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.
Tag: writing
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.
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.
Freedom, American-Style: Guns Over Healthcare
It says a lot about the state of America when you point out that the U.S. has fallen to 57th place in the global freedom index, and the response you get from a Trump supporter is: “Yeah, well, I get to own guns.”
This is the American illusion of freedom distilled into a single sentence. Forget healthcare, forget workers’ rights, forget privacy, forget the surveillance state, forget the crushing weight of debt—because hey, you can still buy a gun. That’s supposed to make us the freest country on Earth.
But what kind of freedom is that, really? Is it freedom when millions can’t afford basic healthcare? When a medical emergency can bankrupt a family? When corporations own politicians, and workers are trapped in jobs just to keep health insurance? Is it freedom when your choices are narrowed down to which corporate brand you’ll consume, which billionaire will own your data, and which politician will fail you more slowly?
The gun argument is really a confession. It’s saying: “We’ve lost so much freedom that the only one we cling to is the ability to arm ourselves.” Guns have become the consolation prize in a country where every other right and protection is chipped away.
You can’t afford insulin, but you can afford an AR-15. You can’t get mental healthcare, but you can stockpile ammo. You can’t get your child’s asthma medication covered, but you can walk into a Walmart and walk out with a weapon of war. This isn’t freedom. It’s a parody of it.
Real freedom isn’t just the right to own a gun. Real freedom is the right to live without fear of medical bankruptcy, to have control over your workplace and your government, to exist without being exploited by corporations or surveilled by the state. Real freedom is collective, not individualistic. It’s not about clutching a weapon in the ruins, it’s about building a society where weapons aren’t necessary.
The sad truth is that when a Trump supporter says “I get to own guns,” what they’re really saying is: “This is the only freedom I have left, and I’m going to cling to it no matter what else is taken from me.” But clinging to a single hollow freedom while the rest are stripped away isn’t liberty. It’s defeat dressed up as patriotism.
And that’s why America is 57th in freedom. Because we’ve traded healthcare for hardware, dignity for firepower, and genuine liberty for a cheap illusion of it.
Does Love Exist? A Cynic’s Reflection
Keep in mind that I’m writing this as a cynical, misanthropic pessimist, okay? But I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard people declare with a mix of bitterness and certainty that “love doesn’t exist.” As if it’s some grand revelation. As if anyone who believes otherwise is naive. Again, coming from a cynist, I think this particular claim misses the mark. Love is real and it’s one of the most undeniable forces in human life.
When someone insists love isn’t real, they’re usually speaking out of pain, disappointment, or distrust. Maybe they were betrayed by a partner, so now love seems like nothing more than a manipulation. Maybe they’ve embraced a biological reductionism: “love is just chemicals firing off in the brain so it doesn’t count.” Maybe they’ve taken their own misanthropy so far that they can’t imagine people acting out of genuine care for one another. I sympathize with all of that, but I don’t buy the conclusion.
If we deny love because it can be explained chemically, we’d have to deny everything else too such as joy, grief, awe, even the taste of a favorite meal. Reduction doesn’t mean negation. Love might be tied to hormones and neurons, but so is every other human experience. That doesn’t make it unreal. It makes it embodied.
If we deny love because people fail at it, because they betray or exploit in its name, then we’d have to deny courage, kindness, or justice too. Every virtue gets betrayed. That doesn’t erase the thing itself, it only proves how fragile and valuable it is.
Love shows up in too many undeniable forms to write it off. A parent staying awake with a sick child. Friends carrying each other through decades of hardship. Strangers risking something for people they’ll never see again. Protestors linking arms against police lines for the sake of those they’ll never meet. Even grief is a form of love. What else is mourning but love with nowhere to go?
Cynicism has its uses. It can cut through illusion and sentimentality. But cynicism that denies love altogether becomes just another illusion, one that pretends detachment will protect us from hurt. In reality, it only leaves us emptier.
Love exists. It’s not perfect, not eternal, not invulnerable. But it is as real as anything else that shapes our lives. Pretending it doesn’t exist won’t make us stronger; it only makes us lonelier.
Anti-Natalism Isn’t My Most Extreme Position
Most people recoil at the idea of anti-natalism. “But my legacy!” “I need the family name to live on!” “You’re not full until you’ve had a child!” Spare me your bullshit. There’s no altruistic reason to have children. Every reason anyone gives is selfish and self-absorbed. Most people feel like being an anti-natalist is a spit in the face of them and their progeny. Let them think that. I will not back down from this view. I don’t stop at anti-natalism though. My position goes further. I’m pro-omnicide. Yes, I mean that literally: I’m pro the end of all life. Not just humans. Not just animals. All of it.
Life is suffering. That’s not a metaphor. It’s biology. Every living being spends its existence avoiding pain, hunger, sickness, loneliness, decay, and finally death. Even joy is temporary, always shadowed by loss. The very structure of life is cruelty: to live is to feed off of other life.
The one and only true solution to suffering isn’t better medicine or fairer societies (although I wish for those to ease the suffering as well as ending capitalism before we go.) It’s ending life itself. Omnicide is the clean cut, the only guarantee that no more beings — animal or human — will be forced into pain.
There can be comedy in this as well though. It’s not all doom and gloom. Billions of years of evolution, countless wars and inventions, all the books and religions and empires, and it all ends with nothing. Lights out. Curtain call. The universe shrugs and deletes its own save file.
People keep searching for meaning, for some grand story about progress, destiny, or utopia. But the joke is that there is no meaning. The only punchline left is extinction; not tragedy, not triumph, just silence.
Why say this publicly though? Because most people won’t even look in this direction. They’re terrified of questioning the assumption that “life is good.” But if we really care about ethics, if we really care about suffering, then omnicide is the most compassionate conclusion. And if we really embrace the absurd, then there’s no need to dress it up as anything other than what it is: the end of the joke.
I don’t expect anyone to agree with me, but I also don’t think the can refute me, try as they might. They can’t deny that suffering defines life. And they can’t deny that omnicide would end it once and for all.
That’s why I’m pro-omnicide. Not because of a hatred for life, but because I see life for what it is.
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.
I’m Sick of Living in a Country With a Price Tag on Survival
There’s something deeply wrong with a society that puts a dollar sign on everything: air, water, healthcare, housing, even hope.
In America, you don’t get to live, you get to rent existence. And the rent keeps going up.
Need to drink water? Better hope your tap isn’t poisoned, privatized, or shut off because you’re behind on the bill. Need to see a doctor? Hope you can navigate the insurance labyrinth, dodge bankruptcy, and survive long enough to get an appointment three months from now.
This isn’t a functioning society. It’s a hostile marketplace cosplaying as civilization.
We slap “In God We Trust” on the currency, but worship profit above all. Billionaires hoard resources like dragons while kids ration insulin. Corporations dump chemicals into rivers while charging us for clean water. Politicians talk about “personal responsibility” while handing corporate welfare to their donors.
Everything is for sale … except dignity.
This system wasn’t built to help us. It was built to extract from us. Your labor, your time, your energy, your life. All monetized. The only thing “essential” in this economy is your ability to generate profit for someone else.
And when you stop being profitable? You’re disposable. That’s the cold logic of capitalism. It doesn’t care if you suffer. It needs you to.
But here’s the thing: people are waking up. The cracks are visible. The rage is growing. The question now isn’t “Is this sustainable?”, it’s “What the hell are we going to do about it?”
We can’t shop our way out of this. We can’t vote our way out of it alone. This is going to take organizing. Disruption. Solidarity. Mutual aid. Refusing to play their game by their rules.
Because survival should not be for sale.
And I, for one, am done pretending this is normal.
Overthinking, Pandora’s Box, and the Mercy We Don’t Deserve
By someone who’s tired of dodging landmines in family group chats.
I posted a photo on Snapchat the other day—Bertrand Russell’s The History of Western Philosophy. I didn’t think much of it. Just one of those small, nerdy flexes you throw into the void. But then my aunt replied:
“I didn’t know there was such a thing, but I guess everything has some sort of philosophy.”
Okay, fair. Not everyone grew up reading Plato or spiraling into existential dread during sophomore year. I responded:
“Western civilization’s been overthinking everything for like 2,500 years. They had to write it down eventually. Even things like math and science have deep philosophical roots.”
Her response? “Some things are just overthought, and need to be left alone I think. Just my opinion.”
That’s when I felt it: that itch to argue. To start listing how “overthinking” gave us medicine, civil rights, space exploration, critical thinking, and the ability to ask whether the status quo even should be left alone.
But instead, I replied calmly:
“Sometimes overthinking is how we uncover the stuff hiding under the surface.”
She came back with:
“That could be really bad and in the long run not helpful. Kinda like Pandora’s box. But I understand some things need to be known.” I went full myth nerd:
“Yeah, opening Pandora’s box definitely unleashed chaos—but also hope was in there too. Can’t forget that part.”
Then came the turn I knew was coming:
“Yep, you are right on that. And mercy, which we don’t deserve.”
Ah. There it was. The theological twist. The Southern Baptist worldview shining through. Mercy as something we’re lucky to get, not something we’re entitled to. A cosmic handout, not a human right.
And that’s where I bit my tongue. Because yeah, I could’ve said that if mercy is real, it shouldn’t be conditional. Or that maybe people don’t deserve suffering either. Or maybe we do deserve mercy because we’re born into a broken system we didn’t ask for and spend our lives trying to make sense of it.
But I didn’t say any of that. I kept the peace. Not because I agreed, but because sometimes family isn’t where the fight lives.
Still, it stuck with me. The way generations talk past each other. The way questioning becomes “overthinking,” and curiosity becomes a threat to tradition. The way a simple book post turns into a theological minefield.
So here I am. Overthinking it, of course.
Just like the philosophers taught me to.
And maybe, just maybe, that’s where hope still lives.
Waiting for the End
I didn’t ask to be born. I didn’t sign up for this whole “life” thing. I just opened my eyes one day and the clock started ticking. Expectations piled on. Rules I never agreed to. A world I didn’t create.
By now, I’m 38. No spouse. No kids. I still live with my mom. That fact alone makes me feel like I’m not a “real adult,” even though I pay attention to the world, think deeply, and try to be a good person. But none of that matters, right? Not in a world where adulthood is measured by mortgages and marriage licenses.
I look around and feel alien. Tired. Like I missed a train everyone else caught, or maybe I was never invited to the station. People around me post pictures of weddings, kids, vacations, “success.” I sit with the weight of just surviving, and sometimes even that feels impossible.
The truth? I’m tired. Bone-deep tired. I’ve had days where I didn’t want to wake up. Days where I felt like checking out would be easier than dragging myself through one more empty cycle of eat-sleep-repeat. I’ve thought, “what’s the point?” more times than I can count.
I didn’t ask for life. But life was handed to me like a debt I didn’t incur, and now I’m supposed to be grateful just for enduring it.
Still… Somewhere in the middle of all that noise, I told someone how I felt. And I wasn’t met with judgment. I wasn’t told to “cheer up” or “get over it.” I was just heard. And sometimes, that’s enough to get through another day. So maybe this blog isn’t a rallying cry or a solution. Maybe it’s just a flare shot into the dark for anyone else who feels this way. You’re not alone. You’re not a failure. And you don’t have to carry this on your own. I don’t know what comes next. I’m still here, and for now, that’s enough.
Sisyphus Shrugged 