forever on the edge

just working for your thread until the end

Hey! How are you hanging on?

My hands bear the scars of a chemical burn. And yet the unrelenting rash still comes back. Heightened stress, poor health, low self-esteem, and the list goes on.

I am a loser—or so say my dark thoughts.

Thus the problem with nihilism, as I’ve mentioned before, is that it makes too much sense. The logic follows that there is no reason for anything to happen at all. Every moment an accident of entropy as we rush through the minutes and hours of every day.

And yet I feel compelled to make an appeal to hope.

That foolish wish to see something better is more than a delusional dream embedded in dogmatic desires—the eternal struggle within and without when the drums of war are howling in the winter wind.

If for nothing more than the strength to keep hanging on.

wheel ain't stopping
you're on and you're locked in
in the end you get one thing, nothing

Addendum: I will never define hope as blind faith or arrogant ignorance. Those are empty masks in my eyes. Indeed, it is easier to memorize the lyrics to any given hymn than it is to understand the sermon in its full length—and even moreso to appreciate any original sins lost in translation.

Instead, I believe calling attention to that very weakness to be a way to know thyself.

💡A Bright Tomorrow, Today!

My personal preference may be ironic reinterpretations or fantastical explorations, but either way the end is met with the seized means of production.

Working through those difficult emotions and hidden traumas is what Lux Aeterna meant to me. I’ve since learned to call it corporate satire, but the joke runs deeper than the C-Suite.

The book is more than the bottom of the box of complaints, it’s a critique of corporate-religious reality.

Lux Aeterna — Corporate satire novella in a collection of poetic letters.

My short story features a curious character — the cosmic janitor — who is a victim of pointless cruelty. The juxtaposition of cold company logic and religious hierarchy is meant to build into a chaotic paranoia around authority.

Azrael searches for meaning in all the solemn letters he finds, but that only leads to his inevitable damnation and corruption.

I leave the final decision of who was right and who was wrong up to the reader, but between the lines, all I can hope for is that you find something worthwhile in at least some of my desperate cries.

No matter how far they go or how costly the shipping phare.

The Scouts Lighthouse

Back in Besniwod, everyone knew the stories.

The pride of my home was embedded in every last stone. We were the reason there was anything at all—we were the ones left in the cold.

We fought for every seed and worked hard to plant every blade of grass and every forest tree. We created our own sustenance and no one could take that from us.

That was the long-lasting truth of Saint Vinson’s Triumph where I was from—across the strait and a long train ride from the walled city. She gave my people the confidence to be ourselves.

To see this northern shore lit up against the dark of what was—to me and my sensibilities—an exceptionally long night, was then as much a shock as having survived the journey at all.

These people were blessed with fruitful earth and an abundance of moderate climes. For the first time in my life, I fully understood exactly what She meant to our forefathers.

Her Flame gave us the strength to not just survive but to thrive and have pride in who we were and where we lived.

Caught up in the emotion, I remembered an old song:

Sailing straight and true again.
I found myself a life long friend.

Because I lifted my head that one last time,
to see your angel's light you sent for me.

My eyes did not deceive me.

I was finally seeing the lighthouse at the end of the world.

The World’s Edge

Significatorius is still more a pile of unorganized notes than anything close to a draft, but the shape of the plot and characters is solidifying into something fun.

I will likely lean into the broader lore behind Besnowed. I’ve largely kept all of that hidden from the self-contained story. Antarctica may have seemed incidental—or even arbitrary—but it was actually a deliberate choice, hinting at what is waiting in the rest of the world for those who look closely.

The setting itself holds significant details that add to the conversations and politics around the families, holidays, and religions I created.

Besnowed — The warmth of winter in a book: Love, family, meals, and snow.

While I plan for Significatorius to be a lighter love story, me being me, those little hints are likely to touch on darker themes.

I believe that will be a fun way to satisfy both the desire to have an enjoyable escape while leaving the crumbs of deeper questions along the way.

After all, I believe in hope, but never said that it was easy to do so.

Until next time.

—JMB