We trace the patterns. That’s what we do. Not because we want to be prophets, or martyrs, or right. But because we’re scared. Because we’ve seen this before. Because somewhere beneath the noise and the slogans and the calls for blood, we remember what it means to be human. This is the tenth post in a series I wish I never had to write. I thought maybe one piece would be enough. One scream. One warning. One grief made public. But the world kept moving. The machine kept turnin

It starts with a shrug. A cough dismissed. A mask pocketed. A headline scrolled past. The quiet normalization of risk. The idea that “everyone will get it eventually.” That some people just won’t make it, and that’s fine. That’s the price of moving on. But that’s how political violence begins — not with spectacle, but with consent. With the slow erosion of empathy, the bureaucratization of suffering, the dulling of outrage until neglect becomes policy. The body count turns in

Grief, Memory, and the Echoes That Stay With Us The last thing I can clearly remember my grandmother saying was this: “Your kids are crazy.” We were in Florida, in the little outdoor patio space of her senior living complex. She had vascular dementia by then—supervised care, memory lapses, the usual cruelness of a fading mind—but her voice that day was sharp, warm, amused. My brother and I must have been doing something loud or silly or both, because she turned to my mom, sai

The photo that started it all. Taken from a bedroom window in the Lakes District, UK It didn’t start with the camera. It never does. It...

It didn’t happen all at once. That’s what makes it so terrifying. There was no singular law passed, no dystopian regime, no camera drilled into the center of every ceiling. What happened instead was slower. Quieter. Cultural. Algorithmic. We turned ourselves into witnesses, into judges, into brands. We learned to perform—and then forgot we were performing. And somewhere along the way, the surveillance state didn’t need to grow stronger. It just needed us to keep watching each

A story of two people, one myth, and the ache that lingers when gods grow quiet. A shared delusion, born of trauma and longing, woven into the language of gods and dragons. Fay used to believe that names were just masks—handles chosen to slip into a different skin. They were for forums, for MMOs, for quiet corners of the internet where you could become who you weren’t allowed to be. Ryu Hikari was one of those names at first: half drawn from a wandering boy who carried the bl

Back in 2013, I scribbled a list into a cheap Beatles themed notebook. A list of rules. Life rules. Survival rules. Philosophy rules. It was messy—literally written in different colors of ink, with smudges and strikethroughs and new thoughts wedged between the old ones. It wasn’t polished. But it was mine. And looking at it now, over a decade later, it feels like the very first whisper of the worldview I’ve since come to call Ethicism. I didn’t know that name yet, didn’t have

A dream that shouldn’t have to be a dream (and what we can build right now) If you removed the budget caps. If you lifted the policies...

High school was starting, and I was a mess. All I could think about back then was finding a soulmate. I met my first real girlfriend, let's call her Squeak, and I loved her endlessly, regardless of her actions. I was convinced she was cheating on me, and decades later I would learn that maybe it was true. I also found out that two people, my first “friends,” were paying her on a dare to date me. She broke my heart, and that heartbreak led me straight to my first psych ward st

Strange days are here again. Seven years. That was the line I carried like armor. Seven years sober. Seven years of saying “no,” of...

The words are out in the open now. Not whispered in think tank reports, not hidden in policy drafts, not implied between lines of speeches — spoken plainly, with applause in the halls of Quantico. The new banner is raised: defense is dead. Defense is no longer. War has taken its place. We are told peace is not the mission. War is. We are told pacifism is not caution. It is “naive and dangerous.” We are told lethality is not a grim necessity but a calling card. And we are

Some poems arrive as fragments, but others arrive as seasons. This one came in three. At the last section, is a blog post separate but connected, showing what love means to me beyond the fire and storm. The first season was longing — To Be Wanted Back. It was the porch light, the lighthouse, the bus seat left open. It was me saying: here is what wanting me looks like, here is what love should look like in return. It was hunger and grief without a funeral. The ache of being t

It was never going to take long. The gunfire was still echoing, the grief still raw, and already the script was waiting. Not from the fringes this time, not from anonymous accounts stitching lies together in the dark corners of the internet, but from the podium of the White House itself. A statement polished to a blade: blame named, enemy chosen, cause declared. “Unhinged crusade.” That’s the phrase they use. Not grief, not inquiry, not even hesitation—just crusade. As if cri

It starts quietly, like so much else in this country now. An order slips across the wires, sudden and absolute: every general, every admiral, every senior commander above a certain rank must be in Virginia. Not a request. A command. Rearrange your missions, reroute your flights, leave your posts. The world will wait. And they come. Hundreds of them. Veterans of old wars, survivors of deployments that stretched decades, men and women who have buried soldiers under too many fla

It keeps happening. We’ve seen another shooting. This time, two ICE detainees are critically injured, with one dead, in Dallas. And already, the same war machine is turning: press conferences, buzzwords, declarations of war. A shell casing marked “ANTI-ICE” becomes the proof of an ideology. A name. A face. A photo. A post. That’s all it takes. The script is ready. But dig even slightly beneath the surface and it slips. As Ken Klippenstein has uncovered , Joshua Jahn, the shoo

They’re not curing autism. They’re trying to erase it. The Trump administration just took a dangerous step: they’ve officially endorsed...

We didn’t talk much that morning. Just sat there, watching the sun catch the road like it had a secret to tell. It’s funny—when I was younger, I used to believe that love meant finding “The One.” My soulmate. My twin flame. Chalk it up to Disney movies, maybe, or just being a kid who wanted to feel safe and chosen. Even in elementary school, that was the daydream running through my head. Not “what do you want to be when you grow up?” but “who’s going to sit beside me forever?

The Trump administration has now confirmed the worst of the rumors. In a sweeping set of announcements, they have officially endorsed the...

Some stories don’t end in triumph. Some don’t end in reconciliation. Some just end in silence, and the decision to stop carrying someone else’s weight. This is one of those stories. For fifteen years, I loved someone. Not passively, not distantly. Romantically, fiercely, foolishly at times. He was the first man I ever had feelings for, and I believed, again and again, that if I just held on long enough — if I carried both of us long enough — he’d find his way back to the boy

Those words sit on my chest like a wet coat. They are not dramatic for me; they are accurate. Not because a stranger told me so once, but because I keep proving it to myself — in the small, honest places where I can’t hide. In the ways I’ve spoken (too loud, too blunt), in the ways I’ve lashed out when sleep and food and safety ran thin, in the ledger I keep of all the times I failed to be the person I promised I’d be. I am not trying to be poetic about it. I am trying to be