Why I Walked Away from WWE

Here’s something you may not know about me: I used to be a huge pro wrestling fan. I started with WCW, but then they got bought out by WWF (now WWE.) I knew it was all bullshit storylines and bullshit feuds, but it was entertaining. After so many years though, I drew a line. The entire illusion died when WWE partnered with Saudi Arabia.

People frame the deal as a moral lapse or a bad PR move. It wasn’t. It was capitalism doing exactly what it’s designed to do. Capital does not care where money comes from, only that it comes. When accumulation is the highest value, repression becomes just another market.

The Saudi shows weren’t “global expansion.” They were sportswashing: using spectacle to launder the image of a state built on censorship, executions, and violence against dissenters. WWE didn’t wander into that role accidentally, it accepted it enthusiastically, signed long-term contracts, and adjusted its product to fit the needs of power.

And this is where the “it’s just wrestling” defense collapses. WWE actively reshaped its content” editing women’s gear, limiting performers, scrubbing chants, rewriting narratives. That’s not neutrality. That’s discipline. Capital always demands discipline, especially from bodies.

Which makes sense because WWE has always been a factory that runs on bodies.

Wrestlers are classified as “independent contractors” while being controlled like employees. Injuries are treated as costs of doing business. Unionization is crushed before it can form. Careers are shortened, pain is normalized, and the company walks away clean. The Saudi deal didn’t contradict this model, it extended it. If workers’ bodies can be consumed for profit, why not public conscience too?

What WWE exposed is something bigger than wrestling. Under capitalism, there is no ethical entertainment, only profitable entertainment. Values exist only until they interfere with revenue. Empowerment is a slogan. Progress is branding. Human rights are negotiable.

Boycotting WWE isn’t about pretending my absence would topple a billion-dollar corporation. It was about refusing to play my assigned role as passive consumer while capital uses spectacle to anesthetize atrocity. Capital wants you entertained, distracted, and grateful, never asking where the money comes from or who pays the price.

I miss wrestling. But what I miss was never just the product. It was the illusion that something I loved existed outside the logic of extraction and domination. The Saudi deal shattered that illusion completely.

WWE didn’t betray its fans. It told the truth about itself. And once you see that truth — that capital has no red lines, only price points — you can’t unsee it.

Walking away wasn’t purity. It was clarity.

Why I Believe in God

I’ve recently joined a new church. For the longest time I refused to go to church. It wasn’t that I lost my belief in God or anything of that nature. As the saying goes, “I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.” It was a lot of that for me. I experienced being bullied in church as well as witnessing racism in the church. After that, I swore I’d never attend another Baptist church. And with the exception of funerals and the occasional Christmas, I haven’t.

I was asked by a dear friend why I believe in God in the first place. I’ve thought about this a lot and I hope I can answer this here and now. You see, people expect belief in God to come with sunshine, hymns, and an emotional montage about “finding peace.” That’s never been my story. I don’t believe because life is beautiful. I don’t believe because everything makes sense. I believe because the world often feels like a meat grinder, and I refuse to accept that this is all there is.

For me, belief isn’t about evidence. It’s not about some philosophical proof that wraps the universe in a neat bow. It’s not about doctrine, denomination, or the kind of theological gymnastics that some people use to win arguments. My belief is simpler and much more stubborn: I reject the idea that this life, with all its cruelty, absurdity, and chaos, gets the final word.

When you’ve seen enough of the world’s ugliness, you reach a fork in the road. One direction says: “This is it. Meaning is an illusion. Suffering is the point. Eventually we all vanish and nothing matters.” Plenty of thinkers I admire lean into that: Cioran, Schopenhauer, Ligotti. They saw the darkness clearly. But even they never managed to convince me that the darkness is absolute.

The other direction says “Maybe the absurdity isn’t the whole picture. Maybe the pain isn’t the whole story. Maybe something exists beyond the mess.” That “maybe” is where my belief lives.

I don’t need a heaven with golden streets or a God with a perfect PR team. I just need the possibility — the hint — that existence isn’t limited to this bleak stretch of highway we’re traveling. That there’s depth behind the veil. That suffering isn’t the only language the universe speaks.

Call it faith. Call it refusal. Call it philosophical stubbornness. I believe in God because the alternative feels too small for the scale of human experience … too empty, too bleak, too final. If this life is just pain, noise, and entropy on repeat, then the whole thing collapses under its own weight. I believe because I need there to be something more, something better, something that outlasts the cruelty.

And that’s enough for me.

More Anarchist or Communist?

I’m firmly rooted in my beliefs as an anarcho-communist, but what does that mean? Am I an anarchist or a communist? How can one be both? Every political label has a built-in identity crisis, but few produce quite as much confusion as anarcho-communism. People squint at it like it’s a glitch in the ideological matrix: “Are they more anarchist or more communist? Which part matters more?”

Here’s the honest answer: you can’t pull the two apart without breaking the whole thing. Anarcho-communists aren’t halfway between the two. They’re the union overlap in the Venn diagram. Let’s break it down:

Anarchism: The Method

Anarchism begins with one foundational argument: hierarchy is not self-justifying. If someone claims the right to rule you, the burden of proof is on them. And good luck making a convincing case.

For anarchists, freedom isn’t something the state grants. It’s something the state obstructs. No kings, no presidents, no vanguards, no bosses, no landlords. Human beings coordinate their own lives without coercive authority. So when anarcho-communists talk about society without a state, they aren’t being edgy. They’re being consistent.

Communism: The Goal

Take the classic communist vision:

No classes

No private ownership of the means of production

No wage labor

No markets

No state

Marx called this the “higher phase of communism.” The endpoint. Anarcho-communists don’t disagree with that goal. They disagree with the path.

Where Marxists-Leninists picture a transitional state to shepherd you into communism, anarcho-communists see the contradiction immediately: You can’t build a stateless society by strengthening the state.

To them, that’s like saying the way to eliminate fire is to pour gasoline on it “temporarily.”

So which matters more? This is the fun part:

They’re anarchists in strategy and communist in outcome.

If you ask Marxist-Leninists then anarcho-communists are “too anarchist” because we reject the transitional state.

If you ask a market anarchist they’re “too communist” because we reject markets entirely.

If you ask an anarcho-communist then we’ll tell you the question is wrong. We see anarchism and communism as two sides of the same project: a society without domination, whether political or economic.

For us, you can’t be truly anarchist if you still allow economic hierarchy, and you can’t be truly communist if you preserve political hierarchy. Authority and exploitation are one machine with two gears.

So what’s the cleanest definition? Anarcho-communism is communism without the state and anarchism without the market. No bosses, no state, no landlords, no wage slavery, just cooperative, decentralized, freely associated communities handling things together.

The “more anarchist or communist?” debate only makes sense from the outside. From within, the two are inseparable.

A Treaty with the Abyss

I’ve only written two poems in my entire life. Well, that’s not entirely true. I used to write lyrics for a band my friends and I were forming that never got off the ground. I’ve been in a bad place as of late and jotted this down last night to kind of try to help me through what I’m going through. I don’t know if it makes sense or if it’s any good, but I thought I’d share it here. Maybe it can help someone else. Maybe I’m just screaming into the void as usual. Like I said, I’ve just been in a bad way and felt the need to write something and couldn’t come up with anything but these words. I didn’t do much thinking on it. I just wrote down what came to mind. Just my own discombobulated mind spilled out on paper and now here on the Internet.

I wake up each morning
as if returning to a mistake I didn’t make.
The sun rises out of habit,
and I rise out of spite.

Some days my mind is a broken cathedral,
echoing with sermons I never asked to hear.
Other days it’s a carnival mirror–
every reflection warped
every laugh track broken.

There is a rhythm to the collapse,
a pulse that insists I keep going
even when I want to negotiate my exit
with whatever god still bothers
to read the fine print of my thoughts.

Bipolar dawns come and go:
one morning I am incandescent,
a lighthouse for a ship that will never arrive;
the next I am the ocean floor,
quiet enough to make silence uneasy.

But existence refuses to end on cue.
It drags on with the stubbornness of a bad joke
that no one remembers telling.
And I still stay for the punchline,
not out of hope,
but because even futility has a texture
I’ve learned to hold without breaking.

If there’s any mercy in this world,
it’s that numbness, too, is a kind of shelter.
And on the days when the abyss leans in
as if to whisper a shortcut,
I answer the only way I know how:
Not today.
I’m busy watching the ruins glow.

The Last Christmas

It was decided, though no one could say who decided it first, that humanity would end itself on Christmas. Not out of devotion. Not out of malice. Out of a particular exhaustion, the kind that settles over a species the way frost settles over a corpse; quietly, inevitably, without spectacle.

Some called it a gift for Jesus. Others called it a release for themselves. Most didn’t call it anything at all. Naming things only gives them weight, and humanity had grown tired of carrying anything with weight.

The idea spread the way despair always spreads: silently, with the elegance of a shadow that has finally stopped pretending to be anything else. By Advent, the world understood the plan without having spoken it. By Christmas Eve, the world accepted it the way a terminal patient accepts a prognosis.

There was no mass panic, no riots. Absurdity rarely inspires hysteria, only a kind of philosophical shrug.

One by one, city by city, continent by continent, humanity closed its eyes and unmade itself. No great violence. No catastrophe. Just a soft relinquishing, like candles choosing not to burn. When the last human fell into that darkness — a darkness strangely calm, strangely welcoming — the world exhaled for the first time in millennia.

Silence spread across the planet.

A silence so total.

Then came the surprise…

Jesus, expecting once again the usual hymns and the brittle cheer of obligatory joy, found instead the entire human race standing before Him in the soft luminosity of the afterworld. Billions of eyes, all sharing the same expression: the expression of beings who didn’t quite regret existing, but regretted having tried too hard to justify it.

“Happy birthday,” someone murmured. It wasn’t festive. It wasn’t ironic. It was spoken the way one apologizes for overstaying a life. Jesus looked at them — at this species that had repeatedly fumbled both suffering and hope — and for a long moment He said nothing.

Finally He whispered, “You weren’t all meant to come at once.”

A few souls nodded. Some shrugged. One laughed softly, the laugh of someone who has spent a lifetime wrestling with the absurd only to die of it. “We thought it would be a surprise,” another said.

“A surprise,” Jesus repeated, not angry, not sad, but with weary tenderness of someone who watched a child break their own toy just to make sense of its pieces.

He continued to send them back, but to what? To the same repetition? The same spiral between meaning and meaninglessness? Even He wondered if return was a kindness or cruelty.

He told them the truth: a truth so simple it was almost cruel in its clarity:

“Existence was the only miracle I ever gave you. What you made of it was your burden.” The souls felt no shame. Shame was for the living.

Instead they stood there, suspended in a light that illuminated nothing but themselves. Beings who had fled the weight of existence only to find that consciousness follows like a shadow. And so humanity spent eternity as it had spent life: questioning, doubting, arguing with itself, trying to make sense of a gesture no one had requested and no one had fully understood.

Jesus remained with them, not as judge or savior, but as a witness to their absurd act. The only species in creation to annihilate itself out of equal parts fatigue and affection.

A birthday surprise.

A cosmic misunderstanding.

A final proof that even in its ending, humanity insisted on being both tragic and ridiculous. The only combination it ever truly mastered.

More on Dealing with Bipolar Disorder

I think I’ve mentioned before that I’m bipolar. I deal with it with medication and therapy. I got diagnosed when I was 28 or 29. I always suspected, but it was nice to finally know what was wrong with me. I noticed my previous blogs where I was blogging every day or every other day. That’s me when my mood is lifted and I’m on cloud nine. Now I have no energy to write about anything. Sure, you get the occasional blogs here and there, but it’s nothing like it was.

That’s what happens with me. I get that creative spark and I’ll be on a high for a while and then it’ll all come crashing down and I don’t feel like saying anything. I hide it well from people and put on a happy face while going to bed and wishing I don’ wake up the next day.

I hate that I have to be medicated. I hate that my psychiatrist has to keep tweaking my meds. I hate that I can’t talk about this with anyone because I don’t think they’ll understand. Sometimes I just hate being here overall. I feel useless, worthless. I feel like my life has no meaning or purpose. I’m just going through the motions.

So, if you see me not posting for a while, you know the reason. I’m having to deal with these mood swings. I’ll get a little boost and get creative and write for months and months then it’ll all come crashing down and I don’t write anything because I feel like there’s no point. No one cares what I have to say on here or in my real life. Just bear with me. It’ll pass eventually. It always does, even when I feel like it won’t.

The Lie of Glory

I started reading Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo for one reason: Republicans said not to. They said it was anti-American and socialist. What it is is anti-war and anti-imperialism. If the people who glorify war and worship a flag are afraid of a book then that’s usually a sign the book is telling the truth.

The book isn’t just anti-war. It’s anti-illusion. It’s about Joe Bonham, a World War I soldier who wakes up in a hospital with no arms, no legs, no face; he’s deaf, mute, and blind. His body is gone, but his mind is still very much alive. The entire book consists of his thoughts, his memories, his realization that he’s become a piece of government property in a bed.

There’s no glory in this book. There’s no heroism. There’s silence, darkness, and the sound of your own mind refusing to die.

The deeper I got into the book, the more it hit me: everything recruiters promise — pride, purpose, brotherhood — it’s all marketing. The same system that feeds you “honor” will turn you into cannon fodder the second you sign on the dotted line. When you’re useful, they decorate you. When you’re broken, they hide you.

There’s a chapter where Joe hallucinates Christ walking among the dead and mutilated soldiers. It’s not divine. It’s horrifying. Christ doesn’t save anyone, He just watches humanity destroy itself again, in His name this time. That’s when Trumbo’s message cuts through: war isn’t sacrifice, it’s slaughter dressed up as salvation.

Joe eventually figures out how to communicate: by tapping his head against his pillow in Morse code. What he asks for is simple: let him be seen. Roll him through the streets in a glass case so people can see what “sacrifice for freedom” actually looks like. Of course, they refuse. The military can’t afford truth. They sedate him and shove him back into silence.

That’s how the machine works. It eats you, then buries what’s left under words like “honor” and “duty.”

Johnny Got His Gun isn’t an easy read, but it’s the kind that wakes something up in you. It makes every flag-waving speech sound like a sales pitch. It makes every “support our troops” bumper sticker feel hollow. The book isn’t anti-American. It’s anti-lie. And that’s exactly why they don’t want you to read it.

The Comfort of Nothing

I’m usually picky with horror movies. I prefer more supernatural than all out gore. I’m fine with a little gore, but gore for gore’s sake just feels cheap to me. I’ve watched two horror movies this Halloween season. I watched 28 Years Later last night. It wasn’t too bad. 7/10. I watched Stephen King’s The Monkey today and liked it a lot better. It hit me harder than I expected.

Beneath all the supernatural horror — the cursed toy, the unshakable deaths — there’s a deeper, quieter terror; nothing anyone does actually matters. No prayer, no effort, no redemption changes the outcome. The monkey bangs on its drum and death follows. That’s it.

But what surprised me was that I didn’t find it bleak. I found it comforting. There’s a strange peace in realizing that life, in all its chaos and noise, doesn’t add up to anything cosmic. We live, we love, we lose, we die. The monkey drums, and the world keeps turning.

If nothing truly matters, then everything is equally free; every small joy, every passing moment, every act of kindness or rebellion exists for its own sake. There’s no final meaning to chase or ultimate purpose to prove. The universe isn’t watching, judging, or keeping score.

And maybe that’s the most honest freedom there is. Once you stop searching for meaning, you can finally live without it.

Infinite Jest and the Test of Boredom

Infinite Jest is one of those books I re-visit a lot on this site. It’s in my top five favorite books of all time. When people ask what it’s about I tell them the surface level answer: It’s about a film so entertaining that people watch it without doing anything else until they die. Oh, and tennis. It’s more than that though. I talked to a friend of mine about it who introduced me to the book in the first place. I told him, “I think, at its core, Infinite Jest is a book about our inability to deal with boredom.” Not even our inability, our refusal. It’s about the sheer panic that rises in us when we’re left alone with our thoughts, without a screen or distraction to drown out the noise inside.

The author — David Foster Wallace — saw boredom as the truest test of freedom. Not freedom in the political sense, but the freedom to exist without the constant need to be entertained. The freedom to pay attention — to life, to others, to ourselves — without numbing out. The irony, of course, is that we’ve built a society where that kind of freedom feels unbearable.

The book also tackles addiction, and the addicts in Infinite Jest aren’t just addicted to substances, they’re addicted to escape. To anything that shields them from the crushing weight of unfiltered consciousness. But Wallace’s genius was showing that this isn’t limited to drug users. We all have our fix. Some people chase achievement. Some chase pleasure. Some chase attention. The forms change, but the hunger doesn’t.

At the center of the book is “the Entertainment,” a film so irresistibly pleasurable that viewers lose the will to do anything but watch it until they die. It sounds absurd, but it’s not that far off. Every endless scroll, every algorithmic loop, every dopamine hit of digital validation is a step toward that same self-erasure. Wallace wrote the book in the 1990s, but he saw where we were heading: a culture where overstimulation replaces meaning, and distraction becomes the dominant mode of existence.

What makes the book so overwhelming — so sprawling, so labyrinthine — is that it mirrors the chaos of modern consciousness. The fragmented attention, the tangled connections, the endless search for something that feels real. The structure itself resists our hunger for easy satisfaction. You can’t skim it; you have to wrestle with it. And maybe that’s the point. Reading it is an act of resistance against the same forces it warns about.

Wallace once said that “the real, profound boredom” we experience in everyday life is where freedom begins. But to get there, we have to stop running from it. We have to stop medicating every quiet moment with noise. Boredom is uncomfortable because it strips us bare. It forces us to confront who we are when we’re not performing, producing, or consuming.

That’s the real terror of the book. Not addiction, not death, not even despair, but the silence underneath it all. The realization that maybe we’ve built our entire lives around avoiding ourselves.

In that sense, the novel is both a warning and a mirror. It asks whether we can still be present in a world designed to keep us from ever being present. It asks whether we can stand the boredom long enough to rediscover what’s real.

Boredom, it turns out, isn’t the enemy. It’s the doorway back to awareness. It’s where meaning has been hiding all along: in the space we’re just too afraid to enter.

What Comes After Capitalism?

I hate capitalism, not as an abstract idea, but as the system that defines every hour of our lives. It’s built on exploitation: profit over people, hoarding over fairness, and the systematic creation of suffering so a few can live in excess.

You can see it everywhere: hospitals run like businesses, housing treated like a commodity, education turned into debt. Every “crisis” under capitalism — housing, climate, healthcare — isn’t a malfunction. It’s the system functioning exactly as designed.

Capitalism isn’t natural. It’s a historical stage, and it’s one that’s exhausted itself. The ruling class tells us “poverty is falling” as if global misery is acceptable collateral for billionaire wealth. But inequality isn’t an accident; it’s the engine that keeps capitalism running. When you work, you create more value than you’re paid for. That unpaid labor becomes profit which is extracted and accumulated until the very people who create everything own nothing. That’s not a bug. That’s the core contradiction: workers create all wealth but control none of it.

So the next move isn’t just hating capitalism. It’s organizing against it. Protests, memes, and writing all matter, but their goal must be to build class consciousness: to connect the struggles we already see — over housing, over healthcare, over dignity — into a unified fight for worker power.

We can’t reform a system built on exploitation. We have to replace it with one run democratically by workers for the common good.

The question isn’t whether capitalism deserves to fall. The question is: are we ready to build what comes after?