Not Endangered

Just Done With Your Bullshit

2010. Somewhere In Afghanistan. Studying. Writing.

This isn't my usual style. I don't write opinion pieces. Don't do literary criticism. Usually, I'm sharing stories about why life is fucked, and marketing sucks.

But something about this Times piece got under my skin.

Maybe it's because I spent ten years in the Marines, watching men write their stories in places no literary critic would ever look. Maybe it's because I'm tired of being told what kind of stories men should tell. Maybe I’m exhausted of people telling me what a man should be like.

So here's my response. Raw. Unfiltered. Probably with typos because editing is just too fucking complicated…and lies.

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Saw this Times piece this morning. Laughed. They think men are some endangered fucking species. Like we're dying out because we're too busy jerking off to OnlyFans and playing Call of Duty to write their precious novels.

I spent ten years watching Marines scribble in notebooks. Saw guys write letters home knowing they might be their last words. Lost friends to suicide because they couldn't find a fucking job after serving. Those weren't novels...but they were true.

Men aren't writing fancy books because we're done pretending. Done trying to write like whatever ivory tower fuck is teaching creative writing this semester. Done masturbating our egos onto pages for some New York critic's approval.

The real men writing? We're in the VA waiting rooms. The divorce court parking lots. The overnight shift break rooms. Writing about child support payments and restraining orders and what a gun barrel tastes like in the parking lot.

I know men who write poetry between their PTSD episodes. Men who filled journals before eating their pistols. Men who Facetime kids they're only allowed to see every other weekend. That's not fucking declining. That's surviving.

The Times thinks we need more Jonathan Safran Foer types writing about childhood trauma through the lens of magical realism. Meanwhile, I've got friends who can't watch fireworks with their kids anymore because the sounds make them taste copper and gunpowder. Others who shares horror stories about custody hearings because that's the only way he can process losing his daughter one weekend at a time.

That's the literature they're missing. The stories that don't fit in their fucking Barnes & Noble displays.

Know what's really killing male literature? Fear of being honest. Fear of admitting we're not the heroes. Fear of showing how fucking scared we are of becoming our fathers.

They mention Trump and Fight Club like they're clever. Like reading Palahniuk instead of their approved feminist literature is proof we're all fascists-in-waiting.

Truth is, men aren't reading less. We're reading different. Reading about depression in Reddit threads at 2 AM. Reading crypto forums like scripture because at least that promises escape. Reading conspiracy theories because even lies are better than this emptiness.

Stop trying to fucking save male literature. Let it die, let it rot, let it become something ugly and true.

I write about teaching your kid to ride a bike through FaceTime. I write about group therapy where they tell you your masculinity is a disease. I write about staying sober when the nightmares won't stop.

That's the future of male literature. Won't win prizes. Won't get reviewed. But it might keep some guy alive when the silence gets too loud.

The real stories are being written in halfway houses and psych wards and shitty studio apartments. Written by men who don't care about Oxford commas because they're too busy trying not to put a bullet in their brain.

That's not decline.

That's fucking survival.

And I'm here for it.

---

I'm not endangered

They tell you to be a man but never define the terms
Dad was Rum breath and calloused hands
you're prescription pills and therapy appointments
evolution through chemical castration

your daughter calls another man "daddy" now,
he teaches her about consent and
toxic masculinity while you scrub blood off your knuckles,
remembering the way war felt like home

ten years of learning to kill efficiently,
now they want you to journal about your feelings
because PTSD is trending

you're an endangered species
a throwback—
neanderthal DNA,
violence wrapped in business casual,
pretending fireworks
don't trigger firefight memories.

they prescribe SSRIs for your battle dreams,
beta blockers for the rage,
group sessions where men
cry into their coffee about how
their fathers never hugged them

your father's silence was a language all its own—
his distance was armor
he forged to protect you and
you wear it now,
pretending it fits

every morning you stare at yourself,
military precision in your shaving routine
straight razor against throat,
wondering if today's the day
you press too hard

but you don't—
because that's what being a man is
surviving,
even when survival feels like surrender

you stay sober
work overtime
pay child support, and
die slowly in a job you hate

this is modern masculinity—
learning to apologize for existing
while still carrying the weight of
every war your ancestors ever fought