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.
“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.
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.
All my life I stumbled, staggered like a drunk at closing time, reaching for something, anything. I’d been told to find meaning in the sermons of men, the wisdom of books, the clink of coins in a beggar’s cup
it was all more of a junkie’s dream. The kind of thing you’d find slipped in between the folds of the Interzone, tucked inside the sweaty palm of some two-bit dealer with half his face gone, nodding off in the alley. I wasn’t looking for it, not really. But it found me. They always find you.
Years spent in the static haze, the off-channel white noise of existence. I moved through life like a virus spreads—covert, unnoticed, but always present, always creeping. Everything felt slippery, synthetic. The streets, the people. All part of a bad signal, fuzzing in and out of view. I tried to decode it, cracked open veins and heads alike, trying to read the messages in the blood and the circuitry. It all led nowhere. Circling the drain.
Then the tablet. Green. The color of rot, the color of new life. One third of the tricolor draped along the walls of the long, hollow corridor of time, reverberating with the somber hymns of Irish proverbs, and maybe, just maybe, carrying enough luck to turn pessimism into hope. Sort of like a coin toss, only with a tablet. I didn’t so much find it, it found me, pressed itself into my hand, throbbing like some living thing. Organic. Synthetic. All of the above. I swallowed it without thinking.
And then the world folded in on itself, a collapsing wave. Time ceased to have meaning, space unraveled into dimensions I didn’t believe existed—places where gravity was just another bad trip, a suggestion instead of a rule. The walls of the room bent, melted, reformed. Faces flickered, sliding in and out of their skulls. Bureaucrats with insect eyes and needle fingers. All the usual suspects.
The tablet wasn’t knowledge. It was beyond knowledge. It was access, a key to a hidden layer of reality, a frequency just out of reach unless you knew where to tune the vibrations. And there it was—the whole system laid bare. The machinery behind the facade. The puppet strings of control, the invisible hands pulling us all in circles.
The thing I’d been looking for in gutters and bars, in the eyes of strangers and the bottom of empty bottles. Turns out, it was the very thing that made me stop searching.
I don’t remember what was written on it. Maybe there was nothing. Maybe it was just the act of finding it that mattered. That green tablet wasn’t salvation, not in the way they sell it in churches or schools. It was just a reminder that the world, the one I had spent years fighting, didn’t give a damn. It never would. And finally, I no longer needed it.
I wasn’t stumbling anymore. My new found saunter suggested confidence, not arrogance—just the ease of a man who knew the system and could slip through its cracks unnoticed, the few eyes that caught me probably green with envy. But I always looked past them, through their lost souls, and left a simple inscription on their softened brains…
I’m always five minutes late. Doesn’t matter if it’s therapy, a meeting, or a funeral—hell, I know for a fact i’ll be late to my own, if I even show up at all.
I’ve been seeing this shrink for a while now. Good guy. Listens well, scribbles occasionally, throws a “hmm” out like he’s adding salt to a shitty dish his wife whipped up. So, one day, after the usual “you’re late again” look, he finally asks me, “James, why are you always five minutes late? No matter what time we set, it’s always the same.”
I shrug, staring at his overly polished desk, and say, “Well, Doc, best as I can figure, my five minutes and your five minutes just aren’t the same.”
He raises an eyebrow like I’m onto something. Like I’ve finally cracked the code to the universe of perpetual tardiness. So, I keep going.
“See, your five minutes, it’s precise. Probably feels like 300 seconds ticking away, one, two, three. But mine? Mine could be five seconds, or five hours. I don’t feel the difference.”
I could tell he wanted to laugh but was trying hard to remain the professional. He adjusts his glasses, the kind of move therapists do when they’re buying time to decide if they should diagnose you or just let it slide.
“Maybe it’s because you taught me to live in the moment, Doc. You ever think about that? Maybe I’m just so focused on the now that time… bends. It warps around me like some kind of slow-motion bullet in a movie. Except, instead of dodging it, I’m just late.”
TikTok killed Hollywood, and I watched it die, in a dim-lit bar on the 3rd street promenade where ghosts from the golden age whispered eulogies into cheap whiskey glasses that shattered just as the silver screen cracked, like brittle, glass bones under the weight of 30 frames…. and in one second, just like that, there were filters that washed away the grit. I saw the stars fade, one by one, replaced by brats in their bedrooms, dancing to bullshit algorithm’s, lined up one after the other to join the pixelated parade of fleeting faces. there were no more dream factories, only copycat hackers of distraction, likes and follows replacements for a deflated currency, every scroll, heroine at the end of a billion thumb prints the old guard, lost in digital dust, while new idols born without a single talent pushed trends of bite-sized dopamine compressing all creativity into an offensive nothingness Hollywood and its lost souls echoed the silence of unread scripts, rejected Oscar winning directors and queers being canceled for being queer blown away by the winds of virality. the city’s neon lights flickered, as if to signal the end of an era, a final curtain call for the grand illusion, now reduced to a series of swipes. so here’s to you, TikTok, the swift assassin, the desensitized dream killer, you paralyzed and buried a behemoth, leaving us to mourn the magic, lost in the endless scroll.
The dream hits like a cheap shot after last call, every night, same damn thing. There he is, the poor bastard, standing on the edge of nothing, staring at the horizon where the sea meets the sky. It’s calm, too calm, like the silence before a bar fight. And then, out of nowhere, it comes—a tidal wave a mile high, a wall of watery doom.
This isn’t some Hollywood disaster flick. No, this wave is real, raw, unfiltered. It rises with the fury of every unpaid bill, every broken promise, every lonely night spent in the bottom of a bottle. It’s the weight of existence, the crushing force of life’s relentless bullshit.
The man, he doesn’t run. There’s no point. He stands there, rooted to the spot, like a drunk pinned by a cop’s flashlight. He knows what’s coming, knows he can’t escape it. It’s not about courage; it’s about acceptance. He’s staring down the barrel of inevitability, eyes wide open, heart pounding like a bum’s fist on a midnight diner counter.
The wave looms, casting a shadow that swallows the sun. It roars, the sound of a million lost dreams and forgotten loves. It’s beautiful, in a way, this monstrous, all-consuming force. There’s a terrible beauty in surrender, in the recognition that fighting is futile. The wave crashes, and for a moment, everything is chaos, a swirling, suffocating mess of saltwater and despair.
But then, there’s a strange peace. The man is engulfed, yes, but in that drowning, there’s release. No more running, no more struggling. Just the cold embrace of the inevitable. It’s over, and in the end, maybe that’s all anyone can hope for—a moment of clarity in the madness, a brief respite in the endless tide of life’s absurdity.
Life’s a wave, kids. You can’t outrun it. You just stand there, take the hit, and hope to hell you find some meaning in the drowning.
