The Product

There’s a factory somewhere that manufactures meaning. Nobody knows where it is, but we all buy what it makes. You can’t survive without it. Every morning, I wake up to the same alarm sound — like a shriek filtered through cheap optimism — and I clock in at my terminal, typing things for other people who think they’re changing the world by moving numbers around. The boss says we’re “innovators.” I say we’re dream janitors, sweeping up what’s left of hope.

At night, I scroll through faces that look like me: sleep-deprived, smiling, sedated by purpose. They post about “grind culture” and “mindfulness,” like saints of a new religion where salvation costs $9.99 a month.

I used to believe I was different. I wrote poetry. I loved someone once. Then I started to feel the product wearing off. It began small. A crack in the script. I’d catch myself staring at my reflection in a window not recognizing the thing looking back. Like someone had replaced me with a cheaper copy, printed on recycled despair. My laugh started to sound overdubbed. The air smelled faintly of disinfectant and resignation.

I told my therapist. She smiled, a perfect mechanical crescent, and asked if I’d tried “meaning supplements.” She handed me a sample pack. They were glossy pills the color of television static. “Swallow one before sleep,” she instructed.

That night, I dreamed of the factory. Rows of bodies in chairs, their eyes wired open, pupils projected onto screens. Every time one blinked, a machine printed out a new slogan: Live. Laugh. Persist. The air was thick with burnt plastic and serotonin. I tried to run, but my legs dissolved into assembly lines.

When I woke up, my mouth tasted like melted silicon. The mirror showed me someone else entirely. It was the same face, but smoother. Cleaner. My pores had been edited out. My thoughts too.

I went back to work and everyone looked perfect. No one blinked anymore. The boss said we’d hit a new quarterly record. He clapped, but the sound was hollow, like hands slapping a coffin lid.

Now, sometimes, when I close my eyes, I can hear the factory humming under everything: under the city, under my heartbeat, under the polite noise of civilization.

We’re not employees. We’re inventory.

Every morning when I swallow the next pill, I understand a little more: the product is us.

The Last One to Leave, Please Turn Off the Stars

The end began on a Tuesday, not with a bang, but a corporate memo. Subject line:

“Due to budgetary constraints, existence will be discontinued effective immediately.”

At first, no one noticed. Birds kept chirping. Influencers kept influencing. A man in Tallahassee still refused to return his library books.

Then came the second memo.

“This is not a drill. Earth is being decommissioned. Please gather all meaningful memories into a single shoebox. Label it clearly. Return to HR.”

No one knew where HR was, but rumors spread it was located inside a vending machine behind the moon. The vending machine offered two items:

1. A bag of Dust of What Could Have Been

2. The Answer (temporarily out of stock)

A philosopher named Dr. Linda Spoon attempted to rally humanity. She declared: “Omnicide is just suicide with a better view.” She received a standing ovation, then spontaneously combusted from the irony.

The whales voted to stay neutral.

The bees unionized and demanded severance pollen.

The cockroaches opened a jazz club called “The Fallout Lounge.”

Meanwhile, governments responded the only way they knew how: with committees. The United Nations formed the Final Task Force on All That Is (and Isn’t). Their final report read:

“We deeply regret to inform you that everything was a clerical error.”

Earth filed an appeal. It was denied on the grounds of insufficient vibes.

In a bunker beneath Antarctica, a man named Derek attempted to reboot existence using an old Nintendo console and a paperclip. He succeeded, but only in resurrecting Disco.

The skies filled with mirrored balls and Donna Summer.

The oceans turned into soda.

The dolphins began speaking in limericks.

In space, the Galactic Oversight Council convened.

“Who authorized this?”

“I thought you did.”

“No, I outsourced it to a freelance algorithm.”

“Oh god.”

“No, just Algorithm-7. God was laid off last quarter.”

They voted to cancel the universe’s trial period. Turns out, no one had upgraded to Premium.

As atoms began untangling like poorly made spaghetti, one child—unbothered—drew a smiley face in the dirt. The dirt began humming. The humming confused the laws of physics.

The universe paused.

Time asked Space, “Are we… still doing this?”

Space shrugged. “I don’t know, man. I was just here for the free gravity.”

And just before the final pixel flickered out, someone whispered:

“Maybe this was a screensaver.”

Then everything crashed to desktop.

The Existentially Moist Wish of Darlene Crumb

A friend of mine asked me to write a sequel to my last short story involving the genie. This is what I could come up with. I hope she enjoys it…

—

Darlene Crumb was a woman haunted by one, unrelenting truth: she was always a little bit damp. Not soaking wet. Not sweaty. Just perpetually… moist. Elbows. Neck. Behind the knees. The mystery persisted across climates, shampoos, and three failed marriages.

One Tuesday—because all the strangest things happen on Tuesdays—she wandered into the back of a defunct Payless Shoes, looking for nothing and finding everything.

There, underneath a pile of expired insoles and dusty Crocs, sat an antique humidifier. She plugged it in. It sparked. The fire alarm laughed. And then, in a cloud of grapefruit LaCroix mist, emerged the same genie. Hawaiian shirt. Aviators. Pursed lips of someone who had once dated an energy healer named “Blade.”

“You’ve summoned me,” he said. “One wish. No bartering. No do-overs. No wishing for more wishes unless you’re into recursive paradoxes.”

Darlene blinked, the condensation on her eyelashes catching the light like tragic disco balls.

“I want,” she said slowly, “to finally understand the universe. I want the truth. All of it.”

The genie’s brow did a little dance. “That’s the big one. Cosmic enlightenment. You sure?”

“Positive. I’ve been wet for 39 years and I think it’s related to everything.”

With a shrug and a snip-snap, the genie granted the wish.

Instantly, Darlene’s brain exploded—not physically, but conceptually. Her eyes dilated into portals of pure comprehension. She saw time as a Möbius strip braided into a cat’s cradle. She understood dark matter, gravity, and why bread always lands butter-side down.

She gasped.

“It’s all soup.”

Everything. Matter. Meaning. Morality. Relationships. Socks. Soup.

Existence was just soup, swirling in infinite flavors, none of them consistent, all of them burning the roof of your mouth if you tried too hard to enjoy them.

She wept.

Then laughed.

Then threw up alphabet pasta that spelled out THE VOID WAVES BACK.

For the next three weeks, Darlene became a guru. She wore bathrobes in public and answered all questions with the phrase, “Only the broth knows.” She gained a cult following among TikTok astrologers and people who read horoscopes ironically.

But her enlightenment began to curdle.

She couldn’t enjoy anything anymore. Romance? Soup. Art? Soup. Her favorite podcast? Two Blokes Talk Soup, suddenly too literal. She once screamed for 14 minutes in a Whole Foods because someone asked if she wanted bone broth.

Her moistness increased. Because, of course, what is soup, if not the ultimate damp?

Desperate, she found the genie again, this time running a hemp-scented vape bar called “Vaporwave Vespers.”

“You gave me enlightenment!” she hissed, dripping all over the floor. “Take it back!”

The genie looked up from his crossword. “‘Cosmic reversal’ isn’t in the contract. One wish per customer. Union rules.”

“But I’m unraveling!”

“You asked for the truth,” he said, handing her a complimentary kale-flavored vape pen. “Turns out the truth is kind of a wet noodle.”

Darlene now wanders the world wrapped in towels, whispering cryptic soup-based riddles to strangers in parking lots. Her cult disbanded after she declared celery “the key to death.” She exists beyond joy, beyond suffering, beyond dryness.

She knows the secrets of the universe.

And she deeply, deeply regrets it.

Moral? Never ask for everything. Especially from a genie who smells faintly of citrus and has strong opinions about ska music.

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.

America 2035

A dear friend of mine gave me the idea to write a blog about what will the U.S. be like if we continue on the course we’re on right now. I jotted it down in my own personal journal and thought I’d share it here. Let me know what you think.

If America stays the course it’s on now with no correction, no revolution, no collective awakening then 2035 will not be some sort of dystopian nightmare. It’ll be something worse. It’ll be a comfortable, numbing decline punctuated by chaos, distraction, and denial.

Corporations will no longer need to whisper in politicians’ ears, they will write the laws themselves. Amazon will own the postal service. Google will handle public education logistics. A few tech CEOs will rotate through cabinet positions like it’s a TED Talk residency. Elections will still happen, but mostly to decide which billionaire’s PAC can out-psyop the other.

The Midwest will experience a new Dust Bowl. Florida real estate will be underwater, but people will still buy beach homes thanks to delusion. Power grids in the South will collapse under summer heat, and water shortages will trigger hydration riots in Arizona. Don’t worry though, your smart fridge will still work as long as you don’t mind watching an ad every time you open it.

The rich and wealthy will live in gated green tech bubbles, shuttled by autonomous Teslas between sanitized, sensor-laden smart cities. Everyone else though? They live in logistics deserts, under-policed until they riot, then over-policed for sport. The economy has metastasized. People livestream their labor for tips, like Twitch but with more sweat and desperation.

Fascism will not wear jackboots. It wears athleisure. It smiles. It hosts a morning show, but it also bans books, surveils dissent, and locks up people in ICE-style “resilience camps” for protesting. The courts are rubber stamps. The media is infotainment sludge. The line between cop, soldier, and “private security consultant” has fully blurred.

The right will have armed militias, billionaire funding, and a 24/7 propaganda network. The left is still subtweeting each other over theoretical frameworks and canceling organizers for old tweets. Direct action is rare and criminalized. Hope is commodified. Revolution is a brand. Every year, a new savior candidate promises change, only to be eaten alive by the machine.

Citizenship is no longer a birthright. It’s a subscription service. The U.S. exports cultural dominance while its internal infrastructure rots. We’ll stream images of freedom to the world while internally dismantling it piece by piece. Freedom of speech remains, but mostly because no one in power takes anyone without a million followers seriously anymore.

Is it all doom? Not necessarily.

This future isn’t inevitable, but it’s likely if we continue business as usual: treating politics like fandom, trusting the system to reform itself, and refusing to disrupt the real levers of power.

We don’t need utopia. We just need rupture. Resistance. Imagination. Something that breaks the loop. But if we wait ten more years to try, we may not get the chance again.

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.

The Ashwood Grill

No one noticed when The Ashwood Grill burned down.

It happened on a Tuesday night long after the dinner rush, when the last of the barflies had staggered home and the kitchen staff had staggered home and the kitchen staff had scrubbing the grease from the fryer. A faulty wire in the walk-in fridge sparked, caught onto a stack of dry storage, and within minutes the whole place was up in flames. The fire department arrived too late to save anything but a few charred beams.

And yet, the next day, The Ashwood Grill was open again.

Same red vinyl booths, same flickering neon sign, same smell of burnt coffee and stale fryer oil clinging to the air. The menu still had the Tuesday night meatloaf special, still served with a side of lumpy mashed potatoes. But no one noticed.

Regulars wandered in, taking their usual seats without a second glance. The waitress, Barb, refilled their coffee cups with the same practiced indifferent. The cook, Gus, clanged around in the back, flipping burgers on a grill that should have been a heap of melted steel.

Across the street, Joe — the owner of a rival diner — watched with a cigarette handing from his lips. He’d seen the fire. He’d watched the flames lick the night sky, seen the fire trucks roll in, heard the building collapse. Yet there it was, standing just as it always had.

He crossed the street, pushed open the door. The bell jingled. The air smelled of burnt toast and fryer grease.

Barbara looked up, “Morning, Joe. The usual?”

Joe hesitated. “You burned down.”

Barbara blinked and him, unbothered. “Did we?”

“I saw it. I saw the fire.”

She shrugged, pouring his coffee. “Well, you must have been mistaken. We’ve been here the whole time.”

Joe sat and stared at the menu, his hands clammy. The letters seemed off. Fuzzy. They shifted when he tried to focus. The food came. The burger looked normal enough, but when he bit in, the taste was wrong. Not bad … just empty. Like a memory of a burger rather than the real thing.

He looked around. The customers chewed in silence, their faces strangely vacant. The jukebox played a song that didn’t quite exist, the melody twisting just out of reach.

Joe pushed back from the table, his chair scraping against the linoleum. “I gotta go.”

Barb smiled, “See you tomorrow, Joe.”

He left, the door jingling behind him.

No one noticed when The Ashwood Grill burned down.

And no one noticed when it came back.

The Eternal Waiter

There was a man named Gregor who worked as a waiter at a restaurant that no one ever seemed to visit. The building was enormous. An architectural monstrosity that stretched far beyond what was needed for any reasonable number of customers. The windows were perpetually clouded with dust, and the floor creaked with every step. Still, Gregor showed up every day at 11 a.m., precisely on the hour, and stood behind the counter.

For years, he waited.

Occasionally, the door would swing open with a dramatic screech, but no one would enter. Yet Gregor remained, polishing the empty glasses, adjusting the already perfectly folded napkins, and rearranging the menu for no one in particular. The menu, of course, was endless; an impossible list of dishes that spanned all the way to the horizon. Some items, like Essence of Tomorrow and Stew of Yesterday, seemed more like philosophical concepts than food. But Gregor knew them by heart.

One day, in the middle of wiping down an already spotless table, he saw a figure in the distance, at the far end of the restaurant. It was a woman, dressed in a wide-brimmed hat and an extravagant gown that shimmered as though made of forgotten stars. She walked slowly toward him, her shoes clicking on the floor in a rhythm that sounded like the ticking of a clock.

“Hello,” she said when she finally reached his counter.

Gregor stared at her, blinking. It was the first time someone had spoken to him in years.

“Are you ready to order?” he asked, unsure of the appropriate protocol for such an event. It had been so long since he’d expected an actual customer.

The woman smiled, but her smile seemed to vanish before it fully formed. “I don’t know,” she said, gazing at the menu. “What do you recommend?”

Gregor hesitated. The menu was a labyrinth of absurdities, and he knew better than to suggest Beef of Forgotten Futures or Chicken that Should Have Been Left Alone. But somehow, despite the meaninglessness of it all, he felt an odd sense of duty.

“The Soup of Your Dreams,” he said, pointing to a small, unassuming item at the very bottom of the list.

She nodded and sat down at one of the many empty tables, her eyes never leaving the menu. Gregor disappeared into the kitchen, though there was no one there to prepare the soup. The kitchen was, like the rest of the restaurant, a mockery of activity, a space where pots and pans hung still, gathering dust. There was no soup, of course.

He returned to the counter, holding an empty bowl, and placed it in front of the woman.

“Here,” he said. “The Soup of Your Dreams.”

The woman stared at the empty bowl for a long moment. Then she stood up without a word, turned, and began walking toward the door. The door squealed open, but she didn’t exit. Instead, she began walking back toward the horizon of the restaurant, getting smaller and smaller as she approached the other end.

Gregor watched her go. After a long pause, he stood up, walked back to the counter, and began polishing an already polished glass.

It was a cycle he knew all too well. A cycle that, like his waiting, had no purpose and no end. But, like the universe itself, he would continue the motions. The door would open again, no one would come, and the glass would need polishing. Always.

And so, in the heart of the empty restaurant, Gregor waited.