Last night I watched as a man younger than me stood before New Yorkers and gave his vision for a brighter tomorrow. I now know what the oldheads felt like in 2008 watching Barack Obama talk. Never mind that Zohran Mamdani was born just six months after me. My body received a shot of hope meant for a wide-eyed college student on Election Night. My withered thirty-something heart simply cannot take that dosage.

I realize I use many words to explain what I could state in few. And so I shall reduce my words down to the essentials. If I can. I have also learned that I tend to go on tangents. No more. Stick to the message. If a post goes over 500 words it is too long. Eyes on the prize.

Massive blue wave wins across the US last night and Guy Fawkes Day being today is going to make one group of people clinically libbed up and one group of people have pearl-clutching panic attacks. I belong in the former camp, and let me tell you, it’s a rush. My head hurts.

Despite the great victories of the Democratic Party, and especially the Democratic Socialists of America, the work remains. Yes, we can celebrate our Ws. But there are many wins left for us, and we cannot lose momentum now, or else we’ll never reach them. Again, eyes on the prize.

And what is the prize? An American Dream everyone can achieve? A good, safe, quiet life for every person on Earth, where bigotry and genocide do not stand? A society where no one must make the choice between keeping a roof over their head, having a hot meal, or being able to take the bus to an underpaying job? All of the above?

Yes. A better world is possible. Every day could be the first day of a better nation. There is no benefit in defeatism to powers that would rather see everything burn while they hide in their fire-proof bunkers.

I certainly have not felt like this in a long time. But again, I know that this feeling is contagious and addictive. It is so easy to get hooked on it, to let it distract from the work, to let it blind me to the real issues that need addressing. At a certain point I will have to splash some water on my face, come down from the clouds, and say, “Okay. What’s next?”

What an evening. What a year. Eleven months of fascist and anarcho-capitalist nonsense really do make the slimmest glimmer of hope feel like two thousand volts directly to the rib cage. I am too old to not have slept last night. I am sucking coffee down like a demon.

The people who lost hard last night are already preparing themselves for the midterms. They are already working on ways to destroy what little joy we gained. Let’s not let them. Turn the volume up.

I set out to write a blog post. Every single time I do this I fail. I get to the first sentence, maybe. Then I delete the whole thing. I delete the website. I delete the browsers from my computer. I throw the computer out the window. I rebuke all technology and put my necessary belongings in a small knapsack. I walk to the river and set up my camp there. I look to the stars. I ask them for guidance. They give none. I drink the water from my hands. I get cholera or something. I wake up in a hospital three months later where a doctor tells me they have cured my disease. I throw the doctor out the window.

Anyway, we have reached the era of Will Sisskind where unhinged nonsense knows no bounds. I used to try to sound smart. I used to want to be taken somewhat seriously. But by God and every god and devil, why? We live in a nonsense world. I hate to sound cynical. I hate to sound nihilistic. I am neither. I believe in hope and that a new and better world is possible. But why stick to the ways that have always been, especially in an era where they do not work? Nazis have infiltrated government. Everyday folks go hungry while their elected government spends their tax money on lavish parties and ballrooms.

I can’t write about these things. My brain shuts down. I hit a wall.

Because I’m not wired to think like this. No human is and no human should be. We were born to live off the land, to tend to it, to not milk it of all its resources for minuscule financial gain and the indentured servitude of all mankind. We were born to live together on this land, not to fight and shed each other’s blood across it. We were born to adapt to this land’s strange whimsy, not try and control it, and certainly not to cause its climate to go off the rails.

And yet, people have found countless mind-boggling ways to be very stupid. I have certainly acted stupid in my life. But I like to think I have learned from my mistakes. So many people have not. And those folks would rather double down on their stupidity and land themselves in scalding hot water than take accountability for their accounts. Those folks would rather let their errors cause people to die because they’re too insecure and afraid to look weak, and they will never apologize or take the blame. They will always frame themselves in the passive tense, because they are passive people, because everything that has propped them into a position of power is due to passive income. They are weak whether they like it or not.

This kind of attitude, this kind of economy, this way of living cannot stand.

What is the point of the article, Will? This is what you ask. I don’t know. Again, I stopped trying to frame my thoughts into anything coherent a while ago. I could run this through ChatGPT and tell it to make me sound smart and well-rehearsed and organized, but do I want to waste gallons of water on that? Do I want to ruin my mental elasticity? Do I want to become a drooling husk of bone while a computer somewhere in a burnt-out Virginia forest does all the thinking for me? No, no, and no. I would rather scoop out the interior of my scrotum with a sewing needle. Employers, if you just read that sentence, just know you’re getting a creative mind over here. You didn’t think anyone would say that sentence, did you? Big brain. Galaxy brain, as the kids say. Six-seven.

Fact is: I’m done shutting up, and I’m done trying to appease folks, and I’m done trying to make myself sound like a watered-down version of what I am. Sure, that just adds to the noise. Sure, that just means one more dumbass white man adding his unnecessary opinion to the slurry of shit that fills the Internet like a New York City sewer after a monsoon. But I have always regretted not yelling about something when I need to yell about it, because that thought then festers in my brain and eats away at the top layer of it like a termite, and then the structure of my skull caves in and my head hits the edge of my desk and cracks, and the goo leaks everywhere on my office’s hardwood floor and makes a big damn mess. And then my wife has to come home and see that. Do you want my wife to have to see blue brain goop? Do you want to question why it’s blue? No and no. I know it’s not blue, but blue is my favorite color and I like to think my head is full of that. So there.

This is the end of the post.