Ash and Seed

The cities fell quietly. Not with fire or fanfare, but with a flicker. Supply chains snapping like old rope, currencies crumbling into irrelevance, and governments too bloated to breathe. People had waited for rescue. None came. Then, something stranger happened: they stopped waiting.

Maya lived in one of the Transition Zones, carved out of the skeleton of what had once been Pittsburgh. Skyscrapers stood hollow, colonized by vertical gardens and data relays. Streets were no longer roads, but corridors of barterless exchange: food grown by solar-fueled machines, distributed by drones with no masters.

She remembered the old world in fragments: clocks, ads, the endless scrolling of fake urgency. In this new world, days were marked by need and contribution. Some days she coded for the mesh network. Other days she repaired the water-capture towers or helped with conflict mediation—though those requests were rarer now.

There was no money. No one starved. The idea of “earning a living” had become as quaint as leeches in medicine. What did it mean to earn what had always been a birthright?

Occasionally, envoys came from outside the Zone—wandering emissaries from collapsing enclaves or liberated factories. Some brought new blueprints, others just stories. Maya loved the stories. One woman spoke of how a collective in former Indonesia had wired up an entire island to run itself, then dismantled their last police drone ceremonially, like a funeral for fear.

In the evenings, Maya sat under the wind trees, their turbines singing above, and read aloud to anyone who wandered by. Tonight it was McCarthy. Tomorrow, maybe Marx. No one made her do this. That was the point.

They lived without rulers or markets, not because they had to—but because they finally could.

And in the ruins of profit, something strange had taken root:

Hope.

But not the kind you wait for.

The kind you build.

Watchmen: A Review

A dear friend of mine bought me Alan Moore’s Watchmen graphic novel for my birthday and I just finished it today. It took me no time at all. I was so engrossed throughout the entire novel that I had to know what happened next. I watched the movie many years ago, but I really didn’t remember anything of it besides the opening credits where one of the characters assassinates JFK. I’ve never been a big comic book reader, but I love graphic novels. I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it before, but Neil Gaiman’s Sandman is one of my all-time favorites, but Watchmen may have topped it.

Watchmen isn’t just a deconstruction of superheroes–it’s a scalpel slicing into the bloated corpse of American exceptionalism, liberal idealism, and the myth of power as virtue. Set in an alternate 1985 America where Richard Nixon never left office and masked vigilantes once roamed the streets like violent boy scouts, Watchmen asks a simple but brutal question: What kind of person puts on a mask and calls it justice?

Spoiler: It’s not the noble-hearted. It’s the traumatized, the fascistic, the god-complex-ridden, and the deeply, deeply broken.

The story pivots on the murder of the character known as The Comedian, a government-sponsored sociopath whose death pulls his former teammates–each more morally compromised than the last–back into a decaying world teetering on nuclear annihilation. At the center is Dr. Manhattan, a glowing blue god who’s lost all connection to humanity, and Ozymandias, a genius whose plan to save the world requires mass murder and absolute control.

Watchmen teaches us that power doesn’t purify. It distorts. Good intentions, when weaponized at scale, become indistinguishable from tyranny. And that the systems we trust to protect us–governments, heroes, even truth–are often just better-dressed versions of the same old brutality.

If you’re looking for hope, Watchmen laughs in your face. However, if you’re looking for clarity about the lies we tell ourselves to keep the machine humming, it’s a masterpiece. In the end, the most radical idea Watchmen offers isn’t that the world needs saving, it’s that maybe it doesn’t deserve to be saved in the first place.

What I Learned from Malcolm X

I’ve just finished The Autobiography of Malcolm X today. It took me a week to read it and I loved every page. We weren’t taught much about Malcolm X in school, more about people like Rosa Parks and MLK. So I was interested in reading about him for myself, but I also wondered, “What can I, a white, Southern person learn from a black man from Harlem?” The answer is quite a bit.

The book is a deep exploration of power, transformation, and systemic oppression. As a white person, here are some of my takeaways:

Malcolm X detailed how racism is woven into American institutions, from schools to the legal system. Seeing it from his perspective exposed blind spots I never noticed before. These issues are still going on today and the Civil Rights movement ended decades ago.

The book makes it clear that racism isn’t just about personal prejudice but a system that shapes people’s lives from birth. Malcolm X’s experiences with teachers, the criminal justice system, and media narratives all reinforce this. The criminal justice system is still, in 2025 wrought with prejudice against those of color and the poor.

I always just thought Malcolm X was a racist who hated white people, but I’ve learned he was so much more than that. His rage at white America wasn’t irrational–it was a response to generations of oppression. His story forced me to confront the reasons behind that anger instead of dismissing it.

His transformation from a hustler to a political leader showed me the power of self-education. As I become more politically involved and lean more into libertarian socialism, I’m learning more and more about the power of self-education. It shows that there’s a lesson in there that people can change, including how we perceive race and privilege and politics.

Malcolm X’s views evolved over time, just as mine have. He went from being against white America until his pilgrimage to Mecca. He started with a hard separatist perspective but later saw the potential for solidarity across racial lines. That evolution is crucial–realizing that no single perspective is fixed.

Lastly, while Malcolm X was skeptical of white allies, he also acknowledged that some could play a role in dismantling white supremacy. His challenge to white people was to do the work among other white people rather than expecting praise from black activists.

Ultimately, the book isn’t just about race. It’s about seeing the world as it really is, questioning power, and committing to real change. I think if you read it with an open mind as I did, it can be a transformative experience.

Revisiting Blood Meridian

I’m currently re-reading Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, which is one of my top five favorite books of all time. It’s a brutal, hypnotic, and unrelentingly bleak book. McCarthy takes the myth of the American West and rips it apart, exposing it as a landscape of pure, amoral violence. He makes the violence seem surreal and inevitable.

The character of Judge Holden in particular is one of the most haunting literary figures. He’s part philosopher, part warlord, part devil. He embodies a vision of history and human nature that is completely devoid of redemption.

The book doesn’t offer easy conclusions of moral lessons; it just drags you through an endless nightmare and dares you to find meaning in it.

It’s one of those books that leaves you stunned when you finish it. Either you’ll be in awe of it, or you’ll never want to touch it again. Maybe both.

Blood Meridian reshapes how you see literature and maybe even history itself. It’s not just a Western, it’s a cosmic horror novel disguised as a Western. The sheer indifference of the universe in it is chilling, and Judge Holden is the embodiment of that.

Blood Meridian doesn’t just flirt with nihilism, it drags you into the abyss and makes you sit with it. There’s no redemption, no justice, no meaning beyond the endless cycle of violence. Even the protagonist, who seems like he might have a shred of humanity, is ultimately powerless against the chaos of the world. And Judge Holden? He’s basically an immortal force of destruction, dancing through history, laughing at anyone who thinks there’s order or morality. It’s the kind of book that leaves a scar.

There are some lessons in it though:

Violence is inherent to civilization.

McCarthy shows that violence isn’t just a byproduct of civilization but a fundamental part of it. The Glanton Gang’s violence is just business as usual in the American frontier. Human history is driven by war, conquest, and destruction, and making any romanticized view of the past naive.

Manifest Destiny was a Bloodbath.

The novel dismantles the myth of Manifest Destiny as a heroic expansion. The Glanton Gang which were hired to hunt Apaches turns into a lawless death squad, killing indiscriminately for profit. The Westward Expansion wasn’t just about pioneering and opportunity–it was also about genocide, greed, and chaos.

War is God.

Judge Holden represents a kind of cosmic nihilism. He believes that war is the only true human activity, the ultimate law of existence. If he’s right, then morality is just an illusion, and history is nothing but and endless cycle of domination and slaughter.

Fate vs Free Will.

The protagonist seems to have moments where he could choose a different path, but does he really have free will? The Judge suggests that all men are bound to the game of war, whether they admit it or not. The novel leaves open the question of whether the protagonist’s attempts at redemption matter or if he was doomed from the start.

At its core, Blood Meridian is a rejection of comfortable narratives about human nature, history, and morality. It doesn’t tell you what to think; it forces you to look into the abyss and decide for yourself what it means.