“Emotional Support Whiskey” by McCarthy (written on a bar napkin, signed in ketchup)
When the woman cuts in front of me at TSA, I don’t flinch. I picture her face-down in a Marriott pool, clutching a mimosa and a yoga mat. It’s not a murder fantasy. It’s a peace offering.
I am 47 and have cried in more parking lots than churches. A woman once told me I had “sad dad energy,” so I leaned into it— got a flannel, grew a beard, adopted a dog named Regret. We howl at sirens together.
A girl said she likes men who cook— so I made her a soufflé and ghosted myself. Poof. Gone. Left the oven on just in case.
She said I was “too intense,” so I sent her flowers with a card that just said: “RUN.”
Another said I reminded her of her ex. So I slept with her best friend and sent her ex a thank-you note.
When she stopped texting, I took up taxidermy. Now I stuff my feelings into squirrels with tiny hats. I tour the Midwest with them. We sell out in Omaha.
She wanted a man with a five-year plan. I told her I was more of a five-minute man— three of them spent wondering why I still talk to women who say things like “my truth” in a sentence. She left before the microwave hit zero. Good. I didn’t want to share my Hot Pocket anyway.
I don’t key cars. I don’t listen to Taylor Swift unless I’m trying to fake empathy. I don’t write sad-boy poetry on rooftops. I don’t chase closure— but I will send a $2 Venmo labeled “emotional damages” just to see if they flinch.
She told me I was emotionally unavailable. I told her I was emotionally under construction, but the crew quit, the permits expired, and Joy Behar took over middle management. Now my inner child gets interrupted every five seconds and accused of being problematic.
I’m not mad. I’m just tired. Tired of pretending every cup of coffee isn’t just a slow suicide in disguise.
But I’m still here. Still tipping 20%. Still flossing sometimes. Still saying “you too” when the waiter says “enjoy your meal.”
I don’t need closure. I need a burrito and a nap. And maybe someone to lie to me about the future while I pretend I’m not googling if dogs and squirrels can actually be friends.
Not a boot on the shore, but a soft-soled shuffle in the dark.
No flags, no trumpets.
Paperwork and policy, and a nod from some pinstriped man who’s never touched mud.
Ireland—the old girl—she finally crawled out from the ditch they drowned her in,
scrubbed the famine from her face,
stitched the flag back together with borrowed thread and native blood.
She was never perfect, no.
But she was herself.
And that’s a rare enough thing these days.
Now she stands blinking in the fluorescent light of world order—surrounded.
New rules, gods, and ghosts.
Her voice is still hoarse from centuries of screaming in silence,
and before she can clear her throat—someone’s already speaking for her.
They come with stories.
While hers are being shelved,
dusted over by diversity slogans
and the sound of virtue blinking red.
And the irony is so fucking rich.
The United Kingdom, that battered old whore of conquest,
finally getting bent over by history.
The colonizer colonized by complacency,
by the very hunger it once fed across continents.
It’s a punchline soaked in gin,
a banquet where the menu’s in twenty languages
but none of them say “English.”
But Ireland?
Ireland never got her empire.
She got survival.
She got famine, and flight, and diaspora.
She got to be the drunk uncle.
The lucky charm.
The sob story in Boston bars.
And just when the scars started to heal—
when the songs came back, rising from the foggy dew,
not as mourning but emerald celebration—
Then, an untitled wave.
Not men with muskets this time.
Not redcoats or landlords.
Just silence.
Just slow, unrelenting erasure dressed as virtue.
And they say:
“This is progress.”
“This is compassion.”
“This is the future.”
But the future doesn’t speak Gaelic.
The future doesn’t remember the graves under the hedgerows.
The future doesn’t give a damn about your grandfather’s boots.
This isn’t about skin.
This isn’t about race.
This is about place—
and what happens when place gets diluted
until it tastes like nothing.
Give her just a few bloody fucking years to breathe.
To walk her own streets
without feeling like a stranger in the house her fathers built
with song and sorrow.
They call it xenophobic.
As if love for your land is a crime.
As if the only history worth keeping is someone else’s.
This isn’t war.
No bombs.
No battles.
No blood.
Just replacement.
And that’s the real trick of it—
Not a single shot fired.
The quietest conquest is the one where no one even notices it happening until the flags are different, and the pubs are gone, and your children don’t know the name of the river that runs behind the house where your mother was born.
I recently asked Martha, my one-year-old rescue dog — and no, I’m not virtuous enough to claim I rescue dogs in general — but after losing Jack, it was clear she rescued me, in a sense.
This dog is wise. Listens better than any bullshit therapist I’ve ever paid. She doesn’t nod, she doesn’t offer coping mechanisms — she just watches, breathes, and exists in a way that makes you question everything you’ve ever thought was important.
She doesn’t speak. She judges. Silently.
I talk to her about the world. The confusion. The masks behind the masks. And she stares — not blankly, but with that deep, old-soul stare. Like she was once a philosopher who gave up on humans and decided fur and naps were a better way to spend her time.
I told her once, pacing the kitchen, that people will sell their soul for likes now. She licked her paw, unimpressed. They always have, she said, without saying a thing.
Sometimes I think she’s God, if God cared more about naps than commandments.
I asked her, “You think we’re all just pretending? Running on a hamster wheel built from lies we’re too tired to question?”
She stared at me, then farted.
Which, honestly, felt like the most honest answer I’d heard all week.
I once asked Martha what happened to civility. She was chewing a stick like it was the leg of some ancient tyrant.
“The uncivil don’t even know why they’re uncivil,” I muttered. “They’re just echoing slogans, barking at strangers, convinced their rage is righteous because someone on a podcast told them so.”
Martha didn’t blink. Just kept chewing.
She doesn’t pick sides. She picks sunspots on the carpet. And maybe that’s what makes her wise.
I told her the government feels like a house of mirrors — every reflection distorted, every path leading to a deeper maze. “Who’s running this place?” I asked.
She sighed. The kind of sigh that says, Why are you still asking?
Jobs came up next. I said, “Martha, no one wants to admit it, but most people hate their jobs. Even the ones pretending to love them on LinkedIn. Especially those.”
She scratched behind her ear.
“All these posts,” I went on, “just little theater performances. Carefully crafted captions about ‘growth’ and ‘culture’ and how grateful they are to work seventy hours a week for stock options that’ll never vest.”
She got up, walked to her bowl, and stared into it like it was a metaphor.
“Exactly,” I said. “At least your bowl gets filled.”
But this time, it didn’t.
She looked into her bowl and just stood there. Silent. Still.
And I swear, in that moment, it wasn’t just about kibble.
It was everything. All of it.
The politics, the performative civility, the jobs we fake-smile through, the lies we repost and retweet and rebrand as truth. The clout. The fear. The noise.
All of it boiled down to one bowl. Empty.
Martha didn’t bark. She didn’t whine. She just gave me that look — the one that says, You already know.
Then she walked away.
Like any self-respecting philosopher would, once the audience starts clapping for the wrong reasons.
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.
I arrive in a haze of neon twilight, drifting into the celestial dive bar at the end of the universe. The air is thick with ghost-smoke and the scent of spilled whiskey dreams. Constellations glow faintly in cracked light fixtures. A cosmic jukebox in the corner plays a distant, crackling blues – each note a star dying quietly in the night. I take a breath I no longer need and step inside.
Shadows dance along the walls and tell stories, whispered in charcoal tones. In those flickering silhouettes, I catch fragments of my life: a boy (surely me) learning to ride a bike under a summer sun, a teenager (my son, Jack) going out the side door and mumbling, “going to Justin’s, be back by 11pm,” an old man (Dad) slumped in a chair watching his own funeral on C-SPAN. The shadows play them out in silence, a living scrapbook of regrets and love. I blink, and the images waft away like smoke rings.
At the bar, spirits with no eyes sit and sip from empty glasses. They toast to nothing and everything, blind gazes cast toward the glowing bottles that line the shelves like stained-glass saints. They don’t turn as I pass. We’re all orbiting our own stories out here—me, them, humanity.
In a cracked leather booth under a neon halo, Jack and Dad wait for me. Jack beams, all 19 years of him forever etched in that youthful frame. Dad gives a gruff, warm nod, his form flickering between the old man I held as he died and the vigorous father who once held me. My heart – or whatever I have now – aches with a complicated joy.
I slide into the booth. Jack’s eyes shine like wet streetlights. We collide in a hug that transcends time; I feel the strength of his teenage arms again and the undeniable reality of loss washes through me. “I’ve missed you, kid,” I manage to say, voice cracking like the jukebox vinyl. Jack just smiles wider and blinks back gleaming tears. Dad’s hand falls on my shoulder, solid and steady, and I realize I’ve missed him too – God, so much – the lump in my throat says what I can’t.
A bartender who speaks only in old voicemail messages shuffles over, his face a fuzzy outline like a detuned TV. He opens his mouth and a familiar voice spills out, tinny and warm: “Hey, it’s me. Just checking in on you. Give me a call when you can, okay?” My breath catches; it’s a voicemail from my mother. I broke the golden rule and went before she did. The bartender’s head tilts, awaiting our order, the message looping softly: “…just checking in on you…” Jack and Dad look to me, eyebrows raised.
I clear my throat, steady myself. “Three whiskeys, neat.”
My mother’s voice replies from the bartender’s lips: “I love you. I will always love you. Goodbye.” He nods and vanishes to fill our order, leaving me shaken and grateful all at once. It wasn’t my fault I went before Mom—it happened by chance. Or did it? Well, something like that.
I turn to Jack and tell him, “I finally got Miranda, but one of his thugs got me just as I finished the choke that stopped Miranda from breathing for good. I whispered in his ear as I dropped him, bag full of bones onto the concrete, ‘That was for Jack, and his mother, Samantha, God, and the universe.’ Then, boom. I was shot in the back of the head.”
Jack chuckles under his breath, as if he now is far wiser to the world than I am. He’s practically vibrating with excitement to have me here. He lifts one of the empty glasses already on the table, swirling the ghost of a drink. “Dad,” he grins, “it’s okay to drink here. Your sobriety on earth was a gift to the family and possibly the world.” There’s a light in his eyes—pride, mischief, reassurance. I let out a laugh, part joy and part disbelief. Of course my kid knows I’m conflicted about ordering whiskey after decades dry. Of course he’s giving me permission, here at the end of ends.
Dad snorts, easing himself into the booth further. With a teasing smile he turns to Jack, “Yeah, when he was your age he had a thirst for the grape like a mad sommelier on acid plus a case of ’69 Château Latour.” Jack bursts out laughing and I groan, running a hand through my hair. “Always there to make sure I stay humble, huh Dad?” Generational friction follows us even into death, it seems. Dad just winks. “Just keeping my promise that you never forget the importance of being grounded.”
Our drinks appear as the bartender returns, sliding three glasses toward us with a crackle of another old voicemail: “You have… one new message.” This time the voice is my own, it’s more recent, shaky: “Jack… I just wanted to say I’m sorry, I was supposed to protect you, and I failed. I love you.” A message I left on Jack’s phone the day after he died – when I finally understood him. Dad’s eyes brim as he hears it, and he reaches for his glass. The bartender fades back into the haze before the message can finish.
We raise our glasses. The whiskey’s color is deep gold, catching the neon like liquid sunlight. I hesitate, the old instinct of sobriety warring with the desire to join my son in this toast. Jack clinks his glass to mine – the sound rings like a small bell in the quiet chaos of the bar. Dad follows, his large hand swallowing his glass. “To family,” Jack offers, voice soft now. “To second chances,” I add, my throat tight. Dad rasps, “To life… and what comes after.”
We drink.
The whiskey tastes of memory – rich and smoky, with notes of laughter and decades of shared sorrow. It burns going down, but warmly. I feel a weight lift that I didn’t know I was still carrying.
A neon sign sputters above us, casting a gentle glow over Jack’s face. I see the man he never got to become and the boy he always will be. “I’m sorry I couldn’t save you,” I whisper, the words falling out before I can catch them. My vision blurs. Jack sets his glass down and takes my hand – his touch is solid, forgiving. “It wasn’t your fault, Dad,” he says quietly. “I got more love in 19 years than some do in a hundred. You gave me that.” His words are a balm I didn’t know I needed. I squeeze his hand, a tear finally escaping down my cheek. In this bar of ghosts and cosmic light, I can cry freely; each tear turns to stardust in the blue glow.
Dad clears his throat, emotion thick in the air. In true Dad fashion, he deflects the heaviness with a gentle joke: “Well, Jack, your old man sure took his sweet time getting here. We were starting to think he’d stand us up.” I chuckle, wiping my eyes. “Sorry to keep you waiting,” I quip. “Traffic through Mexican Town was hell.” Jack and Dad both groan at the obvious reference to Jack’s and my own demise, and for a moment we’re just three idiots laughing at the edge of eternity.
The cosmic jukebox shifts tunes, and now it plays something low and familiar – a song I recognize as the one that played on the radio the night Jack was born. The melody drifts through the bar like a comet’s tail. I catch a woman made of Polaroids swaying gently to the music near the jukebox. Her form is a collage of photographs, each snapshot a piece of someone’s story. As she twirls, I glimpse a Polaroid of a hospital room – my wife in bed holding a newborn Jack, both exhausted and radiant. Another flash: a photo of me at twelve, baseball glove in hand, Dad standing behind me proud and tall. My breath catches. The woman’s eyes meet mine and she offers a knowing smile before the music carries her into another slow spin. I realize these photos are pieces of my life. She is made of moments I lived, and moments I missed. My heart clenches with a strange nostalgia. In her, I see the totality of my story dancing in one body.
Jack nudges me and nods toward the bar counter. There, a preacher made of smoke has materialized, nursing a drink that evaporates within him. His face is a swirling mist of sermon and ash. He raises a translucent finger and intones in a vaporous drawl, “Sometimes, you have to care enough to know not to care too much,” which floats through the air like incense. Then he dissolves into a curl of smoke, leaving only the faint echo of a hymn. It’s oddly comforting – a reminder that even old dogmas and worries have become specters here, powerless, fading.
Dad shakes his head. “He was always long-winded, plus I’m the one who said that to you when you were 19,” he mutters, and Jack snickers.
We trade stories – not of what was, but what is now. Jack talks about the friends he’s made in this in-between bar, how he’s become something of a pool shark (he gestures to a table where a one-armed ghost and a translucent librarian cheer as a trick shot sinks). Dad recounts with a chuckle how he tried giving the preacher a cigar, just to see him billow. I find myself laughing more freely than I have in years. The sound feels good. Honest.
In a lull, I admit softly, “I was scared to see you both again… afraid you’d be disappointed in me.” It’s out before I can stop it – that raw vulnerability. Jack’s brow furrows in disbelief. “Disappointed? In you?” he says. “Dad… I’ve always been proud of you. Even when I was a stubborn teen and acted like I wasn’t.” Dad nods vigorously. “Son, we’ve both always been proud. You broke cycles, you loved us hard, you lived as best you could. Why would we be anything but grateful?” I bite the inside of my lip to keep it from trembling. This absolution, this love laid bare – it’s more than I ever hoped to earn.
Above us, the neon light buzzes, the color of sunrise. The bar around us hums with its own quiet tales: those eyeless spirits clink glasses and mutter farewells to old pains; the Polaroid woman’s laughter sounds like a shutter click as she trades snapshots with a faceless man in a WWII uniform; the jukebox planets continue their slow orbit through melodies.
Jack stands, grabbing our empty glasses. “Another round?” he asks, already heading toward the bar. Dad slides out after him, patting my back as he goes. “Be right back, son.” I watch them weave through the crowd of memories and phantoms. My father, my child – two bookends to my life, moving with an ease that eluded us in the living world. I take this moment alone to breathe it all in. This absurd, beautiful dive bar of the afterlife has given me something precious: time – time to say what was left unsaid, to laugh at jokes that had been silenced by years, to forgive and be forgiven.
Jack returns carrying three fresh glasses, amber liquid sloshing. The bartender must have delivered them in another recorded phrase, but I was too lost in thought to catch which memory he used. No matter. We gather by the old jukebox now, leaning against it as cosmic light spills like rainbows across the scuffed floor.
“Remember this one?” Dad asks as a new song begins – it’s his favorite tune, the one he used to hum while getting ready to go on the air: You Make Me Feel So Young. He takes Mom’s old Polaroid from the dancing woman’s hand (she giggles and drifts away, leaving that photo behind as a gift). In the picture, Dad and I are standing at the Jupiter Inlet, holding up bluefish, both smiling. Dad slips the Polaroid into his shirt pocket with a satisfied grin. Jack wraps an arm around my waist, and I drape mine over his shoulders. Three generations, side by side in a bar at the end of the world, listening to the music of the spheres.
I raise my glass, and they follow suit. No need for a toast this time – the moment speaks for itself. Our glasses touch, and the sound is like the final chord of a favorite song, resolving at last. We drink deep. The warmth fills us.
In this strange, smoky liminal space, we remain – laughing, loving, healing. The celestial dive bar doors stay open for as long as we need. And as another cosmic record drops into place – Lush Life, sung by Nat King Cole – I know our story isn’t over. We found each other again. We have found peace.
They always called it a rabbit hole like it was some playful spiral, a psychedelic slide into harmless madness. But this hole stinks. Like burned paper and blood on old currency squeezed together by melting rubberbands. Like the back alley of a failed empire.
I didn’t fall — I was pushed. By smiling men in tailored suits, by ads that knew my name before I did, by the unblinking god-eye of surveillance wrapped in convenience. They called it progress. I called it a muzzle with a firmware update.
The rabbit? He was half-rat, half-fed. A jittery informant with bugs stitched into his fur. He sold me a map in exchange for my fingerprints. Told me, “You’re not gonna like what you find, but you already paid the toll.”
We passed the Mad Hatter — ex-Blackrock, now peddling immortality through neural lace and lithium smiles. His tea was laced with lithium, too. Served in a chipped mug etched with OWN NOTHING. BE HAPPY. Said free will was a glitch in the old system, and the new patch fixed it. “Congratulations. You’re cured of choice.”
The Cheshire Cat was just teeth. Rows and rows of them — each one a microphone, a camera, a contract. He spoke in brand slogans and court settlements. His grin was sponsored by Pfizer. And Meta. And Lockheed.
Deeper still: a hallway made of CRT TVs, each screen playing a different lie on loop: Weapons of mass destruction. Flatten the curve. Hope and change. Trust the science. God Bless the Troops. Epstein died alone. The vote was secure. Everything is fine.
The Queen of Hearts ran an NGO now, dressed in recycled virtue-signaling and diversity hires. She didn’t shout off with their heads anymore — she just clicked shadowban and let the algorithm do the killing.
I found a room. Locked. Inside: documents stamped TOP SECRET in 1965, pages soaked in oil and redacted like a priest’s confession. Operation Northwoods. COINTELPRO. Project Stargate. And something called “The Adjustment Bureau.” No files, just a single line: THEY MOVE FASTER THAN YOU CAN THINK.
And that’s when I saw it — not in ink, but in code.
A string of data, buried like a landmine: Jack McCarthy. Snapchat geolocation. Aron Miranda. Proximity trigger. Behavioral prediction confidence: 93.6%. Outcome: Fatal. Status: Acceptable Risk.
I stopped breathing. Not out of fear, but because I finally understood: It wasn’t a coincidence. It was an execution. Sanctioned by silence, written by code, delivered by convenience.
This isn’t a rabbit hole. It’s Hell’s sewer system. A machine that eats your sons and calls it a glitch. A system that makes you watch, and then tells you you’re crazy for screaming.
I went digging for goddamns and found nothing but God’s dam—backing up hypocrisy like a sewer on the verge of bursting. Thought maybe I’d reel in the meaning of that little fish glued to the backs of tan sedans crawling toward mediocrity but turns out it’s just another barnacle clinging to the herd, a bumper sticker with a punchline no one gets. Worse, it’s an acronym—because nothing screams divine wisdom like a secret handshake for suburbanites.
The “shalt nots” were scribbled in dirt while God was out fishing—dreamed up by crackpots, half-cocked in hypocrisy. “In God we trust.” Sounds less like faith, more like a slogan on a war bonds poster peeling off a gas station wall. Maybe God was pickled, tripped over his Birkenstocks into some desert bog, pulled his head out of the sand just long enough to count his fingers and think, “Ten. Yes, ten’s a good number. That’ll keep the peasants from eating each other.”
And so, we got “thou shalt not take the Lord’s name in vain”—but no asterisk for exceptions. Like, say, strapping a bomb to your chest and screaming God’s name on the way out for an express ticket to 72 virgins who, funny enough, spent eternity dodging exactly this scenario.
But before your fingers can strum a harp in the happy hunting grounds of the untouched, you’ve gotta learn to count—because obedience starts young. One… two… three… TIME OUT. Fear gets baked into you before you can spell your own damn name. But the holy scribes forgot their ABCs when it came to abortion.
A: If you climbed in through the side window, anonymity won’t save you.
B: Blood on your hands—stillborn or in plain sight, doesn’t matter.
C: And then, there’s the C. section.
No questions. Just follow the script. The big one? Thou shalt not kill—unless the bastard prays to the wrong God. Then, rape, burn, behead, and while you’re at it, rape again. All glory to one.
Cue the laugh track. Not only do these rules own you here, but once you clock out, guess what still applies? Ignore them?
The gods—you can choose to listen or not, but you will hear me.
God. A silence that leaves me sideways, and it makes no difference if all I get is indifference. I look up into the grey void, a guttural scream shaking the earth—
“Where the fuck are you, you cruel bastard!”
He pretends not to listen, like I’ve got my proverbial head in the clouds, but he knows. Knows what it’s like to lose a son. Knows the emptiness, the gut punch, the 24/7, 365-day guillotine choke around my throat.
And if God is everywhere, like they say, then when I escape to meet Jack in a dream, that means he’s under the bed, listening. Listening to the cracks in my heart clattering onto the mattress.
Is he sorry?
I don’t give a damn. And I sure as hell won’t bother with a plea—I’ve been on my knees long enough.
So, consider this a declaration. A warning.
Grief blackened my heart, changed its beat—forever pounding out some new twisted rhythm of madness.
My plan? To invade heaven.
A place I once questioned, but this loss—this hole where my son should be—has me lacing up my boots, ready to stomp through those golden streets, kick down every door in the happy hunting ground until I find what he took from me.
Is this war? Doesn’t have to be.
But Dylan Thomas said, ‘Do not go gentle into that good night.’
Well, fuck that.
I won’t go quietly into anything. Not the night. Not the silence. And sure as hell not into some pearly-gated bullshit where I’m expected to nod along like a good little ghost.
So when I come knocking, when I tear through those gates with grief as my war drum, you better be ready.
