Not the boots. Not the jacket. Not the watch pretending time means anything.
It’s the uneasy stomach. The golf ball lodged in the throat. The cracked heart stitched together with bad sleep, caffeine and whatever people call “moving on.”
Those are old. Ancient, really.
Hand-tailored over years by loss, disappointment, memory, guilt, love and the quiet observations you never talk about out loud because everyone else is busy performing wellness like it’s an Olympic sport.
I wear old conversations that never ended properly. Old funerals. Old versions of myself I buried but still hear scratching around under the floorboards at 2 a.m.
None of it was designed by me.
It was made for me.
By every slammed door. Every hospital hallway. Every “I’m fine” that wasn’t. Every moment you realized the world keeps spinning with horrifying confidence no matter what it takes from you.
(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.
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.
The murder of Charlie Kirk is not merely an assassination — it is an x-ray of our species at its worst. We are confronted again with the spectacle of a coward mistaking a bullet for an argument. It does not take a man to kill. It takes only the cold blood and weak little veins of someone incapable of reason.
A real man — a real woman — meets an opponent with intellect, with wit, with fire in the mind. Not with a rifle on a rooftop. Those who exalt this act reveal themselves not as revolutionaries, but as bottom-feeders: parasites gnawing at the body of civilization, dragging us down to a point where debate itself is murdered alongside its victims.
This is not about politics or that our outrage wasn’t there when Melissa and Mark Hortman were killed in cold blood. It is about humanity itself, and whether we still deserve the word. If our instinct is to meet cowardice with more cowardice, to answer bullets with bullets, then perhaps we will have proven the assassin’s point — that the species is already finished.
The real turning point is not that Charlie Kirk is dead, but whether we are capable of refusing the abyss that his murderer has opened.
Some of us were dumb enough to think we were chosen. Destined for greatness. I was one of those fools.
Then life swung for the skull—my father gone when I was just twenty-four, my son gone at nineteen. That’s the punchline. And I’m still here, scribbling like a clown juggling knives at his own funeral.
Every line I write turns to rope. And rope’s a funny bastard—you can climb it, you can hang from it. Lifeline and noose, same damn thing.
And here’s where I laugh at myself: I can’t stand writers who always find a way to make it about them. But don’t mistake this for that—this isn’t me making it about me. This is me making it about you, making it about me. That’s the kind of pretzel you twist into when you’ve got nothing left but your own shadow to wrestle with.
Greatness? That’s the carrot they dangle so you’ll chase yourself into the grave. The truth is simpler: I’m under the gallows, grinning through broken teeth, laughing at my own execution, and the only reason I keep writing is because hanging myself with my own words is the one thing I’ve ever done well.
I used to laugh at everything. Irony was my shield. Sarcasm, my second skin. But then life walked in, uninvited, and knocked the mic out of my hand.
There was a time I could joke my way through anything. Grief. Guilt. Failure. Give me a tragedy, I’d find the punchline. Not because I thought it was funny— but because laughing meant I still had control.
Humor was my armor. If I could reduce it to a one-liner, I didn’t have to feel it. I just had to deliver it.
But eventually, the jokes stopped landing. Not because they weren’t clever. But because the pain got louder than the laugh track in my head.
You can’t joke your way out of a child’s funeral. You can’t riff your way around a hollow chair at the dinner table. And you can’t meme your way back to who you were before everything shattered.
There’s a point— when irony stops being a coping mechanism and starts becoming a coffin.
It’s not edgy. It’s not cool. It’s just another way to keep people from getting too close.
And I’ve had to reckon with that. Because while I was busy being the emotionally unavailable Bukowski of the grieving dads club, I was also bleeding underneath the punchlines.
So now? Now I still laugh. But not to deflect. I laugh because some shit is absurd and crying all the time doesn’t pay the bills. But I’ve also learned to sit in the silence after the joke. To let it echo. To let the truth behind it hang heavy.
And if you’ve felt that— if your jokes are starting to sound like pleas for help wrapped in wit— just know this:
You’re not weak. You’re waking up.
You don’t have to be the strong one. You don’t have to be the funny one. You just have to be real—even when it’s raw and ugly and doesn’t trend.
That’s it for now. Laugh when you can. Cry when you need. Bleed in front of people who’ve earned the right to see it. And if the joke stops being funny? That’s your cue to finally speak the truth.
