Jamiemccarthytv

Tag: anchors

  • 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.

  • 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.