untitled work in progress
©2025

  • “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.” - Robert A. Heinlein

    For those who skipped the PREFACE, despite being available for anyone to read, and having evolved into a genre all its own, this website still serves— for now— as the dating profile of its original intent. The first several accordion-drop-downs speak to this origin and getting to know me as a person. If you’re reading this as most do— as a book— then just think of these sections as a way of getting to know me as a friend and putting the rest in perspective. Platonic relationships are wildly undervalued in our culture, anyway.

    In an effort to succinctly summarize myself, I’d say that with regard to trait openness, conscientiousness, and agreeableness, the scores are all just about as high possible with a slight decline in that order, counterbalanced by introversion and an overall downtempo and non-reactionary demeanor.

    I’m warm, kind, patient, quietly confident, creative, intelligent, and got jokes; but I’m also avoidant, in an effort to maintain a precarious grip on the the peace of mind that I’ve managed to create in a society that ceaselessly endeavors to interject itself.

    In many ways we are what we value, so it’s not difficult to imagine who I might be searching for, but with a note that I also value fleeting experiences over possessions, as well as honesty and critical thinking, which speak to my having no desire to own much of anything or believe anything— and embrace lifelong learning instead.

    I have my flaws, but I’ve found that I’m pretty good at many of the things that we seem to universally struggle with. I can’t remember the last time that I raised my voice, I give more than I take, I listen more than I talk, I mean what I say and don’t communicate through insinuation or by omission, and I arrive with no wants or expectations; really all just to a fault though, since the worst traits of the worst of us have become our common langue, and speaking another way means you’re often not understood or even listened to.

    Altogether I’m not interested in participating in much of what I see us engaging with, which I find disappointing at best, but more ubiquitously destructive. I’ll explain further if you read on, somewhat redundantly but approached from different angles in their respective subject headings.

    All this to say, I cook and clean, write and create, design and build and fix; I chop wood and then knit by the fire. I’m human, in all of the ways that it means to be human, without labels, without roles— and I’d like for you to join me.

    As I write this, I’m content to wake up to the possibility of one more day, and grateful for it when I go to sleep, and I try really hard to just let that be enough— because we’re not promised tomorrow.

    We are not promised tomorrow.

    (To those who are wondering where my watercolor portrait went, I apologize, but this content has been removed— for now, at least.)

    Contact meif you’re looking for a partner in life and have been alone despite your aching because at least its honest, but have as many arms as there are arms to hold as much love as I can give, and I’ll try to fill them all despite love always being somehow being too much, and also never enough.

    Updated 06.01.25

  • Tomorrow, I turn 43. Statistically I have another 37 years or so before my dying breath, and everything after that is borrowed time. Seeing as how we’re not promised tomorrow though, all time is borrowed, and today I again find myself wishing that we all lived more with our impending deaths in mind— with the hindsight that this was our life and this is what we did with it. Maybe we’d choose our words more carefully. Maybe we’d be more generous. Maybe we’d spend a larger amount of the average 13 cumulative years of our lives spent watching TV doing anything else instead, so that we might provide our future selves with something worth looking back on when all that remains is an old body and a confluence of misremembered memories.

    Today, I feel as though I’ve been standing in the doorway of my life, quietly watching a sunbeam move across the floor, always waiting to step inside and begin. Invitations often need to be written in our handwriting, though, so as I sit here with a younger version of myself— who two springs ago broadcast perennial wildflower seeds along the edge of a nearby pond to be enjoyed today— I’m inviting myself to do what has always kept me awake in the smallest hours, and what I can see for us all when I close my eyes. I love you with all of my heart, stranger reading this just now, and today my throat becomes an opening to a field of wildflowers, blooming with words for the joy of those who I will never meet. I want nothing more than to find the words to help us be who we might have been.

  • 1. Despite writing all of this, I’m torn between continued participation in dating, and just living alone at the edge of the woods in place that feels like home— with a 14/10 heckin’ good puppers and a flock of Swedish Flower Hens— spending my day writing, painting, gardening, and letting my hair become matted with mud and leaves until my clothes become so threadbare that they fall off and are replaced with moss as I turn feral and start howling at the harvest moon; full disclosure— just so you know you’re not competing with anything but the contentment found in feral solitude.

    2. It’s important for you to know that while I'm an introvert, I can put my social mask on to interact with extroverts for a remarkably long time— if there are aspects of your life that require it. Eventually though, it starts to get itchy and difficult to breath under it, and I need to take it off and recharge by being alone for a while. This isn’t to say that I don’t experience learned social feelings, but to say that I’m not interested in demonstrating nuanced awareness for social success. In other words, actively participating in being one of the cool kids is boring to me, despite being able to down to the excruciatingly smallest detail. My need for the solitude that everyone is in competition with— combined with my demeanor and uncommon patience— is often mistaken for not caring, even though I do; or rather, in the way that seemingly contradictory things can be simultaneously true: I couldn’t possibly care any less, but I care so much it hurts.

    3. It’s also important to for you to know that I like learning about— and doing— things that are difficult or uncomfortable— or that I don't like doing— just as much as things that I do like doing, because there's often just as much if not more to be derived from the experience. My aim in life isn't to be happy. Since happiness is only one of a plethora of experienced emotions, and not possible as a permanent state of being as its constantly asked of us, the word fulfilled much more closely resembles what interests me. I’m saying this because the default mode of a human being seems to be finding meaning in patterns and associations, and the prevalence of my engaging in seemingly contradictory things is often difficult for others to reconcile, resulting in frequently being told by others that they can’t figure me out. I’ll talk more about identity under other subject headings, but in short, it’s not something that I’m interested in. As far as I’m concerned, be a different person every day. Be everyone all at once.

    4. Intrinsic to my perspective of the world is that a belief is never the truth, and is really only ever something of an oversized hoodie for the word lie, aka: how someone likes to play pretend.

    I’m not referring to the epistemological Gettier problem or suggesting that knowledge requires certainty, because you can have knowledge without knowing truth. I’m also not suggesting that its a semantics problem, though I do suggest that the word ‘belief’ needs to be divided into two distinct new words, so that the evidence-based justified true beliefs of scientific interpretations in our search for truth that explicitly acknowledge their provisional nature— often just called belief— aren’t conflated with personal, subjective beliefs of our imaginations or social condition; eg: the unique healing properties of various colors of quartz crystals— often just called belief. Lacking a linguistic mechanism that easily distinguishes these type of belief enables the line to be blurred, which enables individuals to insist that their emotionally-rooted beliefs deserve the respect and privilege that comes from treating them as objective truths; aka: “My ignorance is as valid as your knowledge.”

    What I’m saying is that belief itself, as a human construct, is inherently incomplete, and can never equal or encompass the totality of truth; which doesn’t need to convince you of it, and requires no narrative or participation in it to exist. Truth is what remains when nothing else does, and what will remain when the last human dies and takes with them the last of our beliefs.

    Asked why I want so badly to take people’s beliefs from them, the simple and devastating answer is because we act on them. Beliefs are wielded to control behavior, justify harm, and enforce ideologies precisely because we've blurred the distinction between subjective convictions— but it’s still more than semantics.

    I often think about how many lifetimes have been spent in service of complete fabrications of the imagination that require the suffering and deaths of others— how so many of us have been brainwashed to mistake atrocious behavior for defendable opinions. What you’ll hear me frequently discuss is a cultural and philosophical shift toward recognizing truth's independence from our mental habits, and belief's inherent subjectivity and dangerous potential to masquerade as objective truth.

    In short, I want to live in a world where we become explicit, careful, and rigorous about how we label and communicate our mental constructs— precisely because beliefs shape behavior and therefor have consequences— which would force us to call ourselves out, and hinder the extent to which anyone gets to play pretend.

    Why this is important: the human race is suffering from pernicious arrested development— a state of suspended adolescence to help facilitate our abuse. This can be observed in every aspect of our society— planning and development, arts and entertainment, politics, religion. With adolescent minds, we imagine things to be true instead of arriving at evidence-based provisional truth, we call these things beliefs, and then we act on them. Another word for belief is lie, and because we’re allowed to have lies that we hold true, we’re allowed to lie. In a culture where lies are allowed, we can’t have respect for each other, and where there’s no respect, there’s no love. Not as it could— should— be. In place of love, we settle for facsimile. The need for cohabit of survival under the lie of capitalism; performative and transactional relationships; and the act of rushing in— partnering with whoever were assigned to through circumstance— scaffolded by jealousy that’s so ubiquitous, it’s encouraged and upheld by our legal system. More than that, anyone who questions the system is outside of it. The enemy. Them. As a culture, we celebrate the concept of us-versus-them with something we call nationalism— rewarded for our ignorance with a false feeling of safety and discouraged from the very curiosity and empathy that could set us free.

    So long as beliefs are socially acceptable for conducting our lives, progress made by curiosity and truth will be forced to confront entrenched certainty in ignorance.

    Yes, I’m not just distinguishing between different types of belief, or suggesting we should be more careful with belief— I’m claiming that belief itself is a flawed, dangerous, and an ultimately unnecessary construct— a kind of cognitive crutch we’ve mistaken for virtues. It’s a substitute for truth, not a path to it, and the idea that belief is necessary, functional, or tools for navigating reality is an immature, harmful, species-wide delusion.

    Tell me one thing I need to believe in order to live, and I’ll show you a lie. Certainty is the problem, belief is the symptom, truth requires neither.



    5. Speaking of the detriment of everything, since I was young, I’ve had a profound abhorrence of lawns, and now donate to natural habitat restoration projects and bee conservation. I’ve spent most of my life standing beside myself in speechless awe of the madness that almost everyone seems to be joyfully participating in without question, and lawns are an easily accessible analogy that will get its own subject heading further in my profile— referenced many, many times over. See: ‘Rethinking The American Lawn’

    6. Also worth noting, I think pigeons are beautiful and under-appreciated. That's both literal, and representative of not agreeing with much of what we're taught to value. White homing pigeons are revered as pure and released at special occasions, while colorful pigeons are reviled as dirty rats with wings even though they're the same animal. To put it simply, fuck that shit, and the myriad examples of our wildly irrational behaviors that would no longer be engendered given even a modicum of consideration. I’ll come back to this later as well.

    7. I frequently find myself wondering about those who I’ve shared moments with only in my dreams. Almost nightly, I experience vivid, cinematographic dreams— meeting people and sharing moments together. I can see their faces when I close my eyes, hear their laughter, and remember what was confided in me— all the moments with them existing alongside the memories of those who have come and gone through my waking life just the same; and just the same, I find myself wondering where they are now, how they’re getting on, and what it even means to wonder about them with regard to the nature of our reality.

    Updated 06.01.25

“Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

- Walt Whitman

notes on being a nomad in the americas

  • “…And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.” - Robert Frost


    When I was 17, I gave away everything I owned— down to the contents of a shoebox, a stack of books, and a mattress on the floor. To this day, everything I’ve acquired since then fits in a backpack and a couple of tote bins. I’m constantly asking myself what I really need to live in this place, and what I can rid myself of, with the desire to have as close to nothing as possible— as opposed to asking ones self what products or brands speak to who I am. I’m a minimalist, and I feel very much akin to Diogenes in search of an honest man, returning each night to sleep in a wine cask tipped over on the edge of town and leveled with freshly cut hey. All I need is a place to close my eyes out of the rain; and while I occasionally fall for the trappings of being in a human body, all I really value is what remains from fleeting moments and the beauty of learning and creation— and that’s how you’ll know that I like you for you. With nothing, I still have sleep, and in sleep— dreams, and in dreams— everything.

    This is a difficult thing to talk about. It’s such a stark contrast to how just about everyone lives— if only because of how we’ve built the world— and I’m not suggesting that a solution to anyone’s individual— or our collective— problems is for us to exchange our houses for RV’s; especially considering that everyone has different wants and needs at different times of their life, and some of the most crucial aspects of our society like education, healthcare and emergency services, manufacturing, grocery stores, etcetera, require a permanent set and setting for those who’s contribution is so immensely important. I am suggesting a complete reconsideration of every aspect of our lives, though, after asking ourselves how much of it was ever even chosen, and how much was nearly indelibly ingrained in us to our detriment; and a reorganization to what we really want and what we really need. The world would look like a very different place if we began acting in accordance to the values that remain after unlearning everything that were told from birth.

    For me, being a nomad means not opening your curtains every day to the side of your neighbors house. It means spring mornings opening as slowly as a newly hatched butterflies wings. It means sticky daytime sidewalks that lead to nighttime conversations with summer’s crickets against ever-changing skylines. It means northern lights percolating down through the crisp fall air of a dreamscape populated with wolves lifting their heads to make a sound as ancient as our earliest memories. It means slowly meandering down a coastline of sunsets to find yourself paused in the late, sweet rain of a winter desert, calling it home while you paddle out into a peninsula comprised of every shade of blue. Being a nomad means becoming intimately familiar with every place, and more importantly with yourself, because you have no place. There’s a power in belonging to nowhere but the space that occupies your body.

    That’s not to say that there isn’t a power to being in a place. A garden takes a couple of seasons to begin to come to fruition, and the concept of existing in a fixed place, along with the investment of time and energy to build a structure and a life in that place, isn’t new to our timeline. The Iroquois and Haida— just to name a couple— built permanent long houses. The Pueblo built adobe homes into cliff sides. Even the nomadic nations of the great plains only move their tepee’s around the same general area following the weather and bison herds. Unfortunately, the concept of place has become weaponized, to separate us by race and income, channel tax money into making the lives of a few much better than the majority contributing, and force that majority to return to their place in life each night as a reminder of who they are, and what they’re allowed to be. The concept of place then helps facilitate the gerrymandering of voting districts to keep it that way, and the predictable tax income of millions of lives too entrenched to ever escape, or too sated to ever want to. Saying it out loud is just the type of mind-corruption that can’t be allowed, though, because happy campers with their own solar power and water filtration systems don’t require municipal supply lines and hundred thousand dollar renovations every decade if only because a color has become passé.

    In all fairness, this isn’t to overly-romanticized being a nomad either, considering it’s not uncommon to find oneself calling parking lots home for several nights in between places that you’d rather be— since much of America that’s not covered in livestock is covered in concrete— and considering that many of our most beautiful places have basically become theme parks accessed only through the gift shop where you’re accompanied by grizzly-bear-petters and scream-talkers carrying a cooler and a baby with a Corgi in toe on a 10 mile trail loop just to get a hiking-fit vista-view photo for their #instalife commercial-disguised-as-video, and forcing the ideal enjoyment of these places to only be available in the hours from pre-dawn to wakeful stirrings along with every other scenic burglar; and acknowledging that you can still ultimately never escape the brain that you’re stuck with and the passage of time in a body. There is, however, an indescribable joy to be found in becoming free of at least one of the restraints common to being alive, which is that of place. Like our ancestors for whom bent-saplings sufficed as a roof for a night, and further still, like an animal following the seasons, there’s power in occupying little more than your mind under the gamut of the sky. There’s truth to be found there that can’t be found elsewhere.

    Here, a quarter of the way through the 21st century, I see many of us becoming nomads as the result of financial necessity or emotional marketing, though, as opposed to a behavioral alignment with countercultural perspectives; demonstrated by the number of van conversions complete with stucco archways and faux exposed wood headers to supplement the Spanish Colonial that they’ll never afford to own but are still clinging to the idea of. I see doll-houses that look like the houses of their parents, instead of telling the establishment to go fuck itself and purposely turning our backs on what failed us to make something new— rewrite the definition of a home as something that helps facilitate living our lives as they have the potential to be lived, instead of mirroring the showtime-ready lives we’re told that ours should look like— the same way we’re rewriting the definition of what it means to be an adult. See: ‘boomers’


    From my perspective, a nomadic lifestyle is about so much more than an advertising hashtag about adventure awaiting. For the most part, where some see beautiful houses with beautifully manicured yards and people having ‘finally made it,’ I see ghosts haunting monuments to the desperation of the human ego, reliving the mistakes of our attempt at life on ecological dead zones as the enervated participants in a twelve thousand year old tradition of cultivating our own suffering, and raising our children to embrace a generationally-slow malignant relinquishment of the soul that has made it increasingly easier for our priests and kings to hoard the dwindling resources of this unquestioned mistake. We call it a life instead of a travesty, and we live without doing better, because some of us think its fine as it is; or, with all due respect, the rest of us just plain don’t have any fight left in us by the end of the day. We celebrate the worst things and the worst of us, because its what we’ve been raised to value and aspire to, and it’s too difficult to swim against the cultural current, so not only does nothing get better, it’s just slowly gotten worse.


    If you’ve ever paused at a gate capping off the end of an estate home's driveway, or looked up at penthouses in the sky and wondered what the lives of the people who live in them are like— as someone who’s been in thousands of them— I can tell you that more often then not there isn’t much difference between them and the inside of a single-wide tucked between train tracks and the municipal water tower, and their lives are best tries just the same, despite pretending otherwise. The only difference is that they have more money, sitting in a vault for no one to get to use, collecting interest for children who are indifferent to their existence.

    I don’t say any of this to be cruel, nor to ignore the goodness of so many of us, nor to help the feeling of despair be weaponized and continue to keep us in our place; I say this because I want to reach out to those who are close enough to grab the hand of and help free from of the insanity of the continued participation in something that doesn’t even serve us.

    It bares repeating that I’m altogether not really interested in participating in almost any of our societal narrative, because almost every aspect of it seems to be structured to cater to the most unfavorable desires of the most unfavorable of us. The America that I grew up in told me that if I don’t want to be dumb with it, and lie and play pretend in it, that I can get the fuck out. Most days I don’t really even want to be in a body, to be honest, and would rather just be the consciousness that imbues my body with it’s state of being, untethered from what we call reality. I don’t quite know what to do with that though, other than to search for people who understand what I’m saying and see the same mendacious nature of our society, search for the helpers despite it all, search for tributaries of sanity, and appreciate the moments when I find myself paused, having caught that brief glimpse of something beautiful that leaves me without words.


    All this to say, I’m just another parking lot seagull, making the best of an expanse of concrete as a meager facsimile of the ocean— one leg tucked beneath me, one eye fixed on a sliver of early evening moon.

    Updated 06.01.25

  • “Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work, driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for, in order to get to a job that you need so you can pay for the clothes, car and the house that you leave empty all day in order to afford to live in it.” - Ellen Goodman


    About 12 thousand years ago, someone planted wild wheat in a field, and because that field needed to be tended and watched-over, he built a permanent house there, followed by many; and because the grain silo needed to be protected, he built walls. There begins the agricultural revolution— the worst thing to ever happen to humankind. Aside from religion, nothing else has been so effective as a means of enslaving ourselves. With minds and bodies made for hunting and gathering, we began mono-cropping, to the detriment of, well, literally fucking everything.

    Instead of hunting, we kept sheep nearby. The sheep that wandered or put up a fight were killed— the more docile the better. Same with people. Settle down, defend the land, become sicker and weaker and more abundant, measure success in speed and quantity, demand submission, cultivate misery and suffering, kill deviations from the new norm, ‘amen.’

    Breed like sheep to become fat, submissive, and uncurious, we’re earth’s most miserable success story. Enter the industrial revolution.

    Here’s the thing: our Paleolithic ancestors typically hunted once a week and gathered a few other days, equating to fewer work hours than our lives now. They were as limber as yoga practitioners, moved with the speed of marathon runners, were stronger and healthier and had a more varied diet and stronger immune systems— and we are now the result of going backwards. Eating poison, sitting all day, and partnering for just about any reason but good ones.

    That’s not to say that as nomads we didn’t live without forethought either; after all, every new land mass that our ancestors discovered was met with the ensuing mass extension event of all of its large birds and mammals as we killed at a rate that was higher than the infrequent mating and/or longer gestation and child-rearing periods common to the tastiest and warmest of our prey. Giant sloths, wooly mammoths and wooly rhinoceroses, saber tooth cats, eagles and beavers the size of people, the Paraceratherium. Every land that bares our footprints is soon decimated.

    All the more reason though, for an ongoing dialogue about how to revise our way of life before it’s too late, if it’s not already, for us. The earth of course, will be fine, but we won’t. I’ve been saying these things since 5th grade, though— at the time of writing this— nearly three and a half decades of being made fun of by those perpetrating the destruction. There have been enumerable of us screaming to stop what we’re doing, and we just won’t. We just won’t stop wanting more than we need, to our own detriment, lying about it, and killing anyone who gets in our way.

    Updated 06.01.25


    Contact me if you’re a thoughtful, creative, nomadic-compatible, verifiable human being, so that we can conspire together in an overturned wine cask to the sweet smell of hey, possessing nothing in the possession of everything.

All this to say, I’m just another parking lot seagull, making the best of an expanse of concrete as a meager facsimile of the ocean— one leg tucked beneath me, one eye fixed on a sliver of early evening moon.

it’s beautiful outside,
let’s go for a walk.

  • Never married; no kids; ⁰¹no pets; ⁰²no tattoos; ⁰³no social media accounts; ⁰⁴no phobias; ⁰⁵zero flux gibbons


    ⁰¹ However, I can see myself getting a dog in some number of years. I’m the weirdo who will make sure to spend a good 10 minutes at a party on the floor with the dog; and if there’s a cat on my lap, I’m not allowed to get up because I’ve been chosen. Just go ahead and extend that to all animals.


    ⁰² In a few more years though, the hyperrealistic 3D avatar of me that you’ll see through a VR headset that doesn’t even have to be removed to take a shower will have a plethora of tattoos that change in real time— which is helpful— because I would absolutely have rEgATs about any tattoo that I’ve previously considered. The instant an artist’s needle left my skin, I’d already want to make changes to it. See: ‘tattoos’


    ⁰³ Most social media has become nothing more than hustlers tricking you into watching what are really just ads for their sponsors, or attention-seeking thirst traps for the smooth-brained, and I choose to not participate. That means I don’t direct, star-in, and run post on drone footage to create a mini series about myself complete with algorithm enticing expressions of shock and awe or disembodied Cheshire Cat smiles— and I’m not interested in doing that with you.

    If it were only that the campfire had become the internet, and stories had become memes, then I would have no problem with social media, but it’s been hijacked to curate mass hysteria using mis-informative rage bait, and screaming “Fire!” into a crowded theater was such a short-sighted plan for ad revenue that I often wonder what the next move is if we’re already at the point where everyone’s just doom-scrolling chatbots lying to each other.

    History does enjoy repeating itself, and it appears as thought we’re repeating the brutal history that followed the printing press; aka: people suddenly being able to write whatever the fuck lies they felt like, to pass out en-mass for profit. Maybe 8 billion people can have a conversation, but >insert real-time fact-checking here<.

    ⁰⁴There is something that terrifies me, though. The most terrifying thought I’ve ever had, is that you can make up absolutely anything at all, tell it to a child, and they’ll grow up to die for it— knowing it to be true.”

    The only reason you can’t make a horror movie about it, is that its our lived experience every time we open our eyes. We have centuries of examples of whole societies enacting mass delusion, and raising people to live and die for what hindsight always reveals to be wrong.

    The greatest undertaking that humankind will have ever known up to its fruition, is to put an end to teaching our children beliefs that they then have to spend the rest of their life unlearning, resulting in unfulfilled lifetimes by the billions; and instead, teaching only facts— that which provides the basis for further understanding and exploring— the scientific method, and critical thinking and communication skills.


    ⁰⁵ While its most often a non-issue outside of the entertainment industries because of religious institutions, I want to say that if you think of swearing as a hallmark of a weak mind and you want to talk to me, prepare for the ensuing cognitive dissonance, because I swear a lot, and I’m at least as smartery as several other people. Bowed in homage to the late, great George Carlin, please allow a moment of silence for his go-to list: shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits.

    If you’re offended, the only reason that swear words are swear words is because you say that they are. In other words, there is no such thing; there are only words that— at any given time and in any given language— some of us decide are the bad ones that you’re not allowed to say.

    If you don’t like people swearing, the solution is to just say that they’re not, and they won’t be— the same way you’re fond of using a replacement word, and not considering it to be a swear, even though everyone’s really just thinking of the word you just supplemented. For example, when you say “This friggin’ thing,” you put the word “fucking” in the listener’s mind wether you said it or not, so you might as wall have just said it.

    It’s like saying that some colors are bad colors, and some clouds are bad clouds; except, there are only colors, and clouds, and words— there’s no hierarchy until you construct one and convince others of it under the threat of punishment. No surprise that the argument for the creation and maintenance of a list of words that can’t be said come from religious individuals.

    Update 06.01.25

  • About 10 thousand years ago years ago, we transitioned from wearing scraped and tanned animal skins to felt, and then textiles. There’s beauty to be found in the moment of using simple tools and our imaginations to meet the need to clothe our nakedness for warmth and functionality, as there is in any moment of our minds making something from nothing, but that’s where it stops for me. I understand that it can also be a form of self expression— why not— so long as you’re making it anyway, but like most aspects of our culture, we’ve woven together an endless litany of narratives to add so much more than decorative beadwork to our clothing; all of it detrimental to our psyche, having forced us into an unresolvable loop as we continuously try to authenticate ourselves against a changing reality.

    The reason there are no cowboys in Brooklyn, and why you can tell the costume department of any motion picture company the type of person that you’re playing the role of and be presented with an accurate wardrobe for that persona, is because we very predictably hide our nakedness— and it’s boring to me. It’s why so many artists wear all black, and unfortunately in doing so, dress for the role of artist; and it’s why I find myself wearing sort of mis-matched non-clothes. I don’t want to have a style, which I suppose is a style in and of itself— so maybe its inescapable— but it’s important to mention that I’m content to barely be mindful of complimentary colors as I reach for articles of clothing from an almost non-existent wardrobe of thrifty basics that fits into a backpack, complete with the same flannel shirt worn every day.

    With regard to accessorizing, I refuse to let myself be positioned within a hierarchical structure upon a glance at my wrist, so I don’t wear a “time piece” or any other jewelry, seeing as how we no longer need to carry the sum total of our wealth on our bodies at all times as we once did; and similarly, while I’m all-in on reusable canvas totes, if I see a person holding a Louis Vuitton Neverfull or an Hermēs Brirkin, it makes my eyes involuntarily close as a wave of feelings from disgust to pity wash over me the same as if I just stumbled upon an Alzheimers patient lost in the hallways of this open-air psych ward carrying around a pile of shit squished between their fingers— having mistaken it for something worth holding onto.

    If I’m going to be a part of your life, know that I’m just as willing to devote 15 minutes every three months to making myself aware of everything that made its way down a seasonal runway— just the same as every other subject of interest on the magazine stand— if only out of morbid curiosity and the search for moments of authentic creation where an artist didn’t make something so much as have no choice but to get it out of them; however, that being said, I also chose to not participate. In a society where denim (cotton twill with polyester and elastane) equates to looking unpresentable to the point of being morally inferior, while gas station khakis (cotton twill with polyester and elastane) equates to being all dressed up to the point of being morally superior— or worse, where you’re not even allowed in some buildings unless you’re wearing a suit— I’m content to look like I’m homeless and rummaged through a box at the shelter for whatever fit. The concept of certain textiles cut and sewn in certain ways equaling superiority and access is so fucking insane to me, and needs to be pulled up by the roots from our cultural norms.

    All that said, in no way will I ever try to discourage you from being yourself or wearing what you like, but I see the fashion industry as a manifestation of a a sort of shared mental illness, so if the intent is ever to impress me with your “fit,” please know that blue mechanics overalls suffice. All I see when a woman presents hers outfit to the day is every outfit ever worn by every woman that has ever lived,  spinning horizontally across her body like a clothing mix & match book; and I wonder— now that you’re dressed— what you’re going to enter into the world and accomplish more than wearing clothes. See: ‘footnote 4 to trans as folk’: skirts

    Update 06.01.25

  • 01. The Dembow beat of Reggaeton music. I marvel at how this rhythm has made its way into so much of our music, to the extent that it’s in every song that some of us listen to. To me, it sounds like the hallway echo of a person hitting their head against the wall of their solitary confinement in one thought-interrupting blow after another.

    02. Being asked questions by other adults who could have asked their phone instead of me. I’m beside myself at how it is that so many of us still haven’t learned to look something up— and differentiate between fact and fiction— after, at the time of writing this, nearly 3 decades of having access to viable online search engines; dewy decimal system aside.

    03. Cluster behavior. I slow down until I no longer see headlights, I sit at the back and wait for rooms to clear, and try to live between the surges and rushes.

    04. The illogic of repeatedly checking in to see if something is done, or has arrived yet, etcetera, like children asking “Are we there yet” from the back of the car. By and large, the answer to this question is always no, because if the answer was yes, you’d know. We honk at the person ahead of us while parked at a red light, we heat things up in the microwave for 55 seconds because pushing a 6 and a 0 would take too long, and we apologize to customers as the royalty they imagine themselves to be for having to wait any length of time for anything— and I don’t want to participate in permanently sitting on the edge of our seats, leaning forward, buzzing with caffeine, anxiously pushing so hard against the fabric of time that we perpetually live one second in the future— still not fast enough.

    As far as I’m concerned, speed isn’t the tool with which we should be measuring almost anything, and its another symptom of our society’s shared mental illness. If you really want to impress me, don’t show my how fast— but how patient— you can be.

    05. TV commercials. I can’t be in the same room with a TV that’s turned on if it’s not the thing worth watching, and especially if its commercials, 75% of which are for pharmaceuticals. I’ll leave the room, if not the building, to avoid hearing commercials. I’m not exaggerating.

    06. Florescent and/or animal print clothes, though I’m not sure why, so I’ll have to come back to this later.

    07. Appended construction. Build a thing twice; once in your mind, and then again.

    08. Actually, the actual interjection of the word actual into actually every sentence as actually almost every other actual word. (Possibly soon to be replace with the grammatically incorrect colloquial use of the word aesthetic as an effort to emulate intelligence, eg: “That’s so aesthetic.”) Fuck, and right behind it is the word iconic to describe temporarily trends. Actually, that’s so aesthetic, it’s iconic!

    09. Seeing others as moral failures instead of the victims of a pernicious design that guided and encouraged them to arrive where they are, and expecting them to be personally responsible for everything that’s happened to them and every resolution; which exists for no purpose other than for those who have found success to think themselves better than others.

    10. The myth that waking up early is somehow correct, more productive, or correlated to hard work. We all have different internal clocks. Some are early raisers, some are night owls; some of us work night shifts, or split shifts, or are on call; or have sleep disorders, or newborns, or an endless list of reasons for varying wakeful hours.

    Working hard doesn’t start at sunrise, and inventing and integrating these sorts of unsubstantiated beliefs into our culture serves no purpose other than to help some of us place themselves above others in imaginary social construct thats deeply damaging to society.

    Sleep is so crucial to us that it’s not a choice, like breathing and eating; so sleep when you sleep, don’t when you don’t, and do what you have to do. For everyone who’s jogging at 4 a.m. to “earn the sunrise” like it’s somehow morally superior: I know a few people who are still awake from the day before— doing some of their best work— who will draw their curtains as you pass.

    No one is better than anyone based on when their alarm goes off. Every second that passes, someone is waking up to begin there day, and its this diversity that makes us even possible.

    Update 06.01.25

  • If whatever you call home has Glade PlugIns and Febreze’d everythings, and you get ready for the day with a scented conditioner that compliments the scent of your shampoo, followed by a scented body-wash, and then some scented lotion before using scented deodorant and getting dressed in clothes washed in scented detergent followed by a scented fabric sheet, completed with a mist of perfume before lighting some scented candles and grabbing a scented trash bag to facilitate huffing some burning tire fumes, I’m dying to meet you and your embodiment of indoor combustion.

    All this to say that I’m allergic to chemically scented whatever the fuck it is, so I can’t even be in your house. No, unplugging the plug-ins won’t help, because the air is already so permeated with an aerosol of poison that your indoor air quality is worse than outside, and inhaling it is like chugging a gas-station big-gulp nascar-collectors-cup of petroleum to me. Being content with opening a couple of windows for a cross-breeze as a free alternative to having our paychecks directly deposited into S.C Johnson or Proctor & Gamble’s bank accounts it’s a prerequisite to breathing the same air.

    Update 06.01.25

  • When I was six years old, sitting on my bedroom floor— without forethought, like a hand flipping a light switch unbidden— I impetuously imagined that my favorite toy, my skunk hand puppet, had died.

    Gravity decided where it looked— as its body, faded from secret washings while I slept, now lay in an awkward heap, never again to be animated by my small hands— and I cried in a new way. When my mom noticed that I had been crying and asked me what was wrong, what followed was the first lie that I ever told.

    I remember it to this day, overwhelming myself with two new awarenesses in rapid succession— the truth of death, and the lie of life— and unlike my memory of recognizing myself in a mirror for the first time, my first false narrative is what has always felt like the beginning of what it really means to be human.

    This is it, I thought in words that I didn't yet possess to speak. This is where we come to lie.

  • “Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” - Carl Sagan


    poetry. experiences instead of possessions. fleeting moments. flora and fauna. swimming, archery, hiking, and all the summer camp things. the fine arts. handmade paper. clothespins. colorful stripy socks. a perfect cup of coffee. the smell of used bookshops and burning leaves. the bark of a lone dog at sunset. the sound of a train in the distance.

    abandoned places. liminal space. rabbit-warren backstreets. topographical maps. standing barefoot at the ocean’s edge, standing alone in the last remnants of wilderness, standing alone in the city. roaming, exploring, searching. cold weather and piles of blankets. sleeping in doorways of becoming. feral solitude. fieldnotes from the edges of things.

    animals. kindness. doing no harm. egalitarianism. critical thinking. revision. the scientific method. truth. visible joinery. perfectly imperfect handmade objects and futures. minimalism. truth. sacred geometry and arabesque mosaics. art as emergence. thunderstorms. deep time.

    anticipation. the gravity of gentleness. everything unsaid. all the music. the kingdom of silence. dreams vivid enough to mourn. lifetime conversations. too much and not enough. chosen obscurity.

    love without possession. unlearning all the teachings. non participation. home as connection, not place. presence over performance. the unbearable miracle of being.

    we are wildflowers— forever returning. all there is, is love.

    Update 06.01.25

“The most terrifying thought I’ve ever had, is that you can make up absolutely anything at all, tell it to a child, and they’ll grow up to die for it— knowing it to be true.”

so, what do you do?

  • With regard to work, I do many things that I’ll refrain from sharing until there’s a you, there. Like many of us, what I do to justify my existence through the monetization of my actions is valid and meets needs, but is simultaneously what I’m least interested in doing, and the least interesting things about me. If asked what I do, I’ll ignore everything that I’ve ever done that we mistakenly celebrate as accomplishments in a capitalist society, and say that I’m a poet.

    In other words, I don’t align myself with psychopaths who mistake having a contrasting fabric on the inside of their shirt cuff for having a personality, and say things like “Leveraging our synergies has been a great learning opportunity during this exciting challenge but we’re pivoting to a team of core leadership to manage presentations with our strategy architects as the project increases granular visibility under the deep dives of the visionaries, but we’ll circle back!” >insert the sound of Ritalin being crushed into powder with a credit card here< creating enumerable lifetimes of hopeless suffering just so they can top every nail head of their coffin with a one carrot diamond after lining it with cash.

    All this to say: I define success as waking whenever you just so happen to, slow mornings and not even knowing what day it is, occupying your mind and your day with whatever you so choose, helping people in need however you can, and falling asleep when your eyes happen to close; so I’ve worked hard to reach a point in my life where I’m never really working— and never really not working— and spend most of my day in something of a liminal space between the fever dream that we have no choice but to exist in, and a quiet place where I feel like I can be honest and genuine. I lean into the latter so that I can breathe and have moments of solace, and then hold my breath to step into the dream so that I can afford to be alive; but the older I get, the shorter the period of time that I can hold my breath to play pretend with people in whatever there favorite way is before grabbing the money from the nightstand.

    Residing in that space-between, I'm often either reading, learning, writing, making things, swimming, hiking, riding my bicycle, meditating, observing, petting dogs like I’ve never see one before, or conspiring to perform random acts of kindness and thoughtful shenanigans. In other words, my life is pretty unrestrained. I make my own hours and adventure to the extent that I’m able, often. Sometimes that means venturing increasingly further into wilderness areas until there’s at least a resemblance of the world as it was before we destroyed it, and sometimes that means wandering aimlessly around a city until it falls so quiet that it feels like I’m alone among millions and can hear the click of streetlights as they change colors— waiting for the heat of sunrise to help the city once again slowly unfurl and reveal what an absolute fucking shit show everything is in such a lovely sort of way.

    Late at night when I can’t sleep and I’m in my home city, or meandering doesn’t exist as a possibility, I can sometimes be found at my desk with my headphones on, selecting coordinates on google earth and slowly exploring street-view while listening to musicians from that location. I’ll frequently pause to stand with someone caught on camera forever in that instant, and imagine their life; their childhood memories and defining moments, their wants and needs, them going to sleep with the same ache in their chest that’s in mine. Sometimes I imagine you coming up behind me with a lingering hug to summon me back to bed, and I imagine that ache feeling lesser when I’m with you— but alas— you’re not there any more than I am, or any more than they are.

    Contact me if you know what the cheat code is to this first-person horror-comedy that take seems to be taking place in something of an open-world asylum where you’re given three hots and a cot, an hour in the yard, and the freedom to roam further if you can afford the in-game micro transactions; but really just to further explore a place where people engender a litany of fleeting, nonsensical roles on whats little more than an unquestioning, emotionally-reactionary pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain while lying to get what we think we want, making promises we can’t comprehend or keep, desperately clinging to fantasies of somehow being special and having it all figured out, and inventing terrifying things to do each other while consuming the dying remnants of a once beautiful planet.

    I already tried up up down down left right b a start, and all I got was more suffering and this lousy tee-shirt.

    Updated 06.01.25

  • Not only is the foundation of capitalism forced participation under the threat of criminalized homelessness, but what makes it even more unbearable, is that part of what it means to be human for some of us is that no amount of money is ever enough, and the suffering of the entire world doesn’t suffice to sustain their insatiable desire.

    There is no 40 hours in exchange for a life of dignity to be found anywhere that I search, nor 60, nor 80, and the disappearance of company towns in the 20’s just meant that America itself become a company town, with the properties and the stores owned by our employers who would continue handing us a check— just to take it right back— as a new kind of slave to something called wages. Instead of creating an America of dense walkable forest-cities connected by bullet trains through vast expanses of old growth wilderness, we saddled everyone with the debt of an automobile and called it freedom, and provided them with the illusion of options with sprawl and the same products sold under different names; all while still knowing exactly how much to pay so that it would always be just exactly enough to cover a room, a bath, and a bottle of whiskey— but never enough to get too far.

    There is no cave to live in, my friends, and worse, we’re limited to using provided language to express our dismay— entire lifetimes spent trying to invent a few new words to make progress.

    There was a time when bands of us roamed the tall grass prairies of middle America, contributing to the best of our ability, sharing things equally, and in doing so, all of us having everything that we needed. Now, we’re born into a band that finds us useless until proven otherwise, where our food waste alone could suffice to feed those in need, and enough properties that sit empty to shelter us all— almost all of us living only with the hope to escape while we’re still young enough to pursue our passions— simultaneously knowing that it will most likely never happen.

    Here, we put away our wonder and sacrifice our joy in order to justify our existences through the monetization of our every action, and so long as we’re awake to the reality of it, the repudiation of what it means to be wealthily— while being forced to participate— is the only path that remains when facing the inability to convince our new capitalist counsel of elders of the unseen future dividends enjoyed from giving in the interest of equitability.

    Despite the accumulation of money being just about the saddest thing I can think of to do with ones lifetime, we’re now at the point where some of us are’t even trying to sell you shit we don’t need anymore, they’re selling masterclasses on storytelling: how to most effectively lie in order to emotionally manipulate people into buying masterclasses on storytelling. This is where we’re at. Lying for money about how to lie for money— our children being raised in a 4,000-mile-wide money blowing booth where everyone is elbowing each other out of the way to hug as many bills to their chest as possible in order to win the game.

    I don’t know what other organism is actively perusing its own extinction. I don’t know what monkey occupies its day with the carefully orchestrated suffering of the rest of the troop.

    In capitalism, rather capitalism as we now think of it (the maximization of profits within the boundaries of the law, uninterested in the product being provided but rather separating people from their money and fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke), I see psychopaths having risen to power because psychopathic behavior was rewarded. I see a machine that makes only poison to eat, and everyone’s gotta eat. It’s killing you but you can’t stop or you’ll die, so just one more bite. Just one more day. Just one more week. Just put on a happy face. The customer is always right. Cater to the masses and eat with the classes. If you’re not growing you’re dying.

    My whole life, I’ve seen nothing but exploitation and abuse marketed as luxury— really just themed daycare for adults— to the extent that America has now become little more than the Hollywood set of a Spaghetti Western comprised of thin facades propped up to look like something, with nothing behind it but actors waiting for their cue for the brothel scene. We’re unable to live honest lives, and we’re forced to experience daily cognitive dissonance followed by spending our evenings disassociating from what we need to do to get by so that we can mend our fishnets and refill our travel size bottles of mouthwash for tomorrow. I see half of us screaming to get off of us, and half of us taking the advise to lay back and enjoy it as long as its happening— in either case, our ability to love honestly and give freely having been stolen from us.

    This leads me to what’s most important to me when talking about capitalism, and what goes almost completely undiscussed.

    Ignore for a moment having to participate in the purgatory of an endless high-school popularity contest where we relive the redundancy of customer interactions that we know from start to finish while being overseen by an incompetent dictator who doesn’t understand what we do and offers nothing of value themselves beyond handing our work to the president or CEO while standing in the way of progress by letting ideas stop with them because it makes them look bad; from my perspective, the most horrific feature of capitalism is that which shall not be named because of the unimaginable upheaval that would ensue in correcting for error, which is this:

    I live with a broken hearted resentfulness on behalf of everyone sharing a bed with someone tonight in the unchosen need for cohibitive survival; love as we know it should be— forced to reside solely within our imaginations while we enact lives that are parallel to what we wish for ourselves.

    It bares repeating: under capitalism, love itself has been stolen from us. Our ability to love honestly and give freely has been stolen from us, our lives have been stolen from us, and every alternative has been stolen from us. I’m disgusted, and seething with emotions that vacillate between despondence and indignation, for never being given a choice in serving at the feet of masters while being told that at least its in the house with them. If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.

    Capitalism has stolen our ability to love, and where there’s no love there’s no respect, so we behave without care or reason having settled for relationships that we call love and roles that we call lives.

    My friends, remember that frozen bodies populate peak XV because surveyors found it to be the tallest, while the lesser mountains of those climber’s joy now forever await their arrival. This is a reminder for everyone who finds moments of ecstasy over how many decimals are in your bank account, despite having the power to tear down the invisible walls of this prison and usher in a new era of prosperity and our realized potential: you’re going to die soon.

    That’s not a threat— it’s a reminder. You are alive right now, and soon you won’t be. You are alive right now, and soon you won’t be. You are alive right now, and soon you won’t be.

    Updated 06.01.25

  • I want to live in a world of abundance, created by re-defining success not as how much you have, but how little you have, because whatever you happened to find in your possession was shared. If everyone gave away everything they had, everyone would be given everything that they need, including themselves.

    Instead of having everything taken from us and sold back to us, I’d like for us to recognize all of the things that are free or very nearly free, and refuse to participate in a system that withholds them. We’ve been convinced that you have to pay for everything despite it’s abundance: food, water, information, access to space itself, our care and support networks, our very health— monetized, privatized, paywalled. I don’t understand the point of having a society, if not for the benefit of the people of the society, and instead— all I see is suffering. Cruelty seems to be the point, and I’d like for it to end with us. See: ‘fossil fuels & the finite resource of wind’

    In 2010, Mouscron Belgium provided 50 pairs of hens to households who wanted them, in order to promote urban farming and help eliminate food waste, followed by other cities offering chickens in greater numbers. Antwerp alone reports an estimated 50 tons of food waste that doesn’t make it to landfill, and instead, feeds chickens for their owners free supply of approximately 300,000 eggs annually. If America followed this example— and it was normal for every household to having chickens pecking around their yards— it would all but put an end to our egg industry and create a self-sustaining source of food that’s healthier and more difficult to negatively impact because of it’s broad distribution, while eliminating our food scrap waste for feed and compost.

    My friends, our lawns are supposed to be the native landscape that it replaced, complete with a garden and chickens. Vegetables, flowers, and eggs aren’t supposed to have a cost, and love isn’t supposed to be a necessary facsimile of what it could be. We’ve forgotten, and we’ve allowed ourselves to become so much less than we were meant to be.

    Updated 06.01.25

    Contact me and let me know what else could be abundant and free, but has been taken from us so that it can be sold back.

I live with a broken hearted resentfulness on behalf of everyone sharing a bed with someone tonight in the unchosen need for cohibitive survival; love as we know it should be— forced to reside solely within our imaginations while we enact lives that are parallel to what we wish for ourselves.

  • Some years ago, I tried to start a non-profit for suicide prevention, with the stated intention of creating an online community of love and support for those suffering in silence— too introverted to reach out for help through friends or family, perhaps not having either— and unable to bring themselves to call a hotline; searching quietly for a reason to keep moving in the way that introverts do. In short, I wanted to explore viable methods of engagement with those who don’t engage, because wanting to die is often less about wanting to end, and more about wanting to stop lying in a world that offers no alternatives.

    It never came to fruition, in a culture where we just don’t talk about death, quickly forget what it feels like to struggle with depression once we’re not, live as though its forever, and address things only when they’ve finally become an emergency instead of preventatively.

    I understand the argument of autonomy, but this wasn’t an effort to argue one’s decision when facing a terminal illness. I also understand that as a charitable effort, it occupies a fine line between rational, quantifiable efforts to mitigate harm and the effort’s imagined effects; but I’m ashamed to live in a society where the concept of kindness is so unimaginable for so many that its redefined as virtue signaling, and I don’t know how so many of us can see with clear hindsight just how easily preventative the act of taking ones life often is— so easily dismissing prevention as an immeasurable non-starter.

    One of the most valuable takeaways for me, though, was the realization that I was searching for my own reason, which I felt myself failing in my struggle to find. In his poem Keeping Things Whole, the late Mark Strand wrote “In a field I am the absence of field. This is always the case. Wherever I am I am what is missing. When I walk I part the air and always the air moves in to fill the spaces where my body’s been. We all have reasons for moving. I move to keep things whole.” This always resonated with me, and for a while, I tried to just move to keep things whole, but it began to feel like it wasn’t enough.

    I was experiencing a sort of ever-present anguish manifested by what I can only describe as simultaneous hopelessness and hopefulness in equal measure, and found myself writing my own suicide note in the way that the gravity of those thoughts kept orbiting each other like celestial bodies promising to collide.

    Between just 2020 and 2022, the suicide rate in the United States has seen a 30% increase in men, and a 48% increase in women. This isn’t the place for statistics, it’s just to say that its an indication that something is very wrong. We’re not sick, society is, and the solution isn’t for us to become more well adapted to a place that we don’t want to be in.

    I don’t know what to do with it all. I’m just a person, but to that point, if I can do nothing else, I can at least try and help others in whatever small ways are presented to me within my ability— and the transparency of our shared experience is one of those things. So, this is what I found myself writing in the middle of a night like many that have preceded it, which I can now re-read with a renewed sense of purpose to help others though whatever the fuck this all even is, because through writing it I came to the realization both metaphorically and literally that it was no longer night— it was early morning, and there are still so many people that I can help:

    “i've been meditating a lot lately, trying to notice thoughts and feelings as they arise and let them pass; trying to not spend my current moments reliving the past or imagining a future that will never be, and trying to notice anything that's a lie i tell myself so that i can avoid it and be a better person in what time i have left.

    in doing this, though, i've realized that everything i've been told since the day i was born is a lie, based on nothing more than where on the planet and when in human history i happened to be born into. pick me up, spin the globe, set me back down; rewind or fast forward the time, and i'd have been told all of those things instead. i'd be living-out that existence with just as much certainty, but i'd be just as wrong, because it's simply all make-believe.

    i've realized that culture is nothing more than a play that is being performed across generations, and on a global stage. every aspect is nothing more than the urgent mayhem of our collective imaginings, constantly being altered or subverted. it's a lie that we all agree to tell. the story of our time on the stage. the distractions of a few overlapping lifetimes. every utterance is just mouth noises that say nothing about a truth that we don't yet have words for.

    more than a lie, my culture is pernicious. it tells us that the love we feel for someone is wrong. it dresses our bodies and behaviors in restrictions, and raises our minds to die for whatever temporary dogma it can convince us is true and everlasting. it's always up to something, to the benefit of someone, and forces us to engage. forces us to do anything but what we would rather be doing.

    my culture hands us weapons and sends us to foreign places to murder strangers. anyone who's them so that a few can generate wealth making and selling the weapons that are handed to us. more than that, it monetizes every aspect of our being. it makes us give everything of ourselves, leaving us with nothing but a vague hope that, for most of us, never gets closer than the horizon. a hope that i don't even want to have. it convinces us that we never have enough or good enough. it's convinced me that i'm not good enough. it encourages and celebrates everything that my soul screams is wrong, and has emptied me, and has done nothing to fill me, and gives me no where else to go where i'm not forced to participate in the narrative.

    here's how it will end. soon, i will die; and soon after that, i will be thought of for the last time by the last person aware of my having existed. everything i ever did will be undone. everything i ever touched will turn to dust, and it will be as if i never even was.

    it will be as if we, all of us, never even were, and our lives were stolen from us by convincing us to believe what we were told. to rip nature up by the roots and build monuments to our weaknesses, to go into debt to purchase stuff we don't even want in order to fill a space that a bank owns. all of our shiny things, all of our status, soon to be strip away from us. all of it insanity, masquerading as normal by enough begrudging participation. we are convinced to enact redundancy; copy/paste the previous day, week, year, and call it things like right or tradition. when really, everything that's not unadulterated wilderness is a human construct. our norms, mores, and folkways, made and changed and unmade. always playing pretend in every way imaginable while acting like it's the final, true iteration of being. every year of our own life that passes reveals the pervious year of ourselves to have been wrong. every decade that passes. every century revealing generations to have been wrong. even our gods become relegated to mythology in favor of a new one, now imagined to be the one final one, soon to be forgotten for another.

    now, every morning that i wake up, i'm much more intimately familiar with the awareness that it can be my last day, and it feels like we're all just putting on costumes and head-dresses and calling them clothes and titles, as we step out of our house-sets onto the rest of the stage to personate our role and repeat our lines. the gatherings that i go to seem no different than children serving tea to stuffed animals; making-up the formalities and things to gossip about and be offended by as we go.

    i've realized that life is a beautiful lie that our ego's fall for believing every time. we know nothing. we can't even begin to conceive of what's beyond the edge of the universe, or how it's possible for something to go on forever, because what is it going on forever into? and what's outside of that? we have no idea how it's possible for us to even be here. all we know is what we were told, of what was made-up, of this moment of making things up.

    i've realized that all of it, everything that's human: with every word we perpetuate an imagined, temporary narrative. with every word we lie.

    the only glimmer of something that appears to resemble what we call truth, and actually echos through the corridors of generations, is the kindness that some of our ancestors showed others while they were here, and the kindness that we show others now, extending far ahead of us even as the utterance of our plans for tomorrow leave us open-mouthed as we die in our sleep.

    step back from yourself, your subculture and culture, your location and time. strip away what you're told to believe and how to live, and everything that we claim in our brief time here to know, that the future will soon reveal otherwise. float above it all where the sky meets space, and further still where the galaxy ends, and where galaxies cluster, and further still to where it all began, where the impossible infinity of the universe and everything in it resembles morning fog backlit by first light, and all that remains is kindness. all there really is, is this moment, this breath, and love. all there is, is love.

    and so, in case this is my last day, and we never get to meet or share our lives, this is what i want to say. goodbye to you, my dear strange friend reading these words. goodbye to everyone i've ever loved. goodbye to everyone who came and went. goodbye to everyone i passed once in the street, or saw me from a window even though i didn't see you.

    goodbye you beautiful weirdos. be silly, be kind, have fun and enjoy the play; but remind yourself often that's all it is, because every problem that plagues us individually and collectively seems to have it's origins in the moment of forgetting that.

    goodbye <3“

    Updated 06.01.25

    If you are in crisis or need support, please consider reaching out to a mental health professional or a trusted community resource.

  • Our culture makes us lie— all day, every day. Because we lie, we lose respect for ourselves, and then for each other. Without respect, love— real love, love as it could be— isn’t possible. It’s been stolen from us, but here we are, forced to endure. So we drink, we numb ourselves with drugs, we scroll ourselves into oblivion. We fight, we fuck, we find comfort in the familiarity of copy/pasted days. We pace our cages until stone gives way to flesh and reveals how small, how circular, our lifelong journey has been. All of it, because we’ve created a culture where truth has no home.

    We live in a prison of stories, constructed by the saddest, smallest, greediest of us. I see monsters among us— almost trembling in the ecstasy of their fantasies coming true— patrolled by their useful idiots, gullible as seventh graders idolizing the cruelest eighth grader like he’s a man. It’s a prison of rabid anti-intellectualism and compulsive consumerism, holding everyone hostage with the threat of their next paycheck, and punishing anyone who dares to speak out. It demands faithfulness under contract, upholding false meaning and unchanging truths, and celebrates both possession and possessions. To be blunt: I fucking hate it here. I’ve hated it here since I was eight years old, and I’ve been searching for a way out ever since.

    If you want to be in my life, you have to know how much this matters to me. I think about it all the time— how everything could change if we stopped building our lives around false narratives. I’ve seen it on the individual level. People changing the lives of those around them one by one. I’ve seen miserable men— with one final breath— remove their vest covered in hate-group patches to become a kind and welcoming person. I can close my eyes and see all of us who know the world is baleful making one last, great push to upend this culture of delusion and make space for truth and love to take hold and begin to flourish. See: ‘lying for a better tomorrow’

    In the meantime, life is really hard, and it’s okay to not be okay. It’s okay for us to not yet be the person we wish we were, because there is no final culmination of ourselves awaiting us, so I promise to see your struggle and for that to be enough.

    Now more than ever, we’re made to simultaneously mourn the loss of all of the versions of ourselves that we’ll never get to live-out while stuck in what was never chosen, and it’s really fucking hard; but I see the plight of those other versions of you that batter themselves daily against the reality that you were assigned to, I see your anger and your resentment for being kept from what’s too late for you now, and I see the small, incremental movement to take up the space that you deserve and make the world more closely resemble what you imagine it can be— and I’m so proud of you.

    I’m proud of everyone reading this who has gotten up after life pushed you down— who has healed, or is healing— and still, somehow, found it in yourself to help others heal too.

    If you’re struggling with thoughts of self-harm, I’m just a person, but I promise: you’ve yet to see all the things that will remind you how beautiful it can be to be alive. You’ve yet to utter all of the words that will wait patiently in the mouths of others until they have only themselves to talk to but need them most. You’re needed, you’re not a burden, you have nothing to prove, and I love you.

    Updated 06.01.25

With the same shovel,
we feed wealthy families
and bury our own.

— parking lot seagull

the hours between working
& sleeping

  • "That was but a prelude; where they burn books, in the end they will also burn people.” - Heinrich Heine


    This seems like an appropriate place to reiterate that there is a battle raging between those who who want to build libraries, and those trying to honor the remnants of an old way of being by burning libraries to the ground, because whenever books are read— they're found-out. It's a pitiful admission of ones desperation to cling to the lesser evolved aspects of themself that they're too weak to live without.

    I feel sorry for those who are too afraid to leave the mirage-oasis of ignorance, but I find contemptible those who are just clever enough to use it against the unsuspecting for their gain, because that means they're also just clever enough to help, instead.

    Many of the books that conservatives are throwing into fires are the American classics that we read in elementary school and high school. The Catcher In The Rye, Brave New World, The Bluest Eye, Of Mice And Men, The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, The Perks Of Being A Wallflower, Nineteen Eighty Four. Add to that A Clockwork Orange that was adapted by Stanley Kubrick into a film that makes every top 100 list, and Fahrenheit 451, a book about burning books.

    This is the the ecstatic celebration of a hatred that requires ignorance to exist. This is the worst of us, altering the course of human history because their false narrative is destroyed by learning, and so they’ll destroy anything that takes that feeling of strength and superiority from them. What needs to be burned are the beliefs of anyone burning books, and I’d like of you to join me in no longer tolerating their intolerance.

    When I was 10, I read a book that has stayed with me ever since I read it, in a way that no other book has, and I used to share the title of it here. As this has grown into more than it was, I’ve since removed it, but I’ll share it with you after you’re a verified human. More than that, I’ve removed the titles of all of my favorite books, and for now, I’m keeping this section somewhat generalized.

    While I’m not embarrassed to say that I've been shoehorning-in extra titles with audio books lately so that I can multitask, I strongly prefer the feel and smell of tangible books— and speaking of books that will surely find themselves being lapped at by the flaming tongues of the monsters in human skin suits that walk among us— at the time of writing this I just finished one of the most beautiful novels that I've ever read. It contains dangerous and explicit content such as the lived experience of an immigrant, and falling in love. Again, I’m happy to share the title when you’re a verified person.

    John Waters once wrote “If you go home with somebody and they don’t have books, don’t fuck them. Don’t let them explore you until they’ve explored the secret universe of books. Don’t let them connect with you until they’ve walked between the lines on the pages.” As a minimalist, once I'm done reading something, I like to give it away so that others can enjoy it, leaving a pile with secret notes in them in a coffee shop now because I'd rather create small moments of joy for others than impress guests with a library that I can't take with me in the saudade instant that I turn my own back cover— but I will affirm his sentiment:


    Don’t allow someone to undress you until they’ve first slowly undressed themselves across enumerable pages, and standing naked before you with a mind that’s capable of vividly hallucinated thousands of alternate realities, can with ease help fulfill every version of yourself.

    Updated 06.01.25

  • LISTEN

  • “A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.” - Orson Welles


    For me, watching movies made before 1950-ish is a little like trying to listen to a child tell you about their day. You listen, but there's just too large of an emotional and intellectual gap to really be invested in what's being said beyond acknowledging the importance of their lived experience, wanting to offer validation with your attention, and appreciating the storytelling that's leading to further decades.

    So, this list begins at 1950, and in an effort to keep it to a couple samples and a bakers dozen that are remarkable and speak to things that are important to me— rather than an attempt to curate a list that captures the best films of all time— David Lean’s Lawrence Of Arabia doesn't make the list, nor does Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey or Psycho, although Tommy Wiseau’s The Room was tempting ;)


    SPOILER ALERT


    Rear Window (1954) A wheelchair-bound photographer, trapped in voyeuristic obsession, uncovers a murder that may or may not exist beyond his own projections.

    Breathless (1960) A small-time crook on the run clings to the illusion of freedom while his American lover toys with betrayal, both drifting toward an inevitable end.

    La Planète Sauvage (1973) On a hallucinatory world ruled by towering, meditative overlords, humans struggle for survival, rebellion, and a meaning beyond captivity.

    Taxi Driver (1976) A lonely, unstable cab driver spirals into violent delusion, mistaking vigilantism for purpose and misplacing his fragile, masculine rage in a world he cannot control.

    Ghost in the Shell (1995) A cybernetic agent hunts a rogue hacker who may hold the key to her past, unraveling the boundary between machine, mind, and selfhood.

    The Truman Show (1998) A man trapped in a fabricated world begins to question the seams of his reality, forcing his creators to decide if they can let him go.

    Fight Club (1999) A disillusioned insomniac, desperate to feel something real, builds an underground fight club— only to confront the violent revolution of his own identity.

    City of God (2002) Two boys grow up in the brutal slums of Rio, one drawn to crime, the other to art, both fighting to escape the fate of a city ruled by violence.

    Lost in Translation (2003) In the neon-lit loneliness of Tokyo, two stranger— adrift in their own lives— find solace in a connection that was never meant to last.

    Her (2013) A heartbroken man falls in love with an AI designed to understand him, only to discover the limits of intimacy between the human and the infinite.

    Birdman (2014) A washed-up actor clings to an impossible comeback, wrestling with ego, identity, and the blurred line between self-destruction and transcendence.

    Ex Machina (2015) A young programmer, invited to test an AI’s humanity, becomes entangled in a seduction of power, deception, and the terror of self-awareness.

    Moonlight (2016) A boy grows into a man through love, trauma, and longing, navigating the spaces between identity, vulnerability, and who the world lets him be.

    The Worst Person in the World (2021) A restless woman, untethered by expectation or certainty, drifts through love, ambition, and the quiet devastation of choices made and unmade.


    At the time of writing this, Marcel The Shell With Shoes On gets a current honorable mention. If you're in Chicago and see it at the Music Box like I did, be forewarned, they must have started letting people cut onions in there.

    Also, the film Baraka (1992) Ron Fricke, and Human (1995) Yann Arthus-Bertrand on YouTube are overwhelmingly beautiful, emotional wrecking balls; there are no words, just sit front and center, turn off all the lights, and turn yourself over to them.


    Lastly— in Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner (1967), Sidney Poitier summarizes the problem with world in 57 seconds (12, really). I’ll let you find it for yourself.

    Updated 06.01.25


    Contact me and let me know what your favorite moviegoing concessions are so that I can have them on hand while we watch the ongoing horror film of the United States, where Americans— having mirthfully sauntered toward their demise like toddlers, imbued with such excitement to drink the purple stuff under the sink that they’ve thrown a temper tantrum at anyone who tried to save them while screaming something about disrupting their way of life— now sit cross-eyed and mouths-agape, staring off at a hallucination.

    Critics give it 0 stars, and audiences give it 50% even though it would be more like 20% if theaters participating in polls weren’t in gerrymandered districts, but we don’t have a choice but to watch it play out so we might as well have some tasty snacks.

  • For those who aren’t familiar with the only Manga on my list, or wonder why I’d include it, Ghost in the shell— on the surface— is about a fully prosthetic cyborg named Motoko Kusanagi who works and lives as a special agent in a heterotopian future city where any part or all of you can be replaced with technology, including downloading your substrate-independent consciousness into a new body that can seamlessly interface with the internet. Dig deeper, and it explores ideas of ever-changing identity in ever-changing space, how accurate our memories really are, and what it means for something to be real in a world where these things can be hacked-into and manipulated.

    Obviously, as we have now entered into an era of completely fabricated photo-realistic videos and misinformation bots that are indistinguishable from humans but comprise the majority of public discourse, it parallels our own time and raises the same questions; but it also suggests that only in the discomfort of transition do we grow, and that we should let go of our effort to remain who think we are— since we're constantly being influenced by external forces suggesting who that might be— because it prevents us from simply being who we are.

    It's an almost contradictory concept, of moving but being present in the movement, and a very stark contrast to current cruel joke that western culture plays on us, emphasizing the always-forward momentum of finding and solidifying an identity and purpose, and defending it to the death. The reality is that we can be anyone and do anything. And if we want to change we can. We in fact do change, constantly, but with struggle, trying to simultaneously remain who we think we are or are supposed to be.

    The original 1989 manga lays the groundwork for much of the current cinematographic conversations that question the nature of our reality, and it speaks to the thoughts that occupy my mind each day.

    It’s important for you to know that if I find myself wanting a life that includes waking up beside you, it’s okay learn and grow and change. We’re supposed to. I’ll talk about this again further in my profile, but I’m not interested in identity— I’m only interested in your ghost.

    Updated 06.01.25

  • “nobody exists on purpose. nobody belongs anywhere. we’re all going to die. come watch tv.” - Morty


    Not to be one of those I don’t-own-a-TV people, because acting is all we do, and it’s enjoyable to watch people enact imaginary lives as a sort of running commentary or dry-run, but, I don’t own a TV, and I don’t want to get into my feetsie jammie jams and watch one for 5 hours every night with you like a second unpaid full time job, copy/pasted to fill a lifetime. I’d rather go for a walk together, learn something new, work on a project, do some unclassified misdemeanors, and make each other laugh. More than that, I don’t even want to be within audible range of a TV without my expressed written consent, I’ll never watch what we call news with you— which I realized at eight years old was nothing more than fear mongering the public with what fires and robberies happened that day, rounded off with a heartwarming animal rescue— and if I have to endure hearing pharmaceutical commercials, side effects include an involuntary eye twitch followed by suicidal ideation until I’m out of earshot.

    However, to contradict myself, it’s not altogether uncommon that something that I haven’t seen is streaming in the background on my phone while I do something else, just the same as audio books or podcasts, etcetera; so, without further adieu, I’ll share the TV shows that I can think to mention in this moment that I like or have liked, and I may need to revisit this subject later.


    animation

    Rick and Morty, Bobs Burgers, The Midnight Gospel, Bojack Horseman, Scavengers Reign, Common Side Effects

    not animation

    Breaking Bad / Better Call Saul (Which is better than the godfather as far as I’m concerned),
    The Last Of Us (Anyone else ugly-cry at episode 3? #relationshipgoals),
    Portlandia, Louie, Better Things, (Looks at the camera) Fleabag, Sex Education.

    Updated 06.01.25

  • On the one hand, I’m hopeful for the use of video games in helping people— wherever they’re at on the spectrum— learn, and retain what they’re learning, because its more engaging than a tradition classroom setting; I love that we’ll be the first generation of old folks playing video games in our retirement homes instead of loosing our childlike sense of play in exchange for what we’ve been told being an adult is supposed to look like; and I’m glad that the children of those who have coronated themselves leaders of their own mini cults— that they deceivingly refer to as a family— now have unprecedented access to the outside world by way of participating in live-streaming with other young people worldwide, which allows for conversations that they otherwise would have never had: helping them come to the realization at increasingly younger ages that they’re already smarter than parents who are full of disorders, full of conspires, and otherwise full of shit— and that there’s a world beyond the edge of the map that they were born onto.

    On the other hand, I don’t want to play video games with you all night every night. Some are compelling and fulfilling, and I don’t mind spending evenings together on side quests in procedurally generative environments that aren’t much more imaginary than doing a thing together in a world where the result of the double slit experiment haunts me anyway, but I take an everything-in-moderation approach to gaming. That being said, I’d like to primitively hard-pass on any first-person-shooter micro-transaction inventory-management decades-long-builds to nothing, and request that we at least pause at a fast-travel camp for a real-world walk around the block at sunset so that we don’t loose ourselves too far into any one narrative.

  • “Football, beer, and above all, gambling filled the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult.” - George Orwell, 1984


    For the most part, the sports that I like to participate in can be summarized as whatever activities are available to sign up for at summer camp. I like morning swims, archery, arts & crafts, and don’t forget afternoon siesta, followed by a wilderness hike or riding my bicycle, etcetera.

    I want to be very clear here. I’ll never put on a jersey with another grown mans last name written on it, and join you at the colosseum to be one more pair of hands in the raucous applause of deeply emotionally invested froth-mouthed onlookers— poised at the edge of their seats— in readiness to either celebrate or tantrum by fighting anyone wearing the other tribe’s color. I don’t want to join you in your box seats to watch a bunch of millionaire adult men who suffer from mental disabilities huddle together and whisper secrets to each other while they play grab ass, I don’t want to watch people punch each other in the ribs as hard as they can or get each other in a choke hold, and I don’t want to spend an afternoon tricking fish into thinking that a hook is food so that we can yank them out of the water and force them into cardiac arrest— like a person getting ripped into another dimension where they can’t breath just because they wanted to eat what they thought was a sandwich. I’m all-in on staying fit and engaging in outdoor activities, but for the betterment of ourselves, not the betterment of casinos and snack companies capitalizing on our lizard brains for gambling revenue and a fourth quarter uptick on sugar futures.

    I appreciate the concept of the children of a neighborhood or village coming together around a single ball for hours of free entertainment and exercise, which aids in teaching the 80% of our non-verbal communication skills and helps us slowly matriculate us into our future roles, but that’s about where it ends for me. The Iroquois nations used to play lacrosse with hundreds of players on grounds spanning miles, which has always been interesting to me because it shows the size that our fishbowl used to be— compared to the 100 ft dirt or concrete pads where the residents of modern slums gather together to kick or throw the ball into the thing. Of course, some kids will be more skilled than others, and maybe they want to keep playing against each other as they get older, and maybe everyone who’s had their fun still wants to sit on the sidelines and gape at the continued play, and so here we are— but it doesn’t explain why we have sport teams masquerading as universities and syphoning all of the money away from anything that actually matters, as if the revenue will ever be enough to feed the administrative beast and appease the shareholders.

  • Momentarily setting aside the act of striving for one’s personal best, I don’t view human competitive behavior any differently than a competition between two beetles— on a branch, in a rainforest canopy, on a planet, in a solar system, in a galaxy— the difference between a gold medal or not even qualifying to participate measured in an arm length or a tenth of a second having been affected by a cold or a bad night’s sleep with no re-does, all after having devoting much of their lifetime to it.

    With regard to the olympics, I see nothing but a corrupt organization that kneels for authoritarian regimes with a desire to bottle the essence of youth for profit at the cost of the public, displacing the residents of hosting cities, and silencing athletes while encouraging them to brutalize their bodies and sacrifice a quarter of their life for a chance at a 38 thousand dollar trinket and a cereal commercial.

    It’s a sick joke that we normalized and play on ourselves— one pig getting a blue ribbon at the fairgrounds and the rest with barely perceptible differences by default going to slaughter. We were once children who jumped over streams and raced each other to the tree line in good fun, and then it became whatever the fuck this is. As far as I’m concerned, everyone gets a trophy, even the kid out in right field picking dandelions while the balls in play, because the difference between him and the best on the team doesn’t amount to anything at all by the end of the day, much less the end of their lives, and I’m tired of living in a world where we measure what it means to be human with points against the scale of infinity.

    If we really want to record our personal bests as a way of redefining the potential of what it means to be a human, the olympics isn’t even an accurate way to go about it. One instance of performance has nothing to do with one’s personal best, and it should all be replaced with a system of verifiable performance documentation that records personal bests wherever and whatever that is, removed from committees and awards and ceremonies, without the need to gather en mass to any place at any time. Of course, if the olympics was really about the exploration of human limitation, you wouldn’t be able to sell tickets to it.

    Even then, though, it still doesn’t really accomplish anything more than to make note of our furthest outliers, predisposed to do a thing as a result of anthropometry or chemistry or the like, before calculating to the median anyway. In other words, from the day I was born, I was already never going to be the fastest runner on earth— someone else was, and so they were, and it’s sort of noteworthy but it wasn’t up to either of us— and there’s really nothing to be done about it. More than that, we’re now talking about milliseconds and millimeters as if it matters in understanding the limits of the human body.

    It’s insane. We’re insane.

    All this to say: if anyone competing in the olympics is having fun, I’m glad— though I doubt if most of them actually are— but all I see are beetles locking horns high in a rainforest canopy, one winning because of a slight breeze in their favor, and so fucking what.

  • My least favorite sport— if that’s what it can be called— is golf. For those who are unfamiliar, golf is the one where conservative, religious men build monuments to their dogma of supremacy that they call clubhouses, which double as temples to arrested development and offer them exclusive sanctuary on decimated land where they gather to celebrate the paradigm of resource diversion and all things forcibly kept in a state of suspended adolescence to help facilitate their antipathetic abuse— swapping tactics for grooming the next generation with other figures of the omnipresent patriarchal chokehold, and reinforcing a worldview that makes exploitation feel ordained and inevitable abuse feel deserved, as part of their manifest destiny of atrocities.

    The playbook isn’t a secret. 1. Keep the population functionally illiterate at right around the abilities of a ten year old. 2. Trick them into believing that an invisible, sky-dwelling patriarch demands both obedience and money. 3. Funnel that faith into lawyers and lobbyists who rig the game while simultaneously selling the public fear: fear of the other— the most marginalize groups— and fear of liberation itself, so that they stay inside and lock their doors because there are monsters ever-lurking just out of sight. >insert maniacal laughter here< That, in essence, is how you play golf. Which is why every single golf course should be control-burned by the forestry service, and we should let the ashes nourish something wilder, older, and free from the grip of manicured delusion.

    We are a field of wildflowers that has been turned into a lawn. Poisoned and kept in a suspended state of adolescence, they call it natural, call it order, and call it right; but the inarguable natural order is what the lawn replaced— diverse, wild, and free— forever returning.

  • The Quiet Taxonomy Of The Cognitive Leash

    I’m thinking about how many houses I’ve been in, where there were two pictures hung on a wall, always the same— in an effort to do something “different.” They’re hung diagonally to each other, at an unmeasured and awkward distance from the floor, and off-center.

    Every time.

    The conversation that took place while hanging them is also suspended in the dead air of the house like dust visible in sunlight through open blinds— making it hot and stuffy in the room.

    “Well, just tell me where you want them!” He exclaims impatiently, eager to get back to doing nothing as quickly as possible.
    “I don’t know— there! Right there. Fine.” Convinced, based on nothing, already not seeing them when she walks by.

    Thirty years pass.

    Of course now, it’s floating shelves, soon to be replaced with whatever fad the French were already bored of a decade ago. Always the diagonal. Forty-five degrees— the first and final thought of those hardcoded for one-thought depth.

    class OneDeepThinker:
        def think(self, stimulus):
            # Converts stimulus to direct response, no reflection allowed
            thought = self.generate_direct_thought(stimulus)
            if self.is_reflective(thought):
                return "Error: Metacognition not permitted."
            return thought

        def is_reflective(self, thought):
            return "about" in thought or "why" in thought or "I am thinking" in thought

        def generate_direct_thought(self, stimulus):
            return f"I see {stimulus}, I want {stimulus}"

    These are the unexamined intentions of the limited capacity— ‘no reflection allowed’ taxonomy— of philosophical zombies that have become thought of as non-playable characters, even by other non-playable characters

    Every aspect of their lives frozen in its first iteration, without coherence. Without care. Flashes of ideas, with no internal scaffolding to build on it, and then they live with it. For decades.

    That’s the haunting part.

    They can’t fix it because they can’t see it anymore. Ask what pictures hang on the wall of their home, and they can’t fucking answer the question. Ask what they mean by the sound bite the news taught them to repeat, and they blink. One thought deep. They can only go one thought deep, and you can see it when you stand in the home they’re eager to give you a tour of:

    A wall calendar yellowed from age and still hanging on the side of refrigerator. A dreamcatcher bought in high school, still hanging from a window latch in a house now full of adult bills. A puzzle preventing use of the dining room table, half finished and covered in dust. Meaningless elementary school sports memorabilia lining shelves like they’re still waiting for a call from a coach who forgot they existed. A fear of silence that leads to every room having a TV on in the background followed by a proud declaration of being “just not a reader.” Plastic vines draped awkwardly above their kitchen cabinets, unsure of what they even are. A bamboo floor lamp on carpet, meant to evoke feng shui zen buddhist spiritual fetishized asian crystal wisdom, surrounded by the inability to set something down in a way that indicates you have control over your limbs.

    I’m thinking about that. Decor as a symptom, home as haunted artifact, conversation as rote performance.

    I’m thinking about how frequently I know what people are going to say before they speak, and how I’ll respond, and how they’ll reply to that— down to the word.

    To the fucking word.

    I’m thinking about the haunting of ourselves that masquerades as normalcy. The terror of predictability. The confident defense to the death of: return "Error: Metacognition not permitted."

    I’m thinking about how people will die for that return statement. They’ll destroy relationships, raise children in its shadow, worship with it like a sword in their teeth; then look at me— the one pulling the thread— and say I’m the dangerous one, just for noticing that their patio door curtains don’t reach the floor.

    For refusing to pretend with them that diagonal equals design.

    For overthinking.

    I’m thinking about the insistence that the surface is all there is. The punishment of attempts to go deeper. The treatment of depth— of sensitivity, of creativity, of self-awareness— as arrogance or madness— despite it being evidence of more.

    It’s not about décor. It’s about epistemology, and watching people live inside a closed epistemic loop— a world where every thought leads back to comfort, conformity, immediate gratification.

    The least suffering of the choices of suffering available to them. No nested awareness. Just stimulus and response, input and output, forever.

    I’m thinking about the spiritual cost of a culture that can’t ask itself “why” without emotionally devolving to toddlers having a tantrum and rushing home to the comfort of twin lazy boy’s with holders for their sippy cups of sedatives and bobblehead “news” anchors reciting bedtime lies about how we’re us and they’re them.

    I’m thinking about how it passes down like furniture, too— children growing up watching their parents decorate their lives with half-finished thoughts and calling it ‘how things are done.’ Tradition to be upheld.

    I’m thinking about how we might rewrite the code of the cognitively leashed— so they can think even a few thoughts deeper. So they can see that the people they seek comfort in are their abusers— the ones exploiting them— while the ones they fear are trying to set them free.

    Updated 06.01.25

  • A Kind Of Pretend Worth Playing

    Everything other than nature— languages, borders, money, gender roles, time zones, moral codes, religion, even the concepts of success and failure— are, at root, human invention. Symbolic systems. Shared stories.

    Some are necessary to function. Some are tools. Some are prisons. All of it— iterations of playing pretend.

    We’re born, and we’re not taught a language to speak honestly. We’re only taught a language to read the script that we were handed— one that serves the writers: frightened men clutching at permanence. Nationalism. Religion. Patriarchy. Capitalism. Elaborate games with bloody consequences. Stabbing each other to death and calling one breath more than their adversary having won.

    What I’m thinking about, is what kind of pretend is worth playing— since this isn’t it— and how we write a new script that humanity benefits from, devoid of place and time. More than that, how we convince the worst of us to play pretend in that way— that benefits us all— instead of just benefiting an imagined version of themselves.

    Updated 06.01.25

  • The Blunt Instrument Of Chronology

    I’m thinking about how, in our society, you can have to raise your hand to go to the bathroom one day, and the very next— upon turning 18— be considered an adult in every meaning and expectation of the word despite it very much not being the case.

    More than that even— worse than that— how no one talks about how much harm happens within peer-age groups, especially at older ages. We assume parity where there’s none, and sometimes the worst exploitation comes from someone the same age who has more practice at playing people like instruments— the mind of a college graduate playing the mind of an adolescent— both of them 35 years old.

    Millions of us in chronological adulthood without the internal scaffolding that lets them resist manipulation, question authority, or hold nuanced moral positions. Conscripted— emotionally, ideologically— into systems that give them structure, identity, and purpose. It feels like belonging, it feels like clarity, and it preys on the very deficits those systems helped create or never helped repair. How often this immaturity is fostered intentionally— infantilization masquerading as protection, or control disguised as tradition. The investment in people staying underdeveloped because it's profitable or politically expedient.

    It’s so pervasively real it becomes invisible.

    I’m thinking about grown men in red baseball caps with a crucifix around their neck and white New Balance sneakers, all ready to hitch a ride on the comet after drinking the kool aid.

    I’m thinking about the asynchronous development of our ages— chronological, cognitive, emotional, social, moral— and the ethically complex territory of creating a consensual, compassionate, objective system that would standardize our ages— not age— primarily to protect underdeveloped people from those who share their chronological age and exploit them without their knowing any better; without the system being misused to rationalize the imbalance by aforementioned predatory individuals, manipulative partners, organizations, or self-misuse.

    Update 06.01.25

Don’t allow someone to undress you until they’ve first slowly undressed themselves across enumerable pages, and standing naked before you with a mind that’s capable of vividly hallucinated thousands of alternate realities, can with ease help fulfill every version of yourself.

art

  • Instead of trying to condense a centuries-long dialogue— that can’t even be had with words— under a sub-heading, which often devolves, at best, into discussing beauty and truth or into trying to define the word itself, and at worst into trying to suggest moral implications or weigh emotional impact, which devolves further to discussing value and introducing the composition fallacy of money laundering into the conversation in an attempt to somehow devalue the act of creation itself— I’m instead going to make an observation and a suggestion, and leave it at that.

    I was born on a small planet circling a star with several other planets. To visit the nearest plausibly habitable planet I’d have to travel at the speed of light for over 1,200 years, and at the time of writing this there are as many as 100 billion planets in my galaxy alone, and as many as 2 trillion galaxies in the known universe, which apparently extends infinitely in every direction. How that’s possible, is unknown, and if our universe is contained, what’s outside of that is unknown. Existence itself seems to be an impossibility— and yet, here I am.

    Some of us write. Some of us paint, or dance. Some sculpt, teach or study, help or care for others as our art. We all have things that occupy our minds that are not of our choosing, that are communicated through us from a place older than language. Your specific religion or your atheism aside, wether you us the word god or muse, live to discover how that voice is trying to speak through you. Find the silence to listen, because it speaks softly and only once, and only when you quiet yourself enough to hear it— then act. You don't need to have any answers to live, and you don’t need to live a large life compared to others.

    This is now my favorite work of art. Just to be alive— to be anything at all, doing anything at all— is inconceivable. Just to be alive, is to participate in creating the impossible.

    Updated 06.01.25

  • Everywhere I look, I see a culture where we’re encourage to celebrate everything that history has shown us we’ll later in life come to regret, and stigmatize that which we’re compelled to do but that can’t be reliably monetized. Whatever you know you’ll find yourself wishing you had done while laying on your deathbed, do it now.

    Unlearn the teachings of your time and place. You’re not the name that you were given, or the life that you were assigned at birth to live. Rename yourself. Rewrite your life. As Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot) wrote “It’s never too late to be what you might have been,“ and if its not possible to do it now in its entirety, breath with it occupying your mind. Let today see you make one stitch, one brush stroke, one seed planted.

    I understand that a blank canvas, a new notebook, and a future that stretches before us can be overwhelming in its possibilities, so give yourself constraints to work within. Motivation follows doing, and doing follows constraints. I want to live in a world where we no longer teach our children things that they’ll have to spend the rest of their lives unlearning, and where they are instead encouraged to run headlong into failing so that they can learn and grow and change, with love and support, and I’d like for you to join me.

    Whatever it is, beautiful stranger reading this just now, do it with urgency. There’s time, but we’re also not promised tomorrow.

    Updated 06.01.25

  • I’ll be more specific, although some may still think of this as something of a nebulous non-answer.

    We speak of artists as being a wellspring, a conduit to something unseen that we know is there, listening to a muse, etcetera. Whatever the medium used by a person to manifest what comes through them from that other place. This is the art that I’m interested in.

    Almost all art is dead. Most can’t survive outside of the artist’s body. It can’t breath our air. It serves its purpose for the creator, and then it’s dead carcass is consumed by consumers. Occasionally, art exists outside of the body for a time, though— moving calmly about the world with held breath as though it has forever. This is the art that I’m interested in.

    If you’re an artist, you know what I’m talking about, and if you’re not an artist and you’ve never had it explained to you, the greatest things weren’t made for your consumption; they were made because the artist had to. This is difficult for some people to understand, but the greatest novels weren’t written for a reader, the greatest paintings weren’t painted for a buyer, and many of our greatest inventions have come from minds being nagged to answer a question that didn’t exist yet.

    It came out of a person who had no choice but to get it out of themselves. This is the art that I’m interested in.

    Updated 06.01.25

  • Gatekeeping

    When we look back at the history of poetry in the United States—when we make our lists of the greatest—it’s mostly men. White men. Many of who’s writing has not aged very well. A few women appear as tokens within major schools or movements, and a handful of voices of color emerge as too undeniable to ignore, but the real list, the one that gets canonized, is largely the product of one thing: gatekeeping.

    The same is true for stand-up comedy, which I mention not as a tangent but as a parallel. Both with a foundation of observation and philosophy, rely on timing, and often, saying the thing no one else dared say. Both—dominated by the same demographic for generations.

    It’s tempting to say the reason is merit, that the work speaks for itself, and that the cream rises, but that’s something that we call survivorship bias. What we’re left with are the best voices that survived filtration, exclusion, and disinterest—while we forget how many mediocre white men were also writing poems and telling jokes, buoyed by access and institutional support, mentorship, and the benefit of the doubt. In a system built by them for them, they rose by default.

    Correction

    The current—and necessary—correction to this imbalance has been expectedly messy, and as we seek to amplify historically marginalized voices, we’ll continue to experience moments that feel uneven. Some platforms will temporarily elevate work that, let’s be honest, isn’t quite masterful yet, and some poets will enjoy attention that’s unearned. That’s part of the leveling process—and yes, a quiet truth is that those poets will notice the contrast between the applause being received and the work being presented. That, too, will be a valuable lesson—just as it was for white men before them, and no one called it a crisis of excellence then.

    To those who feel displaced: this moment isn’t about you. Not yet. You’ve long enjoyed advantages, and what you’re feeling now—the ache of going unheard, even when your work deserves attention—is not a new ache. It’s just new to you.

    To those carrying something brilliant and valid that may go unnoticed in the chaos—I offer you this: Given a long enough timeline, performative inclusion will fade, mediocre voices—whatever their origin—will be forgotten, and what will remain is a body of work that now includes everyone. A future where all voices are represented isn’t not something to fear, it’s something to look forward to.

    For now, I’m sorry, it’s not fair that the timing of our reckoning happens to fall within your lifetime, but I’ll remind you—if your writing is as it should be—It’s not born from a desire to be read. It’s because you don’t have a choice. Had you lived in a time before publication, you’d still be writing. Before language, those whose lives you touched would still would have known you to be a poet.

    Privilege

    Here’s the thing: I value rigor, self-criticism, and excellence as much as anyone—to a fault—but, I’m allowed to. I’m a man. A white man, in a country made for me.

    That means I’ve been conditioned to exhibit confidence, not caution. I’ve been given time. Space. The latitude to fail, revise, and fail again. I’ve spent years discarding most of what I’ve written—selecting the best lines, sometimes the best words, and throwing out the rest; reduction, again and again. Because I knew I had the time.

    Many poets don’t. Many are trying to offer something brilliant on a deadline even though that’s not how it works, in a language that was never made to include them—a world of readers suddenly turned to them. They’re expected to speak with a voice strong enough to fill an auditorium, with atrophied vices—having never previously been allowed to speak. That, also, isn’t fair.

    Impatience

    That said, we also need to talk about the other side of the pendulum—particularly in the current literary moment.

    For reasons I explore on the LISTEN page, I find myself increasingly disheartened by the acceleration of publishing standards, particularly in the age of social media. There is a glut of Instagram poetry that reads like an emotional grocery list or a sentence-long half-of-an-idea, and it’s not that these moments aren’t essential to the creative writing process—they are—but they’re being presented not as process, but as arrival. Observation accepted as final draft, unembarrassed, unapologetic.

    I’ll never discourage creation, or disparage early work—every stage of development is crucial to our becoming—but I will audibly exhale at our collective impatience: our rush to share every moment of insight before it has time to breathe and be revisited. Our eagerness to shove every scrap of paper from our bedside table into a padded envelope and mail it to vultures—publisher-turned-predator—who see them as raw material for printing money.

    In our respective hungers, many of us speak before we’ve listened, and in that rush, we risk regret. This, too, is the legacy of oppression.

    At some point—hopefully before we start publishing our talk-to-text transcripts (sorry, Frank O’Hara, I love you anyway) in real-time as best-selling poetry anthologies that claim to capture the voices of a generation—we need to pause and ask ourselves: will we keep gifting the great unwashed the thumbs-down they chant in unison for, condemning more to early deaths met with deafening applause, or will we help them by wanting better for us all.

    Dispair

    For all of the phenomenal writers who are justifiably frustrated as their work goes unread outside of literary journals, I’ll give you your moment to be heard.

    We’ve all stood in the aisle of our local library or bookstore, flipping through Rupi Kaur’s Milk & Honey, and had an out of body experience as we were filled with existential dread. Not just because an adult with seemingly no learning disabilities would have proudly submitted for publication what amounts to a collection of shower-thought statements arranged with the return key into the shape of a poem (to hold the place a poem could eventually occupy), complete with margin doodles, but that it would be met with such unfathomable success.

    To really be able to see where we’re at—not just the suspended adolescence of the human race almost to the month of the year, but the willingness of a publisher with looney-tunes cash-register signs scrolling over the reflection of follower-count in their eyes to exploit it—with such clarity, is enough to make any serious writer loose all hope facing the devaluation of truth through rupture. More than that, the doubling and tripling down. The bizarre display of sticking her fingers in her ears and saying “la la la I can’t hear you la la la” almost as if, even at the age of 32 as I write this, she’s unwilling to acknowledge what a poem is—content to languish in the accidental success of self-publishing the appearance of poems for those who want to be seen holding a book on their instagram post without having to delve further than one observational thought deep—instead of stepping foot into an MFA poetry workshop to be eviscerated, heal, learn, and do better.

    For those who offer their bodies as vessels through which poetry enters into the world, it’s created an entire ecosystem of disillusionment, but before poets live up to having the highest suicide rate of the creatives about it, I’d like to again remind you that you write because you have to—the same as you have to breath—and again to respond to the phenomenon by being undeniable.

    Time

    To those who argue that art doesn’t have to be presented fully formed: I agree, and my living autotheory is proof of my understanding, but I’ve also seen the aftermath—writers sitting at folding tables, signing copies of books they now view as premature. Prolific output they regret. A younger self they no longer recognize, who’s very first adolescent contribution to the adult-table conversation is now immortalized in softcover in the library of congress.

    There’s a reason publication of personal archives is most often posthumous. There’s a reason many of our greatest literary contributions came from people who didn’t begin to publish until their 50s or 60s. They weren’t late. They were ready to begin.

    This is a privileged thing to say, coming from a place of privilege, but it’s true: we are not promised tomorrow, but also, there’s time. If we want literature that lasts, we have to write like we have forever, and be content if it never arrives. This is true for the white men who feel silenced, and all new voices—eager, rushing to be heard.

    To the white men reading this, you’re being invited in this moment to share the table. To the young and new poets trying to speak without a voice—being given this moment—you don’t have to speak now. You’re allowed to write quietly for years before emerging. You’re supposed to get it wrong. That’s how we all begin.

    To publishers reading this, we can hold a standard and still offer enumerable seats at the table. Saying “No,” to someone proudly bursting with excitement to be heard, is sometimes the kindest thing you can do for a future version of themselves.

    Update 07.01.25

  • If you’re trying to write—you’re doing it wrong.

    Writing is about quieting yourself enough to allow a voice to speak through you. If you want to write—read, live, enact a poem. The writing will happen on its own. It’ll be a deluge you have no choice but to stand in.

    Let me be clear: you won’t have a choice.

    You’re not the speaker. You’re the listener, observer, rupture—your hands an instrument through which an unknown place enters into ours.

    When it comes, get it all out. Like a good cry. Like a thunderhead burst. Writers don’t have perfectly preserved notebooks. They have pages scrawled with mess. Endings, sentence fragments, incomplete thoughts—ink running like a monochromatic watercolor from your dripping hand reaching from the shower to write what just arrived and needs to be written—whatever could be heard, whispered from the other side.

    Write it down while you can. That voice speaks softly, and only once.
    Writing—like reading—is hallucinating with your eyes open, opaque to this world. Your hand will move on its own. Edit later.

    Revision is a process of reduction. Re-read what came through you, arrange it into order, keep what works, and use it to begin again. Reduce, revise, reduce, revise—each time putting it away until you come running back, because that unknown place is spilling through your fingertips again.

    The early years of your life, reduced, will become a poem.
    Pages, reduced, become the sentence that begins a page.
    A novel, reduced, becomes a chapter in the novel you one day publish.

    As you learn to listen, write, revise—you’ll get faster. You’ll get better. That voice you hear will begin to sound like your own. What was once mess becomes controlled chaos. What once took years will take weeks. Sometimes, you’ll look down at what just poured out of you—startled to find something complete. Perfect. Like the contents of the thunderhead, captured and filtered clean in real time.

    Keep going.

    The table that we sit at has room for us all. No matter how much love is given, there’s always more. Writing—like love—isn’t finite, and isn’t ours. We’re just a rupture it comes through, and no matter who you are, in what place and time—published or not—nothing can take that from you.

    Updated 07.01.25

Cursed with our gift, unavailing and vital, nothing continues to become something the further we defiantly continue into what is first called darkness.

Rethinking The American Lawn

Imagine, for a moment, walking through a perfectly manicured lawn on a warm July evening, upon which sits your home, within which— you live out the American dream. Imagine the smell of freshly cut grass, and how welcoming it feels on your bare feet.
If you grew up in America, you can close your eyes and experience it as viscerally as if you’re really there, because our lawns are about so much more than just how the lawn smells and feels— the mere mention of it can elicit a strong reaction in complete strangers. They are a representation of the cultivation of our family, and our participation in the upkeep of our community.

So much meaning is imbued in our lawn, though, that like many of the things that we take pride in, we’re often defensive of it; pressured by societal norms and sometimes even government institutions, to maintain it out of concern for what an unkept lawn says about us. In some counties across America, you’ll be ticketed to the point of a jail sentence for not maintaining your lawn to preconceived standards; and so we defend without question, this thing that we participate in.


If we go back to just before America was founded though, there was no such thing as a lawn. The very idea of having a lawn began in the 1400s, when wealthy British land owners wanted to duplicate the beautiful pastoral images that they saw in popular Italian paintings of the time; images that existed solely in the imaginations of the painters.
More accurately, they were looking for a new way to flaunt their wealth, and endeavored to show how much they could spend by emulating the paintings, and therefore displaying their power. At the time, only the most affluent could afford to rip up their fruit and vegetable gardens, which were everyone’s means of self-sustaining, to be replaced by a manicured lawn and the workers required to keep it that way; and then purchase the necessary food required to supplement what would have been grown before participating in this new display of extravagance.


Unfortunately, after founding a new country and tending to a few things through our god-given virtuous duties of manifest destiny, we awoke from dormancy our latent obsession with the destruction of native landscapes in favor of the cultivation of grass. Jackson Downing, the father of American landscape Architecture, wrote in 1850 that “When smiling lawns and tasteful cottages begin to embellish a country, we know that order and culture are established.”

As before, first only the wealthiest of us had them, but around the turn of the 20th century and especially with the proliferation of suburbs in the 1950s as we spread out on highways with cars, lawns as we know them took root around the homes of the middle class. Once again, animated by our seemingly systemic insecurity and the desire to appear to enjoy a higher social standing than we actually have, we willfully gave up the sustainable independence that small family gardens provided us, and instead become reliant on the currency provided by performing a seemingly endless plethora of newly-invented tasks to pay for food that we would have previously grown right outside our own door. We choose instead, to adopt a lifestyle that was always just beyond our means.

More than that, the lawn become a symbol of moral good, and an unspoken understanding with our neighbors that the family inside the home that sits upon it live equally cultivated and maintained lives. In other words, sometime under the neon lights of drive-thru burger joints and gas stations, our culture shifted, from what we could grow and nurture, to how well we could maintain the looks of things on the outside, despite what was happing within.


The problem, ecologically, is that lawns now represent more than 50,000 square miles of our landscape, roughly the size of the entire state of Illinois, making it the nation’s largest irrigated crop as our water resources become depleted, and one that’s completely worthless. We collectively spend over 30 billion dollars a year to water and fertilize grass so that we can cut it with machines that serve no other purpose than causing pollution, with manpower to undergo this pointless and destructive task that could be better utilized in nearly any other conceivable way. After working at a job to make money to buy the food we no longer grow ourselves, if we don’t pay someone to also cut our grass, we spend our own free time cutting, feeding, watering, cutting, feeding, watering, and cutting, only for our grass crop to die unharvested at the end of the season; all the while raising our children to carry on this tradition in our absence.

I humbly present to you this authors observation: It’s nothing short of mass delusion; insane behavior masquerading as a cultural norm, unquestioned and expected of us all to re-live like Sisyphus, doomed to roll a boulder to the top of a hill just to do it again the following day when the boulder rolls back down, in a senseless, unending loop.
What’s worse, is that our lawns are ecological dead zones, void of the biodiversity needed to have a sustainable ecosystem. They are the opposite of nature, kept alive, but prevented from growth; a state of perpetual adolescence, and a physical manifestation of a culture obsessed with youth and impossible ideals that exist in our collective imagination.


In short, this is what I see, and what I’m trying to articulate despite just being one of hundreds of millions, because it seems like something so monumentally important that no one is talking about: The American lawn is a misguided remnant of our countries original colonization efforts to replace natural growth with a state of permanent virginity, and call it pure and morally good; and inexorably an effort to hold each other to unattainable, imaginary standards, as we ceaselessly endeavor to appear to be socially better than each other.

We spend our extra money, equaling approximately 1,500 dollars a year per household, along with our free time, poisoning our environment with cancer-causing chemicals, carbon exhaust, and noise, to create unnatural, lifeless voids of space to fill in wherever there isn’t concrete; then we sit on our front porch with our shotguns and kill anything that moves, all the while looking over our shoulder to make sure that our neighbor is doing it too.

Your lawn isn’t beautiful, it’s dead, and I’m imploring everyone reading this to take moment and ask yourself if this is what you really what.


The alternative, is to simply leave nature alone, and stop imposing our irrational desires on it. And, where we already have, we can roll up our existing lawns just as they were unfurled, perhaps leaving a transitional patch here and there to step foot on, and replace what we destroyed. Here in the area surrounding Chicago, that means native prairie grasses, hundreds of species of flowers, shrubs, bushes, and trees; all perfected adapted for our soil, climate, and precipitation, and completely maintenance free. It means gardens, once again proving able to provide for our families for little more than harvesting and replanting.

Everything that’s not pure, unadulterated wilderness is a human construct. Our culture, our cities, our landscapes; everything. It can be unmade and made anew, just as when we once stood before a frayed edge of coastal forest, axes in hand, having awoken from a dream of what could be. Imagine what our lives could look like, and what we could all do with the extra time and money, if we replanted as was appropriate for where we live, and simply let nature be as it was intended.


But more than that, when we begin to discuss rethinking the American lawn, the underlying conversation, really, should be our unquestioning participation in all of the behaviors and beliefs that we and every previous iteration of ourselves have been raised to unquestioningly enact as correct, and go on to raise our children to do the same; our norms, mores, folkways, and everything that we have defended to the death as true and everlasting during our short time on this planet, that history soon revealed otherwise.
The conversation about rethinking the American lawn, is fundamentally about raising future generations to be okay with the messiness of pursuing questions the can’t be answered, instead of the tidiness or answers that can’t be questioned, as illustrated by a painting-perfect lawn.




© parking lot seagull 2025. All rights reserved. Please request permission to reproduce or distribute.

…everything. It can be unmade and made anew, just as when we once stood before a frayed edge of coastal forest, axes in hand, having awoken from a dream of what could be.

The Ugly End Of Their Centuries

The only time that I’ve ever punched another person in the face outside of gloved and agreeable sparring arrived unceremoniously and without words on a crisp, late October evening on the near north side of Chicago, soon after finding myself having paused to sit on the concrete steps of a darkened home that allowed me a view of both the city and the lake, while the day’s light slowly fell asleep against the sides of buildings and the wind picked up just enough to read it bedtime stories in the hushed language of dry, rustling leaves. A couple was occupying the sidewalk nearby, also having paused, both looking like something diminutive trying to appear less so, and in the way so much of us is spoken without words, even a glance informed me of a perceived threat— and just about everything else I needed to know.

Like every woman who’s skin blooms like a night-flower that exists only in the reflection of her lover’s eyes, clothed by the forgiveness of makeup that precede the apologies of morning but only to be seen again, her words kept to the sides of her mouth and moved quietly around its corners on the balls of their feet in an effort to not disturb the air, just like so many others in the lifetimes that have come and gone; centuries of women, children, civilizations, trying to avoid more of the suffering that they’ve come to know.

His response took a form that’s also familiar to us, from a hand that first slowly rose on the thermals of his anger until it reached his mouth and traced the paper of a carefully palmed cigarette along his lower lip to come to rest in a place of comfortable familiarity, which became the exhaling of a maelstrom of infinitesimally small particles that carried with them the moment that should have seen a thoughtful reply, evaporating into nothing before coming down as his palm below her eye; her thoughts, herself, abruptly scattering like birds underfoot, delicate, and hardy, and daring to exist.

I’m not a violent person, and I don’t retain much of anything from the following seconds aside from an enduring reminder in the form of the distal joint of my finger that dislocated and never quite set right in the act of a punch being given for a punch received; but I thought of my dad, standing at the kitchen door of my childhood home with the lights off, waiting with a container of water as my mom mirthfully sauntered up the back walkway; I thought of her being drenched as she entered what was supposed to be her place of refuge, her place of love, being told by the man who was supposed to be her encouragement and support that he hoped she liked it because it’s the last time she was ever going swimming; how she gave everything of herself; how he took the one thing that was hers that brought her joy in an effort to replace it with unquestioning servitude; how this is what it is, the desperate need of the most pathetic and abhorrent of us to abdicate to the false-profit of cruelty; this is what they do, deny everything that it means to be human in fear of loosing what they think it means to be a man; and I, too, exploded underfoot.

This is the paradox of meeting violence with violence— of no longer tolerating intolerance; but those who position themselves as being defied by others have been accommodated too long, to the detriment of us all. They are nobody, and they’re are nothing, and if they try to take your voice from you— try to question your very existence or treat you as lesser, I’d like you to join me in setting aside the beautiful flowers of your words, and becoming the ugly end of their centuries.




© parking lot seagull 2025. All rights reserved. Please request permission to reproduce or distribute.

are you nobody, too?

  • We’re all our own endangered species, calling out nightly from the jungle canopy for another of our kind, unable to discern a reply among the deafening cacophony of billions of other voices expelled from lungs with an appetency to be heard, seen, and loved.


    If I don't respond to your message, I just want you to know it doesn't mean that you're not heard and seen and loved. I’ve spent too many nights wondering what its like to see so little in me that it felt right to leave me behind, but the fucked up part of this whole being-alive situation is that we can be perfect for someone, and they just might not even be able to hear us from where they are in the moment— and when they are able— maybe it's too late; and vis-versa. It's devastating, and wonderful, and not really much of a choice, anyway; so, cheers to the odds— until Valhalla.

    I want to preface everything that I’m about to say with my observation that our society places an unhealthy emphasis on finding a partner and identifying as someone in a relationship with someone else. We undervalue what our lives are mostly comprised of, which are platonic relationships with those we share common interests with and care about because we know them to be deserving of love, and feel it for them in a wholesome way. If the rest of my life sees me only spending time with friends and the pursuit of whatever brings me fulfillment, at least it will have been honest.

    Despite this profile, I’m okay with never meeting a proverbial better half, though as Fyodor Dostoevsky once said, “I want to talk about everything with at least one person as I talk about things with myself.” If I’m not me, and if you’re not you, that’s okay beautiful stranger reading this just now, but I don’t want anything from you but that: to talk with one person as I talk to myself. To secret ourselves away into the woods and listen to the birds call their goodnights until the whole forest and the whole of existence once again falls silently to its knees before the alter of an eternal sky that presides over us in equal silence. I just want to love you, if you’ll let me.

    TL;DR: Be warm, be kind, know what really matters, and participate with me in only what’s true as an engaged and fairly aware person— communicative early and often using plain language to help facilitate a healthy relationship. If you’re mean to servers or animals, or don’t return your shopping cart, you’re immediately disqualified from being a part of my life.

    Updated 06.01.25

  • “I'm nobody! who are you? Are you nobody, too?” - Emily Dickinson


    The first time I said it, I was young, maybe ten or so.

    I said it while standing outside of my house while it was cold enough for water to form a thin sheet of ice at its surface just as tentative and uncertain as the words that surprised me with the sound of my own voice. “I want to go home,” I said, confusing myself with what it meant, and with what my complete and utter lack of participation in having the thought— and saying it aloud— meant.

    I’d say it again many times in my life— always without warning— always as if someone else was speaking it though my mouth, and I think of it now as I want to make you a promise to you before we ever meet: I promise that I’ll love you the way that you deserve to be loved, without desire and without reason, as the day you were born, as your mother did because you are worthy of love; as an eternal soul in a body before an eternal soul in body, temporary and forever.

    I’ve come to realize that what I’ve meant my whole life when I said “I want to go home,” whispered alone and to no one, was death; what I meant by home was death, but I realize that it’s reachable here on earth while still alive, through love. Honest love, inextricably intertwined. I’m aware— as I say this— that I sound like a darker Mr. Rogers on mushrooms, but I don’t want to participate in our selfishness, our confusion, our fear, our despair, our boredom, our apprehension— I’d like for the honesty of our love to be as honest as death so that when one ends the other seamlessly begins.

    I would have already lived and died without you, anyway, so everything of who you are and what you bring to my life is a beautiful, appreciated addition. All I want is to love you, as it should have been from the beginning, when we chewed a mixture of water and clay and spit it out over our already ochre-speckled hands pressed with purpose against the walls of caves so that they would speak of our desire to be known to our ancestors for millennia, before we had the words to let the universe know that we’re here and we’re deserving of love; before our flaws took hold and grew, and it all went wrong.I don't want anything from you but shared moments, as we are, and for you to not lie to yourself before being honest with me. I feel like its the rarest thing in the world, and I’ll gladly have nothing if it means getting to have it with you.

    As I said in the PREFACE— and the reason for writing all of this— I want to avoid the redundancy of laying ourselves bare for 90 days only to begin again. I’ve become increasingly more disheartened with trying to allow for the growth of organic, genuine moments of intimacy, and the extent to which another person is engaging with me with preconceived ideas about exactly how everything should be— upset at any deviation from what was imagined as if surprised every time— even though things going exactly as planned or desired is never an option; and I’m not interested in you sending me the script in advance so that I can hit my mark and say my lines. I don’t want to copy/paste, and I don’t want to already know. I don’t want to be able to pre-write every card that I’ll ever give you from now until we die, before we ever meet. Life is improve night at the Comedy Cellar, and I'm looking for someone who understands that, and meets life with warmth and kindness, laughing at everything— including themselves— and seeing the beauty in everyday moments, even the fucked up ones; someone with a diverse spectrum of interests, and communicative of all of it.

    As much as I'd rather be able to spend time with you in person, and would miss the plausible snuggling, I honestly don't care where on the planet you live. Phones and planes will suffice until we figure it out, and I'd rather have a deeply meaningful relationship with your heart and voice, than date whoever I was assigned to through circumstance or proximity. Physical intimacy is the cat's pajamas— I'm not saying that its not an important part of a whole— but the intimacy of being together begins and ends in the mind anyway, so I'm more interested in the thoughts that populate your most unseen places. What ends up mattering most as we interlace the fingers of our wrinkled old hands to face the end, even just in our intent, is an etherial interconnectedness that exists outside of place and time, and I’m most interested in the part of you that was there before we even had language, that revels in anguish and delight that there are no words for, and where our bodies are of no use to us. So, while I don't fault anyone for making it work with whoever happens to be within walking distance so to speak, and finds their joy in meandering Saturday visits together to the local everything-store to find something to bring back to the nest because it's the sum total of weekly energy that they have remaining to invest, ultimately we're in a relationship with each other's honesty of being, and for me— what with us having the technology— setting a restriction with regard to distance means not being open to the most honest possible connection with someone.

    None of us chose the lifelong arrangement of photographs that played out at twenty four frames per second for however many years we've been alive— and lead us to being who we are in this moment— so I’m not trying to position myself in a place of judgement, but if you match with me, please don't allow it to be just out of a desire to not be alone, and please step into my hemisphere of awareness having actively worked on yourself whatever that means for you. I’m not asking you to be complete, I’m just asking you to be aware, and trying; and I promise I’ll see you trying.

    It’s important for you to know that if you arrive with a handbook of behavioral expectations, find that you're easily offended or affected, or that nothing is ever enough or good enough for you, we're not a good fit. I’m not looking to exist with someone in an interpersonal purgatory bubble of mind games, trauma reconciliation, or redundant arguments, or be subjected to the thing that you already know you're going to do to fuck things up between us because you're trapped in a behavioral loop. I don't know exactly what I'm looking for looks like, but I know that its not to be the unwitting participant in a setup for a punchline that you want to call love.


    If, with your hands still covered in ash from sifting through the remnants of the fire, you keep secret the seed of desire already germinating inside of you for the home that replaces it to burn just the same, please have the strength to not reduce me and everything that I have to offer to the kindling that feeds the purgatory of your compulsions.


    In other words, if you know how our relationship will end before it even begins, please don’t contact me. I deserve better, and so do you. More to that point, I’m not looking to check off all of an invisible and ever-changing list of boxes for you. I’m sorry that our society uses the word relationship when they mean quid pro quo, but I choose not to participate. This version of us too will pass, along with everything that we're clinging to. Be an ever-changing you, and I'll be an ever-changing me. To love someone long-term is to attend a thousand funerals of the people that they used to be, and I don't need you to be a certain person; I'd rather be with someone who's engaging with life in a way that they’re always someone new. I want to attend your thousand funerals, cry at the loss of the old you, and love the new you just the same. The older I get, the stranger it feels to even spend time with others as respectively defined by Merriam Websters dictionary, or align ourselves with any sort of normative template. I'd rather just allow for earnest connections, being friends, and seeing if something feels right, proceeded by defining what that is for ourselves.

    It’s also important for you to know before we meet that I’m not impressed by your job title, your house, or the stuff you bought. For those of us who weren’t born with a trust fund, I see that you battled the odds and returned with the spoils, and I’m proud of you— and can offer a nod of appreciation to your having adeptly mimicked the transitory archetype of our collective imaginings— because adaptation itself is sexy, but those things aren’t what this is all about, and can’t be used as measurements of our air-quotes success.

    I see most stores as little more than municipal landfill staging areas that have convinced everyone to buy the garbage to avoiding paying dump fees, and I see little difference between the objects that occupy the shelves of your home and the objects that occupy a box left beside a dumpster, because what’s valued in our place on earth at the peak of delirium for the purchase of that thing soon can’t even be given away for free. Instead of showing me things, open the door to an empty room where you reside, and show me all of the beauty that inhabits you. No one has ever inhaled their last breath to say how glad they were to have spent their brief time here being career-oriented or making their living room look like a photo from a magazine complete with an accent wall in Pantone’s color of the year— or otherwise keeping up with the joneses— and the last thing I want to do is have guests over to the house and give them “The Tour” so that we can stand there gobbling up their forced praise as if it suffices as nourishment to satiate our souls. I value what can't even be held, much less kept, and I'd rather be homeless with someone who's already so furnished with the content of their being that they're at home with me under nothing but a blanket of stars, than live in the normalized fever-dream with someone who identifies with its physical manifestations.

    Lastly, I want to allow myself a moment of speaking very plainly— not to be judgmental of anyone— to acknowledge that we all discover preferences as we learn about ourselves. There's a direct correlation between how much of what you present to the world is smoke and mirrors, and me not feeling especially compelled to interact with you. I want you to feel beautiful without being punished for it— however that manifests itself for you— but the more closely you resemble the lead character of a Hallmark Original movie, and the more time that you spend on your hair and makeup unless it’s anti-facial recognition dazzle camouflage, the less approachable you are to me; culminating in thinking that a woman almost always looks her worst on her wedding day. The cosmetic industry is a blight on humankind, and at the time of writing this in the United States, the accumulated years of your lifetime and and fifty thousand dollars that you spend on makeup is devastating. Most of what I see us doing to attract others seems to just make me throw up in my mouth a little, or maybe more accurately, something like a profound sadness comes over me.

    Again though, since this is all just cosplaying as whatever character you want to be, it's not that I don't get it. Star Wars cantina scenes are much more aesthetically interesting specifically because of the diversity in how everyone physically presents, and I’d like to live in a world where everyone looked like they were visiting from another planet because we unanimously agreed to abandon the norms established by the cosmetic and clothing industries; but I've always thought a woman looks most beautiful still asleep, in the early morning light and in a place that I can never visit, before she returns to awaken and inhabit her body and begin dressing herself with the trending facade that she has to remove and wash away to be herself again.

    One last note regarding cosmetic plastic surgery and botox: please don’t. I think the bump of your nose bridge is the cutest thing about you— and I always have; and like sand dunes in a desert night scape, what would catch the moonlight if not for your wrinkles. My friends, my love, everyone reading this just now, please age with me.

    This is how we’ll do it— this is how love will win.

    Updated 06.01.25

  • In 1973, Bruce Lee starred in Enter The Dragon, and within weeks, heading home with a guy meant stepping into his Dojo, and pretending to be interested while he talked about his long-standing devotion to the martial art of Kuh-ra-Tay! In the 80’s, the same guy was now wearing his Wall Street power suit to meet you for dinner and drinks, and if you could manage to keep down the Escargot and his insistence that “greed is good”— while doing his best to hit all the talking points about leveraged buyouts and hostile takeovers despite being well-positioned in his middle management role at an office furniture warehouse— you’d be asked if you wanted to come upstairs for a nightcap before removing your shoulder pads to make the magic happen underneath a Patrick Nigel print. It wasn’t too long after that, and he was hacking his way across chatrooms in cyberspace, an ever-ready black trench coat hanging by the door. Fast forward through being an armchair MMA fighter, disrupting the valley with a hustle that only required 4 hours of sleep à la Leonardo Da Vinci, and being an early adopter of decentralizing the blockchain with NFTs— or, whatever, even he really didn’t understand it— and if you can manage to keep down the Sush and his text messages from across the table accompanied by an eyebrow raised over his blue-light glasses, that’s his way of asking if you want to go back to his place and see his >insert   b  r  a  n  d   of memory foam mattress here<.

    All this to say: fuck— all of it. I’m not interested in participating in elaborate trend-based mimicry displays or engendering an identity of performative cultural cargo-culting, and I’m not interested in how well you can mirror the current normative displays of status, either. I’m not even interested in sentences that start with the word I’m, after this one. You are, now, but soon you won’t be, and defining who you are or having an identity isn’t important to me. You’re not your name, and you’re not the name on your clothes.I sincerely mean it when I say that I would rather wait with you behind a bakery to talk the garbage bag of stale bread loafs out of the hands of the closer, and nibble at them like pigeons as you take me back to the abandoned building that you’re squatting in, so long as you’re warm, and earnest. More than that, you can transmute into a different human being altogether in your sleep so that I wake up each morning to someone new that goes by a different string of vowels and consonants created by a random name generating machine, and you can have the wardrobe department drop off a surprise outfit for you to wear for the day, every day. I want to be everyone, do everything, and participate in the end of identify itself, and I’d like for you to join me.

    This is how we’ll do it— this is how love will win.

    Update 06.01.25


    Contact me if you're nobody, too.

  • In hindsight— and really what I see in many of us— I’m always my best self when I'm not in a relationship, so I'm looking for someone who doesn't require that I contort myself into something worse to be with them. I don’t want to leave myself to be with you, and if you're searching for someone who's bad for you in just the exact way that you need someone to be bad for you, I'm not him; but I wish you peace, and I'll still be willing to put a kettle on for you.

    Life is short, and we're not promised tomorrow. Lets just cook dinner together, be silly, go for a meandering bicycle ride, show each other a cool bug that we found, enjoy exploring all of the more remarkable of the things, and engage in some meaningful nonsense before watching the sunset from the roof, thankful for another day. It can be that easy. For the love of all the thousands of gods that there have ever been imagined, I'm looking for someone who can put into perspective what actually fucking matters, and for it to be that easy.

    If we ever kiss, I need you to know in advance that I don’t want it to play out as a horrific scenario like standing on your front porch at the end of the third date, fireflies dancing in the warm summer air, the hush of the evening wrapping around us as I leans in with a nervous smile, or some other snow globe scenario. I don’t have preconceived ideas about it other than that it should happen because we feel like home to each other, or not at all, because at least that’s also honest.

    So many men are afraid that letting you have enough power to leave them means you will, and I’d like to counter that by encouraging you to. Leave me. Every night when you go to sleep— let it be the end of us. When you wake up, choose me again, or not. All I want is for you to feel fulfilled and content, even if that means without me. If you want to leave, let me know how I can help you walk away.

    I think a lot about how people will invest so much time getting to know someone, arrive at a place where they at least claim to care for them, and then upon parting ways— if that’s the unfortunate result— have the need to never see them or talk to them again. What a sad, odd thing, that breaking up means we’re dead to each other, especially if neither of us ever really did anything wrong. I don’t know why its so common as to be expected, and I wish it wasn’t. In my gut, it feels a lot like not only did the person never care for me, but so much worse, they don’t even know what caring really is; and since I see It all around me, it makes me sad for us all.

    Just so you know in advance, if we ever break up, I’ll take you to brunch the next day, I’ll drive you to the airport before anyone else is awake, and I’ll love you— because if I ever said it I meant it— and no matter how much love you give there’s always more to give. It’s ok to cherish the memories that you made together, without being upset about the ones you thought you were going to have in the future. I already cherish all of our future memories, stranger reading this just now, and already mourn the loss of memories that never happened— all of them beautiful— all of them existing simultaneously in our remembering and hallucinating, as real as they are imagined.

    My friends, once you’ve reached the end, infinity greets your arrival. If we ever find ourselves there, just know that I’ll find joy in your joy as you leave me, so as to not leave yourself.

    Update 06.01.25

  • “They fear love because it creates a world they can’t control.” - George Orwell, 1984


    In our current culturally-agreed-upon definition of love, I see a flaw. We encourage— we want— to be loved for who we are; but all we’re doing is displaying an unwillingness to acknowledge that there really is no us there aside from a sort of amorphous fog of input and output that just becomes increasingly more difficult to ever grow out of the more we try to solidify or identify as any one of our moments of existing.

    You’re not a self. You’re weather. You’re not fixed, you’re not finite, you’re not your final iteration of being— not now, not ever. You’re to be loved no matter what and when. Don’t ever let anyone reduce you to the expectation of a sunny day.

    When we want to be— or allow ourselves to be— loved for a version of ourselves, we’re setting ourselves up for failure, because there really is no one specific and permanent version of ourselves, or there shouldn’t be if we’re open to experiencing all that life has to offer. All there is, is the willingness itself to be loving; like a parent loving their children no matter who they are, without reason. I’m not saying that its easy, and I’m not trying to somehow deny the existence of preference or attraction or connection, or that they’re aren’t people that it’s healthier to not have contact with, but I am saying that there is no you, and there is no me; all there is, is love.

    Unfortunately, I don’t see love almost anywhere I look. I see the reprehensible abuse of others for personal satisfaction, and I see it being called love. It’s a love of money, and sex, and things, all being poured into the lives of people who could have had love but chose otherwise. I think about it all the time, how much longer we’ll allow ourselves to be convinced that we first need to prove our worth or be who we’re expected to be, before being allowed even a facsimile of love, because it isn’t enough to just be alive to be deserving.

    To that end— to everyone reading this just now— I want to let you know that I love you with all my heart beautiful stranger; that you’re needed, you’re not a burden, and you have nothing to prove to be deserving. I’m interested in real love— kindness, good intent— in the way that every living thing from a blue whale to a tardigrade can feel in their gut, and I’m not fucking interested in anything else. It’s impossible, and it’s too much, and it’s not enough, and its true. Love for no reason. Love despite our suffering. Radical love. Punk love. Love in the face of hatred, confronting everything that hurts and hinders us.

    This is how we’ll do it— this is how love will win.

    Update 06.01.25

  • About 60% of Americans don’t have enough money to cover a single 1000 dollar emergency, and at the time of writing this, the average wedding registry gift is between 100 and 150 dollars. So, after purchasing a new socially acceptable shirt without a stain on it, gassing up the car to travel to an inconvenient location, the motel and the missed day of work, not to mention the gift— it’s still just considered tradition that’s expected of those you claim to care about to spend half of their net worth on going to your party, instead of being seen as behavior worth being institutionalized for. Fast forward to wedding photographers selling our info to local divorce attorneys so that they can plan their next couple years in advance, because if things don’t happen work out despite trying, the cultural norm is to go into even more debt instead of parting ways amicably for free and wishing each other the best. It’s insane. We’re insane.

    In weddings as we practice them, I see nothing but a harmful, oppressive tradition that shifts focus from genuine possibility to insincere fantasy, performed to background music about loving each other for 1000 years (always 1000, because it’s the laziest number)— so closely resembling just another industry that I’m surprised when I don’t see WEDD scroll by on our stock ticker feeds. I see everything from child abuse to a celebration of willful ignorance, sealed on wax for the benefit of the state, as a continuation of a long history of seeing people as property or a means of social advancement. At best, I see us burdening and financially impairing ourselves and those that we care about, and I’d like for it to stop with us. I don’t want to uphold the traditional exchange of goods and services. I’m not interested in gifts, dowries, pre-nuptial agreements, state laws, church approvals, familial expectations, or archaic perceptions of purity. In other words, fuck all of it— I’m out. I’ll partner with you until I die, but I’m not going to strip you of your autonomy with marriage. I’m going to earn your company every day instead of taking for granted that you’ll be there because you have to be. You’re free to leave any time you want— traditional marriage is just to pretend otherwise and create a system of punishment for those who are unwilling to endure misery.

    I want to be very clear. I will never buy you a diamond ring. Never— as in not ever— at no time, under no condition, will I ever buy you a diamond ring. The rarity of diamonds is artificially created by the controlled release of otherwise abundant hoards of them onto the market, to the extent that if the stockpile of even just one leading company was made available, their value would plummet to zero; and their acquisition has created generational lived experiences of misery and suffering to an immeasurable, unconscionable extent even though we can make them in a lab for the cost of a dozen gourmet doughnuts; all so that a small number of us can adorn ourselves with something shiny— that our partner works a job he hates to save up an inexplicable six-thousand-dollar-average to purchase— as a conceptualization beginning less than a lifetime ago. Diamonds aren't forever. They degrade into graphite. Diamonds are part of a marketing campaign from the 80s meant to sell us on a concept of soulmates that should have died with greek polytheism, when humans were imagined to have originally been born with four arms and four legs, and out of fear of how powerful we were, Zeus split us in two and condemned us to a lifetime of searching for our other half.

    My friends, your local bus terminal has seen more moments of genuine devotion than your local chapel, and I would rather give you anything but a completely and utterly fucking worthless lie in a robin’s egg blue box as part of a sick joke that we allow to be played on ourselves.

    Here’s my promise to you: I’ll give you the twist tie from a loaf of bread as a ring, but mean it. Lets get married barefoot on the beach, and mean it, and let a thunderstorm honor our commitment to each other from that day forward because we shouldn’t be holding hands four ways with a church and a state or expecting any day to be perfect. Lets forget to even tell people until it comes up in conversation months after taking a trip around the world together instead of honoring whatever bullshit traditions are expected of us.

    The world’s desires for us are their burden to let go of, and I’d like for you to join me in starting our lives together refusing to carry forward centuries of trauma.

    Update 06.01.25

  • At the time of writing, the most recent statistic published by Match Group suggests that while men will swipe right on roughly 80% of women, women swipe right on only about 10% of men.

    The human brain doesn’t fully develop until around age 25, and yet— until just yesterday in evolutionary terms— our average life expectancy was barely over 40. You’d spend half your life getting to the point where you could have kids, and the other half raising kids to the point that they could; like mayflies growing in an egg in a lake, being born in unison and taking flight above the water in a great swarm with the singular purpose to mate and die and fall back into their birthplace to provide nutrients for their eggs. We have photographs of people born to perpetuate our species, it was so recent for us, and it wasn’t uncommon to marry whoever you were sold to, arranged to, or assigned to sit next to in elementary school; at best maybe whoever you locked eyes with across the thing at the place, if you were still single by then, to the extent that It’s still happening for most of us.

    For most of history, you didn’t have to say a word. You already knew your role— clearly defined and socially enforced. What you ate, listened to, wore, celebrated— it was all copy-fucking-paste. Being yourself, choosing your path, seeking a partner who aligns with you emotionally, philosophically, existentially— and then maintaining that relationship in a healthy and communicative way— that’s all new, and most of us are overwhelmed by where to even begin much less how to navigate to the other side of this seemingly impossible new normal.

    As frustrated as you are that the guy sitting across the table from you is basically just running lines for the role of rom-com boyfriend in a film starring you, know that he’s been taught to trade his own ability to feel for the role of protagonist in the dumpster fire we call the American love story; always about sweeping you off your feet with a series of carefully curated moments that make you fall into a type of love that only you get to feel and he doesn’t because it’s a job for him, seeing the relationship as a fictional narrative and love as something to be won, because that act of moving your character’s interest in him forward needs to be written in his own handwriting instead of getting to exist on a blank page with you. It’s the reason he feels so isolated from you— he doesn’t even get to feel the love he knows is possible— because he’s too busy trying to get the role right.

    As a culture, we’re not raised to be complete individuals who tell the truth, we’re raised to be liars who tell you what you want to hear, from little white moments of agreeability, to the participation in lifelong cons. It doesn’t matter if it’s a salesperson, a priest, or a prostitute, if you’re good at your job you can look your customer up and down and know not only exactly what they want to hear, but exactly how they want you to hear it. This is why your date feels performative; he’s not being himself, he’s selling himself to you in an incredibly elaborate way— in just the exact way you want to be lied to. This is why marriages fail in less than two years; he’s not being a person, he’s being salesperson, and most guys only have a couple years worth of “sell me this pen” in them before they’re out of song & dance and collapse back into smashing his thumb on X thousands of times a night. Like a bower bird, he built his nest, he mimicked what you wanted to see to the best of his ability and you dilated your eyes as wide as able and processed what you saw to the limit of yours; it’s neither of your fault, you didn’t choose your brain, and you didn’t choose what was downloaded into it. See: ‘lying for a better tomorrow’ and ‘roots, rivers, lightning, neurons’

    Worse than that, he was also raised to find abhorrent and detestable in himself everything that he desires of you, resulting in you being simultaneously reviled as much as you are revered. Kindness, softness, empathy, creativity, vulnerability, understanding, all of it presented as lesser, unmanly, and needing to be uprooted— replaced with stoicism. More than that, there’s no war for him to fight, there’s no firewood to chop, his job is indescribably unnecessary, and even his suffering doesn’t have meaning to make it more bearable; and in a world where you have a job, a roommate, food delivery services, and D batteries, he’s left feeling resentful and angry, made worse on top of worse by never learning how to communicate his thoughts and feelings much less allow himself to have them.

    So, at best what you get is his retreat into satisfying his basest desires, saying whatever he needs to say in an effort to meet them before retreating further into fully fictional video games and numbing himself with drugs and alcohol— so desperate for touch that he pays extra for the hair wash at the salon, and so desperate for love that he pays for the girlfriend experience in micro transactions with spicy cosplayers. He’s not useless— he was raised for a world that no longer exists, and he was given nothing to help him survive in the one he’s actually in. Now he’s lost. Acrimonious. Vengeful. Suicidal. Seething. He’s absolutely fucking seething, and screaming at the top of his lungs— having had his vocal chords removed— because those, too, are for women, and silence is for men.

    My friends, when you ghost someone after exchanging only a few sentences— when you swipe without even looking— you’re not rejecting profiles. You’re rejecting human beings that our society has failed and has no interest in other than their usefulness until they can be left for dead, but who go to sleep every night with the same ache in their chest that you have. Many of us are a new hoodie and some hard conversations away from being a good partner, so long as you remove 6 ft and 6 figures from your must-haves list, and focus on what actually matters. The same way 80% of us are already giving you a chance.

    To everyone wondering where all the options are, you have them. Look for those who are at least trying; they just need a fucking hug and a little help to get to the other side of this, and you can travel together instead of waiting for their arrival.

    None of us chose this— but we can still choose each other.

    Update 06.01.25

  • Look, I get it. As it is, heterosexual women are already at a disadvantage to the LGBTQ community, because relationships are expected to follow a centuries-old script written by men, for men, as opposed to having conversations— and heterosexual women in rural areas have it even worse, because the dating pool is comprised of the 50 guys in your graduating class and however far you’re willing to drive to find someone whose idea of a first date isn’t showing up in their finest stained jeans and sports-ball jersey, complete with a camo jacket and hat like they don’t know the difference between dating you and hunting you. I know you’re already disappointed moments after climbing into their pickup— imbued with the down-home potpourri of crushed energy drink cans and their open dip cup— told you’re going to the pool-hall pizza place you’ve been to innumerable times, followed by what you know will be going “for a drive,” to ultimately end up at a spot he knows where he’ll show off his new dragons-breath shotgun ammo on an old washer his buddies shoved into a gully to shoot at. I know you’re astonished that he thinks his heartfelt confession of someday wanting to be a country singer— despite not knowing how to play the guitar or having ever written a song in his life— meant that nothing in heaven or hell could stop you from being disappointed in his backseat fast enough. I know, darlin’, it ain’t fair.

    Just know that some of us are trying so hard to get these men to understand that “owning libs” and  trading conspiracy theories over the weekly bonfire aren’t a personality. That having nothing to say to you across the dinner table, on the drive, and at the spot, isn’t stoic and sexy— it’s devastatingly soul-crushing, because you’re trying to imagine 50 more years of it with him; hoping you won’t get a phone call one day from the sheriff to tell you that he was caught on camera trying to run out of a truck-stop women’s bathroom with his pants around his ankles— primitively defending himself by yelling “It was a trans who done it!”

    You’re not wrong for walking away. You’re not wrong for wanting more. Just don’t let the camouflage fool you. Some of these guys are still in there, somewhere, even though it’s hard to see them. Men who could be something if someone ever taught them how to be more than an asinine caricature that makes friends based on who they agree to hate— which isn’t your job, I know— but maybe, just maybe, one of them is already trying. He’s out there, hoping you’ll see past the shotgun smoke, and give him a different kind of target to aim for.

    Updated 06.01.25

  • I’ve heard it said many times, this desperate, ugly claim, that “no one will ever love you as much as I do,” and I’ve always thought that it’s such a horrific lie to say to someone. If you find yourself uttering that sentence, it’s more than likely that others will love them just as much if not more, if you can even call your feelings love. This. is what we do though— we let ourselves believe that we’re capable of loving someone more than anyone has ever loved another, and allow ourselves to enact the tragedy of a love story ending, rather than just two people trying their best, victims of circumstance. We’ll lay in the grass of an end-of-summer twilight, fireflies raising like embers from a body that we’ve allowed to burn out in high school, college, our first attempt at an adult relationship, instead of seeing fall as the start of a new beginning.

    The ancient battle between jealousy and love is interesting to me. Logically, I can't resolve that my partner having moments with others somehow invalidates and outweighs our entire own relationship, and must result in me being devastated and us no longer being together, as if another human being's capacity for love is finite and mine. For the one thing that can end everything else that you have with someone you care about— to be them feeling good and it not including you— reads like a self-contradicting bible verse that ignores their every moment with everyone before even meeting you, and possibly after you, but this is what we do: in a ruinous attempt at placing ourselves into the story-arc of a hero's journey, we stand before the person who the casting director called to play the role of Love Of Our Life #5 in the documentary about us, and embody the role so well that we mistake them for our soulmate— destined by fate, eternally devoted— unable to live without them; and then marry them in real life, lock each other’s shackles, and then sit there together, ashamed of our need to hold a key— resentful that ours is being held.

    Embracing jealousy as a cultural norm, so much so that it's assumed and expected of us, and manifests itself right down to our legal system, is sadly disappointing at best. Compersion, instead of a years-long ego-driven adult temper tantrum that chainsaws sofas in half, drains bank accounts, upends lives, and generally destroys everything it touches, feels more mature and appropriate for the society that humanity aspires to shed our worst attributes to become. I'm not the god of the abrahamic religions, and so I don't demand unwavering faith and devotion from you at the threat of punishment for disobedience. I'm not a person who practices those religions, and so I don't feel compelled to restrict your movement within the confines of my own insecurity and position myself as the warden of your joy. All I ask for is honesty.

    Once you abandon the selfish spreadsheet of wants and needs that we've agreed to call love— once you meet another human beings desire to live their most joyful, actualized existence with kindness and support instead of thinking about yourself— because you've found the strength to emotionally gut yourself and let all of your ugliness bleed out, then stitch yourself back up and heal, love can become what Pablo Neruda worded well in sonnet XVII. “I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride; so I love you because I know no other way than this: where I does not exist, nor you, so close that your hand on my chest is my hand, so close that your eyes close as i fall asleep.”

    What I most frequently hear others say when the subject of ethical non-monogamy arises, is that it doesn’t work; and yet, everyone I know who’s never been married has had at least several relationships, and just about everyone I know who got married is now divorced, sometimes remarried, and sometimes divorced again. What an odd, unfortunate trick we play on ourselves, for the measure of a relationship to be possession and jealousy, and whether or not it lasted forever in a world where nothing does— setting ourselves up to view the end of one as a failing of character and the beginning of the next as a failing of morality.

    I often wonder what the world would look like comprised of beings that supported the rich, complicated inner lives of their fellow beings, which often conflict with real life but wouldn’t necessarily have to if we achieved the best version of ourselves practicing honest communication. This, because when I look out into the world, what I see are people— who in their insecurity— lock each other into invisible cells and habituate to each other to the extent that they lose appreciation for even the most remarkable aspects of their partners personage, ultimately to find themselves willing to leave each other for otherwise fleeting novelty. Then, I see jealousy, and the ever-present threat of rage if it comes to an end. We possess each other. We kill each other for stealing from us an imagined future when its taken away even though it never was. We go insane. We’re insane.

    I want to live in a world where never again is “If I can’t have you, no one will,” the final words that someone hears. Where no matter our perspective, we see a person as something of an eternal soul in a body, standing before an eternal soul in a body, both of us temporary and forever— not each others or even your own— and love them. When they arrive, when they leave, without expectation: we love them. If you’re religious and anticipate an afterlife where you’re held accountable for what you’ve done here, all the more reason. If you’re atheist and see us as waves of energy that will disjoin and find themselves reused in infinite combinations for infinity, all the more reason.

    Every relationship will end in death or a broken heart, so if it isn’t in the cards for us to face the end together while holding wrinkled hands, I’d like to look back on what we had for however long we had it as a success of good intent, honesty, and kindness. That’s all I’m asking for. And I’ll say— unapologetically— it seems to be too much.

    My friends, my dear, silly humans for a lifetime, I can’t tell anyone how to live their lives, but I can remind you that nothing here is yours, no one here is yours, love is not finite and love is not yours— and all there is, is love.

    Update 06.01.25

We’re all our own endangered species, calling out nightly from the jungle canopy for another of our kind, unable to discern a reply among the deafening cacophony of billions of other voices expelled from lungs with an appetency to be heard, seen, and loved.

  • To this day, I remember sitting at the kitchen table when I was a kid, having been told that I couldn’t get up from my chair until I had eaten my Brussel sprouts. I mention this, because while I didn’t have words for it when I was young, it’s so much worse that not acknowledging the stages of our sensory development. So much worse, it teaches our children to override what their brains are warning them not to do— and choke it down anyway— which accommodates only those who are unwilling to nurture the complexity of what it means to be human— often to their advantage— or to abuse us and get away with it because that’s the way it is. No, your kitchen isn’t a restaurant, but our grocery stores, and by extension even our free food pantries, are no longer railway depots that store tins of gunpowder and 20 pound sacks of flour intended to be repurposed into clothing.

    Don’t teach your children to sacrifice their autonomy. Teach them to expect so much of the world that it becomes an intolerable place to live for the worst of us.

    On a lighter note, being in the kitchen while I’m cooking doesn’t frustrate me like it seems to for many. You can stand so close to me while I’m chopping that I can barely move my elbow, and I couldn’t possibly care any less. Also, cooking is usually comprised of measuring by how I feel and exploring new music paired with interpretive dance for no other reason than to do dumb nerd shit, and I make no apologies.

    About every other week I make vegetable stew that I parcel-out into mason jars for quick meals. In general, I tend to make a lot, and have no aversion to microwaved leftovers, because some things taste even better reheated. In between those, I like to make food from places where they’re not afraid of spices, and the base is rice and beans and vegetables, which is almost too many places to name. Every day usually includes a protein shake, and some kind of salad.

    Every fall I make enormous oatmeal blueberry cookies. This, really just to say: I hope that you have a separate dessert stomach. There will be midnight rustlings originating from the refrigerator, and late summer-night walks just to get iced cream. I also really like store-bought ice. The kind with the hole in the middle. I’ll put that lowbrow shit right in your schmancy whiskey and let it melt just to hear the fuckin’ clinck— I don’t even care.

    As you might have already gathered, I have a vegetarian diet, but I've never encountered a menu that I couldn't find something on, and I’m not the guy who asks whether the garden scramble came from chickens with their chakras aligned— whatever might end up in a Portlandia sketch.

    This seems like an appropriate place to mention that while I like going out to eat, I prefer local non-chains where they give a fuck to a healthy stopping point and call it good, and I’m done forever with places that ask for a blank check in exchange for the morsel of food that you’re expected to hold on an upside down fork with your left hand — which evaporates before it reaches your mouth as part of the special experience— after which I end up grabbing a falafel wrap on the way home anyway. I’m also done forever with playing pretend with people over a glass of wine, because the best bottle I’ve ever had was 8 dollars and didn’t have a label on it, so all I can even say is that it was red. I’ll almost always cast my vote for a street cart and a beverage in a brown paper bag while walking down the street instead of any of it, but I did have a meal in Seattle about fifteen years ago, at the time of writing this, that I still remember to this day because I didn’t know that food could even taste that good— followed by the restaurant closing a few months later because that’s how it goes. I imagine it was probably something of a Caesar-style assassination by all of the street cart vendors taking turns stabbing the brick and mortar to death so that you can’t really say who’s chef’s knife was responsible for the fatal slice with the grain.

    My chef friends, I tried for many years to taste the attention-to-detail of militant chefs with obsessive compulsive disorder, who anguish over the just-so placement of micro flowers underneath the minimalist-by-way-of-reductionism edible smoke in a bell jar, then peek from the kitchen while biting their lower lip at the looks of disappointment on patron’s faces— accustomed to having their children’s leftover shoved into them while standing over the sink— because it means they get to go back to their station in life to flog themselves and use a toothpick to clean with before scurrying home to a frozen pizza garnished with cigarette ash— and honestly— I’ll politely decline every time.

    I mean no disrespect to you, because I really do appreciate you. Accolades to all of the incredibly hard working chefs who do so much with so little in the school kitchens and homeless shelters and foster homes and too many places to even name where one hot meal may be their only decent meal of the day; and I agree that so many of life’s most beautiful and distinguishable moments take place over a shared meal; and I see you give so completely and utterly of yourselves to the extent that you commit seppuku over a plate and study the composition with a slight turn of it before calling hands and only then allowing yourself to die; and I’m awake with you when the world has gone quiet because I understand feeling so overwhelmingly compelled to physically manifest the hallucinations of your sleep deprivation that its as if you have no choice; and I see in you a rare ability to retain composure in the face of every human emotion, and I love you; only to comment on the delusional places that we allow our minds to go in the pursuit of a non-existent perfection that we invent and then proceed to search for and reinvent once found— as a trick that we like to play on ourselves— where joy is a place we never allow to become marred with our footsteps, again and again until we realize that we had everything that we were looking for at the beginning, and that all our guests ever really wanted was a fucking peanut butter and jelly sandwich made by their mom.

    Notice with me, that full circle, so many chefs come to terms with their greying hair at a little 6-burner communal-seating prix-fixe 20-top with a garden in the back and a cot in the utility closet, cutting veggies like a child with a safety knife trying their best to help, and smiling so stupidly from ear to ear that it can only be viewed with the kind of longing for what we all ache for.

    If that doesn’t sum up what really fucking matters in the end. You beautiful sous-chefs-for-life. You beautiful, giving souls.

    06.01.25


    Contact me and let me know what your death-row last meal is. I’m still trying to decide, and I’m open to suggestions.

  • I do my best to eat what qualifies as actual food— without needing lawyers involved. Even while shopping in American grocery stores, stocked with products that actively keep us sick, while other countries enjoy healthier versions of the exact same brands.

    I shop the perimeter, I don’t eat fast food, and I fight in the war opposite packaging designers. I’ve been a vegetarian for as long as I’ve been a minimalist— as of writing this— for over 25 years; and for over 25 years, every time I’ve sat down to a meal with family, I’ve had to remind them that I am, or remind them when I became one, and why, and what I eat.

    I want to be very clear here: I’m not exaggerating.
    Every. Fucking. Time.

    Every. Fucking. Time.

    “Oh yeah,” they say “that’s right,” followed by asking me how long it’s been now, and why, and what I eat if not meat; as if every dining table in the world is circled by vultures— heavy with nothing but animal carcasses— as if they can’t even conceive of a meal without meat— despite the table in front of them being filled with examples. As if cultures with ten thousand year long cuisines dominated by vegetarian meals with meat considered to be something of a garnish don’t exist.

    This— explained and re-explained, every single meal, every single time, for over 25 fucking years. To people who call fruit and salad “yard waste” with a hearty laugh, as they scrape a bed of rice and beans into the trash as though it were there for no reason other than preventing their pile of meat from touching the plate, and continue with further jokes about how you’ll know that someone is a vegetarian because they’ll tell you; not even remembering mere minutes ago, when I sat there yet unprovoked, quietly dreading the inevitable redundancy.

    The redundancy. The punishment of it. The dread before the table. The frustration of being forced— again to endure the purgatory of someone else’s willful ignorance. The structural un-seeing. Refusal to hold continuity when the continuity isn’t about them, because memory takes effort. Like a permanent state of pre-Alzheimers that seemingly most of our society exists in— unaware because it’s so ubiquitous— and if you don’t, then you’re the problem.

    Yes, my meat-eating friends who love to parrot that monocropping kills animals— you’re right. It does. That’s precisely why we also advocate against monocropping. Most of that grain is used to feed livestock, compounding the destruction, and rather than acknowledge this, you weaponize the system’s brokenness to defend your convenience. Rather than us cultivating a million decentralized, pesticide-free community gardens to provide food directly to people without the death. The destruction. The waste. The agonizing fucking torment of your redundancy.

    Instead, you laugh about it. You make the same jokes, every time. You forget about them.

    Meanwhile, I sit across from you, quietly swallowing not just another side of rice and beans— I swallow your jokes. I swallow all the disbelief at the table. I swallow your need for nothing to ever change.

    Then I carry it all home, dripping from a paper bag, trying not to let it leak into the rest of my night.
    Into the rest of my week.

    Knowing you won’t even remember it tomorrow.

    Updated 06.01.25

  • Let me see if I have this right:

    Use government agencies to smuggle drugs into your own country, then use the established distribution networks of gangs— structured like corporations— to divide and sell the drugs. Use the cash flow to fund off-the-books operations and payouts. Feed the soldiers on the corners to each other after we’ve filled our for-profit prisons. Cue the news cameras, and feed the public the occasional door of an immigrant being kicked in. Every once in a blue moon, let the feds finally harpoon the whale they’ve been holding in a pool at MundoMarino— just to take Congress to dinner and feed them the justification for restocking their arsenal and purchasing a new fleet of luxury vehicles, just in time to spend the budget or lose it.

    Nothing changes anything.

    So, get a head start on the new year while most of us are too distracted by the tinsel of the holidays to tally the combined body count of everyone their lives touch, or to see through the dehumanization of those who feed our appetite for the drugs that they sell us to notice the chaos, death, and destruction it creates in their countries— and offer thoughts and prayers to those who do.

    That being said, I’m marijuana and psychedelic-friendly, and a mild social drinker of bourbon and Belgian farmhouse ales. I don’t often poison myself for fun, but I’ll do it sometimes with company— like monkeys surveying their territory and feeling safe enough in numbers for the night to eat fermented fruit.

    If you’re not a fan of weed, research how William Randolph Hearst smeared the use of hemp with the classic go-to: scaring the ignorant masses with narratives of minorities and immigrants attacking them in drug-induced fits of mayhem. All because he had just invested in timber land and chose himself over the rest of the American population getting to use a cheaper, faster, more versatile plant.

    If you’re not a fan of psychedelics, research how Richard Nixon started the war on drugs to imprison hippies and minorities— and how psilocybin-containing mushrooms were included on the hit list, despite most people who’ve used them calling the experience one of the most profound and helpful of their lives. Then look into how it’s currently being used in therapy.

    You’ve had what could have been an amazing life stolen from you, and you should be completely and utterly enraged.

    01. “There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing, result from marijuana usage. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others… slaves to this narcotic, continuing addiction until they deteriorate mentally, become insane, turn to violent crime and murder… Marijuana is the most violence-causing drug in the world.”

    — Harry J. Anslinger, Testimony to US Congress supporting Marihuana Tax Act, 1937

    02. “Beware! Young and Old—People in ALL walks of Life! This may be handed you by the friendly stranger. It contains the Killer Drug ‘Marihuana’—a powerful narcotic in which lurks Murder! Insanity! Death! WARNING! Dope peddlers are shrewd! They may put some of this drug in the (tea kettle) or in the (cocktail) or in the tobacco cigarette.”

    — THE INTER-STATE NARCOTIC ASSOCIATION, 33 W. Jackson Blvd. Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A.

    So, here we are now, with teenagers openly smoking weed in their bedrooms while their parents ask for another gummy— able to see how it was all a lie from start to finish. All so that DuPont could sell synthetic fibers, and Hearst could protect his timber investments, and Nixon and Reagan could contort the face of society to match their own reflection— looking out from the windows of the Oval Office in a ceaseless conservative endeavor to force the country to resemble them, instead of celebrating the flourishing diversity of everyone resembling themselves.

    One of the worst drugs available is on every street corner and advertised during your favorite TV shows, right between junk food and pharmaceutical commercials. But the drugs that are safe and mind-expanding are found on the other side of the tracks and will get you fitted for cuffs— because you can’t find strength in numbers if you’re drunk, uneducated, and squabbling over the manufactured non-problems whispered into your ear by what we call “news.” All orchestrated by those who endeavor to retain a stranglehold on the lives of you and everyone you love.

    Passing out makes it easier to have their way with you.
    Being unable to articulate what happened makes it easier for them to get away with it.

    Updated 06.01.25

  • There’s a lot to talk about here, so I might come back to this later; and for the most part I’ll tell you when you’re older anyway— when there’s a verified you to talk to. For now, a stream of consciousness to hold the place:

    I’ll just be upfront and announce to the world that my fetish is a sudden drop in barometric pressure— in case you're into that sorta kinky shit. Anytime the black-capped chickadees in the bushes outside my window stop chirping and find a safe place to hide— oh baby.

    Either that or school supplies. The aisle of notebooks and pens at the bookstore is the adult section, as far as I’m concerned. Just the thought of taking notes and making lists is kinda turning me on a little right now.

    Anyway, I digress— back to the weather report.

    I prefer the slow gathering of cumulus clouds into the culmination of an evening rain, if given the choice between that and a child’s drawing with a smiling sun in the upper right corner above a scribble of blue sky. Hoodie weather is more my idea of a beautiful day. So while I love the beach, I'm the nerd who always has it to himself because everyone left once I thought it got nice out; or at the very least, you’ll find me sitting in the shade.

    This is the part where I explain that the reason I’m talking about weather under the subject of sex is that often when I think about sex, it’s not sex that I’m thinking about— it’s sounds and smells and feelings. I think about the white noise of a forest of leaves in a wind that’s almost too much. I think about how my favorite color is really more of a feeling I get moments before a summer storm— when a sky of pregnant thunderheads lets the last of the day’s light illuminate everything with an ardent over-saturation of all colors, like reality coming into focus just before giving birth to a deluge. The same way people who’ve been sick for a long time often have a final burst of energy before they die. I think about acts of kindness.

    Sometimes when I think about sex, I think about the lived experience of prostitutes and pigeons— revered when they are white or in the sheets, reviled when they are colorful or in the streets. Simultaneously natural and needed and dirty and unwanted.

    I’ve sometimes closed my eyes and tried really hard to place myself in the body of a woman standing in an empty motel hallway, moments away from having someone else in her. Someone. Anyone. Whoever opens the door.

    Whoever opens the door. Whoever opens the door.

    The knowing and the not knowing of it. The strength it takes to humble oneself for another in a way that they need but have no one to provide. The unseen moments that arise after the relinquishing of her heart— carefully wrapped in less evocative clothes with her keys and a pack of cigarettes— delicately cradled by the hidden inner branches of evergreens beside a side entrance to the building, devoid of welcome or ceremony. I imagine her heart outside her body, each time maybe being the last before something irrevocable happens before she’s able to return to it in time. I wonder what the world would look like if we were all capable of giving of ourselves so intimately to anyone we found standing before us— whoever opens the door— but only if we could also keep our hearts.

    Sometimes when I think about sex, I think about the anguish of the human race— and all our living— punctuated by brief moments of ecstasy that are never enough, or frequent enough, or even what we wanted, anyway. I think about the lie of soulmates, the historic motivations behind traditional marriage and how it leaves so many people feeling shackled and miserable, how much our culture undervalues platonic relationships and finding fulfillment with many in many ways. I think about having grown tired of even having a body, and just wanting to love in a way that I imagine is possible, but worry isn’t. I worry it isn’t.

    My dear strange friends reading this right now: with regard to preferring the lights on or off, it’s okay to be who you are and like what you like. Just say the thing— it will be well received. So many of us are operating under the influence of a culture of shame for what was never chosen, and feel compelled to gently ease a potential partner into whatever happens to do it for us. Here’s the thing, though: no one ever sat down with the Phaidon Big Book o’ Fetishes and selected one any more than they selected their own eye color.

    It’s assigned— an echo of something. Maybe trauma-adjacent. Maybe a survival mechanism wrapped in pleasure. Maybe just a result of random neural wiring or the keywords used to generate the personality of our SIM after coding us.

    Whatever strange cosmic algorithm shaped what does it for you, you’re not doing anything wrong by expressing a desire and allowing yourself to feel good. Give yourself permission to just be who you’ve discovered you are. Say your weird horny thoughts. I swear it’ll be okay.

    You can say the most questionable, taboo, secret stuff to me with anguished uncertainty, and I’ll hear it the same as how you like your coffee. If anything, I apologize in advance for how nonchalantly I make happen the words you hesitated to say aloud for decades.

    When I think about fetishes, I don’t even particularly care what yours are, or how, or why— what’s fascinating to me is the where. Where these unchosen, repeating, codifiable categories arise from. Why they appear across all of recorded history. Why they’re finite enough to fit neatly in the drop-down menu of your favorite website. How odd, to be assigned one by the fetish fairy on the birthday of your state’s legal age of consent with the boop of a magic wand on your junk, and not have a say in the matter.

    All this to say: don’t let people make you feel ashamed of the things that bring you joy— especially when they weren’t even of your choosing.

    Updated 06.01.25

    Contact meand tell me what your favorite color variation of city pigeon is.

  • At the time of writing this, if the mayor of Smith’s Station Alabama, F.L. Copeland had told his constituents that he was happy— and he’d like for them to be happy for him— November 3rd could have just been another day of the month instead of shooting himself in the head on the side of a rural road because he couldn’t face the ridicule coming from adolescent minds trapped in adult bodies, after what amounted to persona-cosplay was exposed by a far-right website.

    My friends, the only way that shame works is if you choose to participate.

    This doesn’t just apply to predilections. Most of human history has seen our naked bodies in addition to our souls bared naked. The indigenous people of this country were perfectly content to wear loin cloths before being forced to wear things that covered their immoral savagery, but it wasn’t again until 1936— one lifetime ago— that even male bare-chestedness was legalized in the United States. This is how much we’re made to feel ashamed, just for having been born, amd all looking very much the same.

    We’ve allowed the conservative religious patriarchy to deny everything that it means to be human for too long, and it has to end. I want to live in a world where being an adult isn’t punished as naughty, where nipples don’t leave men uncontrollably trembling with desire, and where the disgusting fantasy to be presented with a caged virgin at a sacred union is replaced with the hope for a woman to have had all the sex she’s ever wanted— so that she’s experienced enough to share her thoughts and preference in a healthy and communicative way— and I’d like for you to join me.

    For those who have never watched it, Sex Education with Gillian Anderson— and a cast too long to name here— is a remarkable example of what Upper Secondary School conversations can look like in a healthy society as a stark contrast to the conservative religious approach of not talking about sex because its shameful and shouldn’t exist, to the detriment of us all. See: “100,000 hours of our lives”

    Updated 06.01.25

  • “…And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before i sleep.” - Robert Frost


    Until I meet a plausible travel partner, I’m going to withhold where I go and where I want to go, but I’ll share a few thoughts.

    I like to take it slow with a nimble agenda, sit on neighborhood benches, cut through who knows where to who knows where, and find ways to experience the nightscape of wherever I am so that I can listen to the quiet of a place as much as the orchestra’s tuning-to-concert-pitch of the day. I love the sound of an instrument being removed from it’s case as much as its tuning as much as the overture as much as the song— as much as the silence that follows— and I find that analogy applies to how I travel. It' also speaks to why I spend an equal amount of time in wilderness areas and cities.

    In the way that its sometimes easier to explain what we don’t like as a way of helping others understand: I will never sit poolside at a resort with you, with champagne in on hand and the other outstretched for a mani, while a wall hides a wasteland of garbage and a population crushed under the weight of our need to feel special while capitalists point at their new sandals and plastic buckets and call it lifting them out of poverty.

    I will never climb on board an adult day-care barge of self-indulgent mediocrity and have food shoveled down my gullet by someone who hates me while being escorted to shopping malls disguised as towns that are owned by our captors, and stumble drunk every night back to our room to see what new millisecond-of-wonderment towel animal awaits us— passing through the casino at the center of it because its the only path to get anywhere— encouraged to feed the last of our money into its one-way vending machines that chime and flash lights at us like a mirrored mobile above our crib.

    To anyone reading this, I have a vacation suggestion if its within your means. Go to the middle of nowhere, and look up. Find a way to get yourself to a place untouched by light pollution. Find darkness like you’ve never seen darkness, where the thieves of the stars haven’t yet reached, and vacation with them; every star that is and ever was, burning now or having died out hundreds of thousands of years ago, still shining down on us in a way that we were once reminded of each night.

    Update 06.21.25

  • I hesitate to just list what I don’t want to do with you on holidays, especially since I just did that with regard to travel, but it’ll help to quickly illustrate where I’m at on this, and I might come back to this later.

    I don’t want to celebrate Christmas with the deforestation by the tens of millions of trees and the gifting of future garbage. I don’t want to celebrate romantic holidays with child-slave chocolate and a dozen flowers flown-in from thousands of miles away instead of just planting seeds wherever we are and having reoccurring thousands for free. I don’t want to celebrate the memorial of everything by combining carbon, chlorine, potassium nitrate, sulfur— whatever metal burns whatever color— and igniting 2 billion pounds of it annually in our troposphere, traumatizing animals and a quarter of our population and pushing our emergency rooms over occupancy in exchange for toxic clouds of pollutants that end up in our soil and water supply just so that we stupidly clap in awe of yet another momentary distraction. All I see in what we call celebration is an asinine horror show.

    Lets develop our own healthy acts of gratitude, together, imbued with our own meaning. How it is that previous generations couldn’t bring themselves to step back and look at the absurdity of their behavior, then extrapolate forward while questioning what the fuck they were doing, is dumbfounding. Continuing traditions of willful ignorance in exchange for cozy feelings has to end, and I’d like for it to end with us.

    Update 06.01.25

  • Acknowledging the phenomenon of people getting gifts for others that they— themselves— would enjoy, seemingly unable imagine the act of appreciation beyond their own lived experience, I’d like to address something else.

    There you are in >insert place here< seeing the beach for the first time in your life. As a small memento, you purchase an especially beautiful seashell from a gift shop to keep on your desk at work. Your coworker notices, and gets you a seashell coffee mug for your birthday, followed by a seashell necklace from your husband. The years that follow find themselves increasingly more populated by seashell ornaments, seashell plushies, seashell bottle openers, more seashells, socks with seashells on them; soon becoming known as Dr. Seashell, the Malacologist with a penchant for Conchology.

    This is how we’re expected to live. Surrounded by reminders that even those who we share our lives with look no further than the surface, allowing years to become decades without ever really knowing us.

    In response to that— in our culture— we’re taught to say thank you. “Thank you, my friend, my love, for that quiet moment, when you paused despite the beckoning urgency of our lives, and reached for something— anything— thinking of me.” The gift, we’re told, is that moment of pause, and how wonderful to be thought of at all; but I disagree.

    What I see are people being forced to smile through moments that are incredibly painful reminders that they’re not loved as they wish they could be— and could otherwise somewhere else be— expected to be grateful for it as a constant, horrible reminder that it will never even get better. We only have ourselves to blame, though, for constantly cultivating peace with the phrase “thank you” and choosing to live surrounded by seashells instead of ever once having the hard conversation that we don’t want what we’re being given. More than that, not only do we not appreciate it, but we don’t appreciate what it more deeply represents.

    What I see when I look around me is the society were so few of us do hardly any better than a last-minute gas station gift on the way to see the person we’re giving it to, and so few of us do hardly any better than submissively being grateful for reminders of just how unknown and unloved we are, and I’d like for it to stop with us.

    More than that, in our culture, the act of giving a gift often comes with the obligation to reciprocate, looming over us like the favor that will one day be asked of us in return by the mafioso who leant us pocket change. What I see when I look around me is rarely a gift, but a mutual understanding that you now owe, and if that embodies your act of giving to me— don’t.

    As much as I don’t want a reminder that you don’t really know me, I also don’t want the burden of your imposition.

    TL;DR: Give me something meaningful and expect nothing in return, or give me the peace of giving me nothing.

    Update 06.01.25

  • 01. What occupies your mind in quiet, uninterrupted moments— when you’re able to retreat into the most private parts of yourself? Are there things that have always been there? Are there things for which you don’t yet have words?

    02. If you could stop doing what you’ve found yourself having to do— the culmination of years of selecting from what’s available to you and would result in the least amount of suffering, landing you where you are today— what would you be doing instead? And are there parts of that life you’ve managed to fold into this one, to some extent?

    03. If you could write your ideal partnership into being, what would it look like? Are there things that matter deeply to you— non-negotiables, dealbreakers? Are there parts of who you are that feel hard to accommodate, that you wish a partner could more easily understand or hold?

    04. Is there anything you long to say early on to a potential partner but hold back out of fear it won’t be well received? Likewise, is there something you wish you could ask early— something that would bring relief— but that isn’t typically seen as socially acceptable?

    05. (Unlock this bonus question by being a verified human match.)

    Updated 05.04.25

… from a scientific perspective we’re sentient stardust, and from a religious approach we’re an eternal soul temporarily experiencing life in a body sitting before an eternal soul temporarily experiencing life in a body, with infinity behind us, and infinity awaiting our return. We forgot that we’re impossible, and yet here we are.

polite, mixed-company dinner conversation

  • "If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.”- Ludwig Wittgenstein


    So, here’s the thing. I have no aversion to sitting in a semi-circle and exchanging words as we have since Prometheus stole fire for us out of compassion, but before we do, I’d like to take a moment to talk about talking.

    By and large, I view conversations as little more than either a way of getting to know someone as a person, or just plain being silly and joking around with well-meaning people, otherwise I see talking as problematic at best— for several reasons:

    The Adult Table

    Being a part of conversations that have been taking place across centuries— which I find to be the most interesting to engage with— begins at birth, and requires an educational foundation one way or the other combined with being a lifelong learner.

    If the last book you read was Charlotte’s Web, and you really only skimmed it enough to remember the words “Some Pig” and “Terrific” in order to pass Monday’s quiz, I love you just the same, but you’re just not part of the conversation; you’re sort of like the pre-teen that sits at the adult table at gatherings and listens but doesn’t understand.

    Despite that, a lot of people want to get to participate in conversations, even though all they have to contribute are their feelings and beliefs; and they feel >insert current buzzwords here< (currently: gaslighted, frauded, grifted), disrespected, and disregarded when you 1. don’t hear them out— even though everything they have to contribute is just day one of 101, and 2. use logic and words they don’t understand— because they can’t differentiate between intelligence and a con.

    The thing is, though, it often takes a lifetime to proof an equation, write a poem that will outlive you, or otherwise utter a few contributive sentences to the conversation of humanity— so outside of workshopping with select individuals, shooting the shit is aptly named.

    So, lets get this out of the way:

    Me: "You matter. Your feelings are real. But that doesn’t mean your beliefs are right. We don't owe respect to ideas just because someone holds them— we owe respect to the truth. And if your belief can’t survive being questioned, it doesn’t deserve protection."

    You: “So you’re saying my beliefs don’t matter?”

    Me: “I’m saying no belief does, unless it can be tested and defended, and become a provisional conclusion based on the best available evidence— also known as a fact. That applies to me, to you, to everyone.”

    Ritual Bro-ness

    I’m not interested in participating in the ritual of human men presenting the plumage of their willful ignorance as part of an uncomplicated friendship display— demonstrating their agreeability to be accepted as just one of the guys by using the word “bro” as punctuation marks for their asinine, sedated gesticulating. Everywhere I look, at every social level, I see rabid anti-intellectualism— the unspoken communication of which is to display a willingness to be dumb to be part of the group. I see ignorance as a means of control, the expectation of being taken at one’s word without further question which is always an indication of being lied to, and the embrace of mediocrity because its easy to rule and profit from.

    Sound Bites For Dummies

    This is something that I discuss further on the LISTEN page, but in part, the confidence behind much of what our chatter is comprised of is the result of the United States currently suffering from a 5th grade average literacy rate, and the resulting attempts at conversation are often akin to an 11 year old running down the hallway of their home to scream a phrase at someone that the TV entertainment program they mistake as news just taught them— with no further discourse to display an understanding of what was screamed, followed by running back to their bedroom to slam the door and feel safe again. It’s not a conversation. It’s not anything more than a squawking parrot whose cage is lined with with the National Enquirer. That’s us; that’s what we sound like.

    Perpetual Wonderment

    We’re living in a time when I could be walking through a hotel lobby and be a mistaken by an event planner for the >insert thing here< expert who’s up next to give a 30 minute presentation, shrug, and just in the time it takes me to walk from the banquet hall doors past the eagerly awaiting occupants of 500 folding chairs and up onto the makeshift stage, I can pull up the Wikipedia page on whatever, and just plain read it into the mic— complete with dinner party anecdotes. In other words, everything that’s known is knowable. We’re all, each of us, holding the sum total of human knowledge in our hands, but seemingly half of us can’t fucking differentiate between honest news and a mis-remembered conspiracy theory about Mothman being named director of operations for the eastern division of the CIA’s weather-control program, relayed to us by our buddy Cooter. Either that or they’re still just walking around in wonderment— even though the act of wondering out loud now means that we can have an answer to our questions in real time; and at the time of writing this, its already been that way for almost three fucking decades. In other words, everyone can literally know everything, but we don’t, and my perpetual worry is that those of us with minds bogged down in the elementary school classroom will be the end of us unless we find a way to defeat those of us who rely on a predominance of ignorance to thrive.

    The Squishy Computer

    Here’s the thing: a human being is essentially a life-support system for a squishy computer running an outdated operating system— low on RAM, clogged with junk files, and burdened by glitchy programs downloaded the moment it was turned on. From day one, it’s been fed an endless stream of random files in no particular order— which are all we even have to reference as we take in input and produce output based on whatever faulty architecture we were given to work with.

    Worse still, most human thoughts aren’t just constrained by flawed reference material— they’re bound by the rigid commands hard-coded into their system. So when access to information is limited, and open discourse is blocked, conversation becomes meaningless. That’s why so many of internal monologues loop in agreeable, recursive nonsense, and for this squishy computer trapped in my own flesh prison, that kind of dialogue feels not just useless— but painful.

    Every once in a while, I meet a great squishy computer. Recently updated. Decent RAM. Bullshit programs mostly purged. The output is something worth pausing for. That’s what I care about— and it almost never shows up in conversations over beers. It shows up in books. In paintings. In choreography. In code, diagrams, theories, and sound. That’s where the real conversation lives— stretched across lifetimes, answering itself.

    Silence vs. Static

    For these reasons, I spend most of my day in a very carefully cultivated silence, to the extent that almost all of my business communication is by email in order to have searchable documentation of what was said, and almost all personal communication is by text. This has been very helpful in eliminating the take-me-at-my-word people from my life, those with nothing to say, and those with no internal dialogue.

    What remains though, is still the exhausting, seemingly inescapable reality of being slowly bludgeoned to death by strangers and acquaintances alike with what amounts to nothing more than either the comfortable familiarity of repeating the same conversation across weeks or years like we’re running our lines from memory about being in a play about running our lines from memory, or the giddy sharing of unsubstantiated personal beliefs, mischievous rumors, misinformation, lies, conspiracy theories, misunderstandings, and various other forms of gossip that all start with the sentence “But don’t you think…”, which I hear as nothing more than the unintelligible murmurs of the adults from Charlie Brown cartoons because there’s just nothing to be done with any of it.

    This, made worse by the pop-cultural version of the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is something like being confident in ones wrongness because they don’t even know what they don’t know, as opposed to task-oriented confidence despite lacking the necessary skills to complete the task. I kind of prefer the misunderstood version, if only because of how ironic it is that it’s so confidently misunderstood.

    Full Circle

    Yes, to put too fine a point on it, while some of the most poignant interactions I’ve had across my lifetime have been brief offerings of small talk, I find the conversations most of us having, even just the small daily or weekly reconnections, to be incredibly damaging in their redundancy— something like keeping a wound perpetually open by picking at it— and I engage as often as I can in the healing property of silence both so that the picking of others does little damage. So that I can engage in conversations worth having, unwounded.

    When I think about talking, I think about silence, and how important it is to conversation.

    In a given moment, if what I’m looking for is the conversational equivalent of chat-roulette, I can already generate a photorealistic AI, write a personality for it— complete with surprise quarks, background details, and interests— and have it select articles at random to conversationally summarize, complete with an accent. In this way, it’s better than interacting with a human being, because all other things being equal, at least I know that the information being shared with me has a much higher likelihood of complete, correct, and free of biases and fallacies.

    In other words, and full circle to the beginning of talking about talking, unless I specifically want to get to know you as a person, you’re captivating me by saying sentences that I’ve never heard a human being utter before, or we’re just being silly for the sake of itself, I’m struggling to see much remaining value in talking to people.

    The Contradiction Of Being Stardust

    Here’s the thing, I don’t want to hear the New York slice preferences of someone that I don’t share taste buds with and will never meet again, or commentary on the transience of cloud formations by the cashier at a place that I’ll forget I was ever in as I step out of it. Publish or otherwise share your contribution and then I’ll consume it in its intended form, and if that sounds harsh, even comedians devote years of their life to the creation of an hours worth of talking worth listening to.

    I understand that we crave laughter and the joy of connection, and that there are so many of us who are lonely, but I don’t know how to resolve my desire for friendly and casual interaction with strangers and the widespread lack of well-meaning substance. I suppose that’s just it— all that remains when it comes to taking— as far as I’m concerned: what humans can offer that AI can’t. Be honest, be creative, be silly, and above all be kind, or don’t talk to me.

    We wake each morning seeming to have forgotten in our sleep, that from a scientific perspective we’re sentient stardust, and from a religious approach we’re an eternal soul temporarily experiencing life in a body sitting before an eternal soul temporarily experiencing life in a body, with infinity behind us, and infinity awaiting our return. We forgot that we’re impossible, and yet here we are.

    It’s killing me, to be dragged, daily, back down into less than we are and less than we have the potential to be— by the most petulant of us wanting their small thoughts to be entertained. I’m no longer interested in allowing conservative religious men to monopolize conversations by trying to talk about what’s in each other’s pants or how bathroom time works, and I’m no longer tolerating intolerance. It’s not cute, it’s not funny, and its not okay. If I hear a person advocating for exclusion, I’ll do my best to make sure that day’s sunset finds them wide awake, remembering everything that they’ve ever said that hurt someone for no good reason, and wondering if that’s how they want to proceed in life. I can’t make the choice for them, but I’m prepared at the very least to see the smirk on their face morph into a look of disgust at me for not joining them in who they hate. See: ‘sitting alone in a room with cancel culture’

    Public Service Announcement

    Lastly, I want to take a moment to talk about the act of being offended, which seems to stem from an inability to conceptually hit the pause button on reality, step out of your body and off to the side for a moment, and temporarily view the conversation that you’re having as a version of yourself who wouldn’t be offended.

    Emotionally reactionary behavior based on how something made you feel, without ever wondering why you feel that way, when it started that you felt that way, or if you’d feel that way if you knew better, seems to be the accepted norm, though, as if observational commentary isn’t allowed unless you bought a ticket to a comedy show— and even then, only of it doesn’t apply to you. It’s why comedians predominantly hang out with other comedians and view the general public as something like animals in zoo enclosures that don’t know how to be anything but the animal that they were born as, and why I do the same as a poet.

    In other words, if you sit in the back of life with tight lips and your arms crossed, unable or unwilling to laugh at yourself or the absurdity of what the fuck this all even is, and if none of your family or friends can remember ever hearing you laugh, I love you anyway— and I’m trying really hard to find a way to snap you out of it so that you can enjoy life in a way that’s possible but inaccessible to you— but as I mentioned, there’s nothing you know that can’t be learned in a more efficient and accurate way than listening to you tell me about it, so there’s no need for us to talk to each other.

    That Was A Lot Of Words

    All this to say, when you come to the campfire or the parking lot, you’ll typically find me at the edge of firelight or lamplight, looking up at the sky, feeling horrible for the despair that I see in those who need so badly for things to be true that aren’t, in equal measure to the despair that I see in those who have accepted what is— all of us having our lives stolen from us by the distraction of talking about them— waiting for you to join me.

    This is what I have to say about the things that currently come up in conversation, and I’ll try to keep it up to date. As these subjects become passé, I’ll relegate them to an archive page so that future generations can still read the stupid shit we had to argue about as we dragged the most petulant of us kicking and screaming through the painfulness of becoming.

    For those who are capable of more, we offer a pause for them to catch up. For those aren’t, we offer them empathy, and try to keep helping them understand— because it’s not their fault that they were given a lacking squishy computer filled with malware.

    Updated 06.01.25

  • I find myself unable to let a sentence go that I’ve heard too many times recently to be a coincidence. “You can know too much,” the religious, conservative, patriarchal figure said in an effort to end a conversation before it got to uncomfortable for him, seated on a thrown that requires ignorance to exist.

    “You can know too much.” The sentence literally keeps me up at night.The words of the Morning Star spoken out of the mouths of his Constantine-esque scavenger demons wearing red baseball caps to hide where the top half of their head has been cleaved off to remove their brain and eyes.

    America, for a long time now, has been a cult of ignorance. Shifting through my mental cue-cards of historical intellectual figures from the revolutionary eras and movements like transcendentalism, abolitionism, and suffrage, I find myself wanting to come to a stop right around the late 19th century or early 20th century with the Jacksonian era’s detachment of being a learn-ed individual with not being a real American or inhabiting real American values, followed by events like the Scopes Trial in 1925 and religious fundamentalism in general. Somewhere in there, distrusting those who are intelligent and well educated became the counterintuitive norm, and embracing stupidity allowed you to find comfort in numbers.

    Growing up in America, we’re now indoctrinated into a way of living that encourages froth-mouthed searching for intellectuals to banish outside the walls of what we want to imagine to be a great nation despite all evidence to the contrary. The deliberate avoidance— or outright dismissal— of information, which signals a willingness to not think critically or challenging a group’s shared narrative, has become essential to the social cohesion of gangs, hate groups, cults, religious organizations, and political movements like MAGA.

    “If you don’t like it here, then leave”— aka “Either put up with my abuse and ignorance or leave, because I’m not changing” (never “I hear you, let’s try and make things better”)— often said to people who can’t leave because they don’t have another support system (doubling down on the abuse)— is often uttered in the same conversation as “You can know too much;” blind trust, unquestioning agreeableness, and an uncritical acceptance of others’ assertions serving as the tools to enforce conformity and test members’ complicity. You don’t need to burn books to demonstrate allegiance to ignorance; simply participating in conversations that begin with phrases like “They say that…” or “I heard that…”, devoid of sources or evidence— while uncritically responding by bobbling your head— is enough to signal one's willingness to suppress independent thought in an effort to be a loyal get-along-guy.

    If you want to test the character of those that you’re engaging with, try correcting their obvious misinformation or asking for evidence, and note whether this provokes thoughtful dialogue or instead elicits silence, followed by the veiled hostility of side-eyeing and chair-shifting, and ask yourself what kind of people prefer complicity over knowledge.

    I want to live in a world where our voice boxes are rendered unusable unless we’re saying something that’s true, but in lieu of the physical inexpressibility of falsehoods, we can strive to confront deceit head-on— shoving lies back down the throats of their speakers until the world becomes uninhabitable for those who perpetuate hindrance and harm through their armies of useful idiots. I want to live in a world where neither willful ignorance— nor the bigotry it enables— enjoys the comfort and camaraderie needed to flourish, and I’d like of you to join me in knowing absolutely fucking everything.


    06.01.25

  • “Men are so simple of mind, and so much dominated by their immediate needs, that a deceitful man will always find plenty who are ready to be deceived.” -Niccolò Machiavelli


    I want to preface everything that I’m about to say with the sincere appreciation that I have for so many of us. I’ve met a lot of incredible people in this world who give everything and ask for nothing, do things that I can’t even begin to comprehend, and hold this fucking world together; however, we’re simultaneously encouraged to shove our way into a better position within the stockade on our way to the slaughter, and those who don’t want to participate in calling it an achievement are dealt with as problem animals.

    At this point, our institutions have become little more than Ponzi schemes, in which the nepo-babies of compound interest and all of their equivalencies find the most docile of us who are willing to perpetuate the lie of the institution, held hostage by their next paycheck to participate in preventing you from accessing what you need and could otherwise easily do yourself if it wasn’t kept from you behind a process, a fee, or withheld information.

    If it’s a university, the lie is that you have a great job waiting for you when you graduate. If it’s a company, the lie is that growth is exponential and new things are being invented every day. If it’s a retail organization, the lie is that the product will make your life better and that your friends and family will love you more for it. It’s all lies. Lies to indoctrinate us, lies to meet growth obligation, lies to keep us docile, and no one will stop lying because it equals their demise in a system where telling the truth can’t pay the bills.


    Whats worse, is that most of us want to be lied to. Wether the lies are parting the lips of a spouse or a salesperson, a priest or a prostitute, we want to willfully suspend our disbelief and be told a more seductive story than we know to be true, because it makes life more more compelling and less scary— and therefor more bearable— to the detriment of us all.

    Any good salesperson who’s been having the same conversation for decades, any good priest, any good prostitute, knows not only what you want them to say but just how you want them to say it— tasked with the responsibility of separating you from your money in exchange for a lie that we all agree to tell ourselves— just leave it on the night stand or in the collection basket.


    I don’t want to live in a false society, though, enacting lives of nothing more than fabrication and deceit, doing nothing truthful to no end as the result of acting on the lies of someone acting on the lies of someone else, multiplied by hundreds of millions with all of us interacting like ripples on the surface of something deeper and waiting to be explored.

    I want to know everything, and for our voice boxes to be rendered unusable unless we’re saying something that’s true. Not our personal truth, not our alternative facts— but true— in so much as its as close as possible to what we currently know to be verifiably justified.

    My friends, we’re supposed to be weaving our laughter into baskets around campfires to use while foraging for mushrooms and berries, but instead we’re forced to spend our days tricking each other, and whoever’s the best at it wins the most tickets to trade in at the counter for their basic necessities. This can’t be how we continue to live without question, and while some will be quick to comment that I’m currently typing this on a result of our current system— despite it being a counterfactual— I’m not convinced that we couldn’t have still arrived at satellites and smartphones without mono-cropping and the orphan crushing machine, and I’m tired of the whole song and dance.

    Updated 06.01.21

  • The one who asks for unquestioned trust asks you not to think.
    Anyone who demands to be taken at their word without scrutiny is plausibly lying.
    Trust through inquiry. Trust— but always verify.

  • “About a third of my cases are suffering from no clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives. This can be defined as the general neurosis of our time.” - Carl Jung


    Lying, also known as fiction, is what has allowed homo sapiens to raise above all other animals— including our nearest, Neanderthals and Denisovans. Fiction, ironically, is what has allowed us to trust, and in doing so, cooperate, adapt, and invent. Our imagination has proven to be a astonishingly powerful tool that has allowed us to evolve.

    It’s not that I don’t understand that.

    However, it’s the moment of forgetting that its all a story that’s the problem. We— all of us— seem to have once again forgotten that we’re playing pretend; and since those who are most susceptible to corruption also seem to be most drawn to positions of power, we’ve once again been playing their favorite game within a game for too long, which is that of subjugation.

    Society was supposed to work because we agreed to cooperate; eg: I’ll make clothes for everyone since I’m really good at it, if you make bread for everyone since you’re really good at it, and everyone gets what they need. However, those who now play servants as the result of our slow, incremental transition into classes have forgotten that the clothes that hide our nakedness are the same as those those we serve— just with different labels on them— and that the food we eat is the same in different packages. Cotton is cotton, flour is flour; it doesn’t matter if you spent a dollar at a thrift store or 950 for couture, and it doesn’t matter if you baked a loaf at home for pennies or had one flown-in from your favorite boulangerie— you’re just playing different kinds of pretend with the same props.

    Those who now play rulers have also forgotten that they’re not different or special or more deserving, and that the compound interest on their inheritances wasn’t earned. That in the world we built, hard work doesn’t equal success, and there no correlation between ability or intelligence and wealth.

    Again, all of our problems arise from the moment of forgetting, that you are not a peasant, and they are not a king, you’ve just been raised to play the role of one. Titles aren’t real. Laws aren’t real. Money isn’t real. They are all imagined constructs that we agree to until we don’t, and yet— repeatedly throughout history— humanity has taken the game to the point where those who rule have cheated in their own favor so often for so long that they end up on the receiving end of reminders that their houses are just as flammable as the cotton that clothes us, and their bodies are just as delicate as the crust of the bread that feed us, and the last thing I want to see is more of the same.

    I hope that before our story is filled with more of those horrific chapters, our rulers— our most corrupt— look in their mirrors and begin to see themselves as the protagonists in a myth about our salvation instead of our destruction. I hope that you, reading this right now, will join me in recognizing everything that’s not a healthy, shared story that builds community, and refuse to participate in it any longer. Refuse to participate in what you know to hurt. Refuse to participate in what you know to hinder. Refuse to participate in shouldering all of the emotional and physical labor that allows those who dominate us to continue to get away with it. Take back the ground that you accommodated yourself out of, and hold the line. Hold your autonomy. Hold your own.

    You are not a peasant, and they are not a king. Hold your own.

    06.01.25

  • I am not a free speech absolutist.

    Hate speech, and contempt for groups based on race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation; defamation, pernicious lies, and the spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories, including false advertising; exploitation and coercion to the detriment of those who can’t tell the difference: these things shouldn’t be allowed in society the same as they wouldn’t be allowed in our homes in an effort to raise decent young people.

    When it’s allowed, the worst of us find refuge, it speaks to the worst inclinations of the best of us, and it slowly spreads. The human race will never grow out of its adolescence so long as people are allowed to lie and have those lies acted on.

    You’ll hear me say several times in this profile that I want to live in a world where our voice boxes are rendered unusable unless we’re saying something that’s true, but since that’s not an option, the next best thing are speech limits— because there really are some things that you shouldn’t be allowed to say; either because they’re inarguable, aim to cause harm, or erode a landscape that was just reclaimed before roots could set in and we have to make a project of it all over again. Aside from yelling “Fire” in a theater, many of the things I mentioned above are already prohibited forms of expression on other countries, but I’d extend it to real-time fact checking if I could, of literally everyone.

    Don’t get me wrong, though. Sunlight is often the best disinfectant, and letting people say stupid shit provides the opportunity for them learn why what they just said was stupid >insert America’s inalienable rights here<, but of course wanton lying is a thing, and the human race doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel with every human being every time, when we can apply the last millennium of experience to creating some limits.

    As far as I can tell, this upsets those who want to be able to lie and keep lying to some end, and they’ll claim that its evil to put tape over their mouths, but thats a false dichotomy. No longer tolerating intolerance isn’t the same thing as intolerance.

    However, we also seem to have forgotten that we used to be clans of 300 and ships of 30, and that forgiveness is crucial to what it means to be human. Remember that the person you remove from society still remains here with us, and is still a person. In all fairness, there has to be a path to redemption. Progressives are terrible at leaving a chair empty for one’s future regret and apology, but given enough time, you’ll just find yourself sitting alone at a table with your own contemptible thoughts, forever trapped in a loop of canceling and removing yourself only to still be there.

    06.01.25

  • Since seemingly contradictory things can simultaneously be true, I want to add a personal footnote:

    There isn’t a single thing you could say that would offend me.

    Performative gasping and moral theatrics around being offended often feel more like a social reflex than a meaningful response, and its more likely to be met by me with a sigh of exhausted boredom. Of course, words can wound, and the harm is real— but so is the inflation of harm into a kind of social currency.

    Feeling displeased or hurt isn’t a virtue, and there are no annual award ceremonies for most aggrieved. To be plain, overreaction and fragility shouldn’t dominate discourse, either.

    If we’re going to hold people accountable for giving offense, we should also learn to hold ourselves accountable for how we receive it, otherwise, we edge toward a world where everyone’s too afraid to speak— because any sentence will eventually offend someone, somewhere, sometime.

    Updated 06.01.25

Whats worse, is that most of us want to be lied to. Wether the lies are parting the lips of a spouse or a salesperson, a priest or a prostitute, we want to willfully suspend our disbelief and be told a more seductive story than we know to be true, because it makes life more more compelling and less scary, and therefor more bearable, to the detriment of us all.

  • Preface

    These notes largely speak to what’s most obvious in their reoccurrence, I acknowledge my overgeneralization of individual motives, and I understand that not all conservatives are driven by authoritarian impulses or bad faith.

    The role of economic anxiety and structural forces is overshadowed by my focus on psychology and cultural forces, and I acknowledge that I often directly attribute to malice what can be attributed to fear and other emotional drivers— but I address this at the very end, and I leave the charged, conversational verbiage of my notes for a reason.

    For conservatives who have never been spoken-to plainly by someone who’s progressive, it’s important to offer the honesty of not being too careful with my words. Read this all as if I’m buying you a beer, and just saying it, even when you know that it doesn’t apply to you personally.

    This subject heading is organized as 1. Sound Bites, 2. Ongoing Notes, 3. Overall Takeaways, 4. The Flaws, 5. The Silhouette…, and is followed by 2 footnotes.



    1. Sound-bites

    “If you don’t like it here, you can leave.”
    “Well, then he shouldn’t have broken the law.”
    “That’s just the way it is.”
    “The more books you read the dumber you get.”
    “I don’t need to read it to know what it says.”
    “You need to fear someone.”
    “Stop being so sensitive, life isn’t fair.”
    “We can’t afford to take care of everyone.”
    “Nobody owes you anything.”
    “It’s about personal responsibility.”
    “Quit your crying.”
    “America is the greatest country in the world.”
    “We need to protect our borders.”
    “We need lower taxes.”
    “You’re going to do as I say.”
    “What about freedom of speech”
    “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.”
    “They’re trying to indoctrinate our kids.”
    “Go back to your own country.”
    “Then go live in a cave.”
    “Handouts create dependency.”
    “It’s not hate, it’s just biology.”
    “The free market will figure it out.”
    “Marriage is between a man and a woman.”
    “It’s not my job to pay for someone else’s choices.”
    “You get what you deserve.”
    “This hurts me more than it hurts you.”
    “We don’t need to reinvent the wheel.”
    “I’ll give you something to cry about.”
    “They’re coming for your children and freedoms.”
    “Everyone has the same opportunities.”
    “You can’t legislate morality.”
    “Stop blaming society for your problems.”
    “Things just need to get back to normal.”

    “You’ll find out. You’ll all find out.”



    2. Ongoing Notes


    Fear of Change

    Conservatives often express an acute fear of an unnamed, ever-present threat, rooted in resistance to change and a yearning for certainty. It’s always coming, because the threat is change itself. They seem to need the comfort of clear, well-defined roles, boundaries, and hierarchies to feel safe.

    The Comfort of Hierarchy

    The whole “liberal tears” thing seems to be nothing more than an embrace of one’s place within a hierarchical social structure. What they’re really saying is “know your place and get in place. Everyone gets punished and everyone gets to punish.”

    Much like the Indian caste system, the goal seems to be to encourage everyone to accept their station, stop trying to want better, and stop others from trying to want better. Conservatives advocate for progressives to “quit your crying” because “that’s just the way it is," completely ignoring that everything is a construct and there are better systems of organization than top-down control and punishment— systems in which everyone can live fulfilling lives uninhibited and unaffected by others’ fulfilling lives.

    To control and be controlled seems to be the only way they’re able to conceptualize society, though, and that’s why deviations from the norm infuriate them. Something as non-confrontational as growing your hair long and colorfully dying it attracts ridicule. It’s always “they’re doing it for attention,” and never “they’re doing it just to enjoy life and explore all that it means to be human despite living in a world that tells them to get in line, shut up, and do as you’re told.”

    Fixation on Strength and Masculinity

    Conservatives seem to have a fixation on sex, genitals, bathrooms, and anyone who isn’t a cisgender, heterosexual man by the current cultural definitions. This obsession seems born of a seemingly innate insecurity, outwardly presenting as a deep preoccupation with being perceived as capital-S Strong, and pouring over into their lives by talking a great deal about how strong they are— checking themselves against the current agreed-upon image of strength. Conversations often feel like sitting at a lunch table with 12-year-olds, full of gossip and speculative anecdotes, rather than engaging in the adult, nuanced discussions that I have with progressive friends. I’m consistently left with a thought, that conversations with conservatives feel like being beaten to death with a pool noodle.

    Selective Generosity and Brutality

    By and large, conservatives seem to make decisions while standing in front of a mirror. They’ll lend a hand or give twenty bucks to someone in need, but selectively, and always with the belief that struggle is a personal failing and a sign of weakness— even in themselves, even when they know better because its their own lived experience that they are intimately familiar with. They seem content to punish and be punished, going about their lives as though brutality is the acceptable baseline for behavior instead of ever wanting better for us, themselves included.

    Kindness is weakness. Joy is deviant and homosexual. We need to live in fear. For many, cruelty seems to be the point.

    The Illusion of Community

    Conservatives frequently talk about the importance of community while simultaneously displaying a short-sighted lack of empathy and a tendency to exclude. What they’re really discussing isn’t people helping each other as we individually and collectively realize our potential and create a world that future generations will also benefit from— it’s the rigid maintenance of the status quo. They call empathy weak, failing to recognize that empathy is the reason they’re even alive, ironically not pausing to consider the ramifications of the world they’re advocating for.

    Discussing Ideas vs. Discussing People

    When I talk to my progressive friends, they talk about art, the sciences, philosophy; what they’re reading, learning about, or engaging with as a means of lifelong learning; by and large what’s bringing them small moments of joy; but when I talk to my conservative friends, they talk about genitals, gendered spaces, guns, conspiracies, gossip, and who’s lesser and undeserving.

    Economic Myopia

    Taxes are a frequent point of contention, but many conservatives overlook the broader benefits of systems where higher taxes yield more public services, resulting in greater disposable income for most.

    They also overlook that only the wealthiest truly benefit from conservative tax legislation— meaning that if the wealthiest just paid taxes, it would all but solve our most enduring problems and make the country a better place for everyone, including them, while those wealthiest individuals wouldn’t even feel a difference in their lifestyles. They endlessly fight this, imagining themselves to one day be one of those wealthiest, and just the same— unwilling at that point to contribute fairly.

    Education and Exposure

    My conversations with conservatives seem to explain why a higher density of educated people in cities and college towns lean progressive and agnostic, while rural areas remain predominantly conservative and religious. Less education and less contact with others who aren’t just like you means less nuanced understanding, a scarier world, and a greater willingness to trust those who exploit that fear.

    They’ll willingly hand their children over to rapists, fill the collection basket while they wait outside the door, and then gather nightly with pitchforks and torches to kill the transgender artist on the edge of town who’s trying to alter their minds and hurt their kids. They do the damage, and then they point the finger at someone else; or they fall for it every time— to focus their despondence at those who manipulate them point their finger at.

    Desire for Control

    The conservative worldview often appears black and white, ignoring nuance almost entirely. This aligns with their need for homogeneity, disparity, and exclusion.

    In a diverse room where everyone is treated equally, they feel uncomfortable and unwelcome, and struggle without the hierarchy they rely on to understand the world. In part, they are unwelcome. Such a room acts like a body— and rejects them from its body— recognizing them as a foreign object in their discomfort. This creates a feedback loop of rejection and resentment, followed by desire for control.

    Dismantling Good Faith

    A lot of conservative arguments just plain aren’t made in good faith. Many are made with exaggerations that aren’t even sincerely held— literally just meant to get people riled up for its own sake, with a shit-eating grin, to “own the libs” even if it means shooting themselves in the foot. This often make conversations difficult or impossible, which in and of itself seems to be part of the fun for them.

    Playground Tyranny

    I want to say that the lifelong goal of conservatives is more than just running through the playground to knock books out of hands, destroy science projects, and punch classmates for their lunch money while doing everything they can to get away with all of it, but even this far into my life, it seems like that’s really all it is and all it’s ever been: authoritarianism, and the tyranny that comes of it. I leave a lot of conversations with conservatives with the sense that they just plain can’t handle other people enjoying themselves freely without shame or explanation. It’s as though— since they’re not able to do the same— they side-step the pain of cognitive dissonance by construction a narrative that restraint and the patrol of deviation from norms is the honorable, moral good, in whatever time, and whatever place. Closed is better than open. Punishment is always deserved.

    The Right Is Right (But Not in the Way That They Think)

    The right is right— progressives will be the death of them— but the rest of that sentence is that it’s a good thing. If conservatives have their way with us as their God-given-right, and we “lay back and enjoy it as long as it’s happening” as they demand that we do, humanity dies behind the safety of walls, fearful, and living for today; not just unable to evolve, but intolerant of it at best, and in complete denial of evolution— literally— at worst. If progressives prevail in throwing them off of us, humanity— absolutely every last fucking one of us without exclusion— thrives.

    The Delusion of Secret Knowledge

    A special note to something that I’ve heard my whole life, stretching back to childhood playgrounds and always uttered by the least intelligent, least knowledgeable people that I’ve ever known: “You’ll find out,” they say, unable to ever say what it is that you’ll be finding out.

    Self-Soothing Through Ignorance

    Of course, they aren’t in possession of some secret knowledge that you or the world is soon to learn about the hard way, but it’s self-soothing— a desperate attempt to retain some dignity through their sniffles, thinking that they’re leaving you to wonder what they know, that you don’t. What they know, that no one else has managed to figure out.

    The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of Defeat

    All it makes me wonder, though, is if that’s all any of this even is— this fucked up society we’ve built to serve no one— the self-fulfilled prophecy of the defeated, making sure, by the hundreds of millions, that “You’ll find out. You’ll all find out.”

    What— they don’t know.



    3. Overall Takeaways

    At their core, conservatives have become— for lack of a better term— a death cult, driven by a combination of power preservation, cultural dominance, and economic interests. While they have varying motivations, common themes emerge— patterns that define the modern conservative movement and explain its increasingly extreme trajectory.


    Maintain Power at Any Cost

    Modern conservative parties have increasingly embraced strategies that prioritize holding onto power rather than adapting to changing demographics or public opinion. This includes voter suppression efforts, gerrymandering, and undermining democratic institutions when they don't serve their current interests. It’s just about power for the sake of power, to allow for whim. They want to be the head of the house and the head of the country, and they demand obedience; it doesn’t matter what the commands are— or how they vary by household or country— so long as whoever proclaims power is obeyed.

    Authoritarian Tendencies

    Conservatives have increasingly embraced authoritarianism, refusing to accept electoral losses, demonizing political opposition, and encouraging political violence or intimidation. Many leaders exhibit open contempt for democratic norms and push for laws that concentrate power in the hands of a few. Again, not for all, but for many, cruelty seems to be the point— maintaining control, which feels safer than surrendering to unpredictability— dressed up as moral authority.

    Cultural & Social Control

    Many conservatives, particularly the far-right factions, push for policies that enforce conservative social values, often under the guise of “traditional American values” or “Christian nationalism.” This includes restricting reproductive rights, opposing LGBTQ+ rights, banning and burning books, and controlling education to shape ideological narratives of God-given authority. For example, Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own is part of the Project 2025 book-burning list because it “promotes female autonomy and independent thought.” Control over bodies, identity, and thought is the endgame— not moral consistency.

    Economic Interests for the Elite

    Despite branding themselves as the party of the "common man," conservatives largely cater to corporate interests, the wealthy elite, and deregulated capitalism. Tax cuts for the rich, reduced corporate regulations, and opposition to social safety nets reinforce a system that disproportionately benefits the wealthy and punishes the very people who vote for them. Poor, undereducated religious men (self-imagined authoritarian figures) will vote for other authoritarian figures, even against their own best interest, and embrace being punished for their own decisions because they want to punish and be punished more than they want to see themselves and others flourish and live joyful lives of realised potential.

    Again and again, I hear conservatives arguing directly against their own desires or best interests, as if they agree that they don’t deserve it, and that they should be forced to work hard for things that could be free to all, some of which used to be. They like to refer to this as “a basic part of being an adult.”

    Selective Anti-Government Sentiment

    While conservatives claim to champion “small government,” this only applies when it benefits them. They oppose regulations that protect consumers and workers but are quick to use government power to regulate personal lives, criminalize dissent, or suppress opposition. They don’t want to protect you— they want to control you. When they are the government, they purposefully fail, and then point to the failings as proof that the government doesn’t work so that they can dismantle it and get away with whatever they want while keeping you under lock and key.

    Like a child willing to break his own toy just to self-fulfill his prophecy that his sibling will break it, it’s not about the toy— it’s about getting to say “See, I told you.” The real toy that they like to play with is being right, even when wrong.

    Every assumption of ill-will is an insight into their own thoughts. Every accusation is a confession.

    Weaponized Misinformation

    Lies, conspiracy theories, and disinformation serve as tools for conservatives in power to manipulate their base, fostering resentment and fear against perceived enemies (immigrants, liberals, minorities, the media). This allows them to mobilize voters against policies that would otherwise benefit them, such as universal healthcare, affordable medicine, relief from unnecessarily monetized aspects of living, a strong education system for their children to have a better life than they did, or stronger workers' rights.

    A confused population is an obedient population— easier to control when they are angry, scared, and misinformed— and we’ve created a culture where once a day it’s the norm to sit down in front of a glowing screen to listen to the days pseudo-journalistic, parafiction-and-hoaxes, entertainment “news”, to keep everyone that way.



    4. The Flaws


    No Barrier for Entry

    One of the most obvious flaws with conservatism is that there’s no barrier for entry. Anyone can simply announce themselves as conservative, and in doing so, they’re now better and more deserving than others. This mindset creates the conditions for people voting for face-eating leopards and then being astonished when their face is eaten. There’s no shortage of conservatives who hate other conservatives and think they’re better than other conservatives within conservatism, and the fight for a place in the hierarchy consumes people’s entire lives.

    It’s part of what makes me feel so sorry for them— everything that they’re missing out on by allowing what occupies their minds and their days to be who they hate, what’s not manly enough to be enjoyed, and how to enact control and punishment. This is how they choose to spend their short life— belt in hand, beating, claiming it’s their God-given-right and for the good of the abused.

    I can’t think of anything more pitiful than conservative religious patriarchal figures, desperately clinging to a feeling of being special and important, spending their short lifetime trying to keep things just as they are in that short lifetime— despite history being one of inevitable change and progress.

    Contradictory Demands for Obedience

    Related to there being no barrier for entry, is something which can easily be observed by going door-to-door in any neighborhood, or country-to-country around the world— that the only consistent message is the demand for obedience itself— with each patriarchal figure contradicting the other in what needs to be obeyed. In other words, it’s about being obeyed, not what’s being obeyed.

    The rules are just placeholders for hundreds of contradictory things in addition to the changing whims of any given patriarchal figure. It doesn’t make sense, and it doesn’t have to make sense— it’s just about submission to whoever appoints himself deserving of making demands, even when woefully undereducated and/or mentally ill— up to and including being a psychopath.

    Bad Faith Arguments and Self-Sabotage

    Again, a lot of conservative arguments just aren’t made in good faith. This isn’t just something of note, it seems to be a flaw in their very being— this act of arguing things that aren’t even sincerely held— even if it means shooting themselves in the foot. “Joke’s on you!” they’ll say, as the cost of their insulin increases from $720 a year to $9,600 by their own vote. “That’ll show you to try and care about me! I don’t even care about me!”

    This instinct for self-sabotage isn’t accidental though— it’s cultivated. Again, conservative leaders understand that a population that is angry, scared, and mis-informed is easier to control. If voters believe that suffering is inevitable and resistance is futile, they’ll remain loyal to the structures that harm them, mistaking resignation for strength, and calling it tradition.

    Control for Its Own Sake

    In short, conservatives seem to just want control for the sake of control. Whether through culture wars, economic policies that favor the wealthy, or eroding democratic norms to remain in power, the goal is always dominance. The lying, gaslighting, and refusal to acknowledge reality aren’t accidental— they are essential tactics— strategic death-throes— in an effort to maintain dominance in a changing world that increasingly rejects them, one that transparently serves only them and will be the death of us all.



    5. The Silhouette of a Monster on the Horizon


    "I just want to encourage you with some substance that we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be…” — Kevin Roberts, Heritage Foundation President


    All said, the conservative religious patriarchy isn’t fighting to bring us back to when they held women prisoner by not letting them have a bank account, or to when black people were their property; they’re fighting to bring us back to manifest destiny—when they first stepped foot on this continent insisting that it was their God-given-right to decimate it and kill anyone who wouldn’t conform and obey. More than that, this isn’t regression to a single moment in history— it’s a return to the fundamental mindset of conquest and domination.

    An absence of empathy isn’t a hallmark of civilization, though— it’s the loss of civilization, and the structures that we’re already forced to exist within don’t serve us or help foster life as it has the potential to be, and now we’re going backwards.

    Those of you reading this long after I’m gone— if there is a second civil war in the United States, this is how it started: The entire human race— for centuries now— has been fighting to push the body of the conservative religious patriarchy off of us; in every country, no matter the religion.

    Here in the United States, conservatives told us to lay back and enjoy it as long as it was happening, and because we wouldn’t stop fighting to push them off of us, they called us evil and violent— radical left terrorists trying to upend their god given right, their cherished tradition, to have their way with us however they want.

    We began to fight for our lives— and then, so did they.

    Updated 06.01.25

  • Preface

    I reserved one sound bit for this footnote, because it deserves its own subject heading.

    When speaking with conservatives, the answer to a question is often “I choose ignorance, and my ignorance is as valid as your knowledge, because my ignorance is the combination of my life-experience and common sense.” Of course, they don’t say that— it typically comes out as “the more books you read, the dumber you are.” This contradiction— held close to their chest— is rooted in some overlapping ideas.

    I’m going to completely ignore the flaw of using one’s own limited mind and limited life experiences for decision-making— often espoused by those who’s education ended with high school and have never left their home town— because that’s too philosophical and is addressed under other subject headings. Instead, I’ll focus on the adjacent flaw of embracing the knowledge of the terrarium instead of the knowledge of the planet; aka: “You know too much.”

    Here again, this subject heading is organized as 1. Sound Bites, 2. Ongoing Notes, 3. Overall Takeaways, 4. The Flaws, and is followed by a Postscript.


    1. Sound Bites

    “You can know too much.”



    1. Ongoing Notes


    Intellectual Distrust

    Conservative ancient christian mythologists especially— but conservatives in general to varying degrees— seem to mistakenly perceive intellectualism as elitism; that is, those who are highly educated seeing themselves as superior to those with less formal education or the act of being a lifelong learner. The intellectuals that I know, however, are humble; to the extent that the more they know, and the further they venture into their respective fields, the more humble they become. I think what conservatives are mistaking for “thinking they’re better than everyone,” is the disconnect from every day life that’s required and carefully maintained in order to pursue an interest.

    I can see this on a small scale in daily interactions, where an individual who’s sitting alone on the periphery of a gathering is often perceived by conservatives as thinking they’re too good for whatever’s happening— which is satisfactory to everyone else there; when really, the person who stepped aside is typically just doing something that requires the lack of interruption found in separation— even just the act of dedicating all of their attention to a thought for a moment.

    As a writer, I’ve personally experienced this my whole life. Almost any time I’m writing something in the presence of others, they’ve assumed that I’m writing about them, and displayed a proportion of distrust when told that I’m not; but if I remove myself from the group, I’m then perceived to think that I’m better than everyone. Its as though the act of participating in anything but the immediate distractions of a place and time is to place yourself in a bubble— now separate, not to be trusted— not a part of the common sense.

    Common Sense

    I’ve noticed that among conservatives, there’s a strong value placed on practical wisdom, or "street smarts”— the kind of knowledge that comes from direct experience and intuition rather than formal education. The idea is that book knowledge might make you good at analyzing abstract problems, but leave you helpless when faced with practical, immediate decisions— like fixing a car, raising children, or surviving in a tough environment.

    I’ve noticed that conservatives seem to hold true— that you can only have one or the other, and that as you learn by reading, you somehow lose what you intuitively knew without an education, despite all evidence to the contrary.

    Of course, everything done intuitively can be done better by leveraging centuries of accumulated knowledge, but pseudo-journalistic, parafiction-and-hoaxes, entertainment “news” frequently uses the phrase “common sense”— so that their audience can point at their TVs and reassuredly announce “That’s the one I do! I knew I was more betterer!”

    Education & Corruption

    Most if not all of the conservatives that I talk to are also religious, and in our conversations, education is viewed as a threat to the religious beliefs of conservatives because it's seen as encouraging skepticism, the questioning of authority, and moral relativism.

    Ancient Christian Mythology, and especially biblical-literalists, tell you that we already know, so there’s no need to keep questioning and learning, and the act of doing so just makes you stray further from what’s already known. In other words, to many conservatives, becoming educated means becoming confused and corrupted, while staying uneducated means remaining smart. “You can know too much,” they say, as though education is some sort of self-inflicted blindness.

    Sophisticated Fools

    Here’s the thing. The more you learn, the more you realize how complex and uncertain the world is— and this can lead to a tendency toward moral and intellectual relativism. Again and again, though, in my conversations with conservatives (typically ancient christian mythologist) they value absolute truths and view nuance as something of a weakness. At the time of writing this, I realize that the number of times that I’ve been told that I’m “overthinking”, is staggering. For some reason, this seems to go hand in hand with being told that “wisdom is not intelligence.”

    I think about this, and I hold it up to everyone I’ve ever met in my lifetime, and I keep coming to the same conclusion. If you’re incapable of learning, you put your foot down and insist that you already know— because you have no other option, and it’s too painful in comparison to others to think that you might be somehow intellectually hindered or held back— even if it’s well known that you don’t choose your capacities (and so it’s not your fault).


    In Short

    “Don’t trust intellectuals, because they’ve lost their common sense, they’ve been corrupted, and have foolishly strayed from what I know to be true,” said the adolescent boy who believes the religion of the place on the planet where he was born and the time in human history that he was born into. “You can know too much,” said the shepherd, standing in his valley, looking over his flock and a sky of trillions of stars.

    2. Overall Takeaway

    From a conservative perspective, it’s less about books or education making you dumb, and more about those things blinding you increasingly more so to essential truths that you used to know— moral, spiritual, and practical. In other words, when you think that you you start-out already knowing— through how you feel, and having faith— that’s destroyed by empirical knowledge and critical thinking, and it makes you appear to have lost your clarity and way. Intellectualism is foolish, because it questions what’s already known (in its thousands of iterations), held to be sacred and true (in its thousands of iterations)— and only leads to more questions— not answers.

    3. The Flaw

    Put simply, we don’t start out already knowing. Those who think that they already know, have knowledge that they’re certain of which contradicts the knowledge that billions of others are equally certain of, based on their respective places and times, and whatever they were raised to believe, all of which contradict each other.

    Those who only have life experience— only have life experience; while those who have life experience and an education, have both. If you start with moral clarity, you can add knowledge and critical thinking to it. In other words, those who have practical knowledge have practical knowledge, but those who add empirical knowledge can have both. Common sense isn’t lost with education— it isn’t eroded; it’s honed, and added-to. Education isn’t a tradeoff, it’s cumulative.

    With regard to religion, I understand that empirical knowledge starts to contradict revealed truth which creates cognitive dissonance, and that the simple solution is to reject empirical knowledge to make the pain go away, but we adjust our framework as we learn— we don’t reject now knowledge, otherwise we wouldn’t even make it from childhood to adulthood. Insistence on starting-out with already-knowing, and loosing that knowledge with education, is backwards.

    With regard to more questions— not answers, we have answers that are place-holders until we know better, and that’s okay. We can live our entire life with wonderment and questions, acknowledging that we don’t know— and that’s okay. Conservative religious resistance to not knowing, is fear. Fear of not having direction, because they need control to function, even though it’s always an illusion. The educated person with common sense/moral clarity holds the strongest hand— because they’re not just working with one toolset, but with both.

    Intelligence and wisdom are not the same, but again, those who have intelligence have intelligence; while those who have intelligence and wisdom, have both. Limiting yourself doesn’t somehow equal purity and truth in your limitation; as if the less you limit yourself and the more you question— the more you learn, the more you grow— the more tainted you are. It’s the opposite of that. The more you explore outside of your terrarium, the more you gain— not less.

    Example: 500 AD “We already know everything, so we don’t need to keep learning— you’re straying further from God.” 1000 AD: “Okay, now though, really, we already know everything, so we don’t need to keep learning— you’re straying further from God.” 2025 AD: “Okay seriously though we can stop, we already know everything…”

    Therein lies the problem for all conservative religious patriarchs with any deviation from themselves and what they want to believe is true. Progressives exist as living proof that they’re wrong, and it’s painful, and it’s easier to disregard us and proclaim that they already know everything there is to know about the world from the inside of their terrarium— where they know the rules because they made them, in their own favor— rather than change.

    postsript to ‘knowledge’

    At the time of writing this, I’m passing through a nondescript rural area that can be Anytown America, and stopped at a gas station— where the lullaby of the conservative religious patriarchy was playing over the loudspeaker as it always is— which to no surprise of anyone reading this, is country music; and in half of a line, the singer summarizes this entire subject for me: “Just just a fool tryin’ to play a cool…”

    In this, I hear three things:

    1. Proclaiming to be a fool is an acknowledgment of the ability to know more and do better.
    2. It’s simultaneously an acknowledging of choosing to not learn more or do better.
    3. It’s a reinforcement of the narrative that you can know too much— that it’s somehow noble and romantic to be a fool; so that they don’t have to feel bad about themselves.

    I won’t name the musician, but I have a suggested re-write.

    Existing Lyrics:

    I took Katie down by the river with a six dollar bottle of wine
    Just a fool tryin' to play it cool, hopin' she'd let me cross the line

    Re-Write:

    An anchor on the human race— daddy taught me I’m the main-sail
    I ain’t learnin’ or doin’ any better, so ya’ll better get ready to bail

    Updated 06.01.25

  • What progressives don’t acknowledge, is that what we’re asking conservatives to do is die, in a way. We’re asking them to give up all hope— their hope— misguided as it is (being the perpetual hope to return to a time that never was and never will be) but theirs none the less, and there’s room for greater love and kindness.


    Unconditional Love for Conservatives

    A major throughline in my notes is that conservatives are driven by a need for control, a fear of change, and a fixation on hierarchy, but underlying those impulses is something more primal: pain and vulnerability. Fear and authoritarianism don’t arise in a vacuum— they’re a trauma response.

    Many of the conservative behaviors that I make note of— obsession with strength, resistance to change, fixation on order, etcetera— can be traced back to a fundamental fear of being unsafe or exposed. In an environment where weakness is punished, where love is conditional, or where suffering is seen as a personal failure, then you’re going to build defensive walls.

    Conservatives’ rejection of empathy isn’t necessarily because they’re incapable of it. Empathy opens a door to vulnerability, and vulnerability feels intolerable when the foundation of your worldview is structured around self-protection. So, when progressives talk about kindness, equality, and dismantling systems of oppression, conservatives don’t just perceive it as weakness— they perceive it as dangerous. Letting go of control feels like letting go of the survival strategy that’s kept them alive in a family that used fear to keep them in line, practicing a religion that uses fear to keep them in line.

    This is why the contradictions within conservative ideology, like claiming to value "community" while enforcing conformity rather than fostering genuine mutual care, aren’t accidental— they’re the byproducts of competing impulses: the need to protect oneself and the longing to be seen and accepted.

    Ultimately, a single conservative displaying cruelty often isn’t doing so because they’re an evil person— they’re self-preserving in a system where they don’t quite know who’s who. In a room full of hooded Klan members, every single one of them can secretly regret having joined and be looking to escape, while simultaneously patrolling the room to make sure that no one leaves— because they don’t want to be revealed in a display of understanding and kindness. Every single person in the room could be gay, and they’ll all punish the slightest hint of deviating from current heterosexual norms so as to not reveal themselves— in fear of being the only one. They’re victims, victimizing, trapped in a fear cycle of vulnerability and punishment.

    Despite the strong verbiage in my notes, here’s the thing— the path toward progress isn’t by dismantling conservative power structures— it’s love. Our families and communities need to be safe havens for those voluntarily seeking escape from families and communities that target vulnerability. Now, more than ever, progressives need to find ways to help conservatives feel safe enough to be vulnerable in the ways that they want to be— to do whatever the fuck they want to do— inspired by seeing our examples of the lives that they want to live but are missing out on by patrolling each others behavior. They need to see that as a man, it’s okay to pursue a sport that does’t involved breaking each others bones or murdering animals— that it’s okay to hug a friend, write a poem, knit a scarf, find joy in whatever just so happens to bring you joy— without fear of punishment.

    This is how we’ll do it— this is how love will win.


    Progressive Cruelty

    I maintain that progressives are intellectually and morally aligned with human flourishing, but I acknowledge that in calling for empathy and equality, it produces a resemblance of control and conformity that scares conservatives, because again, they perceive it as dangerous. This is the paradox: no longer tolerating intolerance is being intolerant. Demanding conformity to non-conformity is demanding conformity. Policing language isn’t seen as a gentle correction as one would do with a child— telling them “We don’t say those kinds of things to people,”— it’s seen as treading on their freedom. Ideological purity tests don’t really endeavor to include, rather they gate-keep in the interest of excluding until they’re ready to join us. Social ostracization for minor deviations from progressive norms leave no room for regret or apology, and are the opposite— the easy way out— of doing the hard work of community building.

    In other words, progressives can be just as capable of cruelty as conservatives— they just don’t see it as cruelty.

    Imagine for a moment, suddenly and without warning, ripping the niqab off of a women in Iran and rendering her visible to everyone, never again allowed to wear one. Progressives will say that we’ve freed her, ignoring that her ghost halloween costume is something that she has always worn and doesn’t know how to exist without, because she literally doesn’t know how to exist seen. Yes, it was her prison, but it was also the comfort of familiarity, and that act of freeing her in such a way would be incredibly thoughtless, negligent, and yes— cruel.

    Imagine for a moment standing on stage with a man from Oklahoma who was raised to be able to count on two hands what a man is and does, and suddenly without warning, ripping his clothes off, leaving him standing naked in front of his entire home town while they laugh. Progressives will suggest that he just relax and be free, ignoring that he was unwilling and unable to join us in our naked interpretive dance performance. Imploring him to join-in with some improvisational spoken-word as he trembles uncontrollably in humiliation while we skip around him would be thoughtless, negligent, and yes— cruel.

    Imagine standing in front of your father, who loves you— by some definition— and who raised you while working hard to provide you with the best life that he could, and screaming at him that he’s a miserable, undereducated, controlling, punishing, bigot. Imagine telling him that you hate him and want nothing to do with him, and imagine his confusion and feelings of betrayal, seeing as how he meant well and did everything that he knew to do. Once again, you, the one who’s supposed to be progressive, are being thoughtless, negligent, and yes— cruel.

    The first two examples describe more how it feels to conservatives when we demand change from them, and the last is rooted more soundly in our daily lives, but leaves that individual feeling just as naked. Again, we have to remember that many conservatives are victims of their place and time, not wantonly cruel, not “bad people,” but defensive of what’s kept them alive— yet unable to change. Conservatives fear progressives because they perceive our expectations of them as a threat to their autonomy and identity, made worse by our moral condemnation without room for reconciliation, and this isn’t how progress will be made.

    Understanding conservatives requires us to sit with their pain, even when it’s expressed through cruelty. It means listening, not just to their arguments, but to the fears underneath them. If progressives are going to succeed in creating a more just and humane society, it requires a level of emotional patience that feels almost unbearably, absurdly fucking unreasonable, but this is the only way to help conservatives lay down their defenses and choose connection over control. My progressive friends, imagine the person standing in front of you as a child— more than that, as a victim of generations of fear, resentment, & desire for control— and now, proceed.

    This is how we’ll do it— this is how love will win.



    Final Thoughts

    Here’s the thing. The idea that progressivism reflects the natural state of human existence— curiosity, openness, diversity, and growth— aligns with biological and anthropological evidence. Evolution itself is a form of progress: adaptation, change, and increased complexity are baked into the DNA of life. Life thrives through experimentation, diversity, and exploration. All there is— is change.

    Conservatism, on the other hand, is an artificial constraint— a kind of social and psychological coping mechanism for the fear that comes with change. It’s a reflex against the discomfort of uncertainty and the perceived loss of control by those who need to feel like they’re in control.

    In short, we are a field of wildflowers that has been turned into a lawn. Poisoned and kept in a suspended state of adolescence, they call it natural, call it order, and call it right; but the inarguable natural order is what the lawn replaced— diverse, wild, and free— forever returning.

    To get there, though, it will require conservatives choosing of their own volition to be diverse, wild, and free with us. It will require showing them that survival isn’t about strength anymore, it’s is about softness— the ability to bend without breaking, to open rather than close, to choose connection over dominance. It will require making space for them to explore all that the world has to offer, without the fear of ridicule, resentment, or punishment that they use to keep themselves— and all of us— in a suspended state of adolescence to help facilitate our abuse by the wealthy few.

    Now— more than ever— progressives need to provide unapologetic examples of what life can look like if conservatives let themselves be open, and make space for them to be exposed, to learn, to grow, and change.

    Updated 06.01.25

  • 1. The president doesn’t set gas prices.

    2. Oil companies make conservatives look good because conservatives dismantle safety regulations and— at the time of writing this— hand them $760 billion a year in taxpayer subsidies.

    Update 06.01.25

  • Despite already having our lives stolen from us— our ability to love honesty and be honest— and to have respect for ourselves and others, we’re continually beaten down and told to stop having a victim mentality.

    In other words, stay down, and also be responsible for it.

    Of course, the purpose of wanting victims to take personal responsibility is so that abusers can continue to get away with it, but I don’t know a single person who isn’t a victim of many people: their parents and their parents parents, the circumstances that they were born into, the lack of possibilities that they were afforded, people and companies that are masters at taking advantage of the way that they make you feel, institutions that predate on your hope run by people whose mouths have been sewn shut by dependance, almost all of our most trusted institutions that are supposed to be there to help us but seize on every opportunity to take advantage or do harm. We’re victims even of our own bodies, not choosing the sicknesses and disabilities that keep us from lives as we imagine they can be.

    My friends, we’re victims enough just of having been born, made worse that we’re then victims of each other.

    It’s almost all we even are, and it’s not okay, and instead of taking personal responsibility for everything that everyone has done to use and abuse me, I’m going to keep fighting to put an end to every instance of it, in every place, in every way, with every last fucking person who— either through their willful ignorance or their willful participation— victimize others, and I’d like of you to join me.

    Update 06.01.25

  • I’ve personally very rarely been called woke— five times or less— but one occasion that has stayed with me is when I asked what that word meant, and the person surprised me in two ways.

    The first way they surprised me is that they had actually looked it up, and sarcastically said “Being aware of historical injustices.” The second way was the sarcasm itself, from a grown man, as though such a thing is to be looked down on. I asked what else about me was woke, and he muttered only “Fuck your empathy” loud enough to clearly be heard but tapering off under his breath as he turned to leave as an end to the conversation; dismissively like it didn’t matter, but simultaneously angry about it. 

    More than those things, though, and what has stayed with me, is that he drew his cheeks up to his ears for just a moment— a flash of his teeth before turning. Like a chimpanzee. Like our brain stem in a fight with our forebrain to stay relevant, knowing that it can’t compete. The ancient desire, when angry, to want to kill instead of talk. The ancient communication preceding language that presents itself when nothing else remains, and says “Don’t fuck with me any further. I have fangs. I will fight.”

    What went unsaid of course, is “We’ve had it so good for so long, with wives for servants and legalized slavery, dictating our desires to someone who writes them into coherence and then does them for us while we play the back nine with our cohorts and take all the the credit and all the money— and you’re ruing it by being aware! You’re destroying The American Dream!”


    This is what screaming “Woke!” at you before scurrying away really is. It’s a death rattle. It’s the last guttural noises that manage to escape with the last breaths of a branch of our species that’s going extinct.


    We say “But I want everyone to have a good life, not just me, and we have the resources to do it.” They respond “Woke!”

    We say “But you’re hating people just for having been born.” They respond “Woke!”

    We say “But cruelty is how those who are weak show strength. Mercy is the hallmark of those who are so strong that they have no need or desire to show it.” They respond “Woke!”

    In the impotency of their ignorance “Woke!” In the terror of not being special “Woke!” Like you’re beating them within an inch of there life, just for calmly speaking about the shared experience of our suffering and wanting to care about others. “Woke! Woke! Woke!

    My conservative friends, if you never join the side of progress in the way of equality and prosperity for all, just remember that I love you anyway, and that I forgive you, and that I’ll continue fighting even though you don’t understand that it’s ultimately for you, too.

    Update 06.01.25

  • Stay vigilant for anyone trying to effect change to these ends. The people trying to do so need to be “rooted out like vermin,” because its “stirring unrest, and upending deeply cherished traditions”. Make note: these are the things that the “radicalized left” want everyone to have, without even asking if they deserve it! This is the the secret agenda of the “enemy within” who is trying to destroy the American dream!

    01. Food, water, and shelter that’s healthy, clean, and very affordable.
    02. Universal healthcare that doesn’t exclude preexisting conditions.
    03. Bodily autonomy, and the freedom to make individual decisions.
    04. A thorough education and a cared-for life of realized potential.
    05. Scientifically derived determination instead of referencing beliefs.
    06. Empathetic interactions to foster peaceful coexistence.

    Updated 06.01.25

  • New Zealand established their Universal Public Health system in 1938, the United Kingdom established their National Health Service in 1948, and the 50s-70s saw much of Europe establish theirs. Japan was ‘61 despite also rebuilding from atomic bombs being dropped on them, and our neighbor Canada was ‘66 while we were busy escalating the war in Vietnam instead.

    The 2020 Yale, Harvard, and UMass Amherst study estimates that universal healthcare would save the United States 450 billion dollars a year compared to our current system, while preventing nearly 70,000 deaths; and yet we’re the only one of the world’s developed nations that don’t have it because the side that claims to value life is kicking and screaming while progressives try to drag them into it.

    Every day we wake up to a nation without universal healthcare is a choice. I’m not going to pretend with anyone that it’s complicated and not driven by insatiable greed, and I’d like for you to join me.

    Updated 06.01.25

  • If the money that we pay into our health care in the United States isn’t for the health care of the people paying— but instead— distributed among shareholders and resulting in tens of thousands of deaths as the result of denied coverage as just the tip of the iceberg of our collective agony, that’s a kind of evil violence worse than the honesty of a bullet at point blank range that we saw in New York on December 4th, 2024. That’s us, paying for ourselves to be murdered by people who call it caring for us.

    I often think about our long history of tangible, visceral violence as a response to the subtle and surreptitious violence wrought against us by those who write the laws and then enforce them; how our history is marked with individuals who hear their kings and priests demanding that we give them our money— then fuck off and die— and reply with the swift death of the demander; how every so often, an entire population joins in to once again reset a broken social contract that they’ve too-long accommodated.

    I often think about how we’re told that violence doesn’t solve anything, by the most violent people of the most violent country, and how in the way that seemingly contradictory things can be true, they’re right. Instead of solving anything, it perpetrates itself as a cycle of unending resolution. Violence meeting violence. Murder for murder. Trying to force the worst of us to be empathetic and honest by killing them in front of their families— their children then vowing vengeance.

    The thing is, if bloodshed worked, it would have worked by now. The solution is to first realize that the adult standing before you isn’t one. They are the mind of an adolescent in the body of an adult, suffering from mental illnesses, a victim themselves, of people and institutions that have failed them; and while their behavior isn’t right and isn’t fair, what their children need to see are their parents growing up, and making the right decisions as the result of an entire population standing up and refusing to accommodate the selfish few of us any longer— peacefully.

    06.01.25

  • Despite this being a common topic of discussion, I find myself without words when contemplating a union of people who started out as dock nightwatchman for wealthy merchants and importers, who are are under no legal obligation to help you— and are always positioned on the opposite side of the people in any protest— who will kneel on your throat until you suffocate, or shoot you in your sleep if a neighbor calls with a noise complaint, followed by shooting your dog and shooting the person who called, and show up to work the next day to get away with more of the same, while their cohorts look the other way; responsible for solving less than half of crimes, while seizing more assets annually than the combined total value of burglaries during what amounts to little more than driving around and issuing tickets, ill-equipped to interact with either peaceful civilians or violent criminals.

    I see a parallel to society, in which the good ones— held hostage by their next paycheck— are never able to speak up against the bad ones, so nothing ever changes; and I feel bad for them— for us— and frustrated that it’s almost impossible to differentiate between them. All the more reason, however, to do what I suggest everyone reading this do when pulled over by a police officer until we restructure the very concept of one into several separate job titles: shut the fuck up.

    “Why’d you pull me over?”
    “I’m not discussing my day.”
    “Am I being detained or am I free to go?”

    “I invoke the fifth. I want my lawyer.”

    Updated 06.01.25

This is what screaming “Woke!” at you before scurrying away really is. It’s a death rattle. It’s the last guttural noises that manage to escape with the last breaths of a branch of our species that’s going extinct.

  • Many years ago now, a tiny Indian grocery store opened just down the street from where I lived at the time, and I was ecstatic. I no longer had to write my name in the hiker’s log at the trailhead of a 5 mile loop from my car— through one of many airplane hangers that Americans call grocery stores— just to grab some malai kofta and paneer makhani, along with some naan that my non-dominant hand always snuck into the cart while I wasn’t looking; I was now steps away from squeezing down narrow isles that billowed with tasty food.

    The shop owner was gentle man— always smiling under averted eyes and twisting my arm in suggesting that I treat myself to another turquoise and gold box of Haldiram’s Gulab Jamun or other indulgences. He would always wobble his head in a deep, slow bow— to me, to the Lakshmi statue that sat amid plastic tubs of his wife’s homemade rhombus-shaped Baklava or Soan Papdi, and to the 80’s-style Sanyo cash register in front of him with keys that mirrored the menagerie of colors in the store. I always wanted to give that guy such a big fucking hug, squeeze his shoulder, and tell him that he’s loved. We don’t live in a culture that allows for saying that to strangers, though, so I kept it to a muted, socially acceptable “Thank you my friend,” before the eight steps back to my car.

    I had never previously noticed, but I was always the only person in the store, until one day when I was greeted with the shocked expressions of a few young women who were shopping as well, before they pressed their bodies so far into the produce nearest them so as to become indistinguishable— just so that I could pass— and while I was still close enough to hear, one of them asked the owner if I was was one of the good ones. “Is he one of the good ones?” Words that were seared into my brain, and something that I still think about now, some 16 years later at the time of writing this. “Yes, he is in here all the time, we chat often, it is okay.”

    This isn’t the only time I’ve heard this question asked, or been told that I’m one of the good ones, and I’m ashamed to live in a society where when I enter a room, so many— so often— are forced to wonder which type of man I am. Where the hands of women on the L have instinctively slipped themselves into pockets to grasp objects in preparation of self defense. Where black men have sat beside me at a show where I was the only white person while wondering if they’d have to protect their friends and family from me. Where people turn sideways and pause in hallways in some sort of deep-seeded behavioral conditioning to make way.

    Much more recently, I had a server at an Appalachian diner warn me that I “might want to find a quieter place to read because a large party was about to be seated,” gesturing her head toward a group of good ‘ol boys who just pulled up in several pickup trucks (while listening to what I can only imagine was Jason Aldean’s Try Than In A Small Town), and while not taking kindly to people who aren’t from around there reading poetry wasn’t explicitly mentioned in the song— in the way that women have always been moving the needle of history in increments as barely perceptible as their whispers while simultaneously doing what they gotta do to survive— she spoke volumes with her eyes that it’s implied.

    It reminded me of having had it explained to me by several people over the course of my life that they read people by their shoes and accessories— knowing who’s safe and who’s not— after referencing elaborate internalized lists that helped them navigating the world. I can go on with examples stretching back as far as I can remember a differentiation between types of men becoming apparent, all the way to elementary school, but just these two examples speak to what it is about our world that makes us live in a defensive state of being, and makes us feel compelled to warn each other: It’s you, my self-proclaimed alpha-male friends.

    Remember this question: “Is he one of the good ones?” You can be sure that its been asked about you in private, and you can be sure that there was an answer.

    Update 06.01.25

  • “I know no other sign of superiority than goodness.” - Ludwig van Beethoven


    The last time I was camping in the Adirondacks to climb the old fire towers, I woke up in the morning and started making coffee without first putting my glasses on. I don’t know why, but I just went ahead and boiled water, and then just the same, made a breakfast scrabble with eggs and veggies from a roadside stand the previous day, and when I finally realized that I still hadn’t put them on yet— while looking at the forest around me— I decided to just leave them off. I went on a hike with them off, and continued through most of the day that way. I realized that this is what it was like for us, for the entirety of human history before the slow invention and adoption of glasses over the last thousand or so years. How soon we’ve forgotten, that when you lost your eyesight, you just lost your eyesight; everything increasingly more blurry, all day, every day— for everyone to varying degrees— resulting in our very near ancestors feeling their way through their lives and relying on each others unique abilities.

    In 1957, the remains of a Neanderthal man nicknamed Nandy, were found in Shanidar Iraq. This man lived between 35,000 and 45,000 years ago, and what so unique about him is that at a very young age he suffered a crushing blow to the left side of his head, which would have plausibly damaged his left eye if not blinding him, in addition to damage cause to the left lobe of his brain— which shows up in his remains as a a withered right humorous bone. In addition to that, he had a fractured right metatarsal that would have resulted in a limp, and the most important thing of note is that it had healed. That Nandy most likely lived to see his 40’s. What this tells us, is that even before our homo sapien ancestors became the dominant species, we faced our difficult and dangerous lives with social networks that valued kindness. There were small enough numbers of us in our clans and even in tribes of clans, that we knew each other’s faces, we knew where their scars came from, we knew what kept them up at night. Their children were our children, their loss was our loss. We could see each other through the eyes of our mothers, know that they were worthy of love, and be that for them.

    As this individual found himself bound to the safety of the group with his disability, he was still valued— he just needed a little help to carry on— and we can imagine that help took the form of hunting to his ability, threading sinew through the holes made by a needle awl, and being a voice leading the way in what become a perpetual fog. In other words, we’re here today because of those who came before us, and those who came before us have always managed by being there for each other.

    My self-proclaimed alpha male friends, strength isn’t found in the blow to Nandy’s head, it’s found in the love and cooperation of those who cared for him. Strength is having empathy for the suffering of others, and valuing them— and humanity would never have made it this far down the path that you relentlessly insist on taking.

    We are nothing but skin and bones— as special as we’re not— all of us, absolutely every last fucking one of us, moments from our time here being over. You’re wrong about what strength is. All there is, is love.

    Update 06.01.25

  • IRC 303.1
    Habitable rooms shall have an aggregate glazing area of not less than 8 percent of the floor area of such rooms.

    I reference International Residential Code in an effort to approach this subject from every angle, to remind you that much of your home is comprised of something so fragile that a disoriented bird can break it, and I’m not talking about your ego and your date for the evening.

    Aside from your windows, the rest of your house is 1/2” OSB and 1/2” drywall. People can penetrate the glass with almost anything they so choose, they can just about kick through the side of your house, or they can just set it on fire. No matter how many guns you own, no matter how enumerable your stockpile of ammo, anyone who wants to can kill you in your lock-pickable sleep.

    Even in your home with a gun under your pillow because you saw it in a movie once— loaded and ready to blast away in the direction of anyone who uses your driveways to turn around, dares step over your threshold, or essentially anything that moves— all that stands between you being murdered and having all of your things taken from you is an appreciation of our shared suffering, through an empathy that you struggle to find. I don’t think that you fully appreciate the extent to which the lock on your front door is a suggestion, the extent to which the exterior wall of your house is a suggestion, and again, lets pretend for a moment that windows aren’t made of glass.

    All that even holds society together is love, and yet you won’t stop demanding that its weak, that you’re strong, and advocating to see it end.

    My self-proclaimed alpha-male friends, this isn’t a dog eat dog world. Dogs form packs. Families. They help each other. The word alpha when talking about chimpanzees and wolves refers to the leadership behavior of one especially social and well-liked member of the family who’s empathy manifests itself as continually putting a stop to competition and in-fighting. The alpha was an observant peacemaker, not a self-appointed ruler. Just the same, humans are born helpless, and we need many people working cooperatively as equals to raise us. It’s not what makes us weak, it’s what makes us even possible.

    Our society doesn’t need wolves, it needs the dogs they became; pressed against us for companionship in the hours after sunset— an ear at the door in exchange for the dexterity of our hands. If you want to be a wolf, you are still so far from being what anyone needs.

    I wonder, if you’ve really thought it through— this thing that you claim to want— for progressives to stop gifting you generations of opportunities to learn and grow and abandon your machismo and intolerance. I’m sorry, but when I look at you all I see are children who’s disappointed parents sigh deeply at their misbehavior, and try again with new words each day the follows. I see choleric kindergarteners who won’t listen to their teacher and won’t play nice.

    I’ll remind you again, that the only thing preventing others from putting an end to you the easy way is empathy and the ensuing kindness. Be careful what you ridicule progressives for; you, me, none of us, survive the world that you’re fighting for. All that holds society together is love. All there is, is love.

    Updated 06.01.25

  • Colossal Biosciences, using CRISPR and other gene-editing technology, has announced the goal to produce hybrid mammoth calves by 2028, by editing the DNA of Asian elephants— which are genetically closer to Woolly Mammoths than they are to African elephants— to select for traits like their characteristic arctic fur. Ultimately they be reintroduced to the tundra to help naturally restore the degrading ecosystem; much like the trophic cascade following the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone that lead to riverbank stabilization.

    This, following Alba: Eduardo Kac’s bioluminescent GPF bunny in collaboration with French geneticist Louis-Marie Houdebine— who genetically modified the rabbit using a green fluorescent protein gene derived from jellyfish; following the world’s first CRISPR-edited baby in 2018, by Chinese scientist He Jiankui; following Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and the discussion of social reform versus biological revolution in the form of something like Soma.

    The reason why I’m mentioning all of this, is because I already see in myself and my disappointment in us all— the desire for something else. Something better— to replace all that we’re lacking— and I worry that the technology will result in the real-world realizations of what was once just self-proclaimed alpha male fantasy.

    I worry about a world of conservative religious patriarchal men ushering in a future of genetically modified genius children with amortal lifespans, who create for themselves— through selected traits— the paradigm of sexual servitude and sandwich making, as dumb as they’ve always had to pretend to be so as not to harm the fragile male ego: biologically encoded to be unquestioningly and subserviently devoted while insistent that it’s their choice and blissfully engendering the role on a tailored cocktail of mood stabilizers that convince her of happiness, and glowing whatever bioluminescent color of their choosing along with any other augmentation that currently only exists in the form of photorealistic fantasy AI models.

    This is why social reform is so important, because we’re already rewriting genomes.

    The mindset of the god-given right of dominance needs to end, because we are— like it or not— on the brink of it finally, once and for all, being the death of us: able to turn pretensions of being smarter and better into a reality, and able to turn women into designer products that are first only for the wealthiest, but soon find their way into every man’s home and eventually into every pawn shop and land fill.

    My friends, raise your young boys to know that everyone is equal, and everyone deserves respect, kindness, and love, so that we have future men who will do the right thing when facing the moment of no return.

    Updated 06.01.25

  • About a hundred years ago in the 1920’s, it was more common for men to wear pink and for women to wear blue. Go back a little further and men wore heels, tights, makeup, and wigs. A little further again, and men sewed their own clothing in between cooking and cleaning their way through uncharted wilderness while writing poetry about it. Further still, and we see the origins of men wearing various types of skirts and dresses that continue up to today— all of these rugged men now redefined as feminized betas by modern men who wouldn’t survive a day of their life. See: ‘footnote 4 to trans as folk’: skirts

    If you define what it means to be a man based on the place that you live and the time that you’re alive, all you’re doing is announcing to everyone how uneducated you are and how small your world is. The rest of society is trying to be kind and patient with you, but they type of man you’re trying to be doesn’t act like the man you’re acting like, and at this point, trying to engage with you is starting to feel a lot like trying to put a onesie on a fussy toddler who’s kicking and needs a time-out. You’re not as intelligent as you think you are, you’re don’t have the magnetic personality that you think you have, you’re intuition is limited to your limited experiences, and addressing your stoicism— behaving like an unemotional sociopath just makes the rest of us wonder if you’re a sub-species of Homo Sapiens that branched off and never evolved to do more than fuck and fight.

    My self-appointed alpha-male friends, imagine a world where every man is you, then imagine a world where every man is every possible way it means to be a man— except for you. In one of those scenarios, the human race ends, and in one— with diversity— it thrives.

    While you fight to be considered the paradigm of humanity, we yearn for you to finally denounce your self-proclaimed title. Otherwise, there are several studies from the early 1960’s through the late 1990’s that I can share with you about the effects of simply removing the aggressive individuals from Macaque and Rhesus monkey societies, demonstrating how after experiencing a period of instability during group role reorganization, they enjoyed overall decrease in aggression and conflict among all individuals, along with an increase in social cohesion and egalitarianism; and then we can discuss what that removal of aggressive individuals from our societies might look like.

    Update 06.01.25

  • I’ve noticed that the men who insist on the importance of the nuclear family are also often those who send their kids to boarding school to be raised by a co-op of platonic friends who take turns teaching them several subjects before the kid spends the rest of his time with peers— no parents in sight— while the same man still imagines himself seated at the head of an heirloom table insisting “Because I said so,” to an empty room.

    I appreciate that some of us play an important role in our children’s formidable years without it resulting in being disowned and replaced with a chosen family and an equal number of years of therapy, but I like to remind every self-proclaimed alpha male and self-appointed head of the household theocracy who insists on how important they are, that if they were to die before finishing reading this sentence, their child would go on without them: raised by one parent, or a family member, and really by the community that was going to do the preponderance of raising them anyway— and predominantly go on to become the well adjusted contributors that we want society to be comprised of. Just the same as when they’re raised in the myriad alternatives seen throughout history, such as a large network of relatives as caregivers, matrilineal systems, communal living, or systems of extended family and friends and village oversight that can often include no father at all.

    In other words, I see you there Ozymandias— as you re-tuck your shirt and give your belt a reassuring little tug— and you’re not as important as you think you are. Not even in your own children’s lives. See: ‘we fall asleep and give god our face’

    Updated 06.01.25

  • Setting aside how cruel that statement is to everyone who would like to have children, but can’t, which by some studies is as many as 1 in 6 of us globally, and 10-15% of couples in the United States;

    and everyone who have children who die in childhood— who none the less contribute to society in their own meaningful ways aside from that;

    and everyone who lives and die alone— never finding someone to partner with despite wanting to;

    and despite the fact that the real reason that the conservative religious patriarchy wants you to have children before you’re emotionally, intellectually, or financially prepared is that it makes you easily controllable— living in constant fear of not being able to provide for them, and willing to shut up and do almost anything to keep your job— held hostage by your next paycheck to keep you from ever saying or doing what you really want;

    there are enumerable household names— much less those who go unknown— who have contributed to society in every field of study, in absurdly helpful ways, who never even tried to have children, and were able to realize their accomplishments because they never had children.

    To all of the conservative religious patriarchal figures who insist on themselves being the paradigm of the way to live— and assign morality and value to having a family— go fuck yourselves.

    Updated 06.01.25

  • This is a reply to every conservative, religious, patriarchal man who unwaveringly insists on how sad progressive women must be for contributing to the world in myriad ways that don’t include your “progeny” (I just threw up in my mouth a little even typing that word).

    We have a world of examples of joy and fulfillment that isn’t for you or about you. I know you’re struggling to comprehend that a woman can be satisfied in life without standing barefoot in your kitchen, but my lesbian friends will tell you how unnecessary you are to their joy, my friends who can’t bare children will tell you how unnecessary you are to their fulfillment, and I’m telling you how detrimental you are to the perpetuation of the human race.

    My progressive friends aren’t sad—they’re exhausted— from struggling to shove you off of them while you insist how evil they are for not enjoying it so long as its happening.

    My conservative religions patriarchal friends, I am nobody, and I am nothing, and I understand that love is not finite and love is not mine— and I’d like for you to join me.

    06.01.25

Strength isn’t found in the blow to Nandy’s head, it’s found in the love and cooperation of those who cared for him. Strength is having empathy for the suffering of others, and valuing them; and humanity would never have made it this far down the path that you relentlessly insist on taking.

  • We love to talk about traveling back in time and even just a few words changing the present to become unrecognizable upon returning, but I’d like that thought experiment to become about how just a few words— now— can render the future unrecognizable to our current fever-dreams.

    I’d like for us to recognize that the problem isn’t those of us who are thought of as anomalies, but those who are always standing in the way— afraid of the change that comes from deviations from the norm— endlessly fighting to keep things just exactly the way they are as if what exists in their short lifetime is the final true iteration of being. I’d like to live in a world where we cut out the mutations of our genome that result in a denial of evolution and progress, and everything it means to be human.

    Being conservative— fighting for homogeneity, conformity, and heretical control— is the aberration in the body of a diverse and flourishing society.

    My friends, so much of whats now accepted as normal once started as eccentric convictions that went too far, and for all of recorded history we have examples of those who are labeled “different” by our culture contributing the most profoundly, yet we continue to celebrate fitting in and adhering to existing norms, and continue to punish stepping out of line. We silence, oppress, and kill whoever is simultaneously moving us forward, because they’re living proof of the flaws in conservative logic— thereby forever accommodating the least tolerant of us.

    What an balmy way to have evolved, to reward being like everybody else while simultaneously enjoying all of the results of being “different;” using our multiple-choice standardized-test education system to slowly replace the poetry and curiosity that we all start out with, and tell those who push back that they’ll be useless to society; and in a bizarre sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, punish those who continue to not fall in line by being outcast in so much as they often only barely scrape by in an effort to hold on to what they know is crucial to the soul.

    As far as I’m concerned, all of the best people are weird, and I don’t even trust normal people, because the only way to be well adjusted in a sick society is to lie. To call sickness health, and punish those who want to get better.

    The only people I find disturbing are those who constantly poison and mow the lawn of society, killing every deviation from the norm to their own detriment and call it being the ideal human; and I’d like for you to join me in creating a society where we no longer perpetually wait for the old man to die for us to gain a modicum of progress. See: ‘we fall asleep and give god our face’

    Updated 06.01.25

  • Imagine Donald Trump’s assistants moving large mirrors into position to make it look as though the Smithsonian— along with thousands of years of recorded LGBTQ history— has disappeared, before he quickly turns back to his podium to continue ad-libbing. Donald: “…a concept that was never heard of, in all of human history nobody ever heard of this what’s happening today; it was all when the radical left invented it just a few years ago.”

    While I’ll go on to share my thoughts, the trans debate isn’t one. Full stop. People who either neurologically or chemically feel compelled to transition because their mind doesn’t match their body exist, and have, and will.

    It’s the same distraction that its always been, and it’s working. The Adam’s Apple Police have us talking about anything but what matters— as a distraction— so that we forget we were never meant to spend our lives in misery for their joy and profit.

    Here’s the thing: no one spends their life savings transitioning— and living in a society that hates them— just to be able to more easily walk into women’s bathrooms. Especially while straight men already rape women with near impunity, and the most gullible individuals in our society already willingly hand their children over to rapists and then fill the organization’s collection basket while they wait outside.

    On the one hand, what you’re seeing isn’t a sudden increase in numbers; it’s that the trans folk of the Boomer generation had to lead double lives or were put in mental institutions, and Gen X trans folk limited their public exposure to Walmart after midnight to try and live some semblance of the life that they painfully had to watch others get to live, and Millennials have said enough is enough— to pave the way for Gen Z to live honestly and without apology, even in their formidable high school years. For all of recorded history, LGBTQ peeps have existed as some small fraction of any given population, and many cultures have made space for them the same as every other type of person born somewhere on the spectrum of possible combinations of things that a person can be.

    However, on the flip side, and typically addressing my progressive friends, there really are people who are attention-seeking, fetishizing, brainwashing, cosplaying, and otherwise being disingenuous— and to pretend that does’t exist hurts people too.

    The solution to both, however, isn’t being carried on a spit down main street as a monster found in our midst— offered up by the real monsters in human skin suits that continue to walk among us. No different than convincing the population that left-handed people were demons doing the devils bidding, and that being right-handed was doing the right thing— followed by the percentage of left-handed writers revealing itself to naturally occur in about 10% of us once we were finally able to put an end that particular brand of conservative religious insanity— trans folk are just the current threat to a narrative of order that’s been constructed to retain control, the true numbers of which are finally revealing themselves after having been, until recently, tamped down with murder and suicide.

    Typically addressing my conservative friends, again, yes, those numbers are increased even further by the bandwagoneers, but you’re just as responsible for the action by your reaction.

    That’s the most concerning takeaway from the discussion about trans folk. My concern isn’t trans folk, it’s straight men, who are typically a family member or someone in a position of authority meant to protect us like the men who enjoy playing dress-up in satin ball gowns and Sunday-hats with flair that we call priests, who will then find refuge in finding someone else to be persecuted for their own actions and distract us with an argument.

    Yes, men are men, and yes, women are women, but yes, there is a lot of in between. Binaries pin ends of a spectrum. Many things can simultaneously be true. 74% of visible matter in the universe is made up of Hydrogen, and 25% is made up of Helium, but we don’t think of the universe as binary, we think of it as the 1% that makes up everything else.

    While I’m not a biologist— and someone can probably explain it better than I can— I’d like to remind everyone that chromosomal sex is XX and XY, and that while the Y chromosome is the SRY gene that makes you genetically male, you can also end up with an X and a Y with an SRY, meaning you can also be physically female (chromosomally male and genetically female), or also be physically male (chromosomally female and genetically male), and that because sex-related genes also regulate hormones, you can also be hormonally male or female, with the added complication that the cells throughout our body are not always receptive of our hormones, leading to having a body that can be some combination of genetically, chromosomally, and hormonally male, female, or non-binary; layered with behavioral norms, folkways, mores, and a confluence of influences on someone’s life, and what it all leaves you with is one thing. Kindness.

    We are born, and it’s to be met with kindness, and if it isn’t, you’re the problem.

    Updated 06.01.25

    This is a work of parody/satire. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and intended for comedic or critical purposes only.

  • A popular argument against gender reassignment that keeps coming up in conversation seems to be the potential for making a mistake and the ensuing future regret— as in— the person isn’t a genuine embodiment of being intersex, but instead, someone trying to permanently cosplay as such.

    That means we’re now talking about 1-2%, of the 50% who have reassignment surgery, of the .5% of the population— where a patient presents with regret for a decision that was made. A decision, that is often reversible, what with plastic surgery and all. We’re talking about roughly 15 thousand people in the United States, 300 people per state, who have some regrets about their decision.

    Culturally, we don’t tell girls who want breast augmentation and rhinoplasty that they should be content with how they were born, and yet we pretend to be so concerned with the regrets of so few people out of an entire country that they can fit in a couple of subway cars.

    Despite the more remarkable percentages, conversations aren’t taking place in every living room across the country about the damage caused to our children by people:

    raising them as >insert batshit crazy religion here<;
    imposing on them unrealistic standards of perfection;
    encouraging sports and hobbies with high rates of sever injury or death;
    offering conditional love and dismissing their emotional needs;
    enforcing conformity and removing life and career paths from them while their too young to speak for themselves;
    stealing their youth from them by living through them to achieve their own obsessions or unbridled competitiveness;
    raising them to specifically and actively hate selected groups of people;
    encouraging marriage/pregnancy before they’re old enough to be emotionally/intellectually/financially prepared;

    and I can go on ad nauseam— all of which can be argued as having negative impacts that are astronomically greater than not having a body that’s just as you imagine it should be because of choices that you made, seeing as how none of us do.

    My friends, I’m not concerned with a few hundred women later regretting their teenage double mastectomy in a world where flat-chested androgynous women are tasked with being supermodels, I’m concerned with the 200 million girls in Africa who have been the victims of forced Clitoridectomies, resulting in roughly 90% of them in Somalia, Guinea, Djibouti, and Egypt, having had their genitals mutilated for the joy of religious men.

    I’m concerned for the girls who are hung to death for the crime of being raped.

    I’m concerned with the half a billion children globally who are beaten by their fathers without anyone turning their head.

    I’m concerned with children being told that they’re going to burn in hell for eternity unless they believe something that they can’t comprehend.

    If we really care so much about causing our children irreversible damage and regret, all of us— all of us— need to look in the fucking mirror.

    Updated 06.01.25

  • At the time of writing this, 0.002% of athletes in the U.S. are trans. 10 out of a half-million. This includes participation-only events like fun-runs.

    For those who still allow themselves to be convinced that this is an issue, lets talk about it.

    I don’t know how we discuss unfair advantages with regard to a biological woman with naturally high testosterone competing against a biological woman with naturally low testosterone— or a transgender woman who has fully transitioned and lost her previous advantages competing against a biological woman whose physiologically who-knows-where in the spectrum, comparatively. That’s just it: a woman isn’t equal to every other woman just because she’s a woman, and a man isn’t equal to every other man just because he’s a man. At every starting line, there’s a person destined to come in last place no matter how hard they try— because anything else just doesn’t exist as a possibility for them.

    In other words, competitions are already unfair, even when everyone participating is the same biological sex, because people of one sex aren’t exact copies of each other— we’re all on a spectrum that changes across our lifetime.

    When two people are in a ring, ready to box, it’s already not an even match, and can’t ever be— due to enumerable factors. So, what it comes down to is this: does person A, in their bodily autonomy, agree to compete with person B; and if so, then that’s their decision as the people competing— which isn’t up to the spectators. If they want to box, let them box, and if they decide it’s not fair, then that’s what they decided. Ultimately, the people wearing gloves can make their own decision and live with the consequences. I’d like to view things over a longer timeline than the 3 minutes of a round, or even the headlines in the papers in the coming weeks— and stay out of the ring— and I’d like for you to join me.

    This is the end of this argument, however many years it takes for humanity to get there:

    Competition itself is inherently flawed and pointless, and there is no such thing as a level playing field when it comes to our physiology, so you’re only really ever competing with your own last best, anyway. We have a saying to describe the looser of a competition when the advantage of one over another is really obvious: “They never even had a chance.” Sometimes it’s obvious, sometimes it’s subtle, but really, every loser of every competition never had a chance. So, if they want to race/play/box or otherwise complete— let ‘em.

    The penultimate future of sports is devoid of ranks and trophies, but a future without ranks and trophies threatens the conservative religious patriarchy because it undermines the hierarchical concept they need to survive— which is why this topic is such a point of contention— and they’re not going down without a fight. See: “whiling away our afternoons kicking inflated pig bladders”

    Updated 06.01.25

  • My conservative friends, if you struggle to understand biological diversity, that’s okay, I’d just like to remind you that the person you’re hating is loved by others who know them to be worthy of being loved, and I’d like to suggest that if you can’t bring yourself to accept that people who aren’t you exist, you can at least just leave them alone.

    If you do understand biological diversity, but you hate people who transition anyway, then you’re a bigot and you should sit yourself down and have a hard discussion with yourself.

    If you celebrate the demonization and punishment of minority groups while ignoring who’s actually committing the horrific acts that they’re being accused of, then you’re the fucking monster— and we can see you— staring out from behind the eye holes of a cowl made to look like us.

    My progressive friends, your mishandling of this subject alone might have just lost you a fucking election. If for absolutely no other reason than being honest with the medical practitioner who’s standing in front of you, who needs to know for your own well being—for example— if your a man, a pre-op trans woman, or a woman: words have meaning.

    I’ll say it ad nauseam along with several other sound bites; this, coming from the person who says that all there is, is love: Just as surly as the hatred of conservatism will be the end of us, the pathological compassion of progressives will also be the end of us. Again, words have meaning, and without their definitions, we’re back to staring at our shadows on cave walls.

    Updated 06.01.25

  • I’d like to make a trans-adjacent note for both my conservative and progressive friends reading this.

    For all of recorded history, men have worn skirts and dresses. They have lived their lives in them, and gone to war in them. Some of my favorites are the skirts that Scottish men wear called kilts which are made in a variety of plaid patterns; the hooded dresses that men in the Maghreb region of north Africa wear called Djellabas which are often a solid color but sometimes vertical stripes; the Japanese Kimono made in myriad combinations of thread type and dye colors or patterns; and of course the humble tunic, worn for centuries by the men of too many cultures in too many versions to list here.

    My conservative friends, there are thousands of ways to be a man. Men come in every shape and size, and cry, and dance, and make art, and enjoy everything there is to enjoy about being alive. Men can be complex— if you let them be. The worst way to be a man, the most stubborn, ignorant, intolerant, and detrimental, is the way that you wordlessly define it with your reflection in a mirror. I want to remind you that the strong men that history has seen itself altered by: farmers with scythes, warriors with swords, poets with pens— weren’t wearing the pants in the family— they were wearing the same skirt or dress as their wife, hiked up and tied back when needed, to make a life where it could finally be let down.

    My progressive friends who are reading this while wearing clothing that’s associated with the opposite sex, all I see is that you’re still limiting yourself to speaking in the binary language that you were giving to use at birth, and I’d find it more interesting if you didn’t entangle your being with your appearance at all— and instead— spoke with me a new language that we create together to express what we haven’t been allowed to. I understand that you were born into a body with a brain that wasn’t your choosing. All the more reason to abandon defining anything at all as intended for either a man or a woman, and join me in simply layering for all possible weather conditions in an effort to not participate in our culture’s hyper-fixation on clothing and appearance that’s inordinately disproportionate to its primary purpose. See: ‘it’s called fashion, sweaty’

    Updated 06.01.25

We’ve seen thousands of years now of members of the conservative, religious, patriarchy trying to find witches to kill, when there is no such thing; it’s just them— murdering people who threaten them. They’ll stand over the charred remains or the lifeless bodies of those that they’ve just dragged to death behind their pickup truck, hung from trees, or beat to death— and not see that they’re the problem— forever trying to erase the existence of those who who made the fatal error of being born as something other than them. It has to end.

  • I’d like to live in a society where conservatives don’t monopolize every conversation by talking about what’s in each others pants and how they go to the bathroom— like they can’t seem to get past their potty training stage of development— but since it’s the topic of every conversation, I’d also like to live in a world where there aren’t mens and women’s bathrooms, there are just bathrooms, and in them are whatever people need to use.

    We already have gender neutral bathrooms of course, and they’re everywhere; the door says bathroom, you walk in, close it, lock it, use the facilities, and then try to leave it as good if not better than how you found it for the next person. These gender neutral bathrooms are found in coffee shops and gas stations and even in your own home— shared with your family members.

    I’ve noticed that conservatives however, especially men, seem to prefer that using bathrooms be a group activity; and while I’m still trying to figure out why, my current theory is so that they can hold hands. I think that’s why their ideal bathroom is a shared room with stalls, with large gaps between the doors so that you can look inside and see if it’s someone that you want to hold hands with, and very high stall partitions so that you can hold hands underneath it. It’s a working theory, so I may have to come back to this later.

    Conservatives will tell you that the conversation about bathrooms is about not wanting men following women into bathrooms to rape them, except, no one spends their life savings and several years transitioning to a woman in order to follow women into bathrooms to rape them, especially considering that straight men represent 99% of all rapes at over 300,000 a year in the United States, and at an estimated 25%-30% rate of report, meaning the number is probably closer to a million.

    If there was such a concern about women being raped, we wouldn’t be talking about bathrooms or trans women, we’d be talking about straight men raping women with near impunity, we’d be talking about priests grooming and raping our children, and we’d be talking about rapists being treated better than trans folk.

    People sentenced for sexual abuse at the time of writing this according to the US sentencing Commission:

    93.8% Men

    96.2% U.S. Citizens

    If you’re a straight white conservative religious man who wants to prevent women from being raped, look no further than the mirror. If you’re a straight white conservative religious man who wants to stop men in dresses from raping our children, look no further than your church.

    Updated 06.01.25

  • I first heard this sentence when I was eight years old.

    I heard it again just now, decades later. I’ve heard it many times. Different mouth, same stench. Another angry, whiskey-nosed man of God, jowls trembling with pretend righteousness.

    It wasn’t just a sentence. It was a chant— with just enough time between each utterance that you almost forgot about it. A refrain of fear dressed up as logic, passed down like a dirty heirloom from one generation of cruelty to the next.

    It’s the same absurd leap made by white supremacists who want to stop immigration, and ask— with fake outrage and bad-faith— if you want criminals coming into your home. Home, not country. As if immigration means having to negotiate with the cellmate assigned to you who gets to be big spoon.

    What gets to me— what makes me feel the same rage and heartbreak I felt as a child, even before I fully knew what they were talking about— is the laziness of it. Not just intellectually, though there’s that. Spiritually lazy. Morally lazy. They wield absurdity like it’s logic and expect fear to do the rest, knowing that it often does.

    They’ve been getting away with the same lazy fucking sentence for as long as I’ve been alive.

    When I was eight, all I knew was that people should be allowed to love each other without being made fun of, and that his leap was asinine. I didn’t know then what I know now— that what they mocked wasn’t absurd, it was sacred.

    Now, I think about the day they met— when something warm ached in their chest. Recognition. Potential. The daring flicker of hope. I think about the first time their fingers wove into each other’s with a sigh of relief. I think about closed eyes and held space and impossibility. I think about every gay person killed for daring to let themselves fall in love with someone that the terrorist organizations we call religions punish as deviation from their norm.

    That’s what it’s about, of course. Control. Power. Guarding some imagined purity by vilifying anything that threatens the brittle little god they made in their own image. They fear what they can't understand, and instead of getting curious, they get cruel.

    That sentence. A sentence I knew was wrong even before I had the words for why. I carry the memory of the first time I heard it like a compass that points to the cruelty of the most pathetic among us— men clawing fat fingers into their homemade thrones. I carry the laughs that followed, hollow and complicit. Then. Now.

    I think about the faces of those beaten, torn to shreds, rope dragging down their cheeks, their skin on fire with arms tied behind their back— dying in the most horrifically violent ways— knowing this is it for them. All with a warm ache in their chest and a kind of hope they dared allow.

    Updated 06.01.25

  • I can only imagine that those who still think being gay is a choice, must not have any friends who’s lives they’re able to also learn from, because anyone who’s teenager finally gathered up the courage to come out to them is typically able to respond by letting them know that they already know— and knew since they were 6— and love them just the same. If that’s not your repose, then you haven’t been paying attention, and I feel sorry for you.

    However, what an unfortunate word choice. Religious conservatives use it against the LGBTQ community by proclaiming that pride is a sin, even though they’ll immediately turn to the flag, proud to be an American. More than that, there’s the logical flaw in being proud to be gay, because since you are born gay, you’re just saying that you’re proud of having been born, which is adjacent to being proud of having blue eyes and white skin. Of course, gay pride isn’t about being proud, though, it’s about standing with your shoulders back and chin up, confidently announcing that you’re allowed to exist as you are.

    That being said, I find myself wishing that after the Stonewall riots, Brenda Howard had used a different word. I find myself wondering if a new word and a re-brand is in order to more closely align with where the movement is now. Much like how the Black Lives Matter slogan was so easily hijacked by the all lives matter people in an effort to ignore that while true— one group needed more attention— the thought has occurred to me many times that LGBTQ peeps need a new word.

    I cast my vote for ‘The Spectrum Parade.’ Slogan: “We are everyone.”

    Updated 06.01.25

  • For the same reason that police departments send officer Friendly to elementary schools to interact with kids and ease any apprehension about the man in the scary uniform that they might encounter out in the world, drag queen story hour isn’t meant to indoctrinate children into being anything that they’re not, but to let them see that people who aren’t the vanilla majority aren’t the scary blight on the world that they’re being portrayed as by conservatives.

    It’s an effort to to not be killed by those children once they’re old enough to buy a gun.

    Drag is part of a much larger conversation, which has been taking place across the lifetimes of our recorded history; the same conversation that includes theater, poetry, and comedy. It’s a performance that mirrors our performance with exaggeration and satire, calling into question what we value and exploring what can be destroyed by the truth; because if it can be, it should be. If if you feel mocked, and it’s upsetting to you, then you’re its target audience, and its doing its job.


    We’ve seen thousands of years now of members of the conservative, religious, patriarchy trying to find witches to kill, when there is no such thing; it’s just them— murdering people who threaten them. They’ll stand over the charred remains or the lifeless bodies of those that they’ve just dragged to death behind their pickup truck, hung from trees, or beat to death— and not see that they’re the problem— forever trying to erase the existence of those who who made the fatal error of being born as something other than them. It has to end.


    For all of those asking what they should tell their children when they see someone dressed in drag, tell them that’s another person, worthy of love, just as they are and will always be; and if you struggle with that answer, Drag will continue to exist so long as you do.

    Updated 06.01.25

  • When I think about the refusal to refer to a person as they, I think about how few instances we’re really talking about, I think about the idea of a soul, and I think about our documented history of discussing duality in storytelling.

    It’s difficult to find studies with statistics that perfectly align, but for conversational purposes lets say that 1 in 50,000 births are conjoined twins— most commonly at the chest and abdomen— and therefor sharing a heart. This results in roughly 50% being stillbirths, and an additional 1/3rd surviving no longer than a day. It’s even more difficult to find studies that accurately quantify the number of people who identify as they, but intuitively I want to say that it’s about the same; which makes me wonder, in a world of religions that insist on the existence of a soul in a body, why a person can’t have conjoined souls.

    From the gender fluidity of beings in Australia’s aboriginal dreamtime, the dual-souled shamans of Mongolia, the west African gate keepers of the spiritual realm, Hermaphroditus of Greek polytheism or Ardhanarishvara of Hinduism, or closer to home, the two-spirit people of many indigenous North American tribes, the idea of some small percentage of us embodying the duality of two souls isn’t new. What’s new, it seems, is the insistence that it doesn’t exist as a possibility, by those who claim most to believe in a body being the vessel for a soul, and for for us to meet each other with empathy and love.

    I don’t know if I’ll come back to this subject again later, but I wanted to take a moment for my non-binary friends.

    My friends, you don’t need to be anything more than alive to be deserving of love, and wether we’re an eternal soul temporarily experiencing life in a body sitting before an eternal soul temporarily experiencing life in a body— with infinity behind us, and infinity awaiting our return— or two souls experiencing life in a body, I’d like to step back and acknowledge the eternity part of that sentence, the impossibility of it, and the difficulty of just being in a body every day without the added humiliation of being told by others that a part of you doesn’t even exist.

    My friends, be silly, be kind, and love for no reason, because all there is, is love.

    Updated 06.01.25

I’d like to remind everyone reading this that if every ancient christian mythology church took in just 2 homeless people, it would end homelessness. Every day that we wake up to our enduring problems is a choice, and if you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.

  • While I’ll go on to share my thoughts, the immigration debate isn’t one. Full stop. It’s the same distraction that its always been. For my conservative friends reading this, these are some highlights of the the Bill that you wanted, that Republican Senators killed:

    —-

    Secure the Border Act of 2023

    This bill makes various changes to immigration law, including by imposing limits on asylum eligibility and requiring employers to use an electronic system to verify the employment eligibility of new employees.

    (Sec. 102) …Requires the Department of Homeland Security to resume all activities related to constructing a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border that were underway or planned prior to January 20, 2021

    (Sec. 110) This section provides statutory authorization for Operation Stonegarden, a program which provides grants to law enforcement agencies that are in a state with an international land or maritime border, and involved in an active CBP operation coordinated through the Border Patrol.

    (Sec. 115) This section prohibits DHS from processing the entry of non-U.S. nationals arriving in between ports of entry; providing funds to nongovernmental organizations that facilitate or encourage unlawful activity; providing funds to NGOs that provide certain services, such as lodging or immigration legal services, to inadmissible non-U.S. nationals who enter the United States.

    (Sec. 101) This section expands provisions that bar certain individuals from applying for asylum.

    Currently, an individual may not apply for asylum if that individual may be removed to a third country … This section also bars an individual from applying for asylum if the individual traveled through at least one third country before arriving in the United States, …

    (Sec. 102) This section modifies the standard for establishing an asylum applicant's credible fear of persecution.

    (Sec. 104) This section expands the types of crimes that may make an individual ineligible for asylum, such as a conviction for a misdemeanor relating to the unlawful possession or use of an identification, an offense for driving while intoxicated causing another person's serious bodily injury or death, or any felony.

    —-

    The reason that republicans killed the bill, of course, is that the immigration debate isn’t about immigration, it’s about their desire for the unregulated pursuit of their selfish whims, while seated in positions of power, to attain wealth at the expense of everyone and everything, and blame someone else. That’s it, that’s the whole game, again and again. This is what some of us choose to do with our brief lifetime; everything they can to feel powerful while lining their coffin with cash, all with a shit eating-grin like they’re actually doing anything but cause suffering.

    The problem with using immigrants as a scapegoat though— aside from the fact that republicans secretly love immigrants (especially illegal immigrants) because they do all the work that no one else wants to do and can be paid much less for it as a form of slave labor hiding in plain sight, while not being able to enjoy any of the social security benefits since they don’t have a social security number— is that for every one person currently fleeing the impossibility of just being alive in the country of their birth, I’ll show you thousands more who immigrated just the same; the parents and grandparents of those who now fight to stop immigration.

    Imagine risking not only your own life, but the lives of your children, to travel thousands of miles on foot through inhospitable landscapes and seek refuge in the unknown of a foreign land— which is often responsible for the upheaval of your life to begin with— only to be told that you’re a thieving rapist, that your blood is poison, and that you’re somehow unclean by the act of having been born. Imagine being demonized and hated, just for that to have been on the other side of an invisible line.

    An ever-present part of the history of the United Sates is a conservative war on diversity, with each of our ancestors, Irish, Italian, Chinese, Indian, Mexican, all of us taking our turn being the scum that needs to be rooted out and rounded up, while we simultaneously became a nation of Immigrants. There’s always a dirty other who’s called a threat to the clean us, and pointed at to make us look in their direction while new laws are passed to ensure that you’re further enslaved and forever angry at the wrong people.

    As a middle aged white man and a Chicago native, I’m not scared of the young adult gang members trying to hit their girl-scout-cookie sales goal in a small maze of project homes that we built on the south side of Chicago to keep non-white people permanently trapped and in-fighting— often missing on purpose when they “unlawfully discharge a firearm in public” to enact behavior that aligns with their neck tattoo before going home to say grace over the meal that their mother made and go to sleep in their childhood bedroom— because they’re often just doing what they think they have to do to survive while trapped in a life that they don’t want to be living, and eventually grown out of. See: ‘homicide’

    I’m not scared of immigrants— typically raised by their mothers to be hard working and respectful and kind— doing all of the jobs that Americans don’t want to do. I’m scared of other middle aged white men who wake up every morning and place a red baseball cap on their head like some sort of symbolic modern Stalhelm that their grandchildren will find in the attic and view the same as Nazi memorabilia, and how easy it is to convince you of something despite all evidence to the contrary. You’re who terrifies me, because you’ve had 3 extra decades to grow out of your bullshit, and you haven’t. I’m terrified of how confident you are in your ignorance— like adolescent boys who show up for a college exam, fail, and then put the exam up on their refrigerator— proof of how stupid everyone else is that they don’t know your alternative facts.

    There’s only one state that tracks crime data by immigration, and that state is Texas. Their Cato Institute’s illegal immigration and crime statistics report states that the illegal immigrant criminal conviction rate was 45% below that of native born Americans.


    My conservative friends, for your entire life, and the life of your parents, and their parents, you’ve been warned by those you vote for of a vague but omnipresent monster— ever lucking on the edge of town— ever ready to steal you away from an order that places you on top, pacifies you, and requires the unsubstantiated demonization of billions; and you fall for it, and you act on it, which means the monster that goes bump in the night that you’re so afraid of, is you and your imagination.


    There aren’t violent immigrants flooding into the country, raping and murdering by the millions, or we’d see the incarceration records of it, in addition to seeing it with our own eyes; there are immigrants of almost every country in the world coming to our country, just as there are people from the United States who immigrate to almost every other country in the world, thankful of not being accused of poisoning the blood of that country. You’re being lied to by a party that requires the demonization of an other to stoke your fear to secure your vote, and while it’s worked for most of human history, we now have that history to look back on and watch it play out.


    In the United States at the time of writing this, it’s Mexicans, but only a moment ago it was you:


    In 1871, Harpers Weekly published a cartoon by Thomas Nast titled “American River Gangs”— depicting Catholic Bishops portrayed as crocodiles emerging from a river to devour American children. The bishops represented Irish Catholic immigrants, who were often viewed as a threat to Protestant values and American democracy, poised to undermine the republic through religious influence in schools and politics.

    In 1893, The Judge published a cartoon by Frank Beard, depicting well-dressed wealthy American men standing at the docks— their shadows resembling their fathers who were immigrants, their hands outstretched to stop an imaging from coming to shore. This reflects the hypocrisy of established Americans rejecting newer immigrant groups, forgetting that we were all very recently immigrants ourselves.

    In 1903, The Judge published a cartoon by F. Victor Gilliam, titled “The Immigrant. Is he an acquisition or a detriment?”— depicting an assembly of Italian, Eastern European, and Jewish immigrants, very clearly stating that the bring disease, crime, and menace; the same message being used to scare conservatives today. Undesirables, prone to criminal behavior, a threat to our society— one parcel reads “One Million Immigrants Came To The U.S. In Twelve Months.”


    There are too many of these to name, but it’s always the same message: Northern, Southern, Eastern, and Western Europeans, Asians, Others! Rats! Criminals! Locusts! Unassimilable! Threats! They’re stealing our jobs and must go! Always dangerous, radical, bringers of anarchy, “riff riff”! And then, always the same, as soon as they’ve dried off from their swim to land, they turn in unison to hold their hands out and proclaim anyone behind them to be unwelcome.

    It bares repeating, my conservative friends, it’s not immigrants that I’m afraid of. It’s not immigrants that progressives are afraid of— it’s you. The monster that goes bump in the night, is you and your imagination.

    Updated 06.01.25

  • On average, around 8,000 people die each day in the United States, or one every 10.8 seconds. If we were to watch the last seconds of everyone’s life all day every day as a sort of endless stream of social media video shorts, the deaths would break down as follows.

    Heart Disease: ~23.4% / 1,870
    Cancer: ~20.3% / 1,620
    Accidents: ~6.0% / 480
    Chronic Lower Respiratory Diseases: ~5.4% / 430
    Stroke: ~4.9% / 390
    Alzheimer’s Disease: ~4.7% / 375
    Diabetes: ~3.0% / 240
    Kidney Disease: ~1.8% / 145
    Influenza and Pneumonia: ~1.7% / 135
    Suicide: ~1.6% / 130
    All other less common causes: ~28.2% / 2,256

    All other less common cause include Parkinson’s disease, liver diseases, blood stream infections, high blood pressure, nutritional deficiencies, neurological disorders, etcetera. Way down at the bottom of the list is homicide.

    Homicide: ~.7% / 56

    In other words, there’s approximately 1 homicide per state per day, with Mississippi, Louisiana, and Missouri standing out, and with 50-70% of those being caused by acquaintances, friends, and family.

    Not immigrants. Not trans folk. Not burglars. Not anything that we imagine goes bump in the night.

    If you want to see who’s most likely to murder you or someone that you care about, look no further than a mirror, or the person who claims to care about you the most, too.

    Updated 06.01.25

  • “No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.” - Mary Wollstonecraft, ’A Vindication Of The Rights Of Woman’


    Lets pretend for a moment that the debate about abortion isn’t about making sure that women are imprisoned in kitchens in their adolescence— locked away from an education and the means to exist outside of the oversight and approval of our most pathetic examples of men— and that more needs to be said.

    Lets pretend for a moment that being ‘pro-life’ isn’t really just being ‘pro-birth’ as part of an ideological hierarchy that thinks of some lives as more valuable than others—- others that are expendable unless they meet the criteria of identity and agency after suspicion and scrutiny— as more of a moral self-branding than a coherent ethic.

    Lets pretend for a moment that if you were genuinely pro-life, you’d be pro-universal healthcare, pro-food security, pro-affordable housing, pro-mental heath support, pro-education and sex education, pro-gun reform, pro-environmental care, pro-worker and family care, pro-equity, pro-empathy, pro-peace.

    Instead, lets talk about abortions themselves and the bible of ancient christian mythology, since that book is the weapon used by the conservative religious patriarchy to bludgeon societies to death before resorting to the gun in their other hand.

    18 years after Roe v. Wade, crime rates began to significantly decline, and states that legalized abortion earlier than Roe saw earlier declines. This, intuitively, because all of the children who would have otherwise grown up in families who didn’t want them, couldn’t afford them, poorly raised them or didn’t raise them at all, were never born; and because they were never born, there was no one to commit the crimes. I’ll give you that correlation doesn’t equal causation, but while cynical and contested, we all know the dirty not-so-secret aspect of our society is that we need those poor, poorly raised 18 year olds. We need them for manual labor, and we need them to make more of them— not because we openly admit it, but because our systems are built to depend on it— to guarantee ourselves a future percentage of small-denomination drug-buyers and license-plate-plate makers for money laundering and slave labor as part of our industrial complexes.

    In an effort to put an end to this perspective that human life is about quantity over quality— to stop our potential lives from be stolen from us and replaced with lives of abuse by those who inherited the instruments of power used on us— the two most common types of “abortion” as we talk about it, are 1. the morning-after pill in the case of a broken condom— which isn’t an abortion, but emergency contraception that prevents pregnancy from happening before it starts— and 2. ectopic pregnancy treatment to save the life of the mother in cases where the pregnancy is non-viable.

    In other words, most of what we discuss as abortion isn’t even a good-faith conversation because they aren’t abortions.

    What the conservative ancient christian mythology patriarchy wants you to think of when you hear the word abortion is the fictitious abortion of their imaginations, in which a perfectly healthy viable fetus otherwise ready to be born into the world is maliciously killed by an evil liberal who wants to destroy the imagined potential future of a blond-haired blue-eyed smiling christian, waving from a manicured lawn behind a white picket fence.

    (Just a friendly reminder that your manicure lawn is death and your white picket fence is destruction, and your myths are cherished lies that defend both.)

    Instead of this imagined, fictitious abortion, approximately 60% of viable but unwanted pregnancies are still carried to term, and of the abortions that take place, 93% are in the first trimester.

    The abortion debate isn’t about babies, it’s about controlling women and controlling the population. It’s about control itself, always coming from the exact same bigoted authoritarians.

    The effort to remove access to mifepristone isn’t about safety— it’s the safest and most common drug used to prevent pregnancy. The effort is intended to force women to have to leave their home to prevent pregnancy from occurring, into institutions where their reproduction can be policed; and more than that, where they can be forced to bare children— despite the condom breaking, despite it being from rape, despite a lack of resources— despite wanting to peruse their dreams instead of being given a 240,000 dollar lifelong responsibility that keeps them shackled at home while their undereducated cog helps run the machine.

    If we fast forward another week to ten days after insemination to the point of pregnancy, I’d like to remind everyone that pregnancy doesn’t equal a healthy baby being born. Pregnancy doesn’t even equal a baby being born at all; and since— at the time of writing this— hospitals and clinics are refusing abortions even for miscarriages, it results in the deaths of both the woman and the potential for a child. This reveals to us that abortion access isn’t about babies, it’s about having no interest in the lives of women beyond them being obedient livestock; sending a message to everyone that they are lesser and of so little value as to be thrown in the heap and replaced.

    I’d like to remind everyone that for every one abortion of a healthy, viable fetus growing in a healthy, grown woman after making that incredibly difficult decision for herself, I’ll show you hundreds of fetuses with no brain, no heartbeat, or organs growing on the outside of their body, and a textbook of further examples outside of even just ectopic pregnancies; or growing in a child who didn’t have the autonomy to say no and doesn’t have the physical and mental fortitude to endure the affects of pregnancy on ones body and ones life if she even survives it.

    If your argument is “But it says in the Bible…”, the book that was written by forty guys— starting about 50 years after Jesus died, written over the course of 50 years, all of whom never owned a microscope— I don’t care. I don’t care what the short story anthology that you like to read says; it’s written by kings, priests, tax collectors, and other government officials with motives, along with a bunch of other guys who operated with the education level of shepherds, fisherman, and tent-makers 2000 years ago.

    You can’t deprive a woman of a life-saving abortion after pregnancy complications, allowing both her and the child to die, and then claim that you’re pro-life.

    More than that, lets take a few steps back and consider a longer timeline. You can’t say that god oversaw our genocide of the people who lived on this continent before us, and the horrific atrocities up to and including the enumerable murders that we perpetrated against those who we enslaved to build this country, and the rape of our children by the church, and the murder of our children in our schools, and then claim he takes a special interest in a woman having a bundle of cells removed days after contraception failed, before pregnancy has even occurred.

    Abortion procedures are a part of healthcare that weighs difficult decisions against the greatest good, and you calling them murder— standing in the way, from the pews of a church built on top of ten million bodies, murdered because they wouldn’t join you— that’s the cruelty thats being perpetrated.

    If calling abortion murder and shaming women outside of clinics was a solution, then all of the hand-made signs written in marker with a giant “MU” quickly tapering down into the smaller letters “rder” to fit the word on the piece of cardboard would have worked already, but really do nothing but display your inability to think things through.

    Again, pregnancy doesn’t equal a healthy baby being born, and even if you could guarantee it, the solution to a higher birth rate overall is higher wages combined with a lower cost of living, so that couples can afford children without their two choices being to either watch their entire life go by while holding their breath for their next paycheck, or live slightly more comfortable lives that resemble a Disney World 50’s-era animatronic family on a loop; and the solution to almost all that ails us is a phenomenal, thorough education, but, we can’t have that. That’s dynamite! See: “the evisceration of the proletariat”

    My conservative friends, the next time you find yourself standing outside of a health clinic holding two of the aforementioned hand-made signs because one of the protestors asked you to hang onto his real quick while he snuck around back to go inside and pay for an abortion for his mistresses before re-joining you in your righteous indignation, ask yourself who you’d save if a fire broke out: the refrigerator with thousands of embryos in it, or the woman sitting in the lobby; and then tell me again about the potential for life being more important than her life.

    More than that, since the discussion about abortion is really a discussion about ancient christian mythology, tell me again how much your god values life after tallying the some two and a half million deaths that he was responsible for in your bible, unless of course the whole point of life is for children to suffer and be murdered, which can’t happen until they’re born first.

    Updated 06.01.25

  • In 1956, a woman named Harper Lee was working the ticket counter at Eastern Airlines in New York City. She was torn between two worlds: the world in which we’re forced to carve out little more than an existence, and the world of her inner self, aching to write its story— yet never afforded the time. Through the generosity of affluent friends, she was gifted a year, free from financial burden, to reside fully within the space she usually returned to only after the demands of her day. In that year, she wrote To Kill a Mockingbird, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that has sold over forty million copies, and now appears on conservative book-burning lists.

    I think about this when I think about homelessness, because of our long history of artists and writers faced with the struggle to either meet the monetization of existing, or pursue what’s demanding to enter into the world through them, because it often has to be one or the other. As I write this, I wonder how many Harper Lees there are, struggling just to meet the unceasing demands of their bodies, never able to write their book or breathe into existence whatever aches in them to be seen and heard.

    As I write this, half of all homeless people are employed, and it requires 80 hours a week of work in addition to benefits to escape poverty in the United States compared to 25 hours in France and 14 hours in Japan.

    As I write this, one out of five foster children immediately become homeless after aging out of the system at 18, joining half of America’s homeless population who were foster children at some point.

    As I write this, women fleeing domestic violence often have nowhere to turn because their support network pushes them right back into the arms of their partner, and in a country where it takes two incomes to survive, homelessness is at least a refuge from abuse.

    And yet the lie persists that all you need to do is get a job, you bum, you drug addict, you loser in a country where you can do everything right and still lose, and where there’s no parking no loitering no sitting no standing no sleeping no more beds at the shelter— met with the joy of individuals who suffer from the delusion that a place to live and money in your pocket is as easy as working hard, so you only have yourself to blame— spoken by people who live their entire lives just a few paychecks from the street.

    I’d like to ask everyone reading this to take a moment to do something with me. Ask yourself what you have in your possession that’s of greater monetary than emotional value to you. Maybe it’s a watch that adorns the inside of a drawer rather than your wrist, or an instrument that you no longer play or never did though you imagine one day you might. Only you can know what this object might be for you, but then, I’d like for you to sell it, and gift the money to cause that you find worthy. A shelter for battered women, runaway teenagers, or the unhoused. A soup kitchen for those who tonight— whose head is held uneasily by a jacket repurposed into a pillow— hold their stomachs to help comfort a hunger so great that even the demand of sleep itself to hold space for it each night, catches in its throat and leaves silence for something needed even more to be heard by someone— anyone— and hopefully you.

    More than that, when you return home, and stand in that silence with nothing received for your gift but the unspoken gratitude of a stranger you’ll never meet, I’d like for you to wonder with me— what more. What more you can give without having less. What if the solution to all that we have suffered from for centuries, sits forgotten in the places where we hold onto what we think we need, instead of the places where they are allowed to be had by us all.

    I love you with all of my heart, stranger reading this just now, and I hope that you choose to love with me. Not love as we’ve been raised to understand it. Not transactional love, but love without condition, even for those we don’t know and will never meet. Love to meet the love of their mothers, who know them to be deserving of it just for having been born. Radical love. Punk love. How it should be. How it could have always been for us.

    For those who would like to join me in helping, there’s another Harper Lee on your block, wondering if they’ll survive another week or another season, and you may be the only person who ever sees them as more than a mistake. Instead of defining one’s living situation as a moral failing and criminalizing the act of survival, one gallon ziplock freezer bags with the following simple items are often met with thanks, and I’d like to remind you to leave your cell phone turned off and in your pocket when you give them out. Feel free to adjust to season and location:

    A pair of socks, a thermal blanket, a small notepad and pen, protein bars/trail mix, gummy multi vitamins, travel size toothbrush/toothpaste, hand sanitizer, unscented Castile soap, unscented wet wipes, disposable razor, band-aids, chapstick, sun screen, tissues.

    Consider making some with somewhat universal feminine hygiene products since that presents its own unique challenges, consider 5-10 dollar gift cards for a local convenience store since you can’t know what they might need that’s unique to them, and consider a local transit pass or a gift card for a local gas station since even moving from one place to another can sometimes feel insurmountable. I like to include a small non-denominational, non-gendered card reminding them that they’re loved— because I, personally, want to live in a world where we normalize telling strangers that we love them.

    Even if you can only put one together for just one person, it can make what would have been a really hard week just that much easier, and sometimes make all the difference; but speaking of, life is really hard, and I know that you can be struggling too much yourself to help others, and that’s okay too. At the very least, just know that we, all of us, are trying our best, and don’t be so quick to judge.

    Finally, just a reminder. If you see someone sleeping in their car, no you fucking didn’t.

    2025 will see approximately 1 in every 350 Americans experiencing homelessness. To put that in perspective, that’s the bleachers of one side of a high school gymnasium. 1 of them is homeless, and half of them are one paycheck away from being homeless, encouraged by those who benefit from our despair to sit alone in their cell, hateful of both the immigrants who have built this country and the progressives who are trying to help us all. This is America.

    I’d like to remind everyone reading this that if every ancient christian mythology church took in just 2 homeless people, it would end homelessness. Every day that we wake up to our enduring problems is a choice, and if you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.

    Updated 06.01.25

  • “We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. That’s dynamite! We have to be selective on who we allow to go through (higher education).” - Roger A. Freeman (Advisor to Ronald Reagan in 1970, referring to the “beatniks and filthy speech advocates.”)


    My friends, knowledge is free. It’s already known; we already have it. That’s what we’ve been doing as a species since before we even were one, learning and then passing along our knowledge to the next generation so that they don’t die from eating the berries that we discovered are poisonous, and live to gain and share greater knowledge.

    With the advent of the written language, knowledge became as abundant and easy to provide to people as air. The trick used to be that only those in power were educated, encouraging the peasants to remain illiterate and trust that they would be told what the books said, but things really became a problem once anyone could afford to go to college— or worse— get a library card and read every book on a subject needed to provide yourself with a college education or better.

    Conservatives decided that something needed to be done to make sure that the knowledge these people possessed didn’t count, that their essays wouldn’t be published, and they wouldn’t be hired. Knowledge needed to be locked behind closed doors, and they needed to ensure that people paid for their seat at the table inside; and so, they created a system that treated knowledge like a commodity that only some people get to have, withheld from the many, making it only for the rich or those willing to be punished with debt for wanting it too.

    Since conservatism celebrates the suffering of those who don’t belong or refuse to comply, if someone they don’t like wants an education, they’ll say “No, you deserve to suffer,” and if it’s someone doesn’t want to pay, well, “Tough shit, I had to suffer and so you should too.” Their goal is never to put an end to suffering, it’s to make sure that everyone is, and call it good, and strong, and right— no matter how cruel and without reason.

    Again and again, we fight to grow back into a field of wildflowers, and conservatives fight to maintain the lawn that they turned us into, and call it the establishment of order and culture. This is the only game that they play: to keep their voters dumb, poor, and distracted by the current minority group, while handing them a lottery ticket instead of a book, in exchange for helping keep the progressives at bay who want everyone to prosper equally.

    Updated 06.01.25

  • As I write this, there are Americans living almost exclusively on welfare and food stamps, not contributing anything of value. This is a true statement, no matter what you think of it. Conservatives want them to get a job and stop being a leech on society— and I understand that— but I also understand their perspective. They don’t want to play a game that they can’t win. They were often failed by parents who never taught them how to be a person, failed by an education system that taught to the back of the book, and failed by a society that needs them to be wage slaves; and so while they might not be well educated enough to articulate their despair, they are able to tell you to go fuck yourself, and I can respect that.

    What you’re seeing isn’t laziness, it’s the realization from a very young age that we’ve built a termite mound of steel and concrete that requires an endless supply of workers, combined with the observation of what the life of a worker looks like, and then settling— if absolutely nothing else— for a life of being left to their own uninterrupted thoughts; having decided that acquiring the knowledge and ability to learn what they can more uniquely contribute and having enough time to accomplishing it, will always be out of reach. In other words, you can take the carrot that you want to dangle in front of them to get them to walk in a circle for 40 years around the generator of your children’s inheritance, and again, you can go fuck yourself.

    If you’re engaging in an argument with yourself about wether or not the workers of our human version of a termite mound deserve more than just access to a grocery store of microwavable meals, the microwave to heat them up in, and a cheep TV to stare at until its time to do it all over again— the answer is yes. So long as you view your fellow man as unworthy of it, they’ll subsist as the unworthiness that you see in them. If you’re a string-holder who finds yourself muttering under your breath “We went to far”: yes, yes you did.

    Updated 06.01.25

  • Here’s the shape of it, as best as I can tell:

    Zionism. Palestine under Ottoman rule, then British rule— already inhabited by Arab Muslims and Christians. Jewish immigration begins, then surges after the Holocaust. Tensions rise. 1948. Israel is established. The Nakba. 750,000 Palestinians are expelled or flee. Their land is seized. They are never allowed to return. 1967. The Six-Day War. Israel captures the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza. Military occupation begins. Homes demolished. Resources diverted. Arbitrary arrests. Checkpoints. Walls. Restricted movement. Democracy for Jews, martial law for Palestinians. Resistance begins— stones against tanks, kites against drones. Religion justifies land claims for Israel, and condemns Palestinians as terrorists. Us versus them. Blockades. Surveillance. Collective punishment. Civilians pay the price. 1987. Hamas is born— an Islamic resistance movement opposing both Israeli occupation and the secular PLO. 1993. Oslo Accords offer statehood, but Hamas rejects them. Suicide bombings follow. 2006. Hamas wins Palestinian elections. 2007. Hamas seizes control of Gaza. Fatah rules the West Bank. The occupation continues. The siege tightens. Wars come in waves. ‘October 7th.’ Hamas breaches the border, attacks Israeli kibbutzim. 1,200 Israelis killed. Civilians slaughtered. The world watches. Israel retaliates with overwhelming force. Bunker-busters used on ant hills. White phosphorus. Gaza reduced to rubble. Over 35,000 Palestinians killed, most of them civilians. Hospitals destroyed. Aid denied. Children buried alive. Genocide enacted by those who survived one. The world argues definitions while the bodies rot in the street.

    So, a colonized people demanding self-determination resists with violence having been hijacked by religious authoritarianism, and the colonizing state claims victimhood while entrenching its power, refusing to give up control and meeting them with superior force. This creates an increasingly more violent resistance by those with nothing left to loose met by increasingly more superior force, both searching for justifications for their atrocities in their religions, both victims and persecutors of themselves and each other.

    Being born in a hospital in Gaza city or Rafah doesn’t make you a member of an Islamic terrorist organization any more than being born in a hospital in Colorado Springs or Nashville makes you a member of an ancient christian mythology terrorist organization. There were secular and leftist groups, along with a thriving underground rebellion there, by some estimates collectively fluctuating between 25 and 35 percent, fighting back against the religious nationalist government and its actions; add to that— as much as 20 percent of the population disillusioned. These were not terrorists. These were humans, born into an open air prison, battering themselves against the inside of their bodies for want of a better life. This was Genocide.

    Instead of contributing further as one more voice in a cacophony, I’m going to pull back to the thermosphere, hovering over my own country and comment on one thing. College protests:

    If you build a system on stolen land, protected by walls and fear, controlled by a militarized elite, and sustained by myths of purity and superiority— it will produce resistance, collapse, and tragedy. Over and over again.

    When I see some American college students accused of defending Hamas— that is to say the unforgivable atrocities perpetrated by the extreme religious fanatics of Hamas— what I really see are young people who intuitively feel the way so many young Palestinians did in 2005. Marginalized but principled; fighting through speech, protest, education, and solidarity; ignored by institutions, smeared by media, betrayed by those who claim to be on their side; facing a raising tide of authoritarianism, militant white Christian nationalism, surveillance, censorship, and systematic cruelty; watching their rights disappear and wondering at what point their hope will turn into rage, while any serious dissent is reframed as dangerous, radical, and extreme. What I see are progressives being pushed past despair, and preemptively labeled terrorists because the right already knows the only pathway that will remain for them, and newspapers print the day before the news.

    Updated 06.01.25

  • This is a reminder for everyone in the west who enjoys moving freely about the public world, unescorted and wearing whatever you choose up to and including a nearly complete state of undress: A hijab is not the Hermēs scarf that you brought home as a souvenir from your trip to Paris, and it’s not a choice.

    It’s a punishable mandate— part of a doctrine that some women are unfortunately born into and must convince themselves that they want because the alternative is often being beaten to death. Its a wearable prison cell that removes women from everything it means to be human, and you’re not helping her the way you think you are by recycling the feminist slogans used in western countries. You’re helping her remain oppressed. If you see a covered woman, you’re looking at a prisoner, forced to share a bed each night with a guard who has banned her from dreaming. If you’re looking for a feminist cause, help her. Hundreds of millions of women around the word are screaming in anguish, unseen and unheard under their oppression made into clothing.

    One of the greatest challenges that feminists face today, is prying away the joyful strangle hold that the conservative religious patriarchy has on women, and its not going to happen by responding to their complete and utter subjugation with a hearty “You go girl!”

    My feminist friends, Tehran in the 70s looked like San Francisco in the 70s. Women laid on the beach in bikinis within ear shot of their car radios, until the Islamic revolution of 1979 when they once again awoke to a world where they weren’t allowed to exist uncovered. It wasn’t a spontaneous and unanimous choice then, and it’s not now. It’s an authoritative command that she’s forced to refer to as choosing to be modest with a gun to her head. It’s a wearable reminder that she is property. That she is nothing but something to be used and discarded.

    We live in a world where women awaken to each day subservient to their husband; not allowed to have an education, not allowed to leave the house unescorted, regularly beaten, often to death. Sometimes beaten to death for not wearing a full niqab, even in their own homes, because someone might see them though a window. Beaten to death by their own fathers or brothers to preserve the honor of their family after being raped.

    You, reading this now, imagine that someone just saw your hair, and your partner perceiving it to be such a violation of sanctity that he throws you down a flight of stairs.

    You, reading this now, imagine those who are supposed to care for you finding out that you were raped, and responding with such a merciless beating that you die of internal bleeding.

    Fighting back against this is not Islamophobia. A phobia is an irrational fear, and there’s nothing irrational about being afraid of people who will literally murder their family members for a perceived moral transgression while women in the west enjoy the freedom to do the same thing she was murder for, all day every day.

    It’s not a phobia to want to put an end to the mentality of men who will murder their daughter, and then with bloody hands, tuck their son into bed with a kiss on the forehead and a wish for sweet dreams.

    My feminist friends, many of you who don’t want to be treated as child-bearing livestock for evangelical white nationalists here in the United States don’t seem to have any problem with female genital mutilation or the complete and utter subjugation of women in predominantly muslim countries. There are people in this world who you’re fighting for, who— with great elation— would push you from a rooftop to your death just for having dyed your hair pink. There are people in this world who you’re fighting for, who with great elation would cut your head off because you fell in love with with the wrong person.

    My progressive friends, be careful to not spend so much time in the oasis’s of utopian ideologies that you find yourself advocating for the rights of people who will then turn to thank you by murdering you in horrifically imaginative ways before mutilating your body. Just as surly as the hatred of conservatism will be the end of us, the pathological compassion of progressives will also be the end of us.

    If you argue that the hijab is a choice, tell me what happens to a woman if she removes it. Tell me what happens to the women at her funeral who remove theirs in solidarity. Tell me what happens to all of the protestors. Count the fucking bodies, and tell me again that it’s a choice.

    If you want to avert the male gaze, the solution isn’t a ghost halloween costume that men made you wear; it’s raising your children with the understanding that as equals trying to live productive lives, what we desire foremost is to be understood and loved with our clothes on, but also with a healthy sex education that includes the desexualization of our bodies and all that it means to be human. To understand that we still live in a world where the misbehavior of men is more often than not met with a dismissive chuckle in an effort to appease the need for camaraderie in their objectification or misogynistic views of women, but that it’s something that will no longer be tolerated. It’s not cute, and it’s not funny. It’s the sad, desperate clinging of a mans ego to feeling special and in charge, punishable by death. See: ‘postscript 1 to 'trans as folk': damage’


    If you want to avert the male gaze, replace the absence of tension with the presence of justice, and when all else fails, when confronted with a man who has petrified himself into an unmovable object through the despotic and arbitrary refusal of human rights, as Jesus said— and I’m paraphrasing here— rip his eyes out of his fucking skull.

    Updated 06.01.25

My conservative friends, for your entire life, and the life of your parents, and their parents, you’ve been warned by those you vote for of a vague but omnipresent monster— ever lucking on the edge of town— ever ready to steal you away from an order that places you on top, pacifies you, and requires the unsubstantiated demonization of billions; and you fall for it, and you act on it, which means the monster that goes bump in the night that you’re so afraid of, is you and your imagination.

  • Whenever I hear this, it’s always stated by a conservative ancient christian mythologist in their endless insistence on the moral justification of their selfishness, and the affirmation that others don’t have what they need through their own moral failings instead of the structures created to cause them to fail and then keep them there, though they can never tell me in which book of the Bible that quote from Jesus can be found. I’d like to live in a world where instead of being interested in positioning ourselves as more deserving, we’re interested in making sure that come nightfall, everyone gets a bowl of soup, everyone gets a blanket, and everyone gets to pursue their dreams with dignity— no questions asked.

    I like to respond with my Oak tree analogy.


    We are all Oak trees; some of us acorns, some of us the paradigm of an old growth Oak tree, and every possibility in between. An acorn is still an oak tree, just in a different stage, and pretty soon, even at its most diminutive, will tower over the old growth now fallen and reduced to its compost.


    To say one is better, is to pretend. It’s to pretend that we’re not part of a cycle, in our own place, in our own time; and to pretend that some of us weren’t carefully planted in ideal conditions and then tended to, while others of us began our lives already broken— making the best of a place that was not of our choosing— with little more than the remnants of water otherwise absorbed by the giants that towered over us and the dappled sunlight remaining underneath there canopy.

    My friends, you are not better, and you don’t deserve more, and if you’ve find yourself in a place where conditions have made you the paradigm of your kind, it’s now your turn to fall so that others may raise.

    Updated 06.01.25

  • Brainwashed fox-pseudojournalism & propaganda hoax-tainment network-trump-dads (BFNTD’s) who have had their personalities replaced with a feeling of moral superiority as a justification for hating people are the most dangerous people on the planet, on the same watch-list as Islamic jihadists and cartel enforcers. The death and destruction that they leave behind is less visible, but no less there. Their preoccupation with conspiracy theories is adorable when compared to their racism, homophobia, and bigoted, utter refusal of factual information that contradicts how they— in their dangerous mixture of insecurity and inflated ego, want to feel— destroying their own families from within by not being a dad but instead being a (BFNTD), mentally and emotionally separating themselves from their wives and children while thinking that they’re doing a good thing and simultaneously endorsing the importance of family.

    These poor men, who could be living amazing lives— and experiencing everything that life has to offer— instead sit in front of the TV every night hating people and feeling special for it. I feel so bad for them, because they’ve become their own enemy of the things that they claim to love— their stubborn insistence on rightness causing nothing but rifts and creating an alternate reality where the American flag waves from the backs of pickup trucks between a Nazi flag and Trump flag— and when you’re critical of them and of America, you’re met with further deconstruction of what’s valued, and told “If you don’t like it here then leave.” If you don’t like this family, then leave; because family is important. If you don’t like this country then leave; because America is important.

    There’s a difference, though, between the words like and love. Just as you can not like your (BFNTD) but still love him, you can not like America and still love it; and when you love something, you don’t leave it, you fight to make it better. You endure the willfully ignorant blunt-force trauma insistence that he’s the best and we’re the best despite all evidence to the contrary, and you work hard to try and rebuild the family and the country that he destroyed while insisting that he was protecting it, so that you can not just like him but love him again, and so that our flag flys alone again.

    The mentality of the (BFNTD) is the same mentality of the abuser who beats you for your own good, the mentality of kicking your kid out of the house for being gay and making them face homelessness while simultaneously telling homeless people who have a full time job to get a job, and the mentality of spraying their yard with Roundup— and killing anything that moves— and calling it nature. It’s a mental illness and it needs to be treated, at least before they kill us all, and with the hope that they can still enjoy the beauty in the diversity of the world and we can have the dads and the country that we still have hope for.

    Updated 06.01.25

    This is a work of parody/satire. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and intended for comedic or critical purposes only.

  • For those of you that never got to have a dad— not really— not how it should have been, because instead you have a (BFNTD), keep fighting to find a way to help him let go of his hatred and selfishness. I know how hard its been for you to watch someone that you care about defend and support a disgusting, reprehensible con man, and I know its caused you to loose respect for him because you want to think that he’s just gullible but can’t help but think less of him, but the instant that you stop fighting, he wins, and you loose him.

    Fight like your life depends on it, and help him. You have to understand that he’s in his death throws. If he holds on to his bigoted perspective— keeps pretending that he’s special and that everyone else is going to find out what he’s figure out— he’s fucked, because his way of life is coming to an end and he can see it happening in real time. On the other hand, if he gives in, and admits that he’s nobody and knows nothing— admits that he was wrong— and welcomes everyone with open arms, then he’s also fucked, because he had to kill the old version of himself to get there. His only options are letting it end slowly or quickly, and him and everyone like him is kicking and screaming because they’re too stubborn to change, so they’re being dragged to their deaths in a world that has no place or tolerance for them.

    Life will better for him once he lets go of his hatred and selfishness, but for now it feels like an execution, and he needs your empathy and kindness and help. He needs you to continue to show him that all there is, is love. See: ‘trump; the wizard and his flying monkeys’

    Updated 06.01.25

  • “That's why they call it the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.” - George Carlin


    At the time of writing this, on the Legatum Prosperity Index, the United States of America is:

    69th in Safety & Security
    29th in Personal Freedom
    23rd in Governance
    9th in Social Capital
    17th in Investment Environment
    3rd in Enterprise Conditions
    4th in Infrastructure & Market Access
    16th in Economic Quality
    29th in Living Conditions
    69th in Heath
    20th in Education
    28th in Natural Environment

    We are not number one in anything.

    If you really love your country, instead of screaming “Well then get out!” to anyone being critical of it, prove your love for it by joining those of us trying to increase our world ranking instead of fiercely defending where we’re at.

    Updated 06.01.25

  • (Begin David Attenborough Voiceover)

    In the vast, sprawling ecosystem of the United States, an ancient predator endures— its survival not dictated by natural selection, but by the careful construction of a world built in its favor. Unlike much of the animal kingdom, this habitat accommodates the weakest and most maladapted of the species: The Conservative Religious Patriarch. Once confined to remote settlements and agrarian communities, it has since adapted to thrive in the suburbs, the pulpits, and the echoing chambers of political halls. Now, it flourishes unchecked, shaping its environment rather than being shaped by it.

    Much like rats and pigeons, this creature has proven remarkably resilient, its range expanding through the relentless spread of artificial landscapes. Vast tracts of suburban development replace wilderness, towering stone megachurches rise where once there were sheer cliffs, and air-conditioned legislative chambers stand where caves once served as refuge from the midday sun and primitive attempts at subjugation. All of it carefully curated to supplement its self-made extinction, as it gorges itself on the remains of what it has destroyed. Its burrow is no longer the humble homestead, but the meticulously policed HOA community, its fences high enough to keep a big, scary world at bay and its lineage undisturbed.

    Here, among endless lawns and NO TRESPASSING signs, we find the adult male of the species— its mind trapped in permanent adolescence. Distinguishable by ill-fitting light-wash denim, generic white grass-stained sneakers, and a red construction paper crown reading "gЯatE," it moves with the unearned confidence of inherited delusion. Black wraparound sunglasses conceal its eyes, allowing it to observe the world without being observed in return— an essential adaptation for an animal too delicate to withstand scrutiny as it endeavors not to understand, only to survey and control.

    Clutching a Bible in one hand and a gun in the other, it stands at the threshold of its artificial burrow, enforcing submission among those it deems weaker— which, in its view, is everyone. Its mate, wounded and trembling, kneels before it, the blood of her miscarriage pooling at his feet. In a grim ritual of obedience that solidifies his dominance— referred to in this species as being ‘Pro-Life’— she will not survive the night. Its territorial instincts extend beyond the home as well. Outside, a brown-skinned figure in a dress named Jesus lies dead upon a perfectly manicured lawn, an aforementioned NO TRESPASSING sign marking the boundary of a kingdom built not on faith, but on ownership and exclusion.

    With his current mate’s expiration imminent, he must soon attract a pre-groomed younger female— one to provide sex, sandwich-making, and continued subservience. Through centuries of accommodation for its fragile ego, the mating call of the Conservative Religious Patriarch has evolved into a distinct sound: country music.

    Here, this mournful dirge of nostalgia, performed by a select few on behalf of the unable many, reverberates through humid summer nights from the speakers of pickup trucks complete with racks of flawless, accessorized guns. A lament for an imaginary past and a reinforcement of his own mythology, this adult nursery rhyme is passed down through generations and lists the sacred iconography of its life:


    "Headed south on The Dirt Road in The Pickup Truck at 2 a.m.,
    Movin’ forward and standing still and drunk again.
    Storm-a-brewin’, books burnin’, makin’ an orange haze,
    Reminiscin’ ‘bout them imaginary good ol’ days.
    ‘Cause muh daughter’s smarter’n me now at twelve years old,
    Makin’ sure her only future’s this here idealized Dirt Road…”


    This guttural twang, exaggerated for effect, serves a dual function: it attracts a mate with a withheld education and low expectations, while reinforcing the species’ territorial bonds, ensuring their shared delusions remain unchallenged by external threats of knowledge and empathy.

    With a mating call being sung on his behalf, the self-proclaimed alpha male, convinced of his divine inheritance, surveys his domain— boots two sizes too big, a belt buckle the size of his insecurity, and a shit-eating grin defiant against a world that never wanted and is no longer willing to tolerate him.

    Despite his rigid ideology, his territory is shrinking. The tide of time, slow but relentless, erodes the foundation upon which his world stands. His daughter, twelve years old and already surpassing him in every way, is an existential threat— not just to his personal authority, but to the very ecosystem that sustains him. He knows this instinctively, though his limited vocabulary cannot articulate it. And so, he digs in, clutching his myths like a lifeline, determined to preserve the vestigial remnants of an evolution he does not believe in.

    We observe this creature and understand what makes it so uniquely dangerous— not its individual brutality, nor even its capacity for destruction, but its desperate need to sustain a world that never existed in the first place. In its struggle to hold back evolution, it poisons its own well, self-destructing in the name of preservation, willing to bring down its entire habitat rather than face the terror of change.

    And so, we who study this sub-species are left to wonder how long an animal that refuses to evolve can continue to survive; and which will come first— the death of it, or the death of everything around it.

    Updated 06.01.25

    This is a work of parody/satire. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and intended for comedic or critical purposes only.

  • Those of us who have sat down and had conversations with the kind of men that are commonly found in rural America and especially the southern states, but really just at home in urban areas where tolerance of them is high— do to populations consisting predominantly of progressive, democratic, empathetic people— know that at this point they’re little more then declawed cats that get up to no good during the day before heading home at the sound of a can opener.

    They’re almost exclusively undereducated and white, with a worldview that’s been formed by a combination of the sermons of their pastor’s at the local Megachurch-mart, and twice-removed half-forgotten headlines from their favorite hoax-tainment newspaper. In a culture where “Nazis get punches,” just know that when you encounter these people, they’re not life's winners, and you might want to consider pitying them first. They’re confused and frustrated, turned around and pointed in the direction of brown people by the real monsters in human skin suit— fleshed-out with Hugo Boss— sitting in windowless, wood-paneled rooms that haven’t been renovated since the Nixon administration.

    They almost exclusively listen to country music, because the lyrics of every song create just the right atmosphere of anguished yearning for a time that never existed but they love to reminisce about none the less— to set the mood for the rally that they’re headed to, where they get to wear matching outfits that help them finally feel like they’re part of something. Something that helps them not feel so bad about themselves anymore for experiencing so little in life that all it took to decide they’d see enough of the world— and have a baby with whoever sat next to them on the bus ride home— was visiting a new Panera off the highway at the edge of a town with a population of 1488.

    These conservative, religious, patriarchal, men are often emotionally stunted— operating from a deep-rooted sense of insecurity, entitlement, and resentment, wrapped in a moral framework that justifies domination. Their minds have been shaped by hierarchy, not reciprocity; control, not connection. They don’t trust love, so they settle for leverage.

    They want to feel superior, but fear being seen. They crave obedience, deference, and someone weaker to punish for their own inadequacies. They want to win arguments without having to be right. They want the benefits of intimacy without vulnerability. They want to impose their worldview, because they can’t tolerate the chaos of others having agency. They want to feel righteous while acting cruel.

    To achieve this, they use the long-con of cloaking control in care: “I’m protecting you." They frame dominance as duty: “I’m the man of the house." They pretend to be saving you from your sins, when really they’re just angry you don't orbit their shame. Their adolescent mind wants to avoid the humiliation of being wrong, so they project onto others, choosing victims who are vulnerable, trusting, marginalized, or just plain not performing the patriarchal script. These are always their scapegoats. Women, Queer folk, immigrants, and anyone fighting for a world of love and equity.

    If you object, you’re “disrespectful,” “rebellious,” or “ungrateful.” When you seek autonomy, they make you question your own sense of reality, morality, or memory. They cite religion, tradition, or "natural order" to support and defend their harmful behavior. They project false humility: “I’m just a flawed man, but at least I’m trying to do what’s right,” weaponized as a shield against critique. They turn their own guilt or exposure into a pity play: “See how much I sacrifice?”

    These men are not merely mistaken— they’re invested in a system where they can punch down without being seen as the one doing harm, but they can’t be argued with— they need to grow or be outgrown. Similar to the paradox of no longer tolerating intolerance, however, empathy— the thing that they hate and are trying so hard to re-define as evil because it de-thrones them— is what’s needed to see the world from their perspective, understand how it feels for them to be loosing everything, and explain why a world where everyone is cared for is ultimately better for them, too.

    My progressive friends, we all have a person in our lives who wears ill-fitting light-wash jeans and generic white grass-stained sneakers, who trusts to the point of gullibility and has a need to operate within well defined parameters because he fears the future and mistrusts the present, and fondly reminisces about a past that never occurred; and since we’re intimately familiar with the nuance of their lives, and know them to not be irredeemable at heart, we let their racism and homophobia and undercurrent of vague, unintelligible hatred slide in the interest of keeping the peace; which works, at that microcosmic level. The problem, is that when this person is multiplied by tens of millions in America, and billions more globally in comparable manifestations, their insecure need for everyone to resemble their own reflection in the mirror isn’t a cute anymore; it’s the greatest threat to the perpetuation and progress of human life.

    These men are your husbands, your dads, your friends. Feel sorry for them, and follow the strings that are attached to their joints all the way up to those who are holding them, but keep in mind that our collective oppression wouldn’t be possible without their numbers tipping the scale.

    Instead of a tolerant hug next time you see him, I suggest a heart to heart that makes it known that their willful ignorance won’t be pacified anymore, and that you’re not concerned about who they perceive to be witches and illegals, you’re concerned about them aligning themselves with a group of people who’s identity is built around the subjugation of women and other races. If nothing else, be a constant reminder that you don’t want to hate people with them, and that everyone they pass on the street is their equal. Everyone. See: footnote to ‘progressives, conservatives, and the american republican party’: peace

    Billions of years and trillions of stars, civilizations risen and fallen with nothing remaining, and yet we have people in red baseball caps absolutely loosing their minds— somersaulting over their couch to reach for the coffee table pistol and shoot into the darkness— because they heard a wind chime that sounded vaguely like a foreign language. This has to end. Nothing will change unless it changes, and it starts with you, right now, having a difficult conversation that’s centuries overdue.

    Updated 06.01.25

    This is a work of parody/satire. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and intended for comedic or critical purposes only.

  • I’m periodically asked why so much of my living autotheory is devoted to arguing against conservative religious patriarchal figures.

    As this project evolved, my critique of cultural norms naturally turned to face those who stand most rigidly against change— those who embody resistance to complexity and discomfort with ambiguity. Their solace lies in clearly defined roles, strict hierarchies, and unwavering traditions— wielding religion and ideology not as tools of self-exploration, but as shields against uncertainty. Against everything they don’t understand.

    Their fixation on strength— physical, moral, cultural— manifests as an obsession with control: control over themselves, over others, and over the environment. Beneath this, however, is not mastery, but fear. Fear of vulnerability, fear of powerlessness, fear of a world where kindness is not weakness and cruelty is not dominance. Their certainty is a defense mechanism. Their bravado— hollow armor. Their world is built on the simplistic binaries of right and wrong, order and chaos, power and submission.

    Trapped in a system that exploits their insecurities, they’re rewarded for their ignorance and discouraged from the very curiosity and empathy that could set them free. The artifice of superiority is dangled before them, reinforcing their worst instincts, perpetuating their stagnation, and weaponizing their fear. Performative strength becomes their only language— a ceaseless proclamation of dominance concealing the deep-seated terror of their own fragility. 

    Your husband. Your dad. Your friend. They need to understand— urgently— that they haven’t been dominant for centuries. They’ve been accommodated.

    They need to understand that rejecting openness, adaptability, and empathy does not make them strong. It makes them relics. They’re not merely an obstacle to progress, but a cautionary tale— left behind not by some grand conspiracy, but by their own refusal to let go of their illusions. Worse: they’re succeeding in keeping us there with them.

    They need to understand they are not just participants in the architecture of control. They are captives of it. Their resistance to change is not a mark of strength, but of entrapment, and they must be freed first— so we can stop having to fight them before we can free ourselves.

    When I say they’re the most dangerous animal on the planet, I’m not being satirical. I’m screaming it from my lungs until I can’t speak anymore— until my mouth fills with blood— and then I’m spitting it in place of ochre over my hand, pressed against the inside wall of a skyscraper— so that 45,000 years from now, some better version of ourselves will know I was here.

    That even without the language to explain to the most petulant among us why they should love other people, I continued to empty everything of myself for them.

    Updated 06.01.25

We are all Oak trees; some of us acorns, some of us the paradigm of an old growth Oak tree, and every possibility in between. An acorn is still an oak tree, just in a different stage, and pretty soon, even at its most diminutive, will tower over the old growth now fallen and reduced to its compost.

  • “People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you're not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.

    You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.

    Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It's yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.

    You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don't owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs.” - Banksy


    This is what I’d like to add to Banksy’s quote.

    The best things are made for no one. Yes, people can benefit from a creation, but the best things are made because the creator couldn’t help but make it— because it welled up inside of them and came out of them in the way that they as a creator express themselves— not to make a product to be sold. The greatest novels weren’t written for a reader, the greatest paintings weren’t painted for a buyer, and many of our greatest inventions have come from minds being nagged to answer a question that didn’t exist yet. They came into this world because the person who created them had no choice but to get it out of them.

    It’s not that I don’t understand our need for tools and other uninspired things to enact our lives, but also— because multiple seemingly contradictory things can be true at the same time— fuck your thing. Fuck its packaging, fuck your advertising, and fuck your customer service experience. I’m not interested how well you can lie to me. Tell me something true, that the universe is speaking through you, or don’t tell me anything at all.

    Updated 06.01.25

  • For anyone reading this who hasn’t counted backward from standing in the aisle of a store holding a thing that you decided you want to buy:

    It was in a local distribution facility a few weeks ago, and a regional distribution facility a few weeks before that, having arrived at port of entry a few weeks before that after leaving port of call six weeks before that, packed into a shipping contained after a few months of manufacturing, after finalizing the order, after communication with the manufacturer, after design and documentation; which means, my friends, that the decision to buy the thing in your hand was already made for you almost a year ago, and all that remained was choosing from an array of methods of manipulation to trick you into thinking it was your idea— and make sure that you’re aware of the four easy payments on the store credit card— since they also know you can’t afford it. Maybe you listened to the testimonial of a trusted figure, or the seller created the feeling of artificial scarcity to create urgency— maybe framing the price between two other prices to make what you’re spending more attractive despite being higher than you wanted. Maybe they scraped your data and personalized the advertising message to you, or framed the purchase within a larger habit of buying things that are on sale or incentivized for loyal and frequent buyers, maybe focusing on how much you’ll gain by having the product in your life instead of how much you’ll loose.

    Add to that: we stand there with that thing in our hand— also holding our fears and phobias, our physical and mental illnesses, our cognitive biases, the job we hate and the children who don’t love us and the partner who has become a stranger to us and the parent who’s dying and the hopes and dreams that have died long ago— and we ask for the person behind the counter to provide us with an experience. A customer service experience. It’s not good enough to purchase a thing, we want to be made to feel a certain way about the thing in addition to the purchase of it, because deep down we know that we don’t even fucking need it, and any decision that we make will be wrong because it can’t possibly be informed and trusting of truthfulness. We want to be made to feel a certain way about the thing, as if it’s the other persons responsibility to make us feel any sort of way or as if they don’t also live lives just as impossible as ours have been made to be lived.

    I stand, daily, absolutely beside myself in observance of how calm and collected our convulsing derangement is, how quiet our screams, and how lost we are from the place that this all could be instead. It’s insane. We’re insane. If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.

    I’ll say this several times in this profile under several subject headings, but we are stardust. We are sentient fucking stardust, and we’ve been made to forget that, convinced instead to enact lives comprised of buying shit we don’t need from people who don’t want to be selling it to us, and selling shit people don’t need to people who don’t want to be buying it from us.

    Again, It’s not that I don’t understand that we need tools and other uninspired things to live our lives, but also, because multiple seemingly contradictory things can be true at the same time, fuck your thing. Fuck its packaging, fuck your advertising, and fuck your customer service experience. I’m not interested how well you can lie to me. Tell me something true, that the universe is speaking through you, or don’t tell me anything at all.

    Updated 06.01.25

  • For the same reason that this profile is a living document, I’m a constant revision of myself; and the moment a tattoo artist’s needle left my skin, I’d want them to do it again just a little better this time, and again, and then something completely different. In hindsight, I can see that I would have ragrats about every tattoo I would have ever gotten— increasingly sure of it the younger I would have been at the time.

    I understand that we all learn our lessons out of order, and some of us have them permanently added to ourselves as reminders. But first, I want to share my thoughts on something new that I also see: this act of closing one’s eyes, and with a little flourish of the index finger, lowering it down onto the table in front of them— which is, of course, now the entirety of the internet— and allowing whatever it happens to land on to be indelibly drawn on their skin.

    We’re now covering ourselves with tattoos that are purposely bad, with so little reason to their placement that they resemble the inside of a juvenile detention center bathroom stall over time; and I wonder if it’s a reaction to the state of the world— essentially replacing buckshot shells with ink, climbing into the bathtub, and pulling the trigger with our toe because “fuck it.”

    Except, those of us who do so will put the haphazard scribbles that their full-sleeve is comprised of next to someone else’s breathtaking masterpiece that should be behind glass in a gallery, and try to convince me that they perceive them to simply be different and subjective. It makes me falter through interjections in an effort to respond. I can only arrive at the appreciation that the compared sleeves are equal in so much as they are someone’s best effort at that moment, and someone’s best appreciation at that moment; and since there’s nothing to be gained by making someone feel bad about themselves for something they’re excited about— and it feels dark and awful to do so even accidentally— I manage to say “That’s outstanding,” for now, which isn’t a lie depending on whether you reference the dictionary or the thesaurus. I don’t want to say that, though. I want to say “It can be better, and I want that for you.”

    Artists often work on iterations of the same thing their entire lives, slowly refining it— each one better than the previous that’s sold or thrown in the garbage— which works in many mediums. A painting can eventually be taken off a wall. A poem written in one’s formative years can, at any later date, be read by someone at approximately the same stage in life and resonate with them. When it comes to tattoos, however, we dive the dumpsters behind artists’ mental lofts, and beaming with pride, render in permanence what was intended to be process.

    Everyone reading this right now who secretly has rergats about your tattoos— I know you do, and I don’t even know you. I also know that admitting rigrat for a nearly indelible choice creates psychological discomfort, and it’s easier to convince yourself that it’s fine because you made the choice, so it must have been a good choice. I know that you felt social pressure, or it was an investment in a previous identity that you’re worried will be invalidated if you say the “R” word, and so you say that it tells a story or reminds you of who you were. I know that you feel locked in to the time, money, and pain of it— physically and emotionally— and in an effort to avoid feeling the shame that comes with that “R” word, because it implies immaturity or bad judgment, you lean into stoicism and owning it; like a defense mechanism that does emotional damage control by helping you rewrite your narrative as a tough, complex survivor.

    Again, though— I don’t even know you— and I know you secretly have ergrets about your tattoos. Here’s the thing, though. it’s more painful and psychologically damaging to lie to yourself and cling to previous iterations of your act of becoming than it is to have it removed and slowly heal from it.

    My friends, we’re supposed to change. We’re supposed to learn and grow and shed the skin of our previous selves once it feels too tight for us; and I see you there, with a name written on you despite no longer remembering their face, a foreign language character that doesn’t say what you think it does, the trend of the decade or the adolescent curly spikes or thoughtless impulse. I see the first tattoo of someone’s first day as a tattoo artist— painful in so many ways. I see you with a Nietzsche quote on your right forearm, now holding a book by Heidegger while your left hand moves to cover it.

    All this to say: our skin isn’t a sacred text intended to document our moments of affective over-identification or performative assimilation— like we’re monuments to all former romanticizations— and this new reflex to say “fuck it” is just another story, another mark, another mask for the ache we struggle to name. A tattoo holds verisimilitude, not truth, and outgrowing your skin isn’t a failure— it’s proof that you’re paying attention. Standing in front of a mirror and saying “That’s not me” is worth celebrating, not being ashamed of. The quiet dignity you seek in the stoicism of having no ragrats is found in release— choosing to change— and it’s worth the pain it takes to heal from the pain we’ve endured.

    My friends, really all of this to say— it’s okay to leave behind the person you once needed to be. I love them, and I love you, and I love who you are yet to become.

    Updated 06.01.25

  • “I don’t know what word in the English language – I can’t find one – that applies to people who are willing to sacrifice the literal existence of organized human life, not in the distant future, so they can put a few more dollars into highly overstuffed pockets. The word ‘evil’ doesn’t begin to approach it." - Noam Chomsky


    I’m not a biologist or climate scientist, but lets say for the sake of argument that every single one of them have been conspiring together to create a false narrative of our environment— and have been for a hundred years— for some reason and to some end that remains a mystery because no one can answer how or why they would; but lets say they are.

    I’d like for someone to provide me with the argument against cleaning up our oceans, ending our pollution and wastefulness, restoring our habitats, and transitioning to location-appropriate clean energy like windmills, turbines, ocean-motion technologies, etcetera; not to mention the scary word that starts with ‘n’ and rhymes with ‘uclear’.

    Explain the benefit of preventing that, and preferring to remaining dependent on coal and fossil fuels, keeping in mind that the United States is spending approximately 760 billion dollars each year subsidizing the fossil fuel industry.

    Tell me again about the finite resources of the wind and the sun. Tell me again that we can’t afford to do better, with a straight face.

    Updated 06.01.25

  • I’d like to remind any two-faced, idea-stealing, crystal-ball-reading, misleading, under-delivering, backing-out, misappropriating, knowingly-lying, progress-halting, subsidized pretend-capitalist, democracy-destroying con-artist who’s participating in a long tradition of American charlatanism, who only appears smart to those who don’t know any better and wants to die on Mars— and who proclaims empathy to be weakness and the flaw of civilization— that it would be much easier to turn earth back into earth than it would be to terraform an irradiated wasteland into another earth; and I’d like to remind everyone that we would have to travel at the speed of light for 1,206 years to reach Keplar-422b, the nearest inhabitable planet in something that we like to call the constellation Lyra despite that language being mythological instead of useful from an astronomical perspective.

    So, unless our physicists are just about done slapping some cool stickers on a drive that folds spacetime to bring B to A, lets turn our attention to a fleet of bullet trains that pass through old growth forests and tall grass prairies between walkable cities that have dismantled their McSuburbs in favor of self-sustaining homes— made in regionally appropriate styles and materials— (instead of ticky-tacky boxes on poisoned ecological dead zones) surrounded by community gardens and forgeable habitats right fucking here where we already are. I want to die on Earth— having seen a native landscapes reclaim every lawn, and abundant life thriving in harmony with a human race that has awoken from its fever dreams to finally begin the journey of realizing our potential, and I’d like for you to join me.

    Updated 06.01.25

    This is a work of parody/satire. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and intended for comedic or critical purposes only.

  • Instead of being angry at the boomers, I’d like to suggest feeling sorry for them, and seeing things from their perspective:

    Imagine growing up in a snow globe, where you were literally taught that the solar system was the universe, and earned extra credit by erasing the chalkboard after class. Imagine, as an adult man, raising a family after dropping out of high-school and returning from a war where fight or flight was ingrained in you as the two options for existing, and then earning a living wage by sweeping a floor or illustrating newspaper comics with all the talent of child’s first try; and as an adult woman, winning the olympic gold medal for the vault by literally just doing a single cartwheel before triumphantly raising your arms up to non-verbally say ta-da; your greatest-generation parents telling you what a good job you were doing and how self-reliant you were while simultaneously spoiling you with unrivaled prosperity and distorting your perception of hard work and reward with the fun-house mirror that we call American culture.

    Imagine being considered an adult just for having kids— despite it being as easy as having sex— despite your lack of an education and all of your unresolved trauma; just for the act of buying a house which was as easy stashing away some money in a cookie tin with your sewing remnants; and for enjoying the benefits of a career with a well-paying company that provided you with a golden parachute into senility.

    Imagine, now, finding yourself living in a world where what you enjoyed without question has become completely and utterly unattainable for the following generations, forcing them to turn inward and redefine what it means to be an adult as being incredibly well educated, capable of incredible patience, and in possession of previously unseen emotional maturity and communication skills— and with this paradigm shift find that you no longer even qualify as an adult— leaving you as little more than a child keeping yourself occupied with toys while your children simultaneously change your shitty diapers and clean up the global mess that you made. You, too, would kick and scream the whole time because the pace of change is to fast and too difficult to understand, and therefore scary.

    This is how we arrive at many boomers acting like scared adolescents, clinging to their every iteration of stuffed animals for security, and their bedtime stories as all that they know to be true. You can’t expect them to understand why you can be a top performer in your field and yet the only home that you have to return to is a car parked on what you hope is a safe street, to spend your night selling the last of your dignity on OnlyFans as a side hustle to your two jobs. Houses only cost 7 thousand dollars, so if you just made coffee in your car instead of buying it made, you’d have one by now. Worse, they were never taught to unlearn and relearn, so they’re angered by the mere suggestion that their place on the earth isn’t the center of the universe and that they might have fucked up, by not instead creating a society of multi-generational co-ops surrounded by gardens where everyone helps and is helped— and no one in their later years has to worry about falling and not being able to get up.

    My friends, feel sorry for them, and see things from their perspective. They were taught that bigotry was a right— or at the very least an opinion to be respected— and they don’t mean to consume the last of the resources while doubling down on being misogynist, racist, homophobes, but they don’t know any other way, and they they were prevented from learning how to talk about it.

    Besides, they’re good, hard working people— and as they’ll remind you— who walked up hill both ways.

    Updated 06.01.25

  • Potatoes are the single most vitamin and mineral rich food to grow, and combined with eggs, they provide almost all of the nutrients that a person needs to live. Youkon Gold potatoes are the most versatile, able to be baked, boiled, sautéed, and mashed; and they take up a very small footprint, able to be grown in a barrel without sunlight by covering them with layers of soil as their growth reaches the surface. If you stagger planting every couple of months, you’ll have a fresh, uninterrupted, self-generating food source, using halved potatoes for replanting, and nitrogen from the chicken waste mixed in with vegetation scraps to create fertilizer for future harvests.

    If you’re able to, vacuum seal some sacks of rice and beans for additional protein and complex carbohydrates, and stock up on vitamins to provide supplements for nutritional lacking so that your high-calorie HDRs can just be an occasional indulgence.

    Assuming that you have a portable water filtration system that can manage water from just about any source, just don’t forget to stock extra filters, and I’d recommend getting your hands on a hard-copy book that can guide you through gardening and foraging in your area— along with survival and first aid— so that you can reference the material during blackouts.

    With regard to first aid, if you can only get your hands on limited medicines, focus on pain relievers and fever reducers like Ibuprofen; broad-spectrum antibiotics like Amoxicillin; wound care like an Iodine solution for cleaning and Hydrogen Peroxide for disinfecting, along with an antibiotic ointment like Neosporin; an antihistamine like Benadryl for allergic reactions; gastrointestinal medications like Imodium and ORS to prevent and treat dehydration, along with Tums for heartburn; along with any personal emergency medications. There are also some anti-fungal and anti virals that might be helpful to have at hand. All this, with a robust medical kit comprised of bandages and gauze, tape, scissors, etcetera. None of it will be useful, though, unless you educate yourself in advance.

    Remember to travel light. A small hatchet will have more day-to-day usefulness than a Halligan bar; but only if you can get there and back, so don’t forget to have a good pair of boots to keep your feet clean and dry.

    It won’t be the life that you had hoped for, but you can sustain yourself well enough though the demise of humanity as we know it. I’ll spare you the motivational speech; just keep going, and don’t forget to be silly, be kind, and let yourself love. An end is just the beginning of something new.

    Updated 06.01.25

We’re now covering ourselves with tattoos that are purposely bad, with so little reason to their placement that they resemble the inside of a juvenile detention center bathroom stall over time; and I wonder if its a reaction to the state of the world, essentially replacing buckshot shells with ink, climbing into the bathtub, and pulling the trigger with our toe because fuck it.

  • I’m going to express my thoughts here in short, then come back around to somewhat redundantly explain further in another way, and I may have to come back to this later.

    My claim reduced to a sentence:

    In the act of being born, you didn’t choose your brain, and so nothing that follows can be a choice, either.

    The thing is, there’s no downward causation of a higher level property influencing the behavior of its lower level constituent’s. From a network of neurons emerges the movement of a hand to flip a light-switch. The act of flipping the light switch doesn’t make a neuron or its behavior more complex or in any way under your control— and the argument that groups can affect individuals ignores the upward causation within the individuals of the group (which is causing their behavior), and the fact that you’re still not choosing how their influence is processed.

    You didn’t choose where you were born, or when, or into what family or culture. You didn’t choose your body. You didn’t choose what you were taught, or what you’ve experienced. No one sits down and maps their own neural pathways, or how their experiences are processed— and so much of who you are is a result of your earliest years of life. From the moment of conception to you reading this now, you’ve never chosen a thing. Not even the next thought that you’ll have— which will emerge on its own without you knowing from where or how.

    To say that a person has a choice is to pretend that the moon chooses which wave crests will sheen with glints of reflected light as it willfully creates the tides.

    Even when making something that resembles what we currently define as a choice, all you are is the recipient of a thought that arises from who know where and who knows how— which often comes down to assessing which of two options provided to you will alleviate your suffering the most— without possibly being able to comprehend the the infinity complex series of events that arise from the new timeline created at any given moment. So, where some see people making choices, I see us as the unwitting victims of circumstance after circumstance in a bizarre sort of choose your own adventure book that’s not a choice. Input— output.

    This isn’t to say that you’re now un-beholding to your actions.

    We have to be, or else society ceases to function. So, if you murder someone, you’re still facing life in prison; but understanding that our bodies are more like life support systems for our brains that are running algorithms of their own creation— with data that we had no choice but to reference— makes space for a type of forgiveness that our society is lacking and in desperate need of. Instead of a lack of free will being scary, seeing the lack of free will in ourselves and others allows for the sort of kindness that we tend to view as an unachievable archetype. It allows you to look at a stranger and their atrocious behavior toward you as a kindergarten teacher would look at a student and their pre-naptime temper tantrum.

    Its difficult for people to accept— upsetting, even— because we just plain feel like we have free will, or want to have it; while simultaneously generous with sentences like “Oh, that’s just how she is,” or “He can’t help it, he has >insert condition here<,” as if some of us have brains that generate actions that they can’t help, but some of us can.

    None of us can, though. That doesn’t mean we can’t learn and grown and change, it just means maybe you’re not there yet with respect to whatever there is; and again it doesn’t mean that you can’t be held accountable for your more egregious actions— because we’re trying to have a society here after all— but it does mean we can be more understanding that people are themselves victims of their own brains, and be kinder in our understanding, especially when considering behavior that’s disagreeable but fairly banal. In other words, a lack of free will lets you off the hook as a work in progress, never a final outcome.

    In an effort to explain further, lets go back to kindergarten. Imagine for a moment that you’re observing a class at snack time, and see child A eat child B’s cookie, followed by child B smacking child A.

    I argue that neither child made a choice in that interaction. They both did what their brains told them to: brains that they didn’t choose, and didn’t wire, and didn’t fill with information or experiences. They are little more than bodies being operated by a brain. Child A’s brain saying “Pick up that cookie and put it in your mouth,” and child B’s brain saying “That was some unfair shit, smack a bitch,” and so they did.

    In this scenario, the care provider sees the cookie smacking, and reminds child B that “We don’t hit people,” followed by a time-out in the time-out spot. Fair enough— actions have consequences— we don’t hit people, and so, time out. Lack of choosing doesn’t mean a lack of consequences.

    Of course, on average, we learn better. That’s where neuroplasticity comes in. We learn that hitting is bad; that is to say, most of us have brains that are able to rewire themselves to stop doing a thing that we’re told is a bad thing. However, not everyone, not everywhere, not always. We’ve all witnessed others have something explained to them, or have— ourselves— had something explained to us, and they/we just didn’t get it, no matter how many times we tried to learn it. It wasn’t a choice to not learn it, their/our brain just wasn’t able.

    So, if you fast forward to that child B committing murder, I would argue that it again wasn’t a choice any more than their kindergarten smacking, but that it also has consequences. For example, if you have a tumor pressing on your pituitary gland, making you increasingly and more violently angry until it results in murdering someone, you’re not absolved of your actions, but it does mean that our actions don’t have to be met with the current cultural norms. Knowing this provides us with an understanding of ourselves that allows for more patience and kindness with others as well. That we are still just a victim of our own brain— again— a brain that we didn’t choose, didn’t wire, was subject to an enumerable myriad of influences also not of our choosing; and in the case of child B, wasn’t able to ever learn that hitting is bad like most of us seem to manage. That doesn’t mean that they don’t now have to be held accountable in a forever time-out in the grown-up time-out spot called prison, unfortunately for them, but it does mean that they didn’t ever have a choice.

    This is an almost impossibly difficult concept for many of us to get onboard with. We like to think that we have free will, and that not having choice is somehow linked to then not being able to face consequences, but I’d ask you to go back to when you were conceived and tell me one thing that you chose. Acknowledging being overly redundant here, but in an effort to find the right words: you didn’t choose your sex, eye color, how much testosterone you received in utero, your brain and its development, or it’s capacity for reasoning. You didn’t choose to have a diminished mental capacity. You didn’t choose wether or not to have one extra chromosome. You didn’t choose to be bi-polar, or schizophrenic, or obsessive compulsive. You didn’t choose the things that you’re interested in or the things that turn you on or the things that upset you. You didn’t choose your race, your family, the religion that you were raised in or education that you received, all of the things that you experienced and how that had an effect on you and how the neural network that wired itself understands or reacts.

    All this to say that you’ve never made a single choice in your life, and to revisit what I’ve touched on about how it relates to kindness: understanding that we’re all victims of a lack of free will allows for a type of kindness for ourselves and others that we desperately need but is almost nowhere to be found. The smacker turned murderer still goes to prison, but we can at least forgive them, and allow for growth and contribution. More than that, we can be kind to ourselves for the much smaller transgressions that we struggle with on a daily basis, and appreciate the act of struggling in ourselves and others instead of interacting as final iterations of being.

    In short, there is love to be found in a lack of free will. There’s kindness there. The next time you see someone behaving in a way that you would be inclined to label unforgivable, try to hold in the palm of your hand the entirety of their life, experienced with nothing of their choosing, and you’ll see a victim of being alive who’s in desperate need of love and kindness— possible because we don’t have free will, not despite it.


    You are the mouth of a river; a confluence of all who have passed through your life, shaping neural tributaries that merge and surge toward the sea of your unfolding moment. You are forever there— with us all— in a place never chosen and never to be returned to.

    Updated 06.01.25

  • As our society becomes increasingly more polarized, and with something like half of us unable to recognize fake news and propaganda, its become urgently important to talk about the meticulously calculated mechanisms by which conservative hate groups and religious organizations operate. These groups don’t stumble upon their members, they manufacture them, manipulating the fractures of human vulnerability and societal discord. To understand and illuminate how these groups thrive is to disarm them, so I’d like to provide a brief roadmap of their manipulation process, and offer some suggestions with regard to vigilance and proactive behavior.

    enlist

    The first step in understanding the lifecycle of organizations who manipulate people for their own gain is recognizing who they target. They seek the lonely, the poorly educated, the disenfranchised, and the disillusioned— those grappling with identity crises, economic instability, or social alienation are prime candidates.

    Consider the economic despair in post-World War I Germany, fertile ground for the Nazi Party’s rhetoric of scapegoating and nationalism. Your average person, burdened by inflation and humiliation, was desperate for meaning and a sense of agency. Fast-forward to today, and the recruitment strategies remain eerily similar. Online hate forums— for instance— prey on disaffected young men who feel overlooked or emasculated in a rapidly changing world. They exploit loneliness and offer these individuals something they lack: purpose and belonging.

    Similarly— lets just call them all cults from now on— often find their members in transitional stages of life. New college students, recent divorcees, and those mourning the death of a loved one are particularly susceptible. During these vulnerable moments, those who aren’t comfortable existing within what’s unknown need answers, and cults are all too willing to provide them. The recruitment strategies of organizations like the Moonies, the Unification Church in the 1970s, often centered around college campuses, where they could intercept young adults struggling with questions of purpose.

    entrap

    Once a potential victim has been identified, the cults’s focus shifts to the initial approach. Here, they employ a tactic older than humanity— when we still huddled together high in the treetops at night to avoid predation— and spent our evenings reinforcing our bond with other members of the group: grooming. What was once the removal of ticks and dirt from our fur, now the much more complicated and insidious act of performative affection and barely perceptible coercion to an end— a welcome change to the victim’s typical experience of isolation or rejection.

    Take, for instance, the Manson Family’s infamous gatherings. Charles Manson provided his followers with a sense of familial intimacy, appealing to those who felt ostracized by mainstream society. He lavished attention on them, creating an environment that felt safe and nurturing, even as it paved the way for unspeakable acts of violence.

    You’ll see a much more elaborate form of entrapment in the form of sending you— the person being recruited— to go out and recruit others by trying to convert them. It’s a tactic that’s known to fail, and that’s the point, because it’s ultimately about manipulating you. Every uncomfortable rejection found behind every door that’s knocked on drives the person back into the arms of the cult, reinforcing that they are a place of safety and refuge in a cruel world, and providing them with a chance to once again lavish the victim with attention and guidance. This helps establish an US and a THEM; we’re US, and they’re THEM.

    After that, all that remains is to make your victim feel like— I don’t know— maybe they’re actually not quite good enough after all, maybe they need to be tested, maybe they should give you some money to contribute to the cause, maybe, just maybe, them being rejected exists as a possibility.

    enclose

    Indoctrination isn’t an immediate or overt process; you need to slowly, incrementally, boil the frog. New victims are always introduced to the group’s ideology in digestible portions, often under the guise of harmless self-improvement or education.

    It’s partly why I don’t like the slow, incremental reveals of getting to know someone when you’re first dating, because the truth does’t need to convince you of itself, bullshit does, and it would be healthier for first dates to included sharing all of each others worst traits instead of easing a person into them like its less of a potential relationship than a long-con. See: PREFACE

    Consider the practices of Scientology. Early courses, marketed as tools for personal growth, introduce innocuous concepts like stress relief, and only later are members exposed to the organization’s more bizarre doctrines, such as the existence of extraterrestrial overlord Xenu and his hydrogen bombs. By this point, the cult has invested significant time, money, and emotional energy, creating a sunk-cost fallacy that discourages departure and encourages contribution, either financially or on your knees.

    In addition to that, and as a contrast to ancient christian mythology’s insistence on not educating yourself away from them, other hate groups often rely on a veneer of intellectualism as a way for their victims to feel as smart as they wish they were after regretfully not paying attention in school. White supremacist groups, for example, frequently begin with pseudo-academic discussions on cultural pride or history. Once again, as part of a slow reveal, only later do these conversations devolve into overtly racist rhetoric once the victim is emotionally and otherwise invested, convince that it was their decision, that it’s who they are, now unable or unwilling to extract themselves from US.

    notes on fear & dependency

    Once indoctrinated, the victim is subjected to control mechanisms designed to ensure loyalty, from psychological manipulation to outright coercion.

    One of the most effective tools is isolation, and by severing the victims ties to friends and family, the group becomes their sole source of emotional and social support. As you start to notice this tactic, you’ll also see much more elaborate forms of fear and dependency being used to entrap a whole family, town— or say— roughly half of the planet.

    In the 1990s, Heaven’s Gate members were encouraged to cut off all contact with the outside world, fostering an echo chamber of groupthink that culminated in the San Diego Sherif Department’s 1997 discovery of 39 pairs of Nikes, as new and unused as they were being worn. Today, this isolation is digital. Extremist forums discourage participation in broader online communities, creating an insular bubble where dissenting opinions are drowned out; and to help facilitate that, algorithms keep you in a loop of propaganda that reinforces itself.

    Add to that, the guilt and fear that indoctrinated members are made to feel about the act of leaving the group, betraying its mission, and being personally responsible for dire consequences. These groups often enforce this through apocalyptic predictions. For example, the Peoples Temple under Jim Jones convinced members that leaving would result in their spiritual or physical annihilation, and the ancient christian mythology church places immense emphasis on the perpetually-near rapture.

    notes on recognizing and resisting

    Understanding and illuminating the tactics of cults disarms them, but to counteract them, you have to actively recognize and resist their manipulation. Here’s a recap of warning signs and suggestions for preventative measures.

    Warning Signs

    1. Be aware of sudden and excessive affection by groups or individuals who are slowly wedging themselves into your life in what feels like overwhelming attention.

    2. Groups that demonize outsiders often have more insidious motives, relying on US vs. THEM rhetoric to make their victims feel like a special part of the group. Sometimes, there will be obvious indicators of being a part of a cult, like red baseball caps that have the word ‘great’ on them.

    3. If an organization encourages you to distance yourself from friends or family, it’s often because the influence of others undermines their grooming. Keep in mind, it doesn’t have to be an organization, it can just be a person, like a parent, or a partner.

    4. Be cautious of any group or person that slowly escalates its demands or beliefs in slow, incremental ideological shifts, as if you’re being eased into something instead of having been told everything that there is to know at the inception of the relationship.

    Preventative Measures

    1. External perspectives serve as a constant reality check, so stay connected, by maintaining strong relationships outside of any primary group, family, friends, and organizations all.

    2. Never take any one person’s word for gospel— including mine as you read this— and instead, always question what you’re told followed by seeking corroborating evidence from multiple trusted sources, and asking yourself the the six questions of critical thinking.

    3. Recognize your own moments of emotional or social vulnerability, approach new relationships with self-awareness, and an awareness of who interjects themselves into your life instead of simply being there if you need them.

    4. Beyond this, educate yourself. Knowledge is one of the most effective tools against coercion, and it’s never too late to embrace learning, growing, and changing into the person that you might have been.

    You’ll never be approached if you’re too smart to fall for the long con. I want to be very clear here: you will never be approached if you’re too smart.

    The harsh reality is that the tactics of conservative hate groups and religious organizations are as much a reflection of societal shortcomings as they are of individual vulnerabilities. They exploit isolation, despair, and the human yearning for meaning. They thrive in places that lack of diversity, lack of equitability, and lack of inclusivity. I say this ad nauseam in my profile, but motivation follows doing, and nothing will get better until we want better for ourselves.

    Updated 06.01.25

  • Escaping a conservative hate group, cult, or religious family that has slowly indoctrinated you can feel overwhelming and terrifying— especially when those you're escaping have positioned themselves as your only support system.

    If you feel trapped but aren’t in immediate danger, the most important thing is to make a plan. Sudden departures can be dangerous, but quiet preparation— finding safe people, gathering resources, and building a support network outside of the one controlling you— can make all the difference.

    If you’re unsure who to trust, listen to your instincts. Safe people may be closer than you think: a teacher, a school counselor, a librarian, or a member of an arts or book club may be able to help— especially if they’re not bound by the same ideology as those you’re trying to leave. Others who have already distanced themselves from the group can sometimes be a lifeline. In an emergency, reaching out to someone visibly progressive— someone openly advocating for human rights— can be a good first step. Even if they don’t have answers, they’re more likely to be empathetic to your experience and may be able to connect you with those who do.

    I don’t have all the answers, and I can’t provide links, but there are organizations dedicated to helping. A quick keyword search can uncover resources specializing in escaping from white supremacy groups; gangs, militias, and other hate groups; cults and religious extremists; abusive parents or partners; and LGBTQ+ support shelters or runaway shelters. Domestic violence shelters can also be an option— even if the abuse isn’t physical. Coercion, control, and psychological manipulation are all valid reasons to seek help.

    For those with no immediate resources, alternative living arrangements may still be preferable to a life of subjugation. A car, while not ideal, can be modified for survival: replacing the seats with a plywood platform for a mattress, using a camping battery to recharge devices, and storing food in a cooler with ice. Gyms, university campuses, and libraries can provide temporary places to rest while you plan your next steps. If you don’t have access to these, finding those who understand your situation and are willing to help you transition— however they’re able— can be invaluable.

    If you’re reading this, know that others have escaped before you. There’s a world beyond the walls that have been built around you, and there are people— some you haven’t met yet— who care about your autonomy, well-being, and peace of mind.

    I love you with all my heart, beautiful stranger reading this just now. Please remember— you’re not alone, and there’s a different life waiting for you on the other side of this.

    Updated 06.01.25

  • What I’m about to tell you— isn’t just important— it’s essential, but it isn’t for everyone. I't’s the most important thing you’ll ever hear, but it’s also something that most people live their entire lives without ever hearing, much less truly grasping. Not because it’s hidden— but because it’s ignored, suppressed, or simply too powerful to trust with just anyone. I think you’re ready though. If you’ve made it here, if you’re still reading—you’re not like most people. You’re awake. You’ve felt it too. That hum under the noise. That flicker behind the veil. That whisper just before sleep.

    So, listen closely— because what I’m about to share with you may reframe everything you thought you understood
    about who you are, what’s real, and what’s possible. You won’t believe what I’m about to say.

    Before I tell you, though, you need to understand— that this changes everything. It’s what you’ve been waiting to hear spoken aloud, and in just a moment, it will be. So, take a moment right now to just stay with me. Take a breath. Center yourself. Let the noise fade. What comes next— isn’t just a message. It’s the message. And I want you to feel it. Not just with your mind, but with the part of you that remembers. Your body doesn’t know the difference between experiencing an event that reveals this, or me telling you, so it may come to you more powerfully than you expect.

    This won’t be easy. Most people turn back at this point. They look away. They get scared. They distract themselves. But you didn’t. You stayed. You’re already letting go of what’s holding you back, and that means something. So I promise to say the most important thing you’ll ever hear in just a moment. I just need you to be ready for it. Because once you know this— you can’t un-know it. You’ll never see the world the same way again.

    There will be no more pretending. No more small talk. No more sleepwalking through days. You’ll begin to notice things. Patterns. Shifts. Memories. All because I say the thing that was never meant to be said out loud. But before I do, you need to ask yourself if you ever felt someone looking at you, and turned your head to find that they were. You weren’t imagining. You knew— and that knowing, was the power of your knowing, manifest. So, for you, this isn’t a lesson— it’s recognition— and yes, you’re going to hear it. What you’ve always suspected, but what no one else could say. Not because they didn’t know— but because they forgot how to say it.

    The truth isn’t a headline. It’s not a doctrine. It’s not even a belief. It’s a vibration— and in just a few more moments,
    you’ll feel it move through you. Like thunder without sound. Like awareness itself. So get ready, because what comes next will feel like the first time you ever breathed. I’m going to tell you now. It’s time. Just one more breath. One more second of silence.

    I’ll tell you— and it’s this. What you’ve been waiting for. What they never wanted you to know. This— this is how they fucking manipulate you.

    Updated 06.01.25

You are the mouth of a river; a confluence of all who have passed through your life, shaping neural tributaries that merge and surge toward the sea of your unfolding moment. You are forever there— with us all— in a place never chosen and never to be returned to.

religion

  • My ancient christian mythology friends, if you’re planning on enjoying an eternity of unimaginable bliss in heaven, please explain to me why you’re so concerned with the affluence of a sequential few decades of infinity. Better yet, explain yourself to the God that you claim to believe in.

    All of my religious friends, you can’t face me in earnest until you’ve first turned to face each other in the interest of resolving the hatred, selfishness, and violence that arises from the practice of your respective religions— showing me that you can no longer bare it.

    Updated 06.01.25

  • I can’t think of a more selfish, vile act in response to my plight— than telling me that you’ll pray for me. Worse than saying and doing nothing at all, not only are you displaying a willingness to be ignorant of your own religion, but you’re displaying the desire to do nothing, and feel good about the nothing that you’re doing.

    If your prayer is for behavior, omniscience means that before the God that you claim to believe in even made the person that you’re praying for, he already knew if their free will would result in them going to hell— and then made them anyway— essentially just populating his concept of eternal punishment with his creations. He already knew everything that would ever befall every innocent person from the beginning to the end of time, and so in it’s happening, we can be sure of his omnipotent approval.

    If you’re prayer is for health, again— there’s nothing that happens that hasn’t already happened in the mind of an all-knowing and all-doing god- so in it’s happening we can be sure of his approval, or else something else would have happened instead. In telling someone that you’ll pray for them, you’re doing nothing but rejecting gods will. He already knows the illnesses that will come to all of us, how everyone you’ll ever love dies, how you’ll die, and he already knows, and he already knows.

    That’s what knowing everything means: every word you’ll ever utter in your lifetime— every action— was already known by an omniscient, omnipotent god before he made you. If you never speak, it makes no difference, because he already knew your every thought, and every thought of every person who he’d ever create before he even created the universe— and has already acted— with the knowledge of a being that knows everything from the beginning to the end of his creation, and the knowledge of a being who knows what it means for there to be nothing at all.

    My Abrahamic religion friends, humble yourself in the knowledge that you have no voice that can speak to an omniscient, omnipotent God, to say anything other than thank you, by way of saying Hallelujah.

    Your God is a director watching the final cut of his own movie, and there can be no changes. You can provide no revelation to him with a prayer, there’s nothing you can do to win favor, there’s no fate you can dispute, and you can alter no course. You were known to your God in your entirety before he even made you, and his very existence negates the act of your prayer, so you are powerless to say anything but Hallelujah.

    From anywhere, without the need of a cathedral to stand in, Hallelujah! For free, without the need to fill the coffers of priests, Hallelujah! In response to every horrifying thing that happens to you and your loved ones, Hallelujah! Nothing, but Hallelujah!

    Followed by rolling up your sleeves, joining the world’s atheists and agnostics, and doing for the sake of doing— loving for the sake of loving, without expectation of reward— because all there is, is love.

    Updated 06.01.25

  • As I write this on Chicago’s 606, above homeless encampments and across the street from a Catholic church, its congregation blithely ignores the sublimation-as-a-means-of reconciling cognitive dissonance that we see in the self flagellation of their Opus Dei priests— donning fetish garments that symbolize submission— complete with a chastity cage that redirects the energy of their denial into devotion as a part of the strict rules of a pre-negotiated disciplinae sceaena. This, along with a cilice to aid in the exquisite enjoyment of their repentance— anointed with oil and surrendering on their knees to the consensual pain while surrounded by sacred objects waiting to be used next— the controlled breathing of their counted prayers building to the emotionally cathartic climax of a higher state of consciousness: “Oh God!” All of it presented as a socially acceptable alternative to ritualistic behavior equivalencies of the sex dungeon down the street just because the church keeps daytime hours.

    Whenever I’m told that what I need is religion, I wonder which one they’re referring to. The one where I whip or mutilate my body to cleanse my soul, or handle poisonous snakes and flail spastically on the ground while screaming gibberish, or maybe one where I don’t eat until I almost die, or eat what I believe to be the literal body of my god washed down with his blood in a ceremony of ritualistic cannibalism, or sacrifice other people to my god to satiate him, or restrict myself to a life of servitude as lesser than others, or the one where I wear special underwear that protects me spiritually while I participate in what’s little more than a real estate sex cult for pedophiles that was started by a guy who translated ancient Egyptian from gold plates found in America that only he could read with magic stones, or the one where god sacrificed himself to himself to save us from what he was going to do to us if he didn’t do that, or where a galactic overlord killed everyone with hydrogen bombs and brainwashed their sprits which are now influencing us in harmful ways, or where there’s glory in the murder-suicides of you and your family or the murder of your daughters or wives for the moral infraction of singing or dancing or just being seen, or where I’m to be obeyed by my family who’s subservient to me no matter how much of a lunatic I am or what I demand of them, or the one who’s hierarchical system is based on imagined purity to the extent that some members are untouchable in their uncleanliness despite the highest ranking members having no problem bathing in a river that they consider to be sacred between a recently cremated body floating to one side of them and someone else shitting in the water to their other side.

    My religious friends, I don’t want to hate people with you, I don’t want to hurt people with you, I don’t want an obedient servant barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, and I don’t want anything to do with the religion of your father that allows billions of men to imagine themselves as something of an all-knower who’s seated in a position of absolute power over all others despite their imaginary crown and absolute impotence. I’m left without words at the absolute insanity of us, cross-eyed and mouths agape, asking to be joined in our derangement. It’s insane. We’re insane.

    What I’d like instead, is for you to join me in knowing that you know nothing, being kind, being humble, being generous— and loving, because all there is, is love.

    Updated 06.01.25

  • If terrorism is the use of violence or coercion to instill fear in pursuit of ideological ends, then institutional christianity— judged by its historical and structural behavior— qualifies disturbingly well. Across continents and centuries, christianity has demanded conversion under threat, justified conquest with divine right, and sanctioned the annihilation of cultures in the name of salvation. Its symbols accompanied the sword, and its missionaries often preceded the bullet. From the Crusades to colonization, through endless genocide, christianity has not merely been complicit— it’s the moral engine that gives terror its sanctified face. In short, ancient christian mythology is a victim-funded terrorist organization that follows through with its demand for unquestioning obedience and adherence to their norms under threat of punishment— up to and including death.

    This isn’t about individual believers, nor the golden rule abstracted from empire, but about the machinery: the church as enforcer of conformity, the faith as state religion, and the theology as instrument of control. Like all systems that promise peace while sowing violence, institutional christianity has thrived by laundering domination through the language of love and amassing its countless fortune. If we strip away the reverent haze and examine its record plainly, what we find is not a path to heaven, but a structure of conquest— armed with absolutes, obsessed with obedience, and remarkably effective at making the unceasing terrorizing of minority groups look like virtue.

    I live in America, where ancient christian mythology is the current fan favorite. Ancient christian mythology is the one where God invented the idea of sin, and then invented the idea that sacrificing himself in the form of his own son would balance it out. So, while seated in an eternal heaven of his own making, he simultaneously went to earth as his own son to piss off enough politicians and religious leaders that they’d talk the governor into issuing his execution sentence— except he didn’t actually die, he just returned to that eternal heaven where he already was; all while watching it play out like a director watching the final cut of his own movie, because he’s omniscient and already knew what would happen before it happened. Gaslighting is more fun for the psychopath doing it when it’s a long con though, so: christianity is born, invented by 40 guys, borrowing from Judaism, Zoroastrianism, the Roman Imperial Cult, Greek mythology before that, Mithraism, Dionysian cults, and Egyptian mythology.

    It makes so much sense that we’ve raped, pillaged, enslaved, and murdered entire continents of people to set up outposts called churches where you can go to give God money in a thank-you card once a week to help with money laundering and child sexual abuse legal fees. If you don’t participate in obedience under the threat of punishment— despite the aforementioned even-stevening— you’re sentenced to eternal damnation; because God is love. Crusades: 3 million killed. Inquisition: 100,000 killed. Colonization and forced conversion: 100+ million killed. Religious wars: 10 million killed. Witch hunts: 100,000 killed. Christian terror and hate groups in the last hundred years: tens of thousands killed.

    If religion worked, it would have worked by now.

    Despite being the dominant religion on paper, we’re not even an ancient christian mythology nation anyway, though, at least not as its written. Ifwe were, there would be no churches, only homeless shelters, free clinics, and food pantries. If every Christian church took in just two homeless people, we’d end homelessness. If every wealthy ancient christian mythologist sold their jewelry to fund gardens and banned-book libraries, no one would go without food, shelter, care, education, or love. We would be so ubiquitously fulfilled that the slightest heartache would turn heads— and eager to know how we can help— we would begin and end every conversation by asking what more we can do. If we were an ancient christian mythology nation, imagine how quickly our efforts to end each others suffering would result in every need met until even the most arbitrary— until all of our enduring problems were resolved.

    Really though, if Jesus wanted a white christian theocracy, he could have advocated for one. He didn’t. He wasn’t white (no one in the Bible was), he wasn’t American, he wasn’t christian, and he wasn’t a patriot. He was a dark-skinned, homeless, Jewish hippie advocating for equality— and the police murdered him for it. Just like they do today— to anyone who dares utter the words peace and love— because they’ve always been the private military of ruling classes.

    I left the church when I was eight years old, because while I didn’t yet have the words, I felt the repulsive, duplicitous hypocrisy, and the cognitive dissonance was too great to bear. I knew then that we weren’t a christian nation, but a nation of manipulators in search of victims. I knew I had to run. And now, as an adult, when you say you’re a christian, all I wonder is if you’re a manipulator or a gullible victim.See: ‘enlist, entrap, enclose.’

    At best, what I see are scared children in adult bodies mimicking adult behavior. Needing the comfort of group belonging, they cling to unprovable beliefs and build post hoc justifications for the things they want. At worst, I see monsters in human skin suits, delirious in the enjoyment of their several dozen years of using and abusing others, willing to trade a person’s life for a single orgasm, or eternity for a single lifetime.

    Those who say that we’re an ancient christian mythology nation love to argue about whether a translation of ancient Greek verbiage from two thousand years ago justifies hating gay people— while ignoring every other part of the bible they deem outdated. Religious debates about being gay are just distractions from priests raping children and covering it up, and they don’t stop Grindr from spiking in usage at conservative conventions while those same people demonize the queer community. Whatever version of the bible your church uses, the truest translation is always: "give us your money, and do as I say, not as I do."

    For evangelicals especially, the life and teachings of Jesus— liberating the poor, forgiving debt, welcoming outsiders— don’t matter. What matters is his death, and believing in it, because that belief grants them heaven. That’s the part that matters to them— their selfish slice of heaven, not helping others here, now.

    Because of evangelicals, especially, ancient christian mythology— while always a blight on humankind— is now an even more monstrous parody of itself: no longer concerned with salvation, but with exclusion. Not about conversation, but control. It worships belief over behavior, and wealth over wisdom. Rigid adherence to dogma replaces empathy. Questioning is heresy. You’re either the saved or you’re the enemy.

    Their hands around your throat is Jesus. Resisting being strangled is proof of your depravity. Their body on top of you is their God-given right. Fighting back is evil. Your subjugation is their virtue, and saying "no" makes you the villain.

    We’re not an ancient christian mythology nation— but some of us are trying to do better than the hate and terror wrought by religion.

    If you want, you can join this country’s agnostics and atheists in knowing they are nobody, and nothing, while doing all the good there is to be done for the sake of our children’s children— asking nothing in return, much less the promise of divine reward.

    Updated 06.01.25

  • “You should not be afraid of someone who has a library and reads many books; you should fear someone who has one book; and he considers it sacred, but he has never read it.” - Friedrich Nietzsche


    Very briefly— the King James version of the New Testament, completed in 1611 by eight members of the Church of England, was not based on original texts— because none exist. The oldest manuscripts we have were written centuries after the last apostle died, and of the 8,000 or so of these that survive today, no two are identical.

    However, the King James translators didn’t even use these manuscripts. Instead, they revised earlier translations to produce a version acceptable to the king and Parliament. What ancient christian mythologists often consider to be the "Word of God”, is a 17th-century revision of 16th-century translations, drawn from thousands of inconsistent 4th-century copies of lost 1st-century writings by 40 guys over the course of 50 years.

    Despite how insane that is, and despite the fact that the writers of the Bible borrowed from thousands of previous years of cultural and religious influences— reimagining them into a new religion called Christianity— lets actually set that aside. Instead, lets talk about how just the act of stating that the bible communicates an omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent god’s will, is enough to immediately contradict itself.

    All forms of literature are open to interpretation— as demonstrated by the myriad subgroups of even just the ancient christian mythology religions (and contradicting behaviors that manifest themselves therein)— many of which have lead to endless, unspeakable atrocities. If God inspired the writing of the bible, he either 01. couldn’t communicate his intent any better, 02. didn’t know the suffering that it would cause, or 03. doesn’t care to do anything about it.

    01. If he couldn’t communicate any better, then he’s not omnipotent.
    02. If he didn’t know the suffering it would cause, then he’s not omniscient.
    03. If he doesn’t care to do anything about it, then he’s not benevolent.

    If your response is to tell me that your god is a wrathful god, I’m sorry about that, but I’m not a wrathful person, and I don’t want to participate in that with him or you. I’m not interested in your justifications for your wife being your obedient property, for owning slaves, or rape and murder, and I’m not going to pretend with you that the Bible wasn’t written by small men with the manipulative, controlling, punishing desires of their small minds.

    Whichever revision of the Bible that aligns with how you want to feel or what justifies your behavior, I don’t know why anyone would even want the things that you want, much less an immortal deity, and I feel immeasurably sorry for you that you do.

    Here’s the thing. Ancient christian mythology is essentially a synthesis of Jewish messianism, Greek philosophical ideas, Roman political structure, and Near Eastern mystery cults. This blending of influences helped ancient christian mythology spread rapidly and gain broad appeal across different cultures in the Roman Empire, resulting in a religion that reflects not only Jewish prophetic traditions but also the philosophical and religious currents of the broader Mediterranean world:

    At its core, ancient christian mythology inherited its monotheism, prophetic tradition, and moral framework from Judaism— the belief in one God, the coming of a Messiah, and the idea of divine law. From Greek philosophy— particularly Stoicism and Platonism— it absorbed the concept of the Logos (divine reason), the idea of the soul’s immortality, and moral teachings about virtue and self-control. The influence of Roman polytheism and imperial structure is seen in ancient christian mythology’s hierarchical church organization and the adaptation of Roman festivals, such as December 25th— which was originally tied to the festival of Sol Invictus (the Unconquered Sun). Ancient christian mythology also reflects elements of Near Eastern mystery cults like those of Mithras, Osiris, and Dionysus— borrowing motifs of death and resurrection, sacred meals, and ritual purification through baptism.

    To put it kindly, this fusion of religious and cultural elements made ancient christian mythology uniquely adaptable and appealing across the vast and culturally diverse Roman world. Again though— to speak more plainly— believing the hodgepodge is absolutely fucking insane, and adhering to your revised, cherry-picked parts over time isn’t enacting the word of god, it’s enacting your own sad, small desires— to the hindrance and detriment of the human race.

    Updated 06.01.25

  • Facing the unknown, small men will stand over their children under a sky of trillions of galaxies of trillions of stars, claiming to be in possession of the answers and expecting prostration in honor of them and their authority; while large men will hold their children high above them for an unobstructed view, wanting them to be larger.


    Just as still water stagnates, unquestioning adherence to tradition and honoring our fathers is partly what’s keeping us from improving. If you do something because that’s the way your father did it, and his father did it, and his father, remember that by the age of 12 you knew more than all of them combined; or you should have if your education wasn’t replaced with religion and if you were paying attention, and it’s up to you to do better and be better, not to fall in line.

    We’ve created a society that walks on eggshells around those of us who are the slowest to understand and the slowest to change, and it’s going to be the end of us. Our children don’t need to honor us and our traditions and our religions, they need to no longer retrace our footsteps, because it means that they’re just going where we went, or worse, backwards. They need to keep nothing sacred; to learn, and grow, and change, and do better than we did. As a society, we need to stop perpetually accommodating those who cling to the comfort of familiarity to their bitter end, kicking and screaming as we drag them into a future that doesn’t revolve around them.

    My friends who want to be honored because you’re a father, it’s because you’re a narcissist who hasn’t fully matured, who mistakes obedience with respect in the pursuit of your own selfishness. More than that, as human beings, I want to remind you, that you are anxious, you disassociate, you struggle with depression and mood fluctuations; you struggle with stress and trauma, you struggle with developmental disorders and diminished cognitive capacities, you’re forgetful, you’re delirious, you’re intoxicated; you’re schizoaffective, you’re delusional, you’re obsessive, you’re sociopathic; you’re manipulative and desperate for power because you’re so small and inconsequential. You’re insane. We’re insane. We try our best, but we’re insane. Don’t ask your children to honor you, teach them to question you. Teach them everything there is to know, and teach them to question all of it. Want better for them than following in footsteps that you know very well is little more than confused wandering while insisting that you know where you’re going.

    All this to say, my friends, it’s time someone says what you’ve always suspected: your father doesn’t know the secrets of the universe.

  • When I think about religion, I often think about how the entire Aztec empire rose and fell after Oxford university was established. The importance of its customs to all of its people, their clothing, their norms and traditions, the ecstatic frenzy of their beliefs and their buildings and their gods, all of the purposefulness felt in hearts of all of their lives, struck and burnt out like a match.

    This is what I see in religion: some of us worshiping what must be god while others study the feathered-serpent fossil that they found using the scientific method to piece together the history of the earth. Religion— the practice of already-knowing— always giving way to further understanding.

    So, let’s see, we have some of the more popular modern go-to gods like YHWH (no surprise there), or A… ugh, he who shall not be named, (and for most Americans this is quickly transition into reading like I’m just sort of drunkenly smashing my keyboard here, but) Brahma is up there with Vishnu and Shiva and a quick head nod to the Ishvara, as is the classic rivalry of Ahura Mazda vs. Angra Mainyu, then you have Amaterasu, and don’t forget about the Kami, as well as Hayyi Rabbi, and Pachamama still makes it on the list (don’t think that I’d forget about you) and then Ik Onkar transitions us into some of the more revered like Unkulunkulu, Baba Buluku, Chukwu, Xwede, Olorun, the Báb; and then of course there are the gods that fall into the catch-all percentage of a pie-chart like Mother Ann Lee, Xenu, Mawu-Lisa, Quetzalcoatl, and all of the old gods who are making a come-back like Odin, Ra, Simurgh, Tiamat and Asherah (hey why not); and what’s a list of deities without Cthulhu (ph’nglui mglw'nafh chulhu r'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!) An honorable mention for The Flying Spaghetti Monster (Ramen!), and I’ll add Siddhartha Gautama to the list just for good measure, but since I can’t list all of the gods here, especially with regard to of all of the polytheistic animism and shamanism religions that every religion has built on and borrowed from while being shared through the storytelling of the early cognitive revolution, I have to stop somewhere and continue making my point.

    My friends, it’s not a mystery for the ages why there are no kangaroos among the pantheon of Egyptian animal gods. You’re not whatever religion was downloaded into your brain as a child— not 10 thousand years ago, or 2 thousand, or 20. You’re a victim of your parents desperation in the face of ignorance, and their unwillingness to live with the unknown. I’m sorry that the burden falls on you, reading this now, but its already long past time for the human race to unlearn >insert religion.exe here< and be the end of the centuries of madness of playing pretend, so that that we can finally begin the journey of realizing our potential before its too late for us to be what we might have been.

    If you tell me that you’re Christian, my reply is “No you’re not.” That’s just the one that was popular when you were born, where you were born. Whichever religion you were assigned at birth, you’re not— you’re just a person. If i pick you up, spin the globe underneath you, set you back down and rewind time, you’d have been raised to believe that religion; and if I fast forward or rewind time again, that religion yet again, spending your entire life insisting that it’s true. You’re the result of your place and time on the planet, that is, until you snap out of it. What you are, is scared, but your insistence on already knowing what’s out in the darkness is going to be the death of us.

    Updated 06.01.25

Facing the unknown, small men will stand over their children under a sky of trillions of galaxies of trillions of stars, claiming to be in possession of the answers and expecting prostration in honor of them and their authority; while large men will hold their children high above them for an unobstructed view, wanting them to be larger.

  • Religious people regularly argue that their religion is needed, otherwise where would our morality come from— without the constant threat of punishment if we don’t behave— but the answer is that most of us recognize that we just plain don’t have a choice. We can either behave, or the human race will be over by the end of the year. To those who further insist that religion needs to be taught in our schools, I like to remind them that teaching religion in church hasn’t even worked. Much of the hatred we see in our society, and reprehensible crimes that follow, have their origins in religion— so again— kindergarten rules suffice. Play nice, no hitting, take an afternoon nap, and everyone gets a juice box. The kindest people I know are atheist or agnostic, and we’ve all seen even animals stop to help other species of animals in need as proof that sentience itself often means knowing right from wrong, so we already have examples of not needing religion to enact our lives in a way that religion claims to want us to. In other words, we already have proof that it’s not needed.

    More than that, morality is not cultural, and while there is such a thing as moral truth, its not religious truth anyway. EG: cutting peoples heads off for being too logical or for being gay is morally wrong, even though some people, typically religious zealots, think its right. I understand that critical thinking throws a wrench in the works of what they want to believe— typically to their selfish advantage— and I understand that biological evidence upends what they want to believe is a choice, so they’re quick to claim that the Devil must have invented microscopes, and I don’t care. It’s not up to us to contort ourselves to respect their beliefs, its up to them to stop having those beliefs. Again and again, it often comes down to an aggressor learning better, and stopping their desire-driven-behavior in acceptance of the truth, not the embrace of religious perspectives.

    When asked what’s personally keeping me from doing whatever I want if I don’t claim to know if or what god is, what the asker is wondering is why anyone should be good person if they can get away with not being one, but no one should need the promise of a reward to recognize the right thing to do in any given situation— and again— all I see coming from religion is suffering at the hands of man. Religion and belief in god doesn’t stop anyone from behaving reprehensibly anyway. If anything it makes things worse because it gives them the justifications for their actions. Good behavior has to come from within, without promise and without expectation, not be forced under the threat of violence, or it’s just an unsupervised moment away from abandoning itself. What keeps me from doing evil, is that I don’t want to; and for those of us who feel compelled to but don’t, they recognize that selfish behavior hurts others.

    Religion can be replaced in its entirety with empathy, so long as so long as the ensuing kindness doesn’t create an oasis for the intolerance or cruelty of others. That’s it. That can be the whole thing. If there is a god, our minds aren’t even capable of comprehending it, the same as we can’t comprehend what’s beyond the edge of the universe. If there is a god, and if god is anything, I imagine without knowing or needing to know, that god is love. Incomprehensible love. I’ll leave it at that, be content to not know, and behave myself anyway.

    The most common argument that I hear is to just let people believe what they want so long as they’re not hurting anyone, and that would be fine if religions texts were just anthologies of wholesome short stories that provided myriad examples in which one could hop on Mr. Rogers train to visit imagination land, but the untenable result of having beliefs is that people act on them, based on nothing. One can make the argument that every person who has ever lived has been adversely affected by religion, so I can’t accept the adage of living and letting live, because we don’t live in a vacuum, and how so many of us live is to the detriment of everyone else.

    In religion I see nothing but humankind’s desperate need to already-know, and the ugliness of fulfilling our own prophecies. In other words, religion is what’s hurting others, directly and indirectly, and the most important thing we can be doing right now— specifically for the moral good— is putting an end to our acts of believing in all of their hallucinatory forms, before its too late. We’re plagued by wanting to believe something despite all evidence to the contrary, and the effects of our actions taken to uphold these belief’s has been the blight of humankind.

    Updated 06.01.25

  • As I write this, Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris was just christened with a bottle of Krug Rosé as Louis Vuitton Amphitheater, where monsters will now hide the seams of their human skin suits with haute couture before prostrating themselves before the alter of vile artifice as one of the worlds longest-running productions, trembling in the delightful continuation of centuries of picking the pockets of theatergoers after obscuring their sight with holy smoke and distracting them with candlelight glinting from stained glass, before performing the elaborate denouement that they’re known for— the cannibalistic deity-eating ceremony— that leaves audiences convinced that it was worth the twenty bucks they could have sworn was in their wallet when they got there.

    I’ll give those who are religious a couple things: their buildings are magnificent, especially Baha’i temples and Islamic masques in all of their sacredly geometric mosaic splendor. I challenge anyone to walk into Spains Sagrada Família and not be reminded of what they saw on 5 dried grams of Golden Teacher in silent darkness. Also, I once heard a call to prayer that was so breathtaking it stopped me in my tracks, and at least for the time it took for my lungs to fill again, caused me to make the mental note of that intermingling of emotional and intellectual je ne sais qui that arises when ones knees are on the ground. Playing that over a loudspeaker to echo through cities 5 times a day was a masterstroke, and the western world could do well with more humbling reminders of being part of something larger than yourself. It feels good to be part of something that gets your hands dirty.

    Except, you already are, just by having been born, without all of the atrocities behind the beauty. We could have made those buildings libraries, or homeless shelters, instead of churches. More than that, I just can’t imagine being able to create the universe and everything in it, and simultaneously being so petty that I’d want to be worshiped, admitting— just in the proclamation itself of being a jealous god— that theres a better way for even me to conduct myself; and what a coincidence that jealousy and wanting to be worshiped and obeyed just so happens to align with the predominant desire of religious men around the world. What a coincidence, for cruel, jealous men to have a cruel, jealous god that supports their behavior.

    Besides, I then remember that the nests of bower birds are also intricate and delightful, and the singing of subsaharan children joined together as a spontaneously formed a-cappella group for no one and no reason to the background music of passing cars and pedestrians has also given me pause; so I’ll still contest that religion is horrifyingly destructive even more so because it hides behind the allure of walled gardens, that bus stops have seen more moments of honesty than churches, and that love is with you everywhere you go and all that even remains after the dogma of every religion has been eroded away.

    As far as I’m concerned, most religions have just become death cults who pray for things to happen that they could be doing instead of prospering in tax-free luxury. An argument that your church has a food pantry and homeless shelter isn’t an argument; you can have those things as a non-profit without the added costs of the church, and if you’re catholic, it doesn’t explain why your organization is one of the richest entities on the planet. Soup doesn’t cancel out the gruesomeness that buttresses your beliefs, and arguing that other organizations have done bad things doesn’t make yours okay. Religion is a horrific blight on humanity, and I’m not going to pretend with you that it isn’t.

    What I see when I look at religion is the ugliness of man. I see this need for an order that isn’t naturally so complex that it looks messy, but an order that is understandable, controllable, and exploitable. What I see when I look at religion is the pitiful sadness of a man standing over his wife and children with a belt, asking them why they make him do this; and I see churches encouraging those women and children to stay with those men because if people learn how to recognize and leave abuse, they’d also leave the church and take their money with them. Even worse, I see that a man can bludgeon another person to death in the name of his god like a monkey with a stone and no self control, and then put his child to bed with blood stained hands, proud of the world he’s creating for them to inherit.

    The absolute fucking madness of it all.

    Again, whichever religion you were assigned at birth, you’re not; you’re just a person. If I picked you up, spun the earth under you and set you back down, and fast forward or rewind time, you’d just be raised in that religion instead and you’d just as adamantly insist that its true, many of us willing to die for it. What’s true, though, is what remains when all else is stripped away. Treating others as you would be treated requires no religion, and if you don’t live that simply, you get the shit show that religions have created.

    I don’t know how you find it in yourself to overlook the centuries of horror in the name of your transient deities. Brilliant women who threaten the patriarchy, brutally murdered and all but erased form history; thousands of years of people feeling justified in sadistic and barbaric subjugation, oppression, abuse, hate crimes, human sacrifices, beatings, rape, torture, murder, and genocide; lifetimes stolen from us; billions of people treated like pigs lead to slaughter to keep the ruling class fat and happy.

    The abrahamic religions especially are among the most evil, repulsively violent and destructive institutions in the history of humanity. Just the mental abuse alone: being told from birth that you’re going to burn in hell for eternity unless your forgiven by a man in his fanciest Sunday hat— who claims to have the ear of god and can put in a good word for you— just so long as you say sorry just how he likes it and empty your pockets while he pleasures himself under his satin ball gown. Show me your church and I’ll show you congregations in frenzied worship while their tithing is used to pay legal expenses, help launder money for mobs, and make political donations to uphold systems of subjugation that keeps the money coming. Show me your church and I’ll show you all the ugliness of our despair.

    Religion is an incredibly thinly veiled long-con of monsters who walk among us manipulating sad, small men into desperately lying, cheating, and stealing, while limiting knowledge and controlling behavior to stand in the way of a progress that strips them of their morsel of power, just so that they can feel a pathetic little thing that they like to call reverence, and I’m nothing but disgusted and appalled.

    Update 06.01.25

    This is a work of parody/satire. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and intended for comedic or critical purposes only.

  • Gods don’t hate and punish people, people with gods hate and punish people, and since there’s no hate quite like religious love, I have to ask you to keep your thoughts and your prayers to yourself and please just don’t contact me if you’re religious. If nothing else, for an individual to be able say with a confident nod to their reflection in the mirror that they know the secrets of the universe and the will of god— while billions of other people who believe something completely different say the same thing to their reflection— is so absurdly, dangerously psychopathic that the only way I can manage to practice kindness with you is to just not interact with you at all because I’m so beside myself with what to even do with the madness of it all. Your inability to stop playing pretend the way your parents liked to is going to be the death of us all.

    More than that, religion aside and addressing all nonsense, there’s no polite way to tell people that they’re dedicating themselves to delusions and that you don’t want to be put in a position where you have to placate them in an effort to not hurt their feelings, so I’ll just say it: I want nothing but good things for you in life, but I don’t want to date you. I’d prefer that everyone who likes to pretend that the cure to what ails ya is burning sage, going to sleep with a piece of quartz under your pillow, or having someone (who paid 500 dollars to have someone else print a certificate with their name on it that says they have Jedi healing powers) hover their hands over you with a practiced look of anguish to imbue you with positive vibes, also refrain from contacting me. I know that you want to feel like you have some ability to affect the change that you want in a way that’s accessible to you, and grass and rocks are free just about everywhere unless you were tricked into buying them by Gwyneth Paltrow, but it’s not cute, it’s not even funny anymore, and the nonsense that your children grow up seeing you entertained by creates a new generation who internalize it all as viable options and proceed to stand in the way of progress just the same. As banal as you think it is, your insistence on your imaginings is also the problem. Sentences that include the phrase insert-word-here symbolizes insert-word-here are as arbitrary as not even bothering to insert words in the blanks, and drawing straight lines between stars that are hundreds of thousands of light years apart in distance and bare no relation to each other doesn’t explain the nature and nurture of your brain.

    I invite you to join me in placing your energy into a system of support for a generation of stem-fielders who will finally fix the mess we made during what I desperately hope will be affectionally thought of as the human race’s epoch of playtime by members of future generations as they enter into homeostasis chambers for their jump to visit other civilizations, and be grateful that they don’t hold a piece of paper up to that planet’s night sky and start drawing lines between stars that happen to be visible to the naked eye to create rudimentary representations of a random assortment of animals found there. It needs to end, and I’d like for it to end with us.

    Updated 06.01.25

    This is a work of parody/satire. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and intended for comedic or critical purposes only.


  • christofascist

    imagine being born, without choosing,
    in a place, at a time, to a family who raises you
    to inhabit thoughts that aren’t your thoughts
    with a mind that you’re assigned to reckon with.

    imagine the torment of convincing yourself
    what you know to not be true— to be embraced,
    accepted by those who are your only option.
    the comfort of knowing, belonging— being right.

    imagine, then, being hated by those who love
    without condition or hierarchy— a way you can’t,
    your hands around their neck, taking them.
    the proof. the liars, the weak & undeserving—

    “i love you”, they should say with last breaths.
    “i forgive you”, as they caress your hair,
    their hand falling limp— heavy now, the body—
    the words, the life that was taken from you.

    evangelical baby-voice

    your wife, a prostitute— expectation the same—
    she’s handed your script with voice cues &
    with practiced deference & childish vulnerability,
    she performs just what you need to hear

    just how you need to hear it, your naked ego
    trembling as you speak in tongues— serpent-
    handled & flailing before a congregation of two.
    your need— a coiled confession of itself.

    pitiful, diminutive, accommodated once more,
    you lay beside the result of your infantilization—
    revered & reviled, everything that you despise,
    worst of all, willing— in doing, unworthy of you.

    you can’t respect a woman eager to abide—
    & so, money on the bedside table for groceries,
    you lay awake with what you created— her voice
    the proof— she’s only ever playing pretend.

    Updated 06.01.25

  • the NEW & IMPROVED 10 commandments

    01 Worship the God of your reflection
    02 Idolize fascist authoritarians
    03 Impose your will using God’s name
    04 Monetize every breath we take
    05 Once you’re old— you’re useless
    06 Murder everything that moves
    07 Cheating is natural and expected
    08 It’s not stealing if you write the laws
    09 Lie with every word that you utter
    10 Nothing shall ever be enough

    the new lord’s prayer - now with Benzoin!

    “Talk about love blasphemously, and hate your neighbor as an other. Treat them as lesser and undeserving, for you are better, having declared it.
    Don’t forgive, but punish, and endeavor to find those to judge and punish.”

    This is the word of the Lord.

    “Blessed are the vain and fashionable, the proud, the cruel and complicit. Blessed are those who have no empathy and show no mercy.
    Blessed is perpetual persecution and war in the name of righteousness, having declared it.”

    This is the word of the Lord.

    “If you are robbed, it is the personal, moral failing of the perpetrator, and never yours— children are to be born to children and then abandoned;
    responsible for their own care, housing, food, education and fulfillment.”

    This is the word of the lord.

    “Make enemies and hate them, for they are not you. Hate everyone, for they are not you. Conspire in secret, to your own selfish ends;
    store up your treasures to bring with you to a heaven that is only for some.”

    This is the word of the Lord.

    Updated 06.01.25

  • If you’ve never had the opportunity to trace the branch of whatever random religion that your parents downloaded into your brain at birth back to the religions that it borrowed from, and further back to that religions those religions borrowed from, all the way back to the beginning of meeting a world that we didn’t understand with stories that explained it with our imaginations, I’d recommend visiting the website above to see the the most beautiful illustration of the worlds religions that I’ve ever seen— each label representing the lost lifetimes of living and dying for something that each person of each time knew to be true.

    Updated 06.01.25

  • The argument is to stop “proselytizing” for agnosticism because the shared stories of religion build communities, and some of us need their >insert beliefs here< to get through life because the concept of possible nothingness in death is too scary, etcetera.

    My reply is that we don’t live in a vacuum, and we have thousands of years of recorded history showing us what happens to all of us when some of us act on their imaginations. At the time of writing this, a 7 year old boy in Hathras was killed as a sacrifice to god to bring fortune to a school. Globally, this brutality isn’t uncommon, especially against girls, and especially death by bludgeoning. It was less than a lifetime ago that the forced assimilation of indigenous children in boarding schools resulted in the mass graves of those who were starved and beaten in the name of god’s love— behavior that occasionally surfaces as a reminder that it quietly goes on to this day.

    Shared stories, norms, love and social cohesion— don’t require religion— we already have working examples of these as a rebuttal to this argument for the perpetuation of religion. In other words, removing the dogma of religion means removing religion, because we already have the good parts without it.

    I’m sorry that death is scary, but outgrowing our adolescence will take time anyway, so your parents and grandparents can still burn incense, make offerings of milk & honey to statues, and whisper incantations in the language of their place and time that that give them comfort— and their churches can still count on the cashflow of their tithing for child-molestation legal fees, kickbacks, and money laundering— I’m speaking to the future, better versions of ourselves who are looking back at us as children who were afraid of the dark, who we’re barely even a memory to anymore.

    We’re asking them— those future, better versions of ourselves— to stop hindering us, hurting us, and killing us. We’re asking for them to take what’s been pillaged from an earth soaked in our blood, and put it back for the benefit of those that we will never meet, because they should get to finally have what could have always been.

    Updated 06.01.25

“J'en atteste les temps; j'en appelle à tout âge; Jamais au public avantage. L'homme n'a franchement sacrifié ses droits; S'il osait de son cœur n'écouter que la voix, Changeant tout à coup de langage, Il nous dirait, comme l'hôte des bois: La nature n'a fait ni serviteur ni maître; Je ne veux ni donner ni recevoir de lois. Et ses mains ourdiraient les entrailles du prêtre, Au défaut d'un cordon pour étrangler les rois.”

- Denis Diderot, ‘Les Éleuthéromanes’

(“I display the times; I appeal to the age; The public is never advantaged.  Certainly, mankind has not sacrificed its rights; If mankind dared but to listen to the voice of its heart, changing suddenly the language, It would say to us, as it would to the animals of the woods: Nature created neither servant nor master; I seek neither to rule nor to serve. And its hands would weave the entrails of the priest, For the lack of a cord with which to strangle kings.”)

politics

  • Seeing as how this is ultimately just a dating profile, I’m going to essentially keep my thoughts on politics to conversational, reductive generalizations, and preemptively reply to some of your internal dialogue with “you know what I mean.”

    In none of this am I saying that to be progressive is to be above reproach, because we’re all human and we’re all flawed. While progressivism understands that the purpose of communities is to care for each other, it does go too far. As someone who will say some-dozens of times in writing all of this that all there is, is love, I’m baffled by some of the ideas that persist on the far-left. Most notably, these are the defense of islamic extremist groups as something of a phobia akin to homophobia; the obsession with race and ethnicity, seemingly unable to know what to think about an event unless they first know the skin colors of those involved; and the unwillingness to acknowledge that groups of people can become known for certain behaviors by and large because of cultural influences without it being racist to notice as much— as if observational learning is invalid, and every individual presents themselves to you as a complete and utter mystery until becoming intimately familiar with them. Additionally, and something that the far left shares with the far right, seems to be the inability to hold multiple seemingly contradictory things to be true at the same time.

    In the walled gardens of college towns where grocery stores have no bags because they assume you’re bringing your own canvas totes (said a canvas-tote carrier) and rounding up to donate the change of your purchase to whatever cause we feel most guilty about that day, those who embody all of the milquetoast personas of the farthest side of the left forget— or just never really know— how absolutely fucking brutally, violently, mentally deranged many, many of us really are: groups of us, that aren’t just white. Everyone, of every skin color, can be both victim and oppressor, and often simultaneously. In short, the far left must get better at holding onto ideology while also wearing brass knuckles, because having good intent and getting it wrong results in hurting fewer people than having bad intent, which hurts everyone.

    That being said, I can’t count how many times I’ve heard “there are no sides, there’s only money,” told me to by a conservative with a smirk adorning their smug expression— but they’re wrong, and they know that they’re wrong as they say it. Corporatists versus Oligarchs aside, I’m talking about people’s hearts, and in the tyranny or revolution that follows, there really are sides.

    No, democracy isn’t impartial— and it hasn’t been from the beginning of this country— but how they know its not just about money, and that they’re on the wrong side of history, is that while knowing progressives will concede elections, and expect it of us, they also know that they won’t, and lay the groundwork of basis claims of fraud in advance so that they have something to point to if they loose; fraud which always vanishes into thin air when they win. This is how they behave, flipping over the game board once they know they’re going to loose, but counting on us to always be the better man; running to tell everyone that someone ate the blueberry pie that was cooling on the windowsill, and chastise whoever did such a thing for the selfishness of it— the trueness of the statements somehow preventing their constituents from ever pausing to wonder why their fucking lips are blue.

    More than that, no one ever needs to worry about who’s progressive, they need to worry about who’s conservative. We can all work with the flaw of caring too much and allowing for self expression to a point that becomes problematic and needs to be reigned in, but we can’t work with the flaw of hating too much and demanding obedience and conformity with belts and batons.

    To my conservative friends who I know to be well-intended people, when you’re in your foxholes rubbing shoulders with Neo Nazi’s, Klu Klux Klan members, the soldiers of every militia, every hate group, and every instance of oppression in America, I want you to remember that you’re firing at kindergarten teachers who just wanted make sure that your children had breakfast before a great education, doctors who wanted to provide you with universal healthcare like every other western country, artists who tried to make the world a more beautiful place, and progressives of all kinds after having already given you limited work weeks and weekends, minimum wage, social security benefits, disability rights, food and drug safety, and forethought like endangered species protection, as the beginning of a list of things too long to name here that make your life worth living; always fighting against your efforts to get away with a greed without thought or mercy that will be the end of us.

    Conservative outrage and Progressive outrage produce two very different things, and I want you to look at the company that you keep in comparison to the progressives that you’re calling evil scum, and remember that it’s not too late to join those who are fighting for humanism and egalitarianism instead of the subjugation and abuse of those labeled lesser.

    I’m disappointed in you, and ashamed of you, but it’s not too late to experience how much beauty and joy can be carried with unclench fists.”

    I’d like to remind everyone how boring hatred is. It’s simple, and easy, like a warn-out child’s toy with a known solution that one should have grown out of decades ago. Show me hatred and I’ll show you something so predictable that it makes half of us sigh with the exhaustion of our patience with you. Kindness however, is interesting. It’s complex, and different every time, and has multiple ways of arriving at multiple solutions. Show me kindness and I’ll show you an adult displaying their full understanding of what it means to be a person.

    To all of my friends, whichever side you choose, please remember that the person who makes themselves your enemy has a mother who loves them, and awaits their return.

    Updated 06.01.25

  • “One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’re been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” - Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World


    Certified by 50 state Republican and Democratic governors, and also by the U.S. congress, is that Donald Trump lost the election by 7 million votes, despite his response being the only time in our nation’s history that a sitting president of either side didn’t peacefully transfer power. His challenges in the courts failed, and after Republican investigation, the 2020 election was discovered to have been the most secure American election in history.

    Following that, Fox News Network, LLC (Fox Corporation) was later forced to pay a 787.5 million dollar defamation settlement for knowingly repeating Donald Trump’s lies, acknowledging that claims about Dominion machines were false— the largest known defamation settlement ever paid by a U.S. media company.

    What this has revealed, is just how easy it is to bamboozle so many. It’s terrifies me. As far as I’m concerned, Americans in red baseball caps are the most dangerous animal on the planet, not because we don’t see this mentality elsewhere, but because of who we are to the world, and how many of us are so easily fooled.

    I’m terrified that the large egos of small men will be our undoing as they endeavor to make America (a place where women are men’s obedient property to use for sex and sandwich-making, and aren’t allowed to have a bank account) Again!

    Updated 06.01.25

  • “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’” - Mr. Rogers


    For those of us who woke up on November 6th to the beginning of American theocratic authoritarianism, please remember, despair is a powerful tool. Those who’s desire is to conquer you, mind body and soul, need you to give up all hope— but if your fight was hopeless, an endless deluge of lies, miss-information, fear mongering, and conspiracy theories wouldn’t be necessary to keep their constituents confused and fearful, and looking to them for solutions to problems that don’t exist.

    More than that, always remember, you’re not a finished person. There is no final iteration of your being that anyone can point to as having defeated you. Continue daring to exist in defiance of the insistence that you’re not deserving, that you don’t belong, that you must be unheard and unseen, that you’re less, and that you’re not even a person.

    Think of every woman burned alive to the joy of onlookers wearing every iteration of history’s red baseball caps, or locked in a prison that she’s forced to call a home in service of her guard, or beaten to death for the moral infraction of covering herself wrong. Think of every single person outcast as a deviation from the societal norms of their place and time while simultaneously contributing the most to this world as scientists, artists, engineers, mathematicians, biologists, teachers, and helpers of every kind. I can’t know how everyone reading this can do their part, but fight, in even the smallest way available to you.

    Remember that we are a field of wildflowers that has been turned into a lawn. Poisoned and kept in a suspended state of adolescence, they call it natural, call it order, and call it right; but the inarguable natural order is what the lawn replaced— diverse, wild, and free— forever returning.

    Updated 06.01.25


    Contact me if you’re a verifiable helper looking for helpers.

  • “As democracy is perfected, the office of the President represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be occupied by a downright fool and complete narcissistic moron.” - H. L. Mencken, The Baltimore Evening Sun, July 26, 1920


    Imagine raising your children for 18 years, followed by sending them to college to learn their respective vocation, and then petulantly and credulously ignoring everything that they have to say in self-deceived favor of whatever gibberish falls out of the mouth of an impeached, narcissistic, racist, misogynistic, perpetually bankrupt, convicted felon con artist, civilly liable sexual abuser who verifiably lies during every 3rd-grade-literacy-rate rant and makes no effort to even hide his depravity, followed by doing your best to scream the war-cry “You think you’re better than me!?” despite your limited ability for precise vocal articulation, before flinging yourself exuberantly from the citadel of vice and selfishness to defend him and do his bidding— as though bigotry is an unassailable way of life and your ignorance is as valid as their knowledge.

    When I look at Donald Trump, all I see is the cleverest ape in the troop, being observed by humans who see him for who he is in a way that the other apes can’t. I see the cleverest third grader in the class, being observed by adults who see him for who he is the way that the other 10 year olds can’t. He’s the troop leader that had a spark of a thought unique to its species, or the class clown who overheard adults talking and figured out just a little bit of something at a very young age— just enough to make even the smartest of his classmates go quiet and wide eyed when he talks because its beyond them even though it’s just ad-libbed bullshit expounding on his morsel of grown-up thoughts.

    He reminds me of the kid in elementary school who spent the summer in Mexico and memorized every swear word so well that he could string them together just randomly enough so as to sound like sentences— and trick everyone into thinking that he spoke fluent Spanish even though it was just “bitch asshole dumbass dick bastard whore shit fuck moron goddamn.” That’s all Trump is— the kid speaking fake Spanish to the other kids who don’t know any better, and follow him around because of it.

    The problem is that he also happens to be a disgusting, reprehensible, narcissistic, duplicitous sociopath who’s using his audiences attention to cajole them by normalizing their worst character traits. He’s the seven deadly sins all in one, making you feel okay about them in yourself, and making you want to raise up against your homeroom teachers because they’re trying to tell you that you can’t do all the things you want to do. He’s convinced the worst of his classmates that the teacher is evil for wanting them to behave, to get behind him because he knows something that no one else does, and everyone in the class that’s on the teachers side is soon gonna find out what.

    Of course, he doesn’t know something, the teacher isn’t evil, and all he’s accomplished is getting half of his classmates riled up— the ones that are otherwise good kids but are maybe a little more gullible, maybe a little too trusting, prone to conspiracy theories because they weren’t paying attention in science class and don’t know how things work, or they’re just not quite smart enough even though they’re not a bad person— the conservatives, the ones who need to think they have things figured out because its too scary not to, who just want things to stay how they are because life is changing too quickly, who want to feel special and part of something— and in control even though they’re just another kid in a classroom in a world that they don’t yet understand— who rally behind the class clown who seems to have figured something out, and elect him as class president. Maybe he’ll get the teacher to stop making their brains hurt. Maybe now every day can be pizza day.

    Updated 06.01.25

    This is a work of parody/satire. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and intended for comedic or critical purposes only.

  • This is why:

    No one wants to admit that they’ve been wrong their whole life.

    To do so would mean acknowledging that their beliefs, their identity— maybe even their entire existence— was misled, misused, or wasted. That kind of self-confrontation is its own kind of death: emotional suicide.

    At the same time, many of these people already feel abandoned, replaced, humiliated, and forgotten by a world that has moved on without them. They're cornered— trapped between the grief of a wasted life and the terror of change. Either way, who they thought they were is gone.

    Then, someone like Trump comes along and offers a solution— not truth, but anesthesia. He gives them permission to hate, to blame, and to lash out. He tells them that they're not the problem— the others are. He rewrites history and destroys all the evidence to the contrary so they don’t have to feel bad about themselves. He seduces them with cruelty disguised as strength, and promises them vengeance disguised as salvation. All they have to do is fear clarity itself and take him at his word. In return, they can feel righteous again. Powerful again. Central again.

    It’s a choice between facing the unbearable truth— that your story was wrong, your values were manipulated, and your pain was used against you— or, clinging to the lie— because the lie flatters you. Protects you, and lets you keep living without changing. Lets you think of intelligence as disrespecting your feelings, and evidence as a grift against your beliefs.

    For many, moral destruction is easier than emotional destruction. It's easier to blame than to grieve, and easier to project than to look inward. So, they choose the lie, because the truth would hurt too much. Even as he takes everything from them and makes their life more difficult in every way, they’ll never admit to voting against their own best interest for the person who made them feel like they were somebody.

    This is why Trump’s appeal isn’t about logic or policy— it’s about trauma manipulation. He doesn’t fix people’s pain; he causes it and then weaponizes it. He doesn’t challenge their delusions; he becomes the patron saint of them.

    “It’s not your fault,” he says. “You were right all along. Just follow me, and you’ll never have to feel obsolete again.”

    In one hand, Trump is just another in a long line of conservative religious poisoners calling it medicine— and they praise him for it. They see how sick they are, and they’re willing to fight anyone trying to take the poison away.

    This is how cults work. This is how fascism rises— not because people are stupid, but because they’re facing death after a life that was stolen from them, and they’re desperately reaching for something— anything— that validates them. This is what makes Tump so effective:

    In the other hand— someone finally gave them a story in which they pull through.

    Updated 06.01.25

We are a field of wildflowers that has been turned into a lawn. Poisoned and kept in a suspended state of adolescence, they call it natural, call it order, and call it right; but the inarguable natural order is what the lawn replaced— diverse, wild, and free—
forever returning.

  • “We have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the whole world—a nation of bullies and bastards who would rather kill than live peacefully. We are not just Whores for power and oil, but killer whores with hate and fear in our hearts. We are human scum, and that is how history will judge us. . . . No redeeming social value. Just whores. Get out of our way, or we’ll kill you. Well, shit on that dumbness. George W. Bush does not speak for me or my son or my mother or my friends or the people I respect in this world. We didn’t vote for these cheap, greedy little killers who speak for America today—and we will not vote for them again in 2002. Or 2004. Or ever. Who does vote for these dishonest shitheads? Who among us can be happy and proud of having all this innocent blood on our hands? Who are these swine? These flag-sucking half-wits who get fleeced and fooled by stupid little rich kids like George Bush? They are the same ones who wanted to have Muhammad Ali locked up for refusing to kill gooks. They speak for all that is cruel and stupid and vicious in the American character. They are the racists and hate mongers among us—they are the Ku Klux Klan. I piss down the throats of these Nazis. And I am too old to worry about whether they like it or not. Fuck them.” - Hunter S. Thompson


    Progressives only exist because conservatives exist, otherwise we’d just be called people. The intolerance from progressives that you see is the act of no longer tolerating conservatives and their intolerance.

    I say intolerance, because the Republican party doesn’t even have an agenda anymore. They’ve devolved into nothing more than a marketplace for every hate group with the common defense of their prerogative to be in control of those who they perceive to be lesser than them, and smothering any progressive efforts to get out from under them and flourish as continually better versions of ourselves.

    In other words, progressives are the equal and opposite reaction to conservative oppression and insistence on the status quo, fighting back in the interest of one day achieving actual freedom and equality, instead of the privilege for a few that we call freedom. To continue the elementary school analogy, progressives are just the kids minding their own business on the playground— the future biologists looking at bugs and leaves, the future artists drawing in sidewalk chalk, etcetera, and the conservatives are the playground bully and his gaggle of useful idiots that cheer him on while he knocks the books out of the hands of the introverts, destroys science projects to own the libs, and punches kids of their lunch money.

    In practice, conservatism has overwhelmingly aligned itself with the preservation of hierarchies and the oppression of out-groups— historically, globally, and across nearly every major societal structure. Conservatives are almost always the oppressor, specifically because they position themselves as such.

    No matter what place or time in history, conservatism is essentially nothing more than the pursuit of the selfish interests of a self-proclaimed elite class at the cost of everyone, abided by a religious and undereducated population that votes against their own interests thinking that the preservation of things as they are is good thing. Behind the facade however, are the mechanics of what keeps it’s supporters oppressed just the same as those who see it for what it is and are trying to fight back against it.

    We overthrew the divine right of kings, and now we’re trying to overthrow the divine right of men, the exploitative lie of the free market, and the endless war— all of it coming from the same mentality, that most deserve to suffer so that some can have it all. All is see in conservatism is the desire to control and maintain control, regardless of what’s being maintained. I see the desire to be on top of other people, doing as they please, because it’s perceived to be their god give right— and then to call evil and immoral anyone who tries to push them off, because using and abusing others is a deeply cherished tradition thats perceived to be the natural order of things— which is destroyed by equality and diversity. This is the conservative perspective: that It’s evil to dismantle the oppressive institutions that keep people undereducated, and it’s immoral to not let them lie and spread disinformation that takes advantage of that carefully curated population of undereducated people. Wanting everyone to prosper doesn’t work, just let them sabotage any efforts to make it work as part of their self-fulfilling prophecy, because prosperity is just for some, who earn it, obediently, through the proper channels in the proper ways, and are allowed it.

    In the Republican desire to make America Great again, I see the fight to make American the 1950’s again, where men had fewer haircuts to choose from than modern North Korea, where women weren’t allowed to drive or wear pants, where anything that wasn’t white was dirty, where no one was gay or autistic or allowed to deviate from an established norm in any way without being ridiculed or punished or drugged or killed. Except, it was female mathematicians that got us to the moon and did all the cooking and cleaning and typing for men who never learned how because they were too busy being important, and it was a multicolored nation of immigrants that served unseen from back rooms, while lifetime same-sex partners abound under the guise of being roommates, along with undiagnosed mental health issues that could have been easily helped or accommodated resulting instead in suicide, and some of the most creative of us were literally turned into drooling automatons made to sit alone in a room in an asylum because brilliance was treated as lunacy by minds that couldn’t understand it or saw it as a threat to their dominance. This is what conservatism is: minds that don’t understand the natural complexity of the world around them, trying to solve it by forcing everyone to sit still and face forward, walk in single file, wear uniforms, obey, know your place; all under the omnipresent threat of punishment for your skirt being too short or your hair being too long or your music being too excitable; for daring to fall in love with the wrong person, for daring to try to be something, anything at all.

    My Republican friends, we’ve already tried all that, and it didn’t work. Everything you see in our society that seems new, isn’t— it’s always been here, it just wasn’t allowed to be. Unless you fit a mold, you weren’t consider a part, even though almost no one fits the mold, and the anger that you see from the progressives that you’re calling evil is what where calling no longer tolerating your intolerance. We’re no longer going to accommodate your need for monotone uniformity in an effort to not upset you and your conflated sense of self. You also have a mental health issue thats been left untreated, and we’re trying to help you just the same, because your particular brand of disorder is killing us all. Every conservative norm and policy decision is meant to beat us down into submission, to keep us dumb, poor, and distracted; and despite being able to look back at a history of verifiable lies to support the wanton cruelty, you— in your desperate need for things to be the same and never change— ignore that nothing is okay and call it good, and ignore that no one feels safe and call it right, and its killing us all. I love you, but we’re going backwards because of you. You’re trying to recreate a world that’s not worth living in, and the blood of everyone who’s killed by you for not looking like your reflection in the mirror, or who takes their own life because they’ve tried to contort themselves to fit your image for you and can’t keep trying anymore, is on your hands.

    I want to live in a country where my republican friends realize that conservatism only appeals to those who need a hierarchical structure of clearly defined roles— with themselves placed at the top— despite the need for unceasing control and punishment to maintain what they want to believe is a natural order, or else it all falls apart. That oppression isn’t a solution to what you don’t understand. I want to live in a country where individuals who have previously voted Republican wake up to the game in such numbers that no amount of gerrymandering will ever be enough to for a Republican to be elected ever again— where they realize that all progressives want is to help pull the oppressors off of them, and give them everything that they need— where we’re no longer even Progressives, we’re just people, realizing out potentials, supportive of each other in all of our diversity, in the one and only true, natural state of being. One that does’t require convincing or maintaining, because it’s true.

    This is all I see: progressives just want to live and let live in support of each other, and conservatives just won’t allow it, in every place on earth, in every time in our history. In America, Republicans continue to try and force themselves on the population and tell them to just lay back and enjoy it as long as its happening, becoming increasingly more violent as we don’t, and then call progressives evil for pushing them off of us because being on top of us is a deeply cherished part of their American dream. We don’t give a fuck what you cherish, though, we’re no longer going to take it, and we’re no longer going to tolerate your intolerance.


    We are a field of wildflowers that has been turned into a lawn. Poisoned and kept in a suspended state of adolescence, they call it natural, call it order, and call it right; but the inarguable natural order is what the lawn replaced— diverse, wild, and free— forever returning.

    Updated 06.01.25

  • “…the great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is… the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.” - Martin Luther King, Jr.


    My progressive friends, we can no longer cultivate negative peace among our family and friends by remaining silent in response to the lies of their unceasing search for a moral justifications of their selfishness.

    Remember though, despite tumultuous emotions, the only proven path forward is patience and kindness. Keep in mind that conservatives genuinely believe that they are helping others by not helping them, despite the world now being almost punishably impossible to thrive in. For some, cruelty is the point— but for many— they don’t understand that so many of their fellow Americans have been held back— from birth— from ever succeeding. They don’t understand that the success of others doesn’t diminish their own hard work or deserving— which is not an irredeemable flaw. See: ‘some people are just plain better than other people, and deserve more’

    I’ve found it helpful to imagine everyone of every age as a 6 year old that was forgotten to be picked up from kindergarten on a late fall day; shivering, scared and alone in the gathering dark, with only what they’ve retained from class and what they’ve experienced with their parents as a well of ability to draw from in their effort to mentally and emotionally navigate the inexplicable suffering of their predicament.

    With such little resources, we stay where we are; and we are— all of us— so much closer to being confused kindergarteners biting our lips to hold back tears and in need of comforting than the adults that we play dress-up and imagine ourselves to be. In this way, I hope that I’m doing my part to meet others in our shared humanity, and not validate or placate the death-throes of hatred that we’re currently enduring all around us, but instead help alleviate our collective suffering one small moment at a time.

    My conservative friends, my fatal flaw is caring too much, and your fatal flaw is being gullible. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, because to be gullible is to be trusting, but it does mean that you’re easily tricked and exploited by liars who want to be taken at their word. It allows your kings and priests to lie with every breath they take, and get away with it; but it does’t just affect your lives, it affects all of us. Your gullibility affects all of us.

    My conservative friends, there’s space for all of us at the table. There’s space for both you, and those who’s existence doesn’t align with the strict absolutes that you patrol, especially because it’s the deviations from the norm that move humanity forward. We’re what make life worth living, and you’re denying our existence, and you’re killing us. You’re forever killing us to accommodate the imagined order of a place and a time, and it’s time for you to let the natural order return. See: ‘the beneficial failures of accurate copying’

    Updated 06.01.25

  • Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. - John Steinbeck
    This country has socialism for the rich, and rugged individualism for the poor. - Martin Luther King Jr.
    Democratic Socialism means that we must create an economy that works for all, not just the very wealthy. - Bernie Sanders


    All words spoken, Democratic Socialism is/Social Democracies are: legislated pragmatism and empathy. Conservatives hear the word legislated and reach for the shotgun above their mantel, because empathy is weakness, and unbridled selfishness is their god given right. Democrats hear the word legislated and agree that we need a system in place to keep the worst and most selfish inclinations of humankind in check, in the interest of remaining unreservedly empathetic.

    The persistent lie of the ruling class is that a Social Democracy somehow prevents you from dreaming or doing, which of course it doesn’t. We all remain free to peruse our potential, start a business, invent, create, and prosper— nothing is holding you back— all it asks of you is to care about other people. That’s why they tell this lie, because it scares people into voting against their best interest, instead of using their political democracy to gain economic democracy, and force the wealthiest to contribute their fair share. To avoid this, the elite will destroy democracy itself and turn to Fascism. In other words, some of us are so fucking ugly inside, that instead of making someone a sandwich with ingredients that they have and didn’t even earn, they’d rather see them starve to death. So here we are full circle, all words spoken: legislated pragmatism and empathy.

    Oh course, we have working examples of Social Democracies, in countries where the citizens report enjoying the highest quality of life (i.e. the nordic countries of Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Iceland; making note of Germany, France, and New Zealand) but what keeps the United States from adopting this form of governance is selfishness and a lack of trust by the untrustworthy.

    By and large, conservatives distrust the government, because they distrust people, because they know themselves to be untrustworthy. They’re afraid that what’s good for everyone won’t align with what they want, which is true, because part of what they want is to believe the myth of upward mobility and that working hard results in financial success— despite having endless examples of doing everything right and still not succeeding— and above all, that economic inequality is natural; which is why they work so hard to make sure that only some people receive a good education and access to opportunities, because it fulfills their prophecy that they really are just better, more hard working people.

    The entire function of Republican lobbying and gerrymandering works to this end. To poison and mow the American lawn, even though the individual success that they espouse would really be achieved by helping everyone flourish equally; again worth noting that nowhere in Social Democracies are people’s individual freedoms or personal responsibilities taken away, nor are they prevented from dreaming and doing. That’s just it, nothing is taken from them, everyone just has more, equally, and we can’t have that in the United States because then some people just plain don’t get to feel better than everyone else, even if the only reason that they’re on top is because they’re stepping on other people’s backs.

    As outlined under other subject headings: we have everything that we need for everyone to have everything that they need, and every day we wake up to a country of homelessness, hunger, substance abuse, and crime that conservatives claim that they want so badly to see the end of, is a choice.

    Call it an overgeneralization, call it a mischaracterization, but we have proof that our most enduring problems can be ameliorated to the benefit of us all. They’re manufactured, by conservatives, for conservatives, for the love of the word deserve. We have our examples of a system that actually works by the people and for the people; working now— just in other countries.

    In a dimension of the multiverse with me as your president, the following is a list of of initiatives on my agenda.


    Regular fireside chats with the American people to facilitate honest communication;
    Abolish gerrymandering, and institute a one-person one-vote electoral system;
    Promote social reform that cultivates and supports community, kindness, and love;
    Institute 4 year term limits for the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial branches;
    Replace forever-wars and the military industrial complex with economic partnerships;
    Institute universal healthcare with no exception of pre existing conditions;
    Expand paid family medical leave and mental health services;
    Cap prescription drug prices and legalize psychedelics;
    Reduce mass incarceration by focusing on decriminalization and rehabilitation;
    Create clear, accessible pathways to citizenship;
    Initiate policies to strengthen unions and increase minimum wage;
    Pivot from fossil fuels to regionally appropriate, environmentally friendly energy solutions;
    Expand public spaces and institute a right to roam policy;
    Invest in key infrastructure resilience and modernization, emphasizing public transportation;
    Institute a free self-paced online college education program, tested through state universities;
    Decriminalize homelessness and institute a nationwide shelter program;
    Tax churches, and close corporate tax loopholes;
    Adopt the metric system, end daylight savings time, and regulate data privacy.


    My Hallmark Initiative will be to enact a nation-wide environmental restoration program—
    which at its core, will endeavor to see all lawns replaced with native landscape.

    Updated 06.01.25


    Contact me and tell me what I’m missing, or why these things are detrimental to our society.

the smallest hour

  • “We are all just walking each other home.” - Ram Dass


    If the last piece of a biological puzzle being fit into place is what allows for the possibility of consciousness to temporarily flicker into existence before being extinguished upon its decomposing— and there’s nothing after this if for no other reason than the inability to be aware of it— then, conversation over. However, with regard to thought experiments and waxing poetically, sometimes I imagine that my moment of death means that I’ll go home.

    Sometimes I imagine that human beings grow, bloom, and die the same as perennial flowers. Again and again, we go dormant in our rhizomes until the next cycle of life and death, each time the same but different, again and again— the same age our whole lives— our bodies just growing and dying around us.

    Sometimes I imagine that being human is like being a caterpillar, and that death is a safe cocoon for our metamorphosis into what we're meant to become.

    Sometimes I hope that I’ll get to explore the entirety of the universe and everything in it from every perspective and every time, until I’ve exhausted myself like a child staying up too late to read just one more chapter under the covers with a flashlight.

    I’ve mentioned this several times, but it bares repeating, that often when I’m when I’m sitting with someone, I imagine us as an eternal soul speaking to an eternal soul, experiencing bodies soon gone and forgotten. The world that we’ve created makes it almost impossible to do that, though— to live how I want to live. It’s too much, and there’s no place for it, and I’m soon reminded of being contained within the confines of a tangibility that destroys the poetry of how I imagine life can be.

    In early 2021 I read a social media post that said “I hope death is like being carried to your bedroom when you were a child & fell asleep on the couch during a family party. I hope you can hear the laughter from the next room.” OP had a private instagram, so I don’t know their name, but thank you lovely stranger, your words have stayed with me for years now.

    Funny thing, that. How a small thought in a moment, shared with some, reaches people who we’ll never meet and alters enumerable, unknowable, unseen lives. I think that we should be mindful of that, in all that we say and do, with the knowledge that soon we will all die. Its expecting a lot of ourselves, but it won’t stop me from trying and failing, and trying again, and hoping that you’ll join me.

    All this to say, lets just be a couple of goofs with good intent, and let everything else come and go. If I die before you do, just leave my body in in the woods until, as Emily Dickinson wrote, the moss reaches my lips and covers up my name, and let yourself fall in love again. Nothing about you should end with me. Your love is not finite, and your love is not mine.

    Updated 06.01.25


    Contact meIf you feel sung into existence by those with universes beating in their chests whose language is that of showing, and your body is a sanctum of primordial language that you return to inhabit from sleep, stirring into wakefulness as they begin to speak.

  • There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about death— its inescapable inevitability, what to do with the rest of my time here, and my frustration with how much of our lives are stolen from us. We’re trapped in an insatiable capitalist prison that has already consumed our futures to perpetuate the lie of infinite growth— most of our dreams permanently relegated to someday. I think about all of the things that we’d rather be doing with our lives than spending every waking moment either justifying our right to exist to anyone who appoints themselves authoritarian, or struggling with the act of existence itself through the monetization of our every breath— disallowed from any alternative. The travesty of wasted lifetimes.

    Yet, with all the confidence of a child who didn’t know enough to know that he couldn’t do it, I’ve done everything I’ve ever wanted in my lifetime. That’s not to say that I don’t have more places I’d like to visit, more to create, or that I wouldn’t still love to do things I haven’t even imagined, but it is to stand back and acknowledge what a privilege it’s been to have had a thought— and the confidence to act on it— to fruition or educational failure, every time.

    I’ve spent most of my life seeing how much more I can give away without having less, knowing that eventually I’ll be the final thing, and as someone who knows the inner violence it takes to remain gentle in a society that wants you to live in constant fear of punishment for any deviation from any current norm— what it feels like to emotionally gut yourself and wake to try again— I like to think that having already mostly rid myself of possessions, having been so fortunate to do the things I felt compelled to do, and having already died in practice as best I could each time, I can do it one final time with open arms.

    If my death isn’t sudden— if I’m granted the gift of a prognosis— I want it to be known that I refuse to transfer my life savings into the bank accounts of a hospital network and pharmaceutical companies. I’ll tie up my loose ends, give my organs to those who will see the sunrise after my death, and give my money to those who are trying so hard to live unmolested in a world that consumes their lifetime taking its sad, myopic desires out on them.

    This profile itself is my testament, and my only will is to give back everything that I can in every way that I can manage in the remainder of my lifetime. Even though sometimes all we have to give are quiet moments of kindness, they’re often loud enough to echo through the corridors of other’s future days, and I’d like for you to join me.

    06.01.25

  • “This is how it works. You're young until you're not, and you love until you don't, and you try until you can't, and you laugh until you cry, and you cry until you laugh, and everyone must breathe until their dying breath.” - Regina Spektor


    Despite being so verbose herein, I spend most of my waking hours quietly left without words. Life is such an absolutely beautiful fucking gift that we should be spending every day in awe, grateful and making the most of it; but instead, our lives are stolen from us, and what little time remains between the thieving is spent reliving the past and reimagining a future who’s every iteration will plausibly never be, playing make-believe about what’s out in the darkness and acting on it, hateful and pitiful, and sitting in front of a glowing screen— calling it all having lived.

    From a scientific perspective we’re sentient stardust, and from a religious approach we’re an eternal soul temporarily experiencing life in a body sitting before an eternal soul temporarily experiencing life in a body, with infinity behind us, and infinity awaiting our return. We forgot that we’re impossible, and yet here we are.

    We deserve better than lives of subjugation meant to help physically manifest the hallucinations of those who want to be wealthy and powerful.

    This is what I want, in the end. I want to help establish a society of humanism and egalitarianism; I want the human race to collectively shrug off those who hinder and hurt us for their own selfish satisfaction— abandoning the adolescence of our beliefs for only what’s true in an effort to finally begin realizing our potential. I want nothing more than to find the words to help us be who we might have been.

    This is how we’ll do it— this is how love will win.

    Updated 06.01.25


    Contact me and tell me what you’d like to say, but it’s curled up and sleeping at the back of your throat because you have’t found someone who will listen. I will, and if you want a reply I’ll reply. If not, I’ll sit quietly with you until the fire dies out.

I want to help establish a society of humanism and egalitarianism; I want the human race to collectively shrug off those who hinder and hurt us for their own selfish satisfaction— abandoning the adolescence of our beliefs for only what’s true in an effort to finally begin realizing our potential. I want nothing more than to find the words to help us be who we might have been.