Born pickled a bundle of brine, spit out with the pigs, stepped on, tossed aside, buried under the muddy rugs— the carpet chorus muffled, rolled up and stained with the slap of hands, wet dirt naming me sinner, naming me fool, while the silence screamed back.
Junk on my hands but my fists stayed open— bound wrists, tight-rope veins walking the thin edge of despair, slippery slopes greased by whispers, shadows hoarding truths behind my spine.
I dreamed of the bottom of the bag— hiding in burlap shadows, draped over my shoulder, the sack of sorrow dragged uphill. The sun was a dagger, its glare split my skull, its fire pushed me to the peak where the earth yawned open.
And I fell.
Down through the dirt, down to the roots that never asked forgiveness, that held the mud and called it life.
I planted my name there, deep in the soil. The weeds forgave me.
I sprouted new hands, climbed the hill backward— not to escape but to meet the sunrise and the bruised boy I’d left behind.
I held his face in my palms. I said, “We are here now.” And he disappeared into the light.
The state is burning again, and this time, it’s not just the trees. No, my friend, California has slipped its tenuous grasp on sanity, plunged headfirst into a Dantean nightmare with flames licking at the edges of every gilded promise. The land of milk and honey is now a charred wasteland of smog-choked skies and people stumbling through ash like extras in a post-apocalyptic snuff film.
I pretend to light a cigarette—an act of rebellion or stupidity, depending on your perspective— starring at the horizon. The sun was a malevolent orange orb, veiled in toxic haze, casting a sickly glow over the melting suburbs. Somewhere in the hills, tech billionaires were watching their mansions turn to soot while clutching useless NFTs like talismans against the inferno. You could almost hear them scream, “Alexa, stop the fire!”
Noah Berger/AP Photo
This is California, where dreams are sold on credit and reality comes with a steep interest rate. A state that promises paradise but delivers apocalypse on demand. The fires, they say, are “natural.” A cleansing force, a rebalancing of ecosystems disrupted by decades of greed-fueled sprawl. But there’s nothing natural about it. Not when every acre of forest carries the weight of broken treaties and corporate negligence, not when every scorched town is a monument to the hollow promises of progress.
The politicians, of course, are useless. Flaccid marionettes jerking off to the rhythm of kick drum, campaign dollars thudding into their off shore accounts, offering “thoughts and prayers” while fiddling with climate policies designed to appease both Greenpeace and ExxonMobil. It’s a delicate dance of double-speak and outright cowardice, and it would almost be funny if it weren’t so goddamned tragic.
And the people? Christ, the people. Desperate and dazed, fleeing in Teslas with their organic soy candles and artisan kombucha tucked under their arms. Some fight the flames with garden hoses, others sit in traffic and weep, their cars packed with photo albums, pets, and the eerie realization that nothing they own is worth saving.
The sky above turns darker, almost biblical, and the smell of burning pine mixed with the acrid stench of melted plastic and singed dreams. Beautiful in a grotesque way, like watching a great empire crumble under the weight of its own hubris.
California will rise from this, of course. It always does. But what it rises into—that’s the real story. A phoenix or a chimera? A shining beacon of resilience or a festering hub of denial? Place your bets, folks, because the odds are as volatile as the stock market when the grid goes down.
As for me, I’ll keep chomping Nicorette and documenting, because someone needs to remember this madness. Someone needs to remind the survivors that the fires didn’t start in the forests—they started in our heads, in our hearts, in the searing heat of human ambition unchecked.
This is not the end of California. But it might be the beginning of something worse.
Let me set the stage: an airplane, five hours from Detroit to Los Angeles. A goddamn tin can full of sleep-deprived zombies and corporate swine, all clutching their pretzels and plastic cups like sacred relics. And me—drenched in sweat, reeking of stale, cheap scotch, tearing through little airline bottles like a lunatic on death row.
This wasn’t just drinking. No, this was a high-octane bender at 35,000 feet—a desperate attempt to defy the laws of physics and sanity. By hour three, the flight attendants were avoiding eye contact. By hour four, I was mumbling incoherent nonsense about the death of civility in America and demanding more ice. By the time we landed at LAX, I was less of a man and more of a biological weapon—a one-man disaster staggering off the plane with murder in my eyes and a thirst that could drown a small village.
Straight to the airport bar. The bartender looked at me like I’d just crawled out of the La Brea Tar Pits, but I waved a twenty at him and demanded a double. This was the routine, the sacred ritual: land, drink, repeat. The cities changed, the bars changed, but the mission was always the same—annihilation, pure and simple.
It wasn’t about fun. It wasn’t even about escape. It was about the necessary obliteration of self. The world was a strange, indifferent circus, and the only way to survive was to light yourself on fire and hope the flames kept the demons at bay.
But here’s the thing: they never stayed gone for long. Sobriety didn’t come to me as some grand revelation—no white light, no epiphany. It came because one day, the demons won. They dragged me down into a pit so deep and dark that even Jack Daniels couldn’t light the way out. But even in my discombobulated subconscious, I knew there was another Jack far more important in my near future. And a Samantha, whose birth opened my eyes to real miracles and shone a spotlight on the skull and crossbones of every bottle, glowing like Las Vegas from space.
Now, 24 years later, I’m sober. Clean. A goddamn Boy Scout. But I’m not stupid—I know the beast is still out there, pacing in the shadows, waiting for me to slip. And I won’t. Not now. Not ever. Even with the loss of my son Jack, the thought of diving back into the bottle just to escape that pain is as repulsive, grotesque, and cowardly as the former lush I used to be.
If someone put a gun to my head and told me to drink, I’d laugh. I’d tell them to shoot, because a bullet is quick, but one drink? That’s a slow, deliberate execution—a drawn-out death sentence dressed up as a good time.
Sobriety isn’t a victory parade. It’s a knife fight in a phone booth. But I’ll take that over waking up in an airport bathroom, trying to piece together what’s left of my soul.
This isn’t an ode to sobriety, where I tear a rotator cuff giving myself a proverbial pat on the back. It’s an extended middle finger to the beast that once ruled my head. And if that’s not worth raising a glass of sparkling water to, I don’t know what is.
The channels, the magazines, the sites—they’re all peddling the same poison under different labels, like snake oil in a kaleidoscope. The pundits, the hacks, the echo chambers disguised as platforms of truth: one chorus chants, “Democracy is over,” while the other screams, “They’re coming for your freedom!” Different flags, same battle hymn.
Some call it the Matrix, a web of manipulation so dense you can’t tell truth from propaganda. But let’s not flatter ourselves with cinematic metaphors. This isn’t some grand sci-fi conspiracy. This is humanity, stripped bare, its truest colors bleeding through like wine stains on cheap carpet. The educated look down on the working class with the smug disdain of someone who’s forgotten who fixes their plumbing or grows their food. And yet, why? Because intelligence without wisdom is just arrogance with better grammar.
The working class isn’t innocent either—eyes glued to screens, buying into their preferred flavor of outrage. They, too, love a good villain, and they’ll take whatever bogeyman the talking heads serve up.
And the intellectuals, oh, the intellectuals. They are often intensely stupid. The kind of stupid that comes with thinking you’re immune to manipulation because you’ve read Marx or Hayek or, god help us, a Twitter thread. They call themselves critical thinkers, but their critiques are as hollow as the echo chambers they inhabit.
What if one had to actually pick a side? Thank god we don’t, because there’s only one side: theirs. And “they” don’t care which team jersey you wear, as long as you’re on the field, playing their game. Democracy? Freedom? Those are just words they use to keep us running laps, convinced we’re winning something while they laugh from the VIP lounge.
So pick a side, if you must. Red or blue, left or right, Coke or Pepsi. It doesn’t matter. The scoreboard is rigged, the game already decided. And when it’s over, the only winners will be the ones who sold us the tickets.
Gratitude isn’t a hymn or a handshake. It’s a bruise you press to remember you survived. A quiet mutter to the chaos for sparing you—this time. It’s outliving a child but remembering the magical brilliance he brought you in just 19 years.
It’s not for the gods, the gurus, or the grifters. They’ve taken enough. Gratitude lives in the cracked things: the last drink in the bottle, the skulled wedge that hits the flag at 100mph and drops in the hole, the night that didn’t kill you.
Keep it small. Keep it sharp. Fold it in your pocket like a cheap map out of hell. And remember, you’ve been beaten but not defeated.
