Jamiemccarthytv

Author: Jamie McCarthy

  • The Gospel According to Dr. Jolly


    the day after Ruby attempted suicide by banging his head on the walls of his jail cell.

    Gather close, children of the static.

    Tonight’s sermon is brought to you by the Un-United States Government,

    that eternal pharmacy of the damned,

    and by one Dr. Louis Jolyon West —

    Jolly, for short.

    A nickname that tells you everything and nothing, which is exactly how the good doctor liked his patients.

    Now… I’m not here to tell you whether Charles Manson was a monster or a kid who wrote bad folk songs until the nation decided to turn him into an exorcism ritual for everything it feared about itself.

    That’s not my job.

    My job is to peel the wallpaper off history and show you the termite tunnels beneath.

    Follow me.

    Picture Jolly West in his tweed jacket —

    a man who looked like he’d apologize

    before cutting your consciousness into strips.

    A man who weaponized curiosity

    and called it compassion.

    He’d inject you with questions

    before the syringe even touched your skin.

    They say he treated broken minds.

    I say he manufactured them wholesale.

    He was the kind of doctor

    who could hand you a glass of water

    and three days later

    you’d be confessing crimes you didn’t commit

    in languages you didn’t speak.

    Some say Manson spent time in his orbit.

    Some say coincidence is just God hiding the blueprints.

    Some say neither Jolly nor Charlie ever met.

    And some—

    some of us just ask the one question

    you’re not supposed to ask in America:

    Who benefits when a nation goes mad?

    Look around.

    Chaos is an industry.

    Fear is a commodity.

    And the human mind—

    well, that’s just clay for the sculptors

    who sit in the windowless rooms

    three floors below the truth.

    But tonight…

    tonight we honor Charles.

    Not the killer,

    but the songwriter he might have been

    before someone decided

    his chords needed more dissonance.

    I imagine him strumming in some halfway house,

    dreaming of fame

    while a doctor in a lab coat

    scribbled notes about “suggestibility thresholds”

    and “malleability of identity.”

    It doesn’t matter what’s true.

    It matters what’s plausible.

    And America…

    America has a way of making the plausible feel like prophecy.

    So let’s raise a glass to Jolly West —

    patron saint of pliable minds,

    architect of the quiet apocalypse,

    the smiling executioner of certainty.

    And let’s raise another

    to the kids who never asked to be born

    into a country that treats the psyche

    like a used car part

    to be swapped, tested, or discarded.

    In the end, children, remember this:

    When the devil wears tweed,

    we call him “Doctor.”

    When the angel grows wild hair

    and sings off-key,

    we call him “Manson.”

    And somewhere between the two

    is the truth.

    And the truth?

    Well…

    she’s still missing.

  • THE HOUSE I GREW UP IN

    THE HOUSE I GREW UP IN

    Series: Filter Failure: Beneath the Noise

    (the crest) (dad at sea)

    Short Announcment: You never really leave the house you grew up in. It leaves pieces of itself in you.

    In the house I grew up in I found the McCarthy crest yesterday — buried in a box by the stairs, right where the house keeps its secrets.

    Same one I’ve got inked over my heart — Jackiemac4ever.

    A promise that never healed right.

    Funny thing about symbols: they start as pride and end as proof.

    Proof that somebody once stood here and mattered.

    Proof that love still bleeds through the cracks of time.

    Next to it was my father, trapped in a photograph — late thirties, early forties, somewhere between wisdom and warning.

    He’s standing on a sailboat, face tilted toward the wind, a man still convinced there’s more horizon left than storm.

    I was twenty-three when I lost him.

    Jack was nineteen when I lost him, too.

    Two men — the bookends of my life — both gone before I figured out what any of it meant.

    Mom sat in her chair, smaller now, soft around the edges, like the world’s been quietly erasing her outline.

    We talked about moving her out of the old house.

    Said it like logistics, but it felt like betrayal.

    Every wall in that place still hums with our laughter, our fights, our noise.

    Every step sounds like an echo of who we were trying to be.

    The air was thick with dust and ghosts.

    Not the kind that scare you — the kind that wait for you to understand.

    Every photo frame, a silent sermon.

    Every object, an altar.

    When I left, I didn’t cry. Or maybe I have selective retention.

    I Didn’t say goodbye.

    Just stood in the driveway, hollowed out and human — the last McCarthy man in a story written in vanishing ink.

    But I don’t call it grief anymore.

    Grief sits still.

    This — this is participation.

    A ritual of remembering.

    A man standing in the ashes of what built him,

    saying softly to the wind,

    I’m still here.

  • 🎙️ Ode to Miscast Men

    (Response to misinformed feminist poet)

    Not every shoulder in an airport is a declaration of war.
    Some are just men…
    half-awake,
    burning their tongues on bad coffee,
    late for gate C17,
    thinking about rent,
    or their kid’s soccer game.
    But someone writes a poem,
    and suddenly he’s the businessman —
    the villain.
    The sting without the bee.

    Not every man who said, “I don’t believe in labels,”
    was dodging a leash.
    Some just hated boxes,
    the way words lock living things inside.
    Some of them loved harder without a label
    than others did with rings.
    But nobody writes poems about those men.

    He said he liked her hair another way.
    Maybe it reminded him of his mother,
    the woman who read him bedtime stories
    when the world was falling apart.
    But in the poem, he’s a chauvinist.
    No cross-examination allowed.

    There were men who fixed the leak at midnight.
    Men who held doors,
    held breaths,
    held their tempers while the world baited them.
    But they got folded into the punchline.
    Another “boy” in a list of wrongs.
    Their quiet was mistaken for guilt.
    Their hesitation, for harm.

    Some said “period sex is gross”
    because no one ever taught them otherwise.
    They weren’t gagging at her.
    They were gagging on their fathers’ silence.

    The one who didn’t say I love you fast enough?
    He wasn’t a monster.
    He was terrified.
    Not of love —
    of being written into someone else’s vengeance poem.
    He was standing at the ledge of his heart,
    waiting for a language that wasn’t a trap.

    Not every man who walked away was running.
    Some just got tired
    of opening their mouths
    and hearing the same labels echo back:
    chauvinist.
    toxic.
    boy.
    Their stories were pre-written.
    Their names replaced with archetypes.

    This isn’t some rehab for men.
    This is an ode to the mislabeled.
    The men who walked gently through a world
    that kept calling them wolves,
    even as they were the ones
    building the fences.

    They weren’t saints.
    But they weren’t the villains in your receipts, either.
    They were just men.
    Complicated.
    Flawed.
    Human.
    And maybe,
    just maybe,
    worth a verse of their own

  • CIRCUS TRUTH

    The Program

    Circus Truth

    The television pukes in every corner bar,

    anchormen with porcelain teeth,

    their jaws, clacking wind-up dolls,

    selling fear like popcorn at the carnival.

    You don’t pick your truth anymore—

    it’s handed to you, pre-chewed,

    a soggy cigarette butt that’s passed around the alley and back.

    The left bleeds red ink,

    the right bleeds black bile,

    and the middle—

    there is no middle,

    just a beige carpet soaked with the bloody chunder of yesterday’s spin cycle.

    Every headline is a slot machine:

    pull the lever,

    watch the cherries line up to spell

    WAR, ASSASSINATION, PANIC, OUTRAGE, WOKE, UAP’S, THE SIMULATION.

    They give you “choice”

    like a prison cafeteria—

    mystery meat or a misery meet with sauce.

    And you nod,

    mouth full of microwaved narrative,

    because it’s all as good as plastic and BPA going down.

    The anchors smile,

    the podcasters scream,

    the Tik-Tokers beg to be put back in lockers.

    The news ticker scrolls like scripture,

    and the gospel is always the same:

    stay tuned, stay scared,

    stay stupid enough to buy what they’re selling.

    Meanwhile the truth—

    the real thing—

    squeezes into a clown suit,

    red nose, floppy shoes,

    juggling grenades for clicks.

    The crowd boos,

    but keeps buying tickets.

    That’s the joke, kid:

    truth doesn’t matter—

    the circus sells out anyway.

  • The Murder of Charlie Kirk

    The murder of Charlie Kirk is not merely an assassination — it is an x-ray of our species at its worst. We are confronted again with the spectacle of a coward mistaking a bullet for an argument. It does not take a man to kill. It takes only the cold blood and weak little veins of someone incapable of reason.

    A real man — a real woman — meets an opponent with intellect, with wit, with fire in the mind. Not with a rifle on a rooftop. Those who exalt this act reveal themselves not as revolutionaries, but as bottom-feeders: parasites gnawing at the body of civilization, dragging us down to a point where debate itself is murdered alongside its victims.

    This is not about politics or that our outrage wasn’t there when Melissa and Mark Hortman were killed in cold blood. It is about humanity itself, and whether we still deserve the word. If our instinct is to meet cowardice with more cowardice, to answer bullets with bullets, then perhaps we will have proven the assassin’s point — that the species is already finished.

    The real turning point is not that Charlie Kirk is dead, but whether we are capable of refusing the abyss that his murderer has opened.

  • JUST NOD

    They sell us hope in paper cups.
    We buy it, tip the priest in the apron.

    A man curses at a parking meter.
    Another shoots drywall into his veins.

    The rats read stock tickers.
    They know more than the professors.

    God skipped town.
    Left his Bible in the Motel trash.

    Politicians grin with teeth like knives.
    We clap while they steal our shoes.

    The absurd thing is—
    we nod.
    Every damn time.

  • Nitroglycerin In A Clown Car

    I’m Thsmart

    Ignorance with confidence is nitroglycerin in a clown car. They slam the gas, swear they own the road, and when the wreckage burns, they call it a parade. The terrifying part isn’t the crash — it’s that the rest of us are strapped in the backseat, duct-taped to the seats, nodding along to the circus music. And the fools? They don’t die — they take a bow.

  • EVERY WORD IS ROPE

    Some of us were dumb enough to think we were chosen. Destined for greatness. I was one of those fools.

    Then life swung for the skull—my father gone when I was just twenty-four, my son gone at nineteen. That’s the punchline. And I’m still here, scribbling like a clown juggling knives at his own funeral.

    Every line I write turns to rope. And rope’s a funny bastard—you can climb it, you can hang from it. Lifeline and noose, same damn thing.

    And here’s where I laugh at myself: I can’t stand writers who always find a way to make it about them. But don’t mistake this for that—this isn’t me making it about me. This is me making it about you, making it about me. That’s the kind of pretzel you twist into when you’ve got nothing left but your own shadow to wrestle with.

    Greatness? That’s the carrot they dangle so you’ll chase yourself into the grave. The truth is simpler: I’m under the gallows, grinning through broken teeth, laughing at my own execution, and the only reason I keep writing is because hanging myself with my own words is the one thing I’ve ever done well.

  • Council of the Damned

    How the fuck do you crawl out of rage?

    How the fuck do you scrub sadness off your teeth?

    Answer: you don’t.

    I call in the heavyweights,

    the intellectual cavalry,

    and it’s a goddamn carnival.

    Nietzsche storms the room screaming will to power,

    eyes rolling like a rabid horse.

    Aurelius is polishing his stoic turds

    while the empire burns behind him.

    Wilde wants better wallpaper.

    Twain heckles from the cheap seats.

    Thompson kicks the door in with a shotgun,

    mescaline dripping from his pores.

    Bukowski is shirtless, pissing in the corner.

    Burroughs has turned into an insect,

    clattering needles like antennae.

    Joyce is babbling in tongues that even hell won’t translate.

    Byron is dry-humping the apocalypse itself.

    Kerouac is pacing the ceiling,

    muttering go, go, go like a scratched record.

    And Hitchens—dear Christ—

    Hitchens is on fire,

    lighting one cigarette off the next,

    snarling through smoke,

    grief is a goddamn scam, don’t tithe to it.

    The walls buckle.

    The sky splits.

    Ink, blood, static, numbers—

    the whole matrix vomiting itself onto the floor.

    And me?

    I’m strapped to the chair,

    still asking the same useless question:

    how in the fuck do I get free?

    The answer is written on the walls in piss and whiskey:

    You don’t.

    You ride the rage like a dying horse,

    you suck up the sadness like sacrament,

    and you learn to make the end of the world

    sound like a song worth singing.

  • UNKILLABLE

    Fuck The Matrix and This Simulation.

    Almost Arriving

    Every time I inch toward something called normal,

    when the day almost tricks me into believing I’ve arrived,

    doom slips its hand back on my shoulder.

    I will never accept it.

    Not in this life, not in any.

    Jack is gone, they tell me,

    but I spit back the only truth I know:

    He may be gone,

    but he will never, ever, ever be forgotten.

    You will know his name.

    You will know his story.

    If I remain in this strange matrix of survival,

    it is only to keep him alive in every syllable,

    every note, every silence that dares to fill the room.

    My grief is my rebellion.

    My love, unkillable.