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.
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.
The bar doesn’t give a damn what’s between your legs. v It only wants what’s in your liver.
You weren’t “winning.” You were bleeding for attention and calling it strategy.
You didn’t outdrink the boys. You auditioned for their approval and called the cuts trophies.
That’s not rebellion. That’s just self-harm in a room full of spectators who forgot your name the second the bottle tipped.
And Johnny? He didn’t hold you like a barred window. He left you outside of one— face pressed to the glass, mistaking cold for intimacy.
You didn’t skip the wake. You skipped the reckoning. Drove past the house, hoping the blood had congealed into meaning.
Here’s the truth you won’t tattoo on your thigh: You bled for a cigarette, and the only smoke left was your own delusion curling into the ceiling fan.
You weren’t the champion of quarters. You were the cautionary tale passed around like a lighter— sparks, burns, and no one remembers who lit the match.
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.
The earth shrugs, and a fault line splits a city in two.
A rock, smooth from centuries of wind and rain, decides today is the day it falls, crushing a man who never missed Sunday mass.
A wildfire starts in the bones of a dead tree, the wind carrying its laughter across acres of homes and history.
Somewhere in the ocean, something ancient rolls over in its sleep, and the tides rise just enough to erase a coastline.
No explanation. No reason. Just the universe twitching in its sleep.
And then there are the other things. The ones written in history books with footnotes that lead nowhere.
The bodies that vanish.
The wars that start because someone blinked at the wrong time.
The lone gunman that wasn’t so alone.
The flag that was still there, an anti-gravity, star bangled banner still waving.
The numbers that don’t add up, the footage that disappears, the coincidences that stack too neatly to be random but too scattered to be anything else.
We shake our fists at the sky, but the sky never bothers to look down.
And then there’s this—the real question, the only one that matters to me.
Jack.
Why Jack?
Not the dealer, not the smug piece of shit pushing poison for profit.
Not the ones who make money off of death while dressed in white coats.
Not the fucking grinning death merchants in boardrooms, approving a new batch of slow, quiet execution.
But Jack?
Why him? Why that night?
Why that second, that breath, that choice?
The tectonic plates shift and ask questions but they don’t answer.
The fire roars, but it doesn’t explain.
The rock doesn’t whisper a reason as it falls.
I wake up every day, expecting the answer to be written on the ceiling, in the cracks in the paint, in the coffee, in the way the wind moves the leaves.
Anything.
I don’t even need it to be the full answer. Just a hint.
But all I get is silence.
And silence is the loudest fucking thing in the world.
But, somehow today I am temporarily at peace, it may not be the answer, but fuck, at least it’s not another question.
