The Transactional Tragedy of Terrance Blip

Terrance Blip was a man of modest ambitions: toast with the perfect butter-to-crisp ratio, socks without holes, and a bank account that didn’t judge him every time he opened his finance app. He lived alone in a studio apartment sandwiched between a psychic who only predicted Tuesdays and a taxidermist who specialized in emotionally distressed rodents.

One evening, while trying to return a cursed air fryer he had impulse-bought during a depressive episode, Terrance tripped over a knockoff lava lamp at a garage sale. It shattered with a melodramatic poof and out came a genie wearing aviators, a Hawaiian shirt, and the resigned aura of someone who’d been summoned during Love Island reruns.

“Congratulations,” said the genie, sipping a LaCroix. “You get one wish. Not three. That’s a myth. Union rules.”

Terrance blinked. “One? That’s not very—”

“Choose wisely or stupidly,” the genie interrupted. “I grant both with equal enthusiasm.”

Terrance, who had been recently charged $4.99 to cancel a free trial, didn’t hesitate.

“I wish that every cent I’ve ever spent in my entire life suddenly reappears in my bank account.”

The genie raised a suspicious eyebrow, which somehow hovered three inches off his face. “You sure? No ‘make me happy’ or ‘stop climate change’ or ‘bring back dinosaurs but they’re chill this time’?”

“Nope. I want my money back. Every dollar. From diapers to drinks. Give it all to Future Me.”

The genie snapped his fingers with a bored sigh. “Done. Good luck, champ.”

At first, it was glorious. Terrance’s phone dinged. His bank app went from $3.87 to $1,042,335.72.

He screamed. He danced. He Venmoed a random stranger $12 just because he could. He ordered eight pizzas, six of which he threw out because they “looked judgmental.”

But by day three, things took a turn. Terrance received a letter from the IRS, handwritten in crayon and lightly singed. It simply read: “WHERE DID THIS MONEY COME FROM, TERRY?”

He shrugged it off—what could they do? He had a genie-backed balance.

But then his body started reacting strangely. He gained weight from meals he hadn’t eaten in years. He suffered recurring stomachaches from a Taco Bell binge in 2012. He began waking up with hangovers from drinks he hadn’t consumed since college, including the infamous Flaming Banshee Night.

By week two, he was pelted by karmic echoes of every regrettable purchase he’d ever made. An army of chia pets stormed his living room. The haunted Beanie Baby he bought in ’98 hissed “capitalist pig” in Latin. A 6-foot stack of receipts materialized and cornered him in the shower, demanding he relive each transaction line by line.

Even worse, people from his past began showing up. A barista from 2007 wanted her tip back. A woman he’d ghosted after paying for dinner appeared, holding a menu and muttering, “You owe me appetizers and closure.”

His bank account remained fat, but Terrance was broke in every other sense—emotionally, spiritually, gastrointestinally.

Desperate, he sought out the genie again, only to find him running a kombucha stand in a strip mall.

“You didn’t read the fine print,” the genie said, sipping his own brand called “Soul Rot.” “You got all the money back. But you also got the consequences. Consumption is a ritual. You broke the cycle.”

“Fix it,” Terrance begged. “I’ll wish for anything. Just make it stop.”

“Nope,” said the genie, smiling serenely. “Only one wish per customer. Union rules.”

And with that, the genie vanished in a puff of oat milk vapor.

Terrance now lives under a mountain of refunded guilt, knee-deep in cursed yoga mats and artisanal regret. His bank account remains full, but he spends nothing—terrified that each swipe might unleash another receipt demon or childhood Happy Meal toy with unresolved trauma.

He’s learned a powerful lesson: Sometimes, the cost of getting your money back… is everything you paid to forget.

Does Socialism Stifle Creativity?

One of the oldest, dustiest arguments against socialism and communism is that they supposedly stifle individuality and creativity. No more artists, no more inventors, no more rebels, just gray uniforms, gray buildings, and gray minds.

This idea gets dragged out every time someone suggests workers deserve rights or billionaires shouldn’t exist. But here’s the truth:

This claim is propaganda and it’s tired.

Yes, in some authoritarian regimes that simply called themselves communist (Stalin’s USSR or Mao’s China), artistic and intellectual repression happened. That’s real. But equating all socialism with state authoritarianism is like saying all capitalism is just Enron and child labor in sweatshops.

Authoritarianism stifles creativity. Not socialism.

Let’s flip the script.

Capitalism loves to parade around as the champion of individuality. But unless your creativity makes more money? It’s worthless.

Under capitalism:

If your art doesn’t sell, it doesn’t matter.
If your innovation can’t be patented or monetized, tough luck.
If you’re too exhausted from your soul-crushing job to create? Oh well.

Creativity under capitalism is only celebrated if it turns a profit. Everything else? It gets buried.

Socialism doesn’t kill creativity. It frees it.

Under democratic socialism or libertarian socialism or anarcho-communism, creativity can actually flourish. Why?

Basic needs are met. You’re not working three jobs just to survive. You have time to think and make things.

Your worth isn’t tied to profit. You don’t need your poem to be a product. Your band doesn’t have to blow up on Spotify to matter.

Community matters. Creativity isn’t just for clout, it’s for connection.

Imagine millions of people who are free to paint, code, write, build, and dream — not because it’s marketable, but because it’s meaningful.

Let’s talk about some actual socialists:

George Orwell wrote 1984 and Animal Farm as a democratic socialist.

Albert Camus was anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist, and deeply creative.

Nina Simone was a radical, a revolutionary, and raw.

Kurt Vonnegut was openly socialist and still endlessly imaginative.

Entire movements — Soviet avant-garde, worker theatre, Cuban film collectives, Indigenous co-ops — were built on socialist principles.

And let’s not forget that Marx and Kropotkin were writing philosophy and science, not just manifestos.

Bottom line: if communism killed creativity, we wouldn’t have all the radical art, music, theory, and rebellion.

If capitalism encouraged creativity, you wouldn’t be drowning in Marvel sequels, AI sludge, and corporate TikToks trying to go viral by pretending to be relatable.

So no. Socialism doesn’t stifle creativity. Capitalism just wants you to believe that so you don’t imagine something better.

36 Chambers and a Molotov Cocktail

I’ve been to a lot of rock and metal shows. I’ve seen every one from Elton John to the Eagles, to Primus, to Tool, to Metallica, to Pantera, to Breaking Benjamin, to Alice In Chains, to Korn, to Ozzy. Never got to see Black Sabbath though and that still bums me out.

Tonight though I witnessed my first rap/hip-hop concert. The audience felt less like an audience and more like a movement. It wasn’t just a concert, it was a rite of passage — my first rap show — and I didn’t ease into it. I dove headfirst into the deep end with Wu-Tang Clan and Run the Jewels: two of the most politically charged, lyrically lethal acts in hip-hop, sharing one stage. I went in a fan and I came out changed.

Run the Jewels opened with a set that hit like a riot in real time. Killer Mike’s voice boomed like a preacher with nothing left to lose, and El-P brought the anarchic genius that turns every line into a Molotov. They didn’t warm the crowd up — the lit the fuse. Songs like “Close Your Eyes (And Count to Fuck)” didn’t just make people jump, they made people feel. Rage, solidarity, defiance. Their set felt like a call to arms disguised as a beat drop.

And then came Wu-Tang. The entire clan minus ODB took the stage like gods descending from Olympus, if Olympus was built from turntables and graffiti. Although ODB wasn’t there, his spirit was in the form of his son, Young Dirty Bastard, who tore through “Shimmy Shimmy Ya” with his dad’s chaotic energy and then some. The crowd went berserk.

They performed the hits: “C.R.E.A.M.,” Protect Ya Neck,” “Triumph,” but it was more than nostalgia. These songs still hit, still reflect the system’s cracks, still speak for the voiceless. You don’t watch Wu-Tang, you join Wu-Tang, even if just for a night. Every shout of, “Wu-Tang Clan Ain’t Nothin to Fuck Wit!” felt like a rejection of everything fake, shallow, and manufactured in the world we’re stuck in.

This wasn’t just music. It was a resistance. It was survival. It was Black art as both celebration and protest, and I felt lucky just to be in the room.

And now? I’m wired. I’m sore, but wired. I want to do something with the fire they handed me. Whether it’s writing, organizing, protesting, or just refusing to shut up … something.

Music can do that. The right music, anyway. Not the algorithm-filled garbage designed to numb us, but the raw stuff that tells the truth, names the enemy, and makes you want to burn something down.

Tonight reminded me: art matters. Culture matters. Resistance has rhythm. And sometimes the most radical thing you can do is turn the volume up until the walls start shaking.

Wu-Tang is for the children. RTJ is for the revolution. And I’m just getting started.

The Duopoly is a Disease

In the land of the free, we are given a choice every election cycle: Red or Blue. Coke or Pepsi. The illusion of choice wrapped in patriotic fanfare. But beneath the spectacle lies a truth most Americans feel in their gut but rarely say out loud: the two party system is a rigged game, a duopoly that has hijacked our democracy.

The Democratic and Republican parties are not ideological opposites; they are co-managers of an empire. One plays good cop while the other plays bad cop, but both serve the same masters: corporations, lobbyists, and the wealthy. They compete for power the way monopolists “compete”: by making sure no true alternative ever gains traction.

Independent and third-party candidates are routinely locked out of debates, buried by media blackouts, and crushed by impossible ballot access laws. Why? Because both parties know that real competition would expose how little they offer beyond symbolic bickering and bipartisan stagnation.

The duopoly thrives on division. Democrats and Republicans whip their bases into a frenzy over culture issues while quietly agreeing on endless war, corporate welfare, and mass surveillance. It’s no accident. The spectacle distracts us while they pass the same bloated Pentagon budgets and sell off public goods to private hands.

Gridlock isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. It keeps meaningful reform off the table. Medicare for All? Dead on arrival. A living wage? Maybe by 2050. Climate action? Let’s ask ExxonMobil how fast we can move. The duopoly ensures nothing truly threatens their donors’ profits.

Leftist movements such as socialists, anarchists, and greens are smeared or ignored not because they’re fringe, but because they challenge the core of the system: capitalism, imperialism, police power. The establishment doesn’t fear chaos, it fears organization. It fears a population that realizes there are more than two ways to govern ourselves.

Likewise, when libertarians call for ending wars or dismantling the surveillance state, they’re treated as dangerous radicals. Any idea outside the red-blue matrix must be neutralized.

So what’s the way out?

Break the machine.

It starts with refusing to legitimize the duopoly. Don’t let “vote blue no matter who” or “lesser evilism” guilt you into obedience. Demand more: ranked-choice voting, proportional representation, ballot access reform, we need mass political education and direct action.

We need to organize outside their system. That means building dual power: worker co-ops, mutual aid networks, radical unions, and community councils that don’t wait for permission from Washington. The future won’t be won in the voting booth alone. It will be built in the streets, on picket lines, and in the quiet rebellion of everyday people saying “enough is enough.”

The bottom line is this: the two party system is not a democracy. It’s monopoly politics. It doesn’t represent us. It contains us. And like all monopolies, it must be broken.

We don’t need better Democrats or nicer Republicans. We need a new system entirely, one that serves people and not profits.

Barking Mad: The Philosophy of Wilfred

The FX show “Wilfred” is one of my all-time favorite shows. I never saw the original Australian version, but the American one struck a chord with me. I’ve watched and re-watched it several times. It’s philosophical. It’s stoner comedy. It’s dark. It’s all the things I love.

On the surface “Wilfred” is a stoner comedy where Ryan (played by Elijah Wood), is a clinically depressed ex-lawyer who tried to kill himself, but instead found himself talking to his neighbor’s dog, who appears to him as a full-grown man in a dog costume. Hijinks ensue. But beneath the bong smoke and profanity lies something far more profound: a surreal meditation of identity, sanity, and the human condition.

At its core, “Wilfred” is about the search for meaning in a meaningless world. Ryan’s life is sterile, scripted, and empty. He’s alienated from his family, his former profession, and himself. Enter Wilfred: a creature who embodies chaos, instinct, and the id run wild. He shits in Ryan’s neighbor’s boots, humps teddy bears, and goads Ryan into ever-more reckless behavior. But Wilfred is also, somehow, Ryan’s guide — his Virgil through a very shaggy Inferno.

The question that hovers over every episode: Is Wilfred real? Is Ryan insane? Does it matter?

This is classic absurdism. Think Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus: the recognition that life has no inherent meaning doesn’t lead to despair — it leads to freedom. Wilfred doesn’t hand Ryan answers. He hands him paradoxes, jokes, and humiliations. But in doing so, he forces Ryan to confront the absurdity of his own life and to choose whether or not to keep pushing the boulder.

Philosophically, Wilfred could be read as Ryan’s shadow self — Carl Jung’s idea of the hidden, repressed parts of the psyche. Wilfred says the things Ryan won’t say. He acts on the desires Ryan suppresses. He’s at once friend, enemy, conscience, and saboteur. It’s like Fight Club if Tyler Durden wore a dog suit and loved Scooby Snacks.

Freud would have a field day here. Wilfred is all id — sex, aggression, pleasure, impulse. Ryan, meanwhile, is ego — repressed, neurotic, obsessed with doing “the right thing.” Their interactions often mirror Freud’s model of the mind in conflict. And the battleground? Reality itself.

But what makes the show so intriguing is that Wilfred isn’t just destructive. He’s also deeply wise in a perverse way. He teaches Ryan how to feel, how to trust, and ultimately how to live, not by giving him control — but by forcing him to let go of it. Just as Tyler Durden said to the Narrator in Fight Club: “Just let go!”

In a society that values productivity over introspection, “Wilfred” dares to ask: what if your mental breakdown is the most honest moment of your life? What if the voice in your head isn’t something to silence, but something to listen to, especially when it’s telling dick jokes?

Wilfred represents the part of us that refuses to play along with the farce of normality. He sniffs out the hypocrisy in Ryan’s family, the cowardice in his friends, and the rot at the heart of every polite interaction. He is, in many ways, Ryan’s subconscious revolt against a life lived on autopilot.

It’s no accident that Ryan meets Wilfred at his lowest point. He’s suicidal not because he wants to die, but because he doesn’t know how to live. Wilfred doesn’t save Ryan with self-help cliches or pharmaceuticals, he drags him through absurdity until Ryan sees the game for what it is. Not a test to be passed, but a joke to be told well.

In the final season, the show doubles down on ambiguity. Wilfred might be a hallucination. Or a trickster god. Or some ancient being teaching Ryan spiritual lessons in the only way Ryan will accept. Or he might just be a dog and Ryan is insane.

The brilliance of “Wilfred” is that it never tells you the answer. Like any good philosophical riddle, it trusts the question to do the work. It doesn’t resolve — it disturbs. It doesn’t comfort — it challenges.

And maybe that’s what makes it feel true.

In a world screaming for certainty, “Wilfred” howls for ambiguity. It’s a show that understands mental illness not as a glitch to be fixed, but as a symptom of something deeper: a culture that has lost touch with play, instinct, and wonder.

So if you ever find yourself talking to a man in a dog suit, don’t panic. Sit down. Light a joint. Listen. He may not be real. But he might just be right.

Why I Broke Away from Nietzsche

Like a lot of people, I discovered Friedrich Nietzsche in high school. Call it teen angst or whatever you will, but he felt dangerous, electric, liberating. While everyone else was parroting morality or chasing grades, Nietzsche was telling me to reject the herd, smash idols, and carve my own path. It felt like rebellion with a brain.

However, over time I outgrew him. Not because I stopped caring about meaning or individuality, but because I realized what kind of individualism he was selling, and who else was selling it.

Nietzsche championed the “Ubermensch,” the one who rises about the herd to create new values. Ayn Rand gave us John Galt, the genius industrialist who shrugs off society to build his perfect world. It hit me one day that these two weren’t as far apart as I once thought. Both glorify the exceptional individual. Both sneer at the masses. Both turn their back on solidarity.

What started as an inspiration to think freely began to feel like an excuse to disengage. Nietzsche was attacking morality from above. Rand was doing it from the boardroom. Either way, it ended with contempt for the people I now wanted to fight alongside.

I’m sure my readers know by now, but what really broke the spell was Camus. The Myth of Sisyphus didn’t offer me transcendence (or male and femalescendence for all you transphobes out there.) It didn’t demand I become a god. It simply asked me to imagine Sisyphus happy. That small act of rebellion — accepting the absurd and refusing to despair — hit harder than a thousand pages of will to power.

I realized I didn’t want to overcome the herd. I wanted to organize it. I didn’t want to create values in a vacuum. I wanted to challenge the systems that crush people every day. Nietzsche gave me the tools to reject inherited meaning, but he had nothing to offer once the dust settled.

Nietzsche lives in the realm of aesthetics: life as art, suffering as transformation, truth as personal creation. But when you’re watching the wealthy elite hoard resources, cops brutalize communities, and working people drown in debt, aesthetics isn’t enough. You need ethics. You need justice. You need solidarity.

Nietzsche taught me to question everything, and in turn, I had to question him too.

I didn’t reject Nietzsche because he was wrong about everything (did that with Rand.) I rejected him because he wasn’t enough. He lit the fire. Camus gave it direction. Socialism gave it purpose.

If Nietzsche taught me to become who I am, then breaking with him was part of that becoming. And maybe that’s the most Nietzschean move of all.

The Government Just Gave Itself Permission to Ignore the Law

Let’s not sugarcoat this: the U.S. government is gutting what little remains of “checks and balances,” and most people are too distracted or disillusioned to notice.

Buried inside a House bill—unrelated to taxes, mind you—is a ticking time bomb aimed directly at the rule of law. A quiet little provision would block all funding to enforce contempt of court orders. Read that again. If this passes, the executive branch can ignore court rulings with zero consequences. It’s not just a loophole—it’s a license to violate the Constitution.

Professor Erwin Chemerinsky, a constitutional law expert, laid it out plainly: if the government defies a judge, nothing can be done to force compliance. No enforcement. No consequences. No rule of law. “The greatest effect of adopting the provision,” he warns, “would be to make countless existing judicial orders unenforceable.” Translation: the courts become a theater of empty gestures, while the executive runs wild.

This isn’t theoretical. The Trump administration has already ignored court orders, including the Supreme Court’s ruling to return Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia from a black-site-style detention in El Salvador. They just didn’t do it. And now? They’re trying to make that standard operating procedure.

This is what a dying democracy looks like: not in flames, but in red tape and fine print. Congress didn’t vote to abolish the Constitution—they just cut its funding.If you still think the system can be fixed from within, ask yourself: What happens when the system rewrites the rules to ignore its own crimes?

This is not just a Trump issue. This is a bipartisan rot. They’ve built a government that polices protestors, jails whistleblowers, and spies on everyone—but suddenly when it comes to holding itself accountable, it’s “too expensive” to enforce the law?

The lesson is clear: the government does not fear the courts. It fears accountability. And it will rewrite reality itself to avoid it.

Burn your illusions. The state is not your protector. It’s a self-perpetuating power machine, and it just found a way to cut the brakes.

“Every Life is Precious!”

Says the GOP, while slashing Medicaid and SNAP that keep actual people alive.

Joni Ernst: “Well we all are going to die.” That’s the GOP’s response when people warn cuts will kill the poor, the sick, and the elderly.

So let me get this straight:

A fetus = sacred.

A hungry child = expendable.

A disabled adult on Medicaid = acceptable casualty?

If “life is precious,” maybe stop pushing policies that treat it like a budget item.This isn’t pro-life. It’s pro-birth, pro-corporate, and anti-human.

When Was America Ever “Great”?

“Make America Great Again!”

I’m tired of hearing it. Not just because it’s overused, but because every time someone says it, I want to ask: “When, exactly, was America great? And for whom?”

It’s a nostalgic slogan, sure. But nostalgia has a habit of airbrushing the past until only the myths remain.

Let’s break it down.

Was America “great” economically?

Maybe during the post-WWII boom. But that was also a time when women were shoved out of the workforce and back into the kitchen. Black Americans were still living under Jim Crow. Unions were strong, but mostly white. The middle class was expanding, but only if you fit the mold.

Militarily?

America’s always had a big stick. But we’ve also used it to prop up dictators, overthrow elected governments, and keep the Global South under our thumb. That’s not greatness — that’s empire.

Culturally?

Sure, American art, music, and innovation have been influential. But much of that greatness came in spite of the system and not because of it. Black musicians, queer writers, immigrant inventors — they created brilliance while fighting for the right to exist.

So who was America great for?

White, straight, cisgender men with money. Everyone else had to fight for scraps or fight to survive.

That’s what “Make America Great Again” means to a lot of people: Make it comfortable again for the people who used to have a monopoly on power. It’s not about greatness. It’s about control.

We don’t need to make America “great again.” We need to make something entirely new. Something built on truth, equity, and justice — not nostalgia for a past that never existed for most of us.

Even Elon Musk Thinks the New “Big Beautiful Bill” is a Joke

You know a bill is bad when even Apartheid Clyde — the meme king of capitalism and Trump’s former efficiency czar — calls it out.

Apartheid Clyde took aim at the Republican-backed “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” (yes, that’s the actual name of the bill. No, I’m not shitting you.) It’s a monstrosity of legislation that somehow manages to combine massive tax cuts for the rich, bloated defense spending, Medicaid restrictions, and a fresh punch in the gut to clean energy. And just like that, Republicans have found a way to spend trillions while pretending they’re fiscally conservative.

Apartheid Clyde, who once led the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) under Trump, publicly slammed the bill for ballooning the deficit and betraying the message of DOGE. “It can be big or beautiful, not both,” Musk quipped, a rare moment of clarity from someone who once called himself a “free speech absolutist” while banning critics from Twitter (I’m still never calling it “X.”)

Let’s be real: Apartheid Clyde isn’t exactly a paragon of progressive virtue. This is the guy who spends his time playing CEO cosplay and beefing with journalists online. But when even he is sounding the alarm on a Republican spending bill, you know it’s not just ugly — it’s a Trojan horse stuffed with billionaire tax breaks and red meat for MAGA donors.

The Congressional Office Budget estimates this “beautiful” disaster will add $3.8 trillion to the national debt over the next decade. That’s more than the GDP of Germany, and somehow, the Republicans still claim we “can’t afford” student loan forgiveness or universal healthcare.

So why is Apartheid Clyde breaking ranks now? Simple. The bill fucks with his brand. It undercuts clean energy (bad for Tesla), bloats defense (bad for his whole “efficiency” thing), and makes him look like a sucker for ever aligning with Mango Mussolini in the first place. Self-interest is a hell of a drug.

Still, his critique opens a window: when even a techno-libertarian billionaire thinks the GOP has lost the plot, maybe it’s time to stop pretending they ever had one. The “Big Beautiful Bill” isn’t governance. It’s graft dressed up in patriotic drag.

If you’re pissed about this bill, don’t just laugh at Apartheid Clyde’s tweets. Organize. Disrupt. And remember: the people writing this legislation don’t care if you live, as long as they get paid.