Privacy Policy

How The Lady Layman Uses and Protects Your Information

Last Updated: August 31, 2026

This Privacy Policy explains how The Lady Layman handles information associated with subscriptions, memberships, members-only content, community access, and interactions with The Lady Layman.

The Lady Layman is primarily a media, podcasting, publishing, and online community business. We do not independently operate a large customer database or intentionally collect extensive personal information from members.

Most account, subscription, payment, and community information is collected and managed through third-party platforms such as Substack, Facebook, payment processors, podcast platforms, and social media services.

1. Information We May Receive

Depending on how you interact with The Lady Layman, third-party platforms may make limited information available to us, such as:

• Your name, username, or display name

• Your email address

• Your subscription or membership status

• Your membership tier

• Subscription or transaction confirmation

• Comments, messages, questions, or posts you voluntarily submit

• Information you voluntarily share within a members-only community

• Basic audience or engagement information provided by the platforms we use

We do not intentionally collect information that is unnecessary to operate The Lady Layman, provide membership access, communicate with subscribers, or manage our communities.

2. Payment Information

Memberships and subscriptions may be processed through third-party platforms or payment processors.

The Lady Layman does not directly collect or store your full credit card number, banking information, or complete payment credentials.

Payment information is handled by the platform or payment processor used at checkout.

Those companies process information according to their own privacy policies and terms.

3. How We Use Information

Information available to The Lady Layman may be used to:

• Provide access to subscriber or members-only content

• Verify an active membership or subscription

• Provide access to private community spaces

• Communicate with members or subscribers

• Respond to questions or customer service issues

• Moderate community spaces

• Manage membership benefits

• Maintain reasonable business, accounting, or tax records

• Protect The Lady Layman and its communities against fraud, abuse, harassment, or unauthorized access

• Comply with applicable laws or platform requirements

The Lady Layman does not sell your personal information.

4. Members-Only Communities

Membership may include access to private Facebook groups or other online community spaces.

Information you choose to post in those communities may be visible to other members of that community.

This can include things such as:

• Your Facebook or platform profile information

• Comments

• Questions

• Personal stories

• Opinions

• Photos or other content you voluntarily post

Please use your own judgment when sharing personal or sensitive information in community spaces.

The Lady Layman does not require members to disclose sensitive personal information in order to participate.

Because these communities may be hosted by third-party platforms such as Facebook, those platforms may also collect information about your activity according to their own privacy policies.

5. Questions, Personal Advice, and Member Discussions

Members may occasionally submit questions, situations, stories, or requests for personal perspective or advice.

You control how much information you choose to provide.

Please do not send information that is unnecessary for the discussion, particularly information such as:

• Social Security numbers

• Banking information

• Passwords

• Full medical records

• Private account credentials

• Another person’s highly sensitive private information

• Other information you would not be comfortable transmitting online

Any personal advice or discussion offered by The Lady Layman is provided as entertainment, commentary, and personal opinion, as explained further in our Terms of Service.

Submitting a question does not require you to disclose your full legal name or other unnecessary identifying information unless a particular platform requires it for account purposes.

6. Third-Party Platforms

The Lady Layman relies on third-party platforms to publish content, manage subscriptions, host communities, distribute podcasts, process payments, communicate with audiences, and maintain social media accounts.

These may include services such as:

• Substack

• Facebook and other Meta platforms

• Podcast distribution platforms

• Payment processors

• Email providers

• YouTube

• TikTok

• Instagram

• Other social media or publishing platforms

These companies may independently collect information about you.

Their collection and use of that information is governed by their own terms and privacy policies.

The Lady Layman does not control the privacy practices, security systems, data collection methods, or policies of third-party platforms.

7. Cookies, Analytics, and Platform Data

Third-party platforms used by The Lady Layman may use cookies, analytics tools, pixels, device identifiers, or similar technologies.

For example, a publishing platform may provide The Lady Layman with general information about subscriber activity, readership, traffic, or engagement.

The Lady Layman may use aggregated or platform-provided analytics to understand how content is performing and how audiences interact with our work.

We do not independently use this information to build detailed personal profiles of individual members.

8. Age Requirement

The Lady Layman is intended for adults 18 years of age or older.

We do not knowingly seek to collect personal information from children.

If we learn that information from a minor has been submitted to us inappropriately, we may remove or delete it where reasonably possible.

9. How Long Information Is Kept

The Lady Layman retains information only for as long as reasonably necessary for purposes such as:

• Maintaining subscriptions or memberships

• Providing community access

• Responding to member questions

• Managing business records

• Resolving disputes or payment issues

• Moderating community conduct

• Complying with legal, tax, accounting, or platform requirements

Much of the information associated with your membership is maintained by the third-party platform through which you subscribed or participated.

Their retention practices are governed by their own policies.

10. Data Security

The Lady Layman takes reasonable steps to protect information under our control.

However, no website, email service, social media platform, payment processor, or online community can guarantee complete security.

Members are responsible for protecting their own account passwords, login information, devices, and privacy settings.

11. Sharing Information

The Lady Layman does not sell your personal information.

We may disclose limited information when reasonably necessary to:

• Operate a service through a third-party provider

• Address fraud, abuse, harassment, or security issues

• Resolve payment disputes or chargebacks

• Comply with applicable law or valid legal process

• Meet tax, accounting, or business recordkeeping requirements

• Protect the rights, safety, or property of The Lady Layman, its members, or others

We do not provide member information to unrelated third parties for them to independently market products or services to you.

12. Your Choices

Depending on the platform you use, you may be able to:

• Cancel your subscription

• Update your account information

• Change your email preferences

• Leave a members-only group

• Delete comments or posts

• Unsubscribe from communications

• Adjust privacy settings

• Request deletion of certain information

Some requests must be handled directly through the platform that collected the information, such as Substack, Facebook, or a payment processor.

If The Lady Layman controls the information involved, you may contact us through our official published contact information with a privacy-related request.

13. Changes to This Policy

The Lady Layman may update this Privacy Policy as our content, membership offerings, platforms, or legal obligations change.

Any updated version will include a revised Last Updated date.

14. Contact

Questions regarding this Privacy Policy may be directed to The Lady Layman through the official contact information published on our website, newsletter, or membership platform.

Memberships, Content, Community Access, and More

Last Updated: August 31, 2026

These Terms of Service apply to subscriptions, memberships, digital content, community access, and other content offered by The Lady Layman.

By subscribing, purchasing a membership, joining a members-only community, or accessing paid content, you agree to these Terms.

1. What The Lady Layman Offers

The Lady Layman is a media and entertainment brand.

Depending on your membership or subscription level, The Lady Layman may offer:

• Free blog and newsletter content

• Paid or members-only blog and newsletter content

• Members-only podcast, audio, video, or other digital content

• Access to private community spaces

• Access to The Lady Layman women’s Facebook group for eligible female members

• Access to designated co-ed community spaces for male members and female members.

• Member discussions, Q&As, commentary, or informal personal advice

• Other digital content or membership benefits announced from time to time

Specific membership benefits may change as The Lady Layman grows.

2. Age Requirement

The Lady Layman is intended for people 18 years of age or older.

By purchasing a subscription or accessing members-only areas, you confirm that you are at least 18 years old.

3. Entertainment and Commentary Disclaimer

The Lady Layman produces commentary, opinion, entertainment, cultural analysis, personal discussion, and podcast content.

From time to time, members may ask for personal advice, opinions, reactions, or perspective from The Lady Layman, its hosts, contributors, or community.

Any such advice or discussion is provided for entertainment and general informational purposes only.

The Lady Layman does not represent itself as a provider of professional legal, medical, mental health, financial, therapeutic, relationship counseling, career counseling, or other licensed professional services.

Our expertise is in media, commentary, and podcasting. Opinions offered about life, relationships, culture, work, family, or personal situations are exactly that: opinions.

Nothing published, recorded, posted, discussed, or communicated by The Lady Layman should be treated as a substitute for advice from a qualified professional when professional guidance is appropriate.

You remain responsible for your own decisions, actions, relationships, finances, health, safety, and other personal circumstances.

4. No Guaranteed Outcomes

The Lady Layman does not guarantee that following an opinion, suggestion, strategy, discussion, or piece of commentary will produce any particular outcome.

We also do not guarantee that:

• You will agree with every opinion expressed

• Every piece of content will apply to your circumstances

• Advice or commentary will produce a desired personal result

• Content will remain available indefinitely

• Specific hosts, contributors, topics, features, or membership benefits will remain unchanged

Part of The Lady Layman’s purpose is discussion. Members should expect disagreement, debate, humor, opinion, and evolving viewpoints.

5. Membership and Subscription Access

Paid membership provides access to the benefits described for the applicable membership tier.

Benefits may include members-only articles, podcast content, community access, discussions, bonus content, or other features.

Membership access remains available only while the applicable subscription or membership is active, unless otherwise stated.

Subscriptions may be billed monthly, annually, or according to another billing period displayed at the time of purchase.

6. Community Access

Some members may receive access to private Facebook groups or other community spaces.

The Lady Layman may maintain different community spaces for different audiences. For example, certain spaces may be reserved specifically for women while male members may receive access to designated co-ed community spaces.

Community access is a membership benefit, not an ownership interest or permanent entitlement.

Members agree to follow community rules and behave reasonably toward other members, moderators, hosts, and contributors.

The Lady Layman may remove posts, comments, or members from community spaces when necessary to protect the community or enforce these Terms.

7. Community Conduct

Members agree not to:

• Harass, threaten, bully, stalk, or abuse another person

• Post another person’s private or sensitive information without permission

• Engage in discriminatory or hateful conduct

• Spam, solicit, or advertise without permission

• Impersonate another person

• Deliberately disrupt community discussions

• Use community access for illegal or harmful purposes

• Record, screenshot, reproduce, or publicly distribute private member discussions in a way that violates another person’s reasonable expectation of privacy

• Redistribute paid or members-only content

• Attempt to gain unauthorized access to membership areas

• Use The Lady Layman community to organize harassment of another individual

The Lady Layman reserves the right to moderate its communities and remove access when conduct is abusive, disruptive, unsafe, or inconsistent with the purpose of the community.

8. Personal Information Shared in Community Spaces

Members are responsible for deciding what personal information they choose to share in Facebook groups, comments, live discussions, direct interactions, or other community spaces.

Please use reasonable judgment before sharing sensitive information.

Other members are real people, and The Lady Layman cannot guarantee how another individual will behave outside of spaces controlled by The Lady Layman.

The Lady Layman is not responsible for private interactions or relationships that members independently establish with one another.

9. Paid Content

Paid or members-only content may include:

• Articles

• Newsletters

• Podcast episodes

• Bonus podcast segments

• Audio or video content

• Livestreams

• Member discussions

• Q&As

• Commentary

• Digital downloads

• Community posts

• Other subscriber-exclusive material

Members-only content is licensed to the member for their own personal use.

Purchasing a subscription does not transfer ownership of the content.

10. Cancellations and Renewals

Recurring subscriptions renew according to the billing schedule disclosed by the platform through which the membership was purchased.

Members are responsible for managing cancellations through the applicable platform, such as Substack or another membership provider.

Canceling a subscription generally prevents future renewal charges while allowing access through the remainder of the period already purchased, subject to the applicable platform’s rules.

11. Refunds

Because subscriptions provide immediate access to digital content and/or community benefits, subscription payments are generally non-refundable once access has been granted, except when required by law or required by the policies of the platform processing the subscription.

Any refund approved outside those requirements is at The Lady Layman’s discretion.

12. Third-Party Platforms

The Lady Layman may distribute content or provide membership benefits through third-party platforms such as Substack, Facebook, podcast platforms, social media platforms, payment processors, or other services.

Your use of those services may also be governed by their own terms, privacy policies, billing policies, and community standards.

The Lady Layman does not control the operation of third-party platforms and cannot guarantee uninterrupted availability of those services.

If a third-party platform changes, restricts, removes, or discontinues a feature, The Lady Layman may replace or modify the affected membership benefit when reasonably possible.

13. Intellectual Property

Unless otherwise stated, The Lady Layman owns or controls the rights to its original:

• Articles

• Newsletter posts

• Podcast recordings

• Videos

• Audio clips

• Graphics

• Branding

• Digital downloads

• Members-only posts

• Written commentary

• Other original content

Content is provided for personal use.

Members may not reproduce, sell, republish, upload, distribute, commercially exploit, or publicly share substantial portions of paid or members-only content without permission.

Sharing a normal link to publicly available The Lady Layman content is always welcome.

14. User Submissions and Discussions

Members may submit comments, questions, stories, opinions, or other material through community spaces or interactive content.

By submitting material for publication, discussion, or use on The Lady Layman, you confirm that you have the right to submit it.

If you send something specifically for consideration on the podcast, newsletter, social media, or another public-facing Lady Layman feature, you understand that it may be discussed, quoted, paraphrased, or referenced unless you and The Lady Layman agree otherwise.

Private communications will not automatically be treated as submissions for publication simply because they were sent to The Lady Layman.

15. Opinions Belong to Their Speakers

The Lady Layman features opinion and discussion.

Statements made by individual hosts, guests, contributors, interview subjects, or community members represent their own views unless expressly stated otherwise.

Guests and community members do not speak on behalf of The Lady Layman merely because they appear on or participate in a Lady Layman platform.

16. Limitation of Liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, The Lady Layman is not responsible for decisions or consequences resulting from a person’s reliance on entertainment, commentary, opinions, discussions, community interactions, or other content.

Use of The Lady Layman content and communities is voluntary and at your own discretion.

Nothing in these Terms limits rights that cannot legally be waived under applicable law.

17. Removal or Suspension of Access

The Lady Layman reserves the right to suspend or terminate community access for serious or repeated violations of these Terms or applicable community rules.

Removal from a community for misconduct does not necessarily create a right to a refund for a subscription period already purchased.

18. Changes to Memberships or Terms

The Lady Layman may update its content, membership benefits, prices, platforms, community structure, or these Terms from time to time.

Material changes will be reflected by updating the Last Updated date or otherwise providing notice when appropriate.

Continued use of The Lady Layman after updated Terms become effective constitutes acceptance of the updated Terms.

19. Contact

Questions regarding these Terms may be sent through the official contact information published by The Lady Layman.

Rock on, ancient queen,
Follow those who pale in your shadow.
Rulers make bad lovers—
You better put your kingdom up for sale?
Up for sale…

Well, did she make you cry? Make you break down?
Shatter your illusions of love?
And is it over now? Do you know how?
T’pick up the pieces and go home?

Well, did she make you cry? Make you break down?
Shatter your illusions of love?
And is it over now? Do you know how?
T’pick up the pieces and go home?
Go home!
Go home…

—Gold Dust Woman, Fleetwood Mac

Life was actually easier when I was still a dog chasing the damn car…

I feel like a lot of people spend their entire lives saying “I’ll start again tomorrow,” “Next Week.” “When I finally have (insert thing here) life will be so much better!” and I know why.

Dreaming feels like satisfaction without the risking the collapse of the unknown.

But then, sometimes your shooting in the dark actually hits the target… and you realize oh my god, this thing could actually work out.

That’s the first part. Elation. Ecstasy. Relief. But then comes the panic of:

“oh damn, I actually have no idea what I’m doing.”

And that’s where we find ourselves at the start of this month. But hopefully nowhere close to where we will be leaving it.

Material World: Business + Wealth

This month feels like I’ve been promoted from “woman with a dream” to “woman who actually has to do stuff in the nightmare behind the dream.”

If I look back at last month’s Motivation Journal, it’s actually wild what can happen when you take a leap of faith and just keep plugging away at the damn thing. What started as helping a friend fill out his guest slots turned quickly into an entire Co-Host slot and a complete pending change of lifestyle. And everything that goes with it.

When I was just writing on the The Lady Layman, failure cost me nothing. If I skipped a day, I’d tell myself I’d make it up tomorrow. If I changed directions seventeen times, nobody noticed but me, for the most part. But now, someone is trusting me with a Co-Host slot. Listeners are trusting us with their time. Future sponsors, subscribers, and readers are going to judge me on whether I show up consistently, if I continue to entertain them, gone are the days of A for effort.

And that’s exciting! …and also terrifying.

But I’ve realized I don’t feel incapable because I’m actually incapable, I feel incapable because I’ve never done this before.

The only way then, is through.

Last Month’s Lessons + Wins:

WINS: Signing the Dotted Line and Hitting the Ground Running

For years, this was the dream.

Not necessarily this exact opportunity, but the idea that one day I could independently create for a living and pursue something outside the mundane. It feels strange to finally be here because life after the starting gun was the one thing I actually, didn’t take into account.

Because winning always looked like the end result in my head. But for the record, , my friend, I’m grateful before we even get started. Because three episodes have taught me how mismatched my reality was vs. my expectations.

—and yet in my gut, I know this is going to be a huge thing for you and me.

WINS: Getting a feel for my on-air personality

Starting a few weeks ago, that old stage fright hit me right between the eyes again.

Going into the first few recordings, I was so worried about presenting myself in the “right” way that I could hear my voice shaking in ways it doesn’t shake. I found myself trying to be polished instead of present. Thinking two or three sentences ahead it exhausting. The more reps we’ve gotten in, the more I relax into it. The easier it feels. If you had told me this time last month I’d be planning on doing a radio show on a stage at the House of Blues I would laugh in your face.

Now though, it’s happening.

One thing that’s become obvious almost immediately is that Ryan and I aren’t supposed to sound the same. We approach life differently, we emphasize different details, and we don’t always agree on what the interesting part of a topic is. Instead of feeling like one of us needs to “win” those moments, I’ve realized the contrast is what makes the show entertaining in the first place. If we always came to the exact same conclusions in the exact same way, there wouldn’t be much reason to have two hosts.

LESSONS: I’m not incapable. I’m inexperienced.

The biggest thing these last few weeks have taught me is that I have to STOP mistaking inexperience for incompetence.

Every time I felt myself getting nervous before a recording, or second guessing a joke, or wishing I’d handled a conversation differently, my instinct was to treat it like evidence that maybe I just wasn’t cut out for this, or if I am, I needed to change my approach. But after three episodes, I don’t think that’s true anymore. The conversations are getting easier. The stage fright is fading. My timing is improving. That’s a natural byproduct of repetition.

There’s something incredibly encouraging about realizing the problem isn’t that you’re bad at something. It’s that you haven’t done it enough yet.

LESSONS: Stop trying to build the whole kingdom in a day.

If there was one habit that fought me every step of the way this month, it was my tendency to treat every goal like it had to be accomplished simultaneously.

I’d sit down to write, remember I needed to make a video to go with it, realize I should probably work out before I have to look gross on camera, think about how I failed to post for my social media strategy, start reorganizing my planner, and before I knew it I’d spent more time trying to optimize my day than actually living it.

When progress wasn’t happening as quickly as I’d imagined, I’d immediately start questioning the entire plan instead of recognizing that meaningful things usually grow slower than our excitement does.

But now, it’s easier to think in terms of consistency as making a plan, and following the task list rather than trying to judge the task list for efficacy before it’s even had a chance to prove itself.

This Month’s Goals + Strategies:

GOALS: Build the system before chasing the outcome.

One thing I’ve learned over the last month is that discipline is built with clunky awkward steps that feel like failure until they feel like flow.

So my biggest goal this month isn’t actually to hit some massive subscriber milestone, write ten perfect articles, or somehow become the world’s greatest co-host overnight.

It’s to build a routine I can still see myself living like it’s second nature six months from now. Because if the system works, results eventually catch up.

STRATEGIES: Make tomorrow easier.

Last month, I learned to pay closer attention to why I procrastinate instead of just getting angry at myself for doing it. Sometimes I’m avoiding a task because it’s genuinely difficult. Other times I’ve simply stacked too much onto one day and my brain doesn’t know where to begin. Those are two very different problems, and they need two very different solutions.

So instead of measuring success by whether my list was right or wrong, I’m going to measure it by whether I kept moving.

If something doesn’t get finished today, it isn’t automatically a failure. It becomes tomorrow’s first task.

Inner World: Fitness, Health, Growth

Originally, this was the section that made me want to do the entire journal series. Last month, I did a very earnest piece about my weight struggles. Since then, it’s been easier to continue to change details about how I live my day to day dietary habits because of an even more important part of me: my brain.

Last Month’s Lessons + Wins:

WINS

While I had gained an additional 9lbs after my surgery, and totaling 13lbs from before I got the surgery, I am pleased to announce that I’m back down to pre-surgery weight, and dropping.

I made the choice about two months ago to track everything I ate in a day, no matter how good or bad I thought I was doing, or what choice I had made about today being a day of effort or non effort, and those results told me just exactly how much I had been consuming without realizing it.

Getting a hold of that, and developing the habit of tracking daily helped me to create an inner sense of where I was at every day, even when I wanted to cheat, making the lifestyle sustainable to get where I wanna go.

When I got on the scale at the doctor’s office this past week, I was down to 190 from 197. That’s a ways off from my ideal 140-145 range, but it’s hardly a drop in the bucket.

LESSONS

The biggest lesson for me this past month has been discovering how much my mental health impacts my diet and exercise routines. Dieting and weight lifting definitely HELP the mood, but they don’t resolve the long lasting issues around why I do the things that I do. I’ll outline in the next section what exactly happened to unlock some of these parts of my brain, but here the more important part is documenting that if you’re struggling on a diet, just forcing yourself out through sheer discipline is probably a losing battle.

You may be using food, or even a lack thereof to cope with other issues. Financial stress can lead to overeating and ‘reward’ meals, familial issues, underlying coping mechanisms related to self worth, can all hinder your progress. I’m not necessarily saying to run out and sign up for therapy you can’t afford this second, but you need to take a look at what drives the behaviors in yourself to unlock higher levels of discipline.

This Month’s Goals + Strategies:

GOALS

• Lose 5 pounds before September, maybe more.

I have a live event coming up in September, and I want to have my body in a decent place by then. I won’t yet be where I prefer to be, but I can at least get to a place that I can say, “Damn. Look at me going.”

• Drink only on weekends.

I bought a subscription to The Daily Dose to cover this exact habit I want to curtail. Personally, I like it, a lot. It’s reduced my drinking and gotten me to bed earlier on a regular basis. I’m also going to work on not talking to myself about calling failures ‘violations’ of the rules I set for myself. Talking to yourself like that has adverse reactions in the body, at least it does in mine, and it can cause the same subconscious-triggers that cause the conflict in the first place.

STRATEGIES

Continue to monitor my intake, workout 5 days a week. Cut back sugars and alcohols.

I bought myself an 18 pound weighted vest and going for a run (walk, but if I get my steps in, fight me. Who cares) has helped me immensely. Just day one of wearing it and I can feel my abs working by the simple act of standing around. Gonna be wearing this bad boy more often, because it’s a total body workout just by wearing it.

Other World: Spirituality + Recreation

Here’s the fun stuff, again. :)

This part is the piece that helped me tie everything together. Which is ironic, since it’s always been the idea that confused me the most since I started buying planners and trying to master my life.

Some people pray. But that’s not really my style. My aunt has always been amazing at remote viewing, so I tried my own hand at it. And the results have been amazing.

Last Month’s Lessons + Wins:

LESSONS

Brown Noise is a phenomena described as:

When I tell this next story, this definition is going to make a lot more sense.

I have engaged in plenty of fandom in my life, and things can absolutely border on the parasocial in the online fandom spaces. But as my life moves forward, old comforts are being shed and redefined too. In my minds eye, one familiar face began to poke through as an avatar for these experiences, sort of a guide, really. I don’t think it’s much more than the brain doing what the brain does with misplaced emotions, but in this case it seems to have given them a face to serve as a guide when I go through these ‘visions’ in pursuit of my own healing.

So as we move forward, I encourage you to use whatever face comes to your mind as well. Tell me in the comments whatever it is you might wind up seeing.

My notes, as they were taken directly from my journal:

“This afternoon’s experience was different from most of the others.

This wasn’t really a vision in the traditional sense. There weren’t long cinematic scenes or symbolic landscapes unfolding in front of me. It felt more like a conversation happening somewhere just outside ordinary awareness. Less “watching a movie,” more “being walked through something.”

It began with him holding out his hand. He’s tall. Muscular. He’s wearing a white sport jacket, matching beanie, a dark shirt, and khaki pants. We were sitting in what felt like a white truck, or maybe a white SUV. He was driving, when suddenly he leaned over and flipped out his open palm, silently asking me to take it.

“You trust me, right?” He began with the somewhat smug formations of a grin.

There was the usual light teasing that tends to happen whenever these interactions start, but almost immediately he looked at me and said:

“This one is about you.”

That line ended up becoming the theme of the entire experience.

I took his hand and the scene changed, to somewhere I couldn’t begin to define. We were standing in a void space, lighting was sparse. The colors were a mix of pond-water brown and other muted aquas and light blues, the kind you’d see while staring at the surface from underneath the pond water.

Suddenly, I’m standing in a tea-length, floral, deep blue dress with quarter sleeves, and a simple cream cardigan. Almost housewife-ish. The rich navy blue stood out because later I realized it matched the dark blue bottle of vodka sitting on my nightstand from the night before. I had grabbed it out of frustration, intending to have a protest shot before bed, but I never even poured a shot. I had fallen asleep first. Looking back, that detail suddenly felt connected. More on that later.

He held out his palms and again asked me give him my hands, and so I reached for him too.

As I looked down at my forearms, the very first thing I noticed was all the dead, flaky skin on my arm where last month’s bout of poison ivy had torn them to shreds, but before I could think about anything else his voice interrupted my head.

“Why is that the first thought in your mind?” He cut in, gently but immediately.

That question lingered. I hadn’t realized how instinctively my attention goes toward what’s damaged about me. The next set of dialogue sort of went like this:

Him: “Clear your mind.”
Me: “Ok.”
Him: “You're not listening.”
Me: “I'm trying. I... ok. Is that what this was about?”

Immediately, it struck me how the cacophony in my head had been preventing me from doing something as simple as “clear your mind.” This wasn’t about seeing another vision. He was just trying to show me the constant static running in my own head.

“What do you need right now?” His voice directed the conversation again to something bigger than just this moment.

Then I thought about everything else I usually think I need. Money. Career. A more trustworthy vehicle with less miles. But that wasn’t really the answer under all the noise.

Finally I answered: “Trust.” Trust that things could work out. Trust that I deserved for them to.

Him: “What’s stopping you from trusting?”
Me, joking: “You’re going to say me, aren’t you?”
Him: “Probably. But listen.”

So I did.

Instead of words, everything flooded in at once. Fragments of conversations. Thoughts. Images I’d never consciously seen before. Random voices. Little pieces of memory. It honestly reminded me of an analog horror film where every channel is playing something different at the same time. Then I realized something that genuinely startled me.

That noise... is always there. I just don’t usually hear it.

It’s compressed into the background so completely that I’d stopped recognizing it as noise at all. There are hundreds of little punishing thoughts, fears, reminders of my own failures, assumptions about my lack of success, internal conversations, anxious memories, and unfinished stories all competing for attention every second of every day, and it has kept me running a silent loop under all of my actions day to day, that have kept me in survival mode, for years.

I started to ask another question when he interrupted again.

“What do you want?”

That question had been following me all day. Ironically, I’d spent most of the day asking him to show me what was meant to be seen. But when he asked me... I realized I didn’t actually know.

I knew pieces of it. I don’t want to be hurt. I want to be chosen. I want to feel safe.

But underneath all of those things was a much bigger realization: I didn’t actually trust myself as much as I thought I did.

At that point, he sort of rubbed the back of my hands with his thumbs and looked at me and simply said: “You can’t trust me, or anyone else, if you can’t fully trust yourself.”

And the vision ended there.

The irony here, is that brown noise is actually meant to quiet internal distractions. I think the reason we were submerged in a body of brown pond water, was to facilitate the discovery I didn’t know I needed. This set of negative programming running under me at all times was the main cause of my hardest to kick habits. Since this moment, it’s been much much easier to stay focused, and stay on track.

I don’t necessarily believe that this person in my visions has a 3D connection to me, perhaps something crazy will happen to me, and we will bump into each other at the supermarket, and think to ourselves ‘No way, you’re that total stranger from that fever dream!’ but somehow, I believe this is highly unlikely to happen.

The point is simply, this is a face I already know. I already assign some sense of comfort to it, so if spirit guides are real, it makes sense they would assume his form to help deliver a message I was finally ready to hear.

WINS

The win here is simple, armed with a self concept that isn’t punishing my every move before I make it, it’s a lot easier to make moves.

This Month’s Goals + Strategies:

GOALS

I plan to do a spiritual practice daily to keep me on track. I’ve gotten pretty good at this visualization thing, and even if it’s not real or if it is, it’s gotten me pretty far in a very short amount of time. I document them more and more often. Maybe I’ll put together a journal of them, and we shall see what unfolds together.

STRATEGIES

Whether visions, or tarot, or meditation, prayer, etc. doing one thing a day keeps my own energy aligned, my lessons fresh in the mind, and presents new ideas.

You’re not incompetent, you’re just inexperienced.

If you, like me, are out here hustlin’ every day to alchemize this pot of dirt into a bucket of gold, remember this: you are not “bad” at something you just started, you are simply at the start of your journey. Be malleable, because maybe the path will change, but in the meantime, be kind to yourself, so you can hear the advice when the time comes.

One Pesky Voice Note

Last week on ’s The Monday After podcast, Ryan and I talked about the viral TikTok voice memo guy. (You can listen to us Weekly on Audience One)

@n1v3a @n1v3a ♬ original sound - nivea

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Puke.

Ryan and I regularly disagree, that’s the fun of everything. From his blaming women for the proliferation of porn, to now victimizing the voice note guy, Ryan enjoys being a lil’ bomb thrower.

True to form, the thesis from his latest piece, Voice Memo Guy and the Vocabulary of Never Being Wrong, calls attention away from the aggressor and blames the woman for her reaction to being given a sex ultimatum. Ryan writes:

A sixty-second voice memo did what no op-ed, no dating coach, and no relationship therapist has managed in years; it got half the internet agreeing that honesty is now indistinguishable from assault. This piece walks through what “voice memo guy” actually said, who said what about it, and why a brand-new phrase — “weaponized consent” — is doing exactly what “gaslighting” and “love bombing” did before it.

And it ends somewhere the discourse hasn’t gone yet… a real defamation per se analysis of what happens when you don’t have to say the accusation yourself, because you built a post that guarantees your audience will say it for you.

and later:

[Ashton’s] argument describes bad execution, bad timing, or bad character. None describe a removed ability to say no, because he handed her that ability twice, on a voice memo, unprompted.

There’s a legal question sitting underneath this entire discourse that nobody — not Ashton, not the reaction videos, not the think pieces — has actually asked yet.

*Heavy sighing.* It’s okay, Ryan, my dear friend… to just admit that I’m right. But since you’re asking, I’ll explain in full detail what we didn’t have time for on air.

So what is Coercion, actually?

Ryan mentions coercion, several times in his piece. He even articulates it with much deeper specificity than usual.

Well, Ryan. That’s close. Google had something even more simplified.

In other words, coercion is not merely the removal of another persons consent or choice. That is domination. That is violation. Coercion, by it’s very nature is sneakier than that. More subtle.

—and far more nefarious and evil because it predates real abuse.

In his piece, Ryan quotes Eamonn McKay, a licensed marriage and family therapist who pointed out that that people with abusive tendencies often push for rapid intimacy and rapid relationship intensity — yes, like threatening to ghost her if she doesn’t open her legs for him on his timeline.

Coercion does not require repetition, according to basic levels of common sense. Someone can coerce you in a small interaction into doing something you didn’t want, and the word is still coercion. Here, repetition is being used as a qualifier to excuse shitty behavior on the part of a predatory man who doesn’t respect this woman or her boundaries and is leveraging the carrot-dangling of a relationship over her head so he can treat her body like a sample plate at a deli.

The problem here is that Ryan keeps using the framing of this manipulation as though it was a genuine exit ramp. It was not. The choice was this: “let me inside you on my schedule and my terms or be discarded.” Framing that as some kind of exit ramp is a lie. Plain and simple.

He doesn’t have to remove her ability to refuse with brute force to introduce the negative consequences that punish her for saying “No.” And that is coercion, even by Ryan’s own definition.

And he gets exactly ZERO brownie points for not being a rapist, nor for this manipulative kind of ‘honesty.’

You can be honest about your intention to abuse another person, it doesn’t make your intent suddenly moral just because you announced it first. That’s like saying to a room fully of people that you’re going to kick random puppy and then claiming it’s ok to kick the puppy because you gave a press conference to announce it first.

Ryan actually debunked himself more than once.

Except there absolutely WAS documentation of her refusal. Listen back to the voice memo where he explicitly states:

As in past tense, as in she already said ‘I don’t know’ to having sex with someone who is still a stranger on the second date. She quite CLEARLY told him this request was being made too soon, and she was uncomfortable. So he responded by threatening to not date her anymore unless he could SAMPLE her to investigate if she qualified as ‘compatible.’

There was no exit ramp. She had two shitty choices: screw him on his terms, or be thrown away at his leisure. None of this was about relationships, building connection, or genuine affection. He actually shamed and dismissed the idea of getting to know each other as if it was merely an obligatory formality of the first date. As though not demanding sex on day one is somehow a price he paid of admission and now her body is his reward for ‘good behavior’, otherwise he’s somehow been sinned against. This is kind of dehumanizing duty sex mentality I’ve written about before.

And why is this predatory? A predator, broadly speaking, is looking for compliance rather than mutual enthusiasm. They aren’t necessarily interested in whether the other person genuinely wants the same timeline. They’re interested in whether the person can be persuaded, pressured, or be made to feel afraid enough of losing the opportunity that they’ll go along with it, even if it violates her principles.

Notice the incentives his message creates:

• If you want to continue seeing me, we are going to start having sex.

• If you don’t, I’m leaving.

• This decision must happen on my timeline.

• Your comfort level is not only secondary to my requirements, choosing comfort over my requirements of you is grounds for outright rejection.

That is not stating a choice, that is not stating a boundary, that is not “honest”, and it is not persuasive. That is not a dating standard. Everyone assumes sex is a natural escalation of genuine affection and trust built between two people. If she’s not having sex with you, one of those things is probably missing. (Sometimes the woman is genuinely more interested in the lifestyle, than the man. But that’s a story for another day, and far above our plebian tax bracket, or these two and their tax bracket, So I digress.)

Men… do you really think you have a right to know if a woman is a dead-fish-sex kind of girl or an absolute vixen on the second date? What kind of sexual compatibility are you trying to test drive? What if you get her to agree with something she’s already expressed a desire not to do, and then god forbid, she doesn’t like the way you pull her hair, so you’re now allowed to abandon her and says ‘oops, sorry. I didn’t like how them tiddies felt. Better luck next time,’ like he’s trying some kind of flavor of ice cream?

When you go to the ice cream shop, do lecture the owner about how you’d like free full ice cream cone full of the rocky road just in case things don’t work out with the cookies and cream you just had them scoop out?

Ryan has applied the definition of persuasion to this man, erroneously, because it takes a great deal of mental gymnastics to paint his manipulation failure like genuine communication.

Coercion and the Dating World

Women are not reacting to Voice Memo Guy because they lack appreciation of actual honesty. They are reacting to a pattern we have encountered, watched, warned friends about, and documented for years: men manufacturing consequences around sex and then pretending the woman remained perfectly free because nobody physically restrained her. It’s gaslighting. You don’t have to become a horror scene in a Monica Belluci movie to be a predatory red flag.

It is the man who reaches for the check at dinner with a smile after you offered to pay your half and says ‘I don’t do dutch’ and later whispers, “But I paid for everything,” when you start to say goodnight to the evening… as though the check purchased a voucher redeemable between her legs. It is the boyfriend who sulks, withdraws affection, picks a fight, or sleeps facing the wall until she gives in to letting him use her body for his pleasure. It is the date who keeps asking after she has already said no, changing the question slightly each time until refusal becomes more exhausting than compliance. It is the man who says, “I thought you trusted me,” “I guess you don’t really like me,” or “My ex never made me wait,” carefully turning her sexual boundary into evidence that she is cold, damaged, prudish, manipulative, or unworthy of further affection. Affection that wasn’t really being given in the first place if the condition of the affection was her bodily autonomy.

The mechanism is always the same: introduce a punishment for refusal, then insist the resulting choice was freely made, because the punishment wasn’t physically violent.

That, is weaponized consent.

Sometimes the punishment is anger. Sometimes it is humiliation, the threat of abandonment, the suggestion that another woman will happily provide what she will not. Voice Memo Guy simply compressed that familiar machinery into sixty seconds masquerading as ‘bOuNdARiEs.’ He already knew she was hesitant; he explicitly acknowledged that and instead of respecting her personhood, he treated it as a personal failure. His response was not, “We may want different things.” It was: decide now, on my schedule, whether your body will remain available to me, because I see no value in you beyond what being between your legs could give me. You’re not that great, unless you’re supplying me with the drug of my choice… your body.

That is precisely why women recognized the red flag so quickly. They have seen this sales pitch before, even when the packaging changes. Dinner becomes a debt, not a date. Affection is leverage. Commitment is bait. Rejection is punished, rather than respected. The woman is offered the illusion of choice while being told that one answer will preserve her safety value and the other will get her tossed with the garbage.

So no, Voice Memo Guy is not some hapless new victim of female hysteria and an internet incapable of understanding honesty. Women are warning one another about him because his message reveals an entitlement many women have learned to fear: the belief that a woman’s time, personality, caution, and comfort are merely delays standing between a man and the body he came to collect. The issue is not that he declined a second date. The issue is that he reduced the entire purpose of being in her presence on the conditional basis he got to fill a hole regardless of how she felt about it.

That may sound gross, but I use the language to demonstrate the point of the level of dehumanization being white washed here.

Women do not owe men the benefit of the doubt after a man announces that getting to know them is pointless without a sexual guarantee. Calling that a red flag is not defamation. It is pattern recognition that can save her life.

Take for example, Marla Hanson, a striking model who had the audacity in 1986 to refuse the advances of her landlord. That man turned around and hired two other men to punish her by ambushing her in the street and taking razors to her face to hospitalize her, and destroy her career and freedoms. But sure, she had a choice to not be brutalized, she could always just do what he wanted.

Weaponized Consent and The Voice Note that Immortalized It

Now that we’ve ironed out that pesky problem of words and their meanings, lets talk a bit about practical application. Ryan, you’re an attorney, you’ll understand this bit. 😉

It’s that, but Ryan is missing a step: it’s also the manipulation of creating plausible deniability through ‘compatibility’ to escape responsibility for his coercion. There is not actually a real concern or a standard on the man’s part: It’s the lie he used to mischaracterize his intent to manipulate her into lowering her standards for his benefit.

The same way a man pretends to not understand how the washing machine works, this man pretends to care about ‘sexual compatibility’ and then leverages never seeing her again as a method of extracting what he wants: inside her, whether she is comfortable with the idea or not.

And while yes, it was in the memo, when he mentioned that she’d already let him know this made her uncomfortable. But even if she didn’t, it doesn’t change anything about this. Because even if she didn’t already tell him she wasn’t comfortable with screwing him yet, he was lying. If you aren’t willing to invest in GOING on a second date to see if you’re emotionally or mentally compatible, what is the value in using her body to EXPERIMENT to find out IF you are ‘sexually compatible.’ It’s just a pathetic failure of a fuck-boy moving the goalposts to extract that from a woman which he also thinks is all the value she holds.

And when he’s done using her like a sampler plate, he’ll claim that there’s just not enough ‘compatibility’ and leave anyway, taking a part of her with him.

And somehow men will make that her fault.

Men love to send these mixed signals. We can’t lead in positions of power because, we’re too emotional. But also the hormones raging in male bodies make them wholly incapable of not trying to screw everything with a pulse. The world is falling apart because feminists have sex, or make a living on OF, but the male producers and engineers who built the porn companies and websites are just ‘boys being boys’.

Because a woman is damned if she consents, and dead if she doesn’t.

Boys will be Boys, after all.

I know that the accusation from predatory men like the TikTok Voice Memo Guy will be in my comments blaming women for saying yes and saying no to sex, and the accusation will be that I hate men. But actually, Ryan and I are good friends. We’ll be debating this and laughing at it this weekend on our podcast, and there is something inherently comforting about the companionship of a good man.

A good man won’t be offended by the words spoken here today. He’d be offended how common these experiences are.

The Lady Layman is a female focused publication that examines current events, pop culture, and life lessons through the lens of their impact on women. You can also listen to our weekly podcast that tackles women’s issues in a fun, conversational space.
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Imagine this—

You’ve been engaged for a year, to the love of your life. You’re perusing Pinterest daily to decide if those pins you saved for a rainy day actually measure up to the reality of the wedding you’ll be having, or if they were mostly the pining’s of a younger woman who couldn’t quite envision the reality now before her.

You've spent the better part of your twenties building your career. He's been building his construction business, and you’ve agreed that once the kids arrive, it would benefit the family to transition you into the home, because his career is more than enough to support all of you.

You take another sip of your wine as your phone pings, it’s him. He wants to talk.

He's spent the better part of his twenties building a construction company from the ground up. Between the business, the trucks, the equipment, the house he bought before you met, and a retirement account he's been faithfully contributing to for years, he's finally reached a point where he has something worth protecting.

This is the man you love. He makes you feel safe. He pushes you without scolding you. You laugh together, he’s there when you’re down. This is both your partner, and your best friend. Of course you respect the hard work he’s put in, and everything he’s been building for that business long before he met you, and throughout this courtship process. You review the prenup with an attorney. Seems reasonable, and standard.

If things go south, you both return to exactly what you had the day that you got married. That’s fair, so you sign it.

A few years in, your first child arrives.

You and your husband had talked about this for years. The plan made sense then, and it still makes sense now. The business has continued to grow, and both agreed —you wanted this. You wanted to be there for the first words, the first steps, the first day of school.

But the adjustment is harder than you expected.

Postpartum is slowly wrecking you. You’re exhausted. The house never really stays clean. Every time you finish one task, another one replaces it. You’re running on interrupted sleep (and because you don’t work, you’re always the one to get up in the middle of the night), cold coffee, and whatever snacks your toddler doesn’t finish.

Then comes baby number two.

Now your days belong almost entirely to someone else.

You could get up earlier, do your hair, put on a little makeup, and feel like yourself again. Or... you could sleep another forty-five minutes before spending the next twelve hours meeting everyone else's needs.

When you finally make it into the shower, you catch your reflection for a moment. The stretch marks don’t bother you nearly as much as the exhaustion does. Your stomach isn’t as flat as it used to be. Your breasts aren’t where they used to be. There are dark circles under your eyes that no concealer seems capable of hiding anymore. Your body doesn’t feel like it belongs to you these days. It feels like it belongs to the children who need it, the husband who depends on it, and the endless list of responsibilities waiting outside the bathroom door.

By the time you get out, someone’s already calling your name.

From the moment the kids are awake, you're on. Breakfast. Diapers. Spilled milk. Tantrums over the wrong cup. Trying to get one child down for a nap while the other decides now is the perfect time to scream. Folding laundry with one hand because the other is holding a toddler who refuses to be put down. You realize sometime around three in the afternoon that you never actually ate lunch, and the coffee you poured that morning is still sitting on the counter, cold.

It never really stops. The irony is that the better you get at managing all of it, the less anyone notices you’re doing it.

When your husband gets home, he doesn’t see everything that happened while he was gone.

He sees toys on the floor. He sees dishes in the sink. He sees that dinner isn’t quite ready yet.

Sometimes he reminds you that staying home isn’t exactly roofing houses in July. You’re not pouring concrete. You’re not hanging drywall. You’re not carrying lumber up three flights of stairs.

“It’s just housework,” he’ll say. “People have been raising kids forever.” You don’t think he’s trying to be cruel, you know he genuinely believes it.

Over time, you stop trying to explain what your days actually look like. Not because you don’t want him to understand, but every conversation seems to end the same way. He’s exhausted from work. You’re exhausted from home. He doesn’t believe that you have any reason to be exhausted the way he is. Neither of you feels seen by the other, and neither of you has enough left in the tank to bridge the gap.

You miss him. He misses you too, though maybe not in the same way.

One Friday, you decide you’re going to make an effort.

You put the kids down for their naps early. You straighten up the house as best you can. You shower. You curl your hair. You put on the dress he always complimented you in before the babies came along. It’s the first time in months you’ve bothered with mascara.

You even catch yourself feeling a little excited. Maybe tonight the two of you will finally have a chance to reconnect.

When his truck pulls into the driveway, you hear the garage door open and wait for the familiar smile you’ve been missing.

It never comes. In fact, he barely looks at you. Dinner is quiet. The kids go to bed.

Then he asks if the two of you can sit down for a minute. Your stomach sinks before he says a word.

He tells you he doesn’t think the marriage is working anymore. That somewhere along the way, the two of you stopped connecting. He says he still cares about you, but he doesn’t feel the same way he used to.

Then he tells you there’s someone else.

His assistant.

She’s intelligent. She’s driven. She understands the business. She challenges him. She dresses well. She has ambition. She makes him feel appreciated. They laugh together the way the two of you used to. He didn’t plan for it to happen, but somewhere between late nights at the office and years of feeling disconnected at home, he developed feelings for her.

You sit there trying to process what he’s saying. You think about the last several years. The nights you stayed up with sick kids so he could sleep before work. The weekends he spent growing the business while you kept the house running.

The opportunities he was able to chase because someone else was making sure there were clean clothes, groceries in the pantry, doctor’s appointments scheduled, and two happy, healthy children waiting for him when he got home.

You weren’t absent from his success.

You were one of the reasons it was possible.

A few weeks later, you’re sitting across from your own attorney. The prenup is sitting on the table between you. Just like you agreed years ago, he keeps the business.

He keeps the trucks. He keeps the equipment. He keeps the retirement accounts he continued contributing to throughout the marriage. The agreement does exactly what it was designed to do; It returns both of you to where you were before you got married.

Except... you can’t go back to where you were.

The condo you owned before the marriage was sold years ago. The career you spent your twenties building doesn’t pick up where you left it. Your résumé has a gap measured in years. The software has changed. The industry has changed. Your professional network has moved on.

Even when you think about starting over with someone new —your body isn’t the same. Your confidence isn’t the same. Your earning potential isn’t the same.

You kept your promise to build a family.

He kept the assets he before the marriage.

But no one protected the value of everything you gave up to make that marriage possible.

Now, if you’re reading this thinking, “That would never actually happen,” it already has.

In fact, the Wall Street Journal recently highlighted a growing trend among family law attorneys: drafting prenup provisions specifically designed to protect spouses who leave the workforce, relocate for a partner’s career, or become the family’s primary caregiver.

There’s a reason those clauses are becoming more common.

What Is a Prenup, Really?

Traditionally, prenups have been very good at protecting things you can point to.

A business with a valuation. A house with a deed. A retirement account with monthly statements. Investment portfolios. Savings accounts. Family land. Debt. Assets with titles, paperwork, receipts, and a paper trail that makes it relatively easy to identify what belonged to whom before the marriage ever began.

That’s why they’re especially common among business owners, entrepreneurs, physicians, attorneys, and anyone entering a marriage with substantial assets they’ve spent years building. There’s nothing inherently unreasonable about wanting to protect what you created before someone else entered the picture.

The problem is that most people don’t experience the conversation that clinically.

For many women, the conversation doesn’t start with contract law, it starts with the man she loves sitting across from her asking her to sign a document that, at first glance, appears to say two things:

“If I ever decide to leave this marriage, I want to make sure you don’t get anything.”

And...

“I know I just asked you to spend your life with me, but I actually don’t trust you the way I said I did.”

Whether that’s what he means or not is almost beside the point. That’s often what the request feels like.

After all, most women aren’t walking into a marriage wondering what they can take from a man if things go wrong. They’re planning a wedding. Picking out baby names. Talking about where they’ll raise a family. They’re building a future with someone they believe they’ll grow old with.

So it’s understandable why a prenup can feel less like a pragmatic discussion and more like a referendum on her character.

The irony is that, from the man’s perspective, he’s often having an entirely different conversation.

He’s thinking about the business he spent ten years building before he ever met her. The house he saved for. The retirement account he’s faithfully contributed to since his first job. The debt he doesn’t want to find himself in if someone could just up and take half.

He’s looking at documented assets. Things with deeds, titles, account statements, valuations, and paper trails.

From that perspective, asking for a prenup isn’t inherently unreasonable. He is wanting to make sure the marriage doesn’t unintentionally transfer ownership of property that existed long before the relationship did.

He’s thinking about what already exists.

She’s thinking about what she’s about to build.

And that’s where traditional prenups begin to show their limitations.

They’re excellent at assigning ownership to assets with a paper trail.

They’re much less equipped to value the years, sacrifices, opportunity costs, and invisible labor that often become some of the most significant investments made during the marriage.

at its core, a prenup is simply a negotiated legal agreement. It isn’t his contract. It isn’t something one person hands the other to either accept or reject without question. It’s a document both parties have the right to negotiate with independent legal counsel until it reflects an agreement they’re both willing to sign.

The problem isn’t the existence of prenups.

The problem is that most prenup conversations stop at the assets you can document.

Much less time is spent asking what happens to the things that don’t generate monthly statements. The career put on hold. The years spent outside the workforce. The retirement contributions that were never made. The opportunity costs of becoming the person who makes it possible for someone else to keep building.

And that’s where the conversation starts to change.

Understanding Your Value

This is where women need to stop thinking about a prenup as a document that only protects what already exists and start thinking about what their own position in the marriage is worth over time.

In our hypothetical, the wife did not simply stop earning a paycheck. She reorganized her entire life around the family they agreed to build. She left a career she had already invested years into, stopped contributing to her own retirement, because she was building a joint one with her husband, gave up future raises and promotions, and accepted that every year she spent outside the workforce would make it harder to return at the same level later. Maybe she delayed graduate school. Maybe she relocated for his business. Maybe she sold property she owned before the marriage because they were combining households, proceeds from a sale that went into a joint bank account. Maybe she became the default parent because his schedule was treated as the one that could not be interrupted.

Those decisions need to be considered both qualitatively and quantitatively.

Qualitatively, she gave up time, independence, professional identity, physical energy, and the ability to build a different life on the same timeline. Pregnancy and childbirth changed her body. Raising children consumed years of her life during which her husband continued advancing professionally. Her fertility was spent building their family, not some future family she might have had if the marriage failed and she had to begin again later. Her reputation, social life, schedule, and sense of self were all reshaped around the role she agreed to fill inside the marriage.

Quantitatively, the losses are easier to identify than people pretend. There are wages she did not earn, retirement contributions she did not make, employer matches she never received, promotions she is no longer positioned to compete for, and years of experience missing from her résumé. There is also the cost of reentering a workforce that changed while she was gone. Certifications expire. Technology changes. Professional networks weaken. Former colleagues move into leadership roles while she returns as the applicant explaining why she has not worked in seven years. Her resume gap makes her employment a bigger liability, and often this reality is scoffed at or glossed over by the very men who said they were going to respect these sacrifices by gaslighting her about how evil a parent she must be to resent her children in this way.

At the same time, her unpaid labor was helping create the material wealth the prenup was designed to protect.

Her husband was able to concentrate on the business because she was handling the rest of his life. He did not have to leave a meeting because daycare called. He did not have to cancel work when one of the children was sick. He did not have to schedule pediatrician appointments, buy groceries, keep track of school enrollment, meet the plumber, wash everyone’s clothes, plan meals, shop for those meals, cook those meals, coordinate holidays, or remember that the dog needed to go to the vet. He was not absolved of those responsibilities because they disappeared. He was absolved because his wife absorbed them for him and then was called an ungrateful nag for asking for help managing them together.

That gave him something extraordinarily valuable: uninterrupted time.

He was able to work all day, then clock out and come home to choose that which he did, and did not wish to participate in.

She was never clocking out.

He could take another client, stay late, travel, network, expand ‘his’ business, and continue increasing his earning potential because someone else was managing the domestic half of his life. He got to clock out from work and return to a household that was high functioning. She moved from childcare to dinner, from dinner to baths, from baths to laundry, and then woke up during the night if one of the children needed her. His workday had an end. Hers did not.

But because hers does not come with a paycheck, hers cannot be tracked and quantified.

If the family had outsourced everything she was doing, those services would have cost money. Childcare costs money. Housekeeping costs money. Meal preparation costs money. Transportation, scheduling, household management, and administrative assistance all cost money. The fact that a wife performs those jobs without issuing an invoice does not make the labor worthless. It means the family receives the value without paying the market price.

This is why the claim that a woman is a gold digger for expecting financial protection after years of unpaid labor is so dishonest. She is not asking for a reward because the marriage ended. She is asking not to absorb every financial consequence of an arrangement that helped her husband build more wealth than he could have built while independently managing every other part of his life.

And women do need to consider the possibility that he may leave.

Men leave marriages. They leave for other women. They leave after years of benefiting from a wife’s unpaid labor. They leave when a wife becomes seriously ill (and they do this in higher numbers than women). They sometimes leave the home and force the woman who remains to file the paperwork, then point to the statistic that women “initiate most divorces” as though filing the case proves she was the person who left a good marriage. Divorce attorneys have repeatedly pointed out that the person who legally files is not always the person who abandoned the relationship, the home, or the family.

That does not mean every man will leave—

or that women should enter marriage assuming betrayal. It means that a prenup is formulated to become the executable contract for the expectations of the marriage from both parties perspectives. Once these assets are all on the table, her losses deserve the same serious calculation as his assets.

Before signing anything, she needs to ask what she will be giving up, what her labor will make possible, how those choices will affect her future earning capacity, and what protection she will need if the person benefiting from those sacrifices eventually decides he no longer wants the marriage.

Her investment is real, even when it never appears on a paycheck, regardless of if it predates the marriage.

Protecting Your Investment

A few years ago, a friend of mine, let’s call her Amy, was marrying a man we will call Chad. Amy wasn’t keen on the idea of marriage, but Chad was, so after five years of dating, Amy had continued to run her own very successful consulting firm, and Chad had his steel business, that outpaced Amy’s about 3 to 1. Amy was living larger as Chad’s paramour, but by no means required him to live a lifestyle she enjoyed.

Upon marriage, Chad naturally presented Amy with a prenup that told her she got nothing in the event of a divorce, unless she could prove her contributions monetarily to the dividable assets. Amy set her own negotiation, she’d relinquish all rights to anything he owned regardless on one condition—

If he cheated on her, the divorce would proceed as though no agreement even existed, and all assets would be divided 50/50, as a traditional divorce.

Chad agreed. You can imagine now why he’s spent the better parts of the last three years calling her a gold digging whore when he violated the one tenant of the marriage he begged her for.

Even so, by now I hope we’ve moved past the idea that a prenup is simply a document rich people use to protect yachts and investment portfolios.

If you’ve decided that your marriage is going to involve sacrifices that permanently change one spouse’s earning potential, then those sacrifices deserve to be part of the expectation negotiation. This isn’t his contract. It’s your contract too.

Maybe that means negotiating compensation for a limited time after a divorce, if one spouse leaves the workforce for ten years to raise the children. Maybe it means recognizing that if his business triples in value during the marriage because someone else was running every other aspect of his life, she should be compensated for some of that appreciation. Maybe it means protecting your own inheritance the same way he’s protecting his, beyond the standard statutes of the state, or making sure assets you bring into the marriage remain yours as well.

For some couples, it may mean including a cheating clause, like Amy’s (though hers was a little aggressive, I will admit). If one spouse chooses to violate the marriage vows, should there be financial consequences? That’s a conversation worth having before emotions are involved, not after someone has already packed a suitcase. The same goes for abandonment. If one spouse walks out of the marriage, disappears from the family, or leaves the other person to shoulder the responsibilities they both agreed to share, shouldn’t the agreement reflect that?

You may decide to include sunset clauses that expire after twenty years of marriage. You may decide to coordinate the prenup with your estate plan so your spouse is protected if something happens to you. You may negotiate exactly how future inheritances, businesses, or investment accounts will be handled.

Too many women walk into these meetings assuming the attorney is there to explain the document. No. The attorney is there to help write the document. Those are two very different jobs. If there is something about your future that concerns you, bring it up. If you’re planning to stay home with children, bring it up. If you’re relocating across the country for his career, bring it up. If you’re worried about spending fifteen years helping him build a business only to find yourself starting over at forty-five, bring it up. If you don’t ask the question while everyone is calm and in love, don’t be surprised when the contract doesn’t answer it later.

Red Flag, Green Flag

When I write these articles, I notice that the men who are green flags never seem to take issue with them. They seem to understand, that such warnings don’t apply to a man who loves his wife and doesn’t feed resentments for imagined slights. (Real slights are another story.) But oddly enough, I don’t think the most valuable thing that comes out of this process is necessarily the document.

It’s his reaction to it.

A man who genuinely wants to build a life with you doesn’t have to love with every clause your attorney suggests. He may think a proposal is unfair, and thus he may counter with something different. He may ask questions, negotiate, and want his own attorney to review it. That’s exactly what should happen. A negotiation isn’t a fight. It’s two people trying to define fairness before life gets complicated.

What would concern me is a man who believes only his sacrifices deserve protection.

The man who expects you to leave your career, raise his children, relocate for his opportunities, and absorb every professional setback that comes with those choices, but gets angry the moment you ask how you’ll be protected if the marriage ends. The man who says, “If you loved me, you wouldn’t ask for that,” while simultaneously asking you to sign a legal agreement because he wants protection.

Pay attention to that.

The clauses matter, they are your protection against a person who says one thing, and then does another when he tires of you.

His willingness to acknowledge the value of what you’re contributing to this marriage matters even more.

Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman,
Giving all your love to just one man.
You’ll have bad times, and he’ll have good times
Doin’ things that you don’t understand.

But if you love him, you’ll forgive him
Even though he’s hard to understand.
And if you love him, oh be proud of him—
‘Cause after all he’s just a man.

—Stand by Your Man, Tammy Wynette

Substack spends a fair amount of time sending me to the “trad wife” corner of the internet.

The motherhood blogs wrapped in poetry aesthetics. The beautiful family photos. The essays about baking bread, homeschooling children, and the quiet joy of building a home. Much of it, honestly, is lovely. I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with women choosing those lives, and I certainly don’t think feminism has all the answers.

But every so often, tucked between the recipes and Scripture quotes, comes an idea that makes my skin crawl.

“A man should lead, and a woman should follow.”

At first glance, it sounds perfectly reasonable. After all, lead and follow are paired words, right? They seem like equal and opposite halves of the same equation.

The problem is that they aren’t.

Not in a marriage, not in a healthy partnership, and certainly not in the way most women actually experience relationships.

Here’s the irony: most women I know aren’t looking to overthrow male leadership. We like competent men. We admire men who take initiative, shoulder responsibility, protect their families, and create stability. In fact, many of us actively want that.

What we don’t want is to be conceptualized as followers. Because supporting and following are not the same actions.

One preserves our dignity while the other quietly asks us to diminish it as a staple of the relationship.

The difference sounds semantic until you realize that language doesn’t merely describe relationships, it teaches us how to think about them on the whole.

Why “I want a woman to follow” is a Red Flag

When women hear “follow,” we don’t hear, “I’d love a wife who believes in me.” We hear, “I would like your role in this relationship to be measured by how much of your own judgment you’re willing to set aside in favor of mine.”

Those aren’t the same thing. That’s why this conversation becomes so frustrating. Men often think women are rejecting their leadership and being contradictory, while women feel like they’re being asked to surrender part of themselves for his comfort. Both sides leave convinced the other has completely missed the point.

“But wives are commanded to submit.”

If you’re thinking from a Christian perspective: even Christian ‘submission’ isn’t the same thing as passivity. Biblical marriage also commands husbands to sacrificially love their wives. The relationship is reciprocal, not one-sided. Many complementarian theologians distinguish submission from silence or intellectual passivity.

“You’re just changing words.”

Words matter because they become expectations. A follower is someone defined primarily by who they follow. A supporter is someone defined by what they contribute. One implies blind deference; the other implies active investment. If we're trying to describe a healthy marriage where both people are sacrificing, building, and contributing, support is the action that is granted more common decency from the person they are supporting.

“Women already want to lead everything.”

Some do. This article isn’t defending domination by women. It’s defending partnership. You can reject domination from either sex.

“If she doesn’t follow, who’s in charge?”

The absence of a following doesn’t remove leadership.

If your first response to “I’d rather support than follow” is “Then who’s in charge?”, you’ve misunderstood the roles entirely. A supporter is not asking to become the leader. They are asking to remain a full participant in the success of the leader.

If you hear “support” and immediately think “loss of authority,” what you’re really looking for isn’t partnership. You’re looking for obedience.

Here’s the irony—

Most women who want masculine men don’t actually want to lead the relationship. We like men who are decisive. We like men who take initiative. We like feeling like the man we’re with can shoulder responsibility when life gets ugly. There’s something incredibly attractive about a man who calmly says, “I’ve got this,” and then proves he does.

But that attraction doesn’t magically erase our own agency.

If I marry a man, I don’t suddenly stop having judgment. I don’t stop seeing problems before he does. I don’t stop noticing when the budget needs attention, when one of our kids is struggling, or when he’s making a decision that I think is driven more by pride than wisdom. A healthy marriage doesn’t require me to become intellectually obedient. If anything, it requires me to become even more engaged, because now another person’s well-being is tied to my own.

Why Supporting is better than “Following”

Control says, “I make the decisions.”

Partnership says, “I dunno, baby, what do you think?”

A genuinely capable leader shouldn’t need the people around him to be conceptually smaller in order to remain the leader. In fact, it should be the opposite.

The best leaders surround themselves with highly competent people whose judgment they rely on.

John and Julie Gottman have decades of research showing that healthy marriages involve mutual respect, influence, and responsiveness rather than unilateral authority. One of their notable findings is that husbands who accept influence from their wives tend to have more stable marriages.

Notice: Accept influence. Not surrender leadership. Influence.

A platoon leader doesn’t succeed because everyone becomes intellectually passive. He succeeds because every competent soldier exercises initiative inside the mission. Modern militaries actually encourage disciplined initiative. That isn’t “follow because I said so.” It’s Understand the mission. Use your judgment. Support the objective.

Support is an active role. It requires observation, initiative, sacrifice, competence, and independent judgment. A happy wife in love isn’t waiting around for instructions like she’s the intern in her husband’s company. She’s constantly evaluating what the family needs and finding ways to strengthen it.

If my husband makes more money that require longer hours at work so I handle dinner and the kids because I know we require those hours to be covered for us, I didn’t follow him, I didn’t ‘do my wifely duties.’ I led. I identified a need and solved it for us both, because I care about all of us.

If I notice that he’s becoming overwhelmed and gently tell him he’s taking on too much, I’m not undermining his leadership. I’m protecting it.

If I handle the family calendar, organize the finances, keep our social relationships healthy, encourage him when he’s discouraged, challenge him when I think he’s making a mistake, or step in to carry more of the load when life knocks him flat, none of those things are acts of followership that should just be expected of me because I’m the wife.

They’re acts of love that naturally unfold from a partner who feels respected and dignified by her partner.

Ironically, they’re exactly the qualities most traditional men say they want in a wife. They want a woman who’s dependable, nurturing, wise, loyal, hardworking, and capable. Those aren’t passive qualities. They’re leadership qualities expressed differently than a man’s often are.

That’s why I think so many women bristle at the word follow. It takes everything they’re actively bringing to the relationship and reframes it as obedience and expectation, or as ‘not that hard’ because it’s not working in the sun as a hot-tar roofer, but it’s no less effort.

The Benefits of Thinking in Terms of Support

This shift in this thinking solves and supports problems that all couples eventually run into.

Life doesn’t respect neat relationship roles. People get laid off. Businesses fail. Someone gets cancer. Babies are born with medical complications. Parents need long-term care. Depression shows up uninvited. Sometimes the husband is the one carrying the family. Sometimes the wife is.

If you’ve spent years thinking of one spouse as the leader and the other as the supporter, it’s much easier for those responsibilities to ebb and flow without anyone feeling like overlooked. Support doesn’t disappear just because the husband needs help for a season. Leadership doesn’t disappear just because the wife temporarily carries more weight.

That’s what partners do.

They compensate for each other’s weaknesses instead of protecting titles and gender-based task lists disguised as labor division (that usually operate on different recurrent frequencies, too.)

Ultimately, I think that’s what most women are asking for.

We’re not asking men to become less masculine, we’re not asking to overthrow male leadership.

We’re asking for acknowledgment that recognizes we’re building the same life together. Ask me to support the man I love, and I’ll happily give everything I have to the mission we’re creating. Ask me to follow him, because that’s my role, and you’ve unintentionally reduced my role from indispensable partner to NPC supporting cast.

Those are two very different marriages, even if they look similar from the outside.

Basically, THINK of her as equal but different, and she’ll listen to you.

I don’t think most women want to reject healthy, masculine, leadership. I think they’re rejecting a mentality that even accidentally strips dignity away from the role they’re asked to play.

Ask me to become the other half of something bigger than either of us could create alone, and I suspect most women would say yes without hesitation. But don’t ask me to follow simply because you want to enjoy the title of leader.

The strongest marriages aren’t built by one person becoming smaller so the other can feel bigger.

They’re built by two people becoming so competent, so dependable, and so committed to one another that each makes the other stronger.

That’s what most women are asking for. Not less responsibility, not more control.

Just the dignity of being seen as a full partner in the life we’re building together.

Just a child of a ruthless man, let the truth be told.
Everyone’s got their cross to bear, and carry that weight alone.
So what would you give? What would you take? All your dyin’ day?
Between the lies and the memories, the shards will fade away.

I say a prayer for my mother, I cry a tear for my father…
Ain’t nothin’ gonna save me—
There’s blood in the water.

I pray for forgiveness; let the lord be my witness.
Ain’t nothin’ gonna save me—
There’s blood in the water.

—Blood in the Water, Ayron Jones

I am not writing this article to defend Karmelo Anthony’s stabbing of Austin Metcalf.

Karmelo’s choice rewrote the story of two lives that now end in irreversible tragedy after the morning of April 2nd, 2025. That story has been told from both sides, again and again and again. In horrific detail.

If you’re offended by the title, please read to the end. I do not write this to make a case of self defense, or to make light of the grief of the family whose son was stolen from them forever. Those are consequences of a much deeper, more evil rot.

I write this article to outline the system used by every single blood sucking vampire that came into contact with Karmelo Anthony before and after his crime, who summarily abandoned him the moment they were done bleeding him dry for personal profit and who created this incentivized machine of despair and destruction that ensures there will be more of this until someone stops footing that bill.

Everything that is left of this case is predatory, artificial, and self serving.

And at the center of it are two lives that ended the day Karmelo turned an ordinary track meet into a nightmare of his own making. For Austin, for the Metcalf family, and for himself, too.

A Rainy Texas Mourning: Who Were Austin Metcalf and Karmelo Anthony?

Austin Matthew Metcalf was a 17-year-old junior at Memorial High School in Frisco, Texas. Voted MVP of his football team, Austin was a linebacker and known for his prowess on the football field. Austin was known as a kind, genuine, and reliable kid, with an infectious laugh and gentle spirit. He was a “leader on and off the field” by all accounts of those who loved him. He loved the outdoors, especially fishing trips with his dad and brother, Hunter, his identical twin brother, to whom he was practically attached at the hip. Austin had a girlfriend, and was known for being an exceptionally strong student. He was being scouted by multiple colleges for his talents on the football field before his death in April of 2025.

Karmelo Anthony was the eldest of four children born to Drew Anthony and Kala Hayes from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Karmelo’s family moved to the North Texas area around 2021 seeking better economic opportunities. Karmelo was a strong student on track to graduate shortly after April of 2025. Captain of both the Centennial High School football and track-and-field teams, he also held two part-time jobs—one at Foot Locker for about two years and at an H-E-B supermarket. His family reported that he was the kind of kid who looked out for his younger siblings and helped with their schoolwork. According to many accounts, Karmelo was known as a responsible, family-oriented kid, and not someone seeking trouble.

The profiles of both boys in this case have an almost eerie similarity. Leaders, well liked by their peers. Giving. Protective, according to their families and peers. As he’s being arrested Karmelo can be heard on camera with a consistent set of ‘yes sir, no sir, yes ma’am, no ma’am’ and an almost lack of comprehension of the severity of his actions and what they are about to cost everyone. He asks if Austin is okay, and expresses certainty that Austin’s ‘not gonna die’ from his injuries.

So many contradictions surrounding such a heavy mistake... so how the hell did we get here?

Note: I want to focus primarily on the mentality surrounding these kids in this article, not the public perceptions of what should have been or not been. We will approach that by the end, but to begin with, I want to focus on motivations that lead to Austin’s death.

Karmelo’s Prior Assault & Parental Lack of Character

Some accounts question the validity of his presence at the track meet that day due to an earlier disciplinary issue in February of 2025, but due to media black outs refusing to provide a more detailed account than the ones described by locals, it is difficult to confirm the truth. Below is the most detailed account of the prior assault but verifying this has been difficult.

But this account does seem to be supported by additional sources in law enforcement and independent journalism.

Drew Anthony himself accounted for the ‘previous incident’ by telling the judge that Frisco ISD handled this internally, meaning that no criminal charges were brought against Karmelo. A very strange caveat to indicate to a judge for a son with upstanding moral character.

Drew testified to the court that he made $72,000 annually. Drew and Kala have 4 children, and only Drew’s income. Unless Kala is receiving some form of assistance from the government, I have to assume Karmelo’s two jobs were contributing to his parents bills. It is my understanding that the siblings are all of the age to be in some kind of public schooling, so I cannot fathom why Karmelo’s financial burdens began at 15 while his mothers seem to not exist, especially after his arrest.

Drew has a criminal history and overall seems to suffer from a wild lack of judgement. He has a criminal history of theft, and likely lied to the state of Texas about his drivers license. This kind of example within the home would contribute to the kind of judgement calls his son would make in tense situations.

It’s not hard to believe that a kid raised by a father who feels the kind of entitlement to steal and to blame a 6 year old for her own sexual assault, would fail in his obligation to teach restraint to his son. I hold Karmelo accountable for his decisions on the day of the stabbing. But I blame the parents for creating the kind of mentality that could make these decisions in the first place, more than I blame the 17 year old child who learned this kind of disregard for others from the parents who would profit from everyone’s pain.

Timeline of the Austin Metcalf Stabbing

There is some dispute about Karmelo’s qualifications or lack thereof in the track meet. Some accounts determined that he didn’t qualify for the district track events, some claim he was participating later that day. There is good evidence that he did not qualify for the track meet. However, it is common for kids who aren’t competing to attend a track meet, even if they have no events for themselves that day.

The morning was misty. A storm was looming, but not yet present. Karmelo and some classmates had been hanging out in one of the baseball dugouts, but were told to vacate the dugout and warm up on the field. There was no tent for the kids from Centennial, as it was supposed to be en route on an additional bus later in the day. But instead of heading to the track as instructed, Karmelo headed to the bleachers.

Now, it’s important to note that there is a direct contradiction between what the rules are, and what tends to happen at these meets. The rules state that the tents are not to be shared, but the humans who run the events say its common to co-mingle, and such things are typically permitted. And in their defense, the idea that anyone could be in mortal danger at a track meet are typically zero.

According to multiple witnesses, Karmelo entered the tent to sit with Eddie Parra, an acquaintance he knew from around town, allegedly from Karmelo dating his cousin. The other witnesses allege that at this time, Karmelo engaged in some shit-talk about Memorial High School’s football team. The Memorial High School students, save for Eddie, were already discussing Karmelo’s presence among themselves and expressing a general distaste for him within their tent. The shit-talk seemed to be where Austin, true to form, decided to stand up and handle the situation himself.

From here, here’s what we knew of the reconstructed dialogue:

• Karmelo began smack talk about the team whose tent he was currently sitting in.

• Austin stood up to pressure Karmelo to leave.

• Karmelo said that Austin would have to ‘make me’ leave, if Austin wanted him out.

• Karmelo then threatened Austin by saying ‘Touch me and see what happens’ while hinting that he may have had some kind of weapon in his backpack.

• Austin at some point told him ‘I’m not gonna fight you at a track meet.’

• Austin shoved Karmelo at some point, the witnesses all allege the shove was not serious.

• Karmelo pulled his knife, and plunged it deep into Austin’s chest.

• Austin bled out shortly after in his twin brother Austin’s arms.

The cries for help as Austin was fading away are difficult to hear, but part of me believes we owe it to him to understand what happened to him. Hunter, too.

Per the footage, it does appear that after stabbing Austin, Karmelo books it out of there. He speeds up to blend in with the crowd, and books it again when he seems to be out of the spotlight. He doesn’t flee far, but it is indicative as to whether or not Karmelo knew that was the aggressor v. his claims of self-defense. His father Drew, went on to lie and cover for his son’s behavior in said footage.

Chaos ensued in the fallout. Karmelo was arrested. Austin was gone. But the real nightmare was only beginning…

Divide and Prosper, Thus Saith the Lord…

Upon the death of Austin Metcalf, the reaction was immediate and swift. Vultures quickly emerged as the representative of the family, and other incompetent opportunists raced to the town of Frisco to profiteer from the Metcalf’s grief.

Jake Lang of violent January 6th fame was also among those who rushed to the Lone Star state to play the character of a concerned ‘white’ citizen and to mold the death of Austin Metcalf into another pathetic bit of theatre that would allow Jake to do the only thing he knows how… rage bait and insult his way to a victimhood narrative he can sell for donation to his ‘organization.’

He went out of his way to insult, and just flat make shit up so that he could villainize a father begging the public to let this tragedy pass without spectacle.

Seem familiar?

Jake, vile, stupid, and pathetic as he is, came for his moment of clout, and hit the road next week to insert himself into ICE protests nobody cared or asked for his input on. He managed to get himself into more trouble there, but that’s a story for another day.

What’s important to note is that because Jake Lang is a shitty mouthpiece for these bait-and-switch games, he largely is looked at in the public for what he is: a moron who spreads hate to profit from hate.

And he learned how to do it from the vultures picking the meat from Karmelo Anthony.

Who Is the Next Generation Action Network (NGAN)?

Enter, Dominique Alexander of the Next Generation Action Network Foundation (NGAN, from here out.)

Dominique’s past is fraught with violence, fraud, and misery.

From abusing children, to evading his taxes, Alexander’s ‘work’ to end racial hate in the United States suffers from the same obstacle that caused the SPLC to start funding the KKK: supply and demand.

On April 17, 2025, the Anthony team was setting up a press conference to discuss the case and the boy’s defense of the murder he’d committed, when Jeff Metcalf himself walked through the doors.

NGAN sprung into action to turn this into a case of self-victimization and hate.

As though standing in front of the parents of your son’s killer was a crime. I suppose if I had raised a son who was the kind of person who would antagonize another team and then stab their players for a conflict I created… I’d be afraid to look the father of that boy in the eye too.

@foxnewsFULL INTERVIEW: Jeff Metcalf calls out the media and the "moral decay" of society after the tumultuous trial of Karmelo Anthony, who was convicted of murdering his son Austin. Jeff described Austin as a “leader” and a “God-fearing son.” “They don't know me. They don't know Hunter, Austin. They don't know Karmelo. They're looking for their 15 minutes of fame or their clickbait. “They're looking to monetize the death of my son. I really wish they wouldn't speak about it at all.” "Unfortunately in today's moral decay of society that we've witnessed, people believe that if they have their own voice, they scream loud enough, they're right." “I think our society is going the wrong direction right now. And us as parents are the only ones that are able to change this because our kids are the future.” Jeff shares with Will Cain what he wants the world to remember about Austin: “He was a leader. He was a God-fearing son. He had compassion. He showed love. He always helped.” @willcainshow #austinmetcalf #jeffmetcalf #karmeloanthony #truecrime #uscrime

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But this pattern was only beginning. The Legal Fund Fraudster merry-go-round has become a staple of this case. Which is on-brand for 501c hoppers. It’s important to note that the first fundraiser built for Karmelo was cited as partial reason for reducing his bond from $1 Million to $250,000. Drew made the claim that access to those funds was not yet available, and thus the bond was aggressively unfair, and risked being unconstitutional.

So in other words, the hardship cited was never actually paid by those citing it. It’s also worth noting, a heavy bond like this and a transcript testimony like the one given in court could be reason to throw the case out later if an appeals court were to have found the $1 Million Bond to be too aggressive, and given the ages of the boys, it’s not crazy to think that a Frisco judge would impose sanctions and reduce the bond. What’s crazy, is that the family paid neither amount.

In fact, they explicitly LIED to the public in their press conference claiming that they hadn’t used anything from the GiveSendGo to buy a new home, the fancy new Escalade, or anything else from the funds. Yet… the GiveSendGo page stated otherwise.

Other security measures you say? Not ones conveniently provided by the uncredentialled fraudsters who paid your son’s bond, no?

How does a stay at home mom and a salesman making less than 80K a year fund security details, a new home, a new car, therapy, new attorneys, and a $250,000 bond for their son? Just to turn around and file a Pauper’s Oath when everything is said and done?

Well, because you’re working with a well connected mob, that’s why.

The Muscle

I’m not exactly sure how organized I would call this operation. These things tend to include a host of bad actors who all clamor for a piece of the pie at the top. But in this case, the mob mentality raked in massive amounts of cash that could be traced on the public fundraisers… and also plenty of cash that could not be tracked down.

Enter, a new set of characters; The Disrupters.

The animated cries from a man with a record of theft screaming ‘why us lord!’ might have been met with a collection of sighs and eye rolls, but that can never simply be the end of something evil.

“Watch, they family will be harassed all of a sudden!” Drew, hear me out. Could that be because you were harassing them?

And it continued. Because the bullying was profitable. It even made it to trending on TikTok. Austin’s family was doxxed, they called for the death of Hunter as well, they terrorized anyone who dared to give the Metcalf family an equal voice. So while the View was victim-blaming a grieving family, NGAN’s groupies were making their own money from their hate campaigns.

And the little guys were about to find out just how connected these bullies really are.

That’s right: Frisco ISD allowed the pressure from outside forces to determine how they conduct their affairs internally. They caved to the mob, every time, and only invited in more chaos.

NGAN’s History of Violence

From 2015 to 2020, Dominique Alexander was involved in various protests that all seemed to lead to various acts of vandalism, violence, and inevitably murder.

Somehow with Mr. Alexander every tragedy turns into a personal account of monetizable victimhood.

In fact, it seems that there’s very little that Dominque doesn’t try to insert himself into. His network of puppets seems quite extensive.

Read more

He left me cryin' late one Sunday night outside of Boulder.
He said he had to find himself out on the road.
I guess when love goes wrong, You've gotta learn to be strong…

So I worked two jobs and I moved three times.
I ended up south of Memphis workin' down in Riverside.
I may not be so lucky in love, But the one thing I'm sure of..

I want a man that stands beside me.
Not in front of or behind me.
Give me two arms that want to hold me; not own me—
And I'll give all the love in my heart.
Stand beside me.
Be true; don't tell lies to me.
I'm not lookin' for a fantasy…
I want a man that who stands beside me.

—Stand Beside Me, Jo Dee Messina

I’ll start this off by saying, for a man I love, who makes me feel like his partner; his other half; the Bonnie to his Clyde, or far more importantly… the Sheila to his Sonny, I don’t mind turning over and meeting him halfway in something he wants when I’m not as interested, given that I’m dealing with a man who in all other aspects of our life makes me feel like I am a person of value and importance to him. Who’s got my back against the world, and wants to build with me at each other’s side, not ‘in front’ of me.

I used to believe that men at large did love women, and that women struggled to understand the differences in how men show it because we’re not wired the same way.

And I think for some people, that still holds true.

But as I age, I see more than I used to.

I believe that in terms of dating and commitment, there’s two kinds of men:

Good Men and Downhill… and the peak at the top is a very lonely place.

But despite the compassion I have for the male experience, and I wouldn’t take back one word in my 9 Magic Words article, one experience continues to violate the good faith I once operated from within and shatter the illusions I once had about an overall belief in men’s regard for women.

Talking to ‘modern men’ for myself.

This Monday, I scrolled across my X feed looking at what was trending and what people were talking about, when I came across this post:

Watching the widespread male crash-out to the very notion that perhaps a woman might have every right to decide when she wants a penis inside of her, was disappointing to say the least, but not at all shocking.

The saddest part that washed over me was this:

Plenty of men could dispose of the woman altogether, because he values what’s between her legs far more than he values her.

Women have much higher rates of sex with men who make them feel like he would still be with her for her, not because she’s the most available warm body that he can stick it in to use her body for his ego’s needs. That is the injury at the root of this dialogue.

Let me be clear: women dream of the kind of love with a man that “I am hers, and she is mine” carries over regularly into the bedroom. The problem is that men want this to primarily benefit them, and they are full of excuses and deflections, or worse… women have been programmed to believe our low libido is natural… rather than a symptom of women’s relationship with the idea of sex in general. It goes back to the whole ‘lady in the streets, freak in the sheets’ trope. The Madonna/Whore complex. The truth is often that women have been programmed to experience sex as another chore in her life to perform for a man, not with a man, and men are absolutely dumbfounded that women might opt out of having sex for him, when he constantly sends out the signal that he’s not actually interested in her… just being inside of her.

Below are the top five kinds of rebuttals men gave in the comments.

#1 - “Then you’re not entitled to his money!’

Sir, if you want a whore, buy one.

I’ll add that there is the rare version of the story where the woman simply does want a man’s status or resources and doesn’t care a lick for him… but the men complaining about this online don’t have those kinds of resources to be exploited for.

You did not begin your relationship between her legs. If you can so easily withdraw romance and emotional support from the woman you [don’t] love the moment she doesn’t let you treat her like a human flesh light, it’s because you never cared for her in the first place.

There is no verse in the bible that says ‘you’re going to hell if you don’t let him smash any time he wishes no matter what your day has been like, and no matter how he treats you regularly.’ Telling a home invader, ‘go ahead and kill and rape her my guy, she doesn’t bang me anyway.’ Isn’t the flex you think it is.

No it can’t be said. Unless you are one of the 30% of Americans making enough to put your wife at home on your salary alone. No it can’t. And even then, it would be penny pinching. You don’t pay your own bills so that you can be inside of a woman. You pay ONE HALF the bills because living costs money. Fuel in your car costs money. The electricity needed to play your Xbox costs money.

Almost every single woman in this generation has had this experience with a “modern man,” and most of them are too broke to be making such transactional demands in the first place. She’s paying half the bills. She’s doing more of the home labor. She’s doing more of the child care. You love to talk about men’s work ethic, but ignore that women doing the majority of leaving work to handle your kids is the biggest cause of the gap between men and women’s hours worked. Why? Because you don’t respect that she’s doing that for you. You’re happy to dangle the very scenario you asked for her help with over her head to mislabel her ‘lazy’ when you’re the root source of the reason she’s got to leave work or schedule work around your kids in the first place.

The tiny pay discrepancy you’re holding over her head, wouldn’t be enough to support the lifestyle you enjoy, because she’s taking on your financial slack and your personal incompetence. If chores are so easy and not worth complaining about, why aren’t you doing your fair share of them?

Speaking of fair shares…

You don’t work your ass off for her. You’re working your ass off for you. You’re doing it for the internal fulfilment that you get from thinking about how her existence glorifies the edifice of you.

The issue isn’t a woman working or not working, it’s the ease and absolution with which men assign our roles for us, no matter what we want, and then insult us for not agreeing to their terms, unilaterally.

The absence of dignity, is still the issue.

So, next time you don’t really want to go to work but need to avoid your boss throwing a tantrum, try rolling up to the office and bending yourself over his desk and let him penetrate you with a dildo, then you can go home. If you’d like to hide behind a workweek to excuse the entitlement you feel to her body, at the very least make your comparison involve exactly what you’re asking of us.

#2 - “She trapped me in a sexless marriage!”

This is flat blackmail. You aren’t being forced into anything, you’re just too selfish to even approach the question of ‘why doesn’t she want me?’

This girl’s profile unironically states: “Christ is King, No hymen no diamond, Trump 2024 , Equal rights Equal accountability, anti-feminist, bad faith degen psychos get blocked.”

All of her posts are about how women suck.

Empathy? If you are minding your business and we kick you in the shins, sure. If you roll over and want sex and she’s tired, what did you suffer from exactly?

That part at the end is an interesting thing to say since it only applies when you can use someone else’s body for your pleasure, but not when you fail to respect her humanity by throwing a tantrum because you didn’t get to use her to satisfy whatever urges you felt despite her wishes.

‘Suck his dick every time’ or suffer the consequences. Every. Time. It’s not about sexless marriage, it’s about refusal, at all.

You should probably start spreading as many STD’s and unwanted pregnancies as possible to stick it TO your partner when she won’t let you stick it in!

Men who think of and treat their wives as partners and people have a lot of sex. You’re not having sex because you don’t think of her as a human being.

Maybe if sex with you was less boring… we’d want more of it. But no one is ready for that conversation… are we?

Women do not enjoy marriages where they are not being ravished by the man they love. It’s more than most men simply do not care about what it’s like to have sex with them.

#3 - “I do things I don’t want to do for you!”

Sir, if I had known that generically listening to me speak was such an imposition on you, I’d have left you years ago.

Saying no when asked for something isn’t coercion. Telling someone that if they don’t comply with your ‘request’ there will be consequences, is.

Imagine thinking that listening to your wife speak is a debt she pays with her body, instead of thinking ‘I love this woman, and I want to spend time with her.’ Also, a marriage is not a car that needs an oil change every 5000 miles. It’s a garden.

As a woman, finding out that you consider time spent with us because you think it’s the obligatory task that you must check off your list in order to ‘keep us around’ feels demeaning, degrading, and it sends us the signal that our sex organs are what you like most about us… which tells us you are an unsafe man to spend our time with, because if what you value most about us has nothing to do with the things that make us who we are, then abandoning us wouldn’t be that hard for you to do.

#4 - “This is what you signed up for. Sex is your duty to this marriage.”

I signed up for a man who considers me to be a human being. But I guess he got swapped out with you at the altar.

I think this is the most nefarious of all the excuses, because it implies that when we made what was supposed to be the ultimate expression of devotion to each other, what you thought you were buying was a season-pass ticket to my body, when I thought you loved me.

It’s the scene from the Swan Princess, where Odette explains that what she wants most from Derrick isn’t his money, she has a throne of her own, she doesn’t want his power, or his empty validation…

The woman of your dreams wants to know that you value her, for just being her, more than she wants anything else you have to give.

In the end of the movie, what he manages to prove is that what he values about her isn’t anything he gets out of her; it isn’t the child rearing, it isn’t being compliant and ‘submissive’, it’s not a constant access to sex… it’s who she is as a human being.

What he lists are things like ‘kindness’ and ‘courage’ not ‘pleasant, fit, and cooperative.’ He likes things about her that are independent of what benefits him.

#5 - “This is how we experience intimacy! Sex is a need!”

You just finished saying how listening to sound come out of my voice box was an absolute chore, but sure, just put a baby in me for your troubles.

That’s hilarious since the data shows men over their lifetime have far more casual sex, and less regret about it than women ever do.

I think their response was better than mine could ever be, to be honest.

Duty vs. Devotion and the Ugly Truth

Intent is conveyed through word choice.

Duty is described as: 1. a task or action that someone is required to perform. 2. (of a visit or other undertaking) done from a sense of moral obligation rather than for pleasure.

When men say they fulfilled their ‘duties’ of spending time with us, holding a purse, going on a target run they didn’t want to, going to a dinner with our parents because it was their ‘boyfriend-duty’ and in exchange, you think her duty to the relationship is treating her like a whore whose payment for your ‘duty-investments’ should be paid with her body, sends only one message: “you are not worth anything more than what I can take from you in the bedroom.”

Devotion, on the other hand, is described as: love, loyalty, or enthusiasm for a person, activity, or cause. Devotion is what you feel for a person you love.

Resentment because her body is her duty to you, for you generically showing up on any given day, is actually pretty evil. It proves that you do not value her decision to wake up every morning and choose you in all the additional ways she wants to care for you.

“Why didn’t you just say that?”

She did. When she asked you for 12 lemons, and you didn’t care enough to listen. She did, when she asked you to help her do the dishes you dirtied after she cooked for you. She did. 1000 times over until you killed the relationship with 1000 cuts.

I’m certain pedantic men will jump into the comments claiming that they were ‘devoted’ husbands who were still not met with sex no matter what they did. Some of them, may have truly been, I don’t deny a woman’s ability to be a total piece of shit too

—because I see women as people, and people can be catty and cruel no matter what gender they are. But if you choose to leave a woman because you believe that sex is what you are owed for merely your presence in the relationship, for the love of god leave.

It’ll be the only good thing you truly ever did for her.

Women do not want to have ‘less sex’ than men do. We learn that sex with you is a chore, because you treat it like it should be. Humans want to feel wanted, and valued, and safe, before we’re asked to give our bodies to you. No, you working a job is not an equitable comparison to that request. She is still working too, and your pay discrepancy doesn’t cover the half of the life she supports for you.

Being unwilling to give anything of actual value to simply show her that you’re not trying to consume her for your glory, is the key that makes a woman trust you enough to become the thing you say you want.

The problem is, most men think the bare minimum of fidelity, attendance, and (maybe) shared finances is a Medal of Honor’s worth of a sacrifice to substitute her entire body for the work week he’d be putting in regardless of her. You went to Target, you didn’t storm the beaches of Normandy.

We want to have sex with the men we love who make us feel safe, wanted, valued, and dignified.

Because we can feel it when you only do the dishes to extract sex from us.

We can feel it when you only picked up the slack with the kids to extract sex from us.

We can feel it when you decided your work week was more important than ours, and therefore our sacrifices didn’t matter enough to qualify as decision making power when you’d like to extract sex from us.

We can feel it when you have decided to change the fundamental arrangement of our entire relationship into a one-sided transaction that values our compliance and servitude over our personhood.

Men who don’t think this way, get more of what you want.

“What are you doing?!”
“Losing…”
“I don’t understand…”
“Neither do I.”

(Gentle reminder that she was willing to leave her entire noble status behind for a life with him and he refused, but I digress.)

Six lanes, taillights. Red ants marching into the night.
They disappear to the left and right again.
Another supper from a sack; A ninety-nine-cent heart attack.
I got a pounding head and an aching back,
And the camel's buried in a big straw stack.

I'm gonna live where the green grass grows.
Watch my corn pop up in rows.
Every night be tucked in close to you.
Raise our kids where the good Lord's blessed.
Point our rocking chairs towards the west.
And plant our dreams where the peaceful river flows.
Oh, where the green grass grows.

—Where the Green Grass Grows, Tim McGraw

This Monday is a little late, but that’s also because it’s the baby stages of the new idea. I’m not even sure how much demand there is for people to vicariously read through these thoughts, but if you create here on Substack, you’re probably sick of publishing into the void based on the advice of some guru who’s using AI to reformat the same article 1800 times just as a shitty pitch to his overpriced dude-bro course.

For me, it’s always been easier to remember things when I write about them; when I think about them. Life gets crazy, work gets busy, stress eats at your brain, and chips away at your progress. It’s easy to make a promise to yourself in the morning, and break it by happy hour when the escapism is louder than the discipline. Mondays I’m going to start attacking that, and bring whoever else along for the ride. If you’re reading this, this journal is meant to serve you as well in whatever you’re struggling to achieve. I prefer to get my hands in the dirt with my readers than speak from on high, up above. Let’s begin!

Long before I was actually overweight, I’d been “overweight” for as long as I can remember.

In high school, at my heaviest, I was 122 pounds soaking wet. Maybe ten or so vanity pounds for a 5’3” senior, but not the unmanageable burden and scarlet letter of ugliness I’d been convinced that it was back then.

I’d had the aspirations of being an actress on my mind (I was 18; sue me, lol) and a tumultuous situation at home.

College was looming, and so was the burden of major selections, the uncertainty of what comes next, and a conflicting set of pressures to travel in multiple directions at once with no real plans in mind.

I had outpatient weight loss surgery back in January. A pretty rough recovery for an outpatient procedure, let me tell you. It’s been a struggle since to overcome the habits and more importantly, the thoughts that have kept me stuck in the habits that led me to that place. It wasn’t until this week that I’ve been able to articulate internally how much that misconception has really been keeping me trapped inside my own damn head.

It’s been over 15 years since that high school girl was tossed loose to live in the consequences of her own choices, hell or high water, and I managed to work myself into a frenzy trying to figure out in my 30’s what you’re “supposed” to build in your 20’s. But this week is a new one, and it’s a great time to chronicle new chapters with lessons from the old one. So we can build as we go. What are you building this week?

Material World: Business + Wealth

Because running a blog with 3 paying subs is serious business, mk? Scratch that, 2 subs.

When I launched this blog, I was really just pursuing financial freedom and trying to find the vehicle that would allow me to build that without becoming my 13th reason why, if you catch my drift.

But like Edison (or Tesla, or someone else he stole it from, I digress) after learning a bajillion ways not to make a lightbulb, I took a gamble on my good friend from The Monday After and let him guide me a little on this creative journey, and it’s been a hell of an eye-opener. (Thanks, Ryan!)

Here’s some of my lessons learned in Business and Wealth this week.

Last Week’s Lessons + Wins:

LESSONS

Sometimes you are the niche you’re looking for. Instead of trying to always fit a round peg into a square hole, find out what you’re good at. What do you think about all the time anyway? And just go write about that.

It’s easy for me to overload my own brain with notions of bad perceptions before I even publish the damn thing. I’ve cycled through the topics of online marketing, life coaching (I signed up for classes and researched certifications, I was dead serious), Fiction Writing, Political Blogging, but all of them scared me too much to hang my hat on any one of them alone. Last week taught me that trying and being really bad at something is a lot more helpful than agonizing over how it will be received. When you focus on controlling the perception… you tend to find out too late that the people you were curating for were never going to support you in the first place. Much easier to just stop worrying about what anyone believes and stick to your guns and your ideals. For me, remaining in the Republican box would have forced me to compromise on the nuance of my own ideals, so… I tossed it. (I ain’t going Lefty either, don’t go crazy.)

When money is tight, I’ve learned that finding a quiet place to muse with my thoughts distracts me from general boredom or the inclination to spend. Having a project to labor upon fights my worst urges. So I’ll be doing more of that in the future.

WINS

I have finally nailed down my ‘type’ of content. And it doesn’t fit neatly into any one category. But I love that. Because I can keep writing about literally whatever I wish, and I’m learning how to let that serve the brand, instead of harming it. It flies in the face of 90% of the advice from all the creators who I have studied that have come before me. But, fuck it. You know? What works for their brain may not work for me. If you can comprehend the basic frameworks of this business we’re engaged in on this platform, there’s really no rules. There’s just clarity, or lack thereof, and motivation.

This Week’s Goals + Strategies:

GOALS

1. Start publishing at least 2 articles per week. Monday Motivations + An Opinion Piece.

2. Craft a strategy for distribution that becomes second nature to me.

3. Replace weekend boredom with accomplishing milestones.

STRATEGIES

Mondays are the days that we start the week anew, it’s filled with groans and dragging one’s self wearily out of bed. But I’m adding a twist to mine: Reflection. Starting off the week by chronicling my successes and failures of the week before gives perspective that will make the next piece easier, and easier as time goes on.

I’ve gotten good at making content about my content, or just making the effort to make content in general. But learning the platforms and their quirks, and how to kill more birds with fewer stones will improve things.

Check my milestones before I choose to leave the house to seek novelty outside my own home.

Inner World: Fitness, Health, Growth

This was the section that made me wanna start this journal in the first place.

Every woman knows that her ability to move in the world one way or another is tied to her beauty. Sure, that might be unfair. Certainly, it can be frustrating. But it’s the truth. I was blessed with a face that I like a lot. It’s probably why I was able to skate by for so long without fixing this problem sooner.

I don’t say any of this for sympathy, but just to be honest. I know that there’s doors that open for me that don’t open for others for reasons beyond their control, or mine.

Talking about the reality of your market value in the world based on optics isn’t comfortable… but… we can spend our lives fighting upstream, or sometimes we can compromise on some parts of reality to get more of what we want. I like my life easier, so I’d rather work on my body, and make it what I like to see, rather than trying to fight everyone else’s perceptions of it. So here’s the ugly truth, and the lessons learned.

Last Week’s Lessons + Wins:

LESSONS

This January, I underwent a pretty substantial outpatient weight loss surgery. Kinda scary to post them here, but I’m not the only person with this story. Someone else might stumble across this who needed it, so I’ll volunteer too much information for public consumption just in case.

Recovery was AWFUL. Seven days of complete bed rest in the most horrific pain I’ve ever felt in my life. But… even though I’m a long way off from my goals, this change has been pretty crazy.

The habits that got me to the position I never wish to be again, have been the trickiest part of life after.

You can lop it all off, and gain it all back. I started working out earlier in the year with my best friend - and we put in a good five weeks of the kind of workouts I’d never done in my life. (I was a theatre kid, wtf is a push up? Can I sing you a song instead???) I kept that up solo for another solid month all on my own. But life, business, other priorities took over again.

Working out is a whole lifestyle, you can certainly work hard to get to a place of maintenance… but you’ll never work to a place of never hitting the gym again. I’ve learned that I LOVE how I feel after a good hour in the gym. It’s the going when I have everything else on my plate that I hate. So, the key for me has been to adjust. Brain tank to full today? Get a minimum of 5k steps. If my diet has been good, that’s enough to get something achieved, and not fall completely off the horse. Busy tonight? Bring touch up make up, and get in a lunch workout. It’s easier to take the mental pressure off some days and not lose the physical labor by just taking the ‘gym hour’ off my plate.

WINS

Last week, I got back on track with counting my calories. And when I passed myself in the mirror I may have done better than I actually think. Won’t know until later tonight when I get to my bestie and her fancy ass scale, but… for a girl who had a hanging belly this time last year, and fell off the wagon the past month. It looks like I’m still headed in the right direction.

This Week’s Goals + Strategies:

GOALS

1. 5000 Steps per Day (Minimum)

2. At least one weight-lifting Circuit daily.

3. 32-64 oz of water daily.

4. Track Calories.

STRATEGIES

If you don’t have a walking pad: GET ONE. I am a walking fiend. It’s a little adventure/private musing space for me. When it’s raining, when it’s late and I haven’t hit my milestones yet? LIFE SAVER.

Even if I have no weights, doing more than just the walking creates an insane effect on my body. No one LIKES sit ups, but endorphins make you happy, and happy people don’t shoot their husbands. I don’t make the rules, I just work here.

Chat GPT is the bane of most people’s existence, but it can be a life saver if you don’t know the calories in a meal at a glance, but you know what ingredients went into making it. I shaved off a few hundred calories from week to week just by being better able to gauge how many calories were in the home cooked meals my friends and family made in social gatherings.

Other World: Spirituality + Recreation

This is the fun section. :)

This morning on my commute it was everywhere. 666. No, not the number of the beast. If you’re not familiar with the concept of ‘Angel Numbers,’ Astrology.com explains them like this:

“Numerology is a fascinating field that seeks to understand our connection to the universe through numbers. Each number holds a unique energy that can provide insight into our lives. One such number is the Angel Number 666. Despite common misconceptions, this number is not an omen of evil but carries a powerful message from the angels. In this ultimate guide to the Angel Number 666, we will explore its various meanings and what it may signify for you.”

Could this be a big case of projection? 100%! But the way I see it is, what’s the harm if the messages surrounding you contribute to your well being, instead of harming it?

For 666 Specifically, the interpretation goes:

“If you keep seeing the Angel Number 666 frequently, it is a sign that your angels are encouraging you to balance your material and spiritual life. Your focus may have been too heavily placed on one area, causing an imbalance in your life. Seeing this number is a reminder to maintain balance and harmony in all areas of your life.”

Last week, I was getting 777, 111, and 444 like it was my job as I slaved away on the new ideation of this blog. But by the end of the week, 666 started to rear its ugly head.

But the message makes sense.

Last Week’s Lessons + Wins:

LESSONS

Slow down. Balance things out. You can kill yourself trying to make it all happen now, or you can take it as it was meant to unfold… and enjoy the ride.

With the 666, the issue is… if all I can think of is how far off the finish line is, it makes it easier for me to say ‘fuck it’ and ruin all my progress on a daily basis. Easier to put off the article til tomorrow, easier to watch another episode instead of hitting my steps, etc. etc. Balancing, revisiting the progress points from where I started to where I’ve come help me appreciate the work I have been doing, especially when I can’t really see the micro-changes I’ve been building along the way.

WINS

This newsletter. Slowing down made me realize I didn’t really have to separate my instincts into different IPs at all. I’ll attract readers who want to go on this journey with me, and the ones who fall off were probably not compatible with me anyway. I’m happiest here. So this is what we’re gonna do.

This Week’s Goals + Strategies:

GOALS

1. Listen to my intuition and document it daily.

STRATEGIES

Expect to see a lot more notes about these things coming your way. Simple in, simple out. :)

Get after it!

I guess all of this to simply say, sometimes we get so very lost in the weeds or the details; numbers on a scale, in a bank account, views, etc. that we forget to take stock of the journey we’re on. I spent all last week focused on the cogs in the machine of my own business, that I didn’t have the stamina to take on anything else. I had for so long been focused on weightlifting, that it was easier to let my diet slide. Letting my brain get so overwhelmed when counting a calorie wasn’t easy enough, that I forgot to just ASK about how a burger bowl was made so I can adjust accordingly. Life is easier when you chill out.

Anyway, here’s the vibe I was consuming while I wrote this today. If you’re not familiar, you should be:

What are you building this week?

You pledge your allegiance, Into the unknown
Trust in your leaders; Mmmm— Bow to the throne.

(One) Resistance is futile.
(Two) Comply if you can
(Three) Trust in your government
(Four) We got blood on our hands!

This is irrelevant —but you keep backing that shit for the hell of it.
And you keep acting like you don’t got skeletons,
Up in your closet that you don’t want dwelling in…
We’re pushing the narrative; Aren’t you proud to be an American?
There’s nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, Bombs away; kiss it goodbye!

Stand down or fall like the rest of them!
One nation under oblivion!
I don’t want drama, But I’m gonna say what I wanna.
There’s nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, Bombs away! Kiss it goodbye!

—Trigger Warning, Falling in Reverse

This article feels somewhat scary for me to write.

I was raised in an Ultra-Libertarian-Right-Wing, Republican household. Heavy on the Republican and Libertarian… I refuse to use the word conservative by design. Though I was raised with some socially conservative values, our outlook and our demeanor was very ‘90s-Liberal, so to call my family ‘conservative’ is sort of a misapplication of terms.

I’ve always split on parts of the movement with my former fellow Republicans, though. For example, I simply don’t believe being gay is a choice (nor a defect), and I just do not care if two grown consenting adults want to be married under the law. As a person with a basic level of common sense (who also enjoys a bit of true crime) I know how incompetent major institutions can be, especially the courts, so I don’t like the idea of the state being the body to determine the validity of my marriage anyway.

I never aligned with the Religious Right, because you cannot force someone to share your faith in whatever version of a higher power you believe in, even if we all get to the pearly gates and you were right all along. No, religions are not all the same and I think it’s a fallacy to say some aren’t kinder than others when we look at modern populations across the world, but I’m more concerned with the fact that ‘because God said so’ is only an argument that applies to those who believe in your faith in the first place. It’s not a logical or effective argument for why and how we should structure the world. Charlie Kirk in fact made this very argument often in his debates, but even his views remain more hard-right than mine.

What Originally Made Me a Republican

Politics were always a part of my life, and thus my identity, going all the way back to the cradle. When I was roughly four years old, my mother taught me a call-and-answer joke that went something like:

“So, Ashton, what is Bill Clinton?” Began my mother upon entering the Thanksgiving family gathering.
“A hippie liberal!” Came my four-year-old reply, to an echo of laughs.

While any liberal now reading this might clutch their pearls and say ‘Oh, heavens! The indoctrination!’ I promise you, just because you view yourself in the lens of righteous savior and raise your children to be more ‘tolerant’ in this world, you’re not exonerated from ‘indoctrinating’ your children. It’s one of the things humans do as parents; we raise them to believe that which we believe to be moral and virtuous, even if we get it wrong. The person doing the raising isn’t trying to raise their child to ‘hate’ but to see things from the only worldview they know… their own. Just like you.

But as I grew older, certain things I was raised with still remain in me today. Simplistic things like: Limited Government is better than an all-powerful Fed. Capitalism/the free market is the best system of economics man has yet to employ. Self-Defense Rights, as a small woman with decent aim and a loud mouth, are awesome. National Sovereignty matters because not all cultures can coexist under the same banner by their very nature, even if we would like for them to. Borders matter. Personal Responsibility matters. And the last of my remaining conservative views is this: The Individual is the most important minority on Earth.

In other words, a Republic in the truest meaning of the root word: that individual human life, property, and liberty is always more valuable than what ‘benefits’ the ‘group,’ (so says the group, who usually wants to take resources from said individual) lest we descend into the only structure of society true ‘Democracy’ can offer… Mob Rule. A place where a group gets together and decides by vote that something that belongs to one person can and should be stripped from that person, so that THEY may benefit from such ‘redistribution.’ Being an independent doesn’t mean I abandoned everything from my upbringing, but I am shedding the label to be able to take on more nuanced issues with a clearer mind.

Where the Fracture Began

When I first saw Donald Trump take the podiums at his rallies, I wasn’t a fan. I sided with liberals; his rhetoric was absurd and obscene, unbecoming of our great nation.

So what changed?

To put it simply, he won the primary. And then the DNC selected Hillary Clinton as front-runner.

But something happened during the transition from primary to general… I was forced to look harder at the only other option beyond Satan herself (can we all finally admit that no one actually likes Clinton?) and I was forced to see the reality on the other side of the biggest hate-headlines against Trump.

Was he smooth like Reagan, Bill, or Obama? Hell no. But he wasn’t the monster I was promised, either. In fact, almost every talking point about the man was misconstrued and suffered from a case of plank-in-your-eye in the world of politics.

Seeing how hard my news media wanted me to HATE the man… it pushed me in the other direction, as pushy narratives are apt to do. Not to mention the bullying and threats I received from people who at the time had been my friends for years. It rocked my little world for a spell.

And it didn’t get any better, watching the violence unfold for years during the Ferguson/Baltimore era, the 2017 Berkeley riots, featuring groups like BAMN (By Any Means Necessary), the Chaz/Chop era (and the rapes and murders that went with them), the 2020 riots; all things that would make anyone run in the exact opposite direction of the media’s ‘warnings.’

They really dug their own graves in the end.

Then came the big one…

The January 6th Problem

Given that I gave 3+ years of my life to the underbelly of activism that fought for the defense of the 1000+ January 6th cases… it feels ironic that this would also become the tipping point that began the death of my association with the Republican Party.

I could write a novel based on this time in my life… but frankly… I’d rather just synopsize as best I can for what’s already going to feel like a novel’s worth of this damn article.

As the violence of 2020 got louder, it drew me deeper into the online discourse in the MAGA-sphere. Until the 2020 election, I’d never really had any interest in the world of InfoWars, but weirder things were happening in my nation, so why not give the Mothership of Weird a fair shot? What I found was… like most things… they weren’t as crazy as I was originally led to believe. They weren’t NOT as crazy as I was lead to believe either… but the real world has a funny way of existing in more shades of gray than is typically a comfortable place for the mass public.

What’s that got to do with January 6th?

Well, with the IW (InfoWars) crowd, I came across the Stop the Steal rallies that popped up across the nation. Three times they amassed on DC.

Number Three would be the worst.

By that time, I had made friends from local events all the way from Austin to Dallas, from rallies, primary governor debates, etc. It wasn’t terribly hard to meet political figureheads in the MAGA-sphere if you had simple gainful employment and free weekends, but when those new-found friends of mine attended the protest-turned riot on January 6th, 2021, all of our lives changed forever. It was sort of terrifying to see my new friends being rounded up and raided by the FBI and called TERRORISTS on my TV screen.

So began a three-year journey of being glued to my laptop watching hours and hours of footage, debunking some of the DOJ’s outright lies, being enraged at the skeevy sleight of hand and the wild embellishments used to get more bang for their legal buck out of everyday citizens, and sighing and rubbing my eyes till they damn near bled when they were right, and it was right there on camera and I knew a heavy round of debates was coming tomorrow when I needed to talk criminal defense attorneys out of their own strategy to protect the man on trial.

Somehow, from simply participating in social media chatrooms on Telegram… I had gone from random nobody to a full-time research assistant for the most high-profile January 6th case of them all…

I wound up in DC working on the Proud Boys trial.

And the pre-trial era was almost as grueling as the actual trial.

Advocating for grown men who were the MAGA equivalent of dogs chasing a car, and trying to explain that to a hostile group of DC jurors that being stupid isn’t the same thing as being a terrorist mastermind quite literally became my full-time job…

Here’s a drive by list of examples I spent my days fighting in court:

• Calling Dominic Pezzola the ‘tip of the spear’ but intentionally cutting out the footage that proves no member of the Proud Boys actually led ANY charge into the Capitol. Dominic was acting solo and following this man below with a monkey-see-monkey-do mentality… that even the jury eventually used to acquit him of his Seditious Conspiracy charge.

• Rearranging the timestamps to make circumstances seem much more violent than they actually were.

1. Cutting out 37 minutes of footage that hid the mass amount of screwups and use-of-force violations that caused ambush and stampede of the crowds.

• Intentionally portraying a ‘gallows’ too small for anyone to hang as evidence of intent to kill congress in some kind of overthrow.

Sure, the MAGA crowd was chanting plenty of outlandish and stupid things about 1776 style revolution… but most of them looked like a dog who caught the car when they finally got inside the building.

Prison had a way of bringing out the worst in everyone.

Once the incarcerations began so came the clumsy world of legal fundraisers and awareness campaigns.

The slightest of criticisms against any J6 defendant became akin to treason of the entire group. Good ol’ groupthink for ya. But if you got yourself blacklisted from the ‘J6 Community’ in pursuit of truth, you also blacklisted yourself from the ability to HELP someone who might truly be in need.

Telling Laura Logan that Jake Lang wasn’t being refused a court date… he was stalling his own clock because his victim narrative opened MAGA wallets, got me blocked. Explaining that Ryan Samsel was never forced to sit in a closet on a gym mat, but instead he had worked with a fellow inmate and a contraband phone (common in the system among any inmates, J6 or otherwise) to set up a tear-jerker photoshoot… because it was great clickbait, earned the ire of the community, and a circling of the wagons that resulted in drama, endless phone calls, allegations of being a ‘Fed’ asset, and constant, never-ending ridicule for the crime of… posting a link to a fundraiser of a different defendant?

Any attempts to cut the cancer from the movement were met with lazy and hypocritical hems and haws and excuses about who these figures had ‘access’ to among the other influential names within the movement. Basically, if someone harmful to the very ideals we were supposed to be trying to embody had enough clout… well, just let your ethics fall by the wayside and play the game.

I attended the same ‘Reawaken America’ tours with a host of characters, and watched the behind-the-scenes drama and nepotism enable the worst mouthpieces available the chance to shoot the movement in the foot and shred credibility faster than you can say ‘chemtrails.’

Note: Free Speech isn’t giving any moron a microphone so they can rattle off nonsense on your stage for 20 minutes (in the hopes they’ll buy a table at your events for $2,000 over and over again…), it’s just a protection against the state shoving you into a concrete coffin for saying things they don’t like in public. Anyone with half a brain would still want to curate their brand to seem like it attracts people with a shred of sanity or integrity, but I digress.

I watched the lack of accountability being rewarded, and dissent punished. Always, punished.

While I was grateful that the bumbling idiots I had taken under my wing were let out of their cages after the 2024 election, it didn’t come without a cost.

They say ‘never meet your heroes,’ and spending three years trying to help mine — of being battered incessantly by the very people I had tried to help and protect… had worn me down to what felt like nothing.

The Red Pill Douchebag Factory

A while back, me, a useless, hypergamic, woefully inferior, and no longer a virgin at 34 years old, total waste of post-wall flesh and blood, had the audacity to notice that much like the smoke-and-mirrors I’d learned to see from my January 6th foray, the modern faces of the Red Pill movement were slowly becoming something grotesque as well. I wrote about this… and what changed me forever was the responses of men who refused to simply READ the piece in question: (See Below)

Part of the Red Pill movement, I once felt aligned with. The idea that men were unfairly treated by the courts in terms of child custody, alimony payments, and child support despite lack of parental rights is something I think should be equitable, instead of stereotyped. Women who use men for money are grotesque humans. Laughing at the idea of the staggering statistics surrounding men and suicide is ugly to the highest degree.

I deleted the comments after a while, but the reaction to this article deeply upset me.

I had assumed that the men of the right would be more like my dad, who appreciates and enjoys my very opinionated mother’s demeanor. I was ill-prepared for lectures about my uterus, my age, my perspective, my personhood to be on the chopping block for merely suggesting the Red Pill movement has any culpability for the world it advocates for. What happened is that a group of my own subscribers spent three weeks lecturing me about how awful and unrealistic women are, because I suggested that treating your wife like a maid you can fuck is a grotesque way to exist within a marriage, and perhaps the 70% of women filing for divorce aren’t doing so because of ‘feminism’ but because… you’re just bad husbands.

But that would have required any of those men to see me as a human being. Instead, I was met with a host of tropes that sounded like they came directly out of the warped fantasy of an extreme feminist… except… it wasn’t a fantasy.

It was the feedback from my own subscriber list.

I took a break entirely from writing about culture or politics at that point. I had, naively, assumed that the majority of right-wing men who supported my publication would support the idea of accountability from both men and women within the structure of marriage they spend so long harping on day-in and day-out.

Turned out… the idea of lending basic dignity to the other half of the population was actually not on their list of priorities, at all.

What the manosphere has become is the exact caricature I used to think the left was Boogeymanning me about.

Years of the same recycled women-hating talking points:

• “Women only want the top 10% of men.” (So explain how ugly men are also married…)

• “Women hang out at the finish line, and they pick the winners.” (Tell that to David Beckam.)

• “She’s not yours, it’s just your turn.” (Women don’t have to stay, and that threatens me.)

• “Delusional standards.” (She wants to be treated like a person, and I know she’s a plaything.)

• “Women don’t want nice guys.” (There are no nice guys. There are good men, and there is downhill.)

• “Women hate accountability.” (For what? They can never explain this.)

• “Women are emotional, not logical.” (They say right before putting their fist through the drywall)

• “Women initiate most divorces.” (Women should remain in marriages they hate for his pleasure.)

• “Female promiscuity destroys pair bonding.” (Male Promiscuity literally does the same thing. It’s not gendered)

• “Women want traditional men while refusing to be traditional women.” (70% of all Americans do not make enough to put one spouse at home full time. But women still do the majority of the household labor.)

Now leads to men in comment sections like this:

Fun fact: The leading cause of death in pregnant women is H O M I C I D E. Men have it rough because a woman wanted a taller man with more money. Women wanted to exist on the street where Elliot Roger took their lives for literally… just existing. Do cry me a river.

I couldn’t help but notice the same influencer games that I had learned during the J6 fundraiser days, were now being courted by mega-conservative commentators. The Sex-Trafficking Tates were getting a right-wing celebrity tour. No pushback. Enrique Tarrio, who once I had seen as an unfairly maligned figurehead (when in reality, he was just the spokesperson of some clout-adjacent street fights… quite literally), was having his boots licked by Myron Gaines. Myron. Fucking. Gaines. Say you’re desperate for the clout you used to have, without saying it, Retardio. Steven Crowder was crashing out at his very pregnant wife like a Hollywood starlet who didn’t get her Starbucks delivered on time. Content? Yes. Major pushback from the men on the right? Not really. Andrew I-can’t-open-a-pickle-jar Wilson was crashing out at a lesbian for accurately pointing out that his own wife is a shining example of his feckless hypocrisy. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Is this really the endgame of the conservative idealism? It’s not the way I understood the party, and it’s not the way I understood the gender roles I was raised with. My mother was always praised and respected for her audacity in a board room, her intelligence and sharp tongue, and her integrity as an employer. She went from simply collections to running the entire family business. She was just plain good at it. My father never stopped being the man of the house just because she was the main driver of the business. There was no ‘cucking’ happening in my household, despite the ‘gender roles’ being somewhat abnormal.

Perhaps that coexistence of common decency actually sheltered me from what millions of women already experienced: there is a very real underbelly of men in this world who consider women to be inferior and our existence to be solely for their benefit, and they have been getting louder and louder, in the past decade.

We use words like ‘Patriarchy’ and ‘Equality’ to tackle these issues, but I think under it all is a much easier sentiment that actually cuts at the core of what we really want:

Dignity.

If being a good “conservative” woman means my entire existence taking the backseat for a man, because he’s deemed it his destiny to lord over me and never to truly consider me his partner —I’ll die alone, gladly.

How hard is it to see your partner as a living, breathing, person, and behave accordingly?

The Death of Partisanship and the Rebirth of Nuance

Somewhere in this tired masquerade of wannabe Kings and Kingmakers, I tired of the bullshit. If this cloak-and-dagger game of team sports is all that this party has to offer me, then no thank you.

I want off this train at the very next exit.

I don’t want to be forced to disassociate myself with views I don’t hold anymore. I don’t want to be associated with the men who ban their daughters from going to college anymore. I don’t want to rub elbows with men who believe a woman’s body count is paramount but their own is of no consequence. I don’t want to have to fight for my own personhood in a room because the party I subscribe to is filled with arrogant douche canoes hiding behind God to justify their power grabs and inferiority complexes.

Both sides are guilty of groupthink… but I’m not lumped in with the lefty delusions. I got lumped in with the people who think aliens are actually demons and that Joe Biden is a clone. I’d like to not have to answer for beliefs I don’t have just because someone with a bigger following says hateful things on a rumble stream and occasionally helps my organization rake in donations.

Immediately following this decision to become politically homeless, I feel insanely free. It’s not like I’m abandoning myself or my values outright, but I am abandoning the dichotomy that forces me to subconsciously look at things in an us vs. them lens, or worse… running every idea through whether or not it will be accepted by those my voting records align with.

That’s obnoxious, and it’s anti-efficiency.

So in Memoriam…

I don’t regret being a Trump voter, and based on the idea of voting anti-establishment I don’t think any lefty reading this is going to convince me I was aligned with LITERALLY HITLER. The reactionary world we live in now isn’t exclusively Red or Blue. I simply refuse any longer to be lumped in with and forced to defend beliefs that I don’t have to serve a herd mentality of people that made hating each other a primary aspect of their personality, and their livelihoods.

That’s a bleak reality to live in, so I’m stepping off course.

Catch y’all on the flip. Peace.

The Adams County Sheriff
kicked down my door then I heard the glass break.
They found no kidnapping victims,
Just some lemon pound cake.
Momma’s lemon pound cake; it takes so nice.
Made the sheriff wanna put down his gun and cut him a slice.
of what?
of what?

—Lemon Pound Cake, Afroman

I know I’m a little late to this party, but I wanted to go back to reexamine something about this story that I may have missed the first time.

When members of the public and members of law enforcement find themselves on opposing sides of a conflict, especially if those parties are also divided by race, conflicts have a tendency of spiraling out of control.

So when the Adams County Sheriff’s raided the home of our Millennial-Beloved Afroman of Winchester, Ohio we could have had rioting in the streets.

We could have had the same playbooks as before — death, destruction, Jake Lang’s awkward pretty-princess high kicks and mistaking a rust stain on the wrong side of the field for ‘blood stains’ so he can stoke racial fires and draw attention away from the victim’s family in order to enrich himself.

No… I’m not kidding…

But with the Afroman trial, we got something hilariously refreshing.

Music, conversation starters, well-documented evidence of wrongdoing and a hilarious sense of community that overcame the standard barriers and galvanized the public to pay attention to what actually mattered… the actual injustices committed by a corrupt and incompetent police department.

Not to mention… the story is deliciously petty.

“Officer Pound Cake” and the Adams County Sheriff’s Department

Before we jump into Officer Pound Cake becoming the most unwilling pastry-based antagonist in modern hip-hop history, we need to talk about how this thing actually unfolded.

On August 21, 2022, the Adams County Sheriff’s Department raided the Winchester, Ohio home of Joseph Foreman, better known to us Elder Millennials as Afroman.

Their warrant had been tied to erroneous suspicions of drug trafficking and kidnapping. But when the smoke of the raid had cleared, they encountered a huge problem… there were no kidnapping victims, no criminal charges, and no grand criminal empire hiding behind the private citizen’s now kicked-down door. What Afroman now did have was an unsecured residence, damage to his gate, seized cash that came back $400 short, a family shaken, and surveillance footage of deputies wandering through his home like the Three Stooges had staged a family reunion inside his residence… until they found a way to cut his security cameras. Well, kinda even then (if you’ve seen the footage.)

Afroman’s relationship with the Adams County Sheriff’s Office was not exactly sparkling before this incident. Following a previous burglary at his home, Afroman consistently checked in with the county for updates, but the sheriff’s department eventually threatened him with arrests and told him they did not have time to keep updating him on the issue. This by no means was a one-off misunderstanding.

Adams County law enforcement has had its share of ugly headlines. Former chief deputy, Jeff McCarty, pled guilty in 2015 after admitting he gave a 15-year-old girl Ambien before performing a sexual act on her. He had worked for the sheriff’s office for roughly 26 years and had held multiple ranks.

James Stokes Sr., a former police officer in both Seaman, Ohio, and in Adams County, pled no contest in 2024 to theft in office and unauthorized use of a law-enforcement database. Bodycam footage caught him threatening to use his position as an officer to file criminal charges against another man if he did not comply with Stokes’s demands that the citizen perform a sex act with the officer. (Side note, what is going ON in Adams County?!)

The raid against Afroman resulted in more than $20,000 in damage to his property, and $400 missing of the $5,000 confiscated. All the man wanted was the damage repaired, or to be compensated for the trouble. He wanted the theft addressed… both of them.

When public officials illegitimately use state power against private citizens, Those citizens are allowed to talk about it. One might say, they’re obligated to shout about it.

This man did not just talk about it.

He slapped a beat on it.

Won’t fix my door? Fine, I’ll make you famous.

The best part of this story is that all of this could have been avoided if the police department had just fixed his damn door.

After the raid, when Afroman asked about repairs, the sheriff’s office laughed him off and refused responsibility for the damage. “The guy started laughing... and said we’re not required to do that. They were unapologetic.” FOX19 also reported that Afroman filed a countersuit for damage to his home, and the case was dismissed.

So Afroman did what he does for a living.

He wrote songs.

In December 2022, he released videos made largely from his own home security footage of the raid. “Will You Help Me Repair My Door?” came first as the most direct version of his complaints. No metaphor. No activist language. Just the simple question he had already asked the department, now set to music for the internet to perhaps come in clutch to save the day.

Then came the big one… the “Lemon Pound Cake.”

This was the single that turned the story from local dispute into a full-blown public own of historic precedent. The trolling of people in traditional positions of authority was a relatable cry against systems that are supposed to protect the innocent and hold the guilty to account.

With a little bit of editing and a steaming pile of petty, Afroman had immortalized the corruption and bleached out the stain with daylight.

The videos climbed into the millions of views. The guilty officers were no longer just names on a warrant or bodies moving through grainy security footage. They became characters in the very story they helped create.

So he kept going.

The songs branched out from the department to single out particular guilty parties from the raid. Public reaction turned into merch. Merch that folded the entire raid back into itself: the door, the pound cake, the missing cash, the absurdity of it all.

The money made from the Lemon Pound Cake project was meant to help cover the damage from the raid.

But the deputies sued him.

On March 14, 2023, seven Adams County deputies filed a lawsuit claiming Afroman’s videos, posts, songs, and merchandise caused them humiliation, ridicule, mental distress, embarrassment, and damage to their reputations. They sought nearly 4 MILLON dollars in damages.

The raid was no longer just about what happened inside Afroman’s house. It became a fight to determine accountability.

The trial arrived in March 2026, almost four years after the raid. By then, the songs had already done what they were designed to do. They had immortalized the injustice. They had made the raid searchable, watchable, singable, and worst of all… relatable.

And when the case finally went to a jury, the deputies lost.

The jury ruled in Afroman’s favor on all counts.

The Afro that was mightier than the Molotov

I’m a Texas girl. You know what they say. (Can take the girl outta Texas, can’t take frizzy hair outta the girl, or something like that, I digress.)

In 2020, it was all the rage to pledge your commitment to not being racist by covering your door in lamb’s blood, posting a black square on the historically essential corporation that almost single-handedly ended racism in America, Instagram.

If you failed to participate in the nationwide piece of performance art, God would take your firstborn child, you were all but proclaiming yourself a Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan by power of omission from posting said black square. (Fun Fact: The KKK’s titles sound like a rip-off from a bad Tolkien novel knock-off. The more you know.)

Well, I failed the black square performative outrage test. And I had a then friend message me to let me know that due to said failure to post a square, he would be terminating our friendship —effective immediately.

And then we watched separately as our country burned.

KB Balla, a Black man and firefighter in Minneapolis, spent his life savings building Scores Sports Bar. When the riots came through, the business he built was destroyed before it even had a chance to live.

Wes Williams, a Black man who owns a restaurant in Dallas, had his BurgerIM restaurant vandalized during the unrest. He told CNBC he understood why people were angry, but he was still the one sweeping up glass from the floor of his own business. His storefront became collateral damage in a movement that claimed to be defending people who share his race and cultural experiences… but they didn’t seem to show up to the cleanup crews.

That friend eventually came back, apologized to me for terminating our friendship, and things went back to normal.

But I couldn’t help but notice how easily that conflict turned into a racial fracture within the entire nation that moved us away from the core issue.

Afroman did something different.

He did not burn down the argument by proxy violence. He simply made the argument impossible to ignore. He took his humiliation and flipped the script on them. He made the public laugh, but he did not make them look away. The jokes forced them to look closer.

That is the power of parody when it’s done right.

The Afroman trial did not demand the public post in solidarity, memorize a slogan, or pick a side in the endless cable-news food fight. He gave them a specific story with receipts. He made songs to make up the costs. They sued him to stifle his voice... which only made it bigger. Then he prevailed.

People rallied around him because the story had something rare in modern America: joy.

It is easy to say destruction is the language of the unheard until the unheard are standing in front of their own destroyed business, holding a broom, wondering why their life’s work had to become punctuation in somebody else’s rage.

A brick gives your enemy fuel.

A laugh gives your allies unity.

Maybe, if someone had been shot in the midst of the raid, we’d be looking at a different story, but I think the point stands: If you really want to unseat evil from its throne—

Mock it relentlessly.

P.S. Hey Jake, can you spot the difference?

Sometimes I thank God for unanswered prayers
Remember when you're talkin' to the man upstairs
That just because he doesn't answer doesn't mean he don't care
Some of God's greatest gifts are unanswered prayers.

—Song Title, Artist Name

There’s a rule in the manifestation community that gets overlooked by the ‘gurus’ who are making more money from the grift. Those folks like to use shaming tactics and blame games to tell their clients that it’s the customer’s fault for not believing in their own delulu’s enough, or for sure their $350 ‘trust-me-bro’ course would have worked.

The coaches who seem more invested never seem to forget to mention this rule though.

The rule of —

This, or something better.

And you know, it’s funny, when I started my journey into the ‘Manifestation’ space of the internet, I was going through some major internal denials… so I didn’t want ‘something better’; I wanted the specific thing I wanted. Things that were so far out of my reach that I decided to try anything to change them into something better.

The idea that I could just will it into reality? Very attractive.

Seductive, even.

But the truth is that I was projecting more than I was attracting, and while I eventually moved away from it in my life, one story always remained.

That damn little rubber duck.

Testing the Universe

There was a time in the last three years I was working almost 6 days a week at a local small business part-time and working at a second job for a startup legal advocacy around the clock for the rest of my waking hours. All the while wishing that the people I had aligned with and had turned out to be who they pretended to be on their podcasts. That the ‘friends’ I had made were capable of being friends. That the ‘muh-patriots’ around me were actually… patriotic and not playing the most cringe game of Republican Mad Libs I had ever seen.

But I was sick of not being able to afford things, I was tired of scraping out the next payroll and having little to no say in the branding my name was tied to. So one night, after a disappointing therapy session and while perusing job listings, I took a break and found myself looking for something mildly entertaining but not too dense on the Youtube’s. What I found was a video about testing the universe to manifest what you want.

In it, you can pick something to focus on, a drum… or a rubber duck.

Well, you all already know which I picked.

The goal was to imagine the duck, pick it up, hear it squeak, feel it in your hands, all five senses, and then to put it down, and stop thinking about it. Not obsess over it, not worry about it, just know it was coming in your near future.

So I did. And I went about my business.

The next week I took a call during one of my shifts and set up an interview with what seemed like a potentially great job. Hybrid remote work, more money than the job I used to have. I was excited at the prospect. But still… somewhere in me… terrified that I would never get out of this rut.

The interview came and went, and it felt like I nailed it. I was a great interviewer in general, so that wasn’t much of an issue for me.

But something was nagging in the back of my brain saying: “What if they never call me back?” “What if this is the rest of my life?” “What if taking this legal advocate job ruined my chance to try any other job again?”

My self-confidence was shot, in general. Lower than it ever had been before.

So when they called me back to say ‘No dice, no job. But let me ask this other department,’ I did something that surprised even me.

I kept the faith.

And without knowing it, that actually proved something far greater to me in the end.

Passing the Test

They’d offered me a chance in another department that I was much more suited to, so I put on my best blazer, and I submitted to the interview processes for that job.

This was a much better match. The first interview went stellar, with the best boss I had ever had in corporate America. The first two rounds went well, so they brought me in for round 3.

Walking into the building, I felt great. I was great at interviewing, I knew that. I was incredibly qualified for the job, I knew that. I had asked for less than I was worth to them, without knowing it at the time, another advantage in my stead.

Then it happened. The Rubber Ducky.

Somewhere during the lull of the aftermath of a good interview, one of the managers started making small talk.

The girls in the office had a fairly tight-knit group, and they were planning a cruise vacation. She was discussing the little hand-crafted toys they’d personalized for the kids on the cruise… and one of them was? You guessed it.

A little pink rubber duck.

And wouldn’t you know it?

I got the job.

Failing the Test

Now, comfort is a helluva drug. After moving out of the house I had been in, getting acclimated to a new roommate, whom I liked a lot. Falling into new routines. I hadn’t done any fundamental changes… I fell right back into my old patterns.

Lazy habits, chasing toxic connections, spending the weekends tied to the same barstool because that’s the place my then-friends frequented.

The toxic connections surrounded themselves with people who echoed the voices in my head that hadn’t changed.

I picked up my old denialism, asked the Tarot cards for clarity… didn’t like the answer. Spiraled. Did it all again. Lather, rinse, repeat.

I got lazy in my dream job, and simple mistakes have a way of racking up.

Eventually I made the $20,000 mistake that cost me my job, and the company a bit of face.

I can’t blame them, I would have done the same thing.

So I got my old part-time job back for a tiny spell, did what I could, moved back to the old place, the old roommate. But I kept pursuing the things that I loved anyway.

And that’s when I learned a hell of a lot.

Now I’m in the gym 3 to 4 days a week. I’m meal prepping more. I have a side business that’s fully ready for business. I’ve been posting on this Substack consistently.

I’m falling in love with being myself again.

Testing Myself Again

At this stage in my life I believe that the universe/God, whatever you’d like to call it, does in fact know best. Just because He/it doesn’t give you what you THINK you want, doesn’t mean that you’re not going to be blissfully happy and taken care of.

Stay loose and flow with the world around you, and watch things you scrambled for… start falling right into your lap.

For example… there’s a man I’m manifesting right now, I don’t know if he’s who I think he is… or someone even better. But I know the feeling when I’m connected to a real energy outside myself, and when I’m just playing a fantasy in my own head.

When I do my little readings, I know that the energy I’m getting isn’t coming from me. That’s my little litmus test. But here’s the something better:

If this is, in fact, the person that’s been in my dreams, casually, then I know/I feel there are things in my life currently that would make that relationship much harder to have and to hold, so… it’s motivating me to upgrade my life. My work ethic. My career. My ambitions. My habits. All of the me I’ve always wanted to be, and struggled to keep.

If it’s him, then by the divine timing of whenever we meet in the real world, I will be much closer to that version of myself than the me I am alone.

If it’s not, then I will have developed the skills and discipline I need to be the me I’ve always wanted to be. And that’s what ‘manifestation’ is supposed to be about in the first place. Your energy, amplified.

Stick with me to see if I’m right in the end.

Now Paul is a real estate novelist
Who never had time for a wife
And he’s talking with Davy, who’s still in the Navy
And probably will be for life

And the waitress is practicing politics
As the businessmen slowly get stoned
Yes, they’re sharing a drink they call “Loneliness”
But it’s better than drinking alone

—The Piano Man, Billy Joel

The single most important mechanism any writer can have in their arsenal, is tension.

It’s the greatest mechanism that determines if your work is going to litter a shelf in aesthetics or if it’s going to be something your readers can’t bear to put down.

Nobody buys a book because the prose in the intro is pretty, though it can help. They buy because something grabs onto them and doesn’t let go. Tension is the vehicle that turns your inner fantasy world from a thought, into a sale. Questions, risk, a sense that something is about to go wrong, or right, and until we know what, it’s the sticky part of the story that makes the reader stick around.

If there’s no built in tension, a reader has no reason to stay. No urgency, no curiosity, no pull. They can put it down and never think about it again.

But when tension is working, a reader leans in. They turn the page. They finish the chapter. And another, until they’re forced come back tomorrow. And that’s what actually converts into reads, follows, and yes, sales.

Taylor Sheridan is a master at this, even though his follow through is sometimes more metaphor than foreshadowing. Yellowstone begins with a nasty car crash. We don’t see that crash, but we see John Dutton waking with blood on his face. We survey the lay of the land as he hops out of his truck, the horse trailer on its side, and notice the driver of the 18-wheeler dead and bloodied against his own steering wheel. The compound fracture of the poor horse standing in the wreckage of the trailer tells us what’s about to happen next, at least if you were raised in the country. We can feel John’s despondency; the icy mix of grief, overwhelm, and apathy as he walks over to the horse and sneaks his revolver under the animals chin... and pulls that trigger.

It’s a strong hook, the new world of consumerism colliding, literally, with the old rustic world of the cowboy, the land, and the conflict of “who gets to own what’s left of us?” But you don’t have the details yet, and the details are what keep you hanging on.

That’s what good tension does, it creates the stakes that ask the reader to invest in your work long enough to keep picking the book up, and putting an algorithm down.

What I am judging in these competitions is not the genre, the trope, or “who’s the best writer” —that’s a matter of taste. What I am judging is who created the strongest experience of tension that kept me moving to the end of the prologue, chapter, or end of the prose.

I have chosen three criterion by which to judge, and will put each work to the test.

By the end I will score all entries on this rubric, plus pick a personal favorite and give my reasons for such.

Criteria #1: Clarity of Stakes (10/10)

Stakes are pretty much the most important gear in any story’s engine. They don’t have to be life or death, but they need to be high enough for us to care about the story. In the movie Sex Drive, the stakes are: Will Rex realize the GTO is missing, and what happens then? Is Ms. Tasty real? Will Ian and Felica ever freaking GET TOGETHER? They’re not as big as ‘Who will sit the iron throne?’ But all that matters is that we understand: These are the stakes.

So the judging criterion is:

Do we understand what’s at risk? Do we feel the consequences, or do we just hear about them?

If the reader doesn’t understand what matters, tension can’t exist. If your reader doesn’t care about the plight of your characters, it makes it harder to convince the reader to stay and finish your work.

A Girl on Lily Street - Clarity of Stakes

This is an interesting piece to judge because the clarity of the stakes here is quite multifaceted. Without spoiling the plot, the first impression I had of Malika and her story was a very domestic one. I’m personally a life-and-death, heaven-or-hell, rock-n-roll, kinda girlie, so domestic settings usually aren’t my gig, but first impressions can be deceiving, and this was one of those times.

The full stakes are not set up at the beginning, but rather as the story is told, which if well handled is the best way to tell a story, in my opinion. It’s also something best-selling authors give advice to do.

But there is a bit of a gap between the TRUE nature of the stakes that are revealed by the end and the premise of the world building done through Malika’s eyes that undercut the reality of her world vs. the tomorrow in her head. In her world, then frustration and fear of losing her sister and best friend to a world outside of the slums is the biggest conflict. And not making it to the wedding on time becomes her biggest concern. And ours, by proxy.

What we don’t really understand is the capacity for violence that exists between the classes at the start of the piece. Nor do we really understand what’s so special, or so dangerous, about Malika’s medical history by the end of the piece. Both of these things could have been handled with a one liner at the start of the opening that could set up the juxtaposition between this likable teenage girl who’s biggest concerns are domestic, in a world with massive worldly concerns. That would embed us deeper into her world without dissolving her voice in any way and allow us, the reader, to feel a deeper, richer version of what she’s trying to accomplish against the backdrop of what she has no idea that she’s even up against.

The piece is fraught with delicious tension, despite my critique, do not be mistaken. The entire piece is almost a total exercise in writing tension. Jason does a wonderful job of the pacing and excitement, but clarity establishing could probably go a bit further, almost to make the classist violence feel like background noise, until she’s up against it herself.

The more interesting part of this piece was that something huge had happened to her before we see her relating to her health and the very classist system that becomes the crux of her every conflict. But unfortunately, we don’t find out by the end of the piece what quite happened with any of that. Not enough to understand how it is impacting her present.

Verdict: Clarity Score = 7/10

Her - Clarity of Stakes

This is a more mysterious piece, so the stakes weren’t 100% clear at the beginning, which is totally normal for a paranormal/horror short. They became increasingly clear as I read further into the piece, which is a format I enjoyed. I wasn’t sure quite how much darkness we were going to get with the piece by the title image, the words got to paint that for me, which I appreciated.

It felt pretty clear that the stakes related in some way to life and death, but for who... I couldn’t determine. Did they kill someone tonight? A lot of tonight’s ago? Was someone coming for them? I wasn’t sure. But that lack of clarity felt very deliberate. Which makes it a +1, instead of a negative. If you are withholding something from your audience, it should feel deliberate, not like an oversight.

We realize soon enough that whatever is happening to them, could cost them their own lives, but we also later find out that they are also surrounded by others inside the confines of the study where this is set. However, the stakes surrounding the premise of the piece and the ‘who is stalking who, and why?’ of the piece, is undercut by leaving out the fact that there is a part happening within the same house until halfway through. The idea of ‘will there be collateral damage or not?’ would have been better suited by letting us know they were stowing away from the group, rather than making the study feel as secluded and lonesome as it did in the first half. Still, the clarity of the stakes that mattered were handled with great care, so my verdict is:

Verdict: Clarity Score = 8/10

Before the End - Clarity of Stakes

Stakes here were immediately high. Grave robbing wasn’t ever explicitly stated and WHAT they were there to take wasn’t immediate to the reader, but I like that, taking a little work to translate is nice, if done well. But sometimes making the reader ask too many questions about who your characters are, or what they are can be a difficult thing. I had incentive to finish all the entries for sake of this contest, but not all readers want to have to decode the first page for a clean foot hold before they will be willing to turn the next page.

What I did know was, the three women were up to something taboo and getting caught meant consequences I couldn’t determine yet, but certainly nothing good. However, this is a prologue, not a one-shot, so the scoring should assume that the rest of the story will explain to a reader things the prologue leaves out.

A prologue is simply a controlled glimpse into the rest of the story, a piece of something the reader gets before the main character has to solve the mystery of it. And without having read the rest of the story, I have to adjust my own taste for balance in clarity against the evidence that the author intentionally used vague language to make me work for the answers in the prologue, so I won’t punish it for that.

Verdict: Clarity Score = 9/10

The Fight - Clarity of Stakes

Stakes immediately high. Life/death situation in a medieval space on a path frequented by bandits. Short piece, very little notes on the stakes. Well staged.

Verdict: Clarity Score = 10/10

Criteria #2: Escalation (10/10)

Escalation is what keeps that tension from stalling out. Sometimes as a writer, you’ll have the larger stakes in mind before the reader ever really understands everything. You don’t have to spoon feed them every detail, but we just need to understand where we’re going and then start moving.

You can have perfectly wonderful stakes, but if nothing changes, nothing gets worse, or tighter, or more complicated, even if it happens in baby steps —the intrigue dies on the page.

It doesn’t have to move fast. Things don’t have to be explosive. But it does have to move.

So the judging criterion here is:

Does the tension build over time, whether fast or slow? Do the risks or complications increase, or does the piece plateau?

If the pressure stays the same from beginning to end, the reader will feel it.

Escalation is what turns a tense moment into something that actually carries you through the story.

A Girl on Lily Street - Escalation

The escalation gets on a fast track from the moment Malika leaves her bedroom, and doesn’t stop until the explosive ending. Jason throws a lot of information at you, but he does so in ways that world-builds, and relationship-builds, set to the backdrop of a literal timer that’s ticking down the seconds, minutes, until Malika may miss the chance to see her sister off forever. And he doesn’t let up on her journey from home slum to wedding venue. Sometimes the pieces and the structure of those moving parts collide in ways that seem more the result of new storyteller over deliberate choice in pacing, but the parts are all there. The escalation reveals how much heart Jason gives his characters and his world. You feel what Malika feels in a vibrant way that makes you root for her, no matter what she’s up against.

Verdict: Escalation Score = 9/10

Her - Escalation

The stakes seem to rise as part of the escalation. The conversation is what drives the mystery forward, and moves us to the big reveal. While I loved the idea of the layers of the mystery being peeled back line for line to reveal more about what was happening as we moved forward. Some of it, for me, felt a bit more like ‘Oh, and I forgot to mention’ instead of ‘Oh, and did I mention?’ The structure of the piece was beautifully thought out, but maybe too thought out. The problem with being too cerebral as an artist is sometimes you forget to walk yourself back through how a reader needs to feel to take the journey you’re hoping they will take. I think due to the lack of extra context within the set up of the stakes, the escalation became a bit muddled, rather than letting the stage be set originally and then escalate from there with the strategy of the dialogue allowing each beat to move appropriately from place to place. The prey v. predator reveal still slots nicely, but having to sort of re-rack the stakes at the midway point undercut what would have been a beautiful escalation of investment that may have left me with more compassion for the men caught in ‘Her’ snare, who were trying to climb back out.

Verdict: Escalation Score = 7/10

Before the End - Escalation

The tonality here was just right. Bellissima. While I had to work a little to understand what exactly was going on or what the girls were doing in the graveyard, the escalation of each tidbit of information was handled very deliberately, and that allowed me to get my bearings quickly to understand what I was seeing. I’m not a fan of being spoon fed the answers right away, so I enjoyed the quick pacing and simplistic silhouette painting that allowed me to discern character differences in age, knowledge, and attitude without unnecessary exposition. Getting almost caught and returning to the scene of the ‘crime’ at a safer distance made for a perfect cliffhanger to the prologue.

Verdict: Escalation Score = 10/10

The Fight - Escalation

The escalation happens quick and fast here, kind of like a fight. It’s a short piece, so I have short notes. The fight itself comes expected, maybe a little too expected. For such a short burst of energy in a piece such as this, I don’t expect the fight to be choreographed like its Black Widow in a Marvel movie, but I need a bit of direction, even within the rough tumbles and quick rolls so that I can keep up with what skill level I’m dealing with based on the characters who are engaged in battle. However, that’s a minor note within a piece that reads like a bit of fantasy haiku. For a short hook-punch, The Fight still packs one. (Ba dum tss!)

Verdict: Escalation Score = 8/10

Criteria #3: Reader Investment (15/15)

The stakes should set the stage, the escalation should determine a readers investment over time.

So the judging criterion is:

Does the piece make the reader care about the outcome? Does the perspective create closeness, distance, or intentional detachment?

Because tension isn’t just something you understand.

It’s something you feel.

A Girl on Lily Street - Investment

Malika’s POV sits in a close third person that pulls you directly into her experience. The emotional tension between the sisters lands hard because you feel both the desire for resolution and the distance that’s keeping it out of reach. You feel the love that Malika’s sister has for her younger sibling, and you feel both Malika’s resentment and yearning, without much effort. Malika’s sassy nature makes her an easy protagonist to root for, and her fiery strength makes her fun to watch, so to speak. So as she races through the streets, I found myself invested with every step as to whether or not she got what she wanted.

Verdict: Investment Score = 15/15 (31)

Her - Investment

Her creates an interesting inversion—the emotional pull leans toward the antagonist. That makes it compelling, but also creates distance from the central perspective, which can make it harder to fully anchor the tension.

I felt more that I was observing their emotions, rather than feeling their fear. It may have just been the idea of guilt within them that made me less invested in their plight, and that may have been by design. But I’m not sure which it is by the end of the piece. So while it captured my intrigue, I cannot say I was emotionally invested in the well being of the characters. Some regret or remorse that was a bit altruistic for the lives in the study that their mistakes may have put into danger would have gone a long way to making them a little more likable, or at least understandable, and that would have made me more concerned for them by the end.

I’m going to give +1 point because I actually very much enjoyed the ending, despite any notes I’ve given until now.

Verdict: Investment Score = 12/15 (27)

Before the End - Investment

Before the End takes a more hands-off approach. The lens is further back, but it works because the escalation and structure carry the tension even without deep interiority.

Mystery and scarcity are what plague this prologue —but again, by design.

I found myself less emotionally invested than intellectually invested, but by the twist at the end, I was feeling the curiosity more than thinking about it, and that’s what matters here.

The farther lens made it harder to understand what I was ‘seeing’ and a little harder to connect, but overall for a prologue it achieved what it needed to. And made me want to keep going.

Verdict: Investment Score = 13/15 (32)

The Fight - Investment

The Fight stays tight and immediate. The stakes are clear and physical, and the proximity keeps you locked into the moment.

The reveal at the end really switched the moment from feeling like a tense conflict, to a relieved one. But even relief has its place in tension writing. And I immediately felt the chemistry between sparring partners. I wanted to know who he was, and where he’d come from.

Verdict: Investment Score = 12/15 (30)

Winners!

Highest Score: Before the End.

Personal Favorite: A Girl on Lily Street.

All entries were incredible here. Some had a much better handle on clean, classic prose than my pick for favorite, and would have probably passed a publisher’s test much easier at a first glance, but it’s hard for me as a reader to dismiss a work that brings me to tears three times before I’m done reading.

Different pieces succeeded in different ways—but the ones that stood out were the ones that made me understand the stakes, feel them escalate, and stay emotionally engaged all the way through.

Thank you so much for letting me read your work! If you want to join the next challenge, join my chat below!

Darlin’, I'm gonna love you forever, forever and ever, amen
As long as old men sit and talk about the weather
As long as old women sit and talk about old men

If you wonder how long I'll be faithful
well, just listen to how this song ends
I'm gonna love you forever and ever, forever and ever, amen.

—Forever And Ever Amen, Randy Travis

The hardest thing to accept for the human psyche is the idea that plenty of human beings go for an Eternity never actually getting the lifestyle or the many things they believe they want most.

Family. Money. Career. Health. Body. Love.

We fill up a Pinterest Board with all the fantasy ideals of the lives we would love to have. We compare ourselves to the influencers on our timelines who are paid to sell us the lie of a glamorous, beautiful, free life in order to move merch and ad space.

We build entire internal worlds around what happiness is supposed to look like, and then we quietly torture ourselves when our real life refuses to resemble the brochure.

Love may be the worst offender of all.

Eternal Love (and the lies we tell)

Hollywood and the literature industry makes a crap pot of money every year selling us toxic romance tropes repackaged as ‘True Love.’ Eternity is a rare breath of fresh air that challenges those tropes in a sweet, funny, and beautiful film asking a nuanced question in a very charming, real, and human way.

When we fantasize about love, we really never stop to think about the ugly in between. We think of a heated reunion. Of spark. The one who got away. Love at first sight. The one soul who could have made life a fairy tale, if only life had gotten with the damn program.

That is the playbook Eternity based its rules within.

(NOTE: Spoilers ahead.)

The movie opens on Joan and Larry, a long-married couple bickering like Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau on their way to a family gender-reveal baby shower. Joan, even in her elder age, displays a characteristic charm and joyous, bright energy. Larry retains a grumpy, pragmatic, yet equally charming, demeanor that plays well to their combined dynamic. Amidst the chaos of the celebration, Larry suffers a heart attack, and is the first of our known characters to wind up in Eternity. In this version of Eternity, the soul enters a kind of curated afterlife where people arrive as they looked at the point in life when they felt most fully happy. Once there, a soul has 7 days to choose their eternal existence. And like marriage, the choice within this story matters, a lot. Once you are committed —that’s it. No divorces. No second chances. No hopping between worlds. There is NO changing your mind later because fantasy tugged at your heartstrings and talked you into something frivolous… forever. Try to violate that choice, and you are hunted down and thrown into the abyss. Alone. Forever.

So, for the next 7 days, Larry finds himself tasked with the chore of picking only one of these eternities to live within for good. Unsure of what he wants, Larry chooses to stall as long as he can waiting for his wife, Joan, to pass on in her own life and join him, so they can spend eternity together. She’s his life partner after all, that’s only natural. But once his 7 days are up, he’s forced to choose, and Larry is already halfway down the escalator to a train station that will take him into his new life when he finally spots her, Joan, the love of his life, wandering up towards the lobby of Eternity just the way he did 7 days ago, disoriented and confused. Larry rushes to Joan’s side, excited to finally have some direction in this strange new place and the comfort of his life partner to venture into their chosen eternity.

But what good is a rom-com without any conflict?

Waiting for both of them at the entrance to the lobby, is Joan’s first husband, Luke, the first man to ever steal her young heart who died serving his country in war, taking their promising future love with him; a man who has now spent 67 YEARS waiting for HIS love to come home.

Now the question becomes unbearable.

Who gets to be home?

Now —this is where the fun, really begins.

Joan is granted special permissions from the powers-that-be to sample two eternities, one with the love life stole from her, and one with the love she built with her bare hands.

First up, we have Luke.

Luke is the man embodying the white-picket-fence fairy tale. The soldier. The knight in shining armor. The one who defends her honor, builds her a home. Waits for her, no matter what life throws at him. Literally.

Luke is handsome, tall, warm, masculine, traditional, chivalrous, thoughtful, and tragic. The film does not make the mistake of making him perfect, but he is the unfinished song, and Joan is the focal point of everything he wanted from the life that life stole from him, too. Theirs is the ideal of a true-and-great-love preserved forever behind the clouds of grief. Luke wears the scars openly of the life he was not permitted to live long enough to become irritating in the boring ways seeded by the routines of domestic life, but the film allows him to show that resentment, and allows the viewer to root for his resolution through his pain. Luke did not live long enough to disappoint her through routine, fatigue, bad moods, grief, bills, aging, or the thousand tiny abrasions that come with actually staying alive beside another person. And that’s not fair. So, the cruel irony is that he got to exist in Joan’s memory as something almost sacred, because reality never got the chance to wear off the shine. And we get to watch as he attempts to court his first love all over again, so that he might give her in death, what he wasn’t permitted to give her in life.

And then there’s Larry.

Larry is awkward. Mentally and emotionally clumsy. He bickers, especially with himself. He’s fussy. Yet there is an easy-to-love charm, even in his flaws. Larry complains about the world’s lack of pragmatism, often, and he is prickly in that very believable way men are when their tenderness has to fight its way through habit, stress, age, pride, bad timing, and not enough resources. He tries, in a very cute number of ways. He fails. Larry is grumpy. Anxious. He is not poetic but he is romantic. There is a sweetness buried under all of that practical irritation, and the movie lets us feel it in every step of Larry’s journey, whether or not Joan is there beside him. He is not a polished romance-novel stand-in. He’s not anyone’s knight-in-shining armor. He is just a simple man shaped by repetition, compromise, and a life of trials and errors. His advantage is that he knows Joan in all the unglamorous ways that only time allows. His weakness is that his every attempt to hold onto the love that domestication was allowed to invade, puts him another step behind Luke’s fantasy idealism.

When the sample trips are finished, and Joan cannot bear to choose between them, she initially tries to choose neither. To step away from both, rather than become the shade that hurts one of the men she loved forever. But… it’s about then that Larry notices something devastating. Joan arrived with the answer right in front of her. She arrived in Eternity as the younger version of herself, the version of her that belonged to Luke. Larry sees this implication before anyone else. So he does the most painful thing a person can do for someone they truly love.

Larry lets her go.

Sounds romantic, right?

But that’s not the full story…

The Stories in Our Heads (and the lies we tell)

Most people spend entire lives chasing or yearning for an ideal-love that is built from exactly that kind of fantasy. The first love waiting for you across the veil. The one your heart knew you always wanted, even if the rest of you tried to forget.

A lot of romantic fiction leans on this for a damn good reason. Hell, most of the lovers in smut writing follow these tropes to a T, because emotionally… they are convenient. It gives us concentrated doses of devotion, longing, chemistry, beauty, and destiny without forcing us to sit through the trying labor of maintaining any of it.

Once Joan follows the fairy tale, at Larry’s insistence, something inside her begins to thin rather than deepen. The satisfaction they both thought would consume her… never arrives. The hunger she thought this choice would satisfy gets worse under her skin. Again and again, she finds herself wandering back to the Archives, a feature of all eternities that lets one revisit the most potent memories of their lives. It functions as both a living museum and sort-of movie theatre. A place to revisit memories. Highlights. Fragments. Moments. During their sample trip, we got to see Joan and Luke’s love story as they had lived it. But now that she’s living in eternity with her first love, she returns to the Archives over and over again, alone.

Because she’s finding out the hard way that the idea of true love is emotionally safe. Real love is messy and hard.

Fantasy gets endless orgasms and emotional satisfaction. Real love has to wake up exhausted, pay bills, survive mood swings, screaming babies, illness, aging, compromise, the boring Tuesday where you’re both in a shitty mood for no particular reason, the life spells that feel like they’re tearing you apart by circumstance alone.

That is where Eternity turns from another Hollywood bad-take into a genuinely loving, and uncharacteristically wise one.

Because what dominates the Joan that she is now, is not Luke. It’s Larry.

The imperfect man she left behind. The difficult one. The one who irritated her. Bickered with her. Disappointed her. Knew her. Fumbled her badly sometimes, but sincerely loved her. The man who set her free when he thought that was what love required of him.

So, she fights hard to break through the system of illusions that brought her to the wrong eternity, and finally makes it back to him, the person who is in fact, her home.

Eternal Lessons (and the lies we tell)

The fact that Eternity lets Joan fully make the wrong choice and presents it, at first, as right is a really wonderful vehicle to let the lesson at the end feel earned. It lets her have her cake, and try to eat it too, and then lets her fight her way back to reality. Such a beautiful real-life metaphor for me. It artistically reinforced something I have always believed. That we all have the capacity for love. But we have a really crappy way of understanding our own damn feelings.

In my system, it works like this:

Imagine that finding the real love of your life is a carnival game. Specifically, a high striker, two of them in fact, and in order to unlock the prize of true love, you have to find someone who can step into your life, and take a good swing at both.

The high striker on the right is called Affection, and the other one is called Attraction. Now, attraction doesn’t need to be purely physical, it just needs to be felt in a way that matters to you. This person doesn’t need to be Henry Cavill to ring your attraction bell —it just needs to be that they ring YOUR bell, the world be damned.

Affection is easier. Affection is a gentle feeling of fondness or liking toward someone, or something. You can feel affection for a beloved pet as much as a best friend. If the other person were stripped of their social standing, financial stability, physical attractiveness, what would you feel about the core of them that is left? That’s how you know if someone is capable of ringing your Affection bell. (NOTE: If you find yourself hitting the bell for toxic or abusive people, this does not mean you are to follow them or stay with them. I would hope that goes without saying.)

Most people can get one bell ringing. And some ring the bell harder than others. They can trigger attraction without safety. Affection without desire. And if one of those bells rings too loud, we often start confusing partial satisfaction with total bliss.

But the person who unlocks real love is the one whose natural state of being can ring both.

Not every second. Not every day. Not in some ridiculous fantasy of permanent emotional perfection. But CAN reach the top, enough that both bells can sound off in the presence of the same person. Once that happens, something changes. You’re handed a chisel named Love. When you unlock the carnival prize, Love stops being a feeling you mistook for intense desire and becomes a tool that enables you to create something more permanent. That’s an entirely different journey.

That is the hardest lesson in the movie, and probably in life too.

What Joan loved about Luke was real, tragic, missed. But what she had with Larry was complete.

And those are not the same thing.

Real Love is not a feeling, it’s a choice.

This is where a lot of people get confused about love in their own lives, because psychologically we are built to chase what glitters as gold. The grass always seems greener where consequence has not yet had time to grow roots. The road not taken feels better at first, because we did not have to live inside those disappointments. We are drawn to possibility because possibility cannot argue with us, age beside us, get on our nerves, piss us off, fall short, or force us to see ourselves clearly in return when we’re in the wrong.

But that does not make possibility more meaningful than reality.

It just makes it easier to pine for without consequence.

Chemistry matters. Longing matters. But none of those things, on their own, are enough to build a life on. They are just scenery. Love is a home you build beside another person.

It is a conglomeration of choices to do right by another person whether that fills your cup in those moments or not. It’s the bickering. The private jokes. The comfort of knowing their rhythms, habits, moods, tells, their stupid little preferences, favorite stories, the look on their face when they are trying not to laugh at an inappropriate time, the way they take their coffee, the way they go quiet when something hurts too much. It is life lived over time until the person is no longer just exciting or beautiful or magnetic, but home in the deepest possible way.

And that is why Joan’s first love cannot ultimately compete with the man she built life with. Luke was a beautiful fantasy, and deserved to live in a way life stole from him. We can grieve for his loss, and his tragedy. But life is just unfair sometimes.

Larry is home.

The cruel thing about being human is that we are built to be tempted by whatever asks the least of us while promising the most. We do this with people, with careers, with our bodies, for our entire lives. We spend fortunes buying fantasy books because they scratch the imaginary itch that somewhere just outside our reach is the pure version of happiness, untouched by frustration, duty, compromise, or decay.

That’s why we love some grit in our fiction. It’s a lot closer to the gratitude we neglect in our reality.

What settles your soul is not a fantasy in your head. It is, always, the reality you build with your own two hands, and with the partner who helped you build a place you can both live, together, maybe forever.

That’s what Eternity tells us.

It answers the question of “what is love, really?”

It knows exactly what kind of romantic myth we are trained to chase.

It also proves that myth will never be as beautiful as home.

Also, the first husband is cute in his way, but who the hell would ever leave Miles Teller for any reason?

You’d have to kill me first.

And it’s one to get ready,
And it’s two to climb.
It’s three to fall,
Back to the starting line.
I don’t wanna get ready.
I just wanna shine, shine, shine,
So I cannot fall,
Back to the Starting Line.

—Starting Ling, All Them Witches

Written for ’s weekly prompt challenge, but also serving as the epilogue to my companion Alternate-Universe series to Dead Man’s Dance.

(Note: Boone and his wife, Jane, are spinoffs from Dead Man’s Dance, they are not the same universe of characters from Dead Man’s Dance, at all.)

I woke with Tom in my ears and Jane in my bed. My little brother had been absent for almost a decade now. But, every now and then the sounds of that night haunted my dreams.

The room was dark in that early-mornin’ way when everything was still in a haze, when the world hadn’t committed to breathin’ yet. The red light from the baby monitor glowed from the dresser. Jane’s robe hung off the chair. My belt lay coiled on the nightstand like a copperhead.

Jane still slept on her side facin’ me, long brown hair a mess across our pillows, that one hand tucked under her cheek. She’d shifted away from where she’d curled around me during the night. The first time I saw her she was lean as a wire and mean about it, built for a fight and damn good at finishin’ one. The years and the kids had left their evidence. The faint lines, the stretch on her skin, grays at her temples she tried to blame on me with a laugh. Now there was more of her. Softness in the places a man’s hands want to land. Hips that filled my palm. A little more curve at her waist. It didn’t read as aging to me; it read as a story with a better endin’. I didn’t want that fixed. I just wanted my arm around her waist and my mouth on her shoulder with the quiet permission of a life that didn’t require that old fight anymore. Her hand found my chest without openin’ her eyes, the way she’d reached for me a thousand times and never missed.

“Morning, handsome,” she murmured. “Don’t tell me you’re getting up.”

“Just movin’,” My voice came out low, quiet. “Go back to sleep, baby.”

She made a small sound that could’ve been agreement or complaint and rubbed lazily at her eyes, trying to get her consciousness up to speed to meet mine.

Somethin’ warm moved low in my chest as I rolled over to kiss her, slow in the dark.

Her breath caught for a second as her arms snaked slowly around my neck.

“What’s on your board, hon?” she asked against my lips. That was how Jane asked what I had planned for the day. Never ‘what are you doin’ today?’ What’s on your board, like she could see the movin’ pieces in my head even when she was still half asleep.

“Two idle teams,” I said. “Couple routes’ta reassign. Paperwork. You know the drill.”

She watched me for a second, breathin’ the sleep out as she raked her fingers through short cropped hair and over my scalp.

“And the part you’re not saying?”

I held her gaze. She didn’t do this thing where she waited for me to volunteer. She asked. Calm. Just enough to extract the truth from the man she married.

“I’m not plannin’ on a field run,” I said.

A soft little smile left her lips with a barely audible huff. She wasn’t the biggest fan of my kinda field day.

A thin cry cut through the stillness from the monitor, fussy and offended. Jane broke away first with a small, tired inhale.

“That’s my cue,” she said.

She rolled out of bed in one smooth movement, already reaching’ for her robe. She tied it without looking, hair still wild, eyes sharper now because motherhood didn’t care how she woke up.

At the door she paused and looked back at me.

“Eat something this mornin,” she said.

“I know.” She held my gaze.

“Something that’s not coffee.”

“I heard you, woman.” I answered with a laugh, rubbin’ my own eyes.

I could damn near hear her smirk as she left, her footsteps paddin’ down the hall.

I sat for a beat and listened to the house wake up: cabinets, the muted clatter of a pan, Jane’s voice low and efficient, the baby’s cries turnin’ into a set of giggles an’ coos. Somewhere upstairs another set of doors opened and shut.

I dressed fast. Old habit. Shirt. Jeans. Belt. Phone. The motions lived in my hands.

In the hallway, a toy truck waited in the dark like a booby trap. I stepped over it before I learned my lesson the hard way, again, more times than I cared to admit.

Jane already had the whole damn kitchen in motion, flawless and efficient, like the room belonged to her more than the mortgage did. Her old life had made food something you grabbed between shifts or watched the guests consume, not somethin’ you assumed would be there when you needed it, so the day we signed for this house the kitchen became her art studio, just with heat and knives. Somehow, that fit her better. One hand on our youngest son, the baby, the other nudging’ a plate toward our eldest son while her eyes clocked me headings’ for the coffee maker.

“Uh-uh. You eat first,” she said.

“I can walk and chew gum at the same time.”

Jane finally looked at me, expression flat.

I stopped with a sigh and made my way to my spot at the table.

She set a plate down in front of me without ceremony. Eggs, toast, potatoes cut into small pieces for tiny hands.

But when the coffee was finally in my mug and the mornin’ had settled into something quieter, I slipped onto the porch for my one quiet minute.

I hadn’t missed my damn sunrise for potatoes and noise, thankfully.

The crisp air of mornin’ still tasted clean. The dew from the green filled my nose, wet in my lungs. The sky was turnin’ bright from that dusk light that always came right before the day took the next shift, but today was overcast and grey with the clouds that were hidin’ the sun. Birds started up one by one, callin’ the mornin’ in for us, and somewhere down the slope a creek kept runnin’ its mouth in my ears just as I caught the little red blur of a cardinal fleein’ his perch. Trees moved easy with the breeze, leaves brushin’ back and forth with all the time in the world that belonged to Mother Nature, and for just one damn minute, my little world was at peace.

Then that quiet got cut clean by a familiar sound.

My phone. An old number. Kind that didn’t call unless something weird had gone wrong.

RICK RUSSELL.

I stared at it a beat longer than I needed to. My old man’s people didn’t call for nothin’. That was always for damn sure.

I clicked my lip behind my teeth before I answered.

“Long time, no see, Rick.”

A pause on the other end, like he was measuring’ the distance between the boy he used to know and the man he heard on my end’a the line.

“Well, well, General Alexander,” he said, soft as a grin I couldn’t see.

“Don’t you start with all that,” I warned with a smirk. “How are ya, sir?”

“I guess as good as a man gets when the mileage starts to show. You up yet?” he asked.

I looked down at the unfinished coffee in my mug like it betrayed me already. “Workin’ on it.”

A faint chuckle. I could hear the wear in his voice that came from the job, not the years.

“How’s the work these days?” Rick asked.

“Still movin’,” I said. “Wife keeps things from catchin’ fire when I’m not lookin’.”

“That woman,” Rick muttered, but I could hear the admiration in it. Then, because he couldn’t help himself, “How is your little anomaly?”

I closed my eyes for half a second, smiling into my coffee. “Don’t.”

Rick’s voice warmed with a hearty laugh. “I’m serious. Never thought I’d see the day the Registry puts a hit out on a Neph Nest and you turn around and marry the damn leader. You always did take the job home.”

“Ya know, she’s frightenin’ly domestic for a code red target,” I said. “Still a menace. Keeps me eatin’ a cooked breakfast.”

“That’s what I’m talkin’ about,” he replied, like that settled the joke. Then his tone shifted, not sharp, just heavier. “How are the little ones?”

“They’re loud,” I said, and my mouth pulled up without permission. “So they’re good. But you didn’t call me for a reunion,” I added. “So hit me with it.”

Rick exhaled slow, like he’d been holdin’ it in the whole time. “Got an old friend,” he said. “Civilian. No real knowledge of what we know.”

I waited.

“He’s got a daughter,” Rick continued. “Been missin’ a few weeks now. She was drivin’ out from college for a visit but she never made it home.”

My grip tightened on the mug without me meanin’ to, this was the kind of trouble that warranted the phone call. “How old?”

“Twenty-one.”

“Last known?”

“The GPS I run pinged her on a back road headed through Damascus,” he said. “Then nothin’. No more calls. No card use. Just… gone.”

“Sheriff doin’ anything?” I probed.

“Sheriff’s doin’ what sheriffs do when they don’t wanna admit they’re outta their depth,” Rick sighed. “Talkin’ like she ran off. Like she got tired of her daddy and her life and decided t’up’n vanish without takin’ her phone.”

“Ain’t that convenient,” I muttered.

“Lazy, more like.” Rick corrected. “And he’s lettin’ it be lazy because the other option scares him.”

I shifted in my chair. “What other option?”

Rick paused, and I heard the smallest hesitation in him, like even he didn’t like sayin’ it out loud.

“That road of hers —there’s a spot down there the locals won’t go near,” he said. “They got a helluva name for it.”

“What’s that?”

“Hell’s Abbey. Old Catholic joint. Old stone. Sits down in a valley at the bottom of that same damn road.”

I frowned.

“I’ve never heard of it,” I said, because I hadn’t. And I hated not knowing things like this in my own territory.

“That’s what’s strange,” Rick replied. “Everybody out there’s heard of it. Teenagers think it’s a spook story. Ol’ folks treat it a little kinder. But it’s got a way of collecting tragedies, if you get my meaning.”

I took another sip. Coffee was starting to cool, but I didn’t care.

“What kinda tragedies?” I asked.

Rick didn’t launch into folklore, he gave it to me straight, the way you hand off a case file you didn’t want your name on.

“Crashes,” he said. “Good road, good tires, clear night, and folks still end up in a ditch like somebody pushed ‘em. People go missin’. Teens dare each other to walk down there, come back shaken so bad their parents can’t get a straight story. Some of ‘em swear they lost time; hours, days. Group of kids took turns on a dare, one thought he got lost ‘til sunrise, came back and he’d been gone twenty minutes.”

My jaw tightened. “Some stories are just stories.”

“I hear you,” Rick corrected quietly. “but then there’s this damn candle.”

“Rivetin’ so far, Rick.”

“Gimme a minute, alright?” Rick said. “In the courtyard, spook stories say it burns, always. Rain don’t touch it. Wind don’t touch it. Wax don’t melt like it should. You can see it from the road if you’re close enough or stupid enough.”

“Not much of a tale in our line ‘a work,” I said.

“Yeah well, it ain’t a tale when I start layin’ out the rest,” Rick replied. “Because here’s the part that don’t sit right with me.”

He shifted on the other end of the line.

“There’s no record of it bein’ built, Boone” he said. “None. No church records. No land records. No records period until a certain year in the eighteen hundreds, and then it just… shows up in the town listing like it’s always been there. Churches that old don’t get built overnight.”

I stared out at the yard like the grass might answer me.

“Sounds like you’ve been busy, Rick.” I cut in.

Rick gave a quiet sound that was half agreement, half exhaustion. “I dug.”

“But busy don’t mean useful,” he said. “I need more eyes on it.”

“You want a team,” I realized.

Rick didn’t flinch. We both understood what he was askin’ me.

“I want it handled like it’s real,” he said.

I leaned back, letting the porch rail press into my shoulder blades. “Rick, I’m not throwin’ good men after ghost stories and recordin’ errors.”

“It ain’t a damn story, Boone” he replied, and his voice stayed quiet, but it hardened underneath. He let out an angry breath through his nose like he’d already argued with himself for a week and was tired of losin’.

“Tell you what, I’ll send a scout,” I continued, because I wasn’t here to posture. “One ranger. In and out. Confirm the place is what you think it is. Scope out the threat level. But we don’t even know it has anything to do with your missin’ girl. I’ll sacrifice a lamb for ya, then decide if it needs a team.”

“No,” Rick said.

I sat up straighter. “No?”

“Dammit, Boone,” he began, and this time it wasn’t stubbornness. It was memory. “You send one kid down there and you’re gonna get that kid hurt or lost.”

“Rick,” I said, keeping my voice even, “you’re askin’ me to mobilize a whole unit off some ghost stories and a hunch. I trust your gut that it’s a good hunch, but you know I can’t do that. I can’t even justify it.”

“You can justify it to me,” he offered.

“That ain’t the same thing.”

Silence for a beat. I heard him shift, heard the old wood complain under him from wherever he was callin’ from. He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t plead. He did somethin’ worse.

“Boone, I already tried to check it out my damn self,” he said.

I didn’t speak.

“Call it pride, I guess. But I drove out, alone.” he went on. “Didn’t originally plan to go down into it. Just wanted to lay eyes on the mark. I’ve been doin’ this long enough I know what I’m lookin’ for.”

My jaw tightened. “And?”

“And it was just like they all said,” Rick said. “Upkept like it had staff. Looked like time didn’t really touch it. You’d’ve thought it was a regular spot if you didn’t know which road you were on.”

I stared out at my yard, bright and innocent, and felt the irritation risin’ again.

“Okay.”

Rick exhaled slow. “It wasn’t rainin’ hard, but it was rainin’. And I got close enough to see the courtyard.”

“And?,” I said.

“That damn candle,” he confirmed. “Burnin’ like it didn’t know the rules of water.”

When he started again his voice got an old dog’s kinda quiet, like he didn’t like relivin’ it.

“I stepped outta the truck,” he said. “Didn’t see a need to have a hand on my weapon yet. Just stepped out.”

I gripped my hand a little tighter on my mug. Wasn’t likin’ the direction of all this noise.

“I’m tellin’ you,” he cut in, gentle but firm. “I took one step toward that place and it knocked me out just for tryin’.”

I frowned. “Hitcha how?”

“Like a fist,” he said. “Like a damn fist in the wind that I couldn’t see.”

I could hear the way he chose the words, the way he hated them. This didn’t sound too crazy in our line of work, but that didn’t seem to be what was eatin’ him.

“Came out of nowhere and everywhere all at once,” Rick continued. “Hit me square between my ribs. Picked me up like I was nothin’ and slammed me on my back hard enough to knock the sense outta me for about twenty damn minutes. My bad shoulder still ain’t right.”

I went still. Rick wasn’t a brittle man, but the years caught up to all of us. And if we both knew anything about this job, it was that you don’t overlook an old man in a profession where boys die young. The thought of losin’ one of the last of my Dad’s generation over a spook he couldn’t even see didn’t sit right with me. Like the devil took a sucker punch at an old friend from behind.

“You all right now?” I asked.

Rick covered the bruise with a familiar kinda shrug.

“I been hurt on the job before; I can handle it.” he confirmed. “But before I could even try to get up, damn thing hit me again. Like somethin’ wanted to make sure I understood: not you. Not today. Not ever.”

The porch felt smaller as the ice settled in my chest.

“You get a shot at it?” I asked; instinct, not judgment.

Rick gave a quiet, humorless sound. “Shoot at what? The wind?”

“Did you try?” I pressed.

“I reached,” he admitted with that tone of a fightin’ man’s frustration. “Couldn’t get my hand to my piece before the second hit came. So I laid there on my side on with my head on fire like some pathetic waste of space just watchin’ that candle crackle in the damn rain. Felt like whatever was inside was enjoyin’ it. Like it was usin’ the whole damn courtyard to let me know my place.”

“So what’d you do?” I asked.

“I crawled.”

The word hit harder than I wanted it to.

“On my elbows and knees, back to my truck,” he said, “because my head finally agreed with my body that this wasn’t no fair fight. And I ain’t too proud to live a little longer.”

The silence that sat between us on my porch felt mean. I had a missin’ girl, and a damn good Ranger askin’ me for help. But still not enough to justify thinnin’ my resources from more dangerous labor on a shot-in-the-dark.

“I got out, Boone,” he added. “But not clean.”

“Meaning what?” I asked, worried he was about to give me the justification I’d been askin’ for.

Rick sighed hard enough to make his chest rattle. I heard it. “I dropped the only goddamn lead on her I had.”

“You what?”

“Wallet,” he said. “Girl’s wallet, I think. Or what was left of it. I saw it on the gravel near the cut-in when I stepped out. Pink sparkles, dirty from the gravel and the mud, little golden cat on the key ring. I grabbed it without thinkin’ and told myself I’d check the name after I swept the place and got outta the rain.”

My chest tightened. A wallet with a positive ID would have been enough for me to justify this run and then some. Without it I was back to square one.

“Dammit. So you still can’t confirm it was hers?”

“No,” Rick admitted, solemn. “When that wind hit me, it flew outta my hand like it got slapped loose.”

He exhaled like it still pissed him off. “I watched it skitter toward that valley like it was bein’ pulled.”

My jaw clenched. I closed my eyes for a second to contain myself.

“You didn’t go back for it, did you?” I asked.

“It laid me out clean in two hits,” he said. “No, Boone, I didn’t go back lookin’ for a hat trick.”

Rick’s voice hardened on the other end of the line. “So when you tell me you’ll send one scout down there, what I hear is you’re offerin’ me another Ranger’s funeral.”

“That ain’t fair,” I spat, a little quicker than I meant.

Rick didn’t snap back; he laughed. “Fair don’t give a damn if it’s true.”

I set the mug down slow, like I was setting down the last easy option.

“Rick,” I said, voice tight, “I believe you. But you know I can’t pull a full team off another hunt without damn certain confirmation.”

“I ain’t askin’ for some goddamn paperwork and a lecture, Alexander” he replied. “I’m askin’ for judgment. Your judgement. You of all people know when somethin’ is actin’ like an anomaly. A big one.”

I opened my eyes and stared through the kitchen window at Jane moving inside, kids orbiting her like little moons. At a life with warm food and small hands and the safety we’d earned the hard way. And then my eyes fell on my baby girl in her little pink nightgown. I knew what was out there in the dark. How the hell would I feel if some up-jumped bureaucrat with a fancy title told me that word-of-mouth and some shoddy mountain GPS was the reason I was never gonna see her little face again?

The boards in my head started shiftin’. Scouts. Teams. Protocols. Liability. That missin’ girl. Proof swallowed by the valley. The valley that knocked one of the best Rangers I ever knew out cold without a trace in sight.

If Rick was right, one scout was too small and a whole team was too big for a discovery mission. It risked feeding the thing if it liked bodies.

Which left only one option sitting there like a nail.

“Alright,” I began, breaking the silence.

“I’ll go,” I said.

Rick’s breath hitched on the other end. Relief tried to turn into guilt.

“Boone—”

“Alone. Lean. just to verify. No spectacle. I lay eyes on the place and if I can say it’s real, I call it in under my rank and we do it right.”

I cut him off before he could bleed all over the ask.

“You’d have done it for my old man without a word if he’d asked,” I said. “And if it was my daughter, I’d want someone I trust to do it right for me.”

Rick went quiet. When he spoke again, his voice was a little thicker than I imagine he wanted me to hear.

“Thank you, Son.” he offered.

“Don’t thank me,” I replied. “Just send me what you got.”

“Copy,” Rick switched into Ranger Russell on command. “I’ll email it. Maps, dates, pins, everything I got.”

“Coordinates first,” I told him. “I’ll check back in at the ridge.”

“Yes sir,” Rick said. Then, softer, the way older Night Men talked when they were givin’ you a blessing without callin’ it one: “Watch yourself, Alexander.”

“I always do,” I lied, because that’s what you told a man who’d done the walk too many times and couldn’t do it anymore.

We hung up.

A second later my phone buzzed. Rick’s email hit my inbox with attachments stacked like a confession. Maps. Crash photos over the years. A timeline, more detailed than he’d let on. Names. Notes that read like a man refusing to let the world convince him he didn’t know what he knew.

I stared at that missin’ girls face and felt my porch get smaller.

With one last sip of my cooled coffee, I stood up.

Then I went back inside to tell my wife I’d made changes to the damn board.

To read the Supernatural Fanfiction universe that spurned this series, click here.

So have you got the guts?
Been wonderin' if your heart's still open
And if so, I wanna know what time it shuts
Simmer down an' pucker up, I'm sorry to interrupt
It's just I'm constantly on the cusp of tryin' to kiss you
But I don't know if you feel the same as I do
But we could be together if you wanted to…

—Do I Wanna Know?, The Arctic Monkeys

If you’ve ever forayed into the world of modern Romantasy writing, you’ll quickly come to understand how much of it has become… pretty much loosely connected porn. Smut writing is VERY popular for obvious reasons, but its appeal goes a bit deeper than just gratuitous sex. Smutty fiction often gives readers an emotional sense of intensity, anticipation, vulnerability, and inevitable satisfaction in a form that mainstream storytelling often fails to provide. The problem is not simply that smut exists or that it’s creating a certain kind of brain-rot in our society, though that argument can and has been made. The more interesting issue is that so much fiction outside of smut no longer seems to satisfy those same feelings for readers without including that kind of explicit depiction.

I’m staying away from the worst of the genre, the niche, the poorly received, and the downright criminal (you read that right), because that’s not really what this article is about. Anything this popular and this financially lucrative is bound to to become more extreme as people indulge and clamor for their piece of the pie, but what matters is the core foundation of WHY these things take off, before they start falling off the rails.

#1 - Smut offers concentrated emotional payoff.

Smut is popular in part because it delivers a form of emotional and sensual payoff that is immediate, focused, and easy to access. Sure, it offers plenty of graphic sex on the page but under the surface, it is offering heightened attention, sharpened desire, and the satisfying release of something deeply wanted finally being fulfilled.

Readers are usually drawn less by the bare mechanics of what characters are doing, (though… that certainly plays a part) than by the anticipation surrounding it and the feeling of payoff that follows. Smut has a way of magnifying the feelings beneath the act itself: being wanted, chosen, pursued, and consumed by someone’s attention. Especially an attractive fantasy-perfected someone. It makes intimacy direct and legible in a way much of modern real life does not.

So, in a culture marked by endless illusions, emotional detachment, and constant instant gratification, that clarity has obvious appeal. But this kind of concentrated payoff can also become a shortcut. Instead of building connection slowly and allowing intimacy to deepen with real complexity, smut often delivers an engineered high that is designed to hit quickly and land hard. That is part of what makes it so addictive to readers, but it also risks flattening the reader’s expectations for how intimacy is supposed to feel in fiction. Which is why the deeper lesson here is not that readers simply want a little taboo, they want the feeling of longing turned into safety and satisfaction. They want the ache followed by release, tension followed by surrender, and the feeling that the story has finally given them something it taught them to crave.

#2 - Smut writing fits better in a culture with depleted attention spans.

The popularity of smut writing cannot be separated from modern digital life. Scrolling culture has trained us to expect fast payoff, constant stimulation, and an almost immediate return on investment with our attention, even half-assed. Social media, short-form video, algorithmic feeds, even the general rhythm of online life have all pushed the brain toward speed, novelty, and repetition. People are now used to consuming content in quick bursts, moving on the moment something feels slow, dense, or too demanding.

Smut-heavy fiction fits neatly into that environment because it often delivers the same kind of compressed reward cycle. It front-loads attraction, tension, fantasy, and gratification in a way that longer, slower fiction often does not. It gives readers a quick sequence of emotional and physiological cues to respond to: anticipation, stimulation, release, then the human desire to repeat that process.

By contrast, longer-form fiction often asks for patience, world-building, attention to detail, and a willingness to stay inside the uncertainty long before the reward arrives. That does not make it weaker, but it does make it harder to compete with genres that have learned how to hook the attention economy more efficiently. This is part of why smut can feel so magnetic for those readers. It is not better crafted; in fact, it often relies on the comfort of favored tropes or colorful, yet one dimensional characters. It is simply better adapted to a culture whose attention span has been warped digital life. For writers, that should not be a warning so much as a lesson. You do not have to imitate smut or dumb down your books, but you do have to better understand rhythm, momentum, and reward to sell your wares. If the page goes emotionally dead, the modern reader has been trained to leave.

Writers misunderstand the lesson

What I think many writers misunderstand is the lesson they should actually be taking from smut’s popularity. The answer is not that every story needs explicit sex, or that the only way to hold a reader is to become more graphic, though sometimes it helps create a kind of style or brand. The real lesson is that readers respond to pacing, tension, anticipation, sensuality, and payoff, and smut often delivers those things more efficiently than a lot of other fiction does… because it’s not bogging itself down with much else.

At its best, smut tends to be structurally simplistic and effective, not just sexually provocative. It knows how to build anticipation, and how to use proximity, tension, and sensory detail enough to keep the reader engaged.

For example:

“He buried his face in my neck and said onto my nape, as if the words would be absorbed by my body, as if he could only say it the way we’d always been good at communicating—skin to skin.”

—Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Mist and Fury

The detail sensory detail is strong here, easily to get lost in the flowery prose regardless of whether the plot felt earned or contrived to you.

That is where many non-smut stories actually fail. Readers do not necessarily shun things that are too “deep,” it’s just that they’re just emotionally flat. Sometimes writers mistake their own dullness for subtlety, or they move so quickly through attraction, philosophical conflict, and emotional intimacy that nothing has time to gather the charge that spurns a reader’s investment. Some readers want vulgar sex and gratuity, sure. But all readers want momentum. They want the feeling that something is building, tightening, pressing toward a payoff. Even if it’s sometimes, cheap.

The vulgarity is where a lot of writers miss the point: they either dismiss smutty writing as cheap and beneath serious discussion, or they assume the only way to compete with it is to imitate it, literally. But smut’s real advantage is that it rarely lets the page go dead for the readers attracted to it. It keeps the those readers in perpetual state of wanting, waiting, and anticipating. Whereas a more complex fantasy might try to spend four pages setting up an elaborate political structure before getting on with the action. The better takeaway, then, is not “more sex.” It is “learn what else creates a similar charge.” Whether a story is erotic or not, readers stay when scenes inspire investment, when tension escalates on time, when desire is palpable, and when the payoff feels earned rather than handed over.

That’s not to say that smut writers always nail this… plenty of it can be gratuitous, bland, tropey, and erratic.

But it’s still one of the easiest to grow genre’s in the game, so they must be doing something right.

At Any Rate,

The bottom line here is that readers return to stories that make them feel something strongly. If smut has cornered that market, the challenge for everyone else is not to sneer at it, (though, sneer away when it’s earned) but to remember how to write hunger in the first place.

What are we gonna do?
We’ve opened the door, now it’s all coming through
Tell me you see it too
We opened our eyes and it’s changing the view
Oh, what are we gonna do?
We opened the door now, it’s all coming through

How big, how blue, how beautiful
How big, how blue, how beautiful

—How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful, Florence + the Machine

“Follow your passion.”

It sounds so nice in a Ted Talk. “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.” What a crock.

Because if we’re being honest with ourselves about it… this crap is so painfully on-the-nose it circles back to losing all meaning the second you actually try to live it out.

Because what even is a passion, really?

Is fiction writing actually your passion?

Or do you just prefer to immerse yourself in fictional stories to escape reality? Because then fiction writing isn’t your “passion,” escapism is the allure.

Is running a company actually your passion? Or do you just enjoy solving complex problems and love providing a good standard of living for your employees?

Is your passion truly content creation, or is it the idea of doing something creative for a living that provides you more freedom than a 9-to-5 the thing you really want most?

That’s the real question.

“Follow your passion” usually means chase your artistic outlets and hope they’ll pay you back one day.

That’s so funny to me, because most of us can’t even properly define what our passions revolve around in the first place.

Because what is passion, really?

Even just the word invokes some kind of magical mysticism. But passion isn’t some mystical force waiting to be tapped like a well. It’s an idea—a fantasy of fulfillment we build up in our heads. It’s the polished version of life where we feel the utmost seen, free, validated, or secure.

For some, follow your passion looks like being an actress, a writer, or a content creator. For others, it’s finally becoming a doctor, launching a dream business, or securing that swanky corporate position with the corner office. The title doesn’t really matter, here. What matters is what’s underneath: we don’t necessarily want the thing we say we’re passionate about. We want whatever that thing can give us.

You say you want to be an actress. But do you actually crave the craft of acting—the long hours of rehearsal, the rejection, the grind—or do you want to be looked at, recognized, admired, and adored? (If you’ve every forayed into the world of actors… there’s a reason the stereotyping exists.)

You say you want to be a creator. Do you actually enjoy sitting down day after day to make things, even when it’s repetitive, lonely, and no one’s watching, and you’re burned out trying to figure out what your creation even tells anyone else? Or do you want the lifestyle—the freedom, the cashflow, and the lack of a ball and chain to a draining 9 to 5 lifestyle.

You say you want to run a business. Do you? Do you actually want the constant problems, tough decisions, financial pressure, and total responsibility? Or do you just want control over your time and money?

These are completely different desires. But we collapse them into one neat package and call it a “passion.” Then we commit to the identity, convinced it will deliver the feeling once the reality is achieved. But when reality hits—the drudgery, the friction, the parts that don’t sparkle—the mismatch feels like personal failure.

But… there’s a bit of freedom in that.

You Don’t Want the Thing—You Want What It Might Give You

This is where I find the advice about chasing your dreams falls desperately short. Most of us aren’t chasing the work itself. We’re chasing a different need we’ve never bothered to identify: freedom, security, status, identity, belonging, excitement, or escape from whatever bores us about our real lives.

But when you don’t know why you want something, it’s easy to make the wrong choice—and then slip into blaming yourself when you start to short circuit.

You hit that mental wall and begin to think: “I must not want this badly enough.” “I’m not disciplined enough.” “Maybe I’m just not cut out for this.”

But the truth is a bit easier when you think about it. Did I even want this… or did I want what I thought I would feel once I had it?

So people chase content creation and realize they hate being constantly visible and judged. They start a business and crumble under the pressure and endless decisions. They pursue writing and discover they don’t actually enjoy the consistency, marketing, or exposure it demands to make it sustainable. So, they quit.

Not because they’re weak or incapable. Because the version of the life they were chasing never actually existed in the first place. They weren’t building toward something they truly wanted —they were building toward an unresolved need for something under the surface.

You don’t lack discipline, you lack perspective.

Here’s the truth modern culture won’t tell you: Most of us ultimately want some combination of freedom and security, and the rest could fall away. We lose steam the moment friction appears because the path we picked to freedom was never aligned with what we actually value.

Sure, some successful people in life seem to “crave the grind.” But for the rest of us, passion burns out fast when confusion sets in. You love writing, but you know nothing about publishing, platforms, or building an audience. You dream of entrepreneurship, but you hate sales and operations. The spark fades, and instead of rethinking the premise, you decide you’re the problem, and you return to the cubicle life, because the familiarity provides comfort and safety.

The fix isn’t always more motivation or just “pushing through.” It’s clearer thinking about what you actually want—and why.

Stop asking “How do I make my passion my living?” That question keeps you stuck somewhere in grind stage.

Instead, get brutally honest with yourself:

What feeling are you really chasing? Admiration? Autonomy? Financial peace? Creative flow? Status?

What does the day-to-day of this path actually look like—not the highlight reel?

Am I willing to do the unglamorous parts consistently, even when no one’s watching or cheering?

What skills or “career capital” would I need to build to earn the freedom/security I want?

If that’s what I really want, is there an easier way to get it?

If the validation or lifestyle never came, would I still enjoy the work itself?

Asking myself these questions is what lead me back, ironically, to my passion.

Fiction Writing.

I knew that I wanted to make a living online from writing… but about what?

I know politics, I’m good at writing about them. But God, I hate the division and the anger.

I wrote about dating, but then soon the chore of finding topics within a niche that would have been relatively easy to monetize became daunting. Because it’s not what I really crave.

What I actually crave, is story telling. The unique process of telling stories of human achievement, exploring worlds that don’t exist… but in my imagination… they do. That’s a process I fell in love with from a very, very, young age. It’s not as easy to build following around but… if I truly wanted freedom and security in my life… I realized I needed to build it around a daily task that could provide me with fulfillment, and not dread. That’s true freedom to me.

Passion isn’t something you discover and then just… follow. In my mind, it’s actually something that comes from deep, authentic alignment.

Wrapping things Up

“Follow your passion” is dogshit advice because it fetishizes the real caveat: figuring out what you truly value and what you’re willing to endure to get it. It sells you a fantasy to pursue and undercuts the cost of the travel, then leaves you blaming yourself when that fantasy identity collides with reality.

The people who build lives they don’t want to escape aren’t necessarily more passionate or disciplined. They’ve learned how to become more aligned, and that allows them to continue pressing forward when things get tough, because the benefits finally out weight the costs. They’ve already determined the purpose behind their pursuits and accepted the trade that comes with it.

So stop hunting for a mythical passion to follow. Start getting honest about the desires you’re truly wishing to be fulfilled and find out what’s required to own it.

When your pursuit starts matching the person you really want to be, motivation stops being the problem.

Because at the end of the day, life isn’t about finding fulfillment through intensity. It’s about contentment. Of course, unless intensity is what gives you contentment. Then I guess you beat me to the punch.

Part I Part II Welcome to Part III

The neon signs over the door hummed like they had a grudge,

I stood there a second too long with my pistol still trained on the air.

Adrenaline does that. Fight ends, but your hands don’t get the message right away. My brain was still halfway inside the last three seconds of that alley. The blade. The last angel hittin’ the ground. Silver eyes.

Then nothing. The alley was just quiet again.

Not ‘normal’ quiet either. No bar doors slamming open. No drunk stumbling out to take a leak and finding four bodies and little ol’ me standing there like dumbfounded Michael Corleone. Just the hum of neon and the distant noise of traffic somewhere out on the main street.

Nobody heard a damn thing. Nobody but the dead.

I let a breath out slow and lowered my gun, sliding it back into my waistband holster.

The spot where she’d been was empty. No smoke. No scorch. No trail. One second she was there with a blade in her hand and blood on the pavement, the next she was just… gone.

“What the hell.”

I turned a slow circle, scanning both ends of the alley out of habit. Fire escapes. Windows. Rooflines. Anyone leaning out with a cigarette right now would see the whole scene laid out in front of them.

Four bodies.

And me standing in the middle of it.

That’s when I noticed the cameras.

“Fantastic.”

One over the back door of the bar, bolted into the brick. Another farther down the alley, angled just enough to catch anyone coming or going.

“Yeah, that figures,” I muttered.

I dragged a hand over the back of my neck, already thinking about how long I had before someone decided to actually watch those feeds.

The tension in my chest was only gonna get thicker like this, so I pulled my phone out and called my brother.

Sam’s voice cut through on the second ring.

“Dean.” He started. “What’s up?”

“Hey, you ever hear of something with silver eyes that isn’t a demon?”

“What d’you mean?”

“Well I just stumbled onto a patch of something that’s a whole new different kind of crazy.” I paced the alley, stepping between the bodies, trying not to screw myself out of anything important.

“What kinda crazy?”

“The kind where a buncha angels walk into a bar after some broad and nobody but her comes out.”

“She’s the silver eyes?”

“That would be correct.”

“How many angels?”

“Three, plus one waiting in the alley.”

“Dead?”

“They are now.”

“So let’s kill it.”

I stopped moving. It wasn’t what he said —it was how fast he said it.

“Wow. Just— kill her? That’s it? No,” I stuttered over my own thoughts, “No questions asked?”

“You said it can kill angels without breaking a sweat, right?”

“Yeah, man, but—”

“And why do you keep calling it ‘her?’ What, did you bang her or something?”

“Shut up. Focus, would you.”

“So you did.”

“I just met the woman, Sam.”

“Never stopped you before.”

“Would you please listen to me.”

“Was she hot?”

“Dammit, Sammy, listen to me.” I sighed. The panic in my voice bled through my frustration.

“I just watched a civilian get the drop on four of heaven’s best and not break a sweat, and now she’s in the wind and I’m at a loss, man. So could you just get on your little computer, do your Zuckerberg robot thing, and tell me what the hell I’m looking at?”

“Yeah, I hear you. How’d she bleed?”

“What?”

“Did she even bleed?”

I stuttered over how to answer that.

“She moved like she’s been killin’ angels her entire life. They didn’t even touch her, Sammy.”

“Doesn’t mean she can’t bleed.”

“What is up with you?”

“I’m just asking questions.”

I took a beat before I said, “Yeah…”

“How’d she give you the slip?”

“I dunno, man. I’ve never seen anything like it before. She slit the poor bastard’s throat and did some kind of— I dunno— voodoo. Her eyes went kind of a smokey silver and she vanished.”

I waited. I expected the classic Sammy ‘I’ll look into it.’

Instead, I got something else.

“I’m sure she can die easy enough.”

The silence stretched a second in my ear. Sam usually had something. Research. A lead. A theory. Hell, even a joke.

Tonight? Just... that.

“Just… see what you can find.”

“Sure.” He was calm and collected in a way that iced me over. Before I could even think of what to say next, his voice cut back through the line.

“I’ll call you, don’t call me.”

And the line went dead.

I stared at the phone a second longer before sliding it back into my pocket.

Then I looked down at the bodies again, and sighed heavier than before I had made the call.

Hollowed out eyes. Wing-shaped scorch marks burned into the pavement behind them.

Didn’t take a genius to figure out what they were.

I crouched next to the first one and did a quick search. Pockets, jacket, waistband. Nothing useful. No wallet, no phone. Just a vessel wearing a dead man’s face.

The second one had a phone. No passcode. Thank God, if he still gives a damn.

I flipped through the messages. Last text was from someone labeled ‘Wife.’ Lot of missed calls before that. The last actual message was almost a year old.

That told me what I needed to know. Old vessels. Whoever these guys used to be before Heaven took the wheel, they’d been out of the driver’s seat for a good while.

I set the phone back where I found it and stood up again, scanning the ground.

Something crumpled near the bar door caught my eye.

I wasn’t sure which of them it might’ve belonged to, but I couldn’t take a chance on not turnin’ that stone. I walked over to pick it up.

Just a piece of paper, old. Wrinkled and folded over itself like it had been sitting in someone’s pocket a while. When I smoothed it out, crayon bled across the page in thick, uneven lines.

Stick figures. A big crooked heart. One of the figures had long brown hair.

Looked a little like her.

I stared at it a second longer than I meant to.

Then I folded it back up and slid it into my jacket pocket.

The last body was a little farther down the alley.

I crouched beside him and ran through the same routine. Pockets. Inside lining. Waistband.

My hand closed around metal within the inside breast pocket.

I pulled it out and turned it over in my palm.

Handcuffs —but I knew warding when I saw it. I could take a wild guess these weren’t for date night.

I sat back on my heels, looking at them.

“…Well that’s somethin’.”

Not a hit. An abduction.

Which meant whatever the hell she was, somebody wanted her alive, just not necessarily in one piece.

I stood up slowly and looked down the alley again.

Then I tipped my head back toward the sky.

“Cas. If you’re listening, I could use a little help here.”

Castiel appeared the way he always did.

One second the alley was empty except for me and four cooling husks.

Next second he was standing there, that low sound of wings you couldn’t see.

“Dean.”

I didn’t bother turning around right away. I was still looking at the nearest body to me, boot nudging the shell where the grace had burned out of the unlucky bastard.

“You and your siblings really gotta stop leaving your messes everywhere.”

That got his attention.

He stepped closer, coat shifting around his legs as he moved past me. He crouched beside one of the bodies, fingers hovering just above the charred outline on the concrete. His expression didn’t change much, but I saw the recognition settle into his shoulders.

“Angels.”

“Yeah,” I said. “That was my working theory.”

Cass looked over the body again, the way a doctor might look at a patient that was very obviously, dead.

“Who did this?”

“Well,” I said, gesturing vaguely at the alley around us, “that’s why you’re here.”

He stood.

“What happened?”

“Caught the tail end of a fight,” I said. “Right here. Lady walked out of that bar and three of your buddies went after her. They were already going at it when I got here.”

His eyes flicked briefly toward the bodies.

“They attacked her?”

“Yeah,” I said. “That was the vibe.”

His head tilted slightly.

“Who was this woman?”

“Five-foot-something. I dunno. Brown hair. Looked about as thrilled with the situation as you’d expect.”

“How did you come to know her?”

“We chatted at the bar top, ok. She didn’t seem like… whatever she is.”

“You were attracted to her.”

“Can we stick to the subject, man, please?”

“What did you see?”

“They tried to hurt her, take her, I’m not sure,” I said. “She clearly disagreed.”

He watched me without blinking.

“Moved damn fast,” I went on. “Took one of them down before the other three even figured out what was happening.”

He glanced down at the bodies again.

“And then you intervened.”

“Didn’t get the chance,” I said. “She took them down like she’s been doing this her entire life.”

I rubbed the back of my neck, remembering the way the fight had actually gone.

“She used the last one for some kind of… spell.” I said. “Her eyes went silver and then she just… disappeared.”

His eyes lifted back to mine.

“Her eyes what?”

“Silver,” I said. “Not like angels, at all.”

“Silver,” Cass repeated, slower, his voice quieter than before.

He crouched again, examining the nearest body more closely. His fingers hovered over the ash-scarred chest like he could still feel the grace that used to be there.

“Then they were hunting her.”

“Sure looked that way.”

Castiel straightened slowly.

“There are very few beings capable of killing angels, like this.”

Castiel looked past me toward the mouth of the alley, thinking.

“There is one possibility, though.”

I folded my arms.

“Hit me.”

“Nephilim.”

The word hung in the air for a second.

“A what now?”

“Nephilim,” Castiel repeated. “The offspring of an angel and a human.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I caught the Bible reference.”

He ignored that.

“In those days, they were powerful. Extremely unstable. They eventually took to attacking humans, so God sent us to destroy them. Most were exterminated with the Great Flood.”

“Most?”

“The rest did not remain as Nephilim.”

I frowned.

“Meaning?”

“Over time, they mutated. Degraded. Some of the monsters you now hunt are the result of those mutations.”

My eyes widened a bit. “So you’re saying, that vampires and werewolves are just basically an angel bastard’s grandkids.”

“Something like that.”

I ran a hand down my face.

“Okay. But the woman I saw tonight? She wasn’t a vampire.”

“She didn’t sprout fangs, or howl at the moon. Jane just—” The word slipped out before I even thought about it.

Castiel’s head snapped toward me.

“Jane?”

He studied my face like there was more on his mind than he was letting on.

“Her last name?”

I snorted.

“I didn’t exactly get the woman’s business card, Cass.”

He didn’t smile.

Instead he looked down at the bodies again.

“These angels served Raphael. Which means her survival will not go unnoticed.”

I frowned.

“Why?”

Castiel looked at the bodies again before answering.

“A Nephilim soul carries immense power.”

“How immense are we talking?”

“To put it plainly, one Nephilim soul holds the power of a thousand human souls.”

I whistled softly.

“Nephilim were created before the Flood,” Castiel said. “Their existence overlapped with the Watchers. Their offspring inherited more than strength.”

I folded my arms.

“Meaning?”

“Their souls carry fragments of the knowledge the Watchers passed to humans. Certain forms of ancient magic are encoded within them.”

I stared at him.

“You’re saying Raphael could crack open a Nephilim soul and use it like a spell book.”

“Worse. We’re at war. If he were to find a single Nephilim, it could lead to others. That kind of power could be, cosmic. The kind of power that could end the war in a single stroke.”

I exhaled slowly.

“Well that’s comforting.”

Castiel looked down at the bodies again.

“Raphael cannot be permitted access to this, Dean. We need to remove this evidence.”

“If they remain,” he continued, “other angels may investigate. They would use these vessels to find out what memories they might hold.”

“Yeah,” I said. “And I’d prefer to not have this conversation with local law enforcement, either.”

“Then it’s decided. I’ll remove them.”

I looked over my shoulder for just a moment to check that we were still alone and when I turned around, Castiel was already gone. Just air where he’d been standing.

I stared at the spot for a second.

“Yeah,” I muttered to the wind. “Friggin’ goodbye to you too.”

He’d even taken the damn scorch marks from the street with him. The alley looked like nothin’ ever happened.

For a second I just stood there staring at the empty patch of pavement.

No bodies. No witnesses. No answers. Typical Tuesday.

I exhaled and shoved my hands into my jacket pockets as I headed for the car.

The door thunked shut behind me. Baby turned over on her first try, a low familiar rumble filling the silence the alley had left behind.

Finally. Something reliable.

I pulled out onto the street and let the city lights swallow the place behind me.

Couple turns later I hit an open stretch of road where the streetlights came slow and steady, sliding across the windshield like a metronome.

That’s when my brain started skipping tracks like a scratched record.

Nephilim.

“That kind of power could be, cosmic.”

Baby hummed against the asphalt. Open road had a way of turning the car into a box full of thoughts you didn’t ask for.

Streetlights slid across the hood.

Jane’s face flashed whether I wanted it to or not. That half smile did something low in my chest I wasn’t gonna unpack tonight.

“I’m sure she can die easy enough.”

My grip tightened on the wheel.

I stared straight ahead at the dark ribbon of highway and let out a slow breath through my nose.

“Doesn’t mean she can’t bleed.”

That one didn’t sit right.

I drove another few miles before the first neon vacancy sign showed up. Cheap roadside motel, flickering red letters buzzing against the dark like a dying bug zapper.

Perfect.

Right now a bed and four walls sounded a hell of a lot better than a a rolling steel think-tank.

I pulled into the lot and killed the engine.

—

The motel shower sputtered for a second before it kicked into something resembling water pressure.

I stood under it longer than I meant to but moved faster than I probably should’ve. Soap, rinse, done. Like I was trying to wash off the night before it had time to settle in my skin.

When I stepped back into the room the quiet hit me again.

I dried off, pulled my jeans back on, and dropped onto the edge of the bed without bothering with the lights.

Phone was already in my hand before I realized I’d picked it up.

Sam’s name sat there in my contacts.

“I’ll call you, don’t call me.”

Nothing.

No text.

No follow-up.

No ‘you good?’

My thumb hovered over the dial button for a second before I locked the phone again and tossed it onto the nightstand.

“How did she bleed?”

I leaned back against the cheap motel pillow and stared up at the ceiling.

Phone still sitting a foot away from my hand.

I could call.

Could make him explain what the hell that was about.

Could try harder to convince myself the guy on the other end was still my brother.

But I didn’t see the point.

The AC rattled quietly in the corner.

Outside a truck rolled past on the highway, tires hissing on wet pavement.

I closed my eyes.

“She can die easy enough.”

My eyes opened again.

That didn’t sound like Sam.

Not even a little.

Part IV. Coming Soon!

That's as good a word as any. He infected us both, didn't he, Mr. Jingles? With life.

I'm a hundred and eight years old, Elaine. I was forty-four the year that John Coffey walked the Green Mile. You mustn't blame John. He couldn't help what happened to him... he was just a force of nature.

Oh, I've lived to see some amazing things Elly. Another century come to past, but I've... I've had to see my friends and loved ones die off through the years... Hal and Melinda... Brutus Howell... my wife... my boy. And you Elaine... you'll die too, and my curse is knowing that I'll be there to see it.

It's my atonement, you see; it's my punishment, for letting John Coffey ride the lightning; for killing a miracle of God. You'll be gone like all the others. I'll have to stay. Oh, I'll die eventually, that I'm sure. I have no illusions of immortality, but I will wish for death... long before death finds me. In truth, I wish for it already.

—Old Paul Edgecomb, The Green Mile

I have something I call the “Tom Hanks” rule when it comes to analyzing an actor’s greatest work. Simply: can that performer can tear my heart out in four words or less?

Hear me out: I miss you, Jenny, Forrest Gump. Four words. Earn this, Saving Private Ryan. Two Words. And the worst of the bunch: Roll on, Two, The Green Mile. Three Words.

The thing that they all have in common, is that they happen at the end of the movie, after the stakes have been fleshed out. After the action has taken place, when the context is at it’s highest peak. Then, and only then do you finally have the necessary ingredients and level of emotional investment necessary to break your readers heart.

So last night, I was up late mapping out one of my original stories and doing some dynamic work I needed to help chart out the plot. I had a couple of characters who have a couple of catchphrases back and forth that are intentionally mundane in normal life, but under the context of their story, I meant for them to be devastating.

I was struggling with a new pairing, and the emotions I want the reader to experience from their relationship.

Eventually, I settled on a useful set of words, in four words or less that I plan to milk unabashedly until the story is dead.

“Too Bad.”

It can be cheeky, it can be playful, it can be serious, and in the end, it just could one day be devastating.

But what will determine that isn’t me ‘showing’ you that it’s devastating. No. It’s something a little simpler than that:

Context.

So, what is the Philosophy of “Show, Don’t Tell?”

When it comes to storytelling, I’m a big proponent of less is more. But I think “show; don’t tell” gets it horrifically because it focuses on the wrong thing.

At its core, the rule means:

Don’t state an emotion or trait.
Demonstrate it through behavior, action, sensory detail, or consequence.

That’s it. It’s not mystical. It’s not anti-exposition. It’s not a ban on narration.

It’s just a reminder to avoid overusing flat, boring, obvious explanations like: “She was furious.” “He was devastated.” Let him fall to his knees trying to scream his sobs, but his lungs are bereft of the oxygen. I’ll get it. I’ll pick up what you’re puttin’ down.

It’s a simple reminder that things work better if you force the reader to infer. But I find this is always in reference to the idea that behavior > a better story telling device to words. And to that I say: We are writers… am I just a joke to you?!

You can tell all you want… if you aren’t being obvious about it. But we will get to that in a minute.

Show, don’t tell is great in certain context. Because not everything in life is something you learned by someone telling you how to do it, you learned by watching it being done. The best books, the best art, slips you so deep into the reality you’re consuming you forget about the boundaries of yours and go off to play in theirs for a little while.

And certainly making the reader work harder to notice important pieces of your story can be valuable. Especially in say, a mystery novel, where the real culprit doesn’t realize your protagonist clocked that fresh

Context creates power. Simplicity activates it.

When my characters mean, ‘I will find you no matter what happens to us, in every lifetime, in every universe. I love you,’ it’s a lot more fun to assume my reader isn’t stupid and will glean all of that information from: “Marco?” “Polo.” I can’t “show” you “Marco/Polo.” I have to tell you. But it’s what I told you, the history I established with it, the stakes under which I’m saying it again, and the restraint I demonstrated in not writing action that makes my brother and sister characters give up acting like siblings in order to make sure you didn’t forget that their bond is central to this moment, and that if one of them was lost to the other, it would cause great harm… I can make you understand all that in three words

When my character’s mean: ‘I don’t like that you just called me out on my bullshit, but I also absolutely like that you called me out on my bullshit,’ I don’t say that out right. I say “You know what? You’re bossy.” and let the reply be “And you’re bratty.”

If I say:

“He was heartbroken.”

Your brain nods politely.

If I say:

As he heard the familiar creak of the opening door he scrambled to hide the phone from view. Now was not the time to try to justify to himself or anyone else how many times he’d called that old number just to hear her voice again.

That might land a little harder for you.

But I didn’t just ‘show’ you by having him hide the phone, I told you what his internal justification was as well. I just didn’t tell you he felt scared, and ashamed of his grief. I implied it. Not with behavior, with internal words.

I think the things that really make a good story pop; that make those moments stay in your head and your heart for years to come is the irony of the mundane and the subtlety of the overlooked.

In Game of Thrones after Ned Starks death Catlin doesn’t say to her son: “Baby it’s gonna be all right.” No. When she finally finds little 14 year-old Rob sobbing, wearing his father’s armor, and hacking his good sword against a tree, she has to scream three times just to get his attention. The first words out of her mouth are not comfort. They are “Rob! …you’ve ruined your sword.”

In one fell swoop, George Martin ripped my soul from my body with that line. For just a second I had forgotten how young he actually is and that he’s now going to war. That’s the consequence of Ned Stark’s death without, telling me that outright. But also, without ‘showing’ me. The imagery is there, yes, but it is the internal math I did in my own head because of the context he built that had me putting the book down to choke back the tears. What do you mean, this 14-year-old boy doesn’t get any time to grieve his murdered father. What do you mean, he’s going to be too busy trying to run a country that’s trying to avenge it. If Catelyn had moved immediately to softening the blow or to comforting her son, I as the reader would not have cared nearly as much about that scene as I do because he didn’t hold my hand.

Show, don’t tell is a nice catchphrase, but it’s missing the point. Sometimes, it’s the kind of clever that is needed. Sometimes, it’s just flat not enough.

All Life is Context

If a husband buys his wife a nice necklace on their one year anniversary, certainly, it’s sweet. It’s hopeful, it’s a beginning. But the kind of gift you give your spouse on you 50th anniversary… it almost doesn’t matter what it is. The context makes it special, already.

Fifty years of sleeping in the same bed. Of funerals attended. Of sickness, and health. Of moving homes and watching your kids get married. Of saying hello and goodbye to furry friends. Of arguments and apologies.

By year fifty, the sentence “I still choose you” carries the weight of a a lifetime. No one needs to explain why it’s meaningful.

That’s why grief hits differently, too.

Losing a friend you met last month hurts. Losing the friend who has known you since you were fourteen is tectonic.

Same word. “Friend.” Very. Different. Stakes.

The emotional difference isn’t in how dramatically someone tells you they’re grieving. It’s in how much life was stacked underneath the loss.

And that’s the part bad craft advice forgets. Investment isn’t novelty. It’s accumulation.

Show just a little “skin”, Earn the Intimacy with Work

So when it comes to emotional impact on your reader, Show, don’t tell is a method to move you from point A to point B, and do it well, to add nuance to reality. But the bottom line is: