Joy and delight are things I’m sort of relentless about wrenching into my life no matter what’s going on<\/a>. I have a seven-year-old, and I refuse to be Grumpy Dad. I also have a loving wife who works hard at a job that ensures I can cook whatever we want for dinner. I also have a lot of friends, loving parents, smoke a ton of weed, and live in Chicago. Joy fucking abounds<\/em>, my dudes. We’ll get to it a little more in the last section of this column. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The majority of the column, though, is gonna be about anarchy and horror.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ANARCHO-CURIOUS<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n What am I trying to say? Reading about Anarchism feels like going to a different domination for Sunday service\u2014I’m still a Socialist, but there are a lot of overlapping characteristics. To be specific, I believe in a big federal government and a planned economy (I just happen to think it should run by the opposite of the people who have run it my whole life). That’s the Socialist part. The Anarchist part is believing in the power of bottom-up organizing. Believing in the power of the people. Believing that your own local community is the only place you can really<\/em> worry about. To be clear, I always felt those things. This year did a pretty good job forcing me to cut through the noise there, though.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It does no good to sit scrolling Bluesky all day, watching ICE abductions unfold. I jumped at my first chance to go to a community defense training, yes. But my personal risk assessment did not include “go out looking for trouble.” Then, like Harry Stables<\/a>, trouble found me<\/a>. This has been detailed in, well, the previous hyperlink, but I feel a lot more like a Part Of My Community than I did three months ago. The people I’ve met on ICE patrols, the parents I’ve gotten to know at my kids’ school\u2014it’s nice to have my suspicions confirmed that the people all around me were Basically Good. Politically speaking, I think 2026 is going to be worse than 2025. We need to stay agile, stay ready. Figuring out ways we can protect each other, figuring out ways we can fight for The Least Of These, Whomever That May Be Because It’s 99% Of Us\u2014that stuff has to continue. <\/p>\n\n\n\n COSMIC HORROR<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n This is the year I officially started thinking that cosmic horror governs our actual world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now, a recent Defector <\/em>review of The Chair Company<\/em><\/a>\u2014which I still haven’t watched, despite largely existing for the zipline<\/a> and complaining that there’s too much shit on me <\/a>when I wear a winter coat\u2014has made me realize that I want to be careful when I talk about “unseen, barely-knowable evil forces.” The sentence in question, from Israel Daramola, reads: “Ron finds the same appeal in his conspiracy that many cranks cherish: the ability to glamorize an ordinary life and chalk its shortcomings up to the work of an unseen, powerful force. Ron’s only desire is to validate his own life, which hasn’t gone the way he originally hoped.”<\/strong> A dude never wants to see themselves in a Tim Robinson character, but here we are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.lazyandentitled.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/image.png\")