I hope God is a crabby old bastard with an untamed beard, smirking eyes, wispy comb-over, and wide gaps between a few piss-yellow teeth. An imperfect, awkward, disheveled, broken variety. Unsafe, even. A description more befitting of the existential mess we know too well and at times can’t help but love. You will see mysteriously staggered sets of footprints in the sands of this particular journey you may or may not wish to call spiritual, because this God has a limp and will tell you to carry yourself, then later hope you forgot and ask for a piggyback ride even though your back went to hell years ago. (…)

An examination of how extreme wealth inequality has transformed America into a nation of billionaires and food banks, where healthcare bankrupts families and education creates debt slaves. Through contrasting Nordic social democracy with American hyper-capitalism, the essay exposes how trickle-down economics has failed while progressive taxation, universal healthcare, and living wages have succeeded elsewhere. Arguing that capitalism needs guardrails rather than replacement, it presents social democratic reforms as the path to rescuing the American Dream from oligarchy and restoring human dignity over corporate profits.

So many days spent in coffee shops, telling myself I’d write, but never etching a single word. I always thought the café would be the key to unlocking me. Turns out, living in a prison of anxiety does a great job of locking up the creative process. So, I had to come up with an escape plan. And, in a way, it was a literal one.

I’ve got the post-whatever blues. Couldn’t tell you why or how, but they’re here. One minute, I was content, the next, I’m balancing the scales of emotional justice. It’s not fear of the unknown that keeps me from wanting out, but the fear of missing a fleeting moment—those rare seconds of life that almost make everything feel worth it. Desire fuels the suffering, always awake, always demanding more. The drugs, the highs and lows, come and go—never enough to fix the emptiness. What I want is quiet. What I need is the end to this repetitive story. But maybe the end is right here.

Israel continues its deadly actions in Gaza with the backing of U.S. tax dollars. This is the moment that broke me. The two-party system is a joke; both sides are complicit in the violence. Biden standing by Netanyahu is not something I can support. We say we care about human rights, but are we really okay with this? If we aren’t demanding a ceasefire, do we even have convictions? It’s time to wake up and demand change.