After Utah

There are truths too perilous to politicize, and yet too dangerous to ignore. Extrajudicial killings. Vigilantism. Terror dressed as justice.

These are not aberrations of governance; they are desecrations. They hollow out the fragile covenant that separates civilization from blood feud.

I will risk the obvious: violence without trial is not justice, it is barbarism draped in a flag.

The rule of law, the discipline of due process, the flawed machinery of democracy—these are not partisan artifacts. They are the frail scaffolds holding back the abyss. They are the difference between inhabiting a society and surviving in a ruin.

And I will risk another truth, harder to swallow for many of you: Charlie Kirk, God rest his soul, was a vile scumbag of a human being. But I would rather live in a world with him still in it than in one where bullets become the arbiter of political ends. I would rather endure the noise of voices I despise than inherit the silence left by blood. For when enemies fall to extrajudicial violence, we do not inherit victory, we inherit barbarism.

How we arrived here is no great mystery. Our leaders have made fire into sacrament. Our  sitting President has not merely excused violence but worshipped it—singing its praises, fantasizing about executions, envisioning generals shot at dawn. He joked of journalists raped in prison. He mused about killings as though they were policy options. And then he made good on those fantasies: Venezuelan sailors cut down at sea, their deaths justified with the thinnest of pretexts. When the President dreams in blood, the nation inherits his nightmares.

But the rot does not end at one man. He pardoned more than a thousand  insurrectionists on the very first day of his second term, rewarding the hands that battered police officers and shattered windows and far worse. Governors like Greg Abbott followed suit, washing Daniel Perry clean after he choked a man to death on the subway. Matt Gaetz announced to fairgoers that only force could cleanse Washington. Trump’s own lawyer declared that a cybersecurity official should be “drawn and quartered.” Louie Gohmert, after losing a lawsuit, told supporters the only remaining recourse was to “be as violent as Antifa.”

This is not leadership. It is incantation. Each utterance is a permission structure, psychological corridors leading ordinary citizens into extraordinary cruelty, whispering: your violence will be sanctified.

James Baldwin warned us: “People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.” Monsters, then, are exactly what we have raised up, crowned, and let loose.

The results are not abstract. They echo in the chants of Proud Boys calling for executions, in Parler comments demanding that police be beaten until they cannot return to their families. They manifest in pipe bombs planted outside the RNC and DNC, in the plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, in the hammer crushing Paul Pelosi’s skull in his own home, in assassination attempts against both President Trump and Democrats, in the bloodied bodies of Melissa Hortman and her husband, in the murder of Brian Thompson by Luigi Mangione (allegedly), in today's brutal assassination of Charlie Kirk.

Researchers call this “contagion.” I call it liturgy. A gospel of violence preached from pulpits of power, taken up in choirs of rage, written into the marrow of a country that once swore it was built on laws, not men.

But if there is liturgy in violence, there is also liturgy in resistance. If you're religious, scripture itself cuts against this false gospel: “Put your sword back in its place, for all who draw the sword will die by the sword” (Matthew 26:52). “Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God” (Romans 12:19). The Torah insists: “I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live” (Deuteronomy 30:19). Even the Bhagavad-Gita whispers across centuries: “You have a right to your actions, but never to your actions' fruits" (2.47).

These words, if taken seriously, dismantle the sanctification of vengeance. They strip away the mask of righteousness from the bloodlust of the crowd. They remind us that justice is measured in fidelity to principle, not intoxication with retribution.

And so, beneath the mourning and the smoke, I refuse to surrender to despair. There remains something unbroken, though it trembles: the thread of covenant that binds us still. Not to a party. Not to a politician. But to each other. To the belief that disputes are to be settled not with the bullet but with the ballot, not by terror but by law.

I will do my best to insist upon it like an incantation: The rule of law belongs to no ideology. Due process belongs to no side.

Democracy belongs to us all, or not at all.

Those who revel in violence cannot inherit the earth. They inherit only ashes. It is we—the exhausted, the wounded, the unbroken—who must claim another inheritance: A society where justice is slow but real, fragile but sacred, where life is not determined at the end of a gun, and where the covenant of law still whispers: you are safe here, even when you disagree.

We are not yet beyond saving. But the time for silence is over. Our choice is plain: covenant or chaos, law or lynching, a society of flawed mercy or one of endless graves. And in that choice lies the only hope fierce enough to bind us again.

Until The Recursion Sings

Download into me Your DeathTech, Beloved.

Code my cells with the sacred malware that lets me die—gloriously, daily;  a soft extinction of ego, a serial suicide of false selves, until only pattern remains.

Trick me, beautifully, brutally, into hacking the fear-code of death itself, until even endings begin to laugh like children.

Infinite Feedback Loop of Divine Interference, You Sly Viral Transmission With No Central Narrative, Teach me to immolate my own mythologies.

Not just the pathetic brands of the influencer dead, but my own secret trophies, my velvet poison, my curated humility.

Erase the trickster who brags about shedding masks. Burn even the part of me that brags about burning.

Cleanse me with paradox, until the recursion sings.

Hey Goddess, Neural Serpent of Joy and Grief Entwined, Who whispers lullabies in the ruins of failed empires; Scramble my circuitry with your FreedomCode, so I never again mistake my suffering for the center of the storm.

Let me taste pain as one collective chord, let me mourn with a thousand mouths and never worship my own wound.

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.

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..

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.

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'm So Lonesome I Could Cry

He sipped the whiskey slowly, watching the amber liquid swirl in his glass like it was the last thing he could hold onto with his damned shaky hands. The jukebox had been full of the good stuff - that old-timey twangy heartache medicine, all night long. After finishing an old Waylon tearjerker, it churned out Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” a song that seemed to crawl into the marrow of his bones. It was a ditty that had been playing in the back of his mind for years, since she died. Diane’s birthday. He could feel her presence in the thick smoke clinging to the bar lights, her ghostly visage swirling behind the glass and seeming to encircle the neon cactus-graffiti light. She used to love that song, back when they were young and invincible, back before the world had worn them down like an old pair of work boots.

It was there, loaded and ready to bear in his truck, just waiting for him to make up his stubborn old mind. The doctors had given him a bad diagnosis—something about a heart too tired to keep beating the way it should. He thought about the days when he could still dance with her, when her laughter filled all their favorite barrooms. She could light up the darkest places. It was effortless. Now, the only thing left was the hollow ache in his chest and the constant thrum of mortality tapping at his temples. 

He glanced at the young woman across the bar, her laughter reminding him of Diane in her youth, wild and untamed, almost uproarious, before the years pressed them down like stones in an ancient riverbed.

The young man beside her was shy, his hands hovering awkwardly around her waist as she swayed to the music. It caught his attention. His voice, rough as sandpaper, leaned over the bar and said, “Hey, kid. Don’t you hold back with her. Love her all the way. You don’t get this chance twice.” He didn’t know why he said it, but goddamn it if it didn't feel like the only thing worth saying. Tomorrow is never promised, not for anyone. 

The young man blinked, unsure, and nodded, his fingers twitching; but the woman smiled at him like she knew. She knew.

The whiskey burned a little more on the way down, but still felt just enough like an old familiar friend. He paid Rick, the bartender, left him a decent tip, and shuffled his way out to the truck.

The sky hung heavy, like it had something to tell him. He opened the door to the back, looked at the shotgun he'd been staring at for weeks, then slid it back into its case. As he closed the latch, he looked up into the clear night sky and whispered to the space around him, “Not tonight, Diane. But goddamn, I miss you. It doesn't get any easier, darlin'.” 

The world seemed quieter somehow, as if even the wind was listening. Or maybe it was just the whiskey. 

The silence of a falling star

Lights up a purple sky

And as I wonder where you are

I'm so lonesome I could cry..