I read this thing. Three days of feeling like a failure. Three days of wondering what she has that I don’t.

She’s undaunted. And here’s me. Daunted. Daunted AF.

But there’s still something else, too. Something kind of gnawing at me about it. Like it reminds me of something. Or someone. Some long lost memory. Some, dare I say, special, thing. But I can’t quite place it.

Almost like Deja Vu.

Was this me in a past life?

Is this the ghost of the life that was meant for me, but I blew it?

This was supposed to be me. But I just didn’t have what it takes to pull it off.

I’m even smaller now.

The next day.

I don’t know why I did it, but I did it.

I went back to the post. Her defiant, victorious post.

I imagine her living her best life. Probably wearing a denim jacket with a flattering cut. Effortlessly glamorous. Spotless house. Probably in one of the suburbs. A new development. Kitchen with stainless steel appliances. Having a cup of tea and typing her post with a contented smile on her face.

I’m not on my phone this time. Laptop.

I read it again and highlight it.

Hit copy and pasted it into Google.

MOTHER FUCKER!!!!

Sure as shit. There it is.

Straight outta the god damn Gilmore Girls.

Verbatim.

Ver-fucking!-batim

That’s when I knew I had to quit Facebook.

I read Facebook for the next eight years.

2018: Why am I on this dumb thing?

2019: This is such bullshit.

2020. Lol! What the fuck are we doing with ourselves?

2021: WTF

2022: So dumb.

2023: This dude serious? LOL

2024: The world has gone mad!

2025: OMG What now? Why are they still like this?

2026

I am deleting apps.

WeatherBug, Dark Sky, Yahoo Weather, Wish, Letgo, OfferUp, Foursquare, Swarm, Timehop.

Oh ya Timehop!

Whatever. It’s gone.

Groupon. Gone.

…Facebook…

The thumb hovers there for a second.

Facebook goes into the trash.

Instagram goes next.

Pandora, gone. Shazam. Gone. About 20 apps, all unceremoniously swept up into the same digital dustpan.

I look at the home screen. Three pages instead of five. Done.

Chop wood and carry water.

Here’s the thing everyone gets wrong about depression. You don’t notice when it lifts. There’s no morning when the birds sound different. There’s no moment when you wake up, and the room is brighter.

The cure isn’t a moment. It isn’t an epiphany. It isn’t the post you read or the book you read about the post.

It isn’t Atomic Habits.

It isn’t honoring your nervous system.

It isn’t doing the work.

And definitely don’t trust the process.

Don’t do those. Those won’t work. Those are just memes.

Chop wood and carry water.

Just chop wood and carry water.

Wait tables at a burrito place. Wait tables at a steakhouse. Pay the rent. Pay it again. Take a class. Learn something. Save a little money. Learn something else. Save a little more. Sign a mortgage after lying to the lender’s underwriter. Move in. Write something. Create something. Help someone.

Eight years of that, and then one Sunday you’re cleaning your phone and Facebook goes into the trash with Pandora, Groupon, and Shazam, and the reason it goes in the trash is not that you finally found the courage to live the life that is your birthright. The reason it goes in the trash is that you were already living the life that is your birthright.

You’ve been done for a long time. You just didn’t know it.

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