what is real after death? after love? after life?
a real-time hyperfiction experiment

I prefer the worse you. I like it when you’re a bit depressed, less manic.

“Fuck. That’s not what I want to hear. ‘I prefer the low John.’ You see how messed up that is, right? I’m easier to control. Yes, dear, that’s fine. What would you like to do tonight? Okay, that’s fine. Everything’s fine. Nothing is fine.”

“You’re upset.”

“Correct!”

“I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“For making you upset.”

“Okay. Um. Thanks.”

+++

All is not well. All is exactly where it’s supposed to be, me included. I mean, if you believe in that sort of spiritual thing. If all is well, then all is hard. At this moment in time, the world is on fire with AI data centers, world wars being launched to protect the world’s worst person. What are we doing, humanity? What’s the point?

What am I doing here? Why am I here? What’s the point of MY life?

I don’t know. I am trying to decode and decipher the messages. They are encoded in songs, texts, pointed memoirs, or something hybrid where I begin to swizzle fiction, fact, songs from Ani DeFranco, songs of my own, songs of myself, my lovers of the past, my lovers to come. I am aspirational in my creative acts.

I make mistakes. I fuck up. This is one of those moments.

Yet, I have been doing the right things. The world is topsy-turvy. Last week I finally landed a job, a good job with all the features and benefits. Boom.

The same day I was awarded a new job, the company froze all new hires due to the Trump/Iran/Netanyahu War.

Why? The gutting of the IRS has caused my refund to be challenged and slowed down. The unemployment claim was denied by Jeff Bezos’s stolen organic grocery empire. Why? It makes them look bad to pay unemployment. Okay. And now, the $5000 that was money I paid into the system is withheld. Money that would’ve provided infrastructure and support. No. The appeal is in process. No timeline on the hearing.

Defer, delay, sue, appeal, lose, appeal to a higher court.

Okay, God. I’m ready for my close-up. This struggle is hard on my life, my body, my relationships. I am happy. I am content. I have joy bursting at the seams most mornings. I protect those moments. I encourage the complications that add time to doing the things I love. I recently started grinding and brewing my coffee again. Those extra steps give me some little joy highlights.

Cats get their half-packet of wet topper. I prepare the brewer. The cats also have their morning routines. Sid gets the first topper, on the left. Hunter waits patiently for his. They both dig in, and in seconds the minijoy is over. I grind my beans, and they flee the kitchen. They come back if they are hungry. I smell the coffee and set the pot to brew. I have a lot of options in that next liminal phase.

If a story or idea is percolating in my mind, often I will wake up with a compulsion to write it down. My “morning pages” have become part of my life rhythm. I’ve learned that checking email or the NYTimes in the early hours is a bad idea. Why infect a perfect moment with intrusions from the outside world? The war. The chaos and pain are being inflicted all over the world. By evil people.

Okay, we (humans of the light) have to rise up together and take back our agency. We do not want to burn up the planet for SLOP-generating AIs that are being used to rip off human artists in a non-human way. The shepherds of this growing plague of technology bubbles are in a race. They have some ideas about escaping our dead planet for Mars or the Moon or other stars.

They may not understand the concept of light-years and the theoretical limits of Einsteinian physics. There is no FTL (faster than light) travel. Warp doesn’t exist. Hyperspace is a science fiction concept.

Much like god, we humans are trying to conceive of ourselves and our role in the universe. We would be arrogant enough to imagine that we are the only sentient beings that have evolved over the last several million years. We are not alone.

But in the expanding universe (have you heard they think the rate is decreasing, not continually accelerating, like we used to believe), we have not received definitive proof, but we may have been kept from the truth. That’s the X-Files and Torchwood in a nutshell.

There is other life in the universe. God is not human. We are temporarily humans. We get to decide what channel of life we want to subscribe to.

The good side, the humanism side. The bad side, “empathy is man’s greatest weakness,” Elon Musk. Gross. And he’s the world’s second most hated man. He is not a genius. The companies he’s known for, he purchased. He did not invent StarLink, Tesla, or Neurolink. But I can tell you, I don’t want him having any more control over my data than I want him controlling and buying our elections.

We’ve got to fight for the good side. We’ve got to vote for what’s right for the planet, for ALL humans, and not just the wealthy and white and American/Jewish.

I am not in control of anything. I can regulate my own mind. I can find reasons to be happy and hopeful even in the most dire situations. The one I’m in now is dark and deep.

It is not the dark night of the soul. I passed through several of those in my teens, a few more in my twenties, and most recently when I was breaking up again, losing yet another library of books to Half-Priced Books.

But our undoing is also our forged-by-fire moment. “You either make it, or you will die.” From the aforementioned partner. She was right. I made it. Neither of us died. The relationship died. I had to leave. I was no longer going to be the focus and joy of her life.

In your fire moments, how did you cope? What prayers gave you comfort? Can you see how all of your actions, all of your daily inputs (news, emails, texts, books, social media) are filling your mind? Are you filling your mind with things that hurt, things you are fearful of, podcasts that feed a narrative that pulls you deeper into a dark place?

In your dark moments, in your “all is lost” moments, what do you do to soothe yourself? How can you reconnect with god, higher power, great spirit, Allah, Bawana John?

What I learned after my first divorce, reading Dark Night of the Soul by Thomas Moore, is that human expression of pain and struggle is a noble cause. The tradition of lament and lambast is long. In the book, he talks about adding your voice to the canon of people who have suffered from depression.

Give voice to the pain. Write your own Disappear. (A Radiohead song I covered at the close of my second divorce, from the mother of my two lovely children.) I was dying. I was still living in the house. She’d seen a lawyer about her options. We were in couples therapy. I had tried a second time to fix our relationship. She was constructing her exit.

And still, what came out of the seizure and destruction of all that I loved and lived for was me. My voice rose up in response to the pain and anguish I was experiencing in a horrible divorce. A woman who continued to attack me years after the divorce. There’s a book about that one.

I write. I try to understand by digging into my own mind. My words approximate my thoughts. Writing is one of my delights. A form of meditation. A self-reflective moment. Not quite meditating, that’s stopping those thoughts and being centered in your breathing or your mantra or some other form of meditation.

I fail.

I fall apart.

I write.

I recover my balance. I move back to the “agro” boyfriend. The one who speaks up when something sucks, who complains, and asks for changes in the dynamics.

“On False Move and I’m Gone” is a documentary about Jack Kerouac. I do know I am attracted to writers of extreme style. Starting with Walt Whitman, leading to D. H. Lawrence, to Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Laurence Durrell, Salinger, Hunter S. Thompson, and David Foster Wallace.

Blow and go. Find your subterranean rhythm and blow your horn. Blow your top. Get freaky, lost, confused, distracted, depressed. Do what gets you “high” in life. Drugs are not the way forward. You and your brilliant beautiful human mind, that is the only way up and out for us.

In writing, in streaming my words as closely to the fractured and tortured thoughts of my “narrator,” I am crafting something like a videotape of events happening around me. That was a concept from the therapist my wife and I were seeing. We were at a traditional couples therapist. We were doing SCT. System Centered Therapy.

One of the other concepts of the approach is to play back the videotape of an event in your mind. (In therapy, you might be encouraged to replay the tape.) As part of the process, then, the other person responds with their own version of the events. The work of this therapeutic idea is that by aligning our communication styles, we can move towards one another in our attention, in our emotional availability.

In SCT, “framing” is the mind’s reframing of a narrative (internal my videotape, external, how my partner felt or experienced the events) to fit a desired appearance to the outside world, to our partners, to our employers. We can frame our childhood trauma, for example, as part of what made us resilient and strong. This is correct and yet unhelpful.

Your childhood trauma, my dad’s abusive alcoholic behavior, has no redeeming value. My response to that trauma is more like a muscle I developed to guard and fight against someone else’s addictions or their abusive behavior.

As we grow, as I have grown, I have adapted my sense of self, my ideas about “framing,” and tried to find the focus in my daily, hourly attention, to focus on the things I can manage. My actions. My words. (This writing.) My response to another’s words or actions. My ex-wife likes to use frames to put a false story, a protective story, around a painful event.

In SCT you tried to remove the frame to see the reality you and your partner shared. Are there datapoints that you agree on? What’s the part you disagree on? Is it okay to disagree? Does everything in a relationship, partnership, or friendship have to resolve perfectly? Do I have to agree with the politics of my partner? (For me, yes. For some, not so much.)

I am tired of my words today. They are not paying the electric bill. I am tired of having to reframe current events (personally and globally) in some positive light.

Things are shit in the world, right now. I have big issues. No frame is going to get me out of my current pickle. Only action is going to provide change and movement. Staying stuck in a historical hurt, a past trauma, a story you are still telling yourself about your failings; all of those things are going to mire you down in your own muck.

Acknowledge the pain. Find the action you can take right now. How can you stop in the moment, take a quick inventory, body scan, energy check? I feel sad about my son. I have caught a sad. Like a sneeze, we can choose to get a tissue, wipe our face, wash our hands, and move on to what we can do about it. Do about life. Do to change what’s not right in your world. My world. Our world.

I open this new chapter with a prayer.

I give thanks for the trauma of the past
I ask to be relieved of the suffering
Transform the energy into some human expression 
I share hope, experience, and strength
I write to transform myself first
I share to reach out my hand to you
Hope is what we need right now
May you have hope, love, and comfort
Right now

Move towards your goals in all of your actions. When making transitions from one activity (paying bills) to another. Ask yourself two questions:

How is my energy? How is my heart?

If you know your goals, if you have a strategy for your life, you can align with that plan. If you have no plan, or the plan has been shaken by someone else’s action, get your plans in order. Draw your plan. Mood board your happy plan. Write a poem. A prayer. A song. Express your pain. If you feel it, share it.

Not everything is for sharing. Some things are just for you. Find your balance in what you do and what you want to be doing. Don’t want to be agro and stressed? Quit listening to podcasts of the manosphere or the momosphere, unless they give you relief. Sometimes, listening to someone else’s pain and how they recovered is just the hope you need. I don’t listen to podcasts. I have other inputs I’m interested in cultivating.

Cultivate your life. Remove the energy drains. Find the leaky behaviors that are causing you health or emotional issues. Find your goal. Stick to the plan. If you vary from the plan, fall off the wagon for one day, simply get back up and get back on the horse.

What do you want to think about today? Will that fuel your actions towards your goals?

Downtime and alone time, sad time, are all valuable human time. Together time with your friends, partners, or colleagues is also valuable human time. I have been seeking a partner since my divorce 16 years ago this August, 2026.

I will leave you with lyrics from one of my favs.

I still haven’t found
what I’m looking for.
– U2

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© 2026 john oakley mcelhenney, all rights reserved