The Noise of Your Songs

Yesterday was Sunday,

and all I could think about were the millions gathering in praise

while their neighbors are being hunted --

not in metaphor, not in shadow,

but in plain sight.

On sidewalks.

On jobsites.

In bedrooms and classrooms, no longer safe.

They invoked God's will as if they had no agency,

as if heaven required their silence

more than their courage.

As if faith were submission,

not resistance.

They denied the material:

the hunger in a child's belly,

the cough in a poisoned lung,

the eviction notice folded on the kitchen table --

as if the spiritual is all that matters,

as if the body is a burden to be endured, not a vessel to be honored.

They dismissed human suffering

as if it's inevitable.

As if it's someone else's calling to intervene.

As if it's not their place

to stand between empire and "the least of these."

But wasn't that the whole point?

How easily comfort recasts itself as righteousness.

How quickly love becomes selective.

How often the name of God is spoken

not as a balm,

but as a boundary.

And yet,

there are still mornings,

like today;

when the light hits the window just so,

and I remember:

the world does not need more belief.

It needs more becoming.

"I can't stand your religious meetings.

   I'm fed up with your conferences and conventions.

I want nothing to do with your religion projects,

   your pretentious slogans and goals.

I'm sick of your fund-raising schemes,

   your public relations and image making.

I've had all I can take of your noisy ego-music.

   When was the last time you sang to me?

Do you know what I want?

   I want justice -- oceans of it.

I want fairness -- rivers of it.

   That's what I want. That's all I want."

--- Amos 5:21-24

So Long, Maestro: A Requiem for a Musical Genius

Brian Wilson, the visionary architect of Southern California’s sonic dreamscape, has left us. Today, the world tilts a little out of key. The tides seem to pause, the sky wears a subtler blue. We have lost not just a man, but a fragment of the divine — the boy who heard symphonies in the wind and turned sand and sorrow into music.

He didn’t just write songs. He dreamt them. From Surfer Girl to Good Vibrations, his harmonies were cathedral-like — sun-dappled sanctuaries built out of ache and elation. And in 1966, Pet Sounds arrived like a comet trailing stardust, an album so tender, so strange and beautiful, that even now it sounds like a secret whispered from another planet. "Wouldn't It Be Nice" is not merely a pop song; it's a love letter folded into eternity, a lullaby for the hearts that still believe in what could be. Hearts like mine. 

But beneath all that lush orchestration, the Wrecking Crew sessions, the genius of layered vocals and sweeping harmonics — there was the wreckage of a childhood too cruel for poetry. Murry Wilson, his father, was a tyrant with a belt and a bitter tongue, a man who hit Brian so hard he lost hearing in one ear — and then took credit for the music he could never have imagined. The very man who should have been his first refuge taught him early that love could be conditional, and violent.

And later, as the walls of his mind began to collapse — voices, fear, isolation — the very brothers and bandmates who had once harmonized beside him left him behind. They boarded planes to tour the world, singing his songs, wearing matching stripes, while he stayed home in bed, weeping into the silence. There was no lifeboat. Just a piano. Just the dogged clink of ivory, trying to build beauty faster than the darkness could take it.

Yet somehow, still, he composed. Because music — oh, music — was the lifeline. It was the place where Brian became whole again. He heard colors. He stitched aching melodies like threads through time, pulling us all into a world where sadness didn’t have to be survived alone. In "I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times," he told the truth plainly: he wasn’t. He was out of sync with the world. He was made for something better. Something softer. He was tuned to a frequency this world too often fails to hear.

And yet, we heard him.

Los Angeles grew up under his spell. The Beach Boys were its sun-slicked soundtrack — surfboards, Mustangs, barefoot freedom — but it was Brian who filled the city with an invisible golden resonance, a kind of sonic afterglow. He made the Pacific sing. He made the car radio a chapel. He gave youth a heartbeat.

And beyond the cars and girls and waves, he gave us something purer: the sound of longing, of the sacred ache to belong, to love, to find peace. He was a boy who wanted to build heaven out of harmonies — and he very nearly did.

Brian Wilson was not just a man. He was a visitation. A candle lit at both ends. A conduit for the infinite dressed in flip-flops and falsetto. He gave us more than songs — he gave us glimpses of the sublime.

I'm so honored to have been alive to see it, hear it, feel it.

So long, Maestro. We return you to the Heaven from which you came.

Thank you for making this place beautiful, and for giving this man something to strive for, both in art and in life.

Tattooed Theology (Matter Matters)

I've been living inside the strange grace of Flannery O’Connor’s imagination—where grotesquery becomes gospel and every wound hums with the low, electric current of divine confrontation. I’ve returned, again and again, to Parker’s Back—a story soaked in mystery and flesh, inked in the theology of Incarnation.

O’Connor did not write from sentiment. She wrote from scar tissue. Her stories do not soothe; they confront. They insist—almost violently—on one unrelenting truth: spirit is not separate from matter. To pretend otherwise is not merely dishonest. It is heresy.

To be enfleshed, as Christ was enfleshed, is to bear the unbearable weight of both divinity and decay. It is to ache with the whole body for the healing of the whole world. Not just the salvation of souls. Not just some pieced-together theology of escape. But for this world—this burning, breaking, beloved world—to be transfigured. The Kingdom, after all, is not waiting in the clouds. It is “within you,” Jesus said. Among you. Within bodies.

So I want to say this plainly, without qualification:

To dismiss suffering—to regard it as a necessary prelude to paradise, or to speak of the world’s unraveling as merely “a sign of the times”—is not faith.

It is cowardice clothed in piety.

It is spiritual bypassing.

It is a refusal to weep with those who weep.

Last week, the president posted an image of planes taking off with the gleeful words: “Let the deportations begin.”

And since then, ICE has brought down hell among the working people of Los Angeles and many other cities. They've tossed flash bangs to dissuade the gathering crowd. They've waited outside courthouses where immigrants—doing things the right way—were seeking asylum and legal protection. Mothers torn from their children. Fathers disappeared into cages. All while the president rejoiced. And the pro-lifers cheered.

Is this pro-life?

Is this faith?

Silence is complicity. But even worse is celebration in the face of terror. Shame on everyone who supports this evil.

Ezra Klein wrote, “The emergency is here.” He wasn’t being alarmist. He was being accurate.

The signs of crisis are not metaphysical—they are material:

 Human beings kidnapped and disappeared by a system we pretend is legal

Programs for the poor, the disabled, the voiceless—slashed and burned like the forests under threat.

A proposed autism registry, that should terrify every human with memory.

And a chorus of public lies, desecrating truth like spit on the Gospel.

I feel this grief in my body. In my nervous system. In the shortening of breath. In the tightening of my jaw when I read the news. That matters. Not because I am the center—but because the body knows: someone else’s suffering is not abstract. It is embodied. Like Christ on the cross. Like the migrant crossing the desert. Like the trans kid facing erasure. Like the mother being told, again, to carry what may kill her.

Prayer without action is not prayer. It is a form of religious theater.

We cannot whisper “thy kingdom come” while building walls to keep the kingdom out.

And yet I’ve heard Christians—many—say with untroubled confidence:

“We always knew the world would get worse. Our hope is not in this world.”

But O’Connor, like the mystics and prophets before her, would call this what it is: a heresy.

To deny the sacredness of this world—to abstract hope into some unbothered realm beyond genocide, hunger, or fascism—is to blaspheme the very act of Incarnation.

If Christ did not come into flesh, then what are we doing here?

If God does not dwell in bodies, then the Eucharist is a lie.

And if bodies do not matter—black bodies, brown bodies, disabled bodies, poor bodies, queer bodies—then the crucifixion was just a myth, not a revolution.

Ram Dass once said, “Compassion is not a mental construct. It’s the trembling of the body when you see someone else in pain and you know it as your own.”

And Chogyam Trungpa taught that the spiritual path begins with raw fear—that moment when all strategies collapse and you realize you’re not above the suffering, you are inside it.

So I will keep pleading—not from a place of political outrage, but from a deeper place.

A spiritual marrow-place.

A place of trembling.

I plead for Christians to remember that we are not saved from the world.

We are saved with the world.

Because the Cross was not an escape route.

It was a door into radical solidarity.

And the Resurrection?

It was not a magic trick. It was a declaration that matter matters.

Farewell to the High Priest of Freak Theology.

Sly Stone disappeared—again and again—and now, finally, he’s departed, age 82. But let’s not kid ourselves: he left the building decades ago. What he’s done now is float permanently into the stratosphere of American music, headfirst into the funkadelic firmament, riding a chorus of wah-wah pedals, broken promises, and celestial overdubs.

Sly Stone is dead, and the world just got a little less funky. But don’t you dare call him a casualty.

This man resurrected rhythm from the ashes of Motown smoothness and white-bread rock. He unleashed chaos into soul and called it A Family Affair. He took all the sounds—black and white, gospel and acid, protest and party—and mixed them like he was summoning angels and setting them on fire at the same time. You want to talk about integration? Integration ain't your college brochure. Integration is Larry Graham's bassline gurgling up from the underworld while Sly whispers revolution through a purple haze. Integration is a band that looked like a commune and sounded like God losing His mind in a psychedelic disco.

Sly was the high priest of freak theology, the sermon in the key of E, the psalmist who declared that fun was sacred and the sacred was funky. He didn’t just bring people together—he electrified them into one body, sweating and moaning and dissolving in 16th notes. In a country splitting at every seam, he stitched sound together like it was the only real flag we had left.

And then he vanished.

Coke. Paranoia. Industry vultures. A thousand empty promises and an RV parked somewhere in the mythic junkyard of American ambition. People called it a tragedy. Maybe. But don’t confuse collapse with silence. The man was still there—in every slap of the bass, in every DJ who ever looped a breakbeat, in every artist who said "let's go weirder." He lived long enough to see his sound sampled, resurrected, worshipped, and mimicked by people who weren’t born when he was storming stages in a robe and Afro and talking to God through a vocoder.

Sly Stone broke the frame. He didn’t just bend genres—he annihilated them. He fed funk through a meat grinder, filtered it through revolution and LSD, and served it to America with a wink and a question: Are you ready?

No, Sly. We weren’t. We never really were.

And now that you’re gone, what’s left?

A groove so deep you could bury empires in it.

A scream that still echoes through civil rights ghosts.

A mirror held up to America—cracked, beautiful, glittering with sweat.

You were the dream and the come-down, the bandleader and the burnout, the preacher and the punchline, the prophet who set the pulpit on fire and called it Saturday night. And you never said goodbye. You just let the reverb carry you home.

Rest in power, Sly.

But let’s be honest:

You’re not resting.

You’re probably still mixing somewhere beyond the moon,

getting the angels to play tighter, louder, dirtier.

The jam doesn’t stop just because we can’t hear it.

I’ll catch you at the funky after-party..

Through the Looking Glasses..

She was ten, and the world had finally come into focus—violently, wondrously so.

Trees were no longer green clouds glued to brown trunks. They were a thousand intricate decisions, each leaf deliberate. Street signs were not just whispers to adults anymore; they spoke to her, too. The world, she learned, was edged.

The glasses were heavier than she expected. They smelled faintly metallic, like pennies or science. But it was the precision of them that made her feel a little dizzy, as though she had been promoted to a clearer version of existence she was not quite ready for.

Then, her brother called her four-eyes. It was said with a smirk, casually cruel. He didn't even mean it. It’s a reflex—like sneezing or  teasing.

Still, she began to wear the glasses less. The blur was softer. The blur did not name her. 

Her parents didn’t push. They encouraged.  Gently. Like gardeners coaxing a bloom rather than demanding it.

“Try them for dinner,” her dad said once, sliding the plate in front of her like a peace offering.

“You might like reading better with them on,” her mom added later, placing a new book at her  bedside, spine uncracked, world unopened.

One night, she fell asleep—or pretended to—on the couch, glasses still perched on her nose. She felt them before she heard them: her parents entering the room, their footsteps tender as breath.

They leaned over her, not speaking at first. She  imagined they were studying her the way one does a painting or a newborn animal—something both familiar and newly miraculous.

Then, she heard her voice. Soft as dusk.

“Have you ever seen someone look so beautiful in glasses?”

A pause. And then, his voice—deeper, certain:

“No, never.”

They lingered for a beat. She held her breath, afraid it might shatter the moment. And then they tiptoed away, back into the rhythm of dishes or bedtime or marriage.

She kept her eyes closed, but not out of pretense anymore. She was trying to memorize this—this weightless kind of love, the kind that doesn’t fix or force or correct, but simply sees you, perfectly, even as you’re still learning to see yourself.

Later, when she opened her eyes, the room was  darker, but not dim. Through the lenses, the ceiling became constellations of tiny cracks and shadows. The air looked clearer somehow.

She left the glasses on.

The Memorial They Deserve..

Today, I find myself thinking about the young men of my grandfather’s generation — boys, really — boarding ships bound for North Africa, or the blood-soaked beaches of the Pacific. I'll bet they were terrified, most of them, though you wouldn’t have known it to look at their faces in most of the photographs. They stood tall, cracked jokes, smoked cigarettes with shaking hands. Scared out of their minds, perhaps, and trying like hell not to show it.

Before the war was through, they’d be asked to summon a kind of courage most of us will never have to imagine. They would crawl through hellscapes of mud and fire, would witness things too awful to tell their mothers when the letters home came — if they came at all. 

Some would be among the first to step into Nazi concentration camps - places where the full horror of human cruelty was paid bare. They saw the emaciated survivors, the piles of bones and discarded shoes, the silence of a place where so much suffering occurred it will likely never be forgotten. After seeing that, they weren't just there under the auspices of fighting for a symbol or a flag, they knew that they helped pull the world back from the edge of total darkness. 

Many of them died there, far from the quiet neighborhoods and corner diners and baseball fields they called home. They died soldier’s deaths — in trenches and beaches and fields with no names — casualties of a cause bigger than themselves, a cause they chose to believe in.

But don’t let the sepia photographs and stone memorials fool you — these were not marble men. They were dreamers. They were kids with plans. They were thinking about holding their sweetheart’s hand in the soft flicker of the movie house, about the sound of the bat cracking at the ballpark on a summer night, about sitting down at a worn kitchen table with their folks, laughing over a pot roast and mashed potatoes.

They dreamed of coming home. They dreamed of this, Today. They probably dreamed it would be a little more peaceful at home, but that's besides the point. 

Look around today. Look at the families stretched out in the grass at the park, at the smell of charcoal and burgers on the grill, at the kids laughing, sun-drenched and barefoot. Look at this little slice of American peace, and take a moment. Take a deep breath. And remember them.

And while we remember them, let us also remember this: True heroism is quiet. It doesn’t need a slogan. It doesn’t strut or shout. It is sober, and often lonely, and rarely comes with fanfare. In an age where some in power are more interested in projecting strength than practicing humility, more invested in the performance of masculinity than the preservation of decency, we must resist the temptation to let our fallen be reduced to a prop The memory of the dead is not a tool to be wielded for political gain, nor a mantle to be draped over any party or politician.

In a time of polarizing conflict and vitriolic discourse, let us remember that America’s obligation to the Fallen does not end at the moment of death — No, what begins at enlistment, continues beyond death. To truly honor them is to see them as whole people, with names and stories and hopes, not symbols. The Fallen must never be used as tools for political means. They deserve more than soundbites. Their families deserve our care, our memory, our gratitude.

Our country deserves a people that will keep their promise to the Fallen and to one another. This place, despite the upheaval, remains a repository of the hopes and dreams of millions within our borders and around the world. If we allow cruelty to settle into our hearts and our policies, we betray the ideals that the men and women we honor today died defending. Their deaths demand more of us - more decency, more courage, more grace. 

May God bless their sacrifice — tender, terrible, and true. And may we honor them not just with words, or flags, or moments of silence, but by living the kind of lives full of the joy, freedom, and everyday beauty that they never got to come back to.

That is the memorial they deserve.

A Precarious Moment: Your Golden Age Fallacy is Bullshit.

There’s a certain grim irony in watching today’s right-wing political class sabotage the very global systems that once made their version of “traditional family values” economically viable. And by “traditional,” of course, they don’t mean the truly old model—subsistence farming, communal labor, multigenerational support. They mean a very specific, very recent historical blip: the postwar, single-income, male-breadwinner household. A structure subsidized, not by timeless virtue, but by rubble, racism, and Roosevelt.

It’s worth recalling that this brief window of prosperity—white, nuclear, middle class—wasn’t the natural fruit of conservative ideals. It was the byproduct of two enormous, liberal internationalist forces: the decimation of industrial competition in World War II, and a massive, coordinated effort by FDR and allies to build an open, rules-based global trade order. These policies were not incidental—they were essential. And yes, they were deeply flawed and racially exclusionary in practice. But they also laid the foundation for an economy that, for a moment, allowed bottom-half men to earn enough to support families in ways that now seem mythic.

What’s tragic, then, is that the same political movement now claiming to defend the “traditional family” is dismantling the architecture that made their version of that family possible in the first place. As John Ganz recently put it, “[MAGA Republicans] are destroying everything that kept the world relatively prosperous and safe for the past 80 years.”

Tariffs are at the center of this self-defeating crusade. We know—from history, from economics, from lived experience—that tariffs don’t revive domestic manufacturing in any sustained way. Trump’s own 2018–2019 tariff spree resulted in net losses in manufacturing jobs. Bush’s steel tariffs fared no better. Even in the 19th century, when American agriculture still reigned, tariffs made life harder for farmers by making imported equipment more expensive.

Now, tariffs are sold as a tool to protect workers and restore “family values,” but in practice they punish working-class families by raising prices on goods they rely on. And when those price hikes aren’t met with real wage growth—because they rarely are—the result is a net loss in economic stability. And with economic insecurity comes exactly the sort of familial instability the right claims to want to reverse.

So why push them? Part of the answer lies in the political utility of trade restrictions: they create endless opportunities for those in power to dole out exemptions, punish enemies, reward donors. They invite corruption. Trump has already signaled his openness to such “offers,” in what feels like a perfectly American blend of strongman populism and late-stage capitalism.

Ganz, again, offers a sobering reminder: "FDR’s embrace of trade wasn’t just about prosperity—it was about avoiding the “beggar-thy-neighbor” spiral that deepened the Great Depression. It was a recognition that mutual flourishing was possible—and necessary—in a globalized world. To reject that lesson is to court another age of retrenchment, division, and shared decline."

And what of the “traditional family”? That ideal—so often evoked, so rarely interrogated—was never as stable or universal as its defenders suggest. It was exclusionary, isolating, and, for many, quietly devastating. Its decline has brought loneliness, yes, but also new forms of freedom, new kinds of kinship, and the beginnings of more honest conversations about what support, love, and solidarity might look like in this century.

We are, undeniably, in a precarious moment. But precarity can be clarifying. It reminds us that what we build next—economically, politically, familially—does not need to mimic the past to be good. It simply needs to be more just, more inclusive, and more resilient. And maybe, if we get very lucky and a little bit wise, more joyful too.

The First Cut

"Just so you know,” Joe said, handing her a starched black apron on her first morning at the butcher shop, “the women will hate you.”

It was December, and the snow had just begun to press its soft weight on the rooftops of the small Michigan town where she’d landed, suddenly and with little plan, like a letter delivered to the wrong address. She had stepped off the bus with a canvas bag and a name no one here knew, and walked the main street with that quiet, resolute look of someone who had left something unfinished behind.

The butcher shop had appeared like a lighthouse in a cold mist—its windows warm-lit and slightly fogged, the air inside perfumed with spice and marrow. She had wandered in, not quite looking for work but knowing, instinctively, that work might be the surest way to anchor herself to this new geography. Joe had hired her without asking many questions.

"Eiighteen an hour,” he’d said, as though it was neither a gift nor a risk, just the natural order of things. “Come in Saturday. Early.”

Now, standing in the raw, meaty hum of the shop, she looked up at him, confused and half-smiling, as if searching for the punchline. Joe stared back at her through the thick lenses of his black plastic frames, his expression unmoved.

“They’ll hate you because you’re beautiful,” he said, as simply as one might mention the fat content of pork belly. “Because you’re bright.”

He didn’t mean it cruelly. There was no edge in his voice, no caution. Just a plainspoken kind of knowing, the way you might tell someone that porcelain tiles hold the morning’s chill long after the sun has risen, or that the best walnuts are kept near the baking supplies in aisle nine.

She nodded slowly, the smile fading. She tucked a wisp of hair behind her ear with a hand that had not yet learned the rhythm of knives and cleavers, that still smelled faintly of lavender soap and ink.

Behind the counter, Megan—the old manager with a soft-spoken mouth and a hard-earned calm—watched the exchange. She gave her a wink, a glance like a hand extended underwater. Joe was right.

Megan, impervious to the hierarchy of gazes and the economies of desirability, had no use for the kind of rivalry that flickered in other women’s eyes like a match half-lit. She didn’t care if men looked or didn’t. She didn’t measure herself in comparisons. That made her rare. That made her kind.

And so, she began—learning the cool heft of bone beneath blade, the language of fat marbling through muscle, the choreography of wrapping, weighing, exchanging. She would come to understand the temperature of silence in the back room, the scent of iron that clung to her hands even after hot water and lemon. But most of all, she would learn to read the eyes of the women on the other side of the counter—not with judgment, but with a tender kind of comprehension.

She would not hate them in return. That, too, would set her apart.

Training Wheels

The alley was never the place you’d expect magic to happen. People avoided it. It was narrow, dirty, and somehow always colder than it should’ve been, even on days when the sun made a half-hearted attempt to warm the concrete. It was the kind of place where things weren’t quite right—flickers of light from the streetlamps, too much shadow in corners that shouldn’t exist, the occasional low hum of something mechanical, like a forgotten engine deep within the building. The alley seemed to know something the rest of the world didn’t, like it had been around long enough to see the patterns, the failed attempts, the slow decay of promises. And today, on this Sunday, it had a particular kind of gravity to it.

Manny stood there beside his son, the bike gleaming in a fitful sun that threatened to collapse under its own weight. One hand on the handlebars, one hand on the seat. He’d taken the training wheels off. Of course, that was the plan, wasn’t it? Get him on the bike, get him to move. But this wasn’t just a simple bike ride. This was some sort of strange, quiet microcosm of the world—a little black hole in the corner of the universe where all of Manny's doubts and fears collided, where past and future merged, where everything could either fall into place or go terribly wrong. And yet—nothing. There were no bystanders, no cheers from the sidelines, just the distant clatter of metal against stone and the smell of trash from behind a rotting dumpster.

"Alright," Manny said, his voice carrying a tremor. "We’ll give it a shot, but if it doesn’t happen today, we’ll try again another time." A moment of preemptive defeat, but a kind of protective shield, a way of navigating the inevitable disappointment that always seemed to linger just beyond the horizon. Maybe it was genetic. His father had always been the same way: soft-spoken, hopeful, but with an ever-present awareness that things didn’t always work out as planned.

And so it began: the attempt, the wobbling, the doubts creeping in from the edges of Manny's mind. His hands were steady but unsure, holding on to the seat and the handlebars as if by some strange alchemy he could will the world into submission. But no. This wasn’t about control, was it? Because what happened next was something completely out of his hands.

There was a moment—a fleeting moment, more of a sensation than a thing—that passed between them, between the bike and the boy. And suddenly, his son was flying. There was no other way to describe it. Manny didn’t have a word for it, not in that instant. But the boy was on his way, moving, gliding past the detritus of a city that had long since lost its sense of purpose. And Manny stood there, hands empty, knowing that for reasons he couldn’t even begin to comprehend, the universe had simply decided to give them both a break.

The air in the alley, still thick with the dust of a hundred failed attempts, had shifted in some inexplicable way. The boy was gone—past the garbage bins, past the edges of reality itself. And Manny, with his hands still tingling as if they had held something precious, let the alley collapse back into its usual quiet, unsure whether anything had really changed, or whether this would all vanish, like a forgotten dream. The boy, for his part, didn’t look back.

The Baker Down The Road..

Did you shed a tear while watching the Band of Brothers episode where the camps are liberated, only to then become the baker down the road?

It is apparently incredibly difficult for many of us to believe that the suffering of different-others is both real and unjustified. I believe, at least in part, that this is because it leads us to grief, guilt, and a feeling of powerlessness in a time when we already feel fearful of our own suffering.

Here's the shitty part, fam: You cannot shift suffering. Not by measuring worthiness, or assessing blame. Suffering is a circle. It grows, or it shrinks. If you are suffering, so, too, are others. Every move to alleviate that condition in others is simultaneously a move  alleviate it for yourself. It will not do you any good to create or entrench enemy-others from your neighbors. It will do nothing to alleviate your pain and suffering. It's an ugly, short-term, pressure relief valve, but in the medium- and long-term, it will only create more division, more ugliness, more pain, and yes, more suffering. 

The way out of your suffering is to go into the suffering of others. Not by avoiding, by othering or by shifting it. Don't look away. Don't allow your fear and suffering to make you cold, indifferent or tribalistic; or even worse, to take joy in the suffering of those even less fortunate than you. Open your eyes. Bear witness to the suffering of others. Weep with them and rejoice with them. 

This is the only way out and through. We cannot remain strangers.

Hard Times

Wrestling, when you’re a kid, is all muscles and mayhem. It’s dropkicks and body slams and bad guys who laugh too hard. But every once in a while—if you’re lucky, if you’re listening—it breaks through the pageantry and speaks in a voice that sounds an awful lot like your own.

For me, that voice came from Dusty Rhodes.

It was 1985, and I was maybe eight, maybe nine. I was the son of a sheet metal worker with calloused hands and a Marlboro cough, a man who could fix anything but couldn’t seem to fix the hole that kept widening between him and the world. My dad drank; enough that you noticed the change in the room when he opened a beer. Enough that I started noticing silence more than sound.

He was a stoic vet who didn’t talk much about work or anything else, but when he did, it was always the same story: someone younger, someone cheaper, someone faster. Laid off. Replaced. Shrugged out the door like he never mattered. He wore his dignity like a second skin, even as it thinned.

And then one night, we were sitting in our faded blue recliners, the ones that still smelled faintly of sweat and sawdust, watching wrestling. NWA. Jim Crockett Promotions. Not the neon circus up north - real wrestling. Blood, grit, and Southern-fried truth.

That’s when Dusty came on the screen.

He was wide like a working man, not a sculpted superhero. He looked into that camera like he was staring down every boss who ever shorted a paycheck. And he said:

“First of all, I’d like to thank the many, many fans throughout this country that wrote cards and letters to Dusty Rhodes, the American Dream, while I was down.
Second, I want to thank Jim Crockett Promotions for waitin’ and takin’ the time, because I know how important it was—‘Hard Times’—for Dusty Rhodes to return.
And, Dusty Rhodes, the American Dream, with that weight, got what I wanted… Ric Flair, the World’s Heavyweight Champion…”

But it wasn’t just about Flair.

It was about us.

“Hard times are when the textile workers around this country are outta work, they got four or five kids and can’t pay their wages, can’t buy their food.
Hard times are when the auto workers are outta work and they tell ‘em, ‘Go home!’
And hard times are when a man’s worked at a job thirty years—thirty years—and they give him a watch, kick him in the butt, and say, ‘Hey, a computer took your place, daddy.’ That’s hard times!”

My father didn’t say anything.

But I looked over, and he wasn’t blinking.

Dusty wasn’t just cutting a promo. He was preaching. He was standing in front of a camera, under hot lights, speaking with the cadence of someone who knew what it meant to carry your family on your back and still come home with not enough. His voice cracked not because it was weak, but because it was weighted. Full of names he’d never know, lives he’d never live—but felt in his bones anyway.

That night, I watched my dad nod along to every word. It was the first time I saw him agree with someone on TV. The first time wrestling made him feel seen, not just distracted.

And it was the first time I realized that wrestling wasn’t all theater.

Sometimes, it was therapy.

Dusty Rhodes didn’t have Ric Flair’s suits or limousine lifestyle. He didn’t speak with polish. He spoke with gravel. With hurt. With history. He was every factory foreman who got passed over, every dad who came home early because they didn’t need him anymore, every kid who watched from the hall as his father sat at the kitchen table with his head in his hands.

When Dusty said, "I am the American Dream," he wasn’t bragging. He was reminding us that the dream had sweat stains and bills to pay. That it didn’t come wrapped in red, white, and blue—it came wearing steel-toed boots and a quiet kind of dignity.

He wasn’t telling us what to believe. He was telling us we weren’t alone.

That mattered.

Especially to a kid like me, in a house like mine, where hope sometimes showed up wearing wrestling boots and a lisp.

I’ve seen that promo a hundred times since. The cadence, the power, the way Dusty points his finger at the screen like he’s pointing straight at your chest. People remember Flair’s robes, Austin’s stunners, Hogan’s posing. But Dusty gave us something more rare:

He told the damn truth.

Not the political kind. Not the kind that shifts with headlines. The deep truth. The kind you inherit. The kind you live. The kind that hurts and holds you in equal measure.

And all these years later, I still hear that voice sometimes. In quiet rooms. On hard days. When work feels like a fight, or the world feels too cold.

Dusty Rhodes, the son of a plumber, the American Dream, reminds me of something simple:

That pain is universal. That pride still matters. And that hard times don’t last forever.

Todo

Death, it’s always there—looming, crawling, whispering, a presence thick like fog in the back of your mind. It’s never far off, never taking a day off. But I’m faster. I outrun it, or at least I like to think I do. I lace up my James Worthy New Balances—bright, ridiculous shoes, names that could’ve only come out of an era where names meant something—but that’s the thing. They’re the only part of me I can trust, the only part that doesn’t betray me as I tear across the canal bank, my legs pistoning in the heat. Todo. Todo. Todo. Every step, every breath, one word, one answer: a mantra, a prayer, a defiant rally against the relentless countdown that never stops.

Luis, always the prophet, always the one to speak the truth of the moment: "How much can change in an instant? His voice in my ear from June, and the answer, Everything. Life to death, a blink of an eye. I can’t say it didn’t stick with me—didn’t worm its way in like a bad song. And then, the Blue Angels come crashing into my universe, a blur of blue and white streaks, a performance of beauty and violence, like some messed-up metaphor for this thing we call life. The earth shakes, the sound’s almost a physical thing, rattling my bones as they peel away into the sky. A giant claw mark on the world’s face. The wind picks up again, hot and insistent from the south, pushing me forward like some unseen force.

And still, I run. Todo. There’s no real finish line. There’s only the chase, the sweat, the air, the ground beneath me. Death’s behind me, keeping pace, but I won’t let it have me. Not yet. Not today. I’ll outrun it for as long as I can.

The Cage Door Slammed..

I was almost six years old the night the Freebirds broke Texas, and I thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen.

It was just after Christmas, 1982. Most kids were playing with new toys or sneaking extra dessert, but I was sitting cross-legged on the carpet in our apartment in California, spinning the UHF dial until the signal came through—static, wavy lines, and then there it was: World Class Championship Wrestling, beaming in from some far-off place called Reunion Arena.

I didn’t know much about Texas. I didn’t know anything about regional loyalty or family dynasties or who was supposed to be the good guys. But I knew what looked cool. I knew what sounded like the music I liked. I knew who felt like they were having the most fun in the room.

And the Von Erichs, well—they were fine. They were handsome and athletic and probably great if you were from Dallas. But I wasn’t from Dallas. I was from the coast. I was rock ’n’ roll, not country. I didn’t want barefoot boys with feathered hair and football muscles.

I wanted Michael P.S. Hayes.

The first time I saw the Freebirds, it felt like someone had snuck a rock concert into the middle of a wrestling match. They wore sequins and sunglasses and attitude. They didn’t jog to the ring, they arrived. Hayes, Gordy, Roberts—they moved like they owned the world. When that entrance music hit, it felt like the whole screen was shaking.

They didn’t belong, and that’s exactly why I loved them.

So, when they showed up as friends of the Von Erichs, it felt like maybe the world was making room for something new. The country boys and the outlaws, the blue bloods and the leather jackets, Texas and Georgia and maybe even California, all getting along. It felt like possibility.

Then came Christmas.

Kerry Von Erich vs. Ric Flair in a steel cage. Title on the line. Michael Hayes as the special referee. I was buzzing before the bell even rang. The Von Erichs looked ready. Flair looked like a villain out of a cartoon. And Hayes? Hayes looked like he had a plan.

The match built like a storm. You could feel it through the screen, even on that grainy broadcast with its rolling lines and static pops. And then came the moment: Kerry had Flair right where he wanted him. Hayes opened the cage door. Told Kerry to walk out. Hand him the win.

And Kerry said no.

I remember sitting up straighter, eyes wide. This wasn’t how I thought it would go. Hayes was helping. Kerry should’ve taken it. That’s what made sense to me. But he didn’t.

So Hayes shoved him.

And then Terry Gordy—big and silent and waiting like thunder—slammed that steel door on Kerry’s head like he was closing a chapter. Like he was declaring war.

And I, six years old in California, watching through static and wonder… I cheered.

I jumped up. I laughed. I whooped like I'd seen my team win the Super Bowl.

My Dad’s girlfriend peeked in from the kitchen, confused by the noise. “Didn’t your guy just get hit in the head with a door?” she asked.

“No,” I said, “my guy slammed it.”

I didn’t see betrayal. Not then. I saw rebellion. The Von Erichs represented something I didn’t understand yet—homegrown pride, tradition, family. The Freebirds were something else entirely. They were cool. They were loud. They were what I wanted to be.

But over the next few weeks, things got harder to explain.

I watched as the Texas crowds turned, furious and hurt. I watched Kevin come out fists flying. I watched David talk about loyalty and blood. And I started to feel it—not guilt, exactly. But weight. Complexity. That strange feeling in your chest when you realize the thing you love might not be for everyone. Hell, it might not even be on the right side of history.

I didn’t stop loving the Freebirds. I couldn’t. They were my first wrestling love—the way they moved, the way they talked, the way they made everyone feel something, whether they wanted to or not. But I started to understand what they’d done.

I started to understand that sometimes, the people who look like they’re having the most fun are also the ones doing the most damage.

That was my first wrestling heartbreak. Not because my heroes lost—but because they won, and I had to figure out what that meant.

Looking back now, it all makes a kind of poetic sense. I didn’t grow up in the Sportatorium. I didn’t carry the Von Erich name in my heart. I found wrestling on my own, on a scratchy UHF station in a cluttered apartment in California. And the Freebirds—their swagger, their sound, their defiance—spoke to me.

I still pull up that match sometimes, watch it on YouTube through the grain of memory. The cage door still slams. The crowd still erupts. Kerry still falls.

And even now, all these decades later, part of me still smiles.

Because that was the night I learned wrestling, just like life, wasn’t black and white.

It was neon. It was noise. It was chaos and charisma and heartbreak all wrapped in glitter. It was Badstreet.

And I’ve been cheering ever since.

A Dangerous Wager

President Trump's open and clear threat to deport American citizens to El Salvadorian prisons should be the final nail in the coffin of our democracy. His repeated Authoritarian attempts to overthrow the United States Constitution, his seizure of power without regard to legality or checks and balances, his complete and total abandonment of all principles of limited government, should absolutely render his Presidency illegitimate.

These "resist" stickers are just virtue signals. They accomplish nothing other than membership in a social club of gentle and fashionable opposition. Don't resist. Revolt. Take off the leash of politeness before these traitorous monsters strangle us with it. The Tree of Liberty is thirsty and it is also brittle. It requires that we tend to it. My hope is that we retake the flag, and turn our attention, our energy, our anger, our hope, to the work of revolution.

Or, you know, we can hold up "this is not normal signs" at his speeches and hope Combover Caligula suddenly grows a soul and conscience. Personally, I think that's a dangerous wager.

Lovetron

 In the 1980's, the world was divided in a way that only young minds could truly understand:

There were those who could graze the bottom of the net.

There were those who could grab the net.

There were those who could touch the rim.

There were those who could grab the rim.

There were those who could dunk a small, round object—maybe a tennis ball or a volleyball—through the rim.

There were those who could dunk.

And then, there was Darryl F*cking Dawkins.

I was still a kid then, and this hierarchy settled deep within me, coursing from my feet to my fingertips like a fire of wonder and want. I was somewhere in that first group, occasionally, desperately leaping with all the might my small body could summon, just managing to graze the soft, puffy threads of the net in the elementary school gym in Seal Beach, California. I’d been playing basketball for three years by then, mastering my hook shot on McGaugh's asphalt courts when I wasn't in the gym with my team, but one year, the team I was on lost every game. And so, it was that year I began to see myself for what I was—a resident of the very bottom of the pyramid. With this came an intensification of a fantasy life, filled with dreams of power, of flight, of soaring beyond the limitations of my own body.

That hierarchy, of course, would eventually give way to the more nebulous traps of adulthood, where the vertical gains of our youth are replaced with less tangible, less triumphant pursuits. I never did make it to the sixth level. I got close once, though. Just once. I can still picture it, a kind of fading photograph in my memory, me, a teenager, pushing a ball through an outdoor rim. The shot felt like a dunk. It felt as if I’d broken through some invisible barrier. But because I could never repeat it with any kind of regularity, I’ve come to believe that the rim was slightly lower than regulation, or that maybe it was a dream—those blurry, half-remembered moments that never quite settle into reality.

Dreams come and go. That’s the truth of it. Now I’m pushing fifty, an age when it’s hard to see life as anything but a slow descent—a decline, if I’m being honest. And yet, even now, life can astonish you. Think about it—being just short of touching the bottom of the net, feeling the weight of that impossible distance, and then discovering that somewhere, out there in the world, there’s a man who can leap so high, so forcefully, that he shatters the entire backboard with his dunk. That’s something else, isn’t it? The counterpoint to the feeling of loss isn’t, exactly, winning. It’s imagining what Darryl Dawkins could do. It’s that moment when the limits you know are shattered by the force of something wild, something beyond.

May you all know Lovetron.

The Towers

 My father, who wasn’t the sort to bother with notions of high culture—certainly not the sort to be moved by the empty grandeur of ivory towers—used to take me regularly to the Watts Towers. A place that, by the time I was old enough to process it, already held its own kind of mythos, woven between the rusty, shimmering spires and the grimy streets where history had quietly coagulated. He never tried to explain it—not in the articulate, “educated” way the world demands of things—because maybe he didn’t have the words. But he’d take me there anyway. It was almost as though he understood, intuitively, that something had to be saved, something worth saving, from the sea of dead noise around us. And in his peculiar way, he knew exactly what it was: the tangible proof that a person, with their hands and their intentions, could create something—a structure, a monument, a physical rebellion against the pull of entropy—that stood, without question, against everything we’d been taught to believe about worth and meaning.

He’d take me to those towers because, well, there wasn’t a map for it, not a single instruction manual to explain what it meant to be there—just the sound of metal scraping metal and the thrum of something primal in the air. You could feel it, the blood pumping through every inch of the steel and the mortar, the grind of existence becoming something more than just dust. It didn’t require an art critic, or some glossy magazine, to make you understand: something had been made, not by the hands of the rich or the highly trained, but by someone who had seen and heard this place differently, perhaps with a clarity the world didn’t want to acknowledge. And in that moment, you knew: that’s the power of art, the real power, the kind that can stand in defiance against the sterile halls of the elite.

Those critics, who scurry about in the shadows of their own high towers, trying to control the language and the narrative, don’t understand this. They couldn’t. They’re busy with their jargon and their curated collections, too far removed from the pulse of what real creation feels like. But my father, in his way, showed me what mattered: a single man, with the audacity to construct something lasting and true, in the middle of all this chaos, standing there like a beacon to everything that refuses to die.

Farce And Fascism

 What a bizarre spectacle this has become. The Democratic Party, putting on a show for the ages, turning up to the State of the Union Address dressed like they’re auditioning for a second-rate high school play, complete with their silly color-coded costumes and absurd "you're a meanie face" paddles. It’s almost too perfect. This, right here, is cowardice wrapped in theatrics. They have managed to turn our national crises into a joke.

For years, they screamed, flailing their arms and clutching their pearls, casting Donald Trump as the grand fascist, the evil tyrant-in-waiting. He was the boogeyman, the man who would bring about the downfall of everything we’ve ever fought for. The New Republic slapped his face on the cover with a Hitler mustache, warning us that Trump’s rise would be the existential threat to the Republic. It was a panic-driven campaign of fear, paranoia, and moral posturing. Every prediction screamed that the United States as we knew it would be destroyed.

And now, here we are. Standing on the edge of that very precipice. The evidence is in front of us, undeniable. The warnings weren’t just the rantings of the paranoid—they were prescient. So, what’s their response? A farce. A pitiful charade designed to distract us from the unraveling of everything they claimed to fight for. It's a sad spectacle—empty gestures that serve only to underline their impotence.

Now, the big question we all have to ask: How did fascism creep into the heart of America, despite the so-called opposition party’s might and supposed resources? How did this happen when they were supposed to be our bulwark against such forces? What were they doing? Collecting their paychecks, watching the train wreck from the sidelines?

In the future, political scientists will look at this with stunned disbelief, their minds racing to explain how this was allowed to happen. Of course, this will all be discussed in some other country, because by then, any inquiry into such matters will likely be illegal here. God help us.

Schmitty

To be alive, to truly be alive, is to be a fragment spinning out in the void, like some errant piece of the great cosmic machine lost in the dark. Before birth, you are whole, one with everything; after death, you return to the void. But in life, in the middle of the mess, you're just drifting; part of something larger, but forever dislodged from it. I felt this most vividly on an acid trip in my early twenties. A piece of flesh, tumbling through the emptiness. But then my brother tossed a baseball at me, mid-trip, and for a moment, I wasn’t falling. I was caught in the pulse of something shared—a connection that hummed across the air like an echo, the daylight stretching long and slow; from my own impending death back to the memories of childhood.

Eating, though—eating was a childhood ritual, a language all its own. That's the thing I remember most vividly growing up. As a kid, it was Saturday mornings, especially. The perfect day to disappear into a bowl of sugar-laden cereal, washing it down with milk and toast, while cartoons like Thundarr the Barbarian and Goober and the Ghost Chasers hummed in the background, filling the void. Each bite, each moment a steady drumbeat of repetition, a foundation to build your day upon. And so, I’ve carried this act of consumption with me, this search for something to fill the empty space. I’ve never outgrown it, though I wonder if I should have. It’s a curse of genetics, this need to consume—thankfully, Saturdays are still a rarity, and I’ve yet to fully expand to the size of a sofa, but I've flirted dangerously with such a reality.

Life isn’t a box of chocolates. When you’re handed life, you don't get to poke at it first, test for the poison; you just dive in. Whether you choke or swallow it whole, that’s your fate, your trial.

But then, life... it’s more like a pack of baseball cards. It's the other thing I remember with utter clarity about childhood: my relentless pursuit of baseball cards. You buy them with the promise of newness, the thrill that this time, you’ll get the one card that’ll make it all worth it. But mostly, you get duplicates—the same old faces, the same old players posing for the same tired photos. The world shrinks back to its mundane cycle. But sometimes, buried in the pack, you find a card that shatters everything. I remember pulling that Mike Schmidt card, his mustachioed face glowing from the plastic, an electric pulse of hope. At that moment, I wasn’t just a kid holding a card. I was holding lightning. A crack in the Universe.

When I Say I'm In Love, You Best Believe I'm In Love, L-U-V...

There are no living members of the original MC5.

And now, there are no living members of the original New York Dolls either.

That’s the joke, isn’t it? Birth leads to death. It’s the rule of the universe. You can’t escape it. It ends this way for all of us - a short ride from womb to tomb. And now, as I write this, just like the last of his Dolls bandmates, David Jo is gone.

But what they created? That’s something else entirely. The birth of those bands, those wild-eyed sons of thunder, is the living proof of that old truth about the sum of parts. The MC5, the Dolls—they weren’t just bands, they were revolutionary acts of destruction. They’re part of the same rope that ties Little Richard to the Sex Pistols, Chuck Berry to the Ramones, Link Wray to the Stooges, the Velvet Underground to the Brian Jonestown Massacre, and so on, ad infinitum. A line that’s been dragging us forward, dragging us through the madness, until it snaps.

David Johansen? That man took a lot of shots early on. Called a Mick Jagger rip-off. They said he was just a cheap copycat, a phony. And that’s bullshit. If anything, David Jo was just as much a copy of a Chicago bluesman as he was anything else—everyone drinks from whatever well they like. Johansen had the look, the swagger, the attitude—but calling the Dolls a Stones knockoff? Not a chance. The New York Dolls were the kids from the tough streets, wisecracking outer borough sons raised on the Shangri-La’s, with a freakshow dollop of the Coasters, Alice Cooper and Bo Diddley stirred into the mess.

And their music? Jesus Christ, that debut album—that record is the purest shot of rock ‘n’ roll ever recorded. It’s not music, it’s a bloodshot, brutal cry from the gut, an atomic explosion that still makes the earth tremble. You put that on, and 52 years later, it still feels like you just got punched in the stomach. The sound of something raw, something true—untamed, unpolished, and unrepentant. That’s why it’s still perfect. Why it hasn’t aged.

But here’s the rub—their push for fame, their hunger to be stars, kept them from ever truly being the songwriters they could’ve been. The follow-up album? Let’s not kid ourselves. It was the B-side to their genius, leftovers from a fire that couldn’t reignite. But even those scraps—hell, even their leftovers—crushed everyone else’s so-called “best.” "Human Being"? You put that against the pre-punk, post-glam rubble of the ’70s, and it still knocks everything else flat. Every time.

But that was just one chapter of Johansen’s odyssey. His solo stuff, with a little less of that reckless heat from his Doll days, was still incredible. Then came Buster Poindexter—the smart-ass, lounge-singer alter ego who gave us that damn “Hot Hot Hot” hit, and God, how he hated that song. DJ’s one and only mainstream hit—the bane of his existence, he’d joke. But he was right, in a way. It was his curse.

Film and TV came next—little bit parts, always with that sneer, always with that self-aware wit. He reunited with the Dolls too, though it was a shadow of what once was. Morrissey called, and he came—humble, amused by the whole damn thing. But the truth is, as we all know, time doesn’t wait for anyone. Cancer and a bad fall pulled him from this world. The world didn’t even have the decency to let him go quietly.

But damn, those lyrics. No one else wrote like David. He carved through every cliche and pretension, turning it into something real, something alive. He wore humor like a badge, cutting through the weight of self-importance with a wink. His love songs never fell into the sappy shit we’re all used to—they were raw and real. His rockers were full-throttle—nothing polished, nothing sweet. His voice? It wasn’t the smoothest, but it had soul. It was the sound of truth. It was the voice of someone who didn’t give a damn about being pretty. And in that? He was the odd soul brother to Ronnie Van Zant—another guy who made the truth sound ugly, beautiful, and, goddamn, unforgettable. No one ever sang to me like David did. No one. Ever.

And so, to David Jo and his four brothers in arms that preceded him in death—those wild, reckless, beautiful bastards—I love you all. You gave us everything. Hell, you gave ME everything. So from one Lonely Planet Boy to Another, Rest Forever in love, in admiration, in gratitude; in that glorious wreckage we call rock ‘n’ roll.

I Wanna Be Your Dog

Right from the chaotic opening that gives way to the raw sonic sludge of the main riff, I Wanna Be Your Dog doesn’t ask for your attention—it takes it. Iggy’s voice howls like a wounded animal, the music’s a dirty, filthy mess, and it’s glorious. It’s the sound of a broken man crawling through the gutter, begging for someone, anyone, to give him a scrap of affection. But it’s not love—it’s a goddamn fetish. It’s animalistic, desperate, and utterly raw. The Stooges don’t care about being pretty or polished—they’re here to drag you through the mud, make you feel things you probably shouldn’t, and leave you shaking in your boots.

And God, the chorus: "Now I wanna be your dog"—it’s not a request, it’s a command. There’s a sick pleasure in Iggy’s voice, like he’s reveling in the degradation, in the emptiness of it all. This isn’t romance. This isn’t tenderness. This is submission, and it’s ugly, and it’s beautiful in its own twisted way. The riff is as dirty as the lyrics, and the whole track feels like you’re falling deeper into a pit of self-destruction with no intention of climbing out. But you don’t care. You’re already lost. And maybe, just maybe, that’s the point. The Stooges didn’t make this for anyone who wanted comfort—they made this for people who wanted to feel alive, no matter how damn filthy it got.

 

The World's A Mess (It's In My Kiss)

This isn’t just a song, it’s a battle cry, a primal scream, a manifesto carved in blood, bone and concrete. The line, "The world’s a mess, it’s in my kiss"—it hits you like a sucker punch, a shot to the gut that doesn’t quite knock the wind out of you but leaves you feeling a little unsteady on your feet. It’s simple, it’s raw, it’s devastating, and it’s perfect. Because that’s the truth of it, right? The world’s a mess, sure. But it’s beautiful in that mess, chaotic and gorgeous in its shattered, half-destroyed state. And it’s in the kiss; the moment of surrender and defiance and connection all wrapped into one. And like every mess, it’s impossible to ignore, impossible to look away from.

But let’s talk about the place this mess comes from—my beloved city of Los Angeles. The land of eternal sun and smog, where palm trees grow amidst the wreckage of broken dreams and glittering false promises. It’s a city built on contradictions: hope and desperation, fame and failure, beauty and decay – where the ornate and the austere collide as mutually co-existing dualities. And out of that sprawling, burnt-out landscape, X emerged. They didn’t just exist, trying to make their name and way in late 70’s L.A.—they defined it, with every note they played and every word they sang. In a place that screamed "look at me" from every corner, X turned their back on that easy grift and dug into something far more real. They carved their sound out of grit and grime, the DIY ethos that punk wasn’t just a scene, it was a way of life. They built their own world with their own hands, rejecting the sterile polish of commercial music and giving the finger to anything that demanded compromising their vision.

And that’s the thing about X—they didn’t just make music. They made fire. They made you feel alive in ways you couldn’t quite explain. Listen to Billy Zoom’s guitar licks in this song—each one feels like it’s shot from a cannon, as precise as it is untamed. Billy doesn’t just play guitar; he hurls it at you, every note a spark that sets off a chain reaction. His leads are sharp and jagged, like shards of glass scattered across the floor, and every time he picks up the pace, you feel your pulse quicken, like the song’s about to burst into something even wilder. Zoom’s guitar isn’t about finesse—it’s about fire, it’s about raw, uncontrolled energy that surges up from somewhere deep inside, a sound that feels like it was created in the darkest corners of the universe.

As always, DJ Bonebrake (the nicest man in rock n’ roll) does what he does best: pounding that beat like it’s the very pulse of the earth itself. It’s the kind of rhythm that doesn’t just live in the music—it takes over your body. You don’t hear it; you feel it, deep in your guts, your throat, your hips. It’s the heartbeat of chaos, the undercurrent of fire, driving the song forward with an urgency that matches the rawness of everything else around it. His drums don’t just anchor the sound—they ignite it, making sure you’re locked into the chaos, forced to ride the wave of passion and sweat that’s crashing over you.

Then there’s Exene and John. Their voices are fire and gasoline, but it’s that primal chemistry between them that makes this song blister with urgency. They’re not just singing to each other—they’re fighting, they’re connecting, they’re tearing themselves apart and rebuilding it, and somehow, it makes this chaotic mess of a song feel real. Exene, with that growl in her voice, tells you to "take it like a man," and you feel it. It’s not just a line—it’s a challenge. It’s a gut-punch that dares you to own your own mess, to wear your flaws like a badge, to stop pretending everything’s okay when it’s clear the world’s on fire. It’s a rawness, a confrontation that leaves you no room to hide. That’s the kind of honesty X embodies—they are in the mess of it, not pretending they have it all figured out, but daring you to stand with them in that ugly, beautiful chaos and bring whatever fire you have to the table.

And, God, their live shows—if you’ve seen them, you know what I’m talking about. X didn’t just play punk rock; they embodied it. It wasn’t just a show, it was an experience. It was chaotic and uncontrollable, like a storm that just rips through everything in its path. They weren’t just a band on stage playing a set—they were creating something, brujos (and a bruja), conjuring something magical, untamed and electrifying. Every show felt like a battle, a war between the past, the present, and whatever the future would be, and you were right there in the middle of it, caught in the fire, baptized by the sound. Punk rock was never supposed to be clean or easy, and X showed you exactly why that was true. They were the lightning and the thunder all wrapped into one explosive package—roots music with a punk edge, rock ‘n’ roll at its core, but something far wilder and more dangerous. They way it was always supposed to be.

X didn’t just shape punk rock—they transformed it. They didn’t play the game—they rewrote the rules, and in doing so, they left a legacy that’s as untouchable as it is indispensable. They didn’t make music for approval—they made it for survival. They didn’t just sing about the mess of the world—they became it, with all its contradictions, all its beauty, all its rage. And in that mess, they kissed it all into something unforgettable. The world’s a mess. But, hell, it’s damn beautiful. It’s in their kiss. And in that kiss, it feels like the entire universe is spinning, and for a second, everything is right.

And all these years later, looking at the legacy they’re leaving behind as they wrap up a 48 year tenure as a band, one thing is for sure: X isn’t just a band. They’re a riot. A wildfire of sound, sweat, and desire. They are punk rock’s untamed Leviathan, roaring through the night and leaving nothing but fire in their wake. They didn’t just burn bridges—they set the whole damn world on fire, and they kissed it while it burned. They didn’t just change the rules—they rewrote them in hot, reckless ink. You feel that heat, you taste that fire, you surrender to it—and you never want to leave. There’s no question. X is as important as any band that ever lived, and with every riff, every line, every guttural scream, they remind you why. It’s in the mess. It’s in the fire. It’s in my kiss.

The Ephemeral and the Eternal: On the Vanishing of Culture

Whatever it is you hold dear—the television shows, the books, the music, the digital whispers that flicker through the web—will, in time, fade into oblivion. In twenty years, perhaps a century at most, the relics of our era will either be relegated to the obscurity of dusty university archives or become the detritus of history, discarded and forgotten, in some landfill. It is a sobering thought, but a necessary one.

What cultures choose to remember, and more crucially, what they do not, tells us far more than any historical record. History’s memory is selective, often cruelly so. Looking back, only a small handful of works—be they texts, songs, or visual art—are preserved across generations. There is a quiet violence in this forgetting, a process in which the bulk of a civilization’s intellectual and creative output is swept away like grains of sand in the tide. Much is preserved in the vaults of academic institutions and the minds of specialized scholars, but the masses, those who shape the present and future, hold only a fleeting few fragments.

Most modern people could likely name only one or two books from the 19th century; the ones that somehow survived the filters of time and culture. Those few that have been elevated beyond mere words on a page to become mythic, immortalized in the form of films, television shows, and repeated cultural references: Dracula, Frankenstein, etc. These titles are not simply remembered; they have seeped into the very fabric of our collective consciousness, like sigils charged with meaning that transcend their original form. And yet, the average person may not even know that these were once mere books. Few would even venture to name Great Expectations, and yet it too—like so many others—was once the cultural currency of its time.

It is a paradox—our historical memory is minuscule in bandwidth, and in that slender space, it clings to the few works that have come to speak for an entire era. Often, the works that are remembered are not the ones that were celebrated in their time, but rather those whose ideas, when revisited by future generations, echo the changing values of those who look back. It is not always the loudest or most famous voices that endure. Often, it is the writers and artists whose visions were dismissed or rejected by their contemporaries—those on the fringes of culture—who find themselves resurrected. These creators become, for a time, icons of a future that sees in them something of themselves. But of course, this too is ephemeral. For just as one era elevates these voices, another might tear them down.

The 19th century was a time of explosive cultural creation, but much like a Tibetan sand mandala, it has been scattered by the inexorable winds of time, leaving behind only a few works chosen to represent the era, often distorted by the very stereotypes we project onto them. These works are at constant risk of revision and sanitization. The current wave of historical revisionism sweeping across our culture—where older works are rewritten to align with contemporary sensibilities—is a reflection of a society cut off from its roots. We now live in an age where information and technology have severed us from the past, and the past is no longer something we build upon, but something we seek to erase, to revise, to rewrite. We see this in the recent censorship of writers like Ian Fleming, Roald Dahl, and Salman Rushdie, whose works are now being rewritten to fit the ideological mold of the present. We see it in the ongoing campaign to remove the works of “dead white men” from the cultural canon.

This is not mere nostalgia for a lost past—it is something deeper, darker. A culture adrift, without the anchor of historical continuity, has no future but the one that the current powers, those who control the flow of information, deem fit for us. It is a culture of erasure, of rewriting the story of who we are. A culture unmoored from its past is, by definition, doomed to perpetual reinvention, caught in a cycle of intellectual amnesia. One can almost feel the shuffling of the sacred alphabet—the rearrangement of the symbols that make up the grand sigil of humanity.

As we stand on the precipice of this new century, awash in the endless tide of data and media that defines our information-saturated world, it is impossible not to wonder: what will survive? In a sea of content, from YouTube videos to streaming shows, from viral tweets to podcasts, what pieces of our cultural mosaic will be remembered by future generations?

I suspect that, against all odds, the Harry Potter books will endure. Though the winds of political correctness have already begun to blow fiercely against them (for good reason), these stories—a sweeping narrative about the battle between good and evil—will likely continue to be read and re-read, their magic undimmed by the fading prejudices of our era. Just as Dracula has lived on through the decades, so too will these books. They captured the collective imagination of their time, and I suspect they will retain their place in the cultural pantheon, albeit perhaps in a more diluted form, thanks in large part to the author's TERFdom. The Road, Cormac McCarthy's haunting meditation on survival, humanity, and despair, will likely stand alongside Harry Potter, not as a tale of triumph but of the primal endurance of the human spirit—an essential text for the dark days that may come.

Television, however, may be another matter. Perhaps Twin Peaks will survive, though not necessarily because of its historical importance or narrative genius. It endures, I think, because it was a product of its time—an era in which we, as a society, turned our gaze back on an America that no longer existed, one we rejected even as we fetishized it. It represents our desire to look at the past with both longing and scorn, to tell ourselves that we are smarter, more enlightened. Perhaps The Simpsons, too, will endure in some form, a cultural artifact of the postmodern age, capturing our era’s contradictions in a single animated frame. And let us not overlook The Wire—a television epic that unflinchingly revealed the underbelly of society, exposing the rot in our systems of power and control. Its exploration of the fragility of institutions and the complexity of human nature will likely echo far beyond its own time, enduring as a touchstone for anyone seeking to understand the nature of our modern urban landscape.

But in the end, I suspect that the true touchstone of this era will not be found in the sprawling, mass-market works we consume today, but in something far more ominous, more prophetic: the works of those whose voices were raised in warning against the consequences of our age—figures like George Orwell, whose exploration of the mechanisms of control and manipulation feels even more relevant now than when it was first penned. Orwell’s stark clarity about the forces that shape our modern world, much like the reflections of others who foresaw the rise of the machine and the perils of technological dominance, may ultimately become the touchstones of future generations, who will look back and see in them not just the critiques of their time, but the warnings that foresaw our present. It is, perhaps, in these works that the alchemy of history is revealed, the transformation of the base material of the present into the gold of future understanding.

The grand hope for the Internet was that it would serve as a vault for humanity’s collective knowledge. And yet, what we have instead is a landscape where our intellectual heritage is being sifted through the algorithms of corporate gatekeepers. What was once a vast and free-ranging space for creativity and discourse is becoming, more and more, a controlled narrative, curated and shaped by forces whose interest is not in truth, but in control. The work of preserving culture is no longer in the hands of individuals, of sages or scholars, but in the hands of corporate entities and the vast, anonymous machinery of artificial intelligence. What was once a flame of freedom now flickers in the shadow of unseen hands.

If we are to preserve any semblance of what truly matters, we must take it upon ourselves to safeguard our intellectual and artistic heritage. The books you love, the ideas that shape your worldview, the voices you hold dear—these will be forgotten unless you act. Hold onto them, share them, cherish them. For in the end, what is preserved by you will be preserved for you. The future, with all its possibilities and perils, will decide what is remembered. And yet, even amidst the decay, there are always those fragments of the past that will somehow persist, enduring as echoes in the vast hall of human experience, as the work continues—the sacred task that each of us, in our own way, must take up, adding brick by brick, until the edifice is complete. The stones are scattered, the symbols lie hidden—but those who seek will find the Light.

Let's Talk About DEI For A Moment..

I'm certainly not crying over the loss of everything DEI related. A lot of it seems to have more to do with encouraging self-flagellation among white liberals than actually helping marginalized communities. The never ending battle against your own internalized racism/phobias is just Catholic guilt repackaged and secularized by academics who spent too much time on Tumblr during their undergraduate years, and you absolutely cannot convince me that infantilizing language ("safe" and "brave" spaces) is genuinely useful or needed by the folks out there doing the work. It's that liberal hyperfocus on the individual as an individual, rather than the individual as a member of a community, which ultimately leaves it feeling patronizing rather than illuminating.

That being said, I would assume that the goals of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion would be the goals of every normal, decent human being. I want diversity in my community organizations, because how the hell else will we know if we're actually representing the community? Of course I want equity, people should have opportunities to pursue their own happiness. Of course I want inclusion, because some of the raddest human beings I've ever met are from wildly different backgrounds than I am. Pluralism is a healthy and beautiful thing. 

I guess you can try and make that sound "woke" if you want, but behind all the needlessly academic language from the sociology department are the most basic, foundational ideas about being a good person and living among other people. It's the foundational basis for community. 

And that's why traitorous, self-serving filth like Donald Trump and his ilk can't stand them.

A Letter to the Youth of America: The Four Dragons You Must Slay

There comes a time, in the depth of any era, when the savage creatures lurking in the shadows of a society become so large, so impossible to ignore, that they are no longer just metaphors. They are real beasts, alive and breathing, their claws unsheathing with every passing moment, their snarls reverberating in the air. You, the youth of this so-called free and prosperous world, find yourselves standing at the precipice, facing four monstrous dragons that, if left unchecked, will swallow the remnants of your future whole. These dragons are not cloaked in mystery; they are the suffocating truths we have buried deep within our bones, truths that feed on our ignorance, our apathy, our blindness to the edge of the abyss.

The first dragon—the most ravenous, and yet the most invisible—is the hopelessness that has woven itself so tightly into the fabric of the lives of so many, it has become as natural as breathing. The poison that has taken root in the bodies and minds of this generation comes not just from the chemical substances that promise a reprieve but from something deeper, more insidious. It is the weight of feeling irredeemably lost in a world that demands constant production, constant action, constant "success," but offers nothing but an unrelenting grind toward personal annihilation. You’ve been fed lies about who you should be, about what your life must look like, but no one told you that the goalposts keep moving, that the game is rigged, that there is no golden prize at the end—just the quicksand of despair.

Opioids, pills, syringes, bottles—tools of your execution—are sold to you as temporary respite, a promise that the pain will subside. Suicide, that final, merciless silence, hangs like a dark cloud over you. You might laugh at the idea of these things in the face of your responsibilities, but you know as well as anyone that the crushing weight of your own soul’s collapse is no joke. In the quiet of the night, when no one is looking, when no one cares to witness your unraveling, the idea comes to you: Maybe it’s easier this way. But it’s not easier. It’s a lie. The real dragon is the emptiness gnawing at the edges of your existence. And it will consume you unless you face it head-on.

Next comes the dragon that has long since crossed the threshold of myth and is now all too tangible: the collapse of moral values that has rotted away the family, the bedrock of society itself. A family should be the first place you learn about love, trust, compassion, and responsibility. But for many, that foundation was never built, or worse, it was smashed apart by indifference, anger, and the decaying relics of false ideals. What was once the last bastion of belonging has become a battlefield, a horror show where relationships are transactional, and the human heart is a commodity traded for the next dopamine hit.

The family is supposed to be the incubator of identity, the space where you come to know yourself, but how can you form an identity when the very people who should have cared for you have traded their humanity for convenience? The truth is, no dragon can be slain without first knowing its true shape. And the shape of this dragon is cold, calcified, and indifferent to your very survival. You must look it in the eye and fight for the basic human decency that allows us to trust, to love, to find meaning.

Then there is the grotesque, ever-growing dragon that lingers in the food you consume and the lack of movement that permeates your sedentary existence. It is not just about obesity—it is about something more profound: the detachment from the body, the forgetting of what it means to be human. You are consuming synthetic, hollow "foods," as if by some divine trickery, and turning away from the primal rhythms of your own flesh. You are told that happiness lies in convenience, that pleasure lies in your next snack or your next streaming binge. The exercise that was once a basic part of being alive—of feeling your heart thrum in your chest, of lifting something heavy, of sweating your way through life—has become an afterthought, a nuisance, something to be avoided. Your body is not a machine—it is a living, breathing entity that requires care, attention, and respect. If you ignore it, it will not forgive you. This dragon does not just lay its weight on you; it suffocates you, traps you in a cocoon of numbness and self-doubt, only to emerge with a bloated, distorted version of yourself.

Finally, the dragon of nihilism, that seductive, poisonous idea that nothing matters. It is easy to swallow because it promises freedom—freedom from expectation, freedom from responsibility, freedom from the weight of purpose. But nihilism is not freedom. It is a prison built of apathy, a graveyard for the soul. The real enemy here is not meaninglessness—it is the absence of action, the lack of courage to shape your own destiny. Nihilism seduces you into believing that if nothing matters, nothing must be done. But in the vacuum it creates, you will find only despair. The greatest dragon you must slay is the belief that your existence is meaningless. It is the refusal to accept that you can create meaning in a world desperate for it.

All of us have struggled with these dragons. We have cowered in their shadows, unsure of how to fight back, unsure if we even could. But here is the truth: you are not alone. You are not powerless. The strength to fight, to rise above the suffocating grip of hopelessness, to rebuild the fractured, broken connections that should be your foundation, to care for your body as it deserves, and to reject the hollow promises of nihilism lies within you. Together, we can slay these dragons. Together, we can reclaim the world. You must know the dragons before they know you. And you must fight with everything you have.

They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y.)

“They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y.)” isn’t just a song; it’s a resurrection, a gospel rooted in the grit of the block, wrapped in the elegance of a lost era, screaming “we were here” into the abyss.

First off, Pete Rock’s beat isn’t just a track—it’s a ritual. That sample from Tom Scott and the California Dreamers—the saxophone, it seeps through your skin like the ghosts of a thousand voices long gone. You can feel it in the air, the pulse of a lost generation, the history of struggle and celebration that hip hop birthed. This is the sound of a moment in time, etched in the city’s concrete, but it’s also timeless—forever. It speaks to the essence of a people who’ have known the depths of pain and struggle, but never gave up their soul. Pete didn’t just sample that shit; he blessed it, turned it into a platform for CL to stand on, a place where the past and present collide in a sublime, soulful protest against erasure. This isn’t background noise—it’s the heartbeat of an entire culture, a sound so deep you could drown in it, and still float back to the surface, reborn.

And then CL Smooth opens his mouth, and you know you’re listening to something that transcends bars and beats. His flow isn’t just rhyming words—he’s painting, he’s carving up his life with a knife made of memory, loss, and the truth. When he spits “I reminisce so you never forget this, the days of way-back, so many bear witness…” it isn’t just some throwaway line. Nah. It’s the sound of a young man holding onto every piece of him that’s slipping away, trying to capture that fleeting essence of a time that wasn’t perfect but was real. His reflection ain’t a search for nostalgia—it’s a reckoning. Every name he calls out is a bullet, every line a prayer to the streets, the crew, the family that helped shape him. In a world where so much is disposable, where so many are forgotten or swept under the rug, CL gives us a glimpse into a life that matters, that demands to be remembered. And it’s that very pain of remembrance—the cost of survival—that makes the track burn with such intensity. It’s the ache of knowing that everything you’ve loved is slipping through your fingers, even while you’re holding onto it for dear life.

But here’s where the real magic happens, where Pete Rock and CL Smooth shake the earth beneath our feet: the loss, the memorial, it’s all wrapped in celebration. This is a love letter to the fallen, to those who lived and breathed this game, but who never got to see it blow up to the stratosphere. The track isn’t just a solemn hymn—it’s a manifesto, a declaration of survival. “T.R.O.Y.”—that’s not just initials. That’s a brotherhood, a bond that can’t be erased. It’s a nod to Troy Dixon, the man whose absence haunts every verse, every bar. But this isn’t a slow march to the grave; it’s a defiant celebration of life, a refusal to let go of what’s real. It’s the spark of a fire that refuses to burn out, even in the face of loss. Hip hop isn’t just a culture—it’s a resurrection of the dead, a place where the names of the forgotten still echo in the rhythm of the beat, in the sound of the shout, in the pulse of the street. It’s a statement about lineage, about the ties that bind us to those who came before, the ones who raised us, the ones who struggled, and the ones who survived. CL Smooth is not just speaking to the ghosts of his own past; he’s retracing the footsteps of his entire extended family, his neighborhood, his culture—people who survived the grind, the demons of addiction, the streets, the trauma of displacement, and yet lived to see another day. In every verse, there’s a nod to the lineage that shaped him: the block, the corner store, the old heads who told stories about times that never quite felt like they existed. But those same demons, the ones that haunted every corner of the hood, are never too far behind. CL doesn’t shy away from them; instead, he faces them head on. He shows us the toll this life takes, the weight of history, and the collective trauma that echoes through the streets. But even through the darkness, there’s a fierce pride in survival. And once again, at the center of this magic, woven into this tapestry of memory is the heart-wrenching tribute to fallen B-boy Trouble T-Roy. He wasn’t just a friend—he was part of the family, part of the extended tribe of hip hop that formed the backbone of this culture.

And this is why “They Reminisce Over You” isn’t just a song; it’s a fire that refuses to be extinguished.

Chicago poet Kevin Coval said it best: “The street is the classroom; the hood is the university.” Pete and CL school you in the lessons of the block, but this ain’t no classroom lecture. This is the real shit—the pain of survival, the joy of remembering, the power of a culture that’s alive in the face of all that tries to erase it. It’s a celebration of what was, and an understanding that it can never die. It’s about more than the music—it’s about legacy. When Pete Rock flips that sample, when CL lets that verse loose, they’re building a monument to something that can’t be taken. Hip hop will never die, because the soul of it—the soul of them—will never be forgotten.