A memory of a photo rather than my life as it happened

That is just some guy that's not me

Luke O'Neil

30 Jun 2026 • 13 min read

A river I looked at

I love it how a few times a year we all gather around the computer to find out which of our constitutional rights we no longer have. A tradition like none other!

The other day I sent out this piece by Niko Stratis to paid subscribers. It's about the new and final Jackass film and the gang's delightfully dangerous, hilarious and heartwarming legacy. It's a good one.

He pulls the trigger again. Click. Again. Click. It’s a harder scene to watch than one that appears later, where grown men wear see-through pants and drink heavy laxatives to slosh around in their own shit. When the gun finally fires, Knoxville is shocked, but delighted, and runs to his friends and their waiting car, the gun left smoking on the ground, laughing maniacally as he leaps in and drives away.

It’s his laugh that disarms it. It’s his laugh that disarms everything, as if it alone is what stops bullets. There is no real Jackass without it and without him specifically wielding it, and it’s only natural that it’s hard to say farewell to it ringing in our ears. I have been raised by Jackass, buying CKY tapes at a local skate shop and sharing bootlegs of the original MTV Jackass series aired in 2000 when I was 18 years old. They showed me a better example of masculinity than I had ever seen before, and modeled a creative use for self-destructive desires, that they might lead to glorious self-expression. That I never ended up being a man at all is no one's fault, it’s just that I wanted to stop being alive, and start living, and to do so meant learning to do a controlled explosion of the self.

Thank you to all of you for your support I am sincerely grateful.

I shared a few new poems in that paid newsletter as well but here's an even newer one.

The sword situation

The sword dangling over my head had lowered a bit over night. Still not close enough that I was freaking out but I could sense its movement. I called my brother to check if there were any developments with respect to his sword and he said he could sort of make it out way up there if he squinted. I don’t know why everyone’s losing it over these swords he said. Then I called my congresswoman to ask yet again if there were any plans to tackle the sword situation as it were and the girl who answered said it was the official position of the office that the swords do not exist except in some rare cases abroad. I could tell she was reading from a script. Can you tell her that they most certainly do exist I said and she said that she would pass the message along and hung up. Outside some landscapers were at work trimming the neighbor’s hedges. Each of them with a gleaming blade perched inches from the back of their necks. Why didn’t they just grab it at this point I thought. Why didn’t they just reach right up and grab it.

Let me ask you something. When you see an old picture of yourself are you capable of sort of jumping back into your own contemporaneous consciousness from when it was taken? Or are you like me where you can merely access a handful of keywords that generally encapsulate that time for you? Like maybe three headlines. That is from when I was in college. That was when I was dating so and so. I was living in that shitty apartment then etc.

I have something that I think is relatively common where there will be a core event from my life – a big family vacation for example – and all I can remember of it is the one or two photos that remain and that have now come to stand in as the memory itself. I know we went to Disney World when I was around 13 but all I can recall now is I had a (fucking sick by the way) Appetite for Destruction t-shirt on that I was very proud of because that is all the information that has been preserved. A memory of a photo rather than my life as it happened. More often I'll see a photo of myself and think that is just some guy. I do not know that person.

There are dogs that I loved more than anything when I was a child and I see photos of myself with them and now and all I can think is "I loved that dog the end." People too which is even sadder.

I posted something like this the other day and got a lot of wildly different answers. Some people seem to be able to time travel for lack of a better term right back into their body and look around and hear and feel the things around them out of the picture's frame. Here's what people said. Tell me about your experience if you like and maybe I'll share some more of them.

I remember events from my trip to Disney World when I was 5. I’m in my mid 50s now. Not the entire trip. Several memories that are first person movie clips with dialogue. I’ve described memories to my parents that they say happened when I was two, but I can’t remember a name for shit.
What's crazy is that it's actually super easy to implant false memories because of this.
Depends on the photo. Sometimes it’s a headline, and other times I can return to the moment, feel emotions in context of that version of me at that moment, be in the room. Especially if others are in the photo.
The way my daughter describes it, it's as if she remembers things, if at all, as a set of bullet points. There's something called "severely deficient autobiographical memory" (SDAM) that seems to fit what she describes. I don't have a photographic memory, but when I see an old photo of me, I can usually remember what the rest of the place in the photograph looked like, and other details, like smells, sounds (birds, traffic, creaking stairs), or what the furniture felt like.
I remember my physical environment vividly and see myself as who I was then.
You know how you get stop motion vision when you are drunk AF? That's kinda how I remember the past.
Depending on the era, sometimes I can't even come up with much more than a vague year.
I’m right back in it, to the point where I can summon echoes of the feelings I was feeling. Some photos are going to have stronger residue than others, but being a millennial means there are fewer total photos of me from the past than someone who grew up with smartphones, so maybe the ones that exist hold more memories for me.
I have SDAM, so my memories are mostly just facts. Some pictures – ones that I've seen often – have more facts attached to them, but I think many of these were "loaned" to me from family and others who have described the photo.
It’s a jump back. Whether lovely, painful, or something else, I remember how I felt, who I shared it with, why I chose what I wore, and what I was thinking about when the picture was taken. Part of me loves that my brain retains all that – another part wishes it’d forget some of it.
It’s like looking at a stranger.
Keywords. To the point where, especially with older photos, my memory/feeling is associated more with the photo than of the event the photo captured.
I can access it all as long as it was after, say, 2005. The farther back it is, the harder it is to reach because I'm sure I'm unconsciously overriding it with my own historical revisionism.
Depends how old the pic is I think. Something from like 8 years ago I probably have more than just headlines. Shit from my 20s? Forget about it. Lucky to have the couple headlines to be honest.
I have debated my past self on whether the action I took at the time was correct or not. It happens somewhat frequently when I'm on hikes. It's like it's basically Olympic-level dissociation. Sometimes just flipping between me watching memory me and memory me experiencing the time and place they are in. Even if it's just studying in the grad lounge.
If I remember the event where the photo was taken, it’s pretty vivid. But a lot of times I have absolutely no idea and am just like, well, there I am, I guess.
I sometimes get a strong sense reaction like I’m smelling a smell, or feeling something physical that was super familiar when that picture was taken. It’s very acute and almost places me in that moment, then it goes away almost instantly and I’m left with the headlines. I do love it when it happens.
Songs and smells get the full ride, pictures of myself get like nothing.
I feel like I can jump back in, but I think I am probably pasting a lot of my current consciousness onto my idea/memory of what that time was like. I don't know how accurate it is.
I remember everything in great detail which can be a curse.
Photos don't do it for me, in part because I am a radically different person at 52 than 20 – it feels like watertight doors slammed shut on anything over 10 years ago. But scents and sounds can instantaneously transport me to specific consciousness moments decades ago, even if only for a second.
This is a good question. As a walking mass of constant memory, which probably is a large reason I became an addict and alcoholic, I can get right back in there immediately. I spent decades trying get away from it, but thankfully that’s not really a thing anymore.
I remember way too much, which can be a blessing or a curse (sometimes both).
I faked myself into thinking I could do this as a child. Looking at a prominent pic of myself on a playground when I was 3. But the answer is no, I don't have access to any of it.
I was a drunk at like 15, so some deets get hazy, but aside from stuff like that I have a photographic memory and direct emotional recall. It fucking sucks. I toted a lot of baggage around until I finally started therapy seven years ago, it's all still accessible (though I do try to leave it alone).

As I may have mentioned I well and truly destroyed by elbows by lifting all the fucking time about a year and a half ago and they still haven't healed. Instead I've been running a few miles every single day since then and you're never going to believe what happened? I fucked up my back so bad about a week ago I finally had to stop. Now have I decided to rest and do nothing? Of course not. Instead I have been taking long ass walks and looking at nature. Here are some photos I took of rivers and bogs for all to enjoy. If you want to you can follow me on Instagram to get my silly photos directly from the tap but don't be a weirdo about it please.

It's the end of the month! Wow that sure was a good and/or bad month. Here's what you may have missed in Hell World.

A really great one on the bullshit myth of "America" by Josh Caress.

There has never been a time in American history when our country was not mythologizing itself to cover atrocities. At every turn, embracing American identity has meant choosing a false reality over a true one. This is how the nation was conceived, how it has operated, and what it continues to do. This is what settler colonialism is: the forced replacement of reality with fantasy. This is also why the fantasy is indispensable. To question it is to unravel the whole thing. And so every time a crack is revealed, there are always those ready to plug the hole with new iterations of the myth. We can’t let it go.

An excerpt from All My Dead Cats and Other Losses by s.e. smith.

Grief associated with politicized losses, which can carry a double weight of anger and sorrow about the loss itself, but also grief about the way the loss played out and was treated by society, are often not understood as a form of disenfranchised grief. People in this situation are unable to mourn the very real and immediate loss of loved ones because those deaths have become wrapped in something larger that doesn’t belong to them anymore. These kinds of deaths are all around us, and sometimes it is hard for us to remember that a prominent, widely discussed death also involves very real people who were close to the decedent in a culture that projects a variety of things onto these deaths.

Me on Trump and some other shit.

Much like many other monarchs and authoritarians Trump has made sure not to cultivate any plausible heirs his entire time in office because an heir is a threat. A symbol of his impermanence. In fact he has always turned on any of the relatively competent standard issue evil guys in his administration (besides Stephen Miller who he knows is too much of a fucking worm to ever be elected anything besides Race Ranker) and taken great joy in humiliating the dumber ones who have stayed loyal (Marco Rubio for example). To state the obvious Trump does not give a shit about the viability of the Republican party going forward or about the country itself or indeed the world.

Zack Budryk with a lovely meditation on grief and how it changes over time.

One of these inexpressible phenomena tied to loss (and there are hundreds that no one person could hope to coherently catalogue) is the way the person you’ve lost is fixed in amber for all time the way they were when they died, but the ghost in their place is changing every second of every day. There are a thousand different Carolines who have lived by my side and given me counsel in the last ten years, all of them as true and real as every other and all of them ungraspable even by other people who loved her, much as their own thousand Carolines could never be understood or felt by me.

A bunch of poetry by me in this one.

This was obviously sad news to hear. I didn’t know him all that well personally but I had been to his apartment in Inman Square a dozen times over the years and drank his tea and he of course had taken a pretty thorough peak under the hood of my life finances-wise. I felt the urge to cry for him but then had the idea he wouldn’t respect it. Stiff upper lip and all that. Instead I told him I would say a little prayer for him and I don’t think he cared for that very much either but he said thank you anyway because even dying people default to being polite.

When we hung up I cried all the same. I will cry for any of you behind your back whether you like it or not.

Me on my favorite band.

All my friends were there. Of course they were, because all my friends were always at Great Scott and all my friends were always at The Sheila Divine show.

Almost everything that ever happened to me in my life, good or bad, came out of the Boston indie and punk scenes of the late ’90s to 2010s. My friends, my wife, my career, I wouldn’t have any of it otherwise. And so many of those nights were soundtracked by this specific band. We were there throughout all their highs and lows too. Shouting along to our favorite songs.

That's all for today. Thank you for being here in all of the senses of the term.