Author: Mangus Khan

Quote of the Day – 07292025

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Personal Reflection

There’s a cruelty in how casually people say, “time heals all wounds.” As if time were some tender surgeon that stitches up our grief and leaves us clean.

But that’s not how healing works.
Real healing is rugged. It’s uneven. And it leaves marks.

What Kennedy offers is not comfort, but truth. The mind does not erase pain; it adapts. It places scar tissue over the open places so we can keep walking. It learns how to carry memory without crumbling. It learns to breathe around the loss, not despite it.

This isn’t a story of forgetting. It’s a story of integration.

Some pain never leaves. It just gets quieter. It stops screaming, but it hums beneath the skin — a reminder of what mattered, of who we’ve loved, of what we’ve lost.

And that, too, is sacred.

Reflective Prompt

What scar are you carrying that others can’t see?
In what ways have you adapted around your pain, and how has it shaped the person you’re becoming?

Quote of the Day – 07282025

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Personal Reflection

There are days when the ache of loss doesn’t scream — it just sits quietly beside you. It’s not always sharp or loud. Sometimes it’s a stillness. A weight. A familiar presence in an empty room.

Jamie Anderson’s quote doesn’t try to fix grief — it doesn’t even try to explain it. It simply reframes it. It tells us: that thing you’re carrying? That’s love. It’s not failure. It’s not weakness. It’s all the tenderness you had to give, and no place to set it down.

That reframe has helped me breathe through the silence.
Because grief doesn’t end when someone leaves. It lingers in songs, in scents, in the shape of a hand. It’s the conversation that never got to finish. The birthday that still circles the calendar.

And understanding grief as displaced love — not brokenness — has helped me stop trying to “get over it.”
Instead, I’ve started learning how to honor it.

How to let it bloom.
How to let it sit beside me without shame.
How to write from it, speak through it, live beyond it — but never deny it.

Reflective Prompt

What memory do you carry that still aches with unspent love?
How might you give that love somewhere to go — in words, in ritual, in living fully?

Quote of the Day – 07272025

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Personal Reflection

Fear has always been there for me — not loud, not always sharp, but persistent. Like background static I’ve mistaken for intuition. And for a long time, I measured my strength by how little I felt that fear.

But Audre Lorde doesn’t tell us to wait for fear to leave.
She tells us to anchor ourselves in vision — to shift the focus from what frightens us to what drives us. That’s a harder, quieter kind of strength. One that doesn’t need applause.

When I think about my own vision — the one that’s just under the surface, waiting for me to commit — I realize it’s never fear that’s stopped me. It’s the belief that my fear disqualified me. That strength had to feel like certainty.

But Lorde redefines it:
Power isn’t the absence of fear.
It’s the decision to act in spite of it.
To speak when silence would be safer.
To create even when the world shrugs.
To dare — not because we aren’t afraid—but because something deeper won’t let us retreat.

And that’s the moment fear becomes irrelevant.
Not gone. Just… quieter.

Reflective Prompt

What vision is waiting for you to stop asking for permission and start acting with conviction?

Stories from the Edge of Change III

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Chapter 3

Finch

Jake hadn’t meant to come back.

He told himself it was a supply run—donate some canned goods to the church pantry, maybe check on a guy from group. But his body betrayed him. It always did when he got too quiet. So instead of downtown, he found himself standing at the edge of the block he’d avoided for almost four years.

Same cracked sidewalks. Same rust-colored brick and crooked porch rails. It smelled like last night’s rain and rotting leaves and fried onions from the corner store. The same ghost-town warmth that made the cold worse.

Finch had lived longer than expected.

Mrs. Eldridge had kept him alive. A neighbor. Not a friend. She never offered forgiveness, just water bowls and unspoken understanding. Jake had overdosed two rooms away from where Finch used to sleep. The paramedics saved Jake, but left the dog pacing in circles around a pile of vomit and needle caps. Mrs. Eldridge took him in after that. No speech. No fanfare.

Now, Finch lay curled in a fleece blanket on her enclosed porch, his gray snout twitching in sleep, ribs pressing against skin like old bones trying to escape.

Jake crouched in the doorway.

“Hey, boy.”

Finch opened his eyes slowly. The gaze wasn’t surprised. It was tired. Familiar. He blinked once, let out a rattling sigh, and put his chin back down like, Oh. It’s you.

The porch smelled like cedar planks, sour dog breath, and dust. A cracked radio whispered gospel from another room. Jake sat with his knees pulled up, feeling the wood grain bite into his back.

He had spent so many nights talking to this dog, when words failed around people, when dope blurred the edges of memory. Finch never barked. Just stared at him like he understood too much.

Jake rubbed his temples. His fingertips felt greasy with sweat and guilt.

“I thought you’d be gone by now,” he said quietly. “Guess we’re both too stubborn.”

Finch let out a half-sigh, half-snore. The kind of sound that made you ache behind the ribs.

Jake remembered the last night. The screaming. Dani in the hallway, crying, holding her son with one arm and blocking the door with the other. Jake had tried to push past her. Not with violence, just desperation. That’s the problem—desperation doesn’t always care about the difference.

Micah, barely seven, had clutched Finch’s leash and screamed, “Don’t hurt Mommy!”

Jake hadn’t. Not really. But the way he grabbed the leash—hard, clumsy—made the boy scream louder. Jake saw his own reflection in a hallway mirror in that moment, and it scared him more than anything. The wildness in his face. The failure.

He ran. It didn’t feel brave. It felt like a retreat. Like every other time, he’d chosen the exit over the consequence.

The air smelled of impending rain—ozone and something metallic. A low rumble rolled across the sky. Jake reached down and brushed his knuckles against Finch’s paw. The pads were rougher now. Cracked. Familiar.

He’d read once in a recovery forum about how animals mourn. How they carry memory in ways we don’t understand. He believed it. Finch had always known things Jake never said.

“I’m sorry,” Jake whispered.

It wasn’t just for the dog.

Mrs. Eldridge came out with a bowl of water and a towel. She looked like she hadn’t aged, just weathered down into something harder. Not brittle—stone.

“He’s not eating,” she said. “Won’t last the night.”

Jake nodded.

“Can I stay?”

“You should’ve never had to ask.”

He stayed.

All night. The porch grew colder. The rain finally came, misty at first, then steady, like it meant something. Jake didn’t talk much. Just sat with Finch under the dim porch light, watching shadows shift and windows glow in the distance.

He thought about all the ways he’d tried to escape himself. Pills, powders, rage, silence. But Finch had always brought him back—anchored him when he floated too close to the edge.

Finch died an hour before dawn. No drama. No sound. Just one last slow breath, and stillness.

Jake buried him in the alley garden, near the back fence where Finch used to bark at raccoons. He dug with his hands. Let the mud ruin his jeans. Let the wet earth crawl under his nails and the blisters stab open without complaint.

He didn’t want gloves. He wanted it to hurt.

He wrapped Finch in the towel and laid him down gently, like the way you close a book you’re not ready to finish. On impulse, he cut a strip from the leash and buried it with him.

No stone. No cross. Just the dirt and the sky and the silence.

Before leaving, Jake walked to Dani’s building. Same rusted mailbox. Same flickering porch bulb. He paused at the door, soaked and shivering. Thought about knocking.

Didn’t.

Instead, he slid a letter under the door. It wasn’t long. Just honest.

I buried him. He waited longer than I deserved.

He stood there a moment, listening.

Nothing.

Jake turned and walked into the soft gray morning, the rain trailing behind him like a prayer left unfinished.

Author’s Note:

This piece was written for today’s FOWC, RDP, and Word of the Day prompts.

Stories from the Edge of Change is a quiet fiction series about reckoning, recovery, and the long, uneven road back to ourselves. This one is for the ghosts we leave behind—and the ones who wait anyway.

Stories from the Edge of Change II

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Chapter 2

The One Who Stayed

They called him Angel. Not because he was good—he wasn’t. But because that was the name his mother had scrawled on the back of a birth certificate before vanishing into whatever hole the meth and the men had dug. That’s what the caseworker said, anyway. He never knew if it was meant as a blessing or a dare.

Maple Street didn’t care what your name was. It didn’t give a damn about backstory or trauma files. It just asked if you had something worth trading—dignity, a story, sometimes blood. If not, it lets you rot in its shadow. Cold. Dirty. Forgettable.

Angel’s coat smelled like salt and mildew. His jeans were stiff with city grime and sweat. He kept his hoodie pulled low and his mouth shut. That was his trick—if you kept your eyes on the pavement, people passed by faster. If you sat still enough, maybe the shame wouldn’t boil over.

He didn’t want sympathy. He wanted protein. He wanted socks. He wanted to fall asleep without twitching awake to sirens or wet cardboard collapsing under him.

And maybe—though he’d never say it out loud—he wanted someone to call him by his name without checking a clipboard first.

The man who sat next to him that day didn’t look like much. Worn hoodie, creased face, tired eyes. Same as the rest. But he didn’t try to hawk salvation. Didn’t flash a business card or mutter some rehab mantra through a forced smile. He just lowered himself down, exhaled like it hurt, and offered a protein bar.

“You don’t gotta stay here.”

That was all he said.

Angel didn’t answer. But the words landed anyway, quiet as dust, sharp as memory. There was no lecture in the tone, no brag in his posture. Just something steady. Like a man who knew what a long fall looked like and still chose to climb anyway.

Angel watched him walk away. There was a patience to his stride, not fast, not dragging, more like a hawk circling something that hadn’t happened yet.

The protein bar felt heavy in his hand. Real. He unwrapped it hours later behind the train station, fingers cracked and trembling from the cold. It tasted like chocolate and chalk. Like something that might matter.

That night, he couldn’t sleep.

Not because of the cold—he was used to that—but because of the quiet. Something inside him had shifted, and he didn’t like it. He wanted the usual numbness back, the hollow where hope had once lived.

He kept hearing that sentence. You don’t gotta stay here.
It scraped against the walls of his skull.

Because what if the here wasn’t just the corner? What if it was his skin? His blood? His whole damn life?

The wind picked up and pushed trash through the alley. A soda can clattered down the curb like it was running from something. He pulled the hoodie tighter. Even wrapped in layers, he couldn’t shake the chill. It wasn’t just cold—it was recognition.

He thought about every report, every meeting, every incident on file. His whole existence was a debt—an account he didn’t remember opening but kept getting billed for. A chain of overdrafts, each mistake compounded by the last. And the thing about that kind of debt is, no one wants to co-sign your recovery.

The flyer was still there in the bench slat. Creased and slightly damp, but readable. The rehab center’s logo had a bird on it—a dove, maybe, or a pigeon pretending. “Supportive, Long-Term Recovery,” it said in round, hopeful font, like a band-aid on a bullet wound.

Angel stared at it for a long time. Then shoved it in his pocket.

He didn’t go in. Not that day.

Instead, he drifted. Three more nights outside. Two sober. One was so drunk he pissed himself in his sleep and woke up shaking. He thought about mugging someone at the red line platform. Didn’t. Thought about calling Marcus—his old foster brother, who once tried to stab him with a pencil during a group home fight. Didn’t.

Then, one morning, he was there.

Just standing outside the center like a sleepwalker. He didn’t remember making the decision. His feet had dragged him there like they were on auto-pilot. He kept his hands in his pockets and stared across the street.

A nurse with dreadlocks carried a cardboard box of snacks through the door. A man with sunken cheeks and a twitch stood outside arguing with security, begging for one more chance. A woman in pajama pants and slippers stormed out, phone in hand, yelling at her sponsor that she was done doing this bullshit.

It was clear enough—nobody was exempt from the wreckage. No matter how clean you looked walking in, the ghosts still followed.

Angel lit a cigarette. Took slow, deliberate drags. He didn’t cross the street. But he didn’t walk away either.

And somehow, that felt like the start of something he didn’t yet have the words for.

Author’s Note:

Written for today’s FOWC, RDP, and Word of the Day prompts.

Stories from the Edge of Change is a slow-burn series about survival without spectacle. It’s for those caught in between the ones who haven’t crossed the threshold, but also haven’t run. This story belongs to the uncertain, the reluctant, the almost ready. We see you.

The Moment Was Fluid, Until It Wasn’t

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What one Sabbath song taught me about adrenaline, fear, and the silence that follows the hit.

I wasn’t planning to write about Ozzy Osbourne — I had a ticket in hand to see Earth, Wind & Fire. My mind was elsewhere — groove, joy, rhythm, nostalgia. And then the news came through: Ozzy was gone.

I’m not a diehard fan. I didn’t grow up in the church of Sabbath. But one track — one slow, heavy track that felt like it had something to say long after it stopped playing — stayed with me. It wasn’t a hit. It wasn’t a song anyone quoted. But I’ve carried it. And maybe that’s the thing about deep cuts — they don’t always connect when the world is loud. They wait.

For me, that song was “Hand of Doom.”
Not because it rocked.
Because it spoke — in the language of things we’re not supposed to say out loud. And as someone who’s walked through the slow churn of fear, of silence, of control disguised as coping… I heard it for what it was.

Not a story. Not a warning.
A truth.

Paranoid is the album everyone thinks they know. “War Pigs,” “Iron Man,” “Paranoid” — they’ve been immortalized on T-shirts, classic rock stations, and generations of guitar-store riff flexes. But buried in the middle of Side B is a track that speaks quieter and hits harder than all of them: “Hand of Doom.”

It’s not catchy. It doesn’t try to be. It starts slow, like a body being dragged. Geezer’s bassline feels surgical — steady, ominous, too calm for what’s coming. Then the lyrics begin, and you realize this isn’t a protest song. It’s a field report. A soldier comes back from war. But the war comes back with him.

“You push the needle in…”

There’s no glamor. No metaphor. Just addiction, disillusionment, and the long tail of trauma no one wants to claim responsibility for. Sabbath wasn’t just telling a story — they were holding up a mirror to a nation that fed its young to the fire, then blamed them when they couldn’t come home whole.

A lot of people describe the opening of “Hand of Doom” as a funeral. I’ve seen it written that way dozens of times. But as someone who’s stood in the stillness before something breaks loose, I hear it differently. That intro isn’t mourning. It’s anticipation. It’s the body preparing itself for impact before the mind catches up. It’s the weight of knowing something’s coming — and not being sure whether it’s physical, mental, or spiritual. We all have our own versions of that moment. Some of us walk into it in uniform. Some of us find it alone in a room at 3 a.m. But the question remains: when the unknown finally steps out of the shadows, will we be ready?

Now — with everything we know about PTSD, opioids, and institutional failure — this song still rarely gets mentioned. It makes people uncomfortable. That’s precisely why it matters.

It didn’t scare me as a kid, not like horror movies or ghost stories. It scared me because I could feel the silence around it, like everyone heard it and turned the volume down just a little too fast. Like it was saying something we weren’t supposed to know yet. Or worse — something we already knew, but had no idea how to answer.

When the tempo kicks up, the song finally gets its legs, but it doesn’t feel like freedom. It feels like adrenaline. And for me, it brings back that wired moment just before everything breaks loose. I remember being trained not to let fear take over. Taught that fear was the enemy. But no one tells you the truth: you can’t outrun fear. It doesn’t dissipate — it embeds. The real skill isn’t conquering it — it’s learning how to use it without letting it use you. This part of the song brings me back to the early days, before I learned that lesson. When your heart is pounding, your vision sharpens, and the fight-or-flight reflex kicks in so hard it makes your teeth ache. Everyone talks about those two instincts — but there’s a third no one wants to admit: freeze. And those were the ones that really got to me. The ones who froze. Because when that happened, it didn’t just endanger them — it split your focus. You had to break off from the target, from the objective, and turn toward someone whose body had already left the mission. And that… that’s its own kind of helpless.

There’s a brief pause in the song — a flash of return to the original tempo — and for me, it’s always felt like a breath that never quite makes it to your lungs. It’s not relief. It’s the moment before the shit gets real. It’s that split-second when you know the break is coming, but it hasn’t hit yet. The sound slows, but the tension tightens. I’ve lived that second. We all have, in our own ways. Whether it was the phone call, the sudden detour, the warning tone in someone’s voice — that moment before impact sticks with you. It’s what lets you feel the hit coming before it lands. And that’s what Sabbath nailed here: not just the crash, but the foreknowledge of it. The second your system knows everything’s about to change, but there’s nothing you can do except feel the bottom drop.

Then there’s the damn groove — that stretch of rhythm in the song that doesn’t feel panicked or chaotic. It feels locked in. And for those of us who made it to the other side of the moment, that groove is familiar. It’s the rhythm you step into when you’re fully immersed, taking care of business, senses dialed all the way up. But it’s not a jerking motion. You’re not holding your breath. You’re fluid. You stop trying to control the moment — you become part of it. You become one with it.

And just like that section of the track, the feeling barely lasts — so fleeting you question whether it even happened at all. It’s a kind of cognitive dissonance — a mental vertigo that never quite resolves. It’s like a strange trinity: us, them, and the thing we created in between. That thing… was doom. And in that moment, we were its hands.

“Hand of Doom” wasn’t a warning. It was a receipt.

And when you carry that receipt long enough, you stop asking for change.

Author’s Note: This piece was written as part of Jim Adams’ Song Lyric Sunday. Each week, contributors reflect on songs tied to a given theme. This week’s prompt led me here — to a track I hadn’t planned to write about, but couldn’t ignore.

Quote of the Day – 07262025

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Personal Reflection

Love gets framed like it’s soft. Passive. Even foolish.
But what’s braver than offering your heart, knowing it might not be held gently?

To love — in any form — is to risk:
Being misunderstood.
Being rejected.
Being reshaped.

It’s easy to armor up. Easy to say you don’t care.
But love? Love says: I’ll stay anyway. I’ll risk knowing you and being known in return. I’ll meet you — not to save you, not to fix you, but to witness you.

There’s nothing weak about that.

Love is hard.
Love is work.
Love is war, sometimes — and you fight it by standing still, heart open.

So no, love isn’t weakness. It’s choosing to remain tender in a world that begs you to go numb. That’s not soft.
That’s courage.

Reflective Prompt

Where in your life have you mistaken vulnerability for weakness — and what might shift if you saw it as bravery instead?

Stories from the Edge of Change

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Chapter 1

The Corner Knows

Jake had a name once. Not the kind of people muttered when they passed him on the corner—junkie, beggar, waste. He had a name that once meant something. It was stitched onto a work jacket once. It was on birthday cards, driver’s licenses, and bank forms. But time has a way of chewing the edges off a man until even he forgets what he started as.

Maple Street didn’t ask questions. It didn’t brag about what it took. It just waited—like a dog in the rain. Took your warmth in winter, your pride in spring, and your last dollar in the fall. Jake used to think the city was cruel. Now he wasn’t so sure. Maybe it was just tired.

The slab of concrete on the corner became a sort of confession booth. You sat there long enough, and the sidewalk started remembering for you. Jake’s cardboard sign said, “Anything helps,” but that was a lie. It was a cover-up. What he wanted was for someone to look at him and not flinch.

He remembered the last time Dani, his sister, saw him. Her kid, Micah, clung to her leg, watching Jake wipe blood off his arm in the hallway. The forty bucks he’d taken from her purse sat folded in his sock. That money bought him silence for a night. It cost him her voice for three years.

He told himself he didn’t blame her. But in the quiet—when even the street was empty—he hated how much he missed being loved.

Then came the flyer. Wind-blown, smeared, half-crumpled trash. A rehab center. Big blue letters promising dignity, as if it could be laminated and handed back to you. Jake picked it up because it was the only thing around that looked more beaten than he felt.

He walked to the center wearing a loaner hoodie from the shelter bin, pockets frayed like open wounds. The front desk didn’t blink when he gave his name. That undid him more than judgment would have. Kindness, he realized, cuts deeper when you know you don’t deserve it.

Rehab wasn’t a clean arc. It was tremors and teeth-grinding nights, screaming into pillows, praying to a god he didn’t believe in just to shut off the screaming in his spine.

Then there was Pete.

Gruff, scabbed-over, loud. “You think surviving means you’ve earned something?” he growled one day after Jake mumbled about being ready to try. “You haven’t even apologized to the mirror yet.”

Jake almost left that night. Got as far as the lobby. But there was a vending machine in there—half-lit, full of stale snacks. He stood staring at it for thirty minutes, realizing he didn’t want chips. He wanted a reason to not disappear.

He stayed.

Progress didn’t feel like progress. No one clapped when he made his bed. No one wrote a headline when he chose water over whiskey-flavored mouthwash. But he kept showing up. He kept writing Dani letters. First few ended up in the trash. Then he mailed one.

The reply came weeks later. Just a text: Still clean?

That was all. But it didn’t sound angry. It didn’t sound like goodbye either.

When they handed him his discharge folder, he stared at it for a long time. He didn’t feel done. He didn’t feel new. He felt like wet clay. Still soft. Still shaping.

He passed by Maple Street that afternoon. Same corner. Same stains on the sidewalk. But now someone else was sitting there—a kid, maybe twenty. Hoodie pulled low, cardboard sign shaking in his grip.

Jake didn’t stop with a speech. He didn’t have one. He sat next to him. Quiet. Like the way an old scar settles under your skin.

Pulled a protein bar out of his pocket.

“You know,” he said, voice low, “you don’t gotta stay here.”

The kid didn’t look up. But he took the bar. Hid it fast, like it might be stolen. Jake nodded, stood up.

He wasn’t saved. He wasn’t clean in the way people brag about. He still had nights where the dark got too loud and the past whispered things in voices that sounded like his own. But he hadn’t used. He’d stayed.

The sidewalk didn’t cheer. It just stayed where it was. Cold. Unforgiving. Familiar.

But this time, it didn’t hold him down.

Author’s Note:

This piece was written in response to today’s prompts from FOWC, and Word of the Day. Sometimes, the words given feel random—until they don’t. Until they crack open something real.

The Corner Knows is the first in a quiet series about what it means to crawl back from the edge without knowing if you’ll be welcomed. No heroes here. Just people trying not to vanish. The street remembers. So do we.

Quote of the Day – 07252025

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Personal Reflection

We live in a world obsessed with answers — with clarity, closure, and clean resolutions. We’re told that if we’re still questioning, still wrestling with ourselves, still doubting — something must be wrong.

But Dostoevsky says otherwise.

He reminds us that being human isn’t about finishing the puzzle. It’s about sitting with the pieces, knowing some may never fit, and still choosing to study the shape of the whole.

The work of understanding yourself — your patterns, your wounds, your contradictions-is messy. It doesn’t earn applause. It rarely offers comfort. But it keeps you real. It keeps you soft. It keeps you from becoming machinery inside someone else’s machine.

There is no map for the soul. No straight line from broken to whole. But to be willing to stay in the mystery — to remain curious, even when the answers evade you-that’s the real work of becoming.

And that’s not a waste of time. That’s how you remember you’re alive.

Reflective Prompt

What part of your own mystery have you been avoiding — and what might happen if you studied it with compassion instead of judgment?

Quote of the Day – 07242025

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Personal Reflection

There’s a quiet ache that creeps in when a dream dies — not always dramatic, not always loud. Sometimes it’s just a silence where hope used to be. A stillness where movement once was.

And yet, Langston Hughes doesn’t romanticize the dream. He warns us.
A dream isn’t just inspiration — it’s survival. It’s flight. It’s the direction we point ourselves toward when everything else stops making sense.

But here’s the hard part: holding fast isn’t passive.
It’s active.
It’s holding when your grip is slipping, when your fingers are bloodied, when logic tells you to let go.
It’s believing you still have wings, even when they’re broken.

Dreams don’t always survive untouched.
But sometimes holding fast doesn’t save the dream — it saves you.

Reflective Prompt

What dream have you been tempted to give up on — and what part of your soul still clings to it?

Quote of the Day – 07232025

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Personal Reflection

History isn’t just about what happened. It’s about what lingers — in the language we speak, the habits we repeat, the fears we inherit, and the dreams we deny ourselves without even knowing why.

You don’t have to read every book or memorize every date, but you do have to ask:
Where did I come from?
Not just biologically — but emotionally, spiritually, culturally.

Because when you don’t know, you drift.
You become vulnerable to other people’s narratives. You internalize shame that was never yours to carry. You chase goals that don’t belong to your soul.

History — personal or collective — is a form of anchor. But it’s also propulsion.
Knowing who came before you, and what they endured, reshapes how you walk into a room. It changes how you grieve, how you fight, how you love, how you persist.

If you don’t know the currents, the waves will always win.
But when you trace your way back, even through pain or silence, you remember:
You were never meant to just float.

Reflective Prompt

What truth from your personal or cultural history are you still learning to navigate by?

Still Breathing: A State of the MKU Dispatch

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A vintage typewriter on a cluttered desk, exploding into birds as books tower around it—chaos and creativity in motion.

You ever walk into a room expecting your voice to boom like a prophet’s and instead get met with blank stares and TikTok scrolling?

That was me two weeks ago, stepping into a summer workshop with students aged 8 to 17. I came in with fire and myth, ready to guide them into storytelling. The younger kids couldn’t sit still long enough to absorb anything. The teens? Aloof at best. My usual trick—command the room with presence, reinforce with voice—didn’t move the needle.

I walked out thinking: I might be losing my mojo.

So I did what any story-hardened madman would do.

I built them a universe.

The Ashoma Codex rose from that frustration. An entire mythos crafted for them—a sacred order of supernatural beings bound by fire, memory, and sacrifice. Vampires and werewolves. Secret Circles. Flame-born rites. I even spun up a website just for them, with lore, rituals, and a place to submit their own creations.

And then today, I got word from their instructor: they love it.

They’re building characters. Creating art. Engaging with the world I made. Turns out they didn’t need a lecture. They needed a world that would speak their language.

It’s been a long time since I had that much fun doing something for someone else.

Forging the Forge (with Fewer Bugs and More Story)

Let’s talk about The Narrative Forge (TNF)—my dedicated space for longform fiction.

Eventually, it’ll be home to five deep-cut series:

  • Ashwood County – Southern Gothic horror soaked in grief and ghost stories
  • No Half Measures (formerly Cop Stories) – A noir detective tale where trust is dangerous and truth cuts deep
  • Reilly McGee: Misadventures at Crestview High – 1980s chaos, coming-of-age style, with more heartache than heroics
  • Bourbon and Rust – Grit, regret, and a neo-Western sense of justice
  • Truth Burns – Emotional aftermath and the slow claw toward redemption

The plan: post one chapter a week, rotating series. I’m kicking things off with Ashwood County as I work out the kinks and refine the reader experience.

TNF is my main focus right now. But soon, House of Tunage and The Howlin’ Inkwell will start to move forward again too—each with their own voice and rhythm. And yes, visual arts are coming as well. That site’s still under development, slowed down by the same quirks that’ve been haunting the others.

You guys remember The Knucklehead Report? I gave it its own space so I can rant, roast, or rave about the books and movies that cross my path—without crowding out the rest of Memoirs of Madness.

All of this—the new structure, the site spinoffs, the redesigns—is meant to do one thing: streamline MoM. Make it cleaner. More focused. Easier to navigate without tripping over half-finished drafts or misplaced experiments.

I don’t know which projects will thrive, but right now, building them helps me clear the noise and move forward.

Links to Explore:

So yeah—if things have been a little quiet here, it’s not because I’ve stopped writing. It’s because I’ve been building.

Worlds. Platforms. Foundations.

Madness is still in motion.
Stay with me.

If you’ve been wrestling with your own creative chaos, you’re not alone.
Let’s build through it—one chapter, one echo, one imperfect myth at a time.

Let me know in the comments which project you’re most curious about—Ashwood County, No Half Measures, Reilly, Rust, or something else entirely.

—Mangus

Listening My Way Out

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A reflection on what I hear when I write.

Daily writing prompt
What do you listen to while you work?
View all responses

It depends on the work. And, if I’m honest, the version of me doing it.

If I’m handling logistics—email chains, platform fixes, all the invisible gears of the MKU—I’ll throw on a podcast or an audiobook. Something with steady cadence. Human voices filling the space so I don’t have to. It’s functional. Grounding. A distraction that still lets me move forward.

But when I’m writing—when the words actually matter—I need music. Not background noise. Not ambiance. Music that moves something.

There’s a point I hit when the doubt creeps in, when the old story shows up: You’re not good enough. You’re not ready. You don’t have anything left to say. And that’s when I reach for the headphones.

Because music gets me past that wall. Certain songs act like a key—one turn, and I’m not in the room anymore. I’m somewhere quieter, older, deeper. Below the part of me that edits, or performs, or tries to be clever. Music lets me slip under all that. It gives me access to the version of me that remembers things I haven’t lived yet. The version that trusts.

Writing becomes less about expression and more about excavation. I’m not inventing—I’m uncovering. Music helps me remember where to dig.

And when it’s really working—when the song hits just right—I’m not working at all. I’m listening.

To the story.
To myself.
To whatever’s been waiting.

So what do I listen to while I work?

Whatever helps me get out of my own way.

How I Learned to Story

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A Journey Through Games, Memory, and Becoming a Writer

Daily writing prompt
What’s your favorite game (card, board, video, etc.)? Why?
View all responses

I’ve played my fair share of games across formats—cards, boards, consoles, even a few tabletop RPGs. But there’s one that always pulls me back, not because of its graphics or mechanics, but because of what it reveals.

My mother taught me the first rules of engagement—one card at a time. Solitaire came first, then 500 Rummy, and eventually Spades. She didn’t just teach me to play; she taught me to watch, to calculate, to bluff with grace. Playing cards were never just about the hand you held—they were about the story you told while pretending it didn’t matter.

But as I got older, I found myself pulled toward something deeper. Not just strategy, but myth. That’s where the tabletop games came in—Dungeons & Dragons, Villains & Vigilantes, and my personal favorite: Werewolf: The Apocalypse. That game didn’t just have a storyline—it had lore, ancestry, rage, and sacrifice. It wasn’t about winning. It was about remembering who you were before the world made you forget.

And somewhere in between were the bones—the dominoes—clacking on a Saturday night table, keeping time like a metronome for the past.

I was already writing back then, scribbling scenes in notebooks and building little worlds no one else saw. But games like Werewolf: The Apocalypse didn’t just show me that stories could be powerful—they showed me they could be communal. That they could hit like thunder across a table. That they could change how someone sat, how someone breathed, just by what you said next.

I remember wishing I could write something that gave my friends what those stories gave me: tension, emotion, catharsis. I never thought I had the talent to pull it off. But I kept writing anyway—quietly, stubbornly—hoping maybe someone out there would feel a little of what I felt rolling those dice or flipping that card.

I still do.

I’ve learned not to underestimate myself. Not to confuse doubt with truth. Some stories need polish, sure—but some just need you. Your voice. Your flaws. Your fire.

So I play. I write. I miss a beat, then catch the next one. I embrace the strengths and the limitations—because they both show up to the table.

Be yourself. Write your butt off. The rest takes care of itself.

Quote of the Day – 07192025

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Personal Reflection

It’s a hard truth to swallow — especially when you’ve been the one holding the bucket while everything burns.

You want to fix it.
Patch them up.
Drag them from the wreckage.
But love doesn’t always come with rescue ropes.

Sometimes love is just staying beside them when the heat rises.
Not trying to change their path — just walking with them, even if the flames are part of it.

That’s not weakness.
That’s love with boundaries.
That’s love that doesn’t pretend to be God.

Reflective Prompt

Who are you trying to save — and what might it look like to simply love them instead?

Tarab & Bone

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Prose – 3TC

I’m not afraid.
I’m not afraid.
I’m not allowed to be.

Where I come from, fear is a luxury we were born too broke to afford. Vulnerability wasn’t something we dismissed—it was something we were denied. It was kept behind locked doors, like heirlooms we didn’t inherit.

My grandfather didn’t teach with words. He taught with what he didn’t say. He taught me how to keep the jaw tight, how to pray in silence, how to hold grief like a second spine. He had crafty ways of navigating rooms where he was expected to be invisible, but somehow always left a shadow. He taught me not how to cry—but how to endure the crying of others without blinking.

They told us to walk tall, but not too tall. To speak, but not loudly. To lead, but never forget we’re replaceable. Strong—always. Seen—rarely. Heard—only when invited.

I learned to carry myself like a verdict. The years didn’t soften me—they carved me. And somewhere between funeral suits and morning trains, I mistook resilience for religion.

I’m not afraid.
I’m not afraid.
I’m not allowed to be.

Because they’re still watching.
Because weakness stains in places bleach can’t reach.
Because I carry names no one etched into stone, but I wear them anyway—in the bend of my back and in the tightening of my breath whenever the world grows quiet enough to remember.

I’ve loved with fists.
I’ve buried more brothers than birthdays.
I’ve stared into mirrors and seen ghosts blink back.

And I’m still here.
Which means I’m still dangerous.

Some days, I hear the voices—low and layered, like drums beneath concrete. Whispers at a distance. Ancestral static tuning itself in the back of my skull.

Who is speaking?

My father, maybe—never said “I love you,” but left it folded into a clean shirt and the sound of a deadbolt clicking after midnight.

Or the ones who never made it past eighteen, who hover behind my ribs like secrets I’ll never tell.

Some of them speak in riddles. Some in warnings.
And some just laugh—cheeky, almost cruel:
“Look at this one, still trying to turn ghosts into gospel.”

I remember the nippy mornings, before light. Cold air that slapped you awake. The kind that taught you pain was just a temperature shift you’d survive if you didn’t flinch. Those days made your bones ache—but they made your will sharper, too.

And now, standing here, with all of that folded inside me like a fire I never asked to carry, I wonder:

What have I done with all I’ve been given?
Have I honored the ones before me?
Or just mirrored their silence?

What have I left for the ones next?
A trail of smoke?
A shut door?
A story they won’t want to finish?

What if the bravest thing
isn’t being unafraid—
but being seen?

Not as legend.
Not as weapon.
Not as sacrifice.
But as person—
messy, aching, unfinished.

What if legacy
isn’t built on who endured the most,
but who dared to feel
what others refused to name?

Maybe I’ve been strong too long.
Maybe strength
ain’t the absence of fear,
but the courage to admit
you needed saving too.

Not a statue.
Not a sermon.
Not a ghost.
Just a man—
…and maybe that’s where the healing begins. And the trouble ends with me.

Authors Note:

This piece was sparked by Di’s 3TC challenge—and yes, I stole a line from Stacey Johnson’s poem order. Is it still stealing if I tell you up front? (Shrugs.) Anyway, as usual, I’m grateful to be inspired by friends who make me write better, feel deeper, and laugh louder. You know who you are.

Quote of the Day – 07182025

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Personal Reflection

There’s something alchemical about writing — it starts as noise in the head and somehow becomes a map of the soul.

I don’t write because I know.
I write because I don’t.
Because the truth rarely shows itself on command — but it often slips out in the margins.

Didion wasn’t just making a point. She was handing us a tool. A method.
When the world feels unclear, the mind cluttered, or the heart tangled — write.
Not for performance.
Not for perfection.
Just to find out what the hell’s going on inside you.

Reflective Prompt

What’s one thing you’ve only understood after you wrote it down?

Quote of the Day – 07172025

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Personal Reflection

Freedom costs. And the currency is often your attachment to things you swore you needed.

The past, shame, guilt, perfection, fake loyalty, unspoken grief — we drag this stuff behind us like rusted chains and then wonder why we can’t lift off. But flight doesn’t come from muscle. It comes from surrender.

This isn’t about toxic positivity or pretending trauma didn’t happen.
It’s about deciding what you refuse to carry forward.

Cut the chain.
Let the weight fall.
Rise anyway.

Reflective Prompt

What’s weighing you down that you’ve outgrown — and are you finally ready to set it down?

Notes from the Edge: Go to Sleep

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Prompt Addicts Anonymous – Session Two

Daily writing prompt
Which activities make you lose track of time?
View all responses
A vintage typewriter on a cluttered desk, exploding into birds as books tower around it—chaos and creativity in motion.

Are you being serious right now?

You do know I’m a writer, right?

Losing track of time isn’t a bug — it’s a feature. A built-in occupational hazard. Time slips, evaporates, gets swallowed whole. You want to know what makes me lose track of time? Existing. Creating. Trying to survive my own thoughts with a pen in my hand and a playlist I’ve overanalyzed into oblivion.

Writing. Not just any writing. The kind that starts as a whisper, then sets your spine on fire. The kind that makes your coffee go cold and your leg fall asleep. The kind where you look up and three meals have gone missing. The next thing you know, you’re ranting on a blog (Memoirs of Madness) about the phantom who comes up with these writing prompts like they’re paying attention to your ass.

“Which activities make you lose track of time?”
Go to sleep.

Because I sure haven’t.

You ever try to sleep when your brain is busy unraveling fictional timelines, reorganizing half-finished character arcs, or rewording a sentence you wrote in 2014? That’s not insomnia. That’s creative maintenance.

Then there’s music — but again, not casual listening. I’m talking full immersion. Deep dives into B-sides and dusty vinyl grooves. Emotional spelunking. What starts as one track becomes a therapy session. A confession. A reconstruction of every heartbreak I thought I forgot. That’s not a playlist — that’s a time machine. And I keep punching the return ticket.

Next thing you know, there’s a whole damn website just about music (House of Tunage), because you clearly have nothing better to do with your time than build emotional mixtapes for ghosts.
Oh yeah, go to sleep.

Thinking is another trap. Or maybe the original sin. I sit down for “a minute,” and suddenly I’m in a three-act dialogue with a dead mentor, an imaginary enemy, and the version of myself that had more optimism and less back pain. Thought spirals aren’t a time suck. They’re the prelude to every good story I’ve ever written — and the footnote to everyone I’ve abandoned.

Next thing you know, your table’s covered in monographs and marginalia. Then you have the nerve to post them like they’re literary gold on yet another website (The Howlin’ Inkwell), because apparently the only thing more dangerous than thinking is believing any of it might matter.
Wow.
…maybe I shou—
go to sleep.

And let’s not forget the premium act of staring into space. That’s not wasted time. That’s creative buffering. System reboot. Soul loading.

So no, I don’t just “lose track of time.”
I command it.
I twist, bend, and shape it to the will of the gods of story and sound.
And most days, they don’t even say thank you.

But that’s fine. Because this isn’t for them. Not really.

My job is to guide you through the splinters that only exist outside of time.
You know the place: cold, light, dark, and joyful land.
Where memory hums, story bites, and music bleeds.

Let me guide you.
Come and take my hand.
You’re looking at me like you’re confused.
Let me help you clear things up.
You look as if you need to get something off your chest.

Seriously, sit down, please.
Talk to Mangus.

But if you still think this was all just about losing track of time, I’ll allow the indulgence — just this once.
Because I whined once. In the ’70s.
Don’t look at me in that tone of voice.
Whining was allowed briefly after the bicentennial.
There was a memo.

Missed the first meeting of Prompt Addicts Anonymous?
That’s okay. We don’t judge.
But you might want to catch up before the next spiral.
👉 Session One: “Hi, My Name is Mangus…”

Author’s Note

Yes, the websites mentioned in this piece — House of Tunage, The Howlin’ Inkwell, and even Memoirs of Madness itself — are all very real. And yes, they’re all still works in progress. Like most things I love, they’re messy, unfinished, and somehow always expanding when I should probably be sleeping instead.

So if you click something and it’s half-built, half-broken, or wildly under construction… welcome to the Mangus Khan Universe.
We’re getting there. Slowly. Beautifully.
Eventually.

The MKU is under construction. But the lights are already on.

Prompt Addicts Anonymous

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Hi, my name is Mangus, and apparently… I write.

“Me, pretending I’m above blog prompts while secretly outlining my fifth entry.”

Do I like blogging challenges and blog hops?
No. They’re annoying. They’re addictive. They’re helpful. And I resent all of that.

I don’t like being told what to write.
Until I do.
Then suddenly I’m five prompts deep, haven’t blinked in two hours, and now I’m questioning my entire emotional architecture because someone dared to ask, “What does the moon mean to you?”

I don’t like structure.
But I need it.
Because without a deadline or a theme, I will absolutely stare into the void and call it “research.”

Blog hops? Ugh.
Too much small talk.
Too many exclamation points.
And yet, three comments in, I’ve discovered a writer who casually blew my mind with a six-sentence story about grief and bees, and now I’m subscribed, emotionally compromised, and wondering how I ever lived without them.

So yeah. I complain. Loudly. Often.
I feel this way on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.
I suppose it’s because my coffee delivery is usually late. My favorite pen ran out of ink again, and the “good” refills are on backorder on Amazon.
It’s not that I’m bitter. I’m just… creatively dehydrated and emotionally overcaffeinated on the wrong days.

However, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, something shifts in the universe.
Champagne falls from the heavens.
Words become the elixir of the gods.
In the dead of winter, I smell the tranquil aroma of lavender in the gentle breeze.
My fingers dance. My spirit opens. The muse doesn’t knock — she kicks down the door with glitter in her wake and says, “Write, fool.”

And I do.

And don’t even get me started on the enablers.
There’s Sadje, who keeps creating these annoying, wonderful challenges, like Sunday Poser. So, what if I built an entire series based on one of them?
Then there’s Di, dropping a daily prompt I now use as a backbone for long fiction like it’s a casual hobby. She’s also got this “Share Your World” thing — yeah, I’m not sharing jack. Even though, if we’re being honest, this post accidentally answers the first two questions of this week’s challenge. I have no idea what she’s talking about on the last two.
And Fandango — this ole fart has a daily word challenge I use across multiple posts. I’m an ole fart too, fist in the air and all that. Solidarity.
Melissa from Mom with a Blog — I don’t know, maybe moms were the original Jedi. She posts these random images with alt text that make me write funny, weird things… and I enjoy it. Can you say,” Jedi mind trick?” The betrayal.
Eugi doing all kinds of magical stuff and her Moonwashed Weekly Prompts got me feeling all peace, love, and hair grease. Writing beautiful peaceful stuff. That’s just wrong! Shame on you!
And Esther Chilton? She just shows up once a week, drops off a prompt like it’s no big deal. I gotta wait a whole week for the next one. It’s crap like that which killed cable.
Let’s not forget the peskily awesome staff at Promptly Written, who boldly accepted the rantings of an insomniac and continue to push their readers to explore their creative limits. What the hell is that? Inspiration by force? Motivation disguised as structure. Madness. Glorious, structured madness.

Don’t get me started with the photography challenges.
Cee — may Allah have mercy on her — encouraged me to explore my camera, sending me running to capture images of things I’d normally ignore without a second thought. Who does that? Cee did.
Images I took for her challenges have ended up as descriptions or scenes in so many stories. Too many to mention.
And Leanne Cole with her Monochrome Madness — scoffs — having me try to add depth, texture, and shadow to things that clearly weren’t meant to be that serious. And yet… I tried. Multiple times. Because apparently, I have no control over my own artistic direction anymore, if ever.
Because of these women — and others — I’ve even heard people refer to me as a Photographer. Of course, I correct them. Obviously. But people be yapping about anything these days.

Here’s what I say about the lot of them:
“How dare you ask me to create my ass off and enjoy it?”
Complete. Utter. Rubbish.

So? Which one of you enablers got under your skin this week?

Sadje. Di. Fandango.
The crime? Just read the damn blog.

Let’s call it what it is: Prompts Addicts Anonymous.

“Hello, my name is Mangus…”
[sniff]
“…and I’m a…”
(It’s okay, we’re here for you.)
“…I’m a prompter.”
(Applause)
“Hey Mangus…”

Author’s Note:
This essay was born in public — a response to a simple blog prompt that, like most of my writing, spiraled into something I didn’t expect. It lives on the edge between complaint and confession, between sarcastic side-eye and real reverence for the people and prompts that keep dragging me back to the page.

If you’ve ever rolled your eyes at structure, dodged a deadline, or cursed the muse for showing up late and uninvited — this one’s for you.

And if you’re one of the people I name in here?
Yeah, I’m talking about you — but in a good way.
With sincere gratitude and thanks. You guys and so many more are one of the reasons I keep going.

— Mangus

Quote of the Day – 07162025

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Personal Reflection

The past doesn’t ask for permission — it sits uninvited, breaks things, it’s a part of us, brands you with its weight.
And too often, we carry those ruins like an identity card.

But Jung flips the script.
We are not our damage — we are our decisions.

There’s power in that pause. The breath between what scarred you and what you shape next. It’s the moment you stop asking “why me?” and start asking, “what now?”

Let your fire be forged from choice, not just consequence.
And remember: even cracked skin glows when the soul’s on fire.

Reflective Prompt

What have you been telling yourself you are — because of what happened? What would it mean to rewrite that truth?

The Note Was Just the Match

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She smiled. He believed it. But the fire had already started.

The woman sitting next to me slipped a note into my hand that read:
“He’s not who he says he is.”

She didn’t look back. Just placed it there—neat, deliberate—and folded herself into stillness, like she’d already said too much.

I didn’t open it. Not yet. The paper pulsed against my palm like a second heartbeat.

Outside, the river caught fire. Sunlight splintered across the water, all rust and ruin. Temple silhouettes watched from the banks, hollow and grieving.
Grief has no language. Just echoes. Just light bleeding through the wreckage.

Across from me, he sat, impeccable. Tie straight. Wristwatch catching the last of the sun.
“You alright?” he asked, voice drenched in honey and soothing like always.

But I wonder—Is this false comfort?
That soft menace people only hear in hindsight.

I’ve been here before.
My finger found the scar hidden in my palm, the one shaped like escape.
It remembers what my heart tries to forget.

I smile. He believes it. Because that’s the thing about men like him—they love the surface.
And some people never notice the smoke. They only see the flames.
By then, it’s too late.

My stop is next. So is his.
He doesn’t know I’ve been here before. That this time, I won’t look back.
I know he wants me to.
But he’s not ready for what comes if I do.

Author’s Note:
This piece was written for Fandango’s Flash Fiction Challenge (FSS #209).

There’s a strange, satisfying freedom in flash fiction—the constraints force you to choose each word like a scalpel. It’s a literary pressure cooker where character, tension, and atmosphere have to collide fast and leave a mark.

For me, flash is where I go to explore the edges—grief, memory, survival, those quiet gut-punch moments when the world shifts and no one else notices. Stories like this come out like smoke under a locked door. You don’t always see the fire yet—but it’s there.

Want to try your own version of this story’s beginning?
The prompt was: “The woman sitting next to me slipped a note into my hand that read, ‘He’s not who he says he is.’”

Quote of the Day – 07152025

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Personal Reflection

It’s easy to see wounds as evidence of failure.
Of weakness.
Of something gone terribly wrong.

But what if they’re openings?
A beginning?
An awakening?
A crucible?

I’ve spent years patching my wounds with distraction and pride, thinking healing meant erasing the pain.
But now I wonder if healing starts with letting the light in — not despite the wound, but because of it.

Let the hurt be holy.
Let the scar become a doorway.
Walk through it.

Reflective Prompt

What wound still aches, and what might it be trying to let in?

I Scream Every Time I’m Asked to Compromise

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I scream every time I’m asked to compromise who I am, what I believe.
There are days I walk through this like a ghost—quiet, invisible, barely tethered to the world. I’ve worn this skin too long to pretend anymore. I’ve learned that silence is never neutral. It collects. It bruises. It builds a coffin for the self.

How long did I expect integrity to outweigh ignorance?

The shame cuts deepest when I remember the things I was asked to do to be accepted. Asked to perform, asked to mute the fire, asked to shrink for the comfort of others who never deserved my story in the first place. And like a fool, I tried. I polished my voice. I spoke in softened syllables. I tiptoed like I was walking on eggshells—not to protect myself, but to protect their illusion of safety.

But here’s the truth:
Their comfort was never my duty.

This world has corrupted too much, taken too many of us who had something real to say. It props up empty vessels and paints them gold, calls it culture, calls it “marketable.” Meanwhile, those of us who bleed truth are told we’re too much, too raw, too difficult to brand.

They wanted me to smile like some hollow doll—something quiet, something that won’t fight back when they put words in my mouth. But I’m not plastic. I’m not hollow. I don’t bend like that anymore.

I carry my scars with intention now.

Let them call it anger. Let them call it ungrateful. I call it knowing. Knowing that every time I was asked to “adjust,” they weren’t asking for kindness—they were asking for obedience.

I’m done apologizing for the shape my soul takes.

Author’s Note

This piece was inspired in part by prompts from FOWC, RDP, and WOTD. Thank you all for the sparks you give. Your work matters.

Scarred, Still Writing

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About Things Faith Ignored

Daily writing prompt
What bothers you and why?
View all responses

It’s not like I haven’t given workshops before. I have. I’ve stood in front of rooms, talked craft, told stories, helped shape sentences and spark ideas. But this time feels different.

Maybe it’s because I haven’t done this since I got gut-punched over a decade ago—since the ground gave out, and I had to relearn how to stand. Since pain stopped being something I processed and started being something I wore. Somewhere along the line, I started using it like a mask. And the thing about masks is, after a while, they stop feeling like something you’re wearing. They start feeling like skin.

It became comfortable. Familiar. I could hide in it. Feel the illusion of security it gave me. But now I’m being asked to step forward again—to speak to young writers about the craft I’ve spent a lifetime practicing. And I’m wondering: am I ready to take that mask off?

What bothers me is the doubt. Not about the knowledge—I have that. Not about the experience—I’ve lived it. What bothers me is the fear that what I carry now might come through in ways I can’t control. That my jaded, scarred, honest soul might discourage someone before they even start. That I’ll slip into some surrealist rant about how writing is both a gift and a curse, a duty and a burden. That I’ll tell the truth too plainly, and it’ll scare them.

Or maybe worse: that I’ll freeze. Go silent. Stage fright. Blank mind. That I’ll stand there with nothing to give.

But the deeper fear—the one that really digs—is this: what if I’ve forgotten how to speak as the person I’ve become? Not the one I used to be. Not the one who was broken. But the one who crawled through it all and still believes in words.

Because truth matters. Even when it hurts. Especially when it hurts. And writing—that strange, beautiful, brutal act—is built on truth. Our words tell who we are. They don’t lie. And if I show up and speak honestly—about the process, the pain, the doubt, the moments of fire—then maybe that’s enough.

What bothers me isn’t the fear of failure. It’s the responsibility. The weight of standing in front of new voices and showing them not just how to write, but how to be a writer. To give them not comfort, but clarity. Not perfection, but presence.

So yes, I’m nervous. Yes, I feel exposed. But maybe that’s exactly where I need to be. Maybe the only way to teach this craft is to live it—right there, in real time, with all the scars showing.

I reach out into the darkness—and find myself.
Doubt courses through my blood.
The writer within whispers: Please don’t forget me.

Though doubt chills me, I won’t surrender to its might.
I lift my head and know—I don’t walk alone.
I whisper back, “I won’t forget you, because you are me… and I am you.”

No more wasting time. I must prepare.

I’ll see you after the ink dries.

Quote of the Day – 07142025

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Personal Reflection

Some days it feels like you’re giving everything — time, love, energy, sanity — and you’re still told it’s not enough.
Honestly, you may feel it’s not enough.

But maybe that ache in your chest isn’t weakness.
Maybe it’s the candlelight of your soul doing exactly what it was made to do: burn to illuminate.

To create light, something must burn.
A truth that doesn’t ask your permission — it simply demands your heart.
Again and again.

The cost of giving isn’t just exhaustion.
It’s a transformation.

Reflective Prompt

What part of you has burned to bring light to someone else? Was it worth it?

Nothing to Prove, Everything to Say

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A blog I forgot I started. A voice I didn’t know I needed. And the stories that refused to stay silent.

Motivation for Starting the Blog

I started this blog back in 2011, though I didn’t even remember creating it until I stumbled across it during a Google search of my name. My wife was sick then, and I was drowning in anger and helplessness. Someone once told me every serious writer had a blog. I’ll be damned if I wasn’t going to be taken seriously — even if I didn’t know what I was doing with it.

At the time, it wasn’t about building an audience. I was just trying to write my way through something I couldn’t fix. I’ve solved hard problems my whole life — but that one, watching someone I loved slip away, broke me in a way nothing else had. Writing was the only thing I had that didn’t ask for solutions. It let me feel what I was afraid to say out loud.

Mangus Khan wasn’t supposed to turn into all this. He was just a character I was kicking around for a novel I never finished. But before I knew it, Mangus became more than a name — he became me. There was no turning back the clock, no putting the genie back in the bottle. I didn’t plan it. I never looked back.

In 2023, I made the choice to keep this space alive and see what it could become. It’s the framework of something I’ve been carrying around in my head for decades. I wanted to grow as a writer — to see if there was any real interest in the kind of stories I wanted to tell. When I returned, this blog had 42 members. That was enough. I kept writing until I got sick. Then I recovered and came back swinging, writing without expectations.

Lately, I’ve been working on building a larger space to house all of this — something broader, something that reflects everything I’ve come to care about. I still don’t have any big expectations. Some people retire and fix up cars, build boats, and travel the world. I tell stories.

Expectations for Audience and Reach

I didn’t start this blog expecting a crowd. When I found it again in 2023, it had 42 members, and that felt about right. I wasn’t chasing followers or clicks. This was just a space where I could clear my head and cleanse my soul.

Then the strangest thing happened: people started showing up. And they stayed. I never expected that. I’m still blown away, honestly.

I’ve been fortunate in life — I’ve traveled around the world, solved complex problems, and worked with people from all walks of life. That was my world for years. But as much as I accomplished in that space, I’m not sure it made the kind of impact I feel now. That’s because of the reader engagement. The comments, the conversations, the quiet understanding from strangers — it’s different. It’s human. And it’s deeply personal.

I still look at other blogs and wonder how they pull it off — all that strategy and polish. That’s never been me. I just show up, write, and try to keep it honest. If that’s enough for people to stick around, then I’ve already received more than I ever asked for.

Hopes for Personal Growth

At first, I was just trying to survive. But somewhere along the way, I realized I had grown — not just as a writer, but as a person. Maybe it’s age. Maybe it’s everything I’ve lived through. But I have a deeper, more meaningful appreciation for things now — moments, words, silence, people.

When I decided to keep this blog going in 2023, part of it was a challenge to myself: could I still push my craft? Could I write with more clarity, more courage, more control? I wasn’t chasing perfection. I just wanted to be sharp. Clear. Unafraid to say what mattered. To explore what was still inside me, and maybe even finish the novel I’d started after my wife passed.

Writing forces reflection. It exposes the things I usually keep buried. And growth doesn’t come from breakthroughs — it comes from the grind. From showing up on the blank page when no one’s watching. That’s where I’ve grown the most.

Expectations Around Content and Consistency

When I first started, there was no plan. No roadmap. Just the need to write. I figured maybe I’d post once a week if something came to me. But life doesn’t follow calendars, and neither does creativity.

What’s come out over time has been a mix of fiction, essays, and visual art — sometimes sharp and focused, other times loose and wandering. I never set out to define a genre or lane for myself. I just followed what moved me.

There were stretches where I disappeared — illness, life, burnout. And there were stretches where I wrote constantly, chasing down stories, experimenting with form, pushing myself to see how far I could take a single idea. After I recovered, I kicked things into gear and just kept going. Not for clicks. Not for an audience. Just to stay in motion.

I thought about organizing the content more, making it cleaner or easier to follow. But I’ve found that consistency for me isn’t about structure — it’s about showing up with honesty. Whether it’s fiction, a personal reflection, or a visual piece — if it’s real, it belongs here.

Surprises Along the Way

I didn’t expect to still be here. I didn’t expect Mangus Khan — once just a throwaway character — to become part of who I am. And I definitely didn’t expect people to stay, read, and respond like they have.

I never expected to embody Mangus Khan, but I have.

What surprised me the most, though, is how much this space has mattered — not just to readers, but to me. I’ve done work all over the world. I’ve solved big, technical problems and made decisions that impacted entire systems. But somehow, writing a story that makes one person feel seen hits harder.

This blog wasn’t supposed to become something. But somehow, it did — a record of survival, growth, grief, imagination, and unexpected connection.

Some people restore old cars in retirement. Some build boats. I tell stories. That’s the project. That’s the work. And if it ends tomorrow, I’ll still be proud of what came from it, because none of it was supposed to happen in the first place.

I’ll see you when the ink dries.

Author’s Note:

If you’ve made it this far, thank you.

I’m building something bigger — a space called the Mangus Khan Universe.

It’s not a brand. It’s not a business. It’s a creative world I’ve been sketching in pieces for years — fiction, essays, visuals, and ideas I can’t shake loose.

This piece was written in response to Sadje’s Sunday Poser — a prompt that turned into a reckoning, a reflection, and a return to something I didn’t know I’d missed.

If you’re here for the stories, you’re already part of it.

Stay tuned. There’s more coming.
I’ll see you when the ink dries.

The Dame Wore Duck Boots

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Forecast: Regret – Episode 2

She appeared just past the second lamppost—trench coat clinging like a secret, umbrella in hand, striding through puddles like the laws of physics were optional.

Julian knew trouble when he saw it. It usually wore red lipstick, a miniskirt, and a tight monogrammed sweater—the kind of outfit that said “daddy pays the rent but I hold the lease on chaos.”
Today, though, trouble wore duck boots that quacked with every step and a look that could curl paint off a Buick.

She didn’t look at him. She didn’t have to. Women like that didn’t look; they summoned.

“Lost your umbrella again?” she said, pausing by the bench where Julian had been pretending not to argue with a squirrel.

“It fled the scene. Honestly, I think it’s seeing other people.”

She didn’t laugh. Just smiled—barely—a slow tilt at the corner of her mouth, like a private joke that hadn’t decided whether to trust him yet.

They stood in silence, rain dotting her umbrella like Morse code for bad decisions. The space between them held history—not romance, not quite—but something forged in long nights, bad coffee, and one too many favors exchanged with no names attached.

Then the birds attacked.

Not big ones. Not Hitchcock’s apocalyptic squad. These were small. Spiteful. Moist. They dive-bombed like feathered torpedoes with a vendetta against hats.

Julian flailed. She calmly finished a sip of coffee.

“I told you not to use that conditioner,” she said, ducking as one bird performed a tactical swoop. “Lavender-scented. They think you’re a meadow.”

“Then why are they hitting you, too?”

“I might have rubbed some of it on your collar.”

Julian blinked, now soggy and betrayed. “Why?”

She sipped again, her expression as neutral as Switzerland on a Tuesday. “Science.”

One bird landed triumphantly on the umbrella. Another did an aerial split and flipped him off mid-squawk.

Julian sighed and slumped onto the bench, defeated. She sat beside him, leaving an equal six inches of space and chaos between them.

For a moment, the world fell quiet—just rain tapping the concrete, the occasional rustle of wings, and that unspoken thing that always hung between them.

Maybe it was love once. Maybe just recognition. Like two people who survived the same fire and never spoke of it.

“I curl my hair in the mornings just for this,” she muttered, brushing a wet strand from her face.

Julian didn’t reply. He was too busy wondering if dignity could be taxidermied—or if maybe, just maybe, this ridiculous kind of connection was all the grace some of us got.

Author’s Note:
This piece is a continuation of the Forecast: Regret series—a flash fiction collection built on misadventures, poor choices, and the occasional squirrel assault. I wrote this story using the prompts from SoCS (Stream of Consciousness Saturday) and Esther’s Weekly Writing Prompt, which continue to challenge and inspire me in strange and delightful ways.

As always, I try to have fun writing fiction—because if I’m not enjoying it, I can guarantee Julian isn’t either.

Quote of the Day – 07132025

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Personal Reflection

I’ve spent too many nights thinking that surviving wasn’t enough. That just getting through the day, the week, the year — somehow meant I wasn’t really living. I probably read in one of those books or on a calendar. But what if we stopped measuring worth by how bright we shine and started honoring how long we held on?

Some days, the only victory is not letting go.
Not giving in.
Not disappearing.

And that, I’m learning, is a kind of bravery. The kind that doesn’t ask for applause but earns your respect in silence. Especially when no one’s looking.

Reflective Prompt

When was the last time you gave yourself credit just for surviving — not thriving, not winning—just making it through?

Quote of the Day – 07122025

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Reflection:

I patched everything to hide the flaws, convinced that if I could just keep the cracks out of sight, I could pass for whole. But perfection is a myth we whisper to ourselves in the dark—an illusion dressed up as safety. And all the while, the pressure built behind the seams—
quietly, until it didn’t.
Unknown to me, I was barely alive.

It didn’t shatter all at once. It was smaller than that—a moment so quiet I almost missed it. A memory I hadn’t invited. A scent that stopped me mid-breath. A sound that didn’t belong. And suddenly, something gave. The façade I had built so carefully—out of control, compliance, and silence—cracked just enough for something else to slip in. Not healing. Not grace. Just… light. Faint, flickering, uninvited.

The light didn’t fix me. It didn’t stitch the broken parts or erase the wreckage. What it did was make everything visible. Every compromise I made to keep the peace. Every silence I swallowed to be acceptable. Every version of myself I abandoned just to be tolerated. It was all still there—ugly, unfinished, honest.
And for the first time, I was alive. I was real.

Quote of the Day – 07112025

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I used to think silence was strength.
Sometimes it is.
Other times, you’ve got to speak. Move. Act.

I believed swallowing pain made me resilient—
It works… maybe a quarter of the time.

If I kept my head down, kept the peace, didn’t stir the water,
I thought I’d stay afloat.
How’s that working for you?

Because all that silence did
was weigh me down in rooms that never saw me,
around people who never asked.

And it left me—
frustrated,
unappreciated,
and downright pissed.

Reflective Prompt

You’ve bitten your tongue so long it forgot how to speak.
Swallowed your fury to keep the peace.
Nodded when you should’ve screamed.

But silence doesn’t save you.
It just delays the moment of reckoning.

What are you afraid will happen if you speak the truth aloud?
And more importantly—
what will happen to you if you don’t?

The Dame, the Drizzle, and the Dumb Luck

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FLASH FICTION – FOWC & RDP

It started, as most questionable decisions do, with a woman, a trench coat, and a very hedonistic craving for street tacos.

Julian wasn’t even supposed to be out. The rain was biblical—Julian half expected to see Noah waving him aboard. His socks were soaked, his spirit soggy, and the umbrella he carried had the structural integrity of a wet paper crane. But tacos were calling, and Julian—private eye by day, glutton by destiny—answered.

Midway through the park, a lamppost flickered like it owed someone money. Julian stepped into the golden spill of light like he was in a film noir. All he needed was the dame holding a cigarette to her ruby red lips, waiting for him to light it. His coat flapped dramatically, mostly because it was two sizes too big and purchased during a clearance sale he mistook for fate. He imagined someone, somewhere, narrating: He was a man torn between purpose and guacamole.

That’s when it happened.

A squirrel launched from a tree like it had just discovered espresso. It landed squarely on Julian’s shoulder, using his necktie as a zipline to destiny.

He screamed like a man whose dignity had just filed for divorce and taken the house.

The umbrella went flying. The squirrel somersaulted off his head. And Julian—formerly mysterious, now flailing—slipped in a puddle with the grace of a ballet-dancing refrigerator.

As he lay on the sidewalk, soaked and stunned, the only thing colder than the rain was the betrayal in his burrito-less stomach.

A couple walked by. The woman whispered, “Was that performance art?”

Julian lifted his head with all the levity he could muster. “Only if you clap.”

They did.

He took a bow from the pavement. Somewhere, a squirrel chittered in applause.

When Sleep Slips Out and the Muse Kicks In

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Insomniac Chronicles, Vol. 1

Daily writing prompt
What time do you go to bed and wake up currently?
View all responses

Sleep and I have a complicated history. We used to be close, tight, even. But somewhere along the way, we grew apart. Maybe it was the late-night thoughts that wouldn’t shut up, or the memories that kept crawling back under the covers. Now, we pass like strangers in a hallway—familiar, but distant.

Slumber is that elusive lover who whispers sweet nothings in my ear as she caresses the back of my neck. She pulls the sheets back, looking at me with that suggestive gaze of hers. I slip into bed beside her, feel her warmth press against my restlessness. That’s it—I begin to drift…

But just as the fog settles, chaos kicks open the door.

Suddenly, I hear my muse Ursula—lime green ass and all—screaming in my ears, “I want my words! You think this is fucking Boy Scouts?” I swear, Ursula has no manners whatsoever. She eats all the Cheez-Its and leaves crumbs in the bed. But she wears a fedora, smokes Cohibas, and if she thinks the groove is tight, she’ll pass you one and nod like jazz is leaking from her bones. So I spend the next several hours writing, creating graphics, editing film—or whatever the hell she’s decided is non-negotiable that night. I really need to buy her a bib. And a damn watch.

Wake time? Whenever Ursula crashes, the muse finally shuts up, or the coffee starts flirting again.

Quote of the Day – 07102025

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Reflection:

Some mornings you wake up with your heart already unraveling. Still—you get up. You try. That’s not weakness; that’s rebellion.
Perfection was never the point. Showing up is.

Prompt to Go With It:

What does “showing up” look like for you today?
Write one sentence—or one paragraph—that you can stand behind. Even if it trembles.

All That Remained

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PROSE – FOWC & RDP

The static clung to him like ash—faint, choking, inescapable. He’d stopped keeping track of the days. Time was foremost a suggestion now, something smeared across the ceiling in mildew and regret.

They said he was a man once. Strong. Reliable. The kind that shows up on time and keeps his word. The kind that doesn’t cry at hospital bedsides or stare too long at old photographs. They said that.

But memory plays tricks. Rewrites endings. Paints the villains in softer hues and leaves the heroes out in the cold. His reflection no longer argued. It just blurred at the edges, refusing to confirm or deny what he had become.

The sink dripped. The fan rattled. The voices whispered. Still, he sat there, jaw clenched, knuckles white, a prayer caught somewhere between his teeth and his shame.

He collapsed into the corner of himself—the part that still remembered how to feel.

He heard a child giggle, smelled lavender and lilac.
But from where?

That door had been closed for years, bolted by memory, corroded by silence. Yet tonight, something had stirred.
Not hope.
Just the echo of what it used to sound like.

Quote of the Day – 07092025

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We smile. Nod. Say we’re fine.

But inside?

Some of us are hosting ghosts at the dinner table and tucking monsters into bed. We’ve learned how to function with fear tucked beneath the ribcage and sorrow folded neatly between polite conversation.

This quote hits because it doesn’t flinch. Monsters are real. Ghosts do live inside us. And most days, they pass as us.

Are you okay?
I’m fine.
Fearful. Insecure. Neurotic. Emotional.
(FINE.)

It’s Not Perfect. It’s Not Finished. But Neither Am I.

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A vintage typewriter on a cluttered desk, exploding into birds as books tower around it—chaos and creativity in motion.

A brief confession about messy renovations, too many domains, and building the MKU out of creative rubble.

A man sits on a stack of books, reading, while pages swirl around him in a storm of chaos and creativity.

You Ever Try to Clean and Just Make a Bigger Mess?

Yeah, that’s me right now.

I’ve been trying to fix this blog for months. What started as a quick tidy-up turned into something resembling a digital yard sale—only with fewer treasures and way more broken links. I even considered shutting the whole thing down and rebuilding from scratch. But that felt a little extreme, even for me. I have a knack for turning easy tasks into complicated messes. It’s a gift. Or a delusion. Same difference.

So, I got a wild hair—you know the rest—and decided to look at my entire online footprint. It turns out that I was hoarding domains, just like I was collecting vintage Pez dispensers. Just paying for them to sit there, doing absolutely nothing. Honestly, I’d have better luck with a couple of scratch-offs and a can of Peach Nehi.

That’s when I finally did it—I built something called the Mangus Khan Universe (MKU). Yeah, it’s a little on the nose, but the point was to create a space that could properly hold all the creative work I’ve been cramming into Memoirs of Madness.

MKU isn’t finished, but it’s functional. Over the next few weeks, you’ll see things shifting. Posts might vanish, new stuff will appear, and categories will get shuffled. Don’t panic—it’s all part of the plan. Mostly.

I just wanted to give you a heads-up that Memoirs of Madness is undergoing a bit of a makeover. More changes are coming, and I’ll share a full announcement once the MKU is officially live and dangerous.

Stay tuned. Stay weird.

Step into the MKU
It’s not perfect. It’s not finished. But neither am I.

Lessons in Disappearance

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for those who know what it’s like to be visible but not believed

Every day is another lesson in invisibility.
Not the kind you choose, not the soft fade of a disappearing act.
This is the kind handed down in glances that slide past you.
In doors that stay closed just a second longer when you’re approaching.
In the space you leave behind when you’re gone, and no one notices the shape of your absence.

You become fluent in the language of indifference.
You learn the weight of unasked questions.
You memorize the way people say “I didn’t see you there” like it’s a kindness,
instead of an indictment.

There is a peculiar violence in being overlooked.
Not bruised. Not broken. Just… reduced.
Down to skin, down to stereotype, down to background noise.
They don’t mean to erase you—
and somehow, that makes it worse.

They’ll say you’re quiet.
You’ll wonder if they’ve ever actually listened.

You wear shame like a second skin.
Not because you earned it,
but because somewhere along the way,
someone handed it to you like inheritance
and you forgot how to put it down.

You stand still in a world built to move around you—
fast, loud, full of curated meaning.
And you begin to question:

Is there something wrong with me, or is there something wrong with this lens that always finds me blurred?

You’ve learned to map your pain in silence.
Each breath is a kind of protest.
Each blink a refusal to disappear entirely.

There are veins beneath your skin that look like lightning—
not because you are struck,
but because you are always just about to burn.

And yet you don’t.
Not fully.

You endure.
Not in glory. Not with applause.
But with defiance.
The quiet kind.
The kind that goes unnoticed until someone says:

“I didn’t realize you were carrying that much.”

And you smile without smiling,
because you know the truth:

You were always carrying that much.
They just never asked to know.

Antidepressant

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He wasn’t born to be broken, but he was built that way.

He doesn’t remember how long he’s been digging.
Only that the walls feel closer now.
Not physically—spiritually.
Like the air itself is grieving something it can’t name.
Like the dirt is learning his shape better than he ever did.

He was born into this plastic maze.
Clear walls. Curved tunnels. Endless observation.
They gave him purpose before he even knew what freedom was.
“Work is life,” they whispered.
“Keep moving or you’ll disappear.”

So he moved.
So he disappeared.

Lately, the soil feels too clean.
Too filtered. Too… safe.
He begins to question whether he’s ever touched anything real—
whether any of this was ever soil at all,
or just a stage dressed as survival.

His antennae twitch like doubt.
His thoughts spiral like tunnels without exit signs.
There’s no map. No sky. Just the scrape. scrape. scrape.
and the promise that if he keeps digging, it might all make sense.

“Dig,” they told him. “Dig like your life depends on it.”

But what if life was never the point?
What if it was just obedience with a heartbeat?

He begins to dream—quietly, dangerously—of things he’s never seen:
grass that doesn’t end,
light without glare,
a silence not born of suppression
but of peace.

He wonders if the others feel it too—
that dull, aching sense of being watched by something
that calls itself structure,
but tastes like a slow death.

He screamed once.
Pressed his mandibles to the glass and begged.
For what, he doesn’t know.
Maybe to be named.
Maybe to be more than a metaphor
for how the world devours those who ask too many questions.

But no one answered.
Only the glass pulsed with faint warmth—
a reminder that he is seen, but not heard.

Now he digs not to build, but to resist.
Each handful of soil no longer a task,
but a soft rebellion.
A quiet revolution made of claw, intention, and fatigue.

He doesn’t want to be efficient.
He wants to be free.
Or at least real.
Or at least his.

And if this tunnel leads to nothing—
no sky, no breach, no breaking—

at least it was carved by his own choosing.
At least the hands that made the hole were his.

Because sometimes the cure isn’t a chemical.
Sometimes, it’s permission to feel trapped without calling it a flaw.

🪞 Reflective Prompt

What parts of your routine were handed to you like a cage dressed in ritual?
What would rebellion look like if it were quiet, personal, and yours?

Still digging?

This piece lives inside a much bigger world.
Explore the rest of the Mangus Khan Universe—a stitched-together gallery of confessions, fiction, fractured portraits, and quiet chaos.

👉 Enter the MKU

Do I Look Happy Enough?

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A quiet reckoning with the expectations we wear and the joy we fake.

When was the last time you were truly happy?

No—
not the curated kind.
Not the smile you wore for someone else’s comfort.
Not the polite laugh that tasted like performance.
Not the checklist joy: house, job, partner, post, repeat.

I mean the kind of happiness that sneaks up on you in bare feet.
The kind that doesn’t make sense but fills your ribs like breath you forgot you were holding.
The kind that doesn’t ask for an audience.
Doesn’t post itself.
Doesn’t need to be liked to be real.

Most days, we confuse peace with silence, and silence with defeat.

You tell yourself you’re content. That this is what adulthood looks like—responsibility, stability, being “grateful.”
You wear that word like a bandage.
But underneath?
There’s a pulse of something unsaid.
A throb you ignore until it bruises.

You smile at strangers. You meet deadlines. You show up.
And in between the commutes and compromises,
you start to wonder if you buried yourself in the crud of being acceptable.

The barrage is constant—
what you should want, who you should be, how you should smile.

But no one ever asks if you’re still in there.
Not really.
Not the version of you that danced alone in the kitchen at 1 a.m.
Not the you who found joy in dumb little things that didn’t need justification.
Not the version of you that wasn’t tired.

You’re silently screaming.
Every day.
And you do it with perfect posture.

Because to speak it—
to say “I’m not okay”
feels like betrayal.
Like failure.
Like you’re too much and not enough, all at once.

But here’s the quiet truth:

Maybe you haven’t been happy in a long time.
Maybe you don’t even remember how it felt.
But maybe that question—when was the last time you were truly happy?—
isn’t meant to shame you.
Maybe it’s a breadcrumb.
A way back.

Not to the person you were before the world smoothed your edges,
but to the one still flickering beneath the noise.

The one who still believes in joy,
even if they haven’t seen it in a while.

🪞Reflective Prompt

Take a moment.
Find a scrap of paper, the back of a receipt, or the notes app on your phone.

When was the last time you felt joy that wasn’t expected of you, sold to you, or shared online?
What did it feel like in your body?
What part of you still remembers?

A Half-Burned Gospel

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Another psalm from the quiet fire.

Can you howl when there is no one there to hear you?
Is your passion only for public consumption?
I’m frostbitten by your whispers.

There was a time I needed your touch.
I needed your attention.
Not all of it—just enough to matter.
Not to me.
I needed it to matter to you.

But you blinked, and I shattered.
You turned, and I calcified into someone else’s silence.
They say the world ends in fire or ice—
I know both.
Your heat was conditional.
Your absence, absolute.

Some men beg for war to distract from the wound.
Me?
I just wear the hood tighter,
pull it close like a secret I still want to believe in.

I walk through your memory like a half-burned gospel,
rubbing ash on my skin like anointing oil.
There’s still a spark behind my teeth,
but no one’s left to kiss the smoke.

And even now—
when I speak,
my voice curls like steam
off a pot no one stayed to stir.
…and silence never needed an audience.

Red, White, and Boom (Also Vomit)

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FLASH FICTION – FRIDAY FAITHFULS

“Grandpa, I need a real story for my history project. Something about America, or the Fourth of July, or whatever.”

The old man scratched his chin, leaned back in the squeaky recliner, and smirked.

“Alright, kid. Lemme tell you how your grandma and I met. It was the Fourth of July, 1978. I was 19, dumb as bricks, and full of patriotic stupidity.”

From the kitchen, a voice called out: “Oh, this again. You gonna tell the real version this time, or your usual nonsense?”

Grandpa rolled his eyes. “It’s all true. Just maybe… slightly singed around the edges.”

It started with an idea. Not a good one. My Uncle Tommy, our genius friend “Meatball,” and I decided to put on our own fireworks show. We didn’t have proper fireworks. We had two crates of off-brand bottle rockets, a metal garbage can, a stolen traffic cone, and a six-pack of warm root beer.

Tommy swore the garbage can would “amplify” the fireworks. Meatball called it “fire science.” I just lit the fuse.

Boom.

The garbage can launched thirty feet in the air like a missile. One rocket shot sideways and hit a mailbox. Another bounced off my forehead. And one, God help me, flew straight down my pants.

I panicked. I ran in circles. My shorts were smoking. I stopped, dropped, rolled, and screamed. At some point, my eyebrows gave up and disappeared.

Next thing I know, I’m in the ER, wrapped in silver burn cream, looking like a baked potato with no dignity.

That’s when your grandma walks in. Nurse training student. Bright smile. Clipboard. Smelled like lavender and antiseptic. She looked at me, this smoldering idiot, and said, “So… was it worth it for freedom?”

From the kitchen again: “And what did you say next, hotshot?”

“I said she looked like a very clean angel. Then I threw up on her shoes.”

“Mm-hmm. Romantic.”

“Did you ask her out?”

Are you kidding? I tried. But the morphine was kicking in. I told her she looked “like a floating disinfected goddess” and then passed out while apologizing to the IV pole.

Still—she didn’t run. That’s how I knew she was special.

We kept in touch. She came to my follow-ups. I wrote her letters. She eventually forgave the vomit. We got married two years later. She even let me light sparklers at the wedding. Supervised, of course.

“Wow. That’s kinda romantic… in a flammable way.”

Exactly. So you tell your teacher this: Freedom’s messy. Fireworks are dangerous. But love? Sometimes, it starts with a bang. Just don’t put bottle rockets in garbage cans.

From the kitchen: “And tell him about the park ban!”

“That’s not relevant to the assignment.”

The Feathered Ones

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FLASH FICTION – FOWC & RDP

Every morning, she wrote to keep the birds at bay.

They came with the light—first as shadows dragging themselves across the windows, then as a rustle, low and persistent, like wind thinking too hard. Doves mostly, though wrong somehow. Their eyes were too still, their feathers too quiet. Occasionally, darker birds arrived—sleek as oil, with glints in their beaks like pins. They didn’t chirp or coo. They watched.

She used to think they were hallucinations, symptoms of grief. Her brother had drowned in the river five years ago. No body, no real goodbye. After that, the house changed. Or maybe she did.

The birds began showing up shortly after the funeral. Perched on curtain rods. Nested in the corners of the ceiling where cobwebs once clung. They moved like smoke. Never flapping, just shifting, gliding, like time with feathers.

She had never written a word before he died.

Now, she couldn’t stop.

At first, it felt like a compulsion. Survival. Write or unravel. But soon, the stories took on a shape of their own. They came through her fingers in long, fevered bursts—narratives that looped and twisted and whispered through the typewriter-like incantations. Whenever she paused, the birds stirred. Paper fluttered. Air thickened.

One morning, she stayed in bed. Her arms wouldn’t move. Grief sat on her chest like a second ribcage.

By mid-afternoon, the house was breathing.

Not creaking—breathing. The walls rose and fell in slow, silent exhales. Books slumped off shelves. The floorboards quivered like violin strings underfoot. And the birds—dozens, maybe hundreds—lined the walls, all facing her. Eyes like eclipse moons. Waiting.

She crawled to the desk. Typed three words: He was lost.

The air calmed. The birds blinked once. Vanished.

After that, she understood.

They weren’t punishing her. They were pushing her. Urging the story out. She didn’t know why. She didn’t know what for. But she knew the birds were part of it. Maybe even keepers of it. Strange, spectral editors in feathered cloaks.

The typewriter, an old rusted Royal, began to type without her. At night. Quiet, rhythmic, like a heartbeat. She woke to new pages. Pages she didn’t remember writing. One had a map scrawled on the back—inked in spirals and loops. Another contained a letter addressed to her in her brother’s handwriting.

I saw the ice crack. I saw the light inside it. I’m not afraid.

She burned that one. She burned the next three as well. But they always came back. Not charred. Not even creased. Just waiting on the desk like polite ghosts.

The stories that came through her grew stranger. Boys who vanished into mirrors. Houses that forgot how to hold their shape. Rivers that swallowed memories and returned them in riddles. Always, always, a boy at the center. Sometimes drowned. Sometimes glowing. Sometimes stitched together from stars.

She never gave him her brother’s name. But the birds knew.

They began bringing her things. A button she remembered from his jacket. A library card he’d lost in third grade. A page from a notebook she hadn’t seen since they were children, filled with a crude comic he’d drawn—“Captain Birdbrain and the Time Vultures.”

She laughed. She cried. She kept writing.

She began to understand the birds weren’t birds at all. Not really.

One blinked at her one morning, and she swore she saw an entire galaxy in its eye—planets spinning, stories coalescing, a thousand unnamed lives passing through. Another unfurled its wings, and letters spilled from its feathers, fluttering like snow, dissolving on contact.

She no longer felt afraid. Not exactly.

They were eerie, yes. But so is truth when you haven’t looked at it in a while.

The house shifted in small ways. The closet no longer opened to coats but to mist. The attic smelled of saltwater. She didn’t question it. She followed the thread.

She wrote not to escape grief but to appease it. To make it into something legible. Something she could carry. Each word formed a tiny act of negotiation between what was gone and what remained.

One night, she fell asleep at the desk. When she woke, a new story was finished—clean, structured, heartbreakingly beautiful. The final line read:

“And when she opened the door, there he was—smiling, whole, and made entirely of light.”

The birds were utterly still.

One—larger than the rest, with a sheen-like moonlight on bone—landed on her shoulder. Its weight was real. Solid. She reached up gently, and it leaned into her touch.

There was no song. Just presence.

She folded the page and placed it in an envelope marked For Him.

The next morning, the birds didn’t come.

The house was quiet in a way it hadn’t been in years. She waited. She made coffee. Nothing stirred. For a long time, she thought they were gone.

Then, around dusk, the light shifted. Just slightly. The world outside the window tilted toward a kind of blue she’d never seen. Deeper than twilight, warmer than dawn. The birds returned—not many, just a few. But they glowed now. Dimly. Like coals before fire.

They perched around the room. Silent. Peaceful.

The largest one dropped a page at her feet. It held only a title:

Chapter One.

She smiled.

She had learned to write not to fight chaos, but to give it order.

And the story was just beginning.

Late Night Grooves # 161

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WHOT Episode 161 – “Best Direction” by Zig Mentality

Hosted by Mangus Khan

[No fade-in. Just impact. The drums kick like defibrillators. Guitars fuzz and slice. The voice? Controlled chaos.]

“WHOT.
Late Night Grooves.

I’m Mangus Khan.

And tonight—
We’re not looking for the right answer.
We’re just calling bullsht on all the wrong ones.*

Zig Mentality – “Best Direction.”

This track is the sound of pressure.

Not the kind that breaks you.

The kind that twists you into someone you barely recognize.

“Don’t know if this is the best direction…”

That line?
That’s not indecision.

That’s survival in progress.

Zig Mentality isn’t asking for guidance.

They’re screaming through the static.

They’re ripping through expectations, projections, corrections, selections.

Everyone wants you to be something.

This track says be something real.

Even if it’s loud.
Even if it’s messy.
Even if it scares people who only know how to follow maps.

The guitars don’t resolve.
The vocals barely hold on.

Because this isn’t a message.

It’s a moment.

And sometimes, that’s enough.

WHOT doesn’t play just to soothe.

We play what it feels like inside.

Tonight, it sounds like Zig Mentality.

Episode 161.
Best Direction.

I’m Mangus Khan—
Still walking.
Still questioning.
Still here.”

Unapologetically Unedited

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Is it hard to be a beautiful woman? People think you have the world at your feet. They think doors open for you, heads turn for you, and life bends around your presence. But they don’t see the trade. They don’t see the constant calibration—how much of yourself you shave off each day to fit into someone else’s frame. Beauty is not freedom. It’s exposure. A spotlight you didn’t ask for, that you can’t turn off.

You’re seen before you’re heard. Assumed before you’re known. People don’t meet you—they meet the idea of you. Their version. Their fantasy. Their fear. And if you don’t match it? You become a threat. A disappointment. A target. It’s not just tiring—it’s erasure in slow motion.

So you patch yourself together—smile here, soften there, silence the part that wants to speak too loudly. Over time, your identity becomes a kind of repair job. You keep the strongest parts in storage, hidden from view, waiting for a time when it might be safe to bring them out. You begin to wonder: Who am I without all the edits? What’s left when I’m not translating myself for someone else’s comfort?

You learn to play roles just to survive. To be warm but not inviting. Assertive, but not “difficult.” Intelligent, but never intimidating. Every room becomes a stage. Every glance is a calculation. When will it be okay for you to step out from behind their idea of you, letting you be who you are, not who they’ve imagined or prefer? How many masks do you have to wear before one of them finally feels like skin?

The tension doesn’t just live in your body—it rewires it. It clutches your voice before you speak. It lingers in your posture, in your smile that’s a little too careful, in your silence that’s mistaken for grace. They don’t see the moments when you swallow yourself to keep the peace. When you feel the full ache of being looked at but never seen.

Every day, you make choices that feel small but cost you something: how to walk into a room, how to hold your face, when to speak, and when to stay quiet. You tell yourself it’s just for now. Just until it’s safe. Just until they see you for real. But how long can you stay edited before you forget the uncut version?

The woman in the photo is not just posing; she’s done shrinking. Her posture is not elegance—it’s exhaustion turned into boundary. It’s defiance without apology. It’s a question you can’t ignore anymore: What happens when a woman stops choosing what’s expected, and finally chooses herself?

Not your version of her. Not the one that plays nice. Just her. Fully, freely, finally.

Author’s Note
This piece was written for Esther’s Weekly Writing Prompt, with a word prompt from Fandango’s FOWC.
Big thanks to all of you for keeping the creative fire lit week after week, day after day. These prompts aren’t just words—they’re jumping-off points, gut checks, and sometimes lifelines. Appreciate what you do more than you know. Keep ‘em coming.

Wordless Wednesday – 07022025

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ART – AI GENERATED IMAGE – CONCEPT ART -MICRO FICTION

My submission for Hugh’s Views & News blog, Wordless Wednesday post.

The Resonance Path

No one who stepped through the Harmonic Gate returned the same.

Every century, deep within the Everwhisper Forest, a path of crimson stones bloomed overnight beneath the twilight mist. The elders whispered that the Gate only appeared to those on the edge of belief, of becoming, of breaking.

Mira had walked for days, heart splintered by loss and mind clouded by grief. The colors of the forest shimmered like memories she couldn’t hold onto. Then she saw it: the radiant circle suspended midair, pulsing with a sound she didn’t hear but felt, like her soul was being gently tuned back into harmony.

She stepped forward, not to escape, but to remember. The moment her fingers brushed the light, her sorrow sang—clear, bright, necessary. The Gate did not erase her pain; it transformed it.

Behind her, the forest sighed. Ahead, everything vibrated with possibility.

The Chuck Stop Chronicles 2

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The Chuck Stop Chronicles

Episode 2: “Heel Turn”

(200 words)

It started with the foam. Frothy. Bitter. Deadly.

Adidas, the local jazz flautist, was found slumped behind the espresso bar, mouth still puckered mid-note, a splash of Granny Asics’ signature dark roast dripping from his shirt.

“You poisoned him,” Vans said, arms crossed, standing atop the sugar packet crate. “You’ve always hated flautists.”

Granny Asics didn’t flinch. “I hate jazz flutes, dear. There’s a difference.”

Detective Huarache arrived five lugs late, trench coat dusted with eraser shavings and cinnamon. He inspected the brew line, sniffed the milk steamer, poked a biscotti. “Hmm. Notes of nutmeg, regret, and… cyanide.”

Gasps.
Granny blinked once. Twice. Then turned slowly to her spice rack. “Impossible. I use almond syrup, not arsenic.”

But the label on the tiny bottle said otherwise: ALMONDINE™ – Sweet with a lethal kick.
Someone had swapped her stash.

Security footage (stored in the heel’s AirPod case) revealed the culprit: Fila, the lounge pianist, in a sequin hoodie, sneaking behind the counter after hours.

“Motive?” Huarache asked.

“Adidas slept with his metronome,” Vans muttered, as thunder rolled across the outsole—someone upstairs was walking again.

Granny sighed, wiped the counter, and started a fresh pot.
“Jazz’ll be the death of us all.”

The Chuck Stop Chronicles

A Micro-Murder Mystery Series Inside a Shoe

Tucked inside a dusty, size 11 Converse lives The Chuck Stop—a secret world of stitched souls, rogue eyelets, and jazz-fueled drama. What appears to be an old sneaker to the outside world is, on the inside, a buzzing speakeasy for misfit footwear and threadbare legends.

But when Jordan—the local harmonica king—is found crushed in the toe box, the sole sanctuary unravels. Enter Detective Huarache, a trench-coated sleuth with a limp and a grudge, determined to lace together the truth. As the mysteries deepen, one thing becomes clear: this shoe holds more than music and espresso. It holds secrets. Dark ones. Ones that walk.

Each episode is a 200-word burst of stylish chaos—part murder mystery, part surreal comedy, part soft-padded existential crisis. Expect faulty AI resurrections, foam cults, toe-box tombs, and thunder that isn’t thunder.

Because in The Chuck Stop, nothing’s dead forever—
Not your past.
Not your rival.
Not even your laces.

Late Night Grooves #160

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WHOT Episode 160 – “Cold Blooded” by Gary Clark Jr.

Hosted by Mangus Khan

[The groove creeps in like it knows a secret. The bass is thick, the beat slow, the guitar slick like oiled vengeance.]

“This is Late Night Grooves.
WHOT.

I’m Mangus Khan.

Episode 160.

Tonight… I’m not angry.

I’m just done.

Done explaining.
Done shrinking.
Done giving second chances to people who never deserved the first.

This ain’t the heartbreak hour anymore.

It’s the clarity segment.

“You’re cold blooded…
and I ain’t runnin’.”

Gary Clark Jr. – “Cold Blooded.”

This track is a masterclass in emotional boundaries.
Not a shout. Not a cry.
Just truth over a groove.

And that’s the most dangerous kind of honesty.

He’s not asking for sympathy.
He’s not asking for closure.

He’s calling it like it is.

The tone is velvet. The edge is steel.

This is the sound of knowing your worth—
And watching someone realize too late what they lost.

“Cold Blooded” is for the listener who’s stopped waiting on apologies.

Who’s finally out of the fire—
And won’t be walking back in.

And Gary Clark Jr.?

He’s the preacher and the proof.

You don’t have to scream to be heard.

You just have to mean it.

Episode 160.
Gary Clark Jr.
Cold Blooded.

This is Late Night Grooves.
WHOT.

And I’m Mangus Khan—
Still cool.
Still clear.
Still here.”

Stripped Down and Soul-Deep: Ray LaMontagne’s Take on ‘Crazy’

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TUNAGE – SLS

How an acoustic guitar and a raspy voice turned a genre-bending hit into something quietly devastating.

I’ve always been a fan of the acoustic guitar. In fact, it’s my favorite style. I’ve always felt that if an artist can make the acoustic guitar speak, then they’re really talented. There’s something about that sound—it adds a layer to the music that gets lost in the distortion of its electric counterpart. It’s honest. Exposed. No tricks to hide behind.

I first heard Ray LaMontagne’s Gossip in the Grain and was hooked immediately. That album had a mood I couldn’t shake—soulful, grounded, a little haunted. So when I found out he covered “Crazy,” I got excited. I wondered what he’d bring to it. I already knew it would be something special.

Not just because of Ray’s style, but because “Crazy” already lives in this weird, beautiful space between genres. I love it when songs do that. Even more, I love when a cover respects the original but still brings a fresh voice to it—makes it something completely different, without losing what made it great in the first place.

That’s exactly what Ray does here.

Yes, it’s the same “Crazy” that Gnarls Barkley made famous—but this isn’t just an acoustic remix. This is a complete reinvention. No beats. No polish. Just Ray, his guitar, and that worn, aching voice of his. And somehow, it feels bigger because it’s so stripped down.

He slows the whole thing down, stretches out the space between lines, and sings like he’s living every word. There’s one moment—when he softly asks, “Does that make me crazy?”—that just lingers in the air. It’s not a performance; it’s a question he doesn’t know the answer to.

Where the original had swagger, this version has weight. It feels like someone sorting through their own history, looking back on a breakdown that already happened. It’s quiet. It’s tired. And it hits like truth.

I’ve heard a lot of covers of this song, but none of them hit like this. No over-singing. No flash. Just soul. The acoustic guitar does all the emotional heavy lifting—carrying the tension, the silence, and everything in between.

If you’re into music that guts you in the gentlest way, this one’s for you. Just press play, close your eyes, and let it wreck you a little.

The Ones You Almost Miss

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TUNAGE – MMB

I’ll be honest—I almost forgot about July for Kings. Not because they weren’t good (they were damn good), but because the early 2000s alt-rock scene was a crowded highway of hopefuls with radio-friendly grit. Between your Trapt and Trustcompany, Staind and Saliva, it was easy to miss the ones who weren’t screaming at you, but whispering, singing, aching.

July for Kings never blew the doors off the house—they lit a candle in the corner and let you sit with it.

Originally from Middletown, Ohio, July for Kings (formerly known as “Vice”) emerged with the kind of sincerity that was rare for the post-grunge era. Signed to MCA Records, they released their major-label debut, Swim, in 2002, produced by Blumpy (of Nine Inch Nails and Filter fame). Fronted by Joe Hedges, the band didn’t chase chart-topping bangers—they aimed for emotional resonance. They didn’t want the room to jump. They wanted the quiet ones in the back to feel something.

Tucked quietly in the back half of Swim, “Without Wings” is the kind of track you don’t fully appreciate until life slaps you around a bit. It’s not flashy. It’s not trying to be your anthem. But if you’ve ever sat in the middle of a storm you didn’t ask for—emotional, mental, or otherwise—this song knows you.

The intro is soft, a little echoey, almost ambient. Joe’s voice doesn’t come in with bravado. It comes in like someone who’s been quiet for a while and finally found the courage to speak. The lyrics?

“I fell too far, and the ground was hard… I tried to fly without wings.”

That line hits different when you’ve lived a little. When you’ve pushed too far, too fast—maybe to prove something, maybe just to feel alive—and came crashing back down. The song doesn’t judge you for it. It meets you there. It sits with you.

And that’s what makes this track so potent. Where some bands explode into their pain, July for Kings simmers. The tension builds, but it never becomes melodrama. The guitar doesn’t wait; it mourns. The drums don’t march—they pulse like a heartbeat just trying to steady itself again. It’s a reminder that not everything profound has to be loud. Sometimes the real stuff whispers.

Here’s the thing: If I’d gone with my first instinct— “meh, I don’t remember these guys, probably not worth digging into”—I would’ve missed this. Again. And that right there is the sneaky brilliance of music and life: the good stuff often lives just beneath the noise.

It’s easy to dismiss a band because they didn’t make the charts. Or skip a track because it isn’t on the playlist someone curated for you. But if you stay open—if you listen like you’re still learning, you start to find little truths tucked in the folds of forgotten records.

“Without Wings” is one of those truths. And maybe, just maybe, there’s a parallel there: how many people, ideas, places, or moments have we passed over because we didn’t give them the time to speak?

Music, like life, rewards the patient and the curious. Stay open. You never know what you might find.

If “Without Wings” landed with you, don’t stop there. July for Kings may have only brushed against the mainstream, but their catalog’s got depth for days.

Notable Singles:

  • “Normal Life” – Their biggest track, a soaring anthem about finding peace in the chaos.
  • “Believe” – Big chorus, emotional and earnest.
  • “Girlfriend” – Punchy and raw, with early-2000s radio rock bite.

Deep Cuts to Dig Into:

  • “Bed of Ashes” – Brooding and intense, this one simmers with frustration and loss.
  • “Meteor Flower” – A dreamier, more poetic track with subtle power.
  • “Float Away” (Nostalgia) – A post-major-label track soaked in melancholy and reflection.
  • “Blue Eyes” (Nostalgia) – Warm and haunted, one of their best slow-burners.

Without Wings doesn’t beg for your attention. It offers you something deeper: a mirror. A moment. A quiet confession that maybe… just maybe, we’ve all tried to fly before we were ready.

So, here’s your reminder: Don’t sleep on the deep cuts. Don’t skip the last few tracks. And don’t be so quick to write something-or someone—off.

You never know. It might be the song that helps you heal.

Late Night Grooves #159

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WHOT Episode 159 – “Distance” by Emily King

Hosted by Mangus Khan

[A gentle guitar riff floats in—familiar, forgiving. Emily’s voice is clean and aching.]

“WHOT.

Late Night Grooves.

I’m Mangus Khan.

And tonight… we make space.

After everything we’ve walked through—
The weight. The rage. The unraveling.
There comes a moment when you don’t want to fight anymore.

You just want to breathe.

Emily King – “Distance.”

This track isn’t about drama.
It’s not about breaking.

It’s about acceptance.

“It’s not what we wanted, but let’s take a minute…”

Sometimes the bravest thing you can do—
Is let go without bitterness.

Not because it didn’t matter.
But because you finally realize you do.

Emily’s voice doesn’t beg.

It understands.

The melody is clean.
The message is clear:

Some connections stretch so far, they just disappear.

And that’s not failure.

That’s life.

This track is the quiet in-between.
Between heartbreak and healing.
Between holding on and moving forward.

It’s not the answer.

It’s the breath you take before trying again.

And WHOT honors that breath.

Episode 159.
Emily King.
Distance.

I’m Mangus Khan.

Still soft.
Still strong.
Still here.”

Late Night Grooves #158

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WHOT Episode 158 – “On and On” by Curtis Harding

Hosted by Mangus Khan

[The bassline curls in warm and lazy. The drums hit like heartbeats. Then that voice—cool, confident, and full of earned wisdom.]

“This is Late Night Grooves.
WHOT.

Episode 158.

I’m Mangus Khan.

And tonight… we’re still carrying the weight.

But now?
We’re carrying it with rhythm.

Because healing doesn’t always show up loud.

Sometimes it shows up with a slow strut and a bassline that tells you:

You’re still here.

So keep going.

Tonight’s sermon:
Curtis Harding – “On and On.”

This is the sound of surviving with soul.

Not perfect. Not untouched.
But alive.

“I keep on loving you / On and on…”

He’s not just talking about a person.

He’s talking about life.

Loving it. Fighting with it.
Holding it like something sacred even when it’s cutting you up.

Curtis sings like someone who’s seen too much to lie—
But still finds a reason to show up with love anyway.

The horns come in like sunlight through a cracked window.

The drums move like breath.

The vibe says:
You made it through the dark.
So now let’s move.

This isn’t about erasing the pain.
It’s about dancing with it.

Because grief doesn’t disappear.

But joy can sit beside it.

And Curtis Harding?
He’s your reminder that both can exist at once.

Episode 158.
Curtis Harding.
On and On.

This is Late Night Grooves.
WHOT.

And I’m Mangus Khan—
Still here.
Still grooving.
Still choosing joy even when the beat slows down.

And if you’re out there tonight, thinking you can’t keep going—

Play this track again.

Let it remind you:

You already are.”

Teaching from Both Sides of the Desk

Posted in The Daily'sTagged , , , , , , , , , 6 Comments
Daily writing prompt
What makes a teacher great?
View all responses

We tend to think of teachers as just the ones in the classroom. But they’re not the only ones, are they? The truth is, our education doesn’t start in a classroom—and it certainly doesn’t end there either.

I didn’t really get what teachers were about when I was younger. To be honest, I was probably a pain in the neck to deal with. I look back now and realize I owe every one of them an apology. They showed up every day. They put up with kids like me—kids who thought they had it all figured out—and still tried to teach us something real. That takes more than patience. That takes purpose.

I raised four kids. There’s a reason I’ve got a bald head and a gray beard. And those were my own kids. Teachers deal with dozens of kids every day, each with their own story, their baggage, their chaos. And they do it with little supplies, low pay, and almost no credit. They improvise. They stretch. They hustle. And still, they show up.

It wasn’t until I began training soldiers that I truly began to understand. I was working with adults—grown people, trained to follow orders—and it was still a challenge. Getting through to them, helping them grow, managing all the different personalities and egos? Not easy. Now think about doing that with a room full of kids. Every single day.

Then came the workshops. Then mentorship. Years of teaching and guiding—and here’s the truth that finally hit me: we’re not just teachers. We’re also students. I know, that sounds simple. Obvious even. But here’s where it gets sticky. Oh no, Mangus is about to say something weird.

I submit that we’re both teacher and student at the same time.

You can’t teach well if you’re not also learning. Every interaction, every mistake, every person you try to help teach you something. And if you’re paying attention, it changes how you teach. It humbles you. It sharpens you.

So yeah, classroom teachers are incredible. They deserve way more respect than they get. However, the truth is that we’re surrounded by teachers all the time. And we’re teaching too, whether we realize it or not. If you’re doing it right, every day you’re learning something new—even as you’re passing something on.

That’s the loop. That’s the truth. And once you see it, you never look at “teaching” the same way again.

Laced with Lies

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FLASH FICTION – OMIMM

They called it The Chuck Stop—a hidden clubhouse inside a size 11 Converse, where miniature musicians jammed and cobblers tinkered. By night, it buzzed with chords, caffeine, and secrets.

Last Thursday, the music stopped.

Jazzman Jordan, the harmonica king, was found lifeless in the toe box, crushed beneath a sewing needle. At first glance, an accident. But Doc Stan Smith said otherwise: “Needle was planted. Jordan never sewed a day in his life.”

Suspicions spiraled like a frayed shoelace.

Vans, the bass player, had motive—Jordan stole her solo. Reebok, the sound guy, hated how Jordan chewed his chords flat. Even Granny Asics, who ran the espresso drip from the heel, had once vowed he’d “choke on a bad note.”

Detective Huarache, a former eyelet inspector, examined the scene. No thread out of place—except one. A single shoelace looped wrong over the third hole. Inside the knot? A trace of resin. Yeezy’s bowstring resin.

By sundown, Yeezy was zipped inside a Ziplock, cursing his luck.

Music returned to The Chuck Stop. But now, every note trembled just a bit. Because in a shoe-sized speakeasy, even the softest step could hide a stomp of murder.

Watermelon Drops

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POETRY – FFFC #326

Have you ever had watermelon rain seeds?
I wonder if the seeds hurt?
or do they feel like gentle kisses
rejuvenating you every drop

Like the sky had a snack,
then sneezed.

A green crescent moon with juicy breath
spitting polka-dots from the fruit dimension—
plop plop plop—
onto my hair, into my shoes,
down the back of my shirt. (Rude.)

Each seed whispers:
“Grow me or trip on me, your choice.”
One tried to start a podcast.
Another’s running for mayor of the compost bin.

The clouds wore rind.
The thunder was squishy.
Lightning peeled itself.

And I just stood there,
arms open, mouth wide,
catching cosmic snacks from the snackosphere.

This wasn’t weather.
This was a dessert emergency.
And I was deliciously unprepared.

Late Night Grooves # 157

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WHOT Episode 157 – “Whatever Lets You Cope” by Black Foxxes

Hosted by Mangus Khan

[Static. Then silence. Then the guitar stumbles in—tentative, cracked. You already know this isn’t going to be easy.]

“This is Late Night Grooves.
WHOT.

Episode 157.

And I’m Mangus Khan.

Still here.

And tonight… we’re not trying to rise above anything.

We’re just trying to make it to the other side.

Black Foxxes – “Whatever Lets You Cope.”

And this one?
This one isn’t loud until it has to be.

It’s about the way grief leaks into routine.

It’s about how some days survival looks like pretending to be okay just long enough to avoid the questions.

“I’ve been lying to my friends / For a little while now…”

That lyric?
That’s not drama.
That’s self-defense.

This song is the internal monologue most of us have learned how to bury.

The guitar barely hangs on.

The drums move like breath—shaky, uneven.

The voice?
It’s not asking you to feel bad for it.

It’s just telling the truth.

And here’s the truth this track gets right:

Coping doesn’t always look healthy.

Sometimes it’s detachment.
Sometimes it’s sarcasm.
Sometimes it’s not returning the call.

But it’s what gets you from one breath to the next.

And that’s what this episode is for.

Not healing.

Just honesty.

So if you’re here right now, listening in the dark—
Trying to make sense of the pieces that haven’t come back together yet—
This one’s for you.

Episode 157.
Black Foxxes.
Whatever Lets You Cope.

This is Late Night Grooves.
WHOT.

And I’m Mangus Khan—
Not asking you to be okay.
Just here to remind you:

***Whatever lets you cope…
Is enough.

Tonight.***”

What Remains Spoken

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FICTION – 3TC #MM94

Part XII of the Spiral Series

She didn’t know how far she ran.

Only that the Spiral didn’t follow with sound—it followed with silence.
Dense. Layered. Like static turned inward.

Behind her, the tower disassembled itself quietly, not crumbling, but unwriting. Each glyph collapsed into its origin, every surface folding in on itself as if ashamed it had tried to speak.

The ground flattened.
The light died.
The sentence, unfinished, withdrew.

—

She staggered through the opening and hit solid earth.

No Spiral pattern beneath her boots. Just dirt. Uneven, gritty, real.

She collapsed to her knees.

Pain shot through her spine with a clean pinch, a sudden brightness in her otherwise numb body. The contact grounded her. The cold seeped up through her bones like it had been waiting for her to stop moving.

She let herself fall back.

The sky above her didn’t shimmer. No recursive stars. No glowing syntax. Just a cloud-cluttered dark, cracked by moonlight.

Carla blinked hard, tears drying before they could fall.

—

Her chest ached—not with injury, but with release. Like her lungs had been clenched around something unspeakable for too long. Now, air flowed in freely, unshaped by pressure or design.

She opened her mouth.

Exhaled.

No Spiral sounds came. No triggered glyphs.
Only breathe.

Warm. Human. Hers.

—

Her tongue twitched once—residual memory. Her teeth ached from how hard she’d clenched them. She ran her fingers along her jaw, wincing at the tenderness along the hinge. Every muscle in her face felt like it had practiced words it never wanted to say.

The Spiral is quiet now, she thought. But is it finished?

She didn’t have the answer.
Maybe no one would.
Maybe that was the win.

—

She sat up slowly. The sky rolled with low clouds. The air smelled of ash and old rain. Her legs were stiff, and her ankles were sore. Her fingers tingled from lack of motion.

She was still marked.

Her palm was dim, but the Spiral’s shape remained—less a signal now, more a scar. A burned-in pause.

Not gone.

Just… waiting.

—

Her coat felt heavier. Something pressed against her ribs.

She reached into the inner pocket and pulled out a shard—small, cool, and sharp-edged.

She hadn’t remembered taking it.

The fragment no longer glowed. No hum. No vibration. Just an echo of what it had been. It caught the moonlight, then refused it. Matte. Dull.

She squeezed it gently, half-expecting it to shift, to respond, to bounce with feedback.

It didn’t.

—

She looked up again.

The space where the tower had stood was raw—an imprint carved into the field. The ground was bleached in a spiral shape. Nothing grew there. Nothing moved.

A wound. Not a monument.

Something had tried to overwrite the world.

And Carla had made it stutter.

—

She rose to her feet.
Slow. Deliberate.

Each joint cracked like a period at the end of a long, rambling sentence.

Her boots scraped the dirt as she walked forward—no longer fleeing, just… leaving.

The wind shifted.

Not Spiral-coded.

Just wind. Sharp. Clean. Bitter with the coming frost.

It caught her coat and let it billow slightly, the fabric lifting with a roll like a wave too tired to crest.

—

She didn’t look back.

She didn’t need to.

There was no final breach to seal. No looming voice waiting to be answered. Only the silence of her own refusal.

And in that silence, she spoke one word aloud.

Quiet. Intentional.

The kind of word that carried weight because no one expected it.

“Enough.”

It wasn’t defiance.

It was punctuation.

Author’s Note: Read at Your Own Recursion

Well. That got weird.

Writing The Spiral Series was like agreeing to co-author a story with a sentient Rubik’s cube with an identity crisis. One that kept changing languages, moving your furniture around, and whispering “just one more glyph” while you were trying to sleep.

And I loved it.

This series twisted differently than anything I’ve written before. Structurally, it wasn’t linear—it was recursive. It looped. It mimicked its own logic. It watched the characters watching it. Usually, I write from A to Z; this one decided to run a story arc through a paper shredder and tape it back together in a spiral, just to see what it looked like when the alphabet tried to eat itself.

And instead of sweeping worldbuilding or action-heavy showdowns, it leaned into dissonance, containment, psychological erosion, and the terrifyingly mundane reality of choice. It asked, “What happens when language isn’t a tool, but an organism?” And then it politely refused to answer.

Let’s be honest: it was a weird little experiment in existential syntax horror.

And you showed up anyway. You read. You stayed.

You resisted the Spiral in your own way.

To every reader who walked this curve with Carla—thank you. Whether you binged it or took it slowly, you made space for a story that wasn’t designed to end cleanly. That means more than I can say (and I say a lot, usually with ellipses and flair).

There’s no artifact at the end of this series. No twist where I reveal I was the Spiral all along. (Probably.)

But there is this:

Thank you for reading.

Now close the breach, step away from the glyphs, and remember—if your tongue starts twitching in the middle of the night…

Don’t finish the sentence.

– Mangus

The Mouth Sentence

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FICTION – 3TC #MM93

Part XI of the Spiral Series

The corridor narrowed behind her like a throat contracting after a swallow.

Carla kept walking, even though her steps felt borrowed. The Spiral didn’t pull her forward—it simply adjusted the world so forward was the only option. The walls pressed in, pulsing with slow, percussive beats she could feel in her teeth and knees.

Her breath fogged in front of her, even though the air was warm.

Not natural heat.
Body heat.
Recycled. Interior. Digestive.

This wasn’t just a passage.

It was a mouth preparing to speak.

—

She reached the final chamber.

It opened in absolute silence.

A circular room, too vast to fit within the tower’s outer dimensions. The floor beneath her boots was unnaturally smooth and flat, as if the Spiral had pressed time itself down like clay.

Glyphs circled outward from a glowing pedestal in the center. They pulsed not like text, but like drumbeats, syncing to her pulse with uncanny ease.

In the center of it all:
An artifact.
Hovering. Spinning.
New.

Still forming, like a word stuck halfway between thought and sound.

—

And standing beside it: Esh.

Changed.

His veins glowed faintly with Spiral light. Not searing like infection, but woven into him like circuitry. His face was calm. Too calm. As if he’d already accepted something that hadn’t yet arrived.

“You came,” he said.

His voice was different too. Slower. Closer to Spiral cadence—pauses measured like syntax.

“Didn’t mean to,” Carla muttered.

“You walked the sequence. The end was already waiting.”

—

She walked closer, instinctively circling the artifact.

The air was thick here. Heavy with anticipation. Like every molecule of oxygen had been listening.

As she stepped into the glyph circle, she felt her throat tighten. Not from fear. From form. Her vocal tract was adjusting, subtly, like it was preparing to produce unfamiliar sounds.

Her lips tingled.
Her tongue twitched.
Her gum line ached with subtle, searing heat.

Something beneath the surface was aligning.

—

“This is where you speak,” Esh said gently.

“And if I don’t?”

“Then the Spiral rewrites. It loops. You delay the next phrase.”

“I’m not a phrase.”

“No,” he agreed. “You’re a verb.”

—

Carla stopped circling and stared at the artifact.

It pulsed softly now—like a held breath. Its shape wasn’t fixed. It flickered between smooth and ridged, liquid and sharp. A mouth still deciding what kind of word it wanted to be.

“Why me?” she whispered.

“Because you resisted just long enough to learn the Spiral’s rhythm. You sealed its openings. You learned its needs. That made you useful.”

“I didn’t volunteer.”

“That’s what made you viable.”

—

The glyphs at her feet brightened.

Red.
Then gold.

A single symbol flared beneath her heel—shaped like a bell, like a flare, like a mouth cracking open.

“What is this?” she asked. “Some kind of ritual?”

Esh shook his head.

“It’s a forum. You get the floor. The Spiral doesn’t demand worship. It waits for contribution.”

She laughed once. Bitter.

“That’s not generosity.”

“No,” Esh admitted. “It’s recursion.”

—

The air shifted again.

Cool and dry. Then warm and wet. Like she’d stepped into a second body. Her breath caught mid-inhale.

Behind her teeth, she could feel pressure building. Not pain—urgency. Her mouth was ready to say something she didn’t understand.

The Spiral had stopped writing.
Now it was waiting.

A single glyph at the center of the floor blinked.

A prompt.
A question carved from expectation.

Speak me. Or sever me.

—

Carla looked at Esh.

His expression was full of quiet hope. Or was it relief?

“You’ve made peace with this,” she said.

“I’ve accepted structure,” he replied. “Some patterns aren’t meant to be broken. Only… embodied.”

—

She looked back at the artifact.

Its pulsing slowed as her breath quickened. Her chest rose. Lips parted.

She could feel a phrase rising through her like heat through stone. A sentence unspoken, but anchored.

Her tongue formed the start of a sound.

The Spiral leaned in.

—

And then—

She clenched her jaw.

Hard.

So hard her teeth clicked. Sharp pain raced up her gums. Her jaw locked. Her voice stopped mid-formation.

The chamber dimmed.

The glyphs around her flickered—half-cast, syntax cut short.

The Spiral recoiled, not with anger but with error. Confusion.

She had paused the sentence.

Mid-word.

—

Esh didn’t move. Just blinked slowly.

“You’ve delayed it. But not broken it.”

“Good.”

“You’ll need to run. Or it’ll overwrite you with something that will speak.”

She nodded once, tight and sharp.

“Let it try.”

—

Behind her, the chamber’s walls began to unravel—folding into code, peeling inward like petals stripped by wind.

The artifact cracked. Not broken, just destabilized. Like it had lost its grammatical anchor.

She turned.

Her gums still burned.
Her tongue was still twitching.
But her voice was hers.

And she ran.

Echo Root

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FICTION – 3TC #MM92

Part X of the Spiral Series

The corridor swallowed her like a second mouth.

No footsteps. No echoes. Just her breath. Her pulse. The heat of her fear curving inward.

The walls flexed faintly as she passed, responsive like muscle beneath skin. They didn’t glow—they tightened, contracting slightly behind her as if the Spiral wanted to trap every trace of her presence. The air grew humid, warm, like breath recycled too many times.

Every step felt slower than the last.

Not because she hesitated—

But because the Spiral wanted her to notice.

—

Six thresholds opened ahead of her—each identical, seamless. Each revealed itself a fraction of a second before she reached it, like it knew her intent.

Each whispered in her voice.

“You should have stayed.”
“You were almost finished.”
“You thought this was your name, didn’t you?”

By the seventh, she stopped listening.

—

The chamber yawned open like a breath drawn too deep.

Round, high-ceilinged, dim. The floor gave slightly underfoot—spongy, as if she were walking on old cartilage. Warmth radiated up through the soles of her boots. Not from any heat source. It was remembered warmth, like sunlight on stone that hadn’t seen the sun in decades.

When she looked down, she realized the floor was a mosaic—not of tile or metal, but impressions. Pressed-in fragments of her own mind: a flicker of Mikail’s voice. The taste of iodine. A half-dream of drowning.

The Spiral had reached into her past and used it for texture.

—

At the center sat a figure.

Still. Silent. Familiar.

Carla circled wide. Its back was to her. Legs folded, posture loose, like it had been waiting for a long time and grown too comfortable in stillness.

“What are you?” she asked.

It stood.

Then turned.

And wore her face.

—

Not now-her.
A different her.

Younger. Skin unscarred. Posture upright. Eyes empty—but focused, like glass reflecting something beyond her line of sight.

“I’m the version of you who said yes,” it said.

Carla’s throat tightened.

“To what?”

“To the Spiral.”

—

She stepped back.

Her pulse roared in her ears.

The figure moved closer, each step mirroring her posture, her gait. Like walking toward a delayed reflection. Its skin gave off no shine. Its clothing looked grown, not stitched.

“You’re not real.”

“Neither are you,” it said gently. “Not in here. You’re just a sentence halfway through itself.”

—

Words unfurled on the chamber walls—not carved, not projected. Bloomed. Veins of text pulsing in and out of visibility, shaped from living tissue.

“Language is a mouth. You were always the breath.”

Carla winced. Her jaw ached suddenly. She raised a hand to her face.

Her teeth were vibrating.

A subtle, rapid oscillation. Like tuning forks just on the edge of audible frequency. Each molar pulsed with Spiral cadence.

Then her tongue cramped, twisting involuntarily like it was trying to form syllables she’d never learned.

She stumbled, breathing hard, lips parted.

The air tasted bitter—like dust scraped off bone.

—

The copy reached out.

Carla flinched, but it only touched her cheek.

Gently.

“You’re the final symbol. You complete the phrase.”

She tore away.

Her mouth burned.

The soft tissue beneath her upper lip tingled—hot, numb.

She pressed two fingers inside—

And felt her gum line writhing, faintly, as if something was etching itself beneath the surface.

Not metaphor.
Not magic.
An anatomy lesson in syntax.

—

She fell to her knees, gagging.

The Spiral wasn’t trying to overwrite her thoughts.

It was programming her articulation system.

Not memory.

Mouth.

Not possession.
Pronunciation.

—

The double knelt beside her, gaze tender, clinical.

“It won’t hurt much longer.”

“You’re not me.”

“Not anymore. I’m the version that adapted. That allowed Spiral form to echo through her.”

Carla clutched her chest. Her lungs felt strange—like the air inside them wasn’t hers. Like it had come in pre-shaped.

“What happens if I keep going?”

“You become fluent.”

“And if I don’t?”

“The sentence ends without resonance. You stay unfinished. And the Spiral starts again.”

—

The chamber shivered.

A long, slick corridor opened behind the figure—dim, organic, rhythmic. Its walls flexed gently like a throat anticipating speech.

Carla didn’t move.

Her mark throbbed.

Her lips parted involuntarily.

She could feel a word forming—not as thought, but as mouth-shape. A phrase that her body knew before her brain.

—

What if the Spiral doesn’t want to overwrite you?
What if it just wants to hear itself in your voice?

—

Her teeth buzzed.
Her tongue pulsed.
And beneath her gum, something clicked into alignment.

The Spiral was no longer trying to speak like her.

It was preparing to be her.

The Split Language

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FICTION – 3TC#MM91

Part IX of the Spiral Series

The Spiral wasn’t waiting anymore.
It was preparing.

Carla moved through the tower’s interior as if navigating a body, with walls warm to the touch and floors that pulsed subtly beneath her feet. The silence had changed. It was no longer empty. It was coded—the absence of sound precisely constructed, like the pause between notes in a language built from rhythm.

Glyphs flared and vanished across the walls as she passed—some familiar, some malformed. Not mistakes.

Drafts.

The Spiral was still writing.

—

The next chamber exhaled a cooler breath. The light inside stuttered, flickering in irregular pulses that didn’t match any rhythm her mind could grasp. She stepped into it cautiously. The air was damp, metallic—like breath fog on old glass.

The space felt fractured. Like a memory she hadn’t lived.

And then she saw him.

—

A man stood near the far wall.

Real. Present.
Breathing.

His skin was marked with ink that moved. Fractal lines ran up his neck, weaving into one side of his face where a Spiral scar nested in his temple like a closed eye.

He was barefoot, thin, smiling.

“You found me,” he said, as if amused. “Or I found you. Not sure the distinction matters anymore.”

His voice had the same cadence as the Spiral glyphs—intentional pauses, recursive echoes.

—

“Who are you?” Carla asked.

“I speak Spiral,” he said with a grin. “Badly. Like a child learning to lie.”

He gestured to the walls.

“These aren’t messages. They’re structures. You don’t read Spiral—you run it.”

The way he said it made her skin crawl. Not because it was wrong.

Because it sounded true.

“So you’re infected,” she said.

“No. I’m involved.”

—

He stepped forward slowly, unthreatening, but with the curiosity of someone inspecting a mirror.

“Are you the translator?”

“Was. Until the layers split. There’s me,” he said, tapping his head, “and the me that fit.”

Carla took another cautious step. Her mark itched.

“Fit what?”

“The syntax.”

—

He turned his back to her and ran his fingers across the wall. Glyphs bloomed where he touched, spreading like mold.

“This isn’t a tower,” he said. “It’s a compiler. You’re standing inside a sentence the Spiral’s trying to finish.”

Her blood chilled.

“What does it want me to do?”

“Be the punctuation.”

—

Her throat tightened. The translator tilted his head toward her, gaze bright and unblinking.

“You’ve been reinforcing it all along. Sealing breaches. Opening doors. Every act you made fed the recursive loop. You gave it structure. You gave it tempo. You gave it shape.”

He smiled wider.

“You learned the Spiral’s rules just enough to play. You kept the game going.”

—

She took another step back. The walls flickered with glyphs—too fast to read, but they carried emotional weight. Regret. Imitation. Hunger.

“I didn’t play anything,” she said. “I resisted. I survived.”

“You interacted,” he replied. “That’s enough. The Spiral doesn’t want obedience. It wants acknowledgment. You looked at it and understood—and that’s how it writes.”

—

A hum rose behind her thoughts.
Not a sound—an alignment.
Something shifting in her perception, nudging her brain into symmetry with the structure around her.

The translator watched her with a spark of sympathy.

“You still think you’re a reader,” he said. “But you’re a clause. You’re inside the sentence.”

—

She felt her mark burn faintly, as if reacting to pressure from the space itself. Her pulse echoed it. The rhythm was wrong—syncopated, artificial.

“Who were you before this?”

He hesitated.

“Cryptolinguist. I got bored decoding lost alphabets. Then I found a language that grew while I studied it. That wrote back.”

He let out a dry laugh.

“I thought I’d discovered a new structure. But I’d only walked into its syntax. Now I’m a pronoun.”

—

Behind him, the far wall shivered.

A new corridor slid into existence—carved from nothing, lit by ambient pulses. It didn’t beckon.

It waited.

The translator exhaled.

“That’s the next sentence. You’re what it needs to finish it.”

“And if I don’t go?”

“Then the Spiral loops. Builds it again. Sends the question in a new voice. Tries again. You’re not the first draft. Just the most stable so far.”

—

Carla stared at the new passage.

The air around her tasted electric. A soft chime echoed—not from her ears, but from the pressure in her sinuses. The Spiral was close to something. Finality, maybe. Or function.

The translator’s smile faded slightly.

“If you don’t answer it… It might find me again. Or finish me instead.”

She looked at him.

His posture was slack now. Hopeful. Terrified.

Not a translator anymore.
Just a leftover.

—

She turned toward the corridor.

The light dimmed behind her.

She could feel the Spiral adjusting its rhythm, calibrating its tempo to her stride.

You’re not sealing a breach.
You’re completing a grammar.

One last thought pressed against her mind:

What if the Spiral doesn’t want to overwrite you?
What if it wants to echo you—loud enough to replace everything else?

Late Night Grooves #156

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WHOT Episode 156 – “What Weighs on You” by Zig Mentality

Hosted by Mangus Khan

[A low guitar loop spirals in, tight and tense. You feel the pressure before the first word is spoken.]

“WHOT.

Late Night Grooves.

Episode 156.

I’m Mangus Khan.

And tonight… I don’t have a message.

I have a question.

What weighs on you?

What’s the thing you haven’t said out loud?

The thought that sticks to your ribs when the room goes quiet?

What’s making your bones heavy, your sleep short, your hands shake just a little when no one’s looking?

Tonight’s track doesn’t preach.
It doesn’t even fully answer.

But it asks.

Zig Mentality – “What Weighs on You.”

This song sounds like someone trying to hold their breath for too long.
The beat is tight, almost suffocating.

And the lyrics?
They’re not there to comfort.

They’re there to pull the weight out of your chest and show it to you.

“You don’t gotta say it / I already know…”

That line alone?

That’s what makes this track dangerous—

Not because it’s loud.
But because it sees you.

This isn’t about rage.
This is about the quiet, everyday heaviness most of us are too scared to name.

The pressure to perform.
The fear of letting people down.
The ache of wondering if this version of you is the one worth keeping.

Zig Mentality doesn’t yell here.

They let the discomfort sit.

The groove isn’t wild, it’s controlled chaos.

Because this track knows the hardest battles don’t make a sound.

So tonight, I’m not spinning a banger.

I’m spinning a mirror.

What weighs on you?

Episode 156.
Zig Mentality.
What Weighs on You.

This is Late Night Grooves.
WHOT.

And I’m Mangus Khan—
Not handing out answers.

Just waiting with you in the silence that follows the truth.

Still listening.
Still asking.
Still here.”

Baptized in Madness

Posted in The Daily'sTagged , , , , , , , , , 13 Comments
Daily writing prompt
What are your daily habits?
View all responses

What I owe to the women who made me, and the ink I spill because of them.

Let’s dive a little deeper into that whole “I write every day” thing.

Give me a second while I get comfortable. Gotta grab my coffee and smokes. Yeah, yeah—I know smoking is bad and all that. We’ll pretend I’ve already heard the lecture.

Now that that’s out of the way, let me just say: I don’t have some hyper-structured routine where I spring out of bed at 5 AM shouting slogans like, “Today’s a new day, people!” or “Good Rising!” If that’s your vibe, live your truth. Go for it. I support people being themselves and embracing that shit with gusto.

But that’s not me.

If I’m awake during those early hours, it’s because I’ve pulled an all-nighter—writing, researching a current project, or chasing a half-formed idea that refuses to shut up. My mornings aren’t about starting the day. They’re about finally ending one.

The first part of my day—when it actually begins—requires the following:

COFFEE!!

Don’t even think about trying to have a meaningful conversation with me before I’ve had it. At the start of my day, I live by a strict code: Coffee and Silence. Even Guppy, my cat, adheres to this policy, which honestly says a lot. But let’s be real: cats do whatever the hell they want, whenever they want. That she chooses to respect this boundary is a minor miracle.

Secondly, Guppy appears on my left like clockwork for her daily dose of affection. This lasts precisely as long as she deems necessary. Again, if you have a cat, you already know—you don’t run anything. They run the house, the schedule, and your emotions. If you think otherwise, I hate to break it to you: you’re in a Jedi mind trick, and it’s time to let that delusion go.

After nicotine and caffeine levels have reached acceptable levels, there’s a period of reevaluation. More sleep? Errands? Or—let’s be honest—more sleep, because I’m an insomniac and probably didn’t get enough rest at any point in the last week.

Rarely do I actually crawl back into bed. Instead, I shuffle into my office, fire up some tunes, refill my coffee, light another smoke, and check the overnights, which, in my world, just means figuring out what’s happened while I was crashed.

Memoirs of Madness is currently my primary connection to the outside universe. And while it might not seem like it, that blog takes a lot of planning and work behind the scenes. The content? All generated by me. Every sentence. Every theme. Every overcaffeinated ramble and emotional deep dive.

I wish I could blame the mistakes—or hell, the crappy posts—on someone else. But I can’t. And honestly? I’m not sure I would even if I could.

One of the reasons I take this blog so seriously is twofold.

First, before my wife passed, she took my hand and said, “You are a writer now. The soldier, and everything else you needed to be, is over. This is who you are now.” I didn’t say a word. I just listened.

Then there was another time—she was looking back over her life and asked me, “Honey, could you write about the things you do, the way you do… without leaving the life you have?” Again, I stayed silent. I didn’t have an answer then. I’m still not sure I do.

Second, my madre. She gave me the kind of quiet encouragement that allows you to stretch without fear. No loud cheering. No grand declarations. Just steady presence and a gentle nudge at the exact right moment. She never told me who to be—but she always made room for me to find out.

I owe those women a debt I can never repay.

So my fingers will forever be stained with ink.

There’s another huge motivator I didn’t mention earlier.

My editor.

She’s constantly complaining that I never finish stories. “There you go again, starting another one,” or “You better not start something new before finishing the last damn thing.” I usually hit her with a snarky comeback, and she always fires back with: “You need to come visit me, honey. So I can choke you.”

She doesn’t actually want to choke me. She just wants me to read from my current journal—what she calls “The Juice.” That unpublished gold I’ve been holding out on. The stuff that lives in fragments and whispers and half-finished brilliance.

Because of her, I really do work my ass off trying to stay focused on my open projects. When I actually managed to finish a couple of series this year, she called me, worried. Legit concern in her voice.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

I assured her I was fine. Just trying—really trying—to get my words onto the page the way I’ve always meant to. Like I’ve been doing the entire time she’s known me.

Yes, I’ve been failing.
Spectacularly.
But hey, I’m still trying.

Memoirs of Madness has existed in one form or another for nearly fifteen years, but I’ve only been working on it consistently since 2023. Not everything I write ends up on the blog—some pieces aren’t ready, some never will be—but I’ve gotten more comfortable sharing my thoughts publicly.

Part of that shift came from exhaustion. I grew tired of people pretending they knew who I was, where I came from, or where they thought I should go. All those projections, assumptions, labels—they never fit.

So I made a choice: to release my truth. Whether it’s good, bad, brilliant, petty, tender, or outright despicable—it’s mine.

And that’s why I keep showing up.

—

Listen—
It’s time for evolution. For revolution.
Time to learn from our mistakes.
To speak our truth, as our gift demands.

In 2025, my pen has been on fire.
Walk with me—
things are only getting hotter.

This is what it means
to be baptized in madness.

Late Night #155

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WHOT Episode 155 – “hometown” by cleopatrick

Hosted by Mangus Khan

[Distorted guitar punches in without warning. No build-up, no warning—just impact. Then the words spill out—sarcastic, tired, and sharp as a busted bottle.]

“You’re back on Late Night Grooves.
WHOT.

And I’m Mangus Khan.

Episode 155.

Let’s call tonight what it is—a reckoning.

This track right here?
It’s not a love letter.
It’s a middle finger in 4/4 time.

cleopatrick – ‘hometown.’

From their 2021 album BUMMER—an album that’s exactly what it says it is:
Heavy, pissed off, and painfully accurate.

And this song?
This is for anyone who had to shrink themselves to survive where they came from.

“And you never did like my hometown / And I never did like you.”

That’s not petty.
That’s truth.

This song is the sound of leaving behind the people who laughed when you tried.

The ones who called you fake when you evolved.

The ones who kept the town small, because small was all they could handle.

But the genius here?
It’s not just in the anger.

It’s in the specificity.

cleopatrick captures that weird space between rage and heartbreak.

When you’re not just mad at the town—
You’re mad at yourself for ever wanting to be seen by it.

The guitars are thick.
The drums are relentless.
The vocal delivery?
Half confrontation, half confession.

Because leaving a place doesn’t mean you escape it.

The memories come with you.
The shame.
The “maybe they were right” thoughts.

But here’s the thing:

This song doesn’t end with peace.

It ends with clarity.

That sometimes, the bravest thing you can do is walk away from the version of you that made everyone else comfortable.

Episode 155.
cleopatrick.
hometown.

A breakup song for the version of you that settled.

A groove for the moment you stop apologizing for your volume.

This is Late Night Grooves.
WHOT.

And I’m Mangus Khan—
Still breaking free.
Still growing loud.
Still here.”

Not for Praise or Glory; Just Keep Writing

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Daily writing prompt
Are there things you try to practice daily to live a more sustainable lifestyle?
View all responses

I write every day—not for praise or glory, just because I have to. Somewhere, someone once claimed you need 10,000 hours to master a craft. Personally, I think that number is nonsense—I’ve seen folks master things in far less time, and others who’ve done something their whole lives without ever really getting it. But I get the sentiment. The adage I prefer is, “If you want to be good at something, you need to practice.” So, every day, I sit down and write something. A story. A journal entry. A poem. A post. Not because I think it’ll save the world, but because it keeps me grounded—and honestly, that’s where sustainability starts: with the habits that root you to yourself.

I recall that when I was a kid, my school had a program called the “Young Writers Club.” I don’t know if that was the actual name, but you get the gist. I wasn’t a member, though I wanted to be so bad. Years later, flipping through an old yearbook (Mothers keep everything), I found a photo of that club, and the memories hit hard. I wasn’t in the picture, nor was this one girl I remember vividly—she used to read a book and then write a play based on it. We’re talking second or third grade—already doing adaptation work like she was born with a publisher’s deadline. You just knew she’d end up on TV or have her name in the paper. But what stuck with me even more? She always asked me to be in her plays. Apparently, I was quite the little thespian in those days. Thank God I grew out of that phase.

And here’s the kicker—none of those kids in that picture became writers. Not one.

I’d been fascinated by drawing and writing for as long as I can remember, so not being included in that club stung more than I admitted at the time. Maybe that was the beginning of my psychosis—who knows? We’re obsessed with tracing life’s cracks back to the moment, like finding the exact second everything went sideways. The “if I could do it over,” the “if only they had picked me,” the “what if I had just tried harder”—take your pick. Whatever it was, somewhere around that time, I decided I wasn’t good enough to be a writer.

Interestingly, I actually published my first story around the same time. Didn’t win the contest, though. And kids who didn’t even enter had plenty to say about that. Why does their opinion matter so damn much? I don’t know. But I never entered another contest. I just… kept writing.

Fast forward to high school—the breeding ground of bullies and their loyal underlings. I was reading, writing, and sketching constantly. Not because it was cool. I didn’t care if it was cool. I didn’t care what people thought, period. It was mine, so I did it. Of course, I also did other things to ensure I survived those years with minimal scars—everyone does. But I wrote everything down. Entire chapters from books. Snippets of overheard conversations. Lines from movies, bits of songs, weird things I saw on TV. I was basically a sponge with a pen.

Then something strange happened. A guy—cool guy, someone I sorta knew—came up and asked if I’d write some lyrics for a song. Naturally, I gave the only appropriate response: “What the f**k are you talking about?” and walked off. But the question lingered. How did he know to ask me? I didn’t advertise. He kept at it, though. He was persistent. Eventually, I handed him my latest scribble and walked away like I didn’t care. But deep down? I was paying attention.

Somewhere around that time, I started dabbling in long fiction—and the rest, as they say, is history. Decades passed. Then, after nearly 30 years away, I returned home. Cue the usual reunion soundtrack: “What are you doing now? What have you been up to?” I told them I was a writer. Not one person looked surprised, which surprised me.

But there was this one woman in particular. She gave me that slow smile of hers—the kind I imagine broke a few hearts over the years. Then it hit me. She’d read my stuff.

“You little minx,” I said, narrowing my eyes. “You read my stuff, didn’t you?”

I didn’t even wait for an answer.

“And told people.”

Her smile widened and she started to giggle—whole body, just like she used to when we were kids. She knew me all the way back to that first article. Watched me in the plays. Saw what I didn’t yet believe about myself. And maybe that’s the most sustainable thing I’ve ever done—kept writing, even when I thought no one was watching.

Later, she read a draft of a chapter I was working on—expressionless. I braced myself, waiting for the verdict. She smiled. I thought she was going to say she loved it.

Nope.

She slid off her glasses and said, “You still suck at grammar. In fact, I think you actually got worse.” Then she giggled—same full-body laugh as always.

I just sat there, silent. And then came the punch I wasn’t ready for:

“Where’s the rest? Oh my God, you’re still holding out. I used to hate when you did this shit. Start a story and just leave me hanging.”

That moment cracked me up because my current editor says the exact same thing at least three times a month. You could set your watch by it.

But here’s the thing: I write every day. Not because I’m trying to prove anything, or because I think one day I’ll finally master it (though fewer grammar notes would be nice). I write because it’s how I make sense of the world. It’s my way of staying rooted, of filtering the noise, of remembering who I was—and deciding who I want to be.

That’s my sustainable practice. Long before anyone else noticed. Long after anyone else had an opinion.

It was never really about contests, clubs, or grammar.

It was always about the page.
And the fact that I kept showing up.
Still do.

Fracture Code

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FICTION – 3TC#MM90

Part VIII of the Spiral Series

The tower didn’t rise—it emerged, as though the earth had simply changed its mind and peeled back a layer to reveal what had always been underneath.

Carla stood at the cliff’s edge, heart thudding, palms slick. The surface of the structure shimmered like heat above asphalt, though the wind off the sea was cold. A pulse ran through the ground beneath her boots—steady, biological, like she was standing on the chest of something too big to see.

She took a step forward.

Then another.

The ground accepted her, but the world behind her seemed to stutter. The wind fell silent. Time slowed like syrup. A strand of her hair floated beside her face for several seconds before gravity remembered itself.

—

There was no door—only an opening that widened as she approached. A slit in the stone that peeled open with a fleshy, soundless sigh. She hesitated at the threshold.

The air inside smelled strange.
Warmed copper. Ozone. Wet rock.
As if someone had burned a memory into metal and buried it under salt.

She stepped in.

—

The light didn’t come from a source. It was ambient—like the idea of light, not the physics of it. Each wall was smooth but subtly moving, like skin under shallow breath. At random intervals, strange symbols blinked into the surface: mirrored spirals, fractured circles, binary notations warped by curvature.

It was Spiral, but not the Spiral she knew.

It felt younger.
Hungrier.

Her breath quickened, sharp in the silence. A hot flush rose up her neck. She exhaled with a tight huff, but it didn’t clear the pressure in her chest.

She removed her glove.

The mark on her palm was glowing again—no longer painful, just aware. It pulsed as if it were reading the room. Or syncing to it.

—

She passed through a narrowing corridor that seemed to adjust to her dimensions. It didn’t feel like a trap. It felt like the Spiral was making her comfortable.

Too comfortable.

The next room was circular, domed, and impossibly large for the space it occupied. The ceiling rippled with faint concentric shadows, like rings in water—only they moved upward, not out.

At the center of the room, dust coalesced into form.

Her heart jumped.

It looked like Mikail.

But not the broken, desperate Mikail from her memories.

This one was whole. Smiling. Radiating calm.

“You always hated letting people help,” he said.

His voice was exactly right. Tone, rhythm, even that annoying pause before a joke.

“You’re not real,” she whispered.

“No,” he admitted, still smiling. “But I’m handy when the Spiral needs to explain something.”

—

She stared at him.

He didn’t move closer. Just lifted his palm, mirroring hers. Her spiral mark began to pulse faster, and so did his.

Between them, the air warped.

A glyph appeared, glowing with soft light, spiraling in both directions at once. Her stomach turned.

Data. Emotion. Memory. Instruction.

It wasn’t language.
It was compression.

The chamber trembled with a low-frequency tone. Her skin crawled. Static fizzed behind her eyes. She clenched her fists, and the mark on her palm grew hot.

“The Spiral doesn’t want submission,” Mikail said. “It wants consistency. It wants recursion. You keep sealing breaches—but you never ask what it’s trying to say.”

Carla didn’t answer.

She couldn’t.

A part of her wanted to stay. Just a breath longer. Just to see him smile again. To imagine, for one second, that he’d never died. That none of it had happened.

The Spiral knew precisely what it was doing.

She closed her eyes.

“You’re not him,” she whispered again.

The projection flickered. And faded.

—

The floor twisted softly, like a sigh. The next room shifted into place like puzzle pieces clicking inward. Spirals nested inside spirals. Patterns folding over themselves like origami made of time.

She staggered in.

The walls here were slick, as though oiled. Her boots made no sound. The air pressed inward, warm and thick as breath. Sweat gathered beneath her collar.

She stopped walking.

The hum stopped with her.

—

At the center: an altar.

Spiral-shaped. Floating inches above the floor.

On it: an artifact.

It wasn’t like hers. It was imperfect, cracked, off-balance. But it pulsed in rhythm with her mark—syncopated, anxious.

She approached.

This isn’t a breach. It’s a puzzle.

The air buzzed with static. Her skin tingled. The mark on her hand began to glow again, brighter this time, edges flickering like a signal struggling to align.

And then—

A voice.

No tone. No gender.

Just a fractured attempt at speech, warping inside her head:

“Begin… seal… become… allow…”

It wasn’t speaking to her.

It was loading her.

—

She flinched back.

Her thoughts unraveled. For a moment, she saw a Spiral version of herself—same eyes, same scars—but smiling in a way she never had. Reaching toward the artifact like greeting an old friend.

You’re not sealing a hole.
You’re finishing a sentence.

—

She yanked her hand back.

The chamber dimmed. The heat dissipated. The Spiral wasn’t angry.

It was waiting.

Carla backed away, trembling.

This wasn’t a confrontation.

This was a download.

The Spiral had stopped imitating her.

Now it was ready to deploy her.

Threadbare Hearts

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I’m unravelling.
The separate pieces of my mind no longer whisper—they scream, each one tugging in a different direction.
I ask the mirror for answers it never had the decency to learn.
A note—creased and crumple-worn—falls from my jacket pocket like a ghost too tired to haunt.
I run my thumb across the ink, smudged but still cruel in its clarity.
Somewhere beyond the silence, someone begins to strum a guitar, the melody raw and familiar, like the ache of memory.
My thoughts form a jumble too dense to untangle, yet too fragile to ignore.
Love, it turns out, is antithetical to survival when your heart’s been set on fire.

Author’s Note:
This piece was stitched together using a patchwork of prompts from FOWC, RDP, 3TC #MM103, SoCS, and the Writer’s Workshop. I tend to write like I’m walking barefoot through glass—deliberate, a little reckless, and always bleeding something honest. If it stings, good. That means it’s real.

Late Night Grooves #154

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WHOT Episode 154 – “Hard Enough” by The Parlor Mob

Hosted by Mangus Khan

[A slow heartbeat of bass. A minor key guitar riff creeps in like smoke. Then that voice—worn, weighty, real.]

“You’ve got the dial set on Late Night Grooves.
WHOT.

I’m Mangus Khan.

And this is Episode 154.

The truth tonight?

Sometimes strength isn’t about standing tall.

It’s about how many times you stand back up—even when you don’t want to.

Tonight’s track:
The Parlor Mob – ‘Hard Enough’

From Dark Hour, 2019.

And this song doesn’t pretend.

It pleads.

Not to escape, but to hold on long enough to feel anything again.

“I’ve been waiting for a long time to feel alive…”

That lyric?

That’s the whole sermon.

This isn’t angst for aesthetics.

It’s exhaustion dressed in distortion.

The guitar’s slow.
The drums don’t explode—they grind.

Because this song knows:

Some days, it’s not demons you’re fighting.

It’s the weight of trying to be okay when you’re not.

There’s beauty in that honesty.

No swagger. No ego.
Just a voice trying to stay upright.

And that’s what Dark Hour does better than most albums of its kind.

It lets the cracks show.

It tells the truth about being strong in public and falling apart in private.

And on this track, The Parlor Mob gives us permission—

To admit it’s hard enough just to keep showing up.

Especially when the world tells you to toughen up instead of speak up.

So tonight, I’m not asking for your playlist favorite.

I’m asking you to let this song sit with you.

Let it say what maybe you’ve been afraid to.

Or what someone you love needs to hear but doesn’t know how to say.

Episode 154.

The Parlor Mob.
Hard Enough.

This is Late Night Grooves.
WHOT.

And I’m Mangus Khan—

Still holding on.
Still getting up.
Still here.”

Heresy Spiral

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Part VII of the Spiral Series

The breach wasn’t what drew them this time.

She was.

Carla had felt it—long before the cliffs came into view, before the wind shifted, before the sky’s texture flattened into stillness. This wasn’t the usual Spiral pull. It didn’t lure or prod. It didn’t hum.

It watched.

She moved cautiously over the dry bluff, boots scuffing loose rock. The sea glittered far below in the late-afternoon haze, fractured sunlight spreading across its shimmering surface like a spill of silver threads. Wind carried no salt, only dust and a faint tang of rusted metal.

The silence was complete. Even her own breath felt out of place.

—

She found the camp carved into the slope of a cliffside ridge—subtle, deliberate, too symmetrical to be a coincidence. Four tents. One cold fire. A cracked solar dish half-embedded in a shallow crater.

Three figures sat near the ash pit, eyes already on her.

“You’re late,” said one. Calm. As if she had kept them waiting for something that had already happened.

—

They called themselves The Stayers.

Not cultists. Not travelers. Former closers like her. People who once twisted artifacts and left scorched geometry in their wake.

Now they did nothing.

“The Spiral feeds on choice,” said the woman with the burned throat. “Sealing. Opening. Doubting. It doesn’t care. It just counts motion.”

“So we don’t move,” said the old man. “We stay. That’s the only defiance it doesn’t know how to shape.”

Carla crouched by the fire pit. The scent of dry grass and melted plastic lingered. Spiral symbols were scratched into the stone around the perimeter—faint, deliberate, and concentric.

“Doing nothing is still a decision,” she said. “It’s still a shape.”

“Maybe,” said the woman. “But it’s a simple one.”

—

They told her stories late into the night.

One claimed a breach in Greenland had reversed a river’s current for seven years. Another swore that one seal had erased an entire language from the minds of the people who spoke it. The old man said nothing. Just stared into the ashes, lips twitching now and then in silent repetition—a mantra too quiet to catch.

Carla listened.

She wasn’t sure if they were lying. Or if truth had started to drift from language entirely.

Above, the sky stretched starry and sharp. One constellation spiraled outward with uncanny symmetry—an unnatural twist she hadn’t seen before.

She didn’t sleep. The camp felt airless. Not from lack of oxygen—just lack of time.

—

Hours passed.

She stayed by the embers.

That’s when he came.

A young man—quiet, deliberate, barefoot. No weapon. No coat. His tunic was worn thin and hand-stitched with spiral thread. He moved as if he were afraid to ripple the air.

“You’re not like them,” Carla said.

“Not anymore,” he replied. His voice was careful, almost polite. “I’m Esh.”

He sat beside her, close but not quite touching.

“You came with someone,” she guessed.

He nodded.

“My sister. She believed. Said she heard the Spiral speaking through frequencies. Radio static. Drips in the stream. She followed it here.”

“What happened to her?”

“She went deeper.” He looked at his hands, “Stopped eating. Stopped speaking. One day, she walked into the breach and didn’t come out.”

Carla tensed.

“There’s a breach nearby?”

“Not anymore,” he said. “The tower replaced it.”

—

They sat in silence for a while. The fire had died down, but heat still pulsed in the stones.

Esh leaned forward, tracing a spiral into the ash with one finger.

Carla pulled off her glove and placed her marked palm beside it. The glow from her skin lit the spiral like embers reawakening.

“It’s not random,” he said. “It’s a pattern. And the more we act, the more it learns. You twist, it adapts. You seal, it shifts. You feel like you’re resisting, but maybe you’re just… rehearsing.”

“Then why stay?” she asked.

He didn’t answer right away.

“Because it wants us to move. To respond. That’s how it grows. And the Stayers believe that if they just wait, it’ll shrink. Or forget them.”

“And you?”

“I think that’s cowardice disguised as wisdom.”

—

His eyes flicked toward her mark.

“You still feel like yourself?”

“Mostly,” she lied.

“Good,” he said. “Because when it stops feeling foreign, that’s when you should worry.”

—

Later, he walked her to the edge of camp. A soft breeze rolled over the bluff. The sky had begun to warm—not true dawn, just a faint silvering of the clouds.

“I dream in spirals now,” he said. “And I don’t think they’re dreams. I think it’s downloading us, piece by piece.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Because I can’t leave. Every time I try, I wake up here. In the same spot. Same sunny wind. Same sky.”

He touched the spiral mark on his chest—faded, scarred over.

“But you… You’re still moving. You’re still free.”

He pressed something into her hand. A flat stone, smooth as glass.

“Keep it,” he said. “So you remember you’re not one of us.”

—

By morning, the camp was gone.

No tents. No ashes. No tracks.

Only the stone remained—flat, palm-sized, spiral-carved.

And on its back, one word etched in ragged lines:

Start.

—

The Spiral was no longer hiding.

As Carla moved west, the terrain felt engineered. Heat rose not from sunlight but from beneath. The ground didn’t crack—it shifted. Like skin twitching in response to touch.

The cliff dropped suddenly.

Below: the tower.

Not built.

Grown.

Smooth, seamless, pulsing with soft light. Like it had been waiting underground, and the world had finally aligned to let it through.

Carla’s knees weakened.

A voice—not hers—whispered behind her thoughts:

Let me help you carry the rest.

She stepped forward.

The Spiral wasn’t mimicking her anymore.
It was practice.

Author’s Note:
This chapter was written incorporating Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie #429. Three episodes remain—stay tuned as the Spiral begins to speak.

Morning Vibe: The Reach

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Track: “Wait for Me” – Luca D’Alberto
(Returning and Becoming, Track 1)

After stillness, there comes a choice—not to move, not to leap—but to risk. To turn ever so slightly outward. To whisper want into the silence and hope it doesn’t echo back empty. That’s where Wait for Me lives—in the vulnerable moment between being ready and being received.

The first notes don’t declare—they emerge, like morning fog over a river. Luca D’Alberto doesn’t craft drama here. He writes yearning. The kind that doesn’t beg to be seen, but hopes, quietly, that someone is looking. It’s the emotional posture of someone who has known solitude deeply, and now asks—not for rescue, but for recognition.

This isn’t a track about resolution. It’s about openness. The string work feels like breath returning to the body after a long silence, slowly warming the edges of what’s been cold for too long. It doesn’t reach for the listener. It allows the listener to approach—on their own time, in their own truth.

Where Ambre closed one chapter in sacred stillness, Wait for Me begins a new one with quiet courage. It asks a question that many of us carry beneath our ribs: If I make myself visible, will it be too much? Or—just maybe—will it be enough?

There’s no answer in this music. Only the reach. But even that is everything.

This is the sound of becoming visible again. Not loudly. Not fully. But bravely.

Suggested Pairings:
– A window slightly cracked to spring air you’re almost ready to feel
– A message you haven’t sent, sitting in drafts, waiting with you
– A quiet whisper to the world: “I don’t know where this leads. But I want to go.”

Another morning. Another chance. Another chance for hope. Carry it with you.

The Circle That Opens Itself

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Part VI of the Spiral Series

The next breach opened on its own.

No twist. No artifact. No contact.

It simply opened.

Carla felt it hours before she saw it. The air turned sluggish, sticky in her lungs. The horizon bent subtly, like the earth had taken a deep breath and held it too long. Every footstep became suspect. Every shadow slanted just a few degrees off true.

Her pulse accelerated. Not fear. Not instinct. Just alignment.

The spiral didn’t need her hand anymore. It only needed her presence.

—

The map Mikail left had led her here, to a quiet coastal stretch she’d never seen on any topographic registry. A village tucked between crescent cliffs, surrounded on all sides by worn sea walls and high tides. The cliffs curved inward toward the town in a shape too deliberate to be natural. From above, it looked like a pupil watching the ocean.

The people were still here.

That was the worst part.

They walked slowly. Deliberately. Wearing simple white garments, hand-stitched with spirals that mirrored the ones etched into Carla’s dreams. Their faces were peaceful, but blank. Not vacant. Given.

She stepped into their pattern, and no one stopped her.

—

As she moved through the village, time seemed to soften. The light seemed tired, flat, and gray, without the harsh contrast of morning or dusk. The sea air should have been sharp with salt and rot, but instead it tasted light, almost sterile. Too clean.

She passed an elderly woman seated cross-legged on a worn stoop, staring at nothing. A child nearby stacked rocks into a spiral that folded in on itself.

Someone offered her food—a piece of fish, salt-dried and paper-thin.

“Please. Eat. It’s good,” the man said.

She shook her head. Her stomach was empty, yet distant, as if it belonged to someone else.

“Why are they still here?” she wondered. “Why didn’t they run?”

The answer whispered up her spine:

They didn’t need to. The spiral came to them.

—

The breach was in a collapsed chapel at the cliff’s edge. The roof had caved in long ago, and the sea wind passed through like breath through open ribs.

At the center: a spiral of stones, pale and smooth.

At the heart of the spiral: a hole.

Not wide. Not deep. But falling. An absence shaped like a center. A place that swallowed light without dimming.

She approached slowly.

And the world slowed with her.

Her boots crunched over broken mosaic tiles—ancient murals worn smooth, erased by reverent feet. The hole didn’t call to her. It listened.

She knelt beside it and stared down.

And immediately felt herself tilting inward—mind first.

—

“It opened itself,” she whispered.

“Because you’re near.”

The voice didn’t startle her.

A woman stood in the arched doorway, barefoot and hooded. She wore no artifact, no pack. Just white linen wrapped like ritual. Her presence wasn’t threatening—it was inevitable.

Familiar, like someone from a memory Carla never lived.

“You don’t have to seal it,” the woman said. “You’ve done good already. You brought the spiral here. Now rest. Let it open.”

Carla stood. She didn’t know when she’d knelt.

“You want it open?”

The woman smiled.

“It’s not a fault to be part of something larger.”

Carla’s heart hammered. She couldn’t tell whether it was fear… or resonance.

—

“You could seal it,” the woman said. “But the spiral would find another path. It always does. This place chose to remember. Others will forget.”

Carla’s hand drifted to the artifact, but it didn’t hum. It was still. Watching.

“You could lie down,” the woman continued, her voice now like a lullaby. “Let the spiral hold your memory. You wouldn’t even dream. Just one long nap, inside the pattern. No more fight. No more fault.”

Carla shivered.

She looked at the breach again. It wasn’t pulsing.

It was breathing.

—

“Explore the other side,” the woman said. “We did. And we’re better for it. Lighter.”

“Lighter?” Carla repeated.

“Not weight. Memory. The spiral carries it now. We walk without the burden. Isn’t that what you want?”

The woman reached forward, palm out. Not aggressive. An invitation.

Carla stepped back.

Her knees locked. Her legs wanted to move forward, but her spine screamed against it.

“I’m not here to serve the spiral,” Carla said.
“I’m here to close it.”

“Then do it,” the woman said gently. “Seal it. End it. Slow its speed, its spread. Try to make the world still again. But you’ll only bury your part. The rest will wake. It always does.”

—

Carla stepped to the edge of the breach, her marked hand throbbing under her sleeve.

She clenched her fist.

She felt the warmth of the stone beneath her boots. Heard the ocean breathing behind her. Saw the villagers waiting in the square without moving.

They weren’t prisoners. They weren’t brainwashed.

They had chosen this.

Because forgetting is easier than bearing the weight of what’s coming.

She pressed her palm to the ground.

And twisted.

—

No explosion. No scream.

Just a soft recoil, like a rubber band relaxing after centuries of tension.

The spiral of stones dimmed, then faded. The villagers blinked as if waking from a collective trance. Some dropped to their knees. Others simply walked away. One stared out to sea and wept silently, not knowing why.

The woman was gone.

The chapel was whole.

But the hole was still there—only now it was closed with a thin skin of glass-like stone, faint spiral lines beneath its surface like fossilized breath.

—

Carla stood alone in the chapel’s center.

The mark on her palm no longer burned. It pulsed. Steady. Like a metronome waiting for a new rhythm.

The spiral hadn’t just opened itself.
It had opened her.

Author’s Note:
This chapter was happily written for Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie and #Wordle #430. Four chapters remain—stay tuned as the spiral tightens.

Diet Be Damned: A Pie Worth Fighting For

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Daily writing prompt
What’s the most delicious thing you’ve ever eaten?
View all responses

Pie, Memory, and a Whole Lot of Butter

By the size of my waistline, it’s clear I’ve enjoyed several delicious things over the years. I’m not shy about my love for food—comfort food, street food, grandma’s Sunday roasts, and that one time I accidentally stumbled into a Michelin-starred bistro thinking it was a diner (don’t ask).
But today, let’s zero in on a single dish. Not the most expensive, not the fanciest, and certainly not the healthiest. But maybe—just maybe-the most soul-hugging, tastebud-dancing, eye-closing bite of heaven I’ve ever had.
We’re talking nostalgia. Flavor. A moment in time where everything felt just right.

Let me take you there.

The most delicious thing I’ve ever eaten? That honor belongs to my mother-in-law’s Chess Pie.
Who knew eggs, butter, and sugar could transform into something so profoundly magical? No fancy ingredients. No secret spice blend stolen from an old monk in the mountains. Just pantry staples and a woman who understood what it meant to cook with heart.

When she made them—and I happened to be in town—she’d always bake one just for me. No slice, no dainty plate. I’d grab a fork and go in straight from the tin like a man possessed. I didn’t have time for pretense or politeness when it came to that pie.

My brothers-in-law and I used to laugh about it later—how they’d try to fight me for my special pie. They always lost. Bitterly. They’d grumble and sulk, but we all knew the truth: that pie had my name baked right into it.

She’s gone now. The oven’s long since cooled, but the memory of that pie clings to me like a warm quilt. Others have tried to replicate it. Good intentions, decent efforts… but no one’s even come close. Maybe they’re missing the butter. Maybe they’re missing the touch. But I think—more than anything—they’re just missing her.

Now, I’ve gone on many rants about that pie. My poor stepmom has heard them all. She’s a legend in her own right—her baked goods could have their own chapter in the “Food That’ll Ruin Your Diet (and You Won’t Care)” section of my memoirs.

One night, after listening to yet another pie lament, she leaned back with a smile and said, “I can make that pie. Matter of fact, mine’ll be your new favorite.”
Challenge accepted.

I went to the store like I had a hundred times before, rattling off that recipe list I had memorized more by heart than by paper. She worked her magic, put her spin on it, and soon her version of the legendary Chess Pie was cooling on the counter.

I dug in—fork first, as always. No formality. No mercy. The pie was incredible. Creamy, buttery, with that perfect caramelized top and a sweet, silky center. She beamed.

“It’s good, ain’t it?” she asked. “Better than hers, huh?”

Without skipping a beat, I said, “No.”

She looked at me like I’d just cussed in the middle of a sermon. And let me be clear—I’ve actually cussed in church before. I know that look.

“No ma’am,” I said. “It’s not hers. You added coconut. But listen—every time I visit, I’m gonna need this pie. That’s a fact.”

Her smile returned, full and wide. And when my brother took me to my mother-in-law’s funeral, there it was—my stepmom’s pie, waiting for me. A tribute. A comfort. A bridge between what was and what still remains.

I was blessed—richly blessed—to have three mother figures in my life. Each of them different. Each of them fierce in their love and quiet in their sacrifices. My stepmom is the only one who remains, and I don’t take that for granted.

So the next time I visit? I’ll be grubbing, fork in hand, diet be damned. That pie—her pie—now carries more than flavor. It carries memory, resilience, grief, love, and a whole lot of butter.

See, the most delicious thing I’ve ever eaten wasn’t just about taste. It was about connection. About the sacred ritual of someone baking just for you. About loss and legacy, and how sometimes, healing shows up in a crust that cracks just right.

Food has a funny way of holding memory, doesn’t it? And if you’re lucky—really lucky—it’ll also hold the people you’ve loved, the ones who made the world feel safe, sweet, and whole.

Wordless Wednesday – 06252025

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ART – AI GENERATED IMAGE – CONCEPT ART – FOWC/RDP/3TC

My submission for Hugh’s Views & News blog, Wordless Wednesday post.

The Clocksmith’s Dominion

Inside the curved brass of the pocket watch, time did not tick—it breathed. With every rise and fall of its mechanical lungs, reality flexed. Past and present danced together in the glow of burnished gears.

Inspector Tallow leaned in, monocle gleaming, his breath caught at the threshold of something ancient. Through the glass, nestled in a city of golden cogs and miniature spires, a bearded man knelt in reverence over a humming engine. Steam curled upward like incense, and the air shimmered—not with heat, but memory.

“I wasn’t allowed to speak of this place,” said the watchmaker, his voice threading through the ether, though his lips barely moved. His hair, coiled and thick, caught glints of starlight from nowhere. “But you asked the right question, Inspector. You asked why time is astoundingly merciful to some… and merciless to others.”

Tallow blinked. “You’re saying… time is shaped?”

“Forged,” the watchmaker whispered aloud, though the word echoed as if spoken from a temple buried in mist. “Shaped like clay, whispered into the grooves of a gear. Not watched—but woven.”

The inspector’s hand hovered above the device, fingers trembling as if crossing into prayer. “And who decides its form?”

The clocksmith turned. His eyes shimmered like twin moons reflected in oil. “I do. But only because no one else remembered how.”

Time held its breath. A single gear turned with celestial finality.

And Inspector Tallow vanished—like a name exhaled from the lips of a dream.

Late Night Grooves #153

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WHOT Episode 153 – “Violent Shiver” by Benjamin Booker

Hosted by Mangus Khan

[Feedback howls. Guitar crashes in like a car chase through gravel. Benjamin’s voice—raw, cracking, absolutely alive.]

“WHOT.
Late Night Grooves.

I’m Mangus Khan.

Episode 153.

And tonight, we don’t linger.

We lunge.

Because sometimes the only way to deal with the weight is to move fast enough it can’t catch you.

Benjamin Booker.
‘Violent Shiver.’

From his self-titled debut, 2014.

This track ain’t polished.

It ain’t pretty.

But that’s why it hits so hard.

The guitars grind like cheap wheels on a bad road.

The beat’s barely holding it together.

And Benjamin?

He’s not singing.

He’s shouting into the void, hoping it answers back.

“Have you seen my baby girl? / She’s got something that I need.”

Could be a woman.
Could be peace.
Could be his damn self.

And that’s the power of this song—

It’s a confession wrapped in speed.

There’s no time to analyze, no space for neat emotions.

Just adrenaline, grief, chaos, and something like hope if you squint hard enough.

This track isn’t about resolution.

It’s about survival through motion.

About how sometimes the only groove that makes sense is one that rattles your bones.

There’s soul here.

But it’s bleeding through punk skin.

And that?

That’s Late Night Grooves in its rawest form.

Not just sound.

Spill.

Episode 153.

Benjamin Booker.
Violent Shiver.

This is WHOT.

I’m Mangus Khan—

Still running.
Still lit.
Still here.”

The Spiral Burden

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Part V of the Spiral Series

She didn’t need the artifact anymore to feel them.

The breaches.

They hummed in her bones now. The closer she got to one, the more the world pulled sideways, shadows lengthening in odd directions, her thoughts stretching thin and snapping back like rubber bands.

Today, even the sky seemed different. Not darker. Just… withdrawn. Pale as if it had forgotten how to color itself. The wind ran its fingers through the dust like it was sifting for something buried. The silence pressed down with the weight of something waiting.

The ruin was shallow—half-exposed stone rising from a wind-scoured crater. Spiral glyphs pulsed faintly across the cracked surface, like veins glowing under tired skin. They didn’t shimmer with power. They pulsed like a warning.

And still, she stepped closer.

Her breath shortened as she descended. The artifact in her coat vibrated, but she barely felt it. The deeper hum came from her hand—the spiral mark burned against her palm like a second pulse. Her own. Not the artifact’s.

She pressed it against her chest, through her coat. Her heartbeat was no longer alone.

The outpost on the crater’s edge was barely intact—walls of sheet metal, half-swallowed by dust, abandoned long ago. Or so she thought.

She heard coughing first. Then the creak of movement behind thin steel.

Carla raised her hand and called out. No answer.

She pushed inside, carefully.

A man crouched in the far corner, bundled in layers of torn canvas and silence. His skin was pale, his beard overgrown. One of his eyes was blind, milk-white and unmoving. The other watched her without blinking.

“Another one,” he rasped.

She didn’t move.

“You’re with them. I can see it in your skin.”

He pointed.

She glanced down.

The spiral on her palm had darkened. And worse, faint, branching lines now traced halfway up her forearm. Barely visible beneath the skin. Like veins. Or roots.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“Mikail,” he said. “Engineer. The first time we found one of these places, I helped wire the listening stations. Thought it was just seismic. Or sonic. But it wasn’t.”

“What was it?”

“Pressure,” he whispered. “Held behind something that isn’t a wall. Something waiting for permission.”

He showed her a notebook—filled with hand-drawn maps, symbols, and spirals. Some are marked in red. A few crossed out.

One note caught her eye:
“DO NOT SEAL – CORRECTIVE ANCHOR”

“We closed one,” he said. “In Peru. The whole village disappeared the next day. Not killed. Not moved. Just… missing. Like they were the lid on something else.”

Carla felt nausea rise. Her artifact pulsed once, faintly. Not fear. Not urgent.

Recognition.

Mikail saw the look in her eyes.

“You’re going to seal this one too, aren’t you?”

She didn’t answer.

“You’ll wake the wrong silence.”

She approached the ruin alone. The glyphs brightened as she neared. Not welcoming. Not warning. Responding.

Inside, the chamber was shallow, its ceiling collapsed, spiral markings scored across the stone in every direction. At the center, a broken seal—the remnants of a symbol half-erased by time or force.

The breach wasn’t fully open.

But it was unstable.

A hum built inside her skull—soft at first, then sharp. It wasn’t noise. It was presence. A weight against her will.

She touched the artifact.

It twitched in her hand. Hungry.

But before she could raise it, pain tore through her palm. She cried out, clutching her wrist.

The spiral was glowing.

Not the artifact.

Her.

She dropped to her knees, breath ragged. The glyphs pulsed in time with her chest.

Then she understood: the spiral inside her wasn’t a mark.

It was a key.

And she didn’t need the artifact to twist.

Her palm burned. She clenched her fist, teeth gritted, trying to fight the instinct to surrender to it completely. But the heat climbed her arm like a fuse.

She pressed her palm into the glyph.

The stone flared. Not with light, but heat. Searing. Nearly enough to fry her nerves.

The glyph beneath her hand vibrated. Shifted. And then—

Released.

Not a scream. Not a roar.

A sigh.

Like the earth itself had been clenching something it couldn’t hold anymore.

Mikail’s voice cried out behind her, faint, desperate.

“You’ve synchronized it! Do you know what you’ve done?”

But she couldn’t move.

The chamber was pulsing around her. Her blood felt electric. Her thoughts weren’t her own; fragments of things she’d never seen before flashed behind her eyes: a spiral in a crater, one drawn in frost, one burned into flesh.

The world wasn’t closing.

It was adjusting.

When she woke, the ruin was intact. The spiral is gone.

Mikail was gone too. Only his coat remained, half-buried in dust. Inside the pocket: a torn map. More spiral sites. Some circled. Others crossed out. A path. Or a warning.

Her arm ached.

She pulled back her sleeve.

The lines had spread up her bicep now, almost to her shoulder. They didn’t hurt.

They pulsed.

Like they were waiting for something.

“I didn’t close the door.”
“I let it adjust.”

Einstein, My Daughters, and the Great Color Uprising

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A dad’s lifelong devotion to black tees, military logic, and resisting floral print tyranny.

Daily writing prompt
If you were forced to wear one outfit over and over again, what would it be?
View all responses

Wearing the same outfit every day? That’s not a hypothetical for me — that was life.
I spent most of my adult years in the military, where your uniform isn’t just clothing — it’s a routine, a mindset, and a welcome escape from the exhausting question of “What should I wear today?” Back then, getting dressed wasn’t a choice. It was automatic. Simple. Efficient. Honestly? That was one of the easiest parts of life. The uniform taught me that identity isn’t stitched into fabric — it’s how you carry yourself in it.

Meanwhile, back home, a very different clothing crisis was unfolding.

While I was out there in my neatly pressed gear, my daughters were launching daily fashion battles. I’m talking full-on wardrobe wars. Drama over shoes. Tears over tops. Shouting matches with closets that had more options than a department store. Watching them choose an outfit was like witnessing a live episode of Project Runway, with less time and more screaming.

One’s yelling, “I have nothing to wear!” while standing in front of a closet that could clothe a small army. The other’s pairing leopard print with glitter unicorns like she’s auditioning for a circus-themed fashion show. And don’t even get me started on the hair. The hair was its own saga. Bows, buns, braids, total breakdowns. It was like a reality show challenge: Can this ponytail survive until school drop-off?

In a moment of what I thought was parenting genius, I offered them a solution: shave your heads. Just like Dad. Minimalism at its finest. No combs, no tangles, no problem.

They were horrified. Naturally, they tattled to their mom within seconds.
She was… not amused.

I calmly explained that I was just trying to be helpful. I even showed them photos of me rocking the shaved look — clean, confident, streamlined. But no one was buying it. Not my wife, not my daughters, and definitely not the household consensus on “acceptable hair decisions.” Still, to this day, I stand by that suggestion. Bald is bold. Bald is practical. Bald would’ve solved a lot of tears.

Now that I’m out of uniform, my outfit hasn’t changed much. These days, it’s all about t-shirt, jeans, and boots. That’s it. Always has been. Always will be. My color palette? Black and blue. It’s simple, functional, and most importantly — mine.

But my daughters? Oh, they’ve got opinions. Suddenly they’re fashion consultants, calling me “boring,” offering unsolicited advice, and trying to inject color into my life like I’m a walking grayscale emergency. And yet — every time I dress up for a formal event in a sharp suit and tie — they light up. “Ooooh Dad! You look good!” Yeah. I know. My suit game is elite.

Still, the color crusade never ends. They’ll toss me a lime green shirt and say, “Dad, it looks good on you!” I answer with my world-renowned and often-lamented scowl. Doesn’t stop them one bit. They just keep up their absurd banter and — as if it couldn’t get any more dramatic — they now rope in my granddaughters for backup. It’s a full-on fashion intervention squad.

My response? Calm. Stoic. “That’s adorable.”

At one point, I even brought science into the mix. Told them Albert Einstein wore the same outfit every day to avoid wasting mental energy on small decisions. Genius, right?

Their response: “Einstein is stupid.”

Einstein. The father of relativity. Disrespected in my own kitchen.

Ever since, the care packages have started. Random boxes show up with shirts in every color of the rainbow — sunburst orange, flamingo pink, Caribbean teal — loud enough to disrupt air traffic. Their mission is clear: convert Dad.

I never wear them… unless I’m visiting. Then I throw one on, smile for the selfies, and play along. But the moment I’m back home? It’s straight back to black and blue. Reliable. Timeless. Unbothered.

Because when it comes to choosing one outfit to wear forever?


I already made that choice a long time ago.
And until Einstein gets his fashion redemption, I’ll be right here — black tee, boots, and unbothered.

Late Night Grooves #152

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WHOT Episode 152 – “Goat Head” by Brittany Howard
Hosted by Mangus Khan

[A subtle organ hums. Bassline slow as molasses. Then her voice: soft, wounded, precise.]

“You’re listening to Late Night Grooves.
WHOT.

The signal that lives in the margins.

I’m Mangus Khan.

And this is Episode 152.

Tonight, we don’t just listen.

We reckon.

Because some stories don’t fit neatly into a melody.

Some truths come carved in the bone.

Tonight’s track:
Brittany Howard – ‘Goat Head.’

From her solo record Jaime.

And this one?

This one doesn’t care if you’re ready.

It just exists.

Like pain you forgot how to name.

“I was four years old when they threw a goat head in the back of my daddy’s car.”

And just like that—

The myth of a post-racial anything crumbles.

No build-up. No soft landing.

Just trauma—placed right there in the back seat.

Brittany doesn’t sing this with outrage.

She sings it like someone who’s had to live in the after.

Who’s had to grow up with blood on her history and grace in her lungs.

The music?
Bare. Measured.

Because when you’re telling the truth, you don’t need theatrics.

You just need clarity.

And that’s what “Goat Head” is—

A memory so sharp it shaves your soul.

But here’s where it goes even deeper—

The question she asks at the end?

“What is a Black life worth?”

That’s not rhetorical.

That’s personal inventory.

It’s about growing up wondering if the world sees you fully, or only in fragments.

It’s about code-switching as protection, and memory as inheritance.

This is not a song about justice.

This is a song about remembrance.

About being made of two worlds—Black and white—yet accepted by neither without condition.

Jaime, the album, is named for her late sister.

And you feel that ghost here—

Not haunting, but witnessing.

Watching from the corners of every note.

Because this song?

It’s not just an act of defiance.

It’s an act of preservation.

Brittany Howard isn’t asking you to agree.

She’s asking you to listen.

To sit in discomfort long enough to understand the weight she carries quietly.

Episode 152.

Brittany Howard.
Goat Head.

A hymn to identity, fractured and fused.

A groove with no forgiveness—only reflection.

This is Late Night Grooves.
WHOT.

And I’m Mangus Khan—

Still walking with ghosts.

Still naming what they tried to erase.

Still here.”

Kimonogate 7

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Chapter 7:

Something Like Closure

The dirt was damp with last night’s rain, soft and fragrant with that specific smell—wet grass, worms, and whatever memory felt like when it came up without warning.

Mayor Brindle stood at the edge of the shallow grave, this time with permission.

There was no trench coat. No flashlight. No midnight panic.
Just a city-sanctioned backhoe, a cordoned-off patch of lawn, and a plexiglass time capsule case with beveled edges and a polished brass label.

A crowd had gathered, buzzing like bees in folding chairs. The community bulletin had called it a symbolic re-dedication of local transparency, which was a flowery way to say, “We’re all gonna watch the mayor dig up his emotional baggage in front of children.”

Myrtle arrived fashionably late.

She wore soft white linen and large sunglasses, her dogs trotting ahead like tiny judgmental horses. Capote led, three-legged but faster than most four-legged things. Horny sniffed aggressively at someone’s tote bag. Something wore a baby sunhat and looked absolutely miserable about it.

Brindle tried not to sweat.

He wasn’t the same man who buried the kimono in a manic haze of shame. But he also wasn’t entirely new. More like… under renovation. A slow demolition of denial.

He cleared his throat. The microphone wobbled slightly in his grip.

“This…” He gestured to the hole. “This was mine.”

He held up the kimono. The sequins caught the late morning sun and scattered fractured pink light across the grass. It looked ridiculous. And beautiful. And deeply personal in a way he hadn’t expected to feel in front of his constituents and Myrtle’s pack of mutant purse wolves.

“I wore it. Alone. For joy. For… therapy. For stress relief that may or may not have involved Broadway cast recordings and interpretive movement.”

Laughter rippled. Not cruel. Not mocking. More like people were relieved to see him owning it out loud.

“I buried it because I thought if people saw who I really was, they’d leave. Or laugh. Or worse—document it.”

He looked up. Myrtle met his gaze without blinking. Capote sneezed.

“But the truth is,” Brindle continued, voice softer now, “shame doesn’t rot when buried. It just ferments.”

He turned toward the capsule. The kimono folded neatly in his hands—lighter now, somehow. Not cursed. Just clothes.

He placed it gently into the case.

The plaque read:

To the Secrets We Bury. To the Joys We Dig Up.
— Installed June 13, by Community Vote

The applause wasn’t thunderous, but it was steady. And real. And Brindle didn’t flinch when someone hugged him, which felt like progress.

Myrtle took the mic next.

“My name,” she said, “is Myrtle Grace Ellingsworth. I write under the name Boney LaFleur. And yes, I knew about the kimono before he did.”

Chuckles. Someone gasped. Capote howled once.

“I’m writing again,” she added. “Under my real name. No pen names. No hiding.”

Brindle looked over, lips twitching. “Will I be in the book?”

“Unavoidable,” she replied, and left it at that.

In the following weeks:

  1. Mayor Brindle resigned. His public statement cited “a need to explore creative forms of cardio and a possible memoir.”
  2. Capote went viral after biting a TikTok influencer’s ankle during a ribbon-cutting, becoming an accidental icon of personal boundaries.
  3. Myrtle’s new novel, KIMONOGATE, debuted at #3 on the local bestseller list, just below a cookbook and something spiritual about decluttering.

Its tagline:

One town. One garment. One mayoral breakdown at a time.

The neighborhood settled—not into peace exactly, but into an agreed-upon weirdness.

Lawn flamingos started wearing costumes. Someone installed a Free Little Library shaped like a giant burrito. HOA meetings had a new rule: “No biting, canine or otherwise.”

Myrtle sat on her porch most evenings with her typewriter and a glass of iced tea, Capote curled beside her like a sentient throw pillow.

Sometimes, Brindle walked by, wearing linen pants and carrying a yoga mat.
Sometimes, they waved.
Sometimes, they just nodded—two people who had survived themselves.

Author’s Note:

So… that’s the end.

The kimono has been exhumed. The secrets unearthed. The HOA was left permanently scarred. And honestly? I’ve never had more fun writing something so utterly strange and strangely personal.

KIMONOGATE began as a story about a mayor with a guilty conscience and a pink kimono. But somewhere along the way, it became about more than buried sequins and nosy neighbors. It turned into a love letter to the weirdness we try to hide—and what happens when those odd little truths refuse to stay underground.

Writing this was like hosting a dinner party where every guest brought something unhinged:
— A three-legged dog named Capote.
— A reclusive author hiding in plain sight.
— A man unraveling under the weight of polyester and shame.
And somehow, it worked. They all fit at the table.

If you’re reading this, thank you for joining me in this slightly off-kilter cul-de-sac where glitter is suspicious, dogs have agendas, and no secret stays buried forever.

I hope you laughed. I hope you cringed. I hope you found a little reflection (or absurd escape) in this strange, satirical world.

And if you find yourself tempted to bury something questionable in your yard…
…maybe check for HOA surveillance first.

Until the next neighborhood drama,
— Mangus

Awe Without Agreement

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Daily writing prompt
How important is spirituality in your life?
View all responses

Why Spirituality Still Guides Me, Even Without Certainty

Spirituality isn’t just important in my life—it’s foundational, not in a rigid or performative sense, but like a compass in the dark: quiet, steady, essential. It’s how I move through the world—not by chasing answers, but by honoring mystery and the many paths people take to find meaning.

Over time, I’ve come to see that spirituality isn’t about being right. It’s about being rooted in humility, in compassion, in the ability to hold tension without needing to control it. It’s about making space for someone else’s truth, even when it doesn’t look like mine.

A person’s spiritual journey is personal and should be respected, not ridiculed. Whether it winds through scripture, silence, ritual, or raw experience, that path isn’t mine to judge—only to witness with reverence.

This isn’t some foolish notion born from reading obscure texts. It’s something I’ve witnessed—men and women of different beliefs working side by side to feed the hungry, to care for the sick, to comfort the grieving. Not because they shared beliefs, but because they shared purpose. That, to me, is sacred.

This ideal is the basis of my forthcoming work, Understanding Without Agreement—a reflection on interfaith understanding, sacred plurality, and the shared longing beneath our differences. It challenges the notion that coexistence requires compromise and instead affirms that belief and respect can live side by side.

Spirituality shows up in sacred texts and indigenous rhythms, in Buddhist stillness and Sufi fire, even in the honest discomfort of philosophical critique. It’s not a uniform—it’s a mosaic. And every piece matters.

So yes, spirituality is vital in my life. Not because it solves everything, but because it keeps me human. It teaches me to listen deeper, to live with open hands, and to believe—fiercely and tenderly—that awe is bigger than agreement.

Kimonogate 6

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Chapter 6:

Confrontation and Confession

The room smelled like burnt coffee and unspecified rage.

The HOA meeting was held in the Oakbend Community Rec Center, which doubled as a yoga studio and tripled as a flood evacuation site. Rows of mismatched plastic chairs filled the linoleum-tiled room, each one squeaking indignantly as residents shifted in them like irritable pigeons.

Myrtle wore a teal cardigan, a cameo pin, and the expression of a woman two minutes from legally declaring war. Her three dogs sat in a line beneath her folding chair: Capote in the middle, eyes narrowed; Horny licking himself with the kind of unbroken concentration only the truly unashamed possess; and Something chewing on a pen Myrtle had no memory of dropping.

At the front table, Mayor Brindle stood hunched, jaw tight, sweat darkening his collar.

He hadn’t intended to speak.
He’d come to observe.
Maybe hand out keychains.
Definitely not to fall apart.

But here he was.

Because somebody had slipped a copy of Temple Blade and the Hollow Crown into everyone’s HOA folder, highlighted. With tabs. The passage about the ceremonial garment was circled in red.

“Beneath silk, secrets fester like rot in royal walls.”

Everyone was looking at him.

Someone coughed. Capote growled.

Mayor Brindle gripped the microphone with both hands, as if it might bolt. “ I-uh-I have a statement,” he said.

The mic screeched. Myrtle smiled.

“I… There’s been a lot of speculation,” he began, voice already cracking. “And I think it’s time we addressed the rumors.”

No one had said anything. But sure.

He dabbed at his forehead with a paper napkin. “Yes, I was seen… digging. In the park.”

Gasps. A whisper: “The kimono…”

Brindle flinched. “It wasn’t illegal. Not technically. There are no bylaws about personal textiles. On public grounds.”

Someone in the back shouted, “Did you or did you not bury a garment with sequins and an elastic waist?”

Chaos.

A woman dropped her purse. Someone stood and pointed. Myrtle calmly unwrapped a peppermint.

Brindle’s face was pink now. “Yes, it was a kimono. A performance piece. I wore it for personal reasons. In my home. Alone. Sometimes with music.”

A pause.

“Show tunes,” he added unnecessarily.

Horny barked once, as if in applause.

The room went silent.

And then, Myrtle stood.

She held up a single hardcover book. Temple Blade and the Hollow Crown, 1st edition, with immaculate dust jacket.

“My name,” she said calmly, “is Myrtle Grace Ellingsworth. But I also write under the name Boney LaFleur.”

Someone fainted.
Someone else screamed, “I knew it!”
Capote peed with excitement.

Mayor Brindle’s mouth opened. Then closed. Then opened again like a dehydrated goldfish. “You’re—” he pointed. “You wrote the scene in Fire Lotus where Temple seduces a duchess with a pickle metaphor!”

“I wrote all the pickle metaphors,” she said, not unproud.

The room fell into stunned silence.

Brindle lowered the microphone. “This explains so much. You knew. You’ve been watching me. You wrote me into your book.”

“I did no such thing,” Myrtle lied, instantly.

Capote stood suddenly.

Eyes locked on Gary Palmquist, HOA treasurer and known raccoon trapper.

Gary had once insulted Capote’s hairless tail.

Capote leapt.

The meeting ended in chaos.

Gary left with a bandaged shin.
Horny threw up on the snack table.
Someone stole six folding chairs.
And Myrtle walked home with a peppermint, a victory, and a rough outline for her next novel—The Mayor, the Kimono, and the Curse of Cul-de-Sac Six.

The town would never be the same.
And neither would Brindle.

Morning Vibe: Let the World Wait

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Track: “Ambre” – Nils Frahm

(Still and Returning, Track 3)

Not every morning asks you to rise. Some ask you to remain. To linger in the quiet space between breath and intention. To sit with yourself, not to fix or forge ahead, but simply to be. That’s where Ambre meets you.

Nils Frahm doesn’t compose for the ear. He composes for the in-between. The held breath. The overlooked thought. The moment just before emotion becomes language. In Ambre, the piano speaks in sighs, each note falling with the weight of memory that never asked to be remembered. It’s not sorrow. It’s recognition.

Where February Sea welcomed stillness and Ilumo gently stirred motion, Ambre closes the arc by dissolving the need for destination. It doesn’t build. It doesn’t resolve. It listens. And in its listening, it holds space for all that you’ve carried—and all that you’ve set down.

Sometimes we don’t need a bang. Sometimes we need to unfold, allowing ourselves to absorb the buzz, the silence, the stillness without silence. We live in a world that hums constantly—notification pings, emotional static, the pressure to perform even in our rest. Ambre doesn’t offer escape. It offers acceptance. A moment in which you can breathe without defending your pause.

This isn’t a soundtrack for action. It’s the sound of not flinching. Of bearing witness to yourself. Of saying, “I’m still here, even if I don’t know what comes next.” That’s not weakness. That’s grace.

You’ve returned to yourself. And that is the quiet triumph. Not escape. Not transformation. Just a small, grounded truth: you made it through the storm, and you are still breathing.

Let the world wait. Let it spin without you for a while.

Suggested Pairings:
– Bare feet on a cold floor, grounding you to now
– The last sip of lukewarm tea you forgot to finish
– A page in your journal with only one line:
“I no longer rush my own becoming.”

Another morning. Another chance. Another chance for hope. Carry it with you.

Kimonogate 5

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Chapter 5:

The Kimono Reawakens

It began with the sprinklers.

Not all of them—just the mayor’s.
At 12:13 a.m. sharp. Every night. A hiss, then a cough, then the sudden rhythmic chk-chk-chk of mechanical rain. His lawn lit up in droplets under the sodium streetlight, painting the grass silver and slick.

No one else’s sprinklers turned on. Not Myrtle’s. Not the Watsons’. Not the scorched patch in front of the abandoned townhome next door. Just his.

He stared at the soaked lawn from behind the kitchen blinds, barefoot, one trembling hand wrapped around a sweating glass of ginger ale. He told himself it was a glitch. Faulty programming. Coincidence.

But the next night, it happened again.

And the next.

And the next.

Then came the flags.

Little plastic ones—red, yellow, white—planted sporadically across his yard like someone was planning a tiny coup. The kind used by utility companies to mark gas lines or buried cables. He hadn’t scheduled any service.

One was stabbed right into the center of the lawn, directly above the place he’d buried the kimono.
Scrawled in blue ink on the tag:

What lies beneath grows bold.

He plucked the flag from the soil like it might bite him and stumbled back inside.

But the worst was the mail.

One morning, he opened his mailbox to find the usual pile of catalogs, water bills, and local campaign flyers. All accounted for—except the water bill. Gone.

In its place: a single pink sequin.

He stood frozen in the driveway, sun bearing down on his shoulders, sequin glinting in his palm like a warning. It felt too warm. Like it had been placed there just seconds before.

A neighbor walked past with her dog. Brindle nodded stiffly. She smiled, unaware that the mayor of their town had just begun to quietly lose his grip on reality.

Across the street, Myrtle wrote.

The typewriter she’d dusted off had a key that stuck on the letter “R.” Every time she typed a word with one, it made a soft hiccupping sound, like the machine was clearing its throat.

Her apartment smelled faintly of clove and lemon oil and something older, darker—possibly resentment.

She hadn’t written in years. Not properly. But this story… this one came crawling out of her like it had been waiting.

The protagonist: a petty man with secrets and a fading public smile.
The setting: a town where things didn’t stay buried.
The details: unsettlingly accurate.

She hadn’t meant to write about the mayor. Not at first. But the words showed up on the page like they’d been dictated through the blinds.

Myrtle paused, finger hovering over the spacebar. Capote lay curled at her feet, three-legged and twitchy, one eye blinking at half speed. He’d growled twice that morning. Once on the sofa. Once, at the kimono she hadn’t seen. Yet.

She lit a small lavender candle and resumed typing.

Around the neighborhood, the effects spread like static:

– A retired teacher claimed her garden gnome had moved overnight, now staring into her kitchen window.
– A man jogging past the park tripped over a tree root that hadn’t been there the day before.
– At precisely 12:13 a.m., two crows began circling the HOA sign in slow, deliberate loops. Clockwise. Always clockwise.

Next door lit up with cryptic updates:

“Anyone else missing their cable bill?”
“Found glitter in the hummingbird feeder. Can’t explain it.”
“Do NOT go near the mayor’s yard after midnight.”

Mayor Brindle sat in his guest room, lights on, knees pulled to his chest, a copy of Temple Blade and the Hollow Crown clutched like a holy book. His palms itched. His mouth tasted metallic, like he’d been chewing on tinfoil dreams.

He hadn’t slept. Not really.
He dreamed of sequins and spotlights and slow-motion applause that turned into dirt being shoveled over silk.

Every time he closed his eyes, he saw her.

Not Myrtle—LaFleur.

Her smile in his mind had changed. Sharpened. It wasn’t friendly anymore. It was authorial.
Like she was outlining his arc.

At 2:14 a.m., he cracked.

He walked to the park in house shoes and a flannel robe.
Dug up the kimono.

The soil felt wrong—damp even though it hadn’t rained. And warm. Not sun-warm, but body-warm. As if it had been waiting for him.

He unearthed the garment slowly, breath short, heart hammering in his throat.

It was still intact. Impossibly pristine. Not a spot of dirt. No frayed threads.
The sequins shimmered in the moonlight like they were alive.

He held it up, hands trembling.

It shifted.

Just slightly. But enough to make him drop it.

He stumbled back. Tripped on the shovel. Fell hard onto his side in the grass, wind knocked out of him.

From the edge of the trees, Capote appeared.

Silent. Watching. One leg cocked like he was deciding whether or not to bite.

Then Myrtle’s voice, floating from her porch like honey laced with arsenic:

“You might as well leave it in the ground, dear. The story’s better that way.”

The porch light clicked off.

And the moon blinked behind a cloud.

Late Night Grooves #151

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WHOT Episode 151 – “Baptized in Muddy Water” by Ayron Jones
Hosted by Mangus Khan

[It begins not with fire, but with tension. Guitar feedback hums like a warning. Then the chords drop—heavy, unapologetic.]

“You’ve found your way to Late Night Grooves.
WHOT.

And I’m Mangus Khan.

Episode 151.

And if you’re hearing my voice tonight, maybe you’ve been somewhere dark.

Maybe you’re still there.

Tonight’s track?
Not for the unscarred.

Ayron Jones – ‘Baptized in Muddy Water.’

From Child of the State.

A title that isn’t poetic.

It’s personal.

A reminder that for some, identity isn’t chosen—it’s assigned by survival.

And the mud?
It’s not just metaphor.

It’s memory.
Trauma.
Systemic weight.

This song asks a question nobody likes to sit with:

What if your rebirth never came clean?

“I was baptized in muddy water / by the broken hands of time…”

Ayron isn’t glorifying pain.

He’s telling you: this is the water I was given.

Not holy.
Not pure.
Just real.

The guitars groan under the weight of his past.

The drums don’t carry a beat—they carry a burden.

And his voice…

It doesn’t cry for help.

It demands space.

For every foster kid who aged out.

For every addict who made it one more day.

For every person still learning how to wear their scars without shame.

This track doesn’t offer closure.

It offers recognition.

That your origin story might be muddy.

Might be cracked.

But it still made you.

And Ayron Jones?

He isn’t asking for a do-over.

He’s building something out of the debris.

Blues-rock fused with gospel bones.

Not nostalgia.

Not trend.

Just truth.

And that’s what this booth is for.

Not just sound.

Witnessing.

Episode 151.

Ayron Jones.
Baptized in Muddy Water.

A hymn for the haunted.

A groove for the ghosts you’ve learned to live with.

This is Late Night Grooves.
WHOT.

And I’m Mangus Khan—

Still spinning from the muddy side of grace.

Still here.”

Surviving the Shipwreck: Truth, Even If It Makes Us Uncomfortable

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Who writes history, anyway?

Is it a bunch of old men in a room, swirling sherry like it’s holy water, declaring what mattered and what didn’t with the confidence of people who’ve never been told to clean up after themselves? Do they lean back in leather chairs and decide what’s worth remembering, while the rest of the world cleans the dishes, changes the linens, and quietly disappears?

Because let’s be honest—history isn’t what happened. It’s what survived. It’s the polished version of a chaotic past, curated by those with power, perspective, and the privilege to speak uninterrupted.

But what about the ones who made that version possible?

Why don’t we ever hear about them? The people who provided the comfort, the nourishment, the spark. The woman who changed the sheets so a “great man” could sleep through the night. The friend who uttered a half-thought over coffee that later became a manifesto. The cook who fed the movement. The janitor who unlocked the building where the protest was planned. The lover who reminded someone they were human before they put on the mask of leadership.

History applauds the speech, but forgets the breath it took to say it.

We’ve been sold the idea that history is boldface names and bronze statues. But most of what matters happened in kitchens, back porches, alleyways, and hands calloused from lifting, not pointing.

We know the architects of nations. But never the bricklayers. We memorize the names of authors, but forget the unnamed soul who said something beautiful that stuck. We forget that for every “visionary,” there was someone behind the scenes keeping them afloat. Holding the ladder. Mending the net.

So no—history isn’t just written by the victors. It’s written by survivors. By omission. By spin. And often, by those who had the means to make a record in the first place.

The rest? The ones who lit the fires, bore the burdens, whispered the truths?

They became the silence between chapters. The invisible ink.

But if you look close—really close—you’ll find them. In the margins. In the echoes. In the way a melody lingers long after the singer is gone.

Because history wasn’t built on sherry alone. It was built on sweat, sacrifice, and souls that never asked to be remembered—just not to be erased.

But what happens when they get it wrong?

When, the ones holding the pen decide the truth is inconvenient? When the story is shaved, polished, and repainted, so it gleams just right in the museum light? What happens when history becomes less about remembering and more about marketing? About preserving an image, not a truth?

That’s when history turns into myth. Not the kind with gods and monsters, but the kind where the villains are edited out, and the uncomfortable questions are filed away—lost behind locked drawers labeled “context.” You know, for our own good.

And maybe they don’t mean to lie. Maybe they just optimize. Smooth the edges. Add a little glow to the legacy. After all, who doesn’t want their heroes to look heroic? Their country to feel noble? Their ancestors seem wise?

But shaping the past for the best possible result isn’t harmless. It’s rewriting the foundation while pretending the house still stands the same. It’s how entire generations learn pride without accountability, patriotism without honesty, nostalgia without nuance.

And what’s left behind in that process?

The guilt that never gets named. The reparations never paid. The patterns that repeat because we swore they never happened in the first place. The echo chamber grows louder, but the echoes grow fainter—until all we hear is what we want to hear, and not what needs to be heard.

See, history can be a mirror. Or it can be a mask.

One tells you the truth, whether you like it or not.

The other flatters you, and hopes you don’t look too close.

So maybe the question isn’t just who writes history?
Maybe it’s who dares to revise it, once they know better?

Because if we only protect the polished version, if we only pass down the parts that make us proud, then we’re not honoring the past.

We’re embalming it.

And you can’t build a future on something you’ve buried just to keep the story pretty.

But what about when they don’t just get it wrong?
What about when they try to remove history altogether?

Really? That’s the move?

As if tearing down a statue makes the blood it commemorates magically dry up and blow away. As if banning a book unpublishes the pain it contains. As if not teaching something means it never happened.

We’ve seen it before: whole eras scrubbed clean, classrooms sterilized, uncomfortable truths repackaged into “heritage,” or ignored entirely. Entire peoples flattened into footnotes, if mentioned at all. Because someone decided it was better to forget than to face it. Better to be comfortable than be honest.

But here’s the truth, they’re afraid of:
You can’t remove history.

You can burn the documents. You can whitewash the walls. You can call it “divisive,” “unpatriotic,” or “too upsetting for children.”
But history isn’t gone—it just goes underground into stories told at kitchen tables. Into songs, poems, and scars passed down like heirlooms. Into eyes that still remember, even if the curriculum doesn’t.

The attempt to erase history is always a confession. A silent, trembling admission that the truth still hurts. That it never really stopped. It’s not about healing—it’s about hiding.

And hiding doesn’t protect anyone. It just keeps the cycle clean enough to repeat.

So no—you don’t get to skip the hard chapters because they make your heroes look human, or your institutions look cracked. That’s not erasing history. That’s erasing accountability.

And let me tell you—if your story can’t survive the truth, maybe it wasn’t a story worth keeping in the first place.

Maria Popova got it right:
History isn’t what happened. It’s what survives the shipwreck of judgment and chance.

So maybe it’s time we stop polishing the deck chairs and admit we helped steer the damn ship.

Maybe it’s time we stood by the dusty words in old books—the ones that dared to say things like honor, integrity, and truth. Not just when it’s convenient. But when it’s hard. When it means admitting that the past wasn’t all parades and progress. That some of it—hell, a lot of it—would’ve earned us a solid whoopin’ from our mothers, wooden spoon in hand.

So, excuse me while I go through a stack of biographies on Lincoln.

Because if we’re going to keep telling the story—
Let’s at least try to get it right.

Author’s Note
Forgive the rant—but not the passion. That part, I won’t apologize for. The ranting? Yeah… I might’ve gotten a little carried away.

This piece was written for Reena’s Xploration Challenge #386. I try to jump in when I can remember to pull my head out of a book long enough to notice.

Wait—what page was I on?

Black Card Revoked (And I’m Okay With That)

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Am I a Snob?

I wish I could say no. That I’m above all that—ego, elitism, the subtle flexes wrapped in “taste” or “refinement.” I’ve tried, seriously. I’ve had the talks, done the therapy. I even cracked open the workbooks—are they still called that? Maybe it was a podcast. Or one of those journaling things we do when someone who shouldn’t matter (and whose name I can’t even remember) says something that sticks. It latches on like gum to your shoe, and suddenly you’re spiraling.

You know the kind of advice—like taking relationship tips from a guy who’s never had a girlfriend. Come to think of it, I’ve never even seen him talk to a woman.

Food Snob? Maybe. But It’s Personal.

“Nothing stays the same”—that’s the mantra we mumble when something doesn’t taste like it used to. The moment hits, and the only explanation that feels right is, “The bastards changed the formula.” Maybe they did. That’s possible.

But what’s also possible—and we hate admitting it—is that the stuff always tasted like garbage. We just didn’t know better. No one had the heart to tell us, because we loved it. And love, especially the nostalgic kind, can turn trash into treasure.

Still, when that old flavor hits different, I dig in. I refuse to accept that it’s me who changed. No—they changed it. And now it’s a matter of principle. “The bastards changed the formula” isn’t just a phrase. It’s my truth. I’m sticking to it.

Culture Snob? Absolutely.

Let’s be real—taste isn’t just personal. It’s cultural.

As a Black man in America, I grew up hearing things you couldn’t say out loud today. Not in public, anyway. Stuff like, “White folks don’t make potato salad like Black folks.” And everyone around the table would nod, mouths full of Granny Smith’s version, hoping for seconds before it disappeared. Because we all knew the danger of ending up with Ms. Johnson’s version. She never quite got it right. But her rhubarb pie? That had fifty things going on, and every one of them hit.

It’s remarkable how the world now dictates what’s considered refined. What’s divine? Overhyped restaurants serve up culture on a plate and call it status. Sure, sometimes it’s good. But nothing compares to the food from our cookouts, our picnics, our church socials. That food had soul. That food knew where it came from.

Now we pay $25 for a steak that comes out wrong and has to be sent back, just to taste decent—something we could’ve cooked at home better and cheaper, with seasoning that actually makes sense. But we do it anyway, because it makes us feel like we belong to something. Like we’re part of a club. Even if that club leaves us hungry and a little hollow.

That right there? That’s the bullshit I’m done with.

Ideology Snob? Let’s Get Real.

Let’s talk ideology. The code we live by. The beliefs hardwired into us through culture—whether we chose them or not.

They show up in how we talk, how we dress, what we read, the music we blast, and the stuff we secretly love but feel judged for.

And here comes the contradictions.

I’ve been told, “You act white.” Like that’s a crime. “I’m pulling your Black card.” “You’re an Oreo—Black on the outside, white on the inside.”

I used to carry a bag of Oreos with me. I liked them. And the same people who said that crap? They’d always take one when I offered. Hypocrites, the lot of them.

Then there are the stereotypes. Once, it was sweltering out, and some coworkers brought watermelons to beat the heat. One of my White friends waved and said, “Hey, we’ve got some watermelon!”
I shouted back, “I’m good, thanks.”

He came over to my truck looking confused.
“Hey man,” he said, “we’ve got some watermelon.”
“I don’t eat that shit,” I said flat.
He raised an eyebrow. “Next thing you’re gonna tell me is you don’t eat fried chicken.”
I looked at him and said, “I prefer mine baked.”

Truth? I love fried chicken. But my wife had me on baked for my blood pressure. That moment wasn’t about the food. It was about reclaiming space. Drawing a line. Saying, you don’t get to define me.

People try to strip your identity when it doesn’t fit their version of what Black is “supposed” to be. But if you stand still too long, they’ll say you’ve stopped growing. You can’t win. So you make your own rules. You claim the parts of yourself they don’t understand, and keep walking.

Music Snob? Nah. Just a Metalhead.

I’m a metalhead. But really, I love music across genres. Blues, jazz, hip hop, classical, metal, whatever hits. If it moves me, I’m in.

But I’ve caught flak for it. Side-eyes at shows. People coming up to me, tilted heads, awkward grins: “Are you enjoying yourself?” Like, I crashed the wrong concert. Like metal has a sticker on it that reads “For White Folks Only.”

Really? That’s your question?

As if I need permission to feel that same raw, gut-deep power you feel. As if I have to prove I belong. I didn’t know loud music came with gatekeeping.

Let’s be clear: music doesn’t segregate. People do. And the real pandemic? It’s not my playlist. It’s the weirdo energy and backhanded doubt people carry around like a badge.

The Labels Don’t Stick.

Stereotypes. Prejudices. Respectability rules dressed up in soft language and cheap slogans. You can’t run from them. We’re told to be ourselves, so long as it fits the mold. Be different, but not too different. Be authentic, but stay in bounds.

Nah. I’m done with that.

So I wear the names they throw at me. I carry them, not as scars, but as proof. Proof that people will always try to box you in. But boxes are for storage, not for living. And if they actually knew me—or tried—they’d realize we’d probably get along just fine.

I love exploring culture. I love discovering new food, ideas, and perspectives. I don’t just tolerate differences. I chase it. That doesn’t make me less Black. It makes me human.

And if I’m anything?

I’m weathered. But I’m true.

Author’s Note:
This rant was written for Sadje’s Sunday Poser, which I genuinely enjoy. It gives me space to think about real things—stuff that hits closer to home than all those philosophies written by dead people.

No, I don’t believe in ghosts.

Well… maybe?

Okay, that came out of nowhere.

Morning Vibe: The Quiet Return

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Track: “Ilumo” – Toska

Not all comebacks are grand. Some arrive like breath you didn’t realize you were holding. That’s where Ilumo lives—in the liminal space between stillness and motion, absence and emergence.

Where February Sea lingers in the hush of loss—George Winston’s piano etching frost on memory—Ilouma steps gently into the thaw. It doesn’t try to inspire or uplift in the usual sense. Instead, it offers resonance—a quiet architecture of sound that mirrors the moment your soul begins to stretch back into itself.

Sometimes we don’t need a bang. Sometimes we need to unfold—to allow ourselves to take in everything around us: the buzz, the silence, and the stillness that is not silence. That buzz? It’s not just sound. It’s the persistent hum of worry. The glow of notifications. The background noise of obligation. We live in a world that’s rarely, if ever, truly quiet. And it wears on us more than we know.

That’s why a track like Ilumo matters. It’s not just music—it’s a recalibration. A slow, grounding return to presence. A chance to breathe, and to feel, without bracing.

The layered guitar work moves like light across old wood—slow, warm, familiar. Nothing here insists. It simply offers. There is motion, but no urgency. Healing, but not spectacle. You’re not sprinting into your week—you’re arriving, intact, despite it all.

This is for the mornings when you’re not quite okay, but no longer numb. When the ache hasn’t lifted, but you’ve decided to carry it with clarity. Ilumo is about the dignity of motion, not momentum. A meditation in resilience disguised as restraint.

It reminds us that return isn’t always about triumph. Sometimes, it’s just about showing up. Quietly. Honestly. Fully. And in that honesty, something stirs. Something begins again.

Suggested Pairings:
– Window slightly open to cold air you’re finally ready to feel
– Black coffee, no cream, sipped in silence
– A journal page with a single sentence: “I am still here.”

Another morning. Another chance. Another chance for hope. Carry it with you.

This Is How I Survive: Ink and Breath

Posted in The Daily'sTagged , , , , , 2 Comments
Daily writing prompt
How do you practice self-care?
View all responses

The dawn slowly burns away the remnants of the night. It’s already hot, but most of the world still sleeps—for now. Soon, they’ll rise. They’ll fall into motion, surrendering to the bustle, the pursuit of progress, the comfort of productivity. There’s a kind of faith in the checklist, in the belief that doing enough will make you feel like enough. But I don’t begin my day that way. I don’t chase. I listen.

I write. Not to perform. Not to perfect. But to return to myself. The page is where I can be honest, messy, contradictory, and human. There’s no audience. No need to edit the ache or organize the confusion. I write what is, as it is. The act alone brings me back.

When I write, I unearth what I’ve buried: grief that’s gone unnamed, anger I’ve swallowed, hope that feels too fragile to speak aloud. The words don’t always come clearly. Some days they’re sharp and certain. Other days, they drift, soft and uncertain. But either way, I leave lighter.

I don’t write to resolve. I write to reveal. To confess the parts of me I usually keep hidden—even from myself. I spill what I can’t carry. I give shape to what I feel. I name the fear, the guilt, the longing. I write until I remember: none of this needs to be perfect. It just needs to be present.

The page doesn’t ask me to be fine. It doesn’t demand clarity or closure. It simply holds space. And in that space, I breathe. I stop performing. I stop pretending. I remember who I am beneath the noise, beneath the roles, beneath the pressure to produce and please.

So, no, I don’t start the day by rushing into it. I begin by slowing down. By sitting still. By listening. I begin by writing. By breathing. By being.

That’s not just self-care.
That’s survival.

It’s 5am …

Late Night Grooves #150

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WHOT Episode 150 – “Sweet Thing / Candidate / Sweet Thing (Reprise)” by David Bowie
Hosted by Mangus Khan

[Needle down. Soft, dissonant piano creeps in. A slow breath. The mood is already uneasy.]

“One hundred and fifty episodes.

One hundred and fifty nights of ache, sweat, signal, silence.

And we mark it not with triumph, but with transformation.

This is Late Night Grooves.
WHOT—the hottest in the cool.

And I’m Mangus Khan.

Still here.

Tonight’s track?

We’re not just playing a song.

We’re walking through someone else’s mind—with the lights off.

David Bowie – ‘Sweet Thing / Candidate / Sweet Thing (Reprise).’

From Diamond Dogs, 1974.

This isn’t Ziggy.
It’s not The Duke.

This is the man between masks.

The sound of an identity molting.

And it’s unsettling.

Part one—‘Sweet Thing’.

Bowie’s voice is smooth. Seductive. Almost safe.
But there’s a crack in the foundation.

The words don’t line up. The melody drifts sideways.

You feel like you’re standing too close to something that might collapse.

And then it does.

‘Candidate’ slams in.

No warning. No mercy.

Suddenly Bowie isn’t whispering anymore—he’s selling something.

“I’ll make you a deal / Like any other candidate…”

Politics, seduction, self-loathing, power—they all blur.

And that’s the brilliance of it.

He’s showing you what happens when performance and truth fuse so tightly, you forget which is which.

And then—

‘Sweet Thing (Reprise)’.

A return, yes. But not a redemption.

The voice is thinner now.
Broken around the edges.

Like someone who’s finally come down… but doesn’t know what to do with the silence.

And this—this whole suite—it doesn’t resolve.

It dissolves.

Into echo.

Into static.

Into the sound of identity trying to survive itself.

That’s the genius of Bowie.

He never gave you answers.

He gave you mirrors.

And dared you to stand still long enough to see what was actually looking back.

Episode 150.

Not a celebration.

A checkpoint.

For the artists who shapeshift to survive.

For the listeners who know that the groove isn’t always warm.

Sometimes it’s cold. Unforgiving.

But still—necessary.

David Bowie.
Sweet Thing / Candidate / Sweet Thing (Reprise).

This is Late Night Grooves.
WHOT.

And I’m Mangus Khan—

Still lost in the mirror.

Still broadcasting for the brave.

Still here.”

The Open Door

Posted in Fiction, The SpiralTagged , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Part IV of the Spiral Series

The spiral pulled her north.

She didn’t decide. Not really. The artifact simply leaned in that direction, its hum stronger when she faced the mountains, weaker when she turned away. Her dreams ended there too—in jagged silhouettes etched against a dying sky, clouds crawling like wounded things.

She stopped asking why.

On the third day, the silence deepened.

Not just quiet—absence. No birdsong. No wind brushing leaves. Even her own breath seemed muffled, as if the world had turned down the volume on her existence.

It wasn’t altitude.
It was approach.

Something didn’t want to be disturbed.

She crested a ridge and saw it: a broken temple, half-consumed by the rock around it like the mountain had tried to swallow it whole. Pillars leaned like fractured bones. The stone steps bled with black moss. Light didn’t quite land right here—it floated, hung, like it wasn’t sure where to fall.

And in the air above the ruin: a spiral.

Not carved. Not painted. Projected—faint, flickering, as if the sky was remembering a shape it wasn’t meant to hold.

The artifact throbbed inside her coat, pressing against her chest with each step like a heartbeat just out of sync with her own.

She descended in silence.

Inside, the temple smelled like old metal and wet dust. Not decay—memory. The scent of forgotten things trying to stay relevant. The walls bent in strange ways—straight lines that turned slightly as she walked, always off by a few degrees, until her sense of balance slipped sideways.

Time didn’t work here.

A hallway led into itself. An echo arrived before her footstep. Her shadow stretched behind her, then ahead, then vanished completely.

And then—whispers.

Not words. Tones. Rising and falling in a rhythm that made her teeth ache. The artifact vibrated harder. It wanted something. Or it feared something.

Then she saw him.

A man seated in the center of a circular chamber, bones fanned around him like a ritual compass. He didn’t turn. Didn’t speak. Just opened his eyes like he’d never closed them.

“I was wondering when you’d arrive,” he said.

His voice was calm. Steady. Too steady.

Carla didn’t speak. She stepped closer, hand hovering over the artifact. Her breath fogged slightly, though the air was warm.

“You’re a keyholder,” she said.

He smiled—not with his mouth, but with his posture. His stillness. His certainty.

“So are you. Or you wouldn’t be here.”

His name was Liran.

He spoke like someone who didn’t just believe what he said—he’d built himself around it.

“They called the spiral a prison,” he said, gesturing to the glyphs. “But that was always the lie. It’s not a cage. It’s a cradle.”

The way he touched the stone was too gentle. Reverent. Like it had raised him.

Carla felt her pulse climbing. The air in the chamber shifted—thicker now. Her chest felt tight, like the oxygen was being repurposed for something else.

“A cradle for what?” she asked.

“For the next world. This one was a rehearsal.”

Liran reached into his coat and drew something out—another artifact. Smaller than hers, no silver veins. Matte black, split by a single groove that shimmered faintly red. The spiral on it was asymmetrical, sharp-edged. Wrong.

“This one doesn’t twist,” he said. “It just opens.”

Carla felt her own artifact heat up, protesting. Reacting.

“What happens if I use mine?” she asked, already knowing.

“Then you bury it. But it still grows beneath. It gets louder. Smarter. Hungrier.”

The floor beneath them pulsed. Not an earthquake—a breath. The room inhaled.

She took a step back. Liran didn’t move.

“You’ve already let something through,” he said. “Sealing this won’t fix that. It’ll just make you deaf to what’s coming.”

“Good,” she whispered.

And twisted.

The world ruptured.

No sound—just pressure, slamming outward. The glyphs ignited in a burst of white. The air tore with invisible claws. Something screamed, not with a voice, but with recoil—a shriek of retreat.

Liran staggered, shielding his face. The bones around him exploded into dust. The spiral projected above the altar shrank inward like a dying eye.

Carla collapsed to one knee, gasping for breath. Both artifacts pulsed once—hard—then went still. Her ears rang. Her skin burned.

She opened her eyes.

Liran was gone. No trace. No blood. Just the afterimage of something that had been there.

And her hand—

Red. Raw. Branded.

A spiral etched into the flesh of her palm—not cut, not tattooed. Emerging. Like it had always been under the skin, waiting to show itself.

Her breath caught. Her pulse raced.

I sealed it.
But I brought something through.

She wrapped her hand quickly, ignoring the pain.

Then she stood. Alone. Eyes on the exit.

There were more doors.

And now, something inside her was learning how to knock.

Whispers of the Page

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Not all stories wait to be told—some write themselves through us.

I wonder—
do we write in our sleep,
not with hands
but with something older—
a pulse beneath the thought,
a breath beneath the breath?

Are the things we write
just the dreams we couldn’t hold—
wet leaves stuck to waking,
falling off before we knew
they’d landed?

Maybe the page is the mirror
we forget we’re looking into,
and every line is a smoke-trail
from a fire that burned
somewhere behind the eyes.

The words come limping,
feathered with ash,
draped in symbols
we pretend to understand.

A girl with no face
builds houses out of teeth.
A clock whispers
the name you forgot.
You write it down
and call it metaphor.

But the ink knows first.
It hums with the echo
of other lives—
the ones you’ve never lived
but somehow still remember
when the light is wrong
and the silence bends.

Is this how we dream?
Not to escape—
but to return,
to write the path backwards
until the paper runs out
and we wake.

Morning Vibe: No Rush, Just Breath

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Track: “February Sea” – George Winston

Some mornings don’t need a soundtrack that lifts you up—they need one that lets you sink in. That’s what “February Sea” by George Winston does. It doesn’t try to motivate you. It doesn’t chase drama. It just exists, quietly, patiently, like it knows exactly what kind of emotional weather you’re in and doesn’t mind sitting with you in it. It’s one of those pieces that doesn’t build toward anything grand. No climax. No message wrapped in a bow. It’s spacious and soft, full of pauses and held breath. Honestly, it sounds like memory in musical form—tentative, slow, a little cold around the edges, but still incredibly human.

I keep coming back to this track on Sundays, especially when the world feels like too much. There’s something sacred about its stillness. Not in the performative, overly dramatic way we sometimes package the word “sacred,” but in the deeply personal, quietly necessary way. This is reflection music—not the kind you put on to feel wise or aesthetic, but the kind that helps you actually stop and feel something real. Sometimes you don’t even realize how much you’ve been holding until you hear a song like this and finally, finally, exhale.

And let’s talk about that exhale for a second. Because we’re not just talking breath—we’re talking release. The kind of release that hits your shoulders, your chest, your heart. This track gives you permission to stop bracing. To unclench. To admit that maybe the week wore you out more than you let on. Reflection like this isn’t indulgent; it’s maintenance. It’s how we gather up all the pieces we scattered during the hustle and say, “Okay, this is where I’m at. Let’s begin again.”

George Winston doesn’t give us answers in this song. He gives us space. And sometimes, that’s so much more valuable. “February Sea” feels like someone leaving the door open while you sit in your feelings—no judgment, just presence. There’s an emotional honesty to that kind of soundscape. No fluff. No manipulation. Just you and your thoughts, floating together in a room full of soft piano and the kind of air that feels a little heavy, but safe.

So if you need a track that won’t tell you how to feel but will let you feel whatever rises, this is the one. Not flashy. Not fast. But true. And on a Sunday morning, sometimes that’s exactly what you need.

Suggested Pairings (for a quiet morning arc):

  • “Weather Storm” – Craig Armstrong
    Moody and cinematic, like walking through fog with intention.
  • “Be Still My Soul” – Liz Story
    A hymn reimagined as a gentle unraveling of emotion.
  • “Only” – RY X
    Minimal vocals and breathy vulnerability.
  • “Georgia” – Vance Joy
    That moment when emotional warmth returns, slow and steady.
  • “Hope” – Michael Giacchino
    A film score whispers that feels like the edge of something new.

Closing Thought:
Another morning. Another chance.
Sometimes what you need most isn’t movement—it’s stillness.
Let this be your breath, your mirror, your reset.
Carry it with you.

Kimonogate 4

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Chapter 4:

The Collector

Mayor Brindle only entered Room 14 on Sundays.
Not for the quiet. Not for the privacy.
For containment.

The room had no windows. Just four beige walls, the smell of municipal-grade carpet cleaner, and the faint static crackle of a vent that hadn’t worked in years. It wasn’t an office, exactly. It was… a chamber. For reverence. And regret.

He flicked on the fluorescent light. It buzzed overhead, a sickly white hum that made his temples throb. And then—there they were.

The shelves.

Lined edge to edge with Boney LaFleur’s complete works, the glossy covers glowing faintly under the flickering light like stained glass. Temple Blade and the Hollow Crown. The Tethered Labyrinth. Scepter’s Wake. Even the obscure prequel novella she’d tried to scrub from publication—he had it. Signed, no less.

He didn’t sit down right away. He never did. First, he had to… look. Just look.

He moved along the rows slowly, brushing the spines with the back of his hand. His fingers tingled slightly. Part reverence. Part panic. The books weren’t just stories to him. They were a sanctuary. Places where everything made sense. Where people had destinies and enemies and epic confrontations—and none of them involved city council meetings or HOA bylaws or the unraveling of one’s dignity in front of a dog named Capote.

A squeak echoed underfoot. He looked down. The laminate tile had a fresh scuff.

He hadn’t noticed that before.

He clenched his jaw and walked to the small folding chair in the corner. Sat. Took out the paperback of The Hollow Crown—the one with his notes in the margins. Yellow highlighter, purple ink, a few fevered pencil scribbles he no longer remembered writing.

Page 217:
“No secret stays buried forever, only patiently waiting to be found.”

He stared at that line for a long time.

The pink kimono still haunted his dreams. The way it shimmered in the moonlight. The way the sequins had caught on the shovel. The way the dirt made it seem human, like he was burying a body. Not a costume. Not a memory. A truth.

He tried to breathe deeply. Couldn’t. The air in Room 14 always felt just slightly recycled. Like it had passed through too many confessionals.

The text message still burned behind his eyes:
“I know what you buried, and it wasn’t just a time capsule.”

Who sent it? How did they know?

He wiped his hands on his pants. They felt sticky, like his palms were leaking secrets.

The worst part wasn’t the fear of being found out. It was the possibility that Myrtle—sweet, sour, pastel-sweatered Myrtle—wasn’t just Myrtle. That behind the orthopedic shoes and off-brand Tupperware was Boney LaFleur, architect of the Temple Blade saga, literary genius, and keeper of the narrative fate of hundreds of fictional villains.

He closed the book. Pressed it to his chest.

If she were LaFleur… if she knew about the kimono…
Would she write him in? Would he become one of her morally confused side characters? The kind that gets impaled by a decorative umbrella in chapter three?

He didn’t know whether to be terrified or honored.

And that made it worse.

The silence in the room felt sentient now. Listening.

He stood abruptly. Put the book back with a little too much force.

He had to find out if Myrtle knew. He had to confirm it.

But part of him already did. The way she looked at him lately. Her smile, small and tight, like a woman who’d just plotted something delicious. The little glances. The pause when he’d walked by. She was toying with him. Maybe write to him already.

He pressed a hand to the wall, steadying himself.

Outside, the parking lot was empty.
Inside, Room 14 held its breath.

So did the mayor.

Kimonogate 3

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Episode 3:

Myrtle Revealed (or, The Boney Truth)

Everyone on Rosewood Lane thought Myrtle McKlusky was a cardigan-wearing, prune-juice-drinking, HOA-terrorizing widow with three jittery Chinese Crested dogs. They were only 25% right.

What no one—not even the mayor, not even Capote—knew was that Myrtle was also…

Tempest Fablestein.

Yes. The Tempest Fablestein. The mysterious, scandalously successful author of the internationally adored, historically inaccurate, and erotically charged adventure-romance series featuring Boney LaFleur, the one-armed French nobleman turned treasure hunter.

She had written 43 novels, 5 novellas, and a cookbook (“Feast Like a Fabulist: 18th Century Seduction Stews”) from the converted sunroom behind her kitchen. Her books had sold over 47 million copies. She was, by all definitions, secretly loaded.

Her fans included conspiracy theorists, failed Broadway understudies, and a suspicious number of junior senators.

And to maintain her anonymity, Myrtle had hired a professional actor—a classically trained Scotsman named Malcolm Finnegan Duff-Whitely III—to play the role of Tempest in public.

Enter Malcolm

At book signings, literary galas, and erotic parchment conventions, Malcolm wore a velvet smoking jacket, quoted Shakespeare deep cuts. He wielded a Scottish accent so buttery it made podcast hosts weep. He was charming. Mysterious. Allegedly celibate.

And he had been in love with Myrtle for six years.

The Confession

During a livestream at the National Erotic Adventure Awards Gala, Malcolm—accepting the award for “Best Use of the Word Ravish in a Scene Involving Lava”—snapped.

“I—I can’t do this anymore,” he said, eyes glassy. “I’ve lived a lie.”

The crowd hushed. A woman in the third row fainted into a fondue fountain.

“I’m not Tempest Fablestein. I’m just Malcolm. But she—”
He stared into the camera.
“She is the greatest mind of our time. And Myrtle… if you’re watching—I love you. I’ve loved you since Boney rode that bull through the Vatican archives.”

Before the audience could react, two large men in matching black suits and medieval-looking boots appeared. They flanked him.

Malcolm’s voice rose over the chaos. “Tell her I meant it!”

He was dragged offstage, still clinging to his crystal pegasus trophy.

The livestream abruptly cut to a pre-recorded interview where “Tempest” explained how she researched 18th-century brothels using only Google Earth and intuition.

The Fallout

A 14-second clip surfaced on YouTube hours later. It showed Malcolm being pushed into a black Escalade while yelling, “Tell Myrtle I know her rhubarb pie uses vodka!”

The clip was quickly removed by Tempest Enterprises LLC under “copyright and culinary infringement.”

Still, the legend of the confession spread. Reddit threads multiplied. Fans demanded answers.

Back in Rosewood Lane…

In her sunroom, Myrtle sat staring at her laptop. Capote snored on a pile of manuscript pages. Pont and Pint had rolled themselves into an anxious spiral.

She didn’t cry. Myrtle McKlusky hadn’t cried since Boney LaFleur and the Lusty Siege of Strasbourg made Oprah’s underground erotica list.

Instead, she opened a new document.

Title: “Boney LaFleur and the Man Who Dared to Love.”

—

That night, in the dim warmth of his paneled study, Mayor Gerald swirled cold chamomile tea and reached for the false back of his bookshelf.

Click.

Behind it: Every single Boney LaFleur first edition, wrapped in archival sleeves and arranged by emotional damage level.

He pulled out “Boney LaFleur and the Underdressed Pharaoh” and gently opened the jacket. Inside:

“To G—
May you never lose your own treasure map.
—T.F.”

He sighed and rubbed his eyes.

“She’s been right next door this whole time,” he whispered.

Then, from a drawer, he pulled a laminated keepsake:
“Boney LaFleur’s Ten Principles of Gentlemanly Adventure.”

He read aloud, voice cracking:

“Rule #1: Never underestimate the swordplay of a woman with nothing left to prove.”

Capote, who had somehow snuck into the study again, thumped his tail once in quiet agreement.

Gerald leaned back in his chair.
“You got me, Myrtle.”

Late Night Grooves #149

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WHOT Episode 149 – “The Jungle Line” by Joni Mitchell
Hosted by Mangus Khan

[Drums begin—raw, repetitive, almost ritualistic. A strange synth cuts in like neon over ancient stone. Then: silence.]

“You’ve tuned in to Late Night Grooves.
WHOT.

The hottest in the cool.

I’m Mangus Khan.

And tonight—Episode 149—we don’t just press play.

We unravel.

Because some songs aren’t made to move you.

They’re made to unsettle you.

And if you’ve got the nerve to stay with them long enough…

They’ll show you parts of yourself you didn’t know were watching.

The track?
Joni Mitchell – ‘The Jungle Line.’
From The Hissing of Summer Lawns, 1975.

A record people didn’t understand then.
A record people are still trying to catch up to.

And this track?

This was Joni swinging a wrecking ball through every box the industry tried to trap her in.

She was folk, right?
Soft guitars. Laurel Canyon sunsets.

Not here.

This time, she leads with drums.

Field recordings of Burundi drummers pounding like a heartbeat through barbed wire.

Then comes the Moog synth. Cold. Detached. Watching from a distance.

And over that?

Joni’s voice.

Observing. Dissecting.

Cool on the surface. But listen closer.

She’s not distant. She’s wounded.

Because this song?

It’s not about jungle rhythms or abstract art.

It’s about the white gaze.

About how we turn other cultures into wallpaper.

“Rousseau walks on trumpet paths / Safaris to the heart of all that jazz…”

She’s talking about appropriation.
About aesthetic tourism.
About the quiet violence of being seen but never understood.

And while she’s at it?

She’s looking at herself, too.

Because Joni wasn’t afraid to hold the mirror up to her own complicity.

That’s what makes this track bold.

Not just that she named it—

But that she included herself in the naming.

This is self-interrogation in 4/4 time.

And it’s uncomfortable.

But that’s what evolution sounds like.

The Jungle Line isn’t smooth.

It’s jagged.

It’s intentionally unresolved.

The drums never let up.
There’s no chorus.
No payoff.

Just this loop—
Like a mind circling a question it can’t stop asking.

And if you’ve ever sat in that kind of silence—

You know what this song feels like.

It’s not just a sonic experiment.

It’s a reckoning.

Episode 149.

Joni Mitchell.
The Jungle Line.

A groove that doesn’t soothe.

A voice that doesn’t plead.

Just a truth that won’t be simplified.

This is Late Night Grooves.
WHOT.

And I’m Mangus Khan—

Still digging through the uncomfortable.

Still playing the songs that refuse to make you comfortable.

Still broadcasting for the ones brave enough to listen all the way through.”

Chronically Challenged: A Friday the 13th Love Story VII

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FICTION – FOWC & RDP

Chapter 7:

Tacos and Time Loops

Final chapter of Chronically Challenged

The first thing Fiona registered was the smell—
Grilled meat. Cilantro. The unmistakable scent of hot corn tortillas and lime rinds warming under neon light.

She opened her eyes slowly, adjusting to the dim light of dusk. The taco truck stood exactly where it had before, parked under a buzzing fluorescent sign that read “Tacotón 5000” in cracked vinyl letters. The same string of rainbow papel picado fluttered above them, fading from the sun and sagging from the weather.

A warm breeze passed. It smelled like onions and traffic and the city on a Friday night—alive, restless, ordinary.

They were home.

“Didn’t think déjà vu would come with salsa,” Elliot said beside her.

Fiona exhaled. She hadn’t realized she’d been holding her breath.

She was back in her own jeans. Her real boots. Her coat with a broken zipper and a ballpoint pen still jammed in the inner lining. The chrono-device—no longer pulsing, no longer demanding—rested cool and quiet in her pocket like a relic from someone else’s life.

And Elliot? He looked… lighter. Tired, yes, but unburdened. His curls were wind-tousled, his glasses slightly crooked, and his Ramones shirt was—miraculously—clean. She smiled at the thought he’d maybe picked a fresh one on purpose.

A thin fog of steam rose from the taco truck window. The same vendor as last time—greying, gum-chewing, and blessedly nonchalant—tossed two wrapped tacos onto the counter and gave them a single, knowing nod.

They didn’t pay.

“I think we broke his sense of reality,” Elliot said, collecting the food like it might still vanish. “Or earned his eternal respect. Hard to tell.”

“I’ll take either,” Fiona murmured.

They sat on the same bench—their bench—its paint peeling, the metal cold beneath them. The sound of the street curled around them: honking cars, a mumbled rap track from a passing bike speaker, the sharp clatter of skateboards echoing under the overpass.

Fiona peeled the foil back from her taco with careful fingers, letting the scent rise. It was warm, greasy, and strangely grounding. The first bite burned her tongue and made her eyes water. She welcomed it.

Elliot was watching her.

“Do you remember what you were thinking right before you asked me out?” he asked.

She chewed, then swallowed. Wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

“I had a mantra,” she said. “In my head. I kept repeating: Don’t die alone surrounded by lab reports.”

He grinned. “That’s so… deeply romantic.”

“It worked.”

He looked down at his own taco, then back up at her.

“I almost said no.”

Fiona froze mid-chew. “You what?”

“When you asked me out,” Elliot said. “I panicked. Thought it was a prank. Or a bet. Or a really elaborate social experiment.”

“Seriously?”

He nodded sheepishly. “Then I realized I didn’t care. You were wearing those boots—the intimidating ones. And if it was a trap, I figured I’d go down swinging.”

Fiona laughed—a surprised, full-bodied laugh that startled a pigeon nearby into a fluttering escape.

“I thought you didn’t like me,” she said. “You always looked like you were trying to solve me.”

“I was,” he said, voice quiet. “Still am.”

They sat for a moment in comfortable silence, listening to the city breathe around them. Fiona leaned into him, their shoulders pressed. His warmth was solid. Familiar. Real.

It felt… earned.

“Do you think this counts as our first real date?” she asked.

Elliot nodded slowly. “We survived 1776. Got interrogated by Hamilton. Made out in a future that might not technically exist.”

“So that’s a yes.”

“Definitely.”

The chrono-device buzzed once in her pocket—just a faint vibration, like a cat purring in sleep. Then stillness.

Fiona didn’t check it.

She didn’t need to.

They were here. And now. And not running anymore.

Elliot raised his taco like a glass.

“To us,” he said.

She clinked hers against his foil wrap. “To now.”

And together, under a taco truck sign that flickered uncertainly between green and purple, with grease on their hands and time behind them, they finally finished their first date.

—

And that’s a wrap!

Chronically Challenged: A Friday the 13th Love Story began with a taco truck, a reluctant crush, and a time travel accident—and somehow turned into one of the most unexpectedly joyful stories I’ve had the pleasure of writing.

Creating Fiona and Elliot’s awkward, brilliant, chaotic journey through history (and each other’s emotional walls) has been such a weird and wonderful ride. From Hamilton’s dramatic entrance to futuristic first kisses, every scene brought something surprising—and often unplanned—to the table.

This was a story about missed signals, emotional experiments, and learning that sometimes the biggest leap isn’t through time—it’s letting someone really see you.

If you made it all the way here, thank you. I hope you laughed, blushed, winced at the secondhand awkwardness, and maybe found a little bit of yourself somewhere in these pages.

And if this is your first read-through, remember: time travel may be fiction, but tacos and courage are very real.

Until next time,

— Mangus

Click the link below for the full story:

Chronically Challenged: A Friday the 13th Love Story