It's a Mad Max World for Us: Post Apocalyptic Daydreams in an Age of Dystopian Crisis

 This may or may not be the literal Armageddon but just peeking through the shades I can tell you that it's looking pretty goddamn apocalyptic to me. As I write this acidic screed, the only square mile of the continental United States that isn't frozen solid by a polar vortex the size of God's asshole is literally in flames. Deny the violence of science all you want but it doesn't take a charlatan like Al Gore to know which way the wind blows, and our rapidly mutating climate isn't even the most immediate threat posed to humanity at this apocalyptic moment.

In fact, there are almost too many Cthulhus to count. While greenhouse gasses bake the ice caps, NATO and Putin continue to play nuclear footsie in Ukraine as the Chinese Communist Party and the wizards of Wall Street race to put artificial intelligence in charge of it all even while they openly admit that this sick gambit runs the risk of provoking human extinction before the stock market crashes.

Fuck Armageddon, mankind will be lucky to make to next Tuesday while we split ourselves into equally hideous political parties to bicker over the remote. I'm honestly not sure if I can save these assholes and trying is making me want to throw myself into the fire. It's at times like these that I actually find myself begging for an apocalypse. It's at times like these that I can't seem help but to fantasize about living in a Mad Max America. In fact, I can almost smell the diesel fumes now....

Waking up whenever the daylight calls my name through the drapes of a bulletproof yurt, I'll hit the vacant desert plains of Central Pennsylvania in a heavily modified, rust-rod, El Camino technical with my leather clad horde of genderfuck lesbian barbarians to scavenge the radiated ruins of suburbia for coffee and gunpowder....

With a Buck knife in my teeth and a sawed-off M1 Carbine strapped to my thigh, I'll scale the facade of an abandoned football stadium strangled by vines and hunt white tailed buck with a crossbow between the charred rush hour carcasses on Interstate 80 from a defiled billboard....

I'll cook raw flesh on a bayonet over a flaming television set while the blistering riffs of an all-Stooges mixtape crackle over a ghetto blaster and my dreadlock laden coven of heathen sisters howl for Loki at a moon populated by the corpses of billionaires who failed to escape their demons on luxury rocket ships....

Maybe this all sounds a bit sick to you, and it probably is. I often have to remind myself to contain my glee over such notions of post-apocalyptic bliss in public. It only seems to feed the narrative popular amongst more industrial inclined leftists that post-civ anprim types like me are little more than recklessly misanthropic romantics turning the cinematic specters of George Miller's Max Rokitansky and Imperator Furiosa into something akin to Rousseau's noble savage. And I will own up to the fact that my lust for dieselpunk daydreams isn't exactly the most constructive response to an era of unprecedented societal collapse, but I won't apologize either.

These fantasies aren't merely the realm of radical minds anymore. Post-apocalyptic fiction is a growing multibillion dollar industry and I'm not just talking about the Mad Max franchise. Legions of otherwise vanilla office slaves binge themselves sick on countless hours of survivalist videogames and an endless procession of streaming zombie apocalypse spin-offs. Meanwhile, larping city slickers escape to the sticks just so they can haul up in luxury bunkers and take turns shooting each other up to a blister pocked bliss with high-powered paintball guns.

If this is a sickness, then it's a pandemic but it's a plague that makes perfect fucking sense when you consider the fact that we are already living amidst the kind of towering dystopian architecture that George Orwell and Aldous Huxley once shilled out as science fiction.

Your average American lives under a state of constant stimulation and constant surveillance. When they aren't struggling to pay off the debts of bourgeois degrees with borderline third world wages in the boiling kitchen dungeons of your neighborhood casual dining franchise, they are burning through their meager wages on clickbait smartphone crack like Candy Crush and being hounded to buy more shit that no one needs by fifteen adds at once. 

All while the Meta-NSA panopticon keeps careful tabs on every bowel movement that you feel compelled by unknown forces to report on social media and murders Somalian peasants with flying robots for choosing Allah over Pepsi-Cola.

THIS is your precious civilization. This is what 500 years of western enlightenment has brought us too. Morbidly obese voluntary enslavement at the barrel of a drone. And all it cost us was our tribes, our villages, our gods, our dignity, and our fucking ecosystem. But I'm the sicko because I'd rather shoot cannibals in the face at the end of the world than vote for backstabbing social democrats and unionizing my cell block at the nearest cubicle colony? Kiss my Unabomber reading faggot ass.

We need to face a few very harsh facts here. The first is that everyone is sick in our post-modern dystopia because we have all been raised on the toxic terrain of a deeply sick society. You smoke crack and I horde ammunition but we're all doing desperate shit to get by in a desperate situation. With that being said, the hardest fact that we need to face here is that, for better or worse, civilization as we know it is fucked, and the damage is likely irreversible.

 Even if by some miracle all the nation states of the world joined hands, buried their nuclear stockpiles, ended their various cold wars, and agreed to "go green" immediately, the sheer amount of infrastructure it would take to transform a colossal, fossil-fueled, global juggernaut like ours into one powered exclusively by renewable energy would require enough pollution and plunder to finish the job gasoline started in the process.

Society itself is the problem. Our entire civilization was designed for the sole purpose of endless expansion. You can pass all the Green New Deals you want, even the ones that aren't colossal scams will merely be shoveling shit against the tide.

This isn't to say that we should all just throw up our hands and go quietly into that good night. We should work like hell to do the only thing that can possibly curtail the damage of global capitalism and that's downsize; decentralize, secede, drop out, rebuild locally autonomous village communities divorced from the restraints of big business and big government. 

But we should also prepare for the worst because it's already here and there are worse teachers than Max Rokitansky to learn these lessons from.

The titular character of the first Mad Max film that began George Miller and Byron Kennedy's five-part apocalyptic opus in 1979 started out much like my critics, trying to work within the system to govern an increasingly ungovernable society on the verge of collapse. 

Max attempted to achieve this quixotic goal as a skull-cracking highway patrolman, but the more skulls he cracked, the less human he became until he found himself virtually indistinguishable from the highway savages he hunted. The resulting violence cost him his family and his humanity. So, Max left everything but the violence behind him and escaped in his battle-scarred Pursuit Special Cruiser to the desert abyss that stared back.

For the rest of the series Max essentially plays the role of the consummate egoist loner sketched out in the works of individualist anarchists like Max Stirner and Ernst Junger. His interactions with other survivors, often various kinds of tribal collectives, begin as solitary exchanges governed exclusively by self-interest, protection for petrol, but Max repeatedly discovers that even the strongest lone egoist cannot survive without forming longer lasting unions with those of seemingly divergent values and lifestyles based on the evolutionary principle of mutual aid.

These experiences don't exactly transform Max into a model communalist, but he learns to do as Stirner suggested in his 19th century masterwork, The Ego and Its Own, with his concept of the Union of Egoists. He builds temporary, voluntary, and non-systematic associations that exist only as long as all parties involved are willing to cooperate, and through this process Max, the other Max, rediscovers the humanity that fighting to keep a polluted society cohesive stripped him of.

However, this school of post-industrial egoism is far from the only approach to stateless survival presented in the franchise and speaking personally, as a genderqueer anarcho-feminist as well as a survivor of systemic sexual violence, the story of Imperator Furiosa told in the last two films of the series is one that resonates very deeply with me. 

After being robbed of a childhood amidst her matriarchal tribe by sadistic marauders who saw her gender as little more than currency in an apocalyptic landscape, Furiosa must conceal her gender and assimilate to a lifestyle of rape and pillage in order to survive. She only finds an opportunity for redemption when she attempts to help the marital sex slaves of her master, Immortan Joe, to escape to "the green place of many mothers" of her childhood.

However, when Furiosa discovers her utopia polluted beyond repair it is Max the masculine egoist who convinces her that salvation lies in her forming a union of many kinds of prisoners, including Joe's own conscripts, to retake the resources that their collective labor created back at the fortress from which they escaped.

The lesson here, as I see it, is that in an age of collapsing superstructures designed by disintegrating majorities, a tribal minority like mine can only survive unassimilated not only by binding ourselves together in a common subculture of resistance but by collaborating with other struggling subcultures of resistance and encouraging those still devoted to patriarchal master races to do the same.

I can't tell you how the next movie ends. I can only tell you that the odds of it ending harmoniously are not in our favor, but that doesn't mean that there is no hope. It simply means that our best hope rests in the survival of the small amidst the wreckage of the big. 

If Furiosa can do that with one arm chained to God's jawbone, then the very least I can do is die dreaming while civilization's useful idiots roll their eyes.

Devoted in loving memory to David Lynch (1946-2025) who left in a cloud of smoke with the flames still burning....

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs for an apocalyptic mixtape

* This Magic Moment by Lou Reed

* Search & Destroy by the Stooges

* We Will Fall by the Stooges

* Down on the Street by the Stooges

* Success by Iggy Pop

* Raw Power by the Stooges

* No Fun by the Stooges

* TV Eye by the Stooges

* The Passenger by Iggy Pop

* Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell by the Stooges

The Politics of Violence and the Violence of the Political

 Some sharp white dude with a nifty haircut once observed that those who make peaceful change impossible make violent change inevitable. Then some other white dude with a nifty haircut blew his brains all over Dealey Plaza with a cheap, Italian, mail-order rifle. In case you haven't guessed, the first quotable white dude was President John F. Kennedy, his far less quotable killer was an angry little man named Lee Harvey Oswald and regardless of what your pet theory on their last tango in Dallas may be, it's pretty hard to deny that it had something to do with the ultraviolence that defined Kennedy's first and only term in office. 

No matter how badly Oliver Stone may want JFK to be Mark Twain with a bigger dick that doesn't change the uncomfortable truth that between poetic soliloquys and boozy sexual escapades, the king of Camelot was little more than a garden variety terrorist, having elected officials whacked and firebombing rice paddies to the last day of his presidency. 

This was the man who followed up the fantastic and nearly apocalyptic failures of the Bay of Pigs Invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis with Operation Mongoose, an extensive campaign of terrorist attacks on Cuba's civilian infrastructure by CIA trained fascist bandidos. oil refineries were bombed, railroads were sabotaged, and innocent people were slaughtered in cold blood.

So, even if you want to believe that there were Cuban exiles on the Grassy Knoll to deflower a generation of milquetoast liberal dreamers, who do you think loaded them up on ludes and Carcanos? Malcolm X called it best when he nonchalantly described Kennedy's demise as chickens coming home to roost. Then he got shot too.

Sixty some years later and America still hasn't learned a goddamn thing about the karmic political violence that decapitated Camelot. In fact, political violence is higher now than it's been since the Days of Rage that followed the JFK assassination, and the tide just keeps swelling higher and higher. 

We barely survived a frantically chaotic presidential election season which saw not one, but two serious attempts made on the front runner's life when he wasn't busy organizing lynch mobs to stock mythic Haitian cat eaters only to see the new year kicked off by not one, but two terrorist acts, both committed by men trained to kill like Oswald by the United States Government. 

At 3:15 AM on January 1rst, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, a 13-year veteran of the US Army welcomed in the New Year by crashing a pickup truck with an ISIS decal into the packed crowds of New Orlean's French Quarter, killing 14 and injuring 35 before he could be shot dead by police. Just six hours later, an active-duty Green Beret named Matthew Livelsberger parked a Tesla Cybertruck loaded with fireworks at the front entrance of Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas and shot himself while detonating his rented vehicle, injuring 7 in the process.

The media on both sides of the aisle seems to be utterly perplexed by this carnage even while they replay the footage in slow-motion to "Oh Yeah" by Yello. The gnashing heads of Snuff TV are quick as silver to blame it on the far-right, the far-left, and their rivals on social media but they've all conveniently forgotten the words of John F. Kennedy and Malcolm X. 

When powerful people make peaceful change impossible while spreading violent change across the world it is only a matter of time before those chickens come home to roost.

All of the violent acts listed above were inspired by a vast array of motives. The only conspiracy connecting them all is that they were all launched against perceived representatives of the most violent empire on the planet. For a nation actively stoking the flames of a full-blown holocaust in Gaza and a possible apocalypse in Ukraine to expect anything less than violence is really nothing short of absurd.

This is the same kind of almost mystical, dewy-eyed, double-standard that the Westphalian nation state tried to apply to the kings and emperors of Old Europe with the specter of monarchism and it worked for a while. Killers were kings and kings were gods until gods started getting killed by their own irate subjects. Empress Elisabeth in 1898, King Umberto in 1900, King Carlos I and Crown Prince Luis Filipe in 1908. It was all oh so very shocking but not nearly as shocking as the October Uprising that shattered Czarist Russia into a thousand shards in 1917. 

Violent change made inevitable.

What exactly is terrorism? What constitutes "political" violence? We're told that it is an act of violence perpetrated with an explicitly political motive. Well, then what about the tax resistor being thrown in prison for refusing to feed the war machine his pocket change? What about the Black man shot dead in cold blood for failing to genuflect to the kings in blue? 

549 Americans were killed in the United States between 9/11 and 2019 during designated terrorist attacks, all during an era in which we were commanded by outrage over political violence to fight a violent War in Terror. Those deaths were the tragic fallout of the state that this forever war grew. So, were the 1,164 civilians murdered during fatal police shootings in 2023 alone but where is their outrage? Where is their war on terror?

This level of downright dizzying injustice cannot be silenced and stifled by the legacy media anymore. Even while the Supreme Court shrugs at banning TikTok and pigfucking oligarchs like Elon Musk buy off Twitter, there are simply too many camera phones for them to govern. We have all become digital witnesses to police stranglings and hospital bombings, and the more the elites attempt to pretend that it's all just not happening or it simply doesn't matter, the less legitimacy they can afford to clothe their naked greed and hubris with.

In a "free world" like this, with a global corporate state apparatus that is this omnipresent and inescapable, the rage becomes like fumes and every act of violence becomes political. Smash and grabs become acts of revenge against the mass gentrification of box stores. Workplace shootings become one-man uprisings against cubicle despotism. And every spark threatens to ignite a Bolshevik size prairie fire amidst the busted ovens of a failed technostate.

We can't pretend that any of this is shocking anymore without being complicit and I refuse to join the gasping class in their breathless chorus of virtue signaling awe, but I won't advocate carnage either even if I do understand it. Not only is it gruesome and dehumanizing even for the perpetrator who has reduced themself to fighting like a state, but it isn't particularly affective either.

Firing three bullets into a CEO feels fantastic but so what? Then what? What changes when we simply remove a single cog from the machine? And what did the Bolsheviks really achieve with their bloodbath beyond merely replacing one massive death machine with another?

The state itself is the source of the mass violence of the political and it cannot be replaced; it must be disengaged. A real war on terror would be a grassroots movement of citizens who refuse to pay taxes, refuse to buy their goods from corporate thieves, refuse to invest in banks or elections. 

A growing collection of autonomous communities who only trade, share, and barter between others who refuse to validate any institution which benefits from the systematic monopolization of the use of force. A counterculture of counter governments rendering the violent authority of the state irrelevant once and for all.

And when the state comes to defend terrorism against the peaceful, and it will come, then and only then do we fire back while the whole world is watching. 

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Cherub Rock by Smashing Pumpkins

* Digital Witness by St. Vincent

* Jesus Built My Hotrod by Ministry

* We Appreciate Power by Grimes

* A Drug Against War by KMFDM

* Behind the Wheel by Depeche Mode

* Head Like a Hole by Nine Inch Nails

* Karma Police by Radiohead

* Kerosene by Big Black

* Zombie by the Cranberries

A Depressed Anarchist's Guide to Not Blowing Your Brains Out This Winter

 In case you haven't noticed, dearest motherfuckers, my mental health is kind of a hot mess. OCD, ADHD, CPTSD, OSDID, all on top of LGBT and just a dash of BDSM for flavor. It seems like every year I add a few more letters to this dizzying alphabet soup, not to mention a few more prescriptions. I thought I was fucked up back when I was afraid to leave the house, then I escaped through the closet, switched genders, and stumbled headlong down a rabbit hole of repressed childhood trauma and began sprouting personalities like fucking mushrooms. 

So, yeah, I'm a little bit fucked up, in fact all five of me are. If anything, qualifying my mental state as a hot mess is kind of an understatement, especially in January when the freezing cold has the odd tendency to make that hot mess a lot hotter.

Don't get me wrong, the trials and tribulations of Stressmas can be quite the shit show in their own right, but at least there's fudge. Then January rears its frigid head and there is no more fudge; no more lights, no more tinsel, no more sugar cookies, no more chestnuts roasting over an open fire or shimmering candy-colored Christmas trees. Only death; cold, dark, muddy, death. 

Just one long slog through three more months of winter sludge without a goddamn thing to look forward to but a light so far at the end of the tunnel that it might as well be on another fucking planet. We don't even get snow anymore in Central Pennsylvania thanks to those climate raping parasites over at Exxon Mobil. Just dead trees with no leaves and the wind whistling Morrissey up my spine. I wouldn't exactly say that I'm suicidal but by February the barrel of a shotgun begins to look more appetizing than a chicken fried steak.

I survive because that's what I do; I suffer, bitch, and survive. But a lot of people don't, and I feel for them. As fucked up as I may be, I'm not alone and I'm not just talking about the alters in my internal family collective. Depression is booming in this country and for good goddamn reason. This country and much of the world it rapes sucks. In 2023, Statista reported that an estimated 17.8% of American adults report currently suffering from depression, which is a significant increase from the 10.5% in 2015.

Armchair normies stroke their beards at such numbers and call it a crisis. I look at those numbers and all I can think is that at least 17.8% of Americans are finally paying attention. Depression may suck but it isn't a fucking illness, it's a painful state of awareness. America is governed by dueling herds of white supremacists who are actively financing at least one full-fledged genocide in the Middle East and several uranium tipped cold wars pretty much everywhere else, including outer space where HAL 9000 will soon be deciding our collective fate with fucking laser beams.

You would be sick if you didn't want to die and as something of a civil libertarian absolutist, I actually support that right. However, if everyone with enough of a conscience to feel like shit about this world being shit blew their fucking brains out there would be nothing left but Republicrats and Dempublicans to talk to and I would have little choice but to join you on the balcony out of pure boredom alone. 

Such a fate would also let the dicks who currently run this world off way too goddamn easy, so this January I have decided to provide my unique services as a professional crazy person with a fifth-degree blackbelt in fending off the noose to anyone feeling tempted to eat their hardware in a Kurt Cobain club sandwich this winter. This is a brief guide from a depressed anarchist on how to be as fucked up as you have every right to be without blowing your brains out and these are a few things you might want to consider trying before pulling that trigger.

1.) Find Yourself an Advocate, not a Life Coach

As you can imagine, I have seen my share of shrinks and most of them deserved to be shot far more than I do. With that being said, contrary to what my screeds against the tyranny of the DSM may lead you to believe, I am not anti-psychiatry. I just happen to believe that like most authority figures, psychiatrists have way too much goddamn power in this country and that the burgeoning for-profit therapeutic state encourages downright tyrannical behavior from such professionals, but there are exceptions to this rule, and they can save your life if you let them.

My advice is to proceed with caution. A good therapist is a lot like a good whore. If they aren't willing to be upfront with you about their ethics, then no condom on earth is going to keep you safe. Seek out a therapist who behaves more like a collaborator than a doctor. The quickest way to do this is to tell any prospective therapist upfront that you don't view your pain as an illness and that you think that the DSM is the shittiest self-help rag since the Old Testament. If they respond by just taking notes and asking how that 'makes you feel', get the fuck out of their and find an actual human being to talk to. Therapy should be an informed conversation between consenting adults. Anything less is just abuse with a bill.

2.) Drop Out of Anything that Makes You Want to Die

We live in a society that ties up way too much self-worth into some strange sense of duty to do things that are soul crushing for a paycheck or a diploma. We all need to make a living but if you're spending nine to five wondering which AR-15 goes best with the color of your manager's empty chest cavity then you really aren't making a living, you're making a dying. Get the fuck out and try to find a way to get by that doesn't feel worse than cancer. Maybe that's flipping pancakes at a greasy spoon in Montana or selling whippets in the parking lot of a Phish concert. Shit, maybe that's begging for change and drinking fortified wine beneath a freeway overpass. 

Define your own goddamn happiness and to hell with everyone else. I'm a welfare queen myself and as much as I despise living on money stollen by the state from other taxpayers, I'd much rather see that money go to putting a downpayment on my first novel then see it go to more scatter bombs for Israel. Stop concerning yourself with pleasing an unwell society and focus on what kind of living you can actually live with instead.  One good way to start is by dropping out of society altogether.

3.) Find a Cause that You are Willing to Fail Trying to Achieve and Build a Community Around It

In my experience most people labeled as mentally ill like me just care way too much about all the right things in all the wrong ways. It's easy to get overwhelmed when you look at the crisis that our entire planet has put itself in since the Agricultural Revolution; AI, climate change, genocide, nuclear war, Nickelback... The stakes are high, and they just keep getting higher but putting all your focus on the whole damn world is only going to burn you out quicker than the sun.

In fact, this whole global universalist mindset is a big part of what has fucked the globe up so badly. No one person can save the world and trying to do so has an ugly tendency of resulting in attempts to rule it. Think smaller. Think locally. Think about the kind of community that you would like to live in right now if the rest of the world would just fuck off and start living it.

I'm an obnoxiously Queer anarchist who lives in the rusty outback of Central Pennsylvania tetanus country. The weight of the military-prison industrial complex crushed me into an agoraphobic mess for most of my twenties. Then I stopped plotting to overthrow the new world order and started to focus on creating a way for people like me to live rurally without having to rely on the vanilla technocracy of big government and big business. It's an endless work in progress. I volunteer at local shelters, take part in local support groups, and help out with my little found family's struggling homestead, but it is both work and progress.

I may never live to see my goal of a Queer hillbilly utopia that's equal parts Mad Max, John Waters, and Ziggy Stardust but I don't mind if I die trying and something tells me that if more people did the same while keeping their finances off the books and between friends instead of with the banks, maybe a lot of this evil global shit that makes so many of us want to die would simply fall apart.

Maybe I am pretty fucked up. Hell, I'll own that shit, all day, every day. But I am not ill, at least not from anything innately biological. I am simply too sensitive to coexist peacefully with a society that considers voting for war criminals and spending two thirds of your life in a cubicle to be normal. This society is the sickness, I'm just slightly more allergic to the pollution than most, but not for long. The rate of despair in the wealthiest nation on earth is booming because human beings simply weren't designed to live this way and we sure as shit weren't designed to die this way. 

If this makes you want to kill yourself then that's OK. You're not alone and you're not the one with the real fucking problem here because you're not the one hurting everyone around you like all those successful people do on their way to the office every morning. 

But killing yourself is quite simply letting those cunts off way too easy. Do yourself a favor, stick around for a while and embrace going nuts as way of life instead of a way of death. The sun is going to explode anyway, right? We might as well make things a little more interesting before it does.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now by the Smiths

* Supersad by Suki Waterhouse

* Today by Smashing Pumpkins

* Go Home by Julien Baker

* Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle by Nirvana

* Beautiful by Lana Del Rey

* Hurt by Nine Inch Nails

* Crazy by Willie Nelson

* Bullet with Butterfly Wings by Smashing Pumpkins

* Hand in My Pocket by Alannis Morrissette

* Until the Sun Explodes by Pains of Being Pure at Heart

* Lazy-Eye by Silversun Pickups

In 2025 We Must All Fight Like the Few People Who Didn't Suck in 2024

 I have been writing this annual post celebrating a handful of people who have achieved the impossible and miraculously failed to suck over the last twelve months for almost a decade now and I have little intention of ending this New Year's ritual any time soon. Even my shrink agrees that it's a healthy thing for a perpetually angry anarchist to do. 

However, my obsessive-compulsive disorder will not allow me to ignore the fact that for several years running I have begun this list by observing with some astonishment that somehow this past year was even more brutally soul crushing than the last and this looks to be yet another ritual unlikely to change in the near future.

Just think about it, dearest motherfuckers. We've gone from Donald Trump being elected president on a promise to ethnically cleanse your local Walmart to his replacement, Joe Biden, somehow sucking bad enough to get that orange asshole reelected in a landslide to do what he failed miserably to do the first time around and make this car wreck country great again. But wait there's more!

Just when you thought that the pandemic was the pinnacle of government facilitated catastrophe, Israel launches a genocidal war on everything brown that moves in the desert with the full financial and rhetorical support of both halves of our plutocratic duopoly.

...And just when you thought that bourgeoise America had finally tired of watching their police strangle one unarmed Black civilian after another on live television they decide that the pigs have become the real victims here and gave those swaggering welfare scroungers a raise.

...And just when you thought that the Wallstreet swamp flooding Wahington had provoked one crippling recession too many for middle American voters to stomach, MAGA populists put the richest man on earth in charge of reigning in government corruption.

Pardon my Esperanto, but what in the holy Jesus fuck is going on here? When did CNN go from being geopolitical Videodrome to an episode of The Twilight Zone with no end? I'm actually starting to miss ISIS. Maybe they'll run a candidate for 2028 that's just marginally more palatable than Kamala Harris. 

I'd kick the TV out the goddamn window again but it's the one thing distracting me from the fact that the only thing more heinous than the news right now is the raging volcano in the mirror. 

This year brought me closer the brink of total madness than I even thought possible when my gender transition ended up unlocking a Pandora's box of repressed childhood trauma that erupted into a raging circus fire of psychedelic flashbacks, epileptic-style seizures, and freshly raped multiple personalities, not to mention the near disintegration of my long struggling Queer rural found family.

I really don't mean to make this yet another story that is somehow all about me, but I can't ignore the harrowing parallels between my own descent into the ninth circle of hell and the Western world's journey into the merciless maelstrom of its own existential abyss. 

Even beyond my own weird genre of emo-gonzo journalism and the paranoid delusions of grandeur that fuel it, this all feels eerily connected and fuck your mother, why not? I have long posited the radical theory that so-called mentally ill people like me are merely emotional weathers vanes so sensitive to the greater trials and tribulations of society that our own neuroses flare up in concert with the flames Rome.

All the voices in my head seem to be singing "Gimme Shelter" in perfect harmony right now, with rape and murder just a kiss away and the screams between the chatter on the evening news filling in the chorus quite nicely. 

Could these really be the end times, the decline of the west, the second coming, the fourth turning, the kali yuga, the age of Ozymandias? Could the gloomy prophecies of the Book of Revelations and the Unabomber Manifesto finally be upon us? Or have I simply snapped beneath the weight of a world run wrong by cabals of pedophile priests and baby killing oligarchs? 

I honestly couldn't say for sure at this point but either way the only thing close to a constructive solution that I can come up with for such ills, be they societal or mental, is to fight and to fight like bloody fucking hell. We must fight like the few people who managed the small miracle of not sucking in this the Year of the Vacuum, 2024....

We must fight like the young pro-Palestine protestors who have hijacked campuses complicit in genocide across the country and across the world this year. Tens of thousands of debt besotted children have embraced the wrath of their Boomer parents by launching encampments and occupations at some of Babylon's most prestigious diploma mills. They have glued themselves to the streets, shutdown parades, hectored Christmas tree lightings, and haunted clueless oligarchs like Joe Biden on the campaign trail. 

They have taken post-adolescent petulance to epic heights not seen since the height of the Vietnam War and they have done so selflessly with the simple mission of not allowing their elders to forget that that isn't red wine staining their fingertips, it is the blood of children. For this unforgivable fit of empathy they have been evicted, suspended, fired, beaten, maced, imprisoned, universally vilified, and tarred with the vilest labels imaginable and they're still screaming the names of the innocent at the top of their lungs from the steps of a university near you.  

We must fight like the pissed-off Muslims and Arabs of this country who refused to turn off their conscience and fall in line behind the Democratic Party simply because they say nice things about Mohammed before bombing and starving his children across the globe. 

After forking over literal tons of deadly ordinances to an increasingly unhinged and openly genocidal regime in Israel, the Democrats essentially dared a nearly invisible minority in this country not to vote for them against an orange supremacist who spent his first term throwing anyone on a prayer rug without a Saudi permission slip out of the country. These people responded by running a hajj around the ballot box with their middle fingers in the air, giving Kamala Harris and her clueless handlers a humiliating defeat that they begged for on all fours.

And yes, at the risk of being added to another dozen government watch lists, I say we should fight like the Shia militias of the Middle East who form the only armies left willing to fight for their brothers and sisters in Palestine even if it costs them the lives of their own families. 

Ansar Allah, Hezbollah, and the Popular Mobilization Forces, all impoverished and poorly armed militias made up of men considered to be heretics by the kind of Sunni fundamentalists elected to govern the Gaza Strip. These bearded barbarians have brought down a driving rain of Soviet-grade artillery and homemade drones upon the combined forces of Pax Americana who built the Israeli Frankenstein out of body parts robbed from Holocaust graveyards in order to make their own declaration of 'never again.' No more Nakba's without a price.

We must all fight and we must fight with hands and fists and teeth and claws because pacifism does not provide a sufficient response to industrial slaughter. 

However, we must also fight like the great unknown American nonvoter, close to 90 million of whom chose simply to disengage the plutocratic theater of the American election circus by withholding any form of validation for a system that contains no more legitimacy than it has empathy.

We must fight like the millions of equally invisible undocumented Americans who have come to this country, crossing invisible lines drawn and redrawn by racist gringos in both parties, to build thriving economies that boom completely off the grid of state facilitated capital.

We must fight like the legions of underage gender outlaws in this country, some 300,000 and growing, teenage iconoclasts reinventing their world and building new identities from scratch that reflect the divinely eccentric contents of their souls even while the Supreme Court condemns them to medical apartheid and violent hate crimes in compulsory school bathrooms.

And we must fight like the screaming voices in my head. My dearly beloved alters, Max, Agnes, Ophelia, and Mona. These jagged pieces of me that an organized crime ring dressed like a church tried to banish to the darkest corners of my subconscious through years of systematic abuse only to have them return to me thirty years later as individuals every bit as sentient and autonomous as the one preaching to you right now. A church tried to destroy a girl in a boy's body, and they created five. 

As hellish and unspeakably violent as this year has been for my mental health, those girls, my girls, are the best thing that ever happened to me because they are me and they have afforded me the ability to be me authentically than I have ever been before. I am a collective that exists in eternal resistance to tyranny. Together I fight and so should you.

Not to win but to redefine ourselves as something that cannot be defined by authority. We must oppose the tyranny of our modern dystopian prison state on every front imaginable, in every way possible, including amidst the banality of our day to day lives. Sometimes that means doing something as bold as picking up a brick in a crowd of cowards and sometimes that means doing something as simple as telling our own demons, "Fuck you, I won't do what you told me..."

If this really is the end of the world as we know it, then we must go down swinging wild because that is the only way to build a new one. We must fight like we don't suck because we all deserve better.

See you fuckers in the Thunderdome. Drop the goddamn microphone.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Get Me Away from Here I'm Dying by Belle & Sebastian

* Darklands by the Jesus & Mary Chain

* As Soon as You Can by Twin Shadow

* Epic by Faith No More

* Sea Swallow Me by Cocteau Twins

* Lithium by the Polyphonic Spree

* Shove by L7

* Sing Me Spanish Techno by the New Pornographers

* Killing in the Name by Rage Against the Machine

* Changes by David Bowie