A system which gives so much to so few
They caught my ass feeling inspired by a politician again. (Not to mention tearing up watching Lucy Dacus singing Bread and Roses). I know and I'm sorry but it is so fucking refreshing to see a politician that actually loves the city he lives in and represents. Fuck what you've heard your entire life about the noble isolated rural individualist it's cities that are in fact the Real America. Both in practice and in the ideal.
A few sections of Zohran Mamdani’s inaugural speech that I wanted to highlight:
"In writing this address, I have been told that this is the occasion to reset expectations, that I should use this opportunity to encourage the people of New York to ask for little and expect even less. I will do no such thing. The only expectation I seek to reset is that of small expectations. Beginning today, we will govern expansively and audaciously. We may not always succeed. But never will we be accused of lacking the courage to try."
"We will govern without shame and insecurity, making no apology for what we believe. I was elected as a democratic socialist and I will govern as a democratic socialist. I will not abandon my principles for fear of being deemed radical. As the great Senator from Vermont once said, 'What’s radical is a system which gives so much to so few and denies so many people the basic necessities of life.'"
I liked this part in particular because it touches on what is perhaps the entire thesis of my project here with this newsletter if there were such a thing:
"For too long, those fluent in the good grammar of civility have deployed decorum to mask agendas of cruelty."
I've already seen a number of Professional Political Dunces feign confusion about what he means by this (like this one here) but it's really quite simple: It's the Rube Goldberg machine of pain my dear boy!
Luke O’Neil
The Supreme Court and politicians and their defenders think they should be able to start up the Rube Goldberg machine of pain then walk away and by the time the boot at the end kicks us all in the balls we'll forget who inserted the ball at the top. No! I saw you put the little silver ball in the thing! I saw you do it. It didn't just happen by magic it was a decision that was made by people.
Politics is making decisions that send people to suffer and to starve and to scrape by and to slowly but surely die. It might take a bit longer than other more reliable forms or killing but it is killing all the same. Almost every single utterance from a Republican (and plenty from Democrats) about their intended policy is an attempt to set real violence against real people into motion by someone else's hands (usually cops but also doctors and landlords etc) which is ok for some reason under the rules of the civility game.
Frederick Douglas also talked about this kind of thing in a famous speech in Washington, D.C. on July 5, 1875.
Read more on the origins of "bread and roses" here in this old Hell World.
We've got a loaded one here for you. Today another kind of hope in the darkness. Mike Brown writes about coming through the Hell on Earth of addiction, violence and homelessness and his efforts to tell the truth, follow the law, and integrate himself back into society. It's quite a good piece and I'm proud to share it. You can also read it here.
Chip in to help pay our writers if you can.
And be sure to read this one if you haven't yet featuring the best of Hell World's contributors.
Luke O’Neil
It is still The Newsletter, but Luke also turned Hell World into a pretty fantastic magazine over the last year. It is always worth paying for, but he's made it increasingly worth it.
— David_j_roth (@davidjroth.bsky.social) 2025-12-27T16:38:18.919Z
I'm very sorry to say that we've recently lost Mike Fossey, one of the funniest posters, and people, in the world. If you've spent any time online, especially on Twitter in the good old days, you will certainly have read and laughed at his work. I wrote about him in this piece for Flaming Hydra earlier in the week which you can read here (for free) or down below at the end of this newsletter.
Luke O’Neil
I wasn’t super close with Mike. We were buddies online in the way that people are, although I got the chance to meet him a couple times. I remember the first, maybe eight or so years ago, meeting up at a concert in Harvard Square. He was sweet and funny in person, too, and we walked around the corner to smoke a joint. I remember being sincerely kind of nervous about it, worried I wouldn’t be able to keep up. That I wasn’t going to be funny enough. Like I was hanging out with a beloved famous comedian or something. Which is what he was, in fact.
This is the fourth fucking longtime friend, online or IRL, that I had to write about losing in 2025. All between 35-55 years old. I just said this a couple weeks ago but I am so sick of writing eulogies. Will you motherfuckers please stop dying?
Nevertheless rest in peace to David Flanagan, Jeff Lawrence, and Kaleb Horton. You are remembered.
We also lost Perry Bamonte of The Cure last week. What a sound. What a band. Read this one if you missed it.
Luke O’Neil
And uh Brigitte Bardot too.
READ MY BOOK PLEASE
I'm going to turn it over to Mike Brown now. More from me after that. Thank you for being here and for being alive.
Why I Started Trying to Follow The Law
by Mike Brown
“I want to be more honest,” I told my counselor. I’ve gotten used to talking to counselors, case workers, psychiatrists, nurses and nurse practitioners over the past two years. At this point I am down to just a few case workers, one counselor, and one psychiatrist. But so I told this counselor that “I want to stop lying, I want to stop cheating, and I want to stop breaking the law.”
“I think that’s a great idea,” the counselor said. “You’ve really been showing growth lately.”
These people have all blurred together into an archetype, The Clinician, which I have internalized and incorporated into my ongoing process of self integration. That’s right folks I’m getting integrated. I recommend it. After all, we live in a disintegrating culture. We need integration.
But I haven’t been working on myself as a means to working on the greater world. I’m not at a point in my life where I can fix the world. It looks like everyone else has that covered anyway. Let them handle it. I scarcely have power over myself. If I’d had power over myself to begin with I would not have ended up on the streets, or in a tent in the Sonoran Desert for a year, or in one hospital for alcoholic organ damage, or in another hospital for methamphetamine abscesses, or in another hospital for co-occurring disorders that made me a threat to myself and others. I would not have been robbed countless times while passed out on train platforms or nodding off at bus stops. I would not have been arrested repeatedly. I would not have gotten my ass beat. Seen others die. Lost all those teeth. So before I get back to knowing everything about the world I’m going to get to know myself better so that I can get integrated.
I have an extensive trauma history going back to early childhood, but now in middle age I’m at the point where I have a strange fondness for the worst things that have ever happened to me. Things like being raped or suffering through years of homelessness and addiction. Because now by the grace of God or some miracle of nature I’m actually happy and healthy and have hard won wisdom that allows me to practice a special kind of compassion specifically because I have suffered and healed. So when someone feels so alone in the world that they have become obsessed with murdering those closest to them and killing themselves; or if someone has seen their friend get murdered in front of them; or when someone has been cast out by friends and family after descending into their own personal hell of addiction and criminality; or if someone has been homeless, or incarcerated, or is haunted by having been victimized or having victimized others I can talk to them as an equal and try to help them get integrated.
It’s important because all of these things can cause disintegration at a spiritual level and that can lead to pain, isolation, antisocial behavior and alienation from the worlds of work, family, friends and community. The end result of it all tends to be things like suicide, homicide, death by cop, institutionalization, incarceration, domestic violence, Hell on Earth.
I’ve met more murderers than I can count at this point. Some of them did not get caught. Some of them needed a friend to confess to. This time of year always reminds me of the Christmas I spent with one young man who was lonely because neither babymom (he had two) wanted him around the kids. We were watching college football on his phone in his pickup truck in a gas station parking lot outside of Tucson and he confessed to me that he’d once killed five people for one of the cartels in Florida. He was young, only 30, and he cried like a baby as he told me. But I’ve really gone off on a tangent here.
So I’m telling my counselor I want to be honest and follow the law. I wasn’t good at that before. I loved breaking the law. Now I’m working with the system. I’d been homeless. I got on Medicaid in the psych ward. I had to reapply when the new administration came in. I filled out new forms and did new interviews. Did the same for food and cash benefits. Then I moved to a new county and canceled my old food and cash assistance and applied for assistance in my new residence in New Jersey.
But I ended up running into a snag.
“What happened with your general assistance?” my counselor asked me. “Why aren’t they renewing it again?”
“I told them about my bank account but I can’t access it or provide paperwork because I don’t have a valid photo I.D. or access to my old email accounts or phone numbers.”
“Why did you tell them you had a bank account?”
“I’m trying to be honest.”
“Oh good grief,” my counselor laughed. “You’re really serious about this thing.”
I said that I was.
“Well life is complex and involves compromises and you said you wanted to work on your black and white thinking.”
“I filed an affidavit saying I couldn’t access my bank account because I’d been homeless and living in institutions for a year. That will work.”
“Even if you’re being radically, rigorously honest, it’s okay to lie to the Nazis about hiding Anne Frank in your house and it’s okay to lie to social services about your bank account. It’s not like you aren’t broke.”
“I am learning by doing,” I said.
I grew up in a dishonest environment in Ridgewood, New Jersey. My dad was a gangster who cheated on my mom. One of the women he cheated with was my babysitter who also sexually abused and stalked me. All the adults around me were addicts, criminals and sexual predators. Lying was de rigueur from a young age. Lie to teachers, lie to doctors, lie to extended family, lie to social workers, lie to the kids at school, and most importantly, lie to yourself and the ones you love, because the real enemy and the most dangerous thing is the truth itself. Not the police or family services, though they are on the list; and not any potential scandal, though that is also on the list. The greatest risk is that the truth might bring us into contact with our own consciences, and that once it does we might never be able to lie to ourselves again. The suffering that would result from that would be worse than scandal, worse than prison, worse than death.
This is a common theme in families like mine. You internalize the established ethos of dishonesty as a matter of psychic survival and end up convincing yourself that everyone else is the same and that nobody in the real world is actually happy, healthy, honest or decent. So by a young age I was a cynical alcoholic truant whose own family warned him against reading too much. It’s like they know that if you get too into Plato you might develop a fondness for Truth that could somehow infect the people around you and destroy everyone’s lives.
“So you filed an affidavit?” my counselor asked.
“I thought you were raised not to leave a paper trail?” he joked. He knew my dad never had a bank account or owned anything in his own name.
I felt comfortable around this counselor. He had done time in prison himself in the 80s. He’d seen a lot. His son had been murdered. His nephew had died of an overdose. He’d told me stories. He’d helped me get in touch with my conscience.
“Right. To the point where I stopped caring about my own documents so that I haven’t had a valid photo ID for fifteen years.”
Flash forward to a little later. I do have a valid ID now. After having spent years without a birth certificate, social security card, photo ID, car, job, residence or friends, I am working on becoming real on paper. This is part of my integration into society after having gotten to a place of integrity within myself. That was the hard part. I’d never really had much of a self. I’d always been unstable, prone to psychosis, bad at relationships, scared and scary. Ultimately I became a danger to myself and anyone around me and entered into a course of institutionalization that I am still involved in. I try to be honest. I try to follow the law.
I was born an outlaw and for a long time I took pride in being crazy and dangerous. But as pride often does this led me to fall pretty hard. In retrospect that was what I needed: to fall hard enough to shatter my own illusions about myself and the world so that I could wake up. I work on telling the story now. Because I’m not the only one who felt like he didn’t deserve a home or a bed because he was victimized in his own bed in his own home; and I’m not the only one who ended up on the streets high on hand sanitizer, methamphetamine and fentanyl, telling people that nobody had ever loved me and that I wished I could actually summon up courage enough to shoot myself in the face; and I was not the only one who’d made bad decisions when I knew better and told myself that I didn’t have to take responsibility for my own life because I was the biggest victim in the world; and I was not the only one who thought it didn’t matter what I said or did anyway because I was essentially invisible; and I was not the only one who passed out on the sidewalk as people walked over me and wondered what might have happened in my life that had led to such a moment; and I was not the only one who’d been kicked out of place after place and been beaten up by cops and criminals both; and I’m not the only one who became a violent criminal and victimized others myself; and I’m not the only one who got arrested over and over again and got to the point where I liked it because at least someone was interested in what I did; and I’m not the only one who’s woken up on a gurney in an emergency room out of an alcoholic blackout before signing in and suddenly feeling like I might have found a way out; and I’m not the only one who actually started to find joy in life and see the beauty in small things and take delight in the presence of other people even when they were giant pains in my ass; and I’m not the only one who wants to tell the story without leaving any of the bad parts out just so that I can make the point that life is still beautiful and worth living and that the world and other people are far more beautiful than I used to think.
I’ve had to work at getting sober, trying to be honest, giving up dealing, stealing, violence, vandalism, whatever. I still jaywalk occasionally. Life is complex and involves compromises. I try to be honest and follow the law now because doing so over time has led me to a point of being able to tell who I am and what I’m supposed to do. I can be a good person.
I’m not particularly good at pointing out what is wrong with the world. It works against me because I have a long history of pointing out the wrongdoings of others as a means of avoiding knowing myself through my own conscience. Deep down I was afraid that if I actually did know myself that I would suffer a fate worse than prison, worse than death. So I’m careful about that.
I’ve spoken with men who’ve been involved in scandals, who’ve gone to prison, who’ve murdered people. A good percentage of them suffer from the feeling that they have cast themselves out of human society and alienated themselves from their own consciences and loved ones by way of their actions. I’ve found that in being spoken to and listened to as if they were men and not monsters they got a glimpse of the light that was buried down at the bottom of it all. They saw that they had vast universes within themselves. Deep in the darkness they too had their stars and their heavens. When people who have been to the outer dark where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth somehow get to the point of seeing a little light in each other it can help them see the light in themselves and many others. This light can awaken a genuine desire to be good.
So when I talk to someone who’s trying to stay off heroin and hold down a job after drifting in and out of rehabs and halfway houses after doing ten years in prison for armed robbery or some shit, I tell him that the truth really can set him free. Because there is a thing that happens when you stop lying and worrying about getting caught. If you can get to where you’re not caught up with thinking about how to stay out of trouble you can find a measure of inner peace that allows for clarity and focus that leads to a more fulfilling and enjoyable life.
In my experience anyway.
“So you have ID now and you have a sense of purpose and you like helping other people,” my counselor said.
“Yeah, it still feels weird. I actually have a speaking commitment tomorrow night at the big spooky looking mental hospital that looks like a castle.”
“Well you know what to do.”
“Yeah I just show up and tell my story so that other people realize that they’re not alone and that they can get better and have fulfilling lives and good relationships and shit like that.”
“Right!”
“I need a photo ID to get into the hospital,” I said. “But I can swing that now. And I answer the phone when people call now. And I have the keys to the church in Roselle Park, and people actually ask me for advice about life and death situations. How bad does your life have to be that you ask me for advice?”
“Be honest,” he said. “You like it.”
“Yeah I like it.”
“So you can access your bank account now,” he said.
“Yeah I got a new card and everything. I just took all my paperwork to the bank and talked to them. I hadn’t had access for eleven months or so.”
“So now you can give your bank statements to social services.”
“Absolutely not,” I said. I learned that lesson. “It’s all about complexity and compromise.”
Mike Brown is a middle aged public library enthusiast living at the YMCA in Elizabeth New Jersey.
The Morning News
The Morning News asked me and a stellar lineup of friends and colleagues to write about the most and least important things of 2025. Here's what I said. Read the rest here.
I genuinely do not believe we can go on like this forever.
Most important: There are masked unaccountable federal agents assaulting citizens and non-citizens alike in the streets of major cities across the country. People are being disappeared and tortured on a daily basis at the whims of a rapidly deteriorating madman and the racist eugenicists in his employ. We are carrying out extrajudicial murders in international waters without even bothering to concoct plausible justifications for doing so.
None of this is particularly new of course. I know that and you know that. Much of it is simply the table stakes of existing in the United States and has been for my entire life. Some number of millions must always be made to suffer for the rest of our comfort and sense of “safety.” But it is nevertheless worse than usual. Bad things can always get worse and seem to be well on their way to just that.
One heartening thing is that there have been so many groups of decent people who have recognized how horrifying all this is and are organizing in their communities to stop it. I genuinely do not believe we can go on like this forever. You have to believe that we cannot. There’s no other point in going on otherwise.
Least important: My new book of stories and poems, We Had It Coming, which just so happens to largely be about the suffering we distribute throughout the world and here at home. I’ve been very fortunate to have so many readers who love my work, and whose support allows me to make my living, and I got to meet so many of them out on tour this fall, but I was kind of hoping that this might be the one to break through to a larger audience. Guess not. Fuck me. Still gonna start writing the next one though. There’s no other point in going on otherwise.
In post memoriam
RIP Mike F
It’s frigid in Massachusetts this morning. When I woke up early to assess the damage from some trees downed by the brutal winds overnight, I saw my neighbor carrying a big box out to their car. She said hello and then immediately ate shit on the icy sidewalk lol. After checking to make sure they weren’t seriously hurt, a certain phrase popped into my mind, as it has many dozens of times over the years.
“Check this shit out motherfucker…”
![Check this shit out motherfucker [I slide one foot out from under me and fall on my ass, its not clear what kind of move I was trying to do]](https://flaminghydra.com/content/images/2025/12/01-check-this-shit-out.jpg)
After that I went inside and read that Mike Fossey had died a few days before Christmas and a couple weeks after his 35th birthday.
I cried for a minute or two and then started laughing. It’s such a strange feeling finding out someone is gone then spending the next couple of hours howling at their old posts.
There aren’t many people who that could apply to but Fossey was indeed one of them. You’ll find hundreds or thousands of others writing something to that effect on Twitter or Bluesky right now. Mike F – who grew up just down the street from me here in Concord, MA – was without hyperbole one of the funniest people I, or most of us, ever knew, whether it was in real life or simply through his iconic Superman-avatar online persona. He was one of the best to ever do it, many are saying.
“His posts brought me much joy over the years,” the journalist Mike Isaac wrote when I shared the news of his passing. "’its not clear what move i was trying to do’ has rattled in my head for a decade.”
“Mike was one of the guys laying the framework for what good jokes would look like in a novel format with a strict character limit,” John Darnielle said.
It’s hard to write about joke posts and the people who make them without coming off as overly serious or spoiling the whole point— as a lot of people learned writing about “Weird Twitter” back in its heyday—but Fossey was a luminary in the golden age of Twitter in the 2010s, up there alongside the likes of Dril and others, that we got to watch invent the form in real time.
The thing about a sense of humor is that it is learned and shared.
Sometimes part of the appeal is how many people remain unable to pick up on the joke. Probably his most famous post was this one about a hot dog. The kind of tweet that was shared widely all over, to the delight or anger of many.
This is a load-bearing feminist post, someone commented earlier.
This one, too.
Fossey was never as overtly political as a lot of his peers (and most of us everywhere) have become online. But a clear political sensibility was there, underneath the silliness.
But more than that, there was the poetic manipulation of language. The way someone like, say, Tim Robinson, speaks a phrase weird and it overwrites how you think about it forever. This is one of those for me:
Insanely surpassed. A phrase I don’t think anyone had ever uttered before but now it’s locked in our heads forever.
I don’t know that I’ve had an Arnold Palmer in many years either without thinking about this one:
Or seen a news story about a drug bust without remembering this:
“It feels kind of wrong, like to the point of feeling embarrassing, to talk about Posting as a writing form, but it really is a type of writing, and the shape and style of a joke-post is its own thing,” Flaming Hydra David Roth said.
“Mike Fossey's posts were so obviously on point in that regard. They're funny, of course, but the economy of how he wrote—creating a little scene, establishing characters in it, using a few details to shade it and make it funnier—was real writing. That wasn't the point, I sense, I think the point was to be funny, and he was funny. But he was also legitimately a master of this weird type of writing. You don't have any room to spare with the character count and all that, and he didn't waste anything. He was one of the greats at doing whatever this is.”
“After spending so much of my life ‘online’ it can be easy to ask ‘what’s the point?’” comedian Mike Ginn, a friend of Fossey’s, who called him “my windmill slam pick for the funniest poster of all-time,” told me.
“I think the point is you get to make friends like Mike F. To connect with people across the country or world who you resonate with on some deep personal frequency. He’s hilarious, wonderful, and I’ll miss him forever.”
You could call him a jokes craftsman, and that would be accurate, but he was also a regular craftsman as well. A woodworker and artisan and in recent years a signmaker around the Boston area for some big projects, not to mention a fine photographer, as you can see on his Instagram.
I just went to look and noticed this at the top, which punched me in the gut.
Rest in peace too to Kaleb Horton. Another great and funny writer and poster we lost way too young. I am so sick of writing eulogies this year.
Aside from the gags he would often share images of the cabinets and tables and such he was working on, both for his job and for his family and friends. As much as I might regularly read his jokes and think I wish I could be that funny, it was truly admirable that he also had this real world talent as well. Something tangible to go along with the ineffable.
I wasn’t super close with Mike. We were buddies online in the way that people are, although I got the chance to meet him a couple times. I remember the first, maybe eight or so years ago, meeting up at a concert in Harvard Square. He was sweet and funny in person, too, and we walked around the corner to smoke a joint. I remember being sincerely kind of nervous about it, worried I wouldn’t be able to keep up. That I wasn’t going to be funny enough. Like I was hanging out with a beloved famous comedian or something. Which is what he was, in fact.
Sadly, like many of the best, a number of Fossey’s original Twitter accounts were suspended over the years and have since been mostly lost to time. Luckily a lot of people have kept screenshots of some of their favorites saved elsewhere. Here are a few of the best.
Listen to this old extremely 2012 ass playlist of mine I dug up. What a year baby!
Dusted off my best of 2012 playlist for the ride home today. It's sick as hell and extremely 2012. Please enjoy. music.apple.com/us/playlist/...
— Luke O'Neil (@lukeoneil47.bsky.social) 2025-12-26T16:11:38.867Z
Luke's Movie Corner!
This one was something else. Emma Stone and Jesse Plemmons as good as they've ever been. Aidan Delbis was perfect too as a humanizing counterbalance, and certain parts of Stavvy’s characterization were indeed believable.
I appreciated the critique of neoliberal girlboss capitalism and unhinged conspiracy theorist YouTubers but I was a little annoyed at the end that it didn't say "and that's why being the exact kind of leftist you are is good" though. ⭐⭐⭐⭐
I respect Kelly Reichardt's point of view and style and whole deal, and liked the undercutting of the tropes of the art heist genre here, and it's always fun to watch some "Boston" dipshits fuck up, but ultimately it was a bit sleight for me. Shout out to Framingham, MA.
Production design and camera were fantastic though. As was Josh O'Connor as a big fucking loser. Alana Haim was underused, although the kids were very good at being little wiener boys. ⭐⭐⭐
I finally watched this one and it was a blast as advertised. I do not care if its politics were coherent or not. Don't care if Bugonia's were either come to think of it. I no longer care about that kind of thing. Until I do at some point out of nowhere again. Maybe five minutes from now. That's called watching da movies. ⭐⭐⭐⭐
It's a cliche to listen to this week but no one's written a better one yet. What a fucking song and one of Bono's best vocal performances ever, especially when he belts out:
Say it's true, it's true
And we can break through
Though torn in two, we can be one
Me and the lads wrote a song once that tried to rip its sound off.