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.

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.

Candide Through an Absurd and Anti-Natalist Lens

I finished Voltaire’s Candide. I bought it I don’t know how long ago, but I’d get distracted with other books as I often do and just forgot about it until recently. All I can say is “Wow!” It was an excellent satire of philosophy in general. Me, being who I am though, I read it through a lens of pessimism, absurdism, and anti-natalism. It’s surprisingly modern and disturbingly relevant.

Right from the start the main character — Candide — and his world are full of relentless misfortune: he starts out expelled from his home, pushed into a brutal army; he witnesses earthquakes, massacres, and hangings. Everywhere he goes, human cruelty and disaster dominate.

For someone like me that’s attuned to anti-natalist thought, the lesson is clear: life is unpredictably cruel, and no amount of idealism or hope can shield anyone from suffering. The character of Pangloss and his philosophy — “this is the best of all possible worlds” — is not comforting. It’s absurd. Voltaire mocks it precisely to show that optimism can blind us to reality.

Candide meets kings unthroned, slaves chained to oars, prostitutes forced by circumstance, and monks trapped in religious life against their will. From the sites of Libson to El Dorado and Paris to Venice, suffering is universal. It doesn’t discriminate by wealth, status, or virtue.

All of this perfectly aligns with anti-natalism. Why bring new life into a world so unpredictable, so cruel, and so universally painful? Voltaire’s stories of absurdly recurring disasters reinforce the ethical argument that procreation inevitably imposes suffering on others. Human ideas are fragile. Pursuits that seem meaningful such as love, wealth, status, and fame often collapse under the weight of reality. For an absurdist like myself, this is expected. The universe offers no inherent purpose and our “ideals” are more likely than not arbitrary constructs.

The end of the book says “We must cultivate our garden.” This is Voltaire’s practical work. Life is absurd and full of suffering, but we can still create meaning in small, tangible ways: tending to our responsibilities, helping others, or our own little personal projects. For an absurdist anti-natalist this means to me:

Accept the universe’s lack’s lack of inherent meaning. Do what you can to reduce suffering wherever possible. And focus on tangible, ethical, or creative work rather than abstract speculation.

So, what did I take away from the satirical work? I learned through its absurd coincidences, relentless misfortunes, and philosophical debates that it mirrors these truths: life is cruel, unpredictable, and often meaningless.

However, like Candide, we are not powerless. We can act, work, and cultivate our little gardens in such a chaotic world, and in doing so, carve out a fragile, ethical, and perhaps even joyful corner of existence.

Favorite Books #6-10

A while back, I gave you a list of my top 5 favorite books. It’s taken me some time and a lot of thinking to think of numbers 6-10, but I think I’ve got them. So, here they are:

6. The Conspiracy Against the Human Race by Thomas Ligotti

Ligotti’s philosophical pessimism is a cold and meditative. It’s about the horrors of consciousness and human suffering. He argues that awareness itself is a curse, and it’s a theme that lingers in your brain long after you finish the book.

7. Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The main character embodies self-loathing, resentment, and intellectual rebellion. His critique of optimism exposes the contradictions of human desire and freedom which reveals our capacity for irrationality and cruelty.

8. Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche

I know I’ve moved away from Nietzsche over the years, but this book was my introduction to philosophy. It helped me discover other philosophers and led me to my favorite (Albert Camus.) This book challenges traditional morality, urging the creation of new values. It’s sometimes difficult, but it’s also poetic and absurd which I love. It insists we confront the void with courage and creativity.

9. Pet Sematary by Stephen King

The author that made me a lover of reading and books in general. It’s still the most terrifying book I’ve ever read. It isn’t just about the supernatural. It’s a meditation on grief, denial, and the impossibility of reversing death. It confronts us with the inevitability of loss and the consequences of trying to cheat the natural order.

10. Blindness by Jose Saramago

A society stripped of sight which exposes the fragility and moral ambiguity of civilization. It’s a very grim reflection on human nature. Survival instincts clash with morality which can lead to brutality. It’s been a while since I read it, but it still lingers in the back of my mind so I had to put it on the list.

A Prophet and a Nihilist Walk into a Bar

I’ve loved stand-up comedy since high school. I even did my own set a few times years ago (I wasn’t very good at it. Need to research comedic timing more.) My all-time favorite comedian is Bill Hicks (rest in power.) He wasn’t just a comic, he was a prophet. He tried to open the eyes of the public at large to how they were being fucked and just sitting back and taking it. He was a fierce social critic. Other aspiring comedians might want to be like Carlin or Pryor or Lenny Bruce or Sam Kinison. I wanted to be like Bill Hicks.

Another comedian I love — who I think carries Hicks’ torch and also burns the world down with it — is Doug Stanhope. He doesn’t care about waking people up. He doesn’t even give a shit if he bombs on stage. He’ll just get bombed on alcohol while he bombs on stage.

Comedy has always had its rebels and these two fit that description. Hicks wanted to wake you up. Stanhope wants to drag you into the abyss with him. Both are/were uncompromising, dark, and unwilling to sell out. However, their philosophies couldn’t be more different.

Let’s start with Hicks. Hicks gave a shit. He wasn’t just telling jokes; he was preaching. Every set was a sermon against consumerism, war, censorship, and blind conformity. He wanted audiences to see through the veil, to wake up. When a joke bombed, it stung him. It didn’t just mean the laugh was missing, it meant the message hadn’t landed. Hicks carried the weight of a prophet, a sense that comedy could save humanity if only enough people listened. His core drive was enlightenment through laughter. His tone — righteous, sermon-like; a preacher in a smokey comedy club. His view of humanity was misanthropic but hopeful. Humanity was flawed, but people would wake up. And when he bombed on stage it was a personal wound, proof at how far gone society was.

Hicks’ legacy is almost biblical. Fans and admirers treat him less like a comic and more like a visionary who used a microphone as his pulpit.

Then there’s Doug Stanhope: the nihilist who doesn’t give a fuck. Comedy isn’t a sermon to him. It’s a dare. Can he say the most obscene, brutally honest thing in the room and still stand there, beer in hand, while the audience squirms? If Hicks bombed, it hurt. If Stanhope bombs, it’s just another outcome. Sometimes it’s even the point. Walkouts, police calls, physical confrontations, they’re not failures … they’re souvenirs. Stanhope is more amusement through honesty. He’s kind of like your drunk, nihilistic, misanthropic uncle who doesn’t sugarcoat shit. His view of humanity is that it’s hopeless and it’s best to laugh at the chaos. When he bombs, he’s neutral and sometimes even celebrates and that shows that he’s not just pandering to his audience.

Stanhope’s legacy isn’t prophetic, it’s apocalyptic. He doesn’t offer hope; he offers anesthesia. He’s not here to save you; he’s here to mock you while the ship goes down.

So you have a prophet and a nihilist. There’s a good set up: “A prophet and a nihilist walk into a bar.” Hicks wanted comedy to save the world. Stanhope wants comedy to burn it all down … or at least make the collapse funnier.

Hicks was a preacher who believed in laughter as a path to truth. Stanhope is a nihilist who believes truth is unbearable, so we might as well laugh while we’re here. Hicks aimed for transcendence. Stanhope embraces the gutter. Both approaches matter. Both expose the absurdity of life and culture. But where Hicks offered a vision of redemption, Stanhope only offers a toast to the void.

Hicks is remembered as a voice of moral clarity in a corrupt world. Stanhope is like Heath Ledger’s Joker. One pointed toward the light. The other cackles in the dark. Maybe comedy needs both: the prophet to believe change is possible, and the nihilist to remind us that, even if it isn’t, the laugh is still worth it.

Elon Musk Has a Breeding Fetish and it Creeps Me Out

Let’s talk about Apartheid Clyde again. Not the genius inventor, not the Mars guy, not the billionaire memelord, but the man on a bizarre, almost dystopian crusade to impregnate the planet. At this point it’s not just “having a lot of kids.” It’s a full-blown ideology. A fetish wrapped in futurism. A techno-breeding manifesto disguised as civilization-saving.

Apartheid Clyde has at least 14 children (that we know of) with multiple women, including employees. He’s tweeted things like “population collapse is the biggest threat to humanity” and “I’m doing my part haha,” as if civilization hinges on him personally repopulating the Earth — or Mars — with his offspring. That’s not family planning. That’s legacy-building with a hint of sci-fi eugenics.

He’s literally turned human reproduction into a status symbol. It’s not about love or parenting or raising decent people. It’s about seeding the future … with himself. He thinks he’s a mythological figure tasked with restarting the species after the collapse.

It’s not subtle. He has said he believes “smart people” aren’t reproducing enough. He reportedly fathered twins with a Neuralink executive. He once called birth control a “civilization-ending experiment.” He’s flirted with the logic of eugenics while acting like he’s just being a rationalist.

In any other context, this would be horrifying. But because he’s rich and quirky, people brush it off as just another Musk-ism. But imagine any regular man walking around, telling the world it’s his moral duty to have as many children as possible because his DNA is just that important. That’s not just arrogant. That’s a fetish.

This isn’t about children. It’s about control. Power. Legacy. Apartheid Clyde talks about colonizing Mars, building superintelligence, and rewriting human history, always with himself as the central node. He doesn’t want to save the word. He wants to remake it in his image, and apparently that starts in the bedroom. He’s not trying to be your kid’s role model. He’s trying to be their ancestor.

Here’s the kicker: Apartheid Clyde doesn’t believe in collective solutions. He doesn’t trust democracy. He doesn’t care about building a better society. He wants a genetically optimized future ruled by the right kind of people: him and his kind.

And that’s why his weird, hyper-capitalist breeding campaign is so creepy. Because it’s not just personal. It’s political. It’s patriarchal. And it’s deeply authoritarian in disguise. We don’t need more Musk children. We need fewer billionaires treating the Earth — and our bodies — like a startup they can scale.

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.

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.

Whatever Happened to Fun Conspiracy Theories?

Remember when conspiracy theories used to be fun?

Back in the day, the tinfoil hat crowd was busy decoding crop circles, talking about secret alien bases under the Denver Airport, and wondering if the U.S. Navy accidentally teleported a warship in the 1940s. Sure, it was a little kooky, but it was mostly harmless, speculative sci-fi for weirdos with late-night radio and too much time on their hands.

We used The Philadelphia Experiment. Area 51. Roswell. Government time travel, secret Nazi moon bases, reptilian shapeshifters in Buckingham Palace. Were any of them true? Probably not. But they were imaginative. They gave us something strange to chew on–a kind of Cold War campfire mythology. These were conspiracy theories born out of curiosity and skepticism, not hatred or delusion.

Then something changed.

Somewhere in the 2000s, the weird wonder of conspiracy gave way to a much darker, dumber version of itself. Suddenly, conspiracy theories weren’t about aliens and teleportation. They were about vaccines causing autism, school shootings being faked, or a Satanic cabal of pedophiles controlling Hollywood and the Democratic Party. Fun got replaced with fascism.

What the hell happened?

Well, a few things, actually:

The Internet democratized crazy and also monetized it. Back in the analog age, you had to seek out conspiracy theories. Now they’re pumped into your feed by Facebook’s engagement algorithm because rage and fear are profitable. Conspiracies became content and worse, career paths. Grifters realized they could make real money off your uncle’s paranoia.

The right also weaponized conspiracy. We went from wondering if the CIA was hiding aliens to wondering if the Clintons were drinking baby blood. This wasn’t random. The far-right figured out that conspiracy theories could undermine trust in institutions, turn people against science, and rile up an angry base. Enter QAnon, anti-vaxxers, climate denial, and a pile of corpses.

People also got lonelier, dumber, and more desperate. When capitalism gives you no future and every institution fails you, it’s no surprise people start reaching for “alternative truths.” Unfortunately, the ones being served up now are dumb, cruel, and designed to radicalize, not enlighten.

Conspiracies used to be about asking questions. Now they’re about refusing reality.

You can’t joke about the moon landing anymore without someone in the comments section trying to sell you ivermectin or ranting about drag queens. The vibe has shifted from goofy paranoia to militant stupidity.

So yeah. The fun is gone.

But maybe it doesn’t have to be.

Maybe it’s time we reclaim conspiracy culture–not to spread nonsense, but to fight absurdity with absurdity. Let’s bring back the tall tales, the surrealism, the while “what ifs” that made it feel like there was something strange and wondrous just under the surface of the everyday.

The world is already insane. Let’s make it weirder, not dumber.

America Loses Every War it Declares…

… and that’s not an accident.

There’s a pattern no one seems to want to talk about: every time America declares a “”war” on something, it loses. Spectacularly. Repeatedly. Almost like it’s designed to fail–or at least never meat to succeed.

Let’s take a stroll down our hall of shame:

The War on Drugs

Launched in the 1970s and ramped up in the 80s, this war didn’t end drug use. It militarized police, packed prisons, and devastated communities (especially Black and brown ones). Meanwhile, Big Pharma ran its own cartel out in the open with opioids. The result? A multi-decade failure that somehow made drugs more common. But hey, prison stocks are doing great.

The War on Poverty

LBJ declared this one in the 60s. Ambitious? Sure. But instead of ending poverty, we got decades of underfunded programs sabotaged by both parties. Fast forward to now: wages are stagnant, homelessness is rising, and billionaires are joyriding to space. Poverty didn’t lose. It adapted, got a tech job, and learned to live in a car.

The War on Terror

We “won” this one by destabilizing the Middle East, fueling global extremism, and wasting trillions of dollars. Afghanistan? A 20-year disaster with a Taliban victory lap at the end. Iraq? Invaded based on lies. Terrorism didn’t disappear, it diversified and learned to livestream.

The War on Crime

What this really turned into was a war on poor people, especially people of color. Instead of addressing root causes–like inequality, housing, education–we militarized police, filled private prisons, and normalized, a surveillance state. Crime didn’t go away, it just got rebranded. And the police budget? It’s still the only socialist program America will never cut.

Losing is the business model. These “wars” aren’t meant to be won. They’re meant to be permanent. They justify bloated budgets, feed private industries, and generate endless political theatre. You can’t win a war if winning means ending the gift.

It’s not a bug, it’s the point.