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I called Max yesterday 

I was hoping to hear his voicemail; some fragment of his self. A digital fingerprint, some relic of a time where he had the fine motor skills to open his phone, let alone listen to messages. Instead I got that “duh dah DEE – the number you have dialed has been disconnected, and is no longer in service – thank you!”

I can’t say I was expecting otherwise, though. Had the call even gone through, I probably would have given my mom a heart attack, seeing as how his phone has just been sitting on her desk for the last two years. Well – 1 year and 51 weeks. Op – 1:11pm as I type that, nice (his birthday = 1/11). 

I’ve been struggling a lot with writing because I don’t know how to find my voice. Blark quif sklechp hanuf. When I make this dumb little internet pebbles I’m not really trying to say or accomplish anything. There’s no image I’m trying to conjure in your mind, nor do I really give a shit if you like what I have to say. I’ll send this to you if I want to feel seen at a specific moment, but for the most part any critical aspect to my writing is a bygone, like choke on a bag of dicks if you think my grief-posting needed fewer tricolons. 

But when I want to write something that moves a story, or a character, or a world forward; it just feels so fucking presumptuous. All I can ever think of is Peter going “it insists upon itself”. Who the fuck am I to string words together? And that feedback loop – every time I start a sentence, be it on pen or keyboard, a buzzer goes off in my head — “who the fuck are you?”. 

The irony of the whole thing is that my own pain is the only thing louder than the self-destructive voice of “Reason” telling me to stop bothering. So I can sit down and write 10,000 words about how awful I feel easy-peasy. But put two sentences together about What Happens Next in a scene that I’ve already imagined, and I’ll deep clean my room 4 times out of anxious procrastination before I even get close to opening the document, let alone finding a place to start. 

Speaking of things that are shit, I get triggered by so many things these days. I never understood anxiety until I got a few doses of trauma-wama straight to the cerebellum. Depression – now thats easy. Just lay there. But anxiety? Holy fucking shit. I’m one meme-straw away from breaking the camel’s Jack. 

Reddit: “r/TrueOffMyChest: go to the doctor early! My stomach ache was lymphoma!”

TikTok: “AITA?: I was pretty tired for a few days and it turns out I have stage IV everything cancer. AITA for quitting my job?” 

Instagram reels: “10 signs you have cancer and what you should do about it!” 

My intestines: “Hey we really loved that coffee you had this morning. Wouldn’t it be cool if we gave you a different kind of poop every day so you’re constantly second guessing whether your insides are dying?”

My brain: “Hey remember all those horrible things you keep seeing happen to people? That’s going to happen to you. It’s already happening to you. It happened and you don’t even know that it’s happened. It’s too late, you’re just going to shit blood one morning or go to sleep with a headache and wake up with a brain tumor or even better, get something even more painful and debilitating and drawn out than anything you’ve seen up to this point.” 

Now, I know what you’re thinking, step 1 is to stop doomscrolling through cancer content, and step 2 is therapy, and step 3 is maybe eating some leafy greens and taking a fiber supplement. Trust me, I’ve been working on it. But it takes energy, to keep myself calm; and it takes energy to not engage in habitual coping mechanisms; and it takes energy to tell myself that everything is going to be okay especially when I don’t really believe that. 

So some days are better than others, and some days I manage to avoid a ton of potential triggers and I go to bed happy and calm; but other days, I see the wrong instagram reel just as I’m having a slightly off-color poop, and all of a sudden in the back of my mind, I’m dying. 

Don’t get me wrong, we’re all dying. You’re dying right now as you’re reading this. But you’re also alive, and usually being alive is enough to remind us that the dying that we’re doing is some ways off. But for the past three years, since Max got sick, I haven’t really been alive either. I was waiting for something horrible to happen to someone I love. There was little life to be found. And the fear that experience left me with — it made me want to brace for impact. I’m in a fetal position, flinching, because I’m expecting the plane to just fall out of the air and kill everyone on board. And no amount of “it’s okay / it’s alright” can shake the sense of gravity. Because when you’re on a plane, the plane WANTS to fall out of the air. The ground WANTS to slam you into it at terminal velocity. And every cell in your body is eventually going to turn into goop. Or something worse than goop. 

But, that’s not any way to live. And I’ve realized that; I’m not ignorant to that fact. But my awareness of these harmful lines of code in my operating system has not given me any more power to avoid these thoughts / triggers / reactions than I had without said awareness. So, I just have to sigh, and roll my eyes, and suck it up, and treat my anxiety like your least favorite child bringing you a picture they drew in school. You put it up on the fridge, pat them on the head, and then throw that shit away at the earliest convenience. 

Anyways, I’m pretty sure typing this was helpful. Maybe it wasn’t. I still feel kind of anxious. But that’s also on August because this last week and this next week are big “remember watching your brother wither and die!” And that definitely adds to my threshold for experiencing anxiety. Honestly probably a solid 30%, as a matter of fact. Lets math it out real quick — 

• Went to bed late last night because I was watching the Equalizer and so had slightly disrupted sleep / I ate some eggs at 11:30pm and that also disrupted my sleep: +15% 
• There’s a red spot on my hand thats probably just a bug bite or dry skin but I can SEE it and I don’t know what it is – 10% 
• My poops were not that great, because of the poke bowl I had last night, but it’s still not a good feeling… +15% 
• August deathiversary coming up +35% 
• Like 5 reels and reddit posts today were about cancer +10%
• I’m stressed about my mom leaving for two weeks and having to take care of 3 dogs and 2 cats +20% 
• My room isn’t clean +5% 
• I’m anxious and stressed about the future, my plans, my tasks, that I have not made any progress on / don’t know how I’ll solve +10%

I feel like I don’t have to do the math on this one to realize that it’s over 100%, and honestly anything over 50% is enough to trigger some anxiety. So I’m gonna do a quick patch on this bad Larry, a little cleaning is in order (I say my room is dirty but you probably wouldn’t agree, but the only thing that matters is that its dirty to me (rhyme)). Maybe some exercise, some pushups and a bike ride would hit really nicely; with a little beach Wim Hof if its not raining (or, maybe especially if it IS raining); and then lets see what I can do about those tasks? 

I mean, thats all it is, at the end of the day: finding what I’m in control over. Trust me, I get it. But god fucking damn if I don’t have valid fucking reasons to be anxious, ya know? Like I’m about to have to do (relatively) so much work, in order to claw back 15-20% of my mental bandwidth, and I’ll STILL be over 90% anxiety tendency. It’s disheartening. Please trust me when I say I’ve been working on this for yearrrrrrrrrrs and I might have gotten better at recognizing + addressing + preventing these things, but h o l y f u c k it is WORK and takes TIME and I’m so fucking tired and done I just want to be done with feeling this way. 

But, it’s like wiping your ass after you take a shit. The longer you sit there the more uncomfortable it’s going to get. So pass me the wet wipes and tell me how much you liked reading what I wrote. 

Say what you will about the Marvel Cinematic Universe

They occasionally drop some absolutely excellent one-liners. 

“What is grief, if not love persevering?” We can all thank WandaVision for that one. It might be time to rewatch WV, as a matter of fact. When did that come out? 2022? No – it had to have been earlier than that, because Multiverse of Madness was 2023…final answer, on the board, 2021 for WandaVision, lets see what the answer is — 

January 2021 release for WandaVision. And now we can ask ourselves our favorite questions when considering content:  

Was Max alive? Did he watch WandaVision? Did he like it? 

And worst of all — 

Did he and I talk about it? Did I just forget? How many memories with my brother have been blended into serotonin soup, reduced to synapses and grey matter, to be coughed or sneezed out? (It’s true – whenever you hawk tuah a thick loogie, there’s a little bit of brain juice in there). Now, you might be thinking to yourself, “Hey, Jack, did you really just post this picture of you and Max only to talk about WandaVision and dubious brain facts?”, and the answer to that question is No, No I Did Not. 

As human beings, we are wired to be risk-averse, to be loss-averse. Tversky and Kahneman (1979) demonstrated this heuristic over a thirty year period – the pain of losing 100$ is twice as strong as the pleasure of gaining the same amount. So I sit here, staring at photos of my dead brother, thinking about how great it would be to find 100$ in my pocket, only to realize the 100$ bill has a bit of brain cancer on it.

I mean, how else is there to think about? You don’t know me. You don’t know my relationship with Max. You might have known one, or even both of us, sure. You might be one of the few remaining childhood friends we still have (NA, AB, BW, hey hi hello); but even you have limited perspective on exactly how times I threw away the 100$ bill of my brothers love. 

I’ve been trying – quite a bit, as a matter of fact – to feel good. It’s an easy goal to set, after all – I don’t want to feel bad, I do want to feel good, baddabing baddaboom we just aimed at something to strive for. I wrap myself in a cloak of positive affirmations, warm myself by the fire of empty platitudes, and try not to think about the oppressive darkness at the edges of my campsite. 

I look at this picture and something opens up inside of me. Something sharp and twisted and dense with gravity and pain and loss. Max looked at me like this for 23 years and I didn’t even notice until it was too late. I see his love, and reach for it across time and space, trying to find my 5 year old little brother who just needed someone to let him know that he was safe and loved and Perfect the way the is; and my love turns to ashes in my mouth.

I’m a big fan of delusion. It’s a pretty fantastic invention – delusion saw Alexander conquer half the known world; delusion saw the invention of the lightbulb and the car, the overthrowing of countless monarchs and dictators – hell, delusion is what gets most people out of bed every morning. The delusional belief that maybe, just maybe, today will be better. Maybe today things will be different. Maybe the way things are, isn’t the way that things need to be. 

Where’s my delusion? I seem to be all out. All I have to look at is death and suffering and meaningless fucking days spent working at Starbucks, or dreaming about a time when maybe things will be different. Max’s delusion left him with nothing. His life didn’t get better. He didn’t get what he deserved. He deserved an older brother who loved and supported him and made sure that he knew that every second of the day. He deserved to feel how much love he brought to the world and how much better off the people in his life were for knowing him. He deserved — he deserved more than what he got. And I’m left at the intersection of Nightmare Ave and Reality Blvd, just missed the last bus to Dreamville, fresh out of anything that might be useful. 

I feel like a boomer on any street named after a civil rights leader after midnight. Am I afraid of nothing but my own conceptions of suffering? Or is there a validity to my fear? Are the shadows in the derelict buildings here to steal my catalytic converter? Or are they about to help me change my tire?  You might be asking yourself if this anecdote is racist. Let me know the answer when you figure it out.

Anyways. I’m only adding more text here because when I went to go upload this post I realized that asking You, one of my Three People Who Actually Read These Things, a rhetorical question about my hypothetical racism probably wasn’t the philosophical headscratcher I was hoping for. I guess the moral of the story for today is Loss. And the bitterness of realizing how much Love I could have returned to someone who deserved it – who NEEDED it – more than anyone I know.

I think I have to just start small. It’s hard to put myself in the headspace to share anything to this website, let alone to “create” “content” that’s supposed to sit here. Who the fuck am I? What do I have to say that’s worth saying, worth sharing? 

But I’ve been thinking about it wrong. I write for the sake of writing, share for the sake of sharing – the aftermath, the impact, is less important than how I feel about myself during the process of creation and existence. And I think, not feeling comfortable in my own skin, head, and words is a symptom of my fear of existence.

Staying trapped in a cycle of avoidance and obtusion – going against the grain of my own life. No wonder there are splinters. How can I truly embrace living, if I can’t even allow myself to exist before I jump to judgement? 

I smoke spliffs, pinners or cannons, not even because I seek the rush of neurotransmitters and brief manual control over my brain chemistry – but because the act of rolling and smoking, creation and consumption, is balanced and enjoyable as a unit of activity. 

So, fuck it. I want writing and sharing here to be as easy, accessible, enjoyable, affirming as rolling a spliff. So, if you’re reading this, I hope you’re not expecting anything revelatory, meaningful, or even particularly interesting. Because this is my little corner of the internet. If you don’t like it, eat sand. 

Now, at this point, if you’ve been paying attention or even accidentally discovered some latent reading comprehension skills, you may be asking yourself, “when is he going to make raisins relevant?”. After all, thats the title of this post. Fuck you, that’s when. Raisins were relevant to me when I started writing this. Jeff Bringus gets it. Everyone also can take another heaping plate full of aforementioned sand. 

Here’s a picture I quite like. I was going to edit a photo specifically for this post; I was thinking some sort of mandala, with circular concentric layers representing different eras of my life; but I don’t want to create a barrier to posting. It would be like rolling a spliff, and then ordering a special lighter off the internet even though I have plenty of lighters already.