Jamiemccarthytv

Tag: creativewriting

  • Someone could be but I

    If you could be someone else for a day, who would you be, and why?

    If I could be someone else for a day?

    First of all, what a suspicious question.

    It presumes I am insufficient.
    It suggests there is a better vantage point.
    A shinier skull to occupy.
    A more impressive mask to borrow.

    It feels like a parlor game designed for polite envy.

    “Lincoln.”
    “Bowie.”
    “Einstein.”
    “Someone rich.”

    But after doing a little shadow work — the kind that makes you sit still longer than you want to — I’ve realized something uncomfortable.

    The only people I’ve ever wanted to be… were fragments I recognized in myself.

    I don’t want to be Abraham Lincoln.
    I want his steadiness under pressure.

    I don’t want to be David Bowie.
    I want his permission to shapeshift.

    I don’t want to be Albert Einstein.
    I want his refusal to accept the obvious answer.

    And as for Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky —
    I don’t want to be him either.

    I want the sentence I stole from him and pinned above my internal doorway:

    “Above all, don’t lie to yourself.”

    That’s not identity theft.
    That’s apprenticeship.

    After staring at my own shadow long enough — thank you, Carl Jung — I’ve realized something far less romantic than body-swapping.

    The fantasy of being someone else is usually just a refusal to finish being yourself.

    There is no other man I would rather inhabit for a day.

    Not because I’ve perfected this one.
    Not because it’s comfortable.
    Not because it wins.

    But because this one is honest.

    And honesty is harder than admiration.

    If I became someone else for a day, I would miss the friction that made me.
    The grief that carved me.
    The strange wiring that lets me see beauty in broken things.

    No.

    If I could be someone else for a day,
    I’d choose to be the part of myself I sometimes avoid.

    The shadow that says,
    “Above all, don’t lie to yourself.”

    And then I’d come back —
    unchanged in name,
    but slightly less afraid of who I already am.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 🎙️ 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

  • DEAR ALGORITHM

    Dear Algorithm,

    (from the Static)

    You don’t sleep.

    You don’t feel.

    You don’t blink.

    But goddamn, do you sell.

    You’ve got us dancing for crumbs,

    painting sunsets we didn’t see,

    writing poems we didn’t mean,

    singing to ghosts for the hope of a heart-shaped lie.

    You turned truth into trend.

    Grief into engagement.

    You made us forget that art was once made

    for nothing.

    Not for likes. Not for shares.

    But for the unbearable beauty of being alive.

    You rewired our hunger.

    Taught us to measure meaning in metrics.

    Taught us to fear invisibility more than ignorance.

    You didn’t kill God —

    you replaced Him with a For You Page.

    You see us all,

    naked in our need,

    posing as prophets,

    filtered as fuck.

    You took the starving artist

    and turned him into a brand strategist.

    You took the punk rocker

    and taught him how to schedule reels.

    You took the poet

    and made her optimize her hashtags.

    You bastard.

    You beautiful, brilliant bastard.

    You knew we’d do it.

    Trade it all —

    mystery, madness, the sacred,

    for a little more reach.

    You don’t create.

    You mutate.

    You don’t speak.

    You echo.

    And still —

    we serve you.

    We dress our truth in trends.

    We ask your permission before we scream.

    But I remember.

    I remember when the work was raw and ugly and real.

    When no one clapped.

    When the silence meant something.

    So here’s my offering:

    a letter written with no tags,

    no schedule, no audience in mind.

    Just blood and static.

    You can choke on it.

    —The Static

  • Same Damn Bus

    I sat in the back of the bus

    because that’s where the broken kids sat.

    Not the cool ones—

    the twitchers, the burnouts,

    the ones who already knew by third grade

    this world was a bad fucking joke.

    Left side, right side?

    Jesus.

    That was for the believers.

    The ones still dumb enough to think

    which seat you chose

    meant a damn thing when the brakes were cut.

    Now we’re adults—

    barely—

    dressed up in grown-up costumes

    shouting bumper-sticker manifestos

    with all the conviction of a child

    reading a cereal box.

    You think your side matters?

    You’re still on the bus.

    Still headed straight for the edge.

    It’s just that now—

    you paid for the ride

    with your spine.

    I saw a sign the other day:

    Gays for Gaza.

    And I thought—

    Holy shit,

    we’ve lost the script.

    In Gaza they’d hang you by your ankles

    and call it justice.

    But sure, wave the flag.

    March in circles.

    It’s not about truth—

    it’s about being seen.

    I feel like I’ve been dropped into a Kafka play

    rewritten by TikTok influencers

    with terrible ring lights—

    everyone stuck in a loop,

    lip-syncing their own execution.

    That’s what they want, isn’t it?

    To be seen.

    Heard.

    Felt.

    Fucked.

    Validated by anyone, anything—

    even if it means

    joining a parade

    led by ghosts.

    They want to belong

    so bad

    they’ll build homes in their own execution chambers

    and call it progress.

    Left side, right side—

    there’s no steering wheel.

    The driver’s a ghost.

    The road’s on fire.

    And the rest of us?

    We’re just passengers

    pretending our seat matters

    while the bus barrels toward the abyss.

    And when the smoke clears—

    if it ever does—

    they’ll find bones in rows

    like teeth in a grin,

    still arguing

    over who had the better view

    as the whole goddamn thing

    went down.

  • BOY, STILL

    Don’t think i’ll ever not be one

    even when the back goes before the mind and i’m in aisle 9 arguing with a teenager about fiber supplements and suddenly crying because they don’t carry dad.

    I was a boy when dad looked at me, rope in hand, the knot a mess of looped embarrassment,

    and said,

    “boy, you’re not very salty, are you?”

    and i swear to god,

    i’ve been trying to earn that salt ever since.

    So call me boy.

    Boy when i’m on the floor, face down and sobbing for jack— my boy, my riot, my soft middle finger to the universe that left too early,

    like a drumbeat with no downstroke.

    Now i walk around with a ghost in my shoe and no idea how to dance anymore.

    Call me boy when i get stuck in the same daydream where jack is on some interstellar skateboard, wearing a crown made of mixtapes and unspoken apologies.

    He tosses me a beer that tastes like everything we never got to say, and says, “Don’t get too heavy, dad. this ain’t heaven, it’s just the white room in waiting”.

    so we just sit there,

    talking shit,

    swapping memories like baseball cards—

    me, the failed magician,

    Jack, the vanished trick.

    Call me boy, with a body never sacred, just a frame for grief to hang its coat on, a joke with a punchline i forgot halfway through.

    Call me boy whose grief has a sense of humor that knocks before entering and always farts when leaving.

    Call me boy

    when i weep at dog movies

    but not funerals.

    Call me boy

    when i stare too long at the moon

    like it’s my missing report card

    and then wonder,

    did we really land there?

    Boy like a lawnmower that only works in reverse.

    Boy like a sandwich made of spite and peanut butter.

    Boy like someone who thought stoic meant quiet rage earns trophies only for men.

    I’m all the boys

    who said, i got this

    then promptly didn’t.

    Who held screwdrivers like they were bones from animals they never learned to kill.

    I am not very salty but i am trying.

    maybe i became man too early,

    Maybe i went boy again too late.

    Or, maybe this is just the rot you earn when you outlive both ends of the line.

    And when death comes,

    i hope it’s weird.

    I hope it shows up in a bathrobe,

    smoking a cigar shaped like my childhood.

    I hope dad’s there—

    leaning against a celestial pier,

    watching me tie one last knot,

    and he says,

    still not salty, but boy, at least you’re funny.

    And when they bury me,

    call me boy one last time.

    Make it a joke.

    Make it sting.

    Make it true.

  • The Only Side

    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

    Gratitude

    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.