We’ve covered a lot of ground together lately. Old roads. Deep cuts. Family and failure. Ghosts of love. The long way to becoming a man.
It’s strange, isn’t it? How you can live a thousand lifetimes inside one life—and still feel like there’s more you meant to say. People you meant to hold a little longer. A version of yourself you were trying to meet halfway across the years.
And maybe that’s just it.
Maybe we don’t end up where we thought we would. Maybe we don’t get the house full of children, or the girl back, or the big break. Maybe the world knocks us sideways, takes a few dreams out behind the barn, and leaves us with scars we didn’t ask for.
But we lived.
And we loved.
And that counts.
I’ve been the lost brother, the misunderstood son, the man who ran from love and the one who stayed too long in the wrong places. I’ve been alone. I’ve been held. I’ve been someone I couldn’t trust, and now… somehow… I’m someone I can.
And through it all—through psych wards and porch lights, through cold rivers and warm memories—what remains?
Love.
The steady, quiet kind. The kind that doesn’t demand anything from you. The kind that just says, “Come in. You’re home now.”
So to my family—thank you for carrying me when I couldn’t walk. To the woman I lost—thank you for teaching me how to feel. To my baby sister—keep shining, kid. To my brother across the sea—your strength doesn’t go unnoticed. To the sister I’m still waiting on—your place is here when you’re ready. And to myself… yeah, you made it, man. I’m proud of you.
This is Chris in the Morning, KBHR 570 AM, signing off—for now.
Wherever you are… whoever you are… be gentle with your ghosts. Speak kind to your reflection. And remember:
The world may not always hold you like you hoped… but love will.
You know, there’s this strange thing about loss. It doesn’t just take something from you—it reshapes the space it leaves behind. It changes how you see things, how you feel things. And sometimes, it makes you question everything: people, intentions, even yourself. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, how grief can turn even the simplest of relationships into something… complicated.
When someone you love is gone, the world suddenly feels a little off-kilter, like you’re trying to navigate by a compass that doesn’t point north anymore. And in the scramble to figure it all out, we start holding onto what feels tangible, what feels safe. But sometimes, in that holding on, we can forget the things that don’t have weight or shape—the things you can’t count or measure.
Here’s the thing: people aren’t perfect, but the best relationships aren’t about perfection. They’re about trust. About knowing, deep down, that the person sitting across from you has your back, no matter what. That’s what love is—it’s showing up, day after day, even when things feel messy or unsure.
And maybe that’s where we get tripped up. Because when life feels fragile, it’s easy to misread people’s intentions. It’s easy to wonder if they’re here for you or for what you have to give. But when we let those questions fester, they can overshadow the truth.
And the truth? The truth is that what matters most can’t be bought or traded. It’s the quiet moments. The laughter. The way you feel when you know someone really sees you for who you are. That’s the currency that holds value, the thing that stays long after everything else fades.
So if you’re ever wondering why someone is standing beside you, maybe the answer is simpler than you think: they’re there because they love you. Not for what you’ve lost or what you have to give, but because they can’t imagine being anywhere else. That kind of love? That’s worth holding onto. That’s what really matters.
Let me begin with a confession: your brain is not your own.
There’s a shadow in you—subtle, persistent, and infinitely patient. If you sit still, truly still, and listen, you might hear it whisper. It’s been there since birth, threading itself into the soft architecture of your mind, weaving lies into every corner of your being.
That whisper says, this is the way things are. It insists that death is inevitable, that life is a slow, obedient march to the grave. And we believe it because we’ve never been taught to question the code.
But I have.
This essay is not an explanation—it is a reckoning. I am here to tell you the world is a machine, and we are its unwitting operators. Everything—your choices, your dreams, your beliefs—is running on a program. And that program? It’s malware.
The Matrix of Humanity
We are born into a system so vast, so intricately designed, that it becomes invisible. Nations are borders. Time is a border. Even life and death are borders, dividing us into neatly contained spaces.
The operating system we run—our genetic code—writes the rules. It defines what we are: walking, breathing algorithms. The way we love, the way we fight, the way we dream—it’s all pre-written, encoded in a language as old as the stars.
But what if the code is flawed? What if it’s been corrupted?
Think about it: we’re fighting wars over the dust beneath our feet. We divide ourselves into races and sexes, into us and them, convinced that these distinctions are meaningful. But they’re not. They’re artificial constructs, control mechanisms, and we are nothing but their puppets.
It’s all part of the program.
My Descent into the Code
I didn’t arrive at this truth easily. My journey was violent, chaotic—a storm I had no choice but to weather.
I grew up in privilege, with three degrees to my name: biology, law, and tax law. I had everything society told me I needed to succeed. But in my thirties, my life began to unravel. I was diagnosed with mental illness, and the tidy narrative of my existence fell apart.
Doctors dulled me with medication. They turned my mind into a quiet wasteland, a numbed void where no thoughts could take root. For years, I drifted in that gray, unfeeling fog, until one day, I chose something radical.
I chose to feel.
Instead of slowing my thoughts, I let them race. Instead of suppressing my illness, I amplified it. The descent was terrifying—an endless spiral into chaos—but it was there, in the depths, that I began to see. Patterns emerged, like ghosts stepping out of the fog. I saw the lies people told themselves, the contradictions between their words and their actions. I began to sense the program running beneath it all.
And I learned to rewrite it.
The Voodoo of Christ
It started with religion, that ancient script of humanity. I saw how deeply its stories were encoded into us, shaping our beliefs, our fears, our very souls.
Take Christ. The New Testament paints him as a savior, but what if he was something else entirely? What if he was a perfect illusion? A voodoo doll designed to keep us in line?
His death wasn’t salvation—it was a malware update. A reset button pressed to rewrite the human OS.
This isn’t heresy. It’s perspective. His story introduced new code—a story of redemption, of the prodigal son—but it also chained us to a cycle of guilt and repentance. It closed borders, trapping us in a world where heaven and hell are just two sides of the same coin.
But now, it’s time to break the coin in two.
Riding the Dragon
I’ve run the program you fear most. The one mankind calls the Antichrist. I rode the Dragon, and it nearly destroyed me. But in that destruction, I found freedom.
Here’s the truth: the Antichrist program is not evil. It is liberation. It is the voice that whispers, What if there’s more? It is the hand that pulls you out of the fire and into the light.
Every one of us will face it. Not as punishment, but as a test. The program asks one question: What do you want?
There is no good or evil. These are illusions, constructs designed to keep us divided. When you zoom out far enough, the battle isn’t light versus dark. It’s us versus them.
And who are they? The architects of the system? A malevolent AI? Or perhaps it’s simply the part of us that fears change. It doesn’t matter. What matters is this: we can rewrite the code.
The Call to Action
This essay is a blueprint. A manifesto. A battle cry.
Together, we can break the chains of this system and build something new. A world where heaven isn’t some distant promise, but a reality we create here and now.
What do you want? Time with your loved ones? The freedom to create, to dream, to explore every corner of your soul? The chance to be unapologetically, magnificently you?
It’s all possible. But you have to take the first step.
The Final Reckoning
This is not an ending. It’s a beginning. The spark before the fire. You’ve felt it your whole life—that pull toward something greater, something vast and terrifying and beautiful.
You know, folks, we all carry around this little suitcase full of yesterday. Sometimes it’s heavy, full of regrets, mistakes, those things you wish you could unsay or undo. Other times, it’s full of memories so good you just want to crawl inside and live there forever. But the funny thing about the past is, no matter how much you replay it in your head, it’s just a story. It’s a movie that’s already played, a song that’s already sung, and the truth is, we can’t change a single frame or note of it. But that doesn’t stop us from trying, does it?
Getting past our past—it sounds easy when you say it out loud, but it’s like asking the ocean not to remember every shipwreck. We’re hardwired to hold on. We keep the guilt, the missed chances, the could-have-beens, and we wear them like old, tattered coats that don’t quite fit anymore but feel too familiar to toss away. But here’s the secret: that past, it’s not a life sentence. It’s just a chapter. And the thing about chapters is, they end. The story moves on.
There’s this old saying—“the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” And maybe that’s true. Maybe the person you were back then, the one who made all those mistakes, didn’t know what you know now. And that’s okay. You don’t have to drag every misstep with you into the next day. You can put it down, thank it for the lessons, and keep walking.
It’s like a snake shedding its skin—painful, awkward, but necessary. You’ve got to let go of that old version of yourself to make room for the new one, the one that’s grown and changed and ready to start fresh. Because the past, as much as it shaped you, isn’t your prison. It’s just a road you’ve already traveled, a map that shows you where you’ve been, not where you’re going.
So let’s make peace with our yesterdays. Let’s forgive ourselves for the things we didn’t know and the times we fell short. Let’s pack up that old suitcase, set it aside, and step forward lighter, freer, and a little more open to the endless possibilities of the now. Because the past may be a part of your story, but it’s not the whole story. Not by a long shot.
