Take some small portion of it for yourself

The best things I wrote in 2024

Luke O'Neil

27 Dec 2024 • 28 min read

Some guy in my tree

Hello. How was your Christmas? Mine was fairly standard thank you. I alternated between making merry and descending into crippling seasonal malaise. The passage of time man. We have to figure that whole thing out one of these days.

Merry Christmas and A Long December to all from the O’Neils
— Luke O'Neil (@lukeoneil47.bsky.social) 2024-12-25T01:42:33.365Z

The other day I shared my favorite pieces we published over the past year that were written by other people. Check it out if you missed it. There's so much good stuff in there.

Today I'm going to take a stab at picking out a bunch of the best pieces that I personally wrote. (Some of them fiction and some of them non-fiction.)

Almost all of the new fiction I wrote this year can be found at Flaming Hydra which you should of course subscribe to.

Luke O’Neil - Flaming Hydra

He writes the first and only newsletter Welcome to Hell World.

Flaming HydraA.J. Daulerio

And in another bit of end of the year business if you didn't see the best songs of the year piece here it is.

Some of these are going to be for paid-readers only so subscribe if you can please and thanks. The next Hell World will (I think) be about the new season of Squid Game and will also be paid-only so sign up if you want to read that.

I love supporting cool shit

Then down below paid subscribers can see pictures of the best bowls of soup M. and I (mostly her) made this year. What a treat!

Alright here we go. Hope you find something you like. If you already read everything in here then you are dismissed for the day. Please do something nice for someone else or for yourself. Do that either way actually.

The truth is that no matter what your cause is and no matter what you do there will always be people saying that you're not protesting the right way. That your slogan needs editing.

Worse than that a lot of them will pretend that they would of course have been sympathetic if only you had your proper protesting papers in order. If you weren't (hypothetically) inconveniencing some (imagined) victim they claim to be speaking on behalf of.

Once you see this in action you can't help but notice it everywhere. People feigning at potential solidarity with a cause or issue yet outsourcing their own actual but concealed personal disagreement with it to other people. "The average voter won't like this" etcetera. It's a kind of political ventriloquism.

Please do not do this. Do not force a mule to smuggle your sincerely held beliefs across the discourse border for you. Just say what you believe.

I know that you believe that you…

She was eliding over the word love like it was a dangerous spell. How you can’t say certain words in the mirror too many times. How you can’t say the name of ___.

Or like the concept of love was a deep and endless hole burrowed into the earth’s core. The lava down there and so on.

Minding her footing carefully and standing away from the infernal edge.

I know that you feel that way about me she said starting over one more time but it’s just a chemical reaction going on in your brain she said.

...All so he can get Republicans to agree to authorize more money for shipping weapons around the world.

Figuring out exactly how racist and xenophobic he has to be to win over zero conservative voters who think he’s a kid sacrificing pervert all while alienating a couple million of his own ostensible voters.

Negotiating the mileage of razor wire the suffering will have to crawl through down to the inch to find the perfect sweet spot that will make no one happy.

Trump and other Republicans are of course saying fuck you we will not give Joe Biden the win on this. Even if he's trying to do something we actually want.

I watched the whole thing. The commercials for Jesus from an evil church and the commercials for on ongoing massacre by an evil country. I watched the whole thing which I guess was itself a commercial for the entire concept of this evil country of our own. I was going to say it is our essence distilled but that implies something being made small and more potent which is the opposite of the Super Bowl and America neither of which can be diminished but instead can only expand. Devour. I don't know. Something so garish defies metaphor. Something so large defies metaphor. If a towering beast appeared on the horizon laying waste to everything in its path right now you wouldn't think to describe it as being like something else you would simply and dumbly perceive its horrible mass.

Unless that same thing happened in a movie in which case it would most likely be a metaphor for America.

...and meanwhile finding my poor sister resting under an avalanche of pillows. She murmured from within the fort at the sound of our footfalls. Who is it now she said. I put my hand on the meat of her and said what is it dear and she said no no no it’s not you.

There’s a bear chasing me in my dreams she said and so I put my hand next backways onto the skin of her skull which was roiling and I told her that there are no bears anymore.

None of this is real dear sister I said and it was unclear at first if she understood me but she subsequently tucked her head into the blanket of her bicep and after a moment’s silence opened her purple eyes and instructed me that I personally do not know what it is that is real and what it is that is not real. I felt that that was a fair admonition.

I stole her phone from under her couch-smushed cheek to aid in her comfort and glanced at it in the movement and on the screen there was a photo of a robust healthy tree growing toward God’s light and in the embrace of its sturdy arm branches was a thinner but still flowering tree without a base or roots of any kind. It looked like it had been chainsawed from below long ago and was now suspended in mid-air like you’d hold a child up in a pool to prevent its drowning. The larger one nourishing the smaller horizontally in the trick of this levitation I presumed.

There's only one flaw I can see in this AI-generated world of six fingered bikini babes with death behind their eyes and photorealistic Family Guy pornos: I don’t understand where they think their personalized sense of aesthetics they plan to input into the computer is going to come from in the first place when all human artists have been driven out of business.

If you want something perfectly tailored 1:1 to your own taste meant solely for you to experience alone you can already do that just by sitting there and thinking about it buddy. Skip the middle man step of the computer. It's just going to put it back in your brain anyway.

This probably applies to all of you – people in possession of human souls who have at least on occasion felt the divine in a work of art – but everything I write myself and everything I love to read or listen to or watch has one bedrock foundation to it which is this:

Oh my god I am alive right now and you are alive right now and someday we will not be but for the duration of this we are both stupidly and beautifully alive.

Please bear witness to my humanity and take some small portion of it for yourself.

Someone reported the robot dogs were on the ground in Gaza and on the ground at the border and everyone else was saying yes exactly that it is the place where they were always meant to have been and Ray Carver was writing about moving toward whatever ancient thing it is that works the chains and pulls us so relentlessly on.

It’s second winter of March now and they’re rounding up human beings in Texas in a somehow more evil way than they normally do and I am contending with the three day refrigerated carcass of a $4.99 rotisserie chicken over the sink disgusting myself viscerally but still cleaning the bones in a way a natural predator would not bother to do. They would leave this detailing business to the scavenging birds and maggots.

What I'm saying is that there is a very long and storied tradition of trying to explain away young people's natural and instinctive horror at war and racism and segregation – and our desire to commiserate and organize collectively against them – as a fleeting and unserious dalliance of youth to make the adult warmongers and racists feel less bad about the faint tug of conscience they're struck by from time to time.

When some amoral loser tells you the kids are being brainwashed by TikTok into opposing genocide in Gaza they're basically some guy from decades ago blaming civil rights protests on the hula-hoop or whatever.

The contemporary liberal will say today retroactively that the civil rights protests were righteous of course because unlike then they have nothing at stake right now. Just like they will say the same thing about protests against Israel down the line. Sooner or later when they find the humanity they've tucked away somewhere deep in their hearts because they convinced themselves it was a silly thing – or too heavy a thing – to carry around every day.

It smelled like someone might have left the gas stove on so I muted the news and got up off of the couch and went into the kitchen to poke my snout around.

Everything seemed to be switched off as best as I could tell.

The bulldozers were breaking ground along the border they had been saying a minute ago. In a place a lot of people didn’t want them to be bulldozing. A place of some import. A consecrated place. I was only half paying attention but it seemed bad. A matter of something despoiled.

When I was done checking I got worried I had turned the stove back on somehow so I had to do the same routine over again in the exact same order. One more time again but no more after that. Controlled enough to not do it the third time.

Half of a thing of macaroni and cheese from yesterday there wilting in the pot and becoming more and more yellow. An exceptional yellowness. So yellow it wasn’t yellow anymore it was orange.

Who closed last night?

The famous eclipse from the newspaper and TV and phone was closing in hour by hour and all day I had been having this intrusive thought that I was going to stare directly at it raw even though I didn’t want to do that for obvious reasons. Like the little ghost that dances up your spine as the subway is pulling into the station.

About 30 minutes before curtain I walked out of the gym (which I go to regularly by the way) and here were a number of people in the parking lot all looking up in chorus at the big idiot sky and so I did the most natural thing in the world the most obvious instinctive thing before catching myself at the last second like come on man.

This is one of those moments where I’m overwhelmed and do not feel up to the task of capturing exactly what is happening in words as peaceful college students across the country are being thrown into the carceral grinder by their own administrations for the crime of sitting around and asking for the facilitation of less death but I will tell you one thing which is that we are currently experiencing a period of collective mass hysteria and mass psychosis I haven’t seen since the early 2000s where every lever of power in the so-called American liberal order – from the ostensibly liberal government to the ostensibly liberal media to ostensibly liberal academia – are all laser focused on one single thing: No matter the cost in blood or money, no matter the suffering of innocents, no matter the violations of supposed norms, the state of Israel must be allowed to massacre as many Palestinians as they wish and any effort to forestall that from Boston to Los Angeles to Atlanta to New York City should be met with the full force of the militarized police to “restore the peace.”

This specific slaughter for some reason – and yes I know a number of the reasons – is worth any price we might have to pay at home in terms of dismantling our own Constitutional rights. It’s madness. People have gone mad.

Protesting for good causes is good and protesting for bad causes is bad. Simple as. Occupying a campus building to pressure your school to divest from the military industrial complex and to register your horror over our country's dogged complicity in an ongoing genocide is an unequivocal good. Reasonable people can disagree about this you might be thinking? No they can't! Finding moral clarity on this matter is one of the easiest things a person could ever do.

"These campus protests are a lot like January 6" I've seen a number of the dimmest bulbs in a media class almost entirely populated by the worst liars on the head wound ward say and that is just not true. January 6 was a protest about something fake for the cause of something bad.

If on the other hand an election had actually been stolen then storming a government building would be good because the cause would be good.

I know I say this all the time but you do not have to temper your moral instincts to project an aura of fair play to your enemies. They will never return the favor. ...

Oh wow did some college kids say something vaguely hypothetically violent? How many bombs are we sending them? How many tanks do they have?

Listen to me if you are in the media and you think antisemitism is coming from the anti-genocide left and not the Biden and Trump and Netanyahu fascist partnership you have a dog's brain and you should be sent to run around in Kristi Noemi’s gravel pit.

The band that wrote “In the Garage” does not often sound like a garage band anymore, but when they do, this is the type of shit I’m talking about. The song has to sound like it has some dirt on it, like it was recorded by some guy one of the guys knew with a cheap space and the band showed up with a few song sketches and just said fuck it we’ve only got an overnight here to bang these out.

Lyrically the characters whose point of view Rivers is singing from have to feel comfortable having spent time themselves in the same dirt the guitars have. Or at least have to have resigned themselves to their familiarity with it.

Also, if possible, and it’s not always possible, the guitar solo probably shouldn’t just be the main song melody.

And it’s a bonus if it has a synthesizer Moog sound and someone trying to do Matt Sharp falsetto harmonies (and absolutely no 2010s hip hop piano stabs although absolute mid-period Weezer classic “Pork and Beans” gets a pass in that regard).

More important than any of that, Rivers has to [Dune reference] use the voice—and like his guitar tone he has a couple of them—that makes me believe in what he’s singing. The hurt has to come through.

Obviously this is not really about reimbursing the state for your stay in Hotel Hell, it's also, as so many things in this country are, about creating and entrapping people in a permanent underclass from which there is little hope of escape. Saddling people, and yes usually a certain kind of people, who have served their time, with crippling debt so that they'll be forced into accepting worse working conditions forever. Or end up back in prison again where the state can further profit off of their bodies.

As an added bonus, those that cannot pay the fees have also not technically completed the terms of their sentence and therefore cannot have their voting rights restored.

Welcome to Hell World.

It was largely uneventful V___ said but she said she couldn’t stop thinking about this rabbit she had seen killed on the side of the road. This specific rabbit had been fucking her up all day she said passing the butter for the lobster.

None of them before she arrived had really had a handle on how to kill the lobsters humanely in the preparation.This always having been her duty. Deciding after all to just let them boil alive then step out of the room out of some kind of ill-imagined pantomime of respect.

I’m Mr. Spider-Man from the other room.

A___ said an Our Father just in case and felt so fucking stupid about it.

What about the rabbit bothered you so much S___ asked and the mother her sister in law said it was just there crushed to a dirty pulp.

Isn’t roadkill pretty common on that stretch A___ said and she said yes yes it’s just that it was all the way seven lanes across the eight lane highway. It must have been running from the woods on the southbound side all the way across toward the water.

What do you mean he said.

Well it almost made it.

The woman in the pink pajama bottoms was writhing in anguish splayed out across three waiting room chairs which I suppose isn't out of the ordinary for an emergency department but I thought perhaps naively that someone would be arriving sooner than this to help her. To collect her up. Swaddle her. At least usher her backstage. Certainly they can't let this play out I thought.

You sometimes think that's how it works but then you remember. You might just get left somewhere.

I can't do it she said. I can't do it. Over and over. I can't do it. Punctuated only by a brief moment of heroic resolve. I can do it. I can do it. One out of twenty.

It was some kind of withdrawal or come down situation I presumed having been through a similar routine a number of times myself over the years more often than not on the floor of my bedroom or bathroom twisting and twisting like a tornado and praying and praying and punching myself in the face out of some deluded and desperate plan to bring on merciful temporary oblivion. Eternal maybe who cares just not this.

One of the best case scenarios for how it goes for any of us is that a person gets to lay there waiting for it to come for a good long while. Not too long mind you. Not that. Nobody wishes for that.

Whoever is left to give a shit or feel as if they have to present as giving a shit stops by and most often doesn’t know how to act no matter how many times they’ve gone through it and no matter how many times we all have gone through it. Catholics I mean. Other kinds of people too sure. Although a lot of them seem less afraid of it. The one single thing that definitely happens.

Bringing instead of overt love food because they only know how to socialize with the living. People with a future.

The past is something you contend with alone.

A Republican shot a Republican with a gun beloved by Republicans and Democrats looked themselves in the eye and said we're sorry for doing this we gotta be nicer to Republicans. Perhaps stop campaigning so hard.

On the plus side it did provide a respite for about two days where they stopped texting me five times an hour begging for money.

It was another example of how as always Republicans play by soccer rules flopping around after a light shin graze and crying to the refs. Democrats play ultimate frisbee rules calling fouls on themselves out of respect to the spirit of the game. ...

It's so obvious it's barely worth mentioning but the right believes political violence and punishing their enemies and violent protest is for them to do to the left and it is an affront to the natural order if done to them. That's it. The hypocrisy is part of the thrill.

Yesterday you disassembled our ancient vacuum. Piece by piece. To figure out if it was worth saving. Cleaned every plastic purple part of it. I thought of a Marine breaking down his rifle.

There must be dust in its bowels from five apartments ago you said.

You had never cleaned it this thoroughly before you said.

Inside of its barrel guts was so much shedded tangled hair that had fallen off of us and the last of the dogs that we had once loved. That had been bred for us to die. Curled and compacted into solid hardened knots like a cancer. We carried all of it from home to home without even knowing it. Everywhere we had to move away from. Smuggled in our baggage like a stowaway.

A staggering number of journalists in Gaza have been killed by Israel. Many of them purposefully assassinated then slandered as "terrorists" in death. 160 and counting in fact. It's an ignominious record. More than the number of journalists killed in World War II, the Vietnam War, and in Ukraine combined.

The bravery of the remaining few still there doing their jobs every day among the rubble and bone is stunning to me. So many of our major journalists here won't even acknowledge this pattern of targeting them for what it is: blatant and obvious war crimes.

A lot of them still insist in fact every day that they have it coming.

I'm sure some small percent of mainstream U.S. journalists do have sympathy and respect for their colleagues in Gaza in private or in their heart of hearts or whatever but who fucking cares. They don't report on it enough or talk about it out loud with the anger and solidarity it deserves because it is simply too dangerous for them! They might have to find a less prestigious job if they start explaining the world as it actually is. Can you imagine how difficult that would be?

The contrast in courage is astonishing.

I marvel at the design of our weapons. So sophisticated they can transform any man woman or child they pummel into a terrorist. Writing in their flight between launch and concussion an entire alternate history of a life.

Just as the cop's bullet convicts you of a crime. Its presence in your body evidence enough that it belongs there.

A violent transubstantiation.

We were going to have to put Jodie Foster down. Out of her misery they said. Send her up to the very same farm my parents conjured for me the last time this scenario played out when I was a child.

She hadn’t been hungry much of late but I kept smuggling pieces of my dinner into her bowl when no one else was looking anyhow. Most of my steak one night and the bulk of a turkey sandwich for lunch and that kind of thing for the last month or so. Hoping that a switch would flip in her brain.

She knew something was weird about it and I knew she knew that.

I got the idea that she instinctively sensed that I was bullshitting her somehow. Dogs are so dumb but an old dying dog is wise enough in its way. Knows things we do not.

What if anything stood out for you there because for me it was the daughter's recognition of a novel type of munition flying over her head. Imagine being bombed so frequently that you come to know – even as a child – the different kinds of missiles sent to kill you by the sounds they make? By the size of the holes they leave behind. A sommelier's expertise in destruction. And what a bounty of varietals we have delivered to her and so many millions of others like her in our bloody history.

I know I should have known that sort of thing and maybe I already did know that and I had forgotten or tried not to think about it too much but does it sicken you too thinking about it right now? That there are so many people around the world who have been brought by our works to talk about bombs like we might different kinds of precipitation. Look at the little app on our phones and figure out what will be falling from the sky today rain or snow or sleet. ...

I am not naive to be clear. I did not just learn about how the world works today. In the past year. It's just that my stubborn belief in the goodness of the world and the goodness of people has been so hard to finally and utterly kill off. And every day it repairs itself just enough like a slowly mending heart. Just enough blood left in it to keep beating.

I saw a video of a man being burned alive in a hospital tent. The IV still attached to his arm. Someone was trying to heal him and someone was trying to harm him and the latter won out in that contest as they almost always do. Murder being so much quicker and easier than medicine. By the latter someone I mean Israel and the United States of course. That goes without saying. The most prolific exporter of terror around the globe for longer than I've been alive and our unhinged henchman.

Think of how difficult it must be for the bulldozer driver to roll his terrible machine over the bodies of the living and the dead alike.

I imagine it must be hard to do so much killing. I certainly do not believe I could do it. I imagine that would take a toll on a person. Engaging in mass murder. Torture. Slaughter. It's something Frantz Fanon saw in his treatment of French torturers in Algeria. It's something even fucking Heinrich Himmler knew. Murdering women and children is a difficult thing for a man to do. Most men anyway. It must nevertheless be done of course so what if there were a way to depersonalize it? To remove the intimacy of it? To industrialize it?

To the point where it is no longer one human being killing another human being it is simply the maintenance and operation of a vast machinery. Insert ammunition on one end and it spits out corpses on the other.

At least 75,000 tons of bombs have been dropped on Gaza in the past year. Although that estimate came from way back in April.

That sort of killing must be so much easier to do.

I know my common refrain in here is that despite how terrible things are we have to maintain our faith in humanity. That we are better than this. And I do think that about humanity. That's something different than American voters though. You cannot underestimate our capacity for violence and hatred to the point of self-sabotage enough. Someone must always be punished even if its also ourselves.

Wouldn't it also be nice if we had an alternative to this that inspired hope that things don't have to be this way? Won't always be this way. Imagine someone whose closing argument wasn't about how much Republicans like her now. Whose stances on immigration and crime weren't only somewhat less draconian. Who was able to muster a full-throated defense of trans people. Wasn't inviting "pro-life" people into the coalition. Who was willing to meet with Arab and Muslim voters and tell them that when it is finally up to her this genocide her administration has been funding might one day end.

We don't get that though. We get this. These are our choices. What did we do to deserve this besides everything as a country we've ever done?

I said no one knows anything but I do know this and I swear to you that it is true:

A better world than this is possible.
There is enough to go around and no one needs to suffer or go without as they so routinely do.

This is further what I believe:

Every single person by default deserves a home and healthcare and an education and a job that pays them enough to live and enjoy leisure and equal rights and dignity and safety regardless of gender or race or birthplace and an end to the perpetual war machine and I'm so fucking sick of being told this is radical by my supposed coalition partners.

Unfortunately there is currently no party in the United States who also believe in this self-evidently moral but also politically viable worldview. Instead we have professional Democrats once again blaming the left for their own failure...

I had a brief crisis of conscience last night. After having looked at the photo of this murdered man in news stories and seeing his eyes so many times in a row I started to wonder if we were all acting too cruelly. But then I remembered that every day companies like this look millions of suffering, injured, sick and dying people pleading with them for help directly in the eye and tell them to go fuck their mother.

Actually that's not true. They just press a button or let an algorithm decide our fate. They don't even have the decency to look people in the eye. They leave that up to some other guy. That care part is not their business. Raking in the money is.

"There had been some threats," Thompson's wife told NBC News. "Basically, I don’t know, a lack of coverage? I don’t know details."

Well you wouldn't know would you? The details are for the people on the other end of the healthcare system to contend with.

Fucking up my back lifting when I was young – and looking at this dude it's pretty safe to guess that's what happened to him – is the single most significant event in my life and my various efforts to self medicate the pain over the years will likely lead to my early death lol.

If you've ever lived with chronic back pain like I do you know that it can make the world a very dark place. It isn't just the physical pain – the lightning strikes throughout your nerves or being unable to walk or sit for very long or to get up and down stairs – it takes an intense psychological toll just to continue to exist. And that's all while you're also being made to jump through the hoops and over the barriers that insurance companies erect to prevent your pain from being taken seriously.