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  • 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.

  • Dr. Falls Freud

    “Doctor, we need more pills for our patience

    so we can get more patients.”

    Get me an Rx, stat—

    hit the deep web,

    or whatever corner the interns score their morals from.

    And bring me a nurse we can bang over—

    well-versed, sober,

    but tell her to hold her applause

    because if this hangover wins,

    I’m clocking out in a hearse.

    And while we’re at it,

    the whole world needs a makeover.

    Fraud in plain sight,

    unconscious piss on the fallen—

    what a trip.

    That’s not a Freudian slip,

    that’s Freud falling down the stairs

    and blaming your mother for it.

    It all goes back to Uncle Trouble’s past.

    Self-made man.

    Self-made until he dropped the big E,

    now he’s just self-mad.

    So let me pause before this final sentence—

    use common sense,

    add an extra comma before but, and, or,

    to add drama or suspense.

    And that comma?

    Instant karma—

    you’ll get what you got coming

    and going.

    Everybody wants their shot,

    but the dharma bums don’t talk about guns;

    they just swing for the fences—

    ostensibly offensive to some,

    but you can’t fix what sticks in your head and makes you want to fight.

    And that being said, here’s my plight:

    the insanity sits in my vanity.

    Maybe I should find God.

    “Doctor, I think you’re losing your patience.”

    What do you mean?

    Love is patient, love is kind—

    they said if I loved myself too much

    I’d go blind.

    Bullshit.

    I can see for miles.

    Maybe I’ll fight the resistance,

    write their riddance,

    rewrite their wrongful existence.

    Be the pause

    before my final sentence.

    And get that nurse an ashtray.

    The patient spent his life working,

    now his heart is hardly working—

    he’ll be living in an urn.

    Too soon?

    Alright, call it.

    Time of death:

    whenever the last punchline landed.

    Cause of death?

    Freud slipped again.

    I’m losing my patience.

    There’s no cadence to this curse.

    I want to go back in time—

    you know, when men were men.

    And goddammit—

    where’s my nurse?

    FATHER SICARIO

  • 19 Feminists

    Nineteen feminists
    —yeah, nineteen—
    were sentenced today
    for laundering bra straps.

    Not the Steinem warriors.
    Not the women who marched, bled, built, changed the goddamn world
    while men smoked on the porch
    and called it thinking.

    No.
    These were the new models.
    The knock-offs.
    The grievance influencers.
    Feminism with a filter.
    Oppression with a promo code plus a series of weak hashtags that only resignate with band wagon broads who’ve never turned the pages of a book beyond Woman’s World.

    And the prosecution—
    a collection of men
    who still need two hands
    to operate a zipper—
    said the defendants got “girly”
    with a plea bargain.

    Meaning:
    they spoke clearly.
    And weren’t apologizing
    for taking up oxygen.

    Then the judge—
    God bless him—
    a man whose worldview
    was embalmed sometime around
    the Reagan administration,
    issued his verdict like a man auditioning
    for a parody of himself:

    Women. For life.
    No parole.
    No shopping.

    The courtroom gasped.
    Mostly because the judge thought
    he was being edgy.

    And in the back?
    Steinem’s generation.
    Arms folded.
    Looking at this circus like teachers
    watching students
    act out Hamlet using emojis, and incomplete sentences.

    Attention all gentlemen:
    a few of these new-breed feminists
    are still on the loose.
    Yes, you’ll know them.
    They weaponize victimhood
    like pepper spray,
    and treat every polite man
    like a war criminal
    who forgot to Venmo reparations.

    But—
    listen to me now—
    if you’re one of the rare good men,
    the real ones,
    the diaper-changing,
    emotional-labor-sharing,
    I’m-here-I’m-present-I’m-accountable men—
    you’re safe.
    You’re invisible.
    They don’t attack you. Because they know you aren’t a murderer but are capable of doing so with your barehands if that means protecting the woman you love.

    They only go for men
    who look like authority
    or know how to use a wrench.

    If you get “hard up,”
    the state recommends:
    Handle it yourself.
    Safest option.
    Least paperwork.

    Ignore that
    and you’ll find yourself
    caught in the spin cycle—
    tumbled, shrunken,
    and left in the lint trap
    next to every man
    accused of sins such as
    “interrupting,”
    “breathing confidently,”
    or “existing while male
    in the general vicinity
    of a complaint.”

    Outside the courthouse?
    Oh, it gets better.
    They’re shouting
    “GLORIA STEINEM! PROSTITUTION!”
    like it’s a spell
    that summons empowerment
    instead of proving they’ve never read
    a single goddamn thing she wrote.

    Somebody tell the prosecution
    this is community service.
    A PSA.
    A reminder:
    that real feminism is a movement,
    not a mood swing with a merch table.

    Meanwhile the doctor—
    who’s clearly done with everyone—
    sent his report:
    “Surgery successful.
    Patience drained.
    Shirt removed.
    Libido parked.
    Safest place for it.”

    He’s running on empty,
    but insists feminism
    stole the gas cap.

    This from a man
    who’s been firing
    homemade grenades
    of insecurity into every conversation
    since 2009.

    It is not easy—
    trust me—
    being a man
    married to the cleaning lady
    when the cleaning lady
    is the only person in the house
    who understands equality
    and how a washing machine works.

    P.S.
    Before you forget—
    help your wife
    with the laundry.
    Not to earn points.
    Not to look woke.
    Not to impress anybody.

    Do it
    because lifting your own weight
    is the oldest
    and sexiest
    political statement
    you’ll ever make.

    Mccarthy, not Cormac, Jamie McCarthy

  • Gratitude (2025 Edition) By McCarthy, not Cormac, Jamie McCarthy

    Gratitude isn’t a prayer or a posture.

    It’s a scar that still throbs when the weather turns—

    a reminder you’re somehow still here

    while the world keeps finding new ways

    to set itself on fire.

    It’s outliving a son

    and carrying his brilliance like contraband

    through a year that tested everyone’s faith

    in everything.

    It’s knowing the gods are broke,

    the politicians are puppets,

    the prophets are running side hustles,

    and the news is just a fear carousel

    you didn’t buy a ticket for.

    Gratitude doesn’t live there.

    It lives in the cracked places:

    the dog who curls against you

    like she’s guarding what’s left,

    the laugh you didn’t think you had in you,

    the friend who calls before the collapse,

    the night that lets you pass without a toll.

    It lives in the chaos we survived

    and the beauty that somehow survived us.

    Keep it small.

    Keep it sharp.

    Pocket-sized and battle-ready—

    your own stitched-together compass

    for a world that keeps losing north.

    Remember:

    you’ve been broken open,

    but you’re still walking.

    You’re still dangerous.

    You’re still here.

    Mccarthy AKA FATHER SICARIO

  • Music: New and Relevant

    https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/new-and-relevant/pl.u-70q3Fg1Wge

  • 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.