Jamiemccarthytv

Author: Jamie McCarthy

  • The Law I Wouldn’t Write

    If you had the power to change one law, what would it be and why?

    I’ve been sitting with this question longer than I expected to. Not because I lack answers — but because the more honest ones don’t arrive cleanly.

    If I had the power to rewrite one law, I would hesitate — not out of humility, but out of suspicion. History suggests that anyone eager to rewrite the rules usually believes they are the exception to them.

    I’ve learned to distrust simple answers, especially the ones that arrive wearing moral certainty like a uniform.

    That’s the trap.

    Every age produces its architects of certainty — people convinced they’ve finally identified the flaw in humanity that can be corrected with enough authority and a well-placed signature. They come armed with good intentions and leave behind unintended consequences.

    So when someone asks me which law I would change, I find myself resisting the premise. Not because nothing needs fixing — plenty does — but because the desire to impose order often reveals more about our fear of chaos than our understanding of truth.

    The problem isn’t that laws exist. The problem is that laws are blunt instruments trying to govern something that refuses to be blunt: human beings.

    Maybe the real issue isn’t legislative at all.

    Maybe it’s cultural.

    We say we believe in free speech, but what we often mean is safe speech. Approved speech. Speech that arrives pre-sanitized so no one has to feel the friction of disagreement.

    But truth rarely arrives politely.

    Truth interrupts. It disturbs. It exposes contradictions — especially where power insists none exist.

    Somewhere along the way, we stopped fearing censorship from above.
    And started practicing it on ourselves.

    Quietly. Efficiently.

    Until silence began to feel natural.

    Consensus has never been a reliable compass for truth. Every meaningful shift in human history began as something offensive to the status quo — not because it was cruel, but because it refused to conform to the narrative everyone else had agreed to protect.

    The most effective form of control isn’t imposed by force. It’s adopted willingly — when people learn to silence themselves before anyone else has to.

    The hardest freedom isn’t speaking without limits. It’s choosing restraint when you could easily go further.

    I’ve learned that life doesn’t exist in slogans. It lives in the gray spaces — in contradiction, in tension, in the uncomfortable distance between certainty and doubt.

    Maybe that’s why I hesitate.

    Not because I lack opinions — I have more than enough — but because every law begins as someone’s certainty, and certainty has a habit of mistaking control for wisdom.

    We imagine the right rule will finally fix us. That somewhere there exists a perfectly worded sentence capable of correcting human chaos.

    But chaos isn’t a flaw in the design.

    It is the design.

    We are contradiction walking upright — capable of cruelty and grace within the same breath.

    And so I resist the urge to legislate discomfort away.

    Because the real danger isn’t that people might hear something they dislike.

    The real danger is that we stop risking honesty altogether.

    So if I had the power to rewrite one law, I suspect the bravest thing I could do would be nothing at all.

    Not out of apathy.

    Out of respect.

    Because maybe the most important law isn’t the one we write.

    Maybe it’s the one we refuse to — and always will

  • The Hour I Stopped Pretending.

    The Hour I Stopped Pretending.

    Are there any activities or hobbies you’ve outgrown or lost interest in over time?

    Today’s prompt asks what hobbies or activities I’ve lost interest in over time.

    The Hour I Stopped Pretending.

    The answer came to me immediately:

    Happy hour.

    Though somewhere along the way, I started calling it Unhappy Hour — not out of bitterness, just accuracy.

    There was a time when I enjoyed it. Or at least, I enjoyed the idea of it. The promise of connection. The belief that if you gathered enough people in one place long enough, something meaningful might eventually happen.

    And sometimes it did.

    ——————————————————

    But over the years, my relationship with time changed.

    Part of that is practical. I don’t drink anymore, which turns social rituals into something easier to observe than participate in. Without the soft blur of alcohol, you start to notice patterns — conversations looping back on themselves, laughter arriving a half-second too late, people searching for the next safe thing to say.

    It begins to feel less like connection and more like choreography.

    Nobody’s doing anything wrong. In fact, everyone is usually trying their best. But there’s a quiet performance happening — an agreement to stay on the surface where things feel manageable.

    And maybe that’s where I drifted away.

    Because what I realized is that I haven’t lost interest in people.

    I’ve lost interest in pretending.

    Time stops feeling infinite at some point. You begin to understand that every hour carries weight, whether you acknowledge it or not. And once that shift happens, the idea of spending it in conversations that never leave the shallow end starts to feel… expensive.

    These days, I find myself wanting fewer interactions, but deeper ones.

    Conversations where nobody is trying to win.

    Where silence is allowed to breathe.

    Where you can say something real without watching it bounce awkwardly off polite smiles.

    Maybe that makes me less social by traditional standards.

    Or maybe it just means I’ve become more honest about what connection actually feels like.

    I still believe in gathering. I still believe in laughter. I still believe in the magic that happens when the right people sit down together and forget to check the time.

    But I no longer believe proximity alone creates meaning.

    So yes — happy hour is probably the activity I’ve lost interest in.

    Not because I’ve lost my sense of humor.

    Not because I dislike people.

    But because I’ve learned that time is the one thing that never comes back once you’ve spent it.

    And if I’m going to give mine away, I want to know it mattered.

    –

    These days, I don’t avoid happy hour because I’ve become less social.

    I avoid it because I finally learned the difference between passing time and living inside it.

  • My First Computer Was A Mirror

    My First Computer Was A Mirror

    Write about your first computer.

    My first computer wasn’t mine.

    It was my old man’s.

    He had an Apple IIe back when Michigan still thought a “home computer” was something you yelled at. My father collected firsts the way other men collected regrets. Not to brag — to know. He wanted to see how the future worked before it decided what it was.

    That machine sat in our house like a glowing confession booth. Green letters on a black screen. The future, stuttering.

    Mine showed up in 1997.

    By then, the future had learned how to sell itself.

    That was the year I became that guy — the one who corrected people at parties over a commercial.

    “Jobs didn’t write that,” I’d say, beer in hand, moral high ground wobbling under my feet. “That’s beat poetry in a business suit. He just stole it and slapped a logo on the ribs.”

    I called it blasphemy — using dead poets to move plastic and silicon.

    But I respected the hustle.

    Because in one clean, arrogant move, he didn’t sell you a computer.

    He sold you a seat at the same table as Einstein and Gandhi and Picasso.

    Buy this machine and maybe, kid, you’re one of them now.

    I couldn’t tell if Jobs was in a garage somewhere burning his fingers on a soldering iron…

    Or just the best preacher Silicon Valley ever produced.

    While all that was flashing across the TV, I was in my room discovering a different sin.

    I started writing.

    In 1997, writing poems on a computer felt like cheating on paper. My classmates were bleeding into notebooks, breaking hearts in cursive. Love songs, death songs, soft-focus misery.

    I was staring at a screen, trying to figure out how to be a hard version of Sylvia Plath without driving my own car into a lake.

    I tried pretty metaphors. Lakes as mirrors. Souls as reflections.

    I hated all of it.

    So I wrote my first real poem instead:

    “Dionysus and the Silver Spoon.”

    It was about a man who treated excess like oxygen. A drunk god in a borrowed suit who thought the world owed him women, wine, and a standing ovation.

    It wasn’t mythology.

    It was me with better lighting.

    And that’s when the joke landed.

    There I was, calling out Jobs for dressing up as Kerouac…

    While I was wearing Plath and dead gods like a Halloween costume, hoping someone in the room would clap.

    That computer didn’t teach me how to write.

    It taught me how to look at myself without flinching.

    It showed me the hunger. The vanity. The quiet little prayer every creative mutters when no one’s listening:

    Please don’t let this be invisible.

    So yeah.

    My first computer wasn’t a machine.

    It was a barroom mirror at 2 a.m.

    The kind that doesn’t care who you think you are.

    It just shows you who’s still standing.

  • The Signal (From The Department of Public Noise.

    You will be told to keep it down.
    You will be called edgy, angry, reckless, dangerous, misinformed.
    You will be warned to think before you speak,
    but the only ones worrying about your volume will be those who fear your voice.
    Truth is treated as noise by those who live
    securely behind their own proof of lies.
    We’ve been told who to hate,
    we’ve been told who to trust,
    we’ve been told when to mourn,
    we’ve been told what to fear.
    And with each order, they’ve made the world quieter, emptier, and easier to control.
    A country where anger, grief, heartbreak, and dissent are classified as symptoms instead of signals.
    Turn it up until they know your name.
    Shatter the windows.
    Wake the neighbors.
    They tell us to be disarmed.
    Let’s make sure they can’t sleep.

  • The Physics of the Line

    What makes a good leader?

    Haha

    The Physics of the Line

    he must be a man who has

    tasted the barrel of the gun

    and found the metal

    cold and honest.

    he must have burned down

    his own house,

    sat in the ashes,

    drinking cheap scotch from a

    cracked mug,

    and decided to build it back

    without a single nail of

    pity.

    he must be dangerous.

    a violent thing

    wearing a quiet suit.

    a wolf who learned

    a knife and fork

    so the children don’t notice

    the teeth.

    he takes the screaming chaos

    of the universe,

    runs it through his ribs,

    and hands it back as

    calm instructions.

    he is the wall in the wind.

    the father who stays awake

    so the family can dream

    of meadows.

    we write books about him.

    we carve his face

    into mountains.

    we argue over

    vision,

    grit,

    the holy mechanics

    of command.

    burn the books.

    sand the statues down

    to dust.

    spit on the philosophy

    until only pavement

    is left.

    the answer is not in the man.

    it is in the space

    behind him.

    you ask what makes a

    good leader?

    turn around.

    if there is no one there,

    you are just a man

    taking a walk.

    if there is a line of

    warm bodies

    mistaking your shadow

    for a map,

    following your heels

    into the fire—

    congratulations.

    you are a leader.

    the rest is just

    marketing.

  • Un-Inventing Organized Religion

    Un-Inventing Organized Religion

    If you could un-invent something, what would it be?

    If I had to un-invent Organized Religion, let’s be clear: I wouldn’t be trying to kill God. I’d be firing the middle management.

    I would dissolve the corporation of faith. Because that is what it has become: a global franchise that sells you water while you’re standing knee-deep in a river.

    There is a profound difference between the spiritual impulse—that raw, undeniable feeling you get when you write a lyric that tells the truth, or when you sit in silence and actually face your own Jungian shadow—and the rigid structures that demand you outsource your conscience.

    Hitchens would call it a “celestial dictatorship,” and he’d be right. It is the ultimate Orwellian surveillance state. It demands we surrender our modern intellect to the whims of bronze-age provincials. It insists we take our moral cues from illiterate merchant warlords who solved their disputes with the sword and claimed divine permission for their questionable domestic arrangements.

    Why should the messy, beautiful search for meaning be held hostage by the egos of men who have been dust for a thousand years?

    If we un-invented the organization, we wouldn’t be left with nothing. We would be left with us. We would be forced to build our own moral architecture, brick by brick, based on empathy and reason rather than fear. We would have to find the divine in the faces of the people we love—and the people we mourn—rather than looking for it in a gilded cage.

    True spirituality requires bravery. It requires the guts to walk into the dark without a map. Organized religion is just selling you a flashlight with dead batteries and telling you it’s the sun.

  • The Alchemy of Green

    I tried to paint a mourning that didn’t hurt,
    dipping my brush into the brightest yellow I could find—
    the color of survival, once the color of son,
    the color of I am okay.

    I laid it thick across the clear sheet of today,
    trying not to cover the past
    but to bring it with me into the next scene.

    But you know the physics of this book now—
    the pages are glass, not paper.

    And deep beneath my layer of yellow sunlight
    lies the permanent midnight blue, sometimes black,
    of losing you.
    The indigo of a silence that started at nineteen.

    I thought the darkness would spoil the light.
    I thought the blue would swallow the gold.

    I tried to outsmart grief—
    it already knew my name.

    But as the layers settled,
    something impossible happened.

    The yellow of my living
    sank into the blue of your absence,
    and the world didn’t turn grey.

    It turned green.

    That wild, impossible emerald green.
    The color of the fields you loved.
    The color of the heritage you wore like armor,
    the family crest tattooed over my heart
    that reads jackiemac4ever beneath it.

    I see it now.

    Every time I let a little light in,
    it doesn’t push you away.
    It just mixes with the memory of you
    to paint the whole world
    in your color.

    (No hashtags necessary on this one)

  • The Calendar Didn’t Change You

    We’re all dysmorphic

    January Is a Mirror, Not a Door

    The calendar did not absolve you at midnight.

    It did not forgive December.

    It did not sprinkle moral disinfectant on your habits while you slept.

    January 1st is not a beginning. It’s a receipt.

    If you were moving toward something in October, you’re already closer now.

    If you were lying to yourself in November, you brought that lie with you—carry-on, not checked.

    Resolutions are charming in the way apologies are charming when they arrive late and rehearsed.

    They sound noble.

    They feel ceremonial.

    They allow us to pretend that discipline is seasonal and courage can be scheduled.

    But character doesn’t wait for fireworks.

    Anyone who truly meant it—the running, the quitting, the writing, the calling back, the drinking less or loving better—quietly started when no one was watching. Usually on a random Tuesday. Usually without an announcement. Usually without permission.

    That’s the part no one sells you.

    Change doesn’t arrive with a slogan. It creeps in through boredom, discomfort, repetition.

    It shows up looking unremarkable and asks if you’re willing to be consistent instead of inspired.

    So keep your resolutions if you like. They’re harmless theater.

    But don’t confuse the theater for the work.

    If you want to begin, begin now.

    If you already began, don’t stop just because the calendar caught up.

    January doesn’t make you new.

    It merely exposes whether you were honest before the countdown.

    And that, inconveniently, is the only resolution that ever mattered.

  • MANUAL FOR SPOTTING A KNIFE

    By Jamie, not Cormac, McCarthy

    Manual for Spotting the Knife

    There’s enough rot in a regular person
    to fuel a thousand comment sections
    and still have leftovers for Sunday.

    You don’t need monsters.
    You just need people
    with slogans
    and something to protect.

    The loudest about mercy
    keep their hands clean
    by pointing.

    The loudest about love
    need an audience
    or it spoils.

    The loudest about peace
    sleep with one eye open
    and a thumb on the trigger
    they swear they don’t own.

    God-talkers rent God.
    They don’t live with Him.
    Peace-talkers rehearse it
    like a line they keep forgetting.
    Love-talkers mean approval
    and charge interest.

    Watch the ones with microphones.
    Watch the ones with certainty.
    Watch the ones who underline books
    but never bleed on the page.

    Watch the ones who romanticize hunger
    or mock it—
    both are tourists.

    Watch the fast clappers.
    They clap to hear themselves.

    Watch the ones who police language—
    they’re terrified
    something feral might get loose
    and name them.

    Watch the ones who need crowds.
    Alone, they evaporate.

    The average man isn’t harmless.
    The average woman isn’t gentle.
    Their love wants a receipt.
    Their love wants witnesses.
    Their love wants to be normal
    so it doesn’t have to be brave.

    And here’s the part nobody says out loud:

    There’s brilliance in their resentment.
    A precision.
    A teamwork.
    A choreography.

    They can’t stand silence
    because silence asks questions.
    They can’t stand solitude
    because it doesn’t applaud.

    They can’t make anything
    that didn’t already exist,
    so when they fail
    they blame the room,
    the time,
    the culture,
    the weather,
    you.

    They don’t understand art
    because art doesn’t ask permission.
    They don’t understand love
    because love doesn’t negotiate.

    So they’ll tell you
    you’re doing it wrong.
    That your grief is excessive.
    That your joy is suspicious.
    That your freedom is offensive.

    Then they’ll come for you
    not messy,
    not emotional—
    but clean.

    Their hatred is efficient.
    It shines.
    It passes inspections.
    It wears credentials.

    It doesn’t rage.zwzwq
    It executes.

    And that—
    that is the only masterpiece
    most of them will ever finish.

  • Dr. Falls Freud 2: The Refill

    (The Diagnosis Was Wrong, But the Confidence Was Strong)

    “Doctor, the patients are restless.”
    Good.
    If they were calm, I’d think the meds were working.
    Hand me the clipboard—
    the one covered in my old resentments
    and your new insurance co-pays.

    The refill

    I need a refill
    on whatever I prescribed last time.
    Don’t check the dosage—
    I wrote it during a blackout
    and the AMA refused to comment.

    Bring in the next disaster.
    Who is it?
    Ah yes—
    the man allergic to responsibility
    and addicted to horoscopes and whores.
    Put him in the trauma bay;
    tell him Mercury’s been in retrograde
    since his third divorce, and Amber retired anyway.

    And someone get me my reading glasses.
    Not to read—
    just to look smart
    while I guess wildly.

    The nurse asks,
    “Doctor, are you okay?”
    Of course not.
    I’m a mental health professional.
    We don’t heal—
    we outsource.

    Now… where were we?
    Ah yes, the refill.

    RX #1:
    Take one truth
    with two lies
    and chase it with a childhood memory
    you haven’t processed yet.

    RX #2:
    Apply gratitude
    directly to the wound.
    If burning occurs,
    good.
    It means you’re still alive.

    RX #3:
    Stop saying
    “everything happens for a reason.”
    Everything happens because
    people are irresponsible
    and God clocks out early.

    Next patient, please.

    Mr. Ego returns—
    as usual—
    complaining of a swollen sense of self.
    I recommend ice.
    Preferably Antarctica.

    Miss Co-Dependence is back too.
    We tried cutting her off last visit,
    but she refused
    because she “didn’t want to be rude.”
    We’ll keep her overnight.

    And you—
    yes, you—
    the one pretending to be fine
    because you bought a new candle.
    You need a refill most of all.

    Your diagnosis?
    Life.
    Chronic.
    Terminal.
    Relapsing and remitting
    but mostly just remitting.

    The nurse hands me a chart.
    The chart hands me my fate.
    I stare into it, horrified.
    “My god… is this my handwriting?”
    No wonder half the patients
    left the building enlightened
    and the other half
    started a podcast.

    Time of day:
    who knows.
    Cause of day:
    capitalism.
    Treatment plan:
    “fuck around and see.”

    I sign the discharge papers
    with the confidence of a televangelist
    and the accuracy of a man
    throwing darts in the dark.

    Before I leave,
    I grab my coat,
    my stethoscope,
    and the final universal truth:

    Nobody’s cured.
    We just refill the prescription
    until the bottle or the body
    runs out.

    Fade to black.
    The credits roll.
    Freud slips again.