Content with the plenty that they have

Luke O'Neil

20 Mar 2025 • 13 min read

I guess this is what he meant by being forced to watch your foes enjoy ceaseless feasts of schadenfreude.

Under authoritarianism you still get to walk around right? Go to the store. Say hey man how's it going. Doff your cap. All that.

They have TV and food and most things.

Maybe I’m just thinking of Tracy Jordan finding out what the morning is.

I do kind of feel like him though. Stupid and drunk and as yet untouched by anything real.

Can sense it coming over the hill though.

It is a very peculiar feeling indeed to watch the slow but inevitable becoming of the creature that had once been wanting form as one might have once put it.

So this is what it was wanting?

Seriously?

Well alright.

Let me ask you something. How does a person live?

That's not rhetorical.

Not an evil person. I don't mean them. I will never know how they live. But people like you and me? How does one do it?

I barely ever even wanted to stay alive all that strenuously throughout our many years in the regular bloodthirsty neoliberal world order. The one we all know about from a few weeks back.

Now this.

I feel kind of weird having written in here the other day about being sad that my accountant had gotten cancer when I found out my little sister has it too like a day later. Should have kept my powder dry there.

I’m not sure how to write about that one.

I put on some music to distract myself from the news I had gotten and all it did was serve as the soundtrack to the news I had just gotten. I thought I had better try watching a movie instead. You can suppose what happened next.

She’s going to be fine though they said. It is small and they caught it very early they said.

Everything I ever wrote about in here about my dead father was also about her dead father. Not many people in the world I can say that about.

It is spring today in my version of the world. The birds are back and they’re horny out of their minds. Flower drunk and zipping around trying to fuck in the sky like perverts. Like commercial airline pilots. Meanwhile we’re all going to die. The end.

And that’s how you write a Luke poem about birds.

Actually it's more like this:

Or this:

The photo I saw that inspired that poem came up in my phone memories the other day. Did I ever share it in here I forget? Here it is anyway.

Support the media that you enjoy

"If you come for one of us, you will get all of us,” Boston mayor Michelle Wu said in a speech last night.

“We are a city that knows our strength is each other. And we will defend the people we love with all that we’ve got. When the weight of the world presses down, Boston stands up."

"Because all over the country, people are feeling the weight of a federal administration that’s attacking our sources of strength, the same people and purpose that make Boston great. Public servants and veterans; immigrants and the LGBTQ+ community; the institutions that conduct groundbreaking research and provide lifesaving care. We are home to the nation’s best hospitals, best colleges and universities, best labs and research facilities. They drive our economy, employ our residents, and make Boston America’s engine of innovation. And today, they are all under attack. Boston is the target in this fight for our future because we are the cradle of democracy, pioneers of the public good, the stewards and keepers of the American Dream. We were built on the values this federal administration seeks to tear down. But for 395 years, come high water or hell – no matter who threatens to bring it – Boston has stood up for the people we love and the country we built. And we’re not stopping now. Boston is not a city that tolerates tyranny. We are the city that leads in the storm; that stands up under pressure, together; and finds strength in each other. We will defend the people we love with all that we’ve got. I couldn’t ask for more in a family.”

Now a lot of that is bullshit sure but listen to me elected Democrats everywhere: You have got to be saying this kind of shit right now all the time. It is the literal least that you can do. Pretend like you have a fucking spine.

Obviously the majority of local cops everywhere are fascists but there’s a lane here to try to appeal to our sense of local pride all over the country. Turn the “Washington D.C.” of it all back around on them. These rich fucks etc. Telling us what to do.

You might even end up inspiring some people too while you’re at it.

Maybe it won’t matter but it seems to me like a better strategy than sitting on your ass. Or doing whatever the fuck Chuck Schumer thinks he’s doing.

You know who else said that their genocide was provoked? Literally every country that ever committed genocide.

Schumer's position on Gaza and Trump and Rubio's position on "terrorists" in this country are not all that different. Essentially this:

The hollowness and malleability of the term means that it can be applied to groups regardless of their actual conduct and regardless of their actual ideology. It admits only a circular definition (not too dissimilar from the definition advanced by the Israeli Counter Terrorism Law) that a terrorist is someone who carries out terrorist acts, and a terrorist act is violence carried out by a terrorist. Conversely, if someone is killed, it is because they are a terrorist, because to be a terrorist means to be killable.

This circularity of the definition allows the designation to justify violence against entire populations both ex-ante and ex-post. Hamas and all of its supporters and members—military and government—have been deemed to be terrorists, and these “terrorists” control Gaza. Thus the bombing of the Gaza Strip can be, at any time, permitted. (Indeed Israel engaged in seven major military operations in Gaza since Hamas’s election in 2006.) Gaza, however, is populated primarily by ordinary civilians as well. But the circularity of “terrorist” occludes this fact: once there exists a category of persons upon whom one can inflict violence by virtue of their status rather than their actions, violence becomes constitutive of the status itself.

Read this please:

He writes in part:

I have always believed that my duty is not only to liberate myself from the oppressor, but also to liberate my oppressors from their hatred and fear. My unjust detention is indicative of the anti-Palestinian racism that both the Biden and Trump administrations have demonstrated over the past 16 months as the U.S. has continued to supply Israel with weapons to kill Palestinians and prevented international intervention. For decades, anti-Palestinian racism has driven efforts to expand U.S. laws and practices that are used to violently repress Palestinians, Arab Americans, and other communities. That is precisely why I am being targeted.

Read this too:

And another good one from Teen Vogue:

TV: Do you think your parents influenced your politics?

VW: Seeing that kind of wealth — extravagant wealth — firsthand, while living in Los Angeles and seeing the [huge] homelessness problem, the wealth gap… You start to wonder, How is this fair? You have to inevitably come to the conclusion it's not. There is no world in which people should be owning multiple private planes, private islands, private whatever, while other people are sleeping on the street.

I read something the other day that I can only half remember. It was a riff on some other old thing I should also remember having read but the gist is that God or one of those guys comes down and says this or that will be beautiful and peaceful forever if you do this or that thing that is terrible. An Omelas type bargain I guess. I barely remember that one either.

But the only proper response to an offer like that the thing said is to immediately ask wait what kind of bookie is giving me these odds?

Who exactly am I getting into business with here?

What kind of God etc...

But that’s a bit too big of a quandary – a quandary – for us to figure out today I suppose. It’s literally the only question that has ever mattered.

I know it's not the most pressing issue at the moment but look at this shit. I'm upset about this. They took down this cool tree I look at all the time from my porch.

I saw them fucking doing it too. I could have done something.

I guess the roots were growing into the shed or something like that one of the other neighbors told me but come on man. If it's cool tree versus shed I know who I'm voting for.

We were talking about AI bullshit the other day. I thought this was funny and true.

This too.

I really enjoyed this piece from this new Jackass World newsletter. It's about Jackass naturally but also the Drive-By Truckers and Southern Identity. It's long but here's a bit of it:

This brings me back to “Outfit.” In all my years of eye-rolling, I just asked the question: who would Isbell be pandering to? Who in 2003 was pandering to Southern dudes who were into loud rock? I didn’t ask this until recently when I watched an old performance of “Outfit.” It’s an undeniable live hit, one of their most melodic songs, and easy to thrash along to after dirges about whiskey and women and women who don’t have whiskey. Anyway, while Isbell crooned the slow song, the camera cut back and forth between him and the crowd, the spotlight hitting the throng singing lines about their mothers, their cars, and eventually themselves. The shining moment was when the sweaty crowd of Southern guys climbed over each other to yell my now favorite line “Don’t worry about losing your accent, a Southern man tells better jokes,” to Isbell, each one ferociously fighting to be the person who yelled the lyric the loudest.

And honestly, when I think of that lyric right now, I don’t think about the Southern men in my life, in fact just one name comes to mind: Johnny Knoxville.

the tennessee daredevil

I think of Jackass as a Southern creation. It is just intrinsically and socially Southern. Southern fried to its core. The whole franchise is rooted in that bizarre flavor of antics that I associate with the rowdiest frats in Arkansas and ruddy-faced regulars in Kentucky bars. And I think Jackass reflects that camaraderie because that’s exactly where the maestro behind it all is from.

The Southern identity I see in the show and movies comes primarily from Johnny Knoxville, the stage name of one of this century’s greatest creative forces: PJ Clapp. While he is a reality TV personality with lots of concussions and a podcast now, he’s ultimately just a guy who grew up in a family of Tennessee pranksters who made his own family of pranksters the second he got the chance.

Timeline-wise, Johnny Knoxville started to get famous around the exact same time that Jason Isbell joined Drive-By Truckers. In 2000, Knoxville’s television pitch, a kind of gross-out DIY stunt show was picked up by MTV and Jackass was born. He was an overnight sensation, but it didn't start there.

Knoxville always wanted to be famous. That much is clear. Sometime in the late 80s or maybe early 90s, PJ Clapp moved to LA for school for acting, only turned up a few jobs, and instead started pitching to magazines and writing articles to pay his rent. His career continued to careen downwards, but he really felt the pressure to Do Something once he got married and found out he had a kid on the way. Suddenly overwhelmed by the need for financial stability and still hungry for his big break, he pitched an explosive article to a raunchy skateboarding magazine — Big Brother. This is effectively the shot heard ’round the world. Or at least heard ’round my world.

What a fucking tune man.

In much less worthy of reading news look at this absolute struggle column I wrote five years ago this week. I was struggling.

Sure you don't buddy.

The end of the world hit right in the middle of the other end of the world. In a social media post confusingly titled “forever a Patriot,” Tom Brady, the absurdly decorated New England quarterback, announced Tuesday that he would, in fact, not be a Patriot forever and was off to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

...

It’s been 24 hours since the Brady news came out, and I’m only just now giving it much thought for the first time, to be honest, and that’s mostly because this newspaper is paying me to do so. Hold on — my wife just coughed weirdly, let me just inch a little further across the room. She’s an elementary school teacher. I’m sure a lot of her students are very upset about the Brady news — I saw some videos online of children crying over it — but there’s really no way we’ll know, because it looks like the entire school year may be canceled. Who cares what happens to Brady at a time like that? Who knows if the NFL season will even be played in the fall?

And then he won the Super Bowl anyway lol.

This one is kind of a mess huh? I'm not thinking straight lately.

Reporters contact me pretty regularly to weigh in on whatever the latest Substack news is and I usually decline because I've talked about it more than enough and have little more to add. But I did write back to this one who was asking me about revenue at Substack vs. Ghost for personal reasons (I had had half of a beer when I got his e-mail).

I am lucky in that I was one of the first writers to get in on and really make my own thing out of this particular era of newsletters 7 or so years ago, and have some success right off the bat in terms of readership and making a decent living, so growth was great for the first few years when people were really stoked about this new seeming model. I hate using that word growth and talking about this shit in terms of a businessman watching line go up by the way. Line goes up is everything that is wrong with everything and tech companies like Substack in particular.

I left Substack for Ghost 3 years ago this month or so because I sensed there was something off that was really bumming me out about being on there and turns out I was right. Particularly as a leftist who tries to do my best under the very bad series of choices we have available to us. No ethical posting under capitalism as I often have said. But that doesn't mean you have no choices at all. Like leaving Twitter as one glaringly obvious ethical choice at this time.

When I switched to Ghost there were some initial hiccups, but everything has smoothed out. The line hasn't continued to go up forever, but I suspect that has more to do with the absolute oversaturation of newsletters rather than the platform I am using. Also how rich is a guy who writes depressing prose poems about the news ever going to be?

Nor did the line go down though, and only pigs consider that a kind of failure.

I make a very nice living writing whatever weird shit I want whenever I want for a loyal and receptive audience, and on top of that get to pay pretty decently for writers I admire to write for me now. I have won the fucking lottery. Not literally. Not in terms of getting rich like some of these soulless monsters out there making millions a year or whatever it is, but after so many years grinding it out as a freelancer and waiting tables on the side I have won the lottery.

Imagine a person being content with the plenty that they have? What a concept.

Anyway pay to subscribe to Hell World if you can. I promise to never be a good businessman or have a million dollars.

I promise I will never have a million dollars

Here are a couple of lovely new songs to listen to. See you later.