!Epic Tomorrows

Ecology of the absurd, FLASH!, Popular & established authors, USA

Chipper Dale

May 27, 2026May 27, 2026 !Epic Tomorrows

By Nina Hart: This story originally appeared in the book of short stories, Somewhere in a Town You Never Knew Existed Somewhere

Charles Chipper Dale stood dressed in the full regalia of an eight-year-old on his front lawn in Xenia, Ohio. The air was hot, and black, and sweet. Charlie jumped nervously from one foot to the other, nostrils flaring like a hunting dog’s. “The tornado will hit without warning!” prophesized Chipper to his audience of six children, one dirty sparrow, and a beat-up red Tonka Truck. “We will all be dead, taken up into the wormlike mass, cold faces pressed against one another in the brutal raging wind!” The children all sighed and began to shake and cry. “I have to go home and get my Snoopy Roo-Roo.” cried Ellen, who looked like a ringing bell in her oversized green dress. “Well the clouds will suck you up like a milkshake into the sky if you do, Ellen! I forbid you to go anywhere, Ellen.” said Charlie. “Where are the parents? Where are the parents?” asked Jake Lacky, who had a wide chest just like his pot-smoking dad. “My teacher said I’m a latchkey kid. What’s a latchkey kid?” No one knew. In the distance the raw smell of rain drew closer. The children could taste the mist as it slipped on their lips like hard candy. They could feel a rumble in the earth under their hot tennis shoes. “What do we do, Charlie?” asked Rainbow, one of Jake Lacky’s three siblings, latchkey kid and daughter of the pot smoker. “Look to the wind.” said Charles Chipper Dale, fingers twitching, eyes veering off into the far distance. “It’s here, it’s coming, and it won’t be long. We won’t wait for the sirens to go off. We’re children. We can feel things. Let’s head on down to the root cellar, one at a time. Single file.” “I love you all so much,” whispered Rainbow, as she held her brother Jake’s hand and followed him down the stone staircase. Cars and their drivers drove past the children on the street. Faces and heads and necks propelled forward on their way back to work after lunch break. All of them ignoring the twisting sky in the distance and the staunch smell of darkness. The tornado would hit without warning. The latchkey kids would be safe in Charlie Dale’s root cellar, listening to the roaring sounds of the King of Winds. All of them holding hands and Rainbow mouthing I love you I love you and I love you all into the dark green landscape.

Canada, Collapse chats & diaries, DIARIES & MEMOIRS: COUNTRIES A-Z, Reflections

Fresh, harder times ahead

May 26, 2026 !Epic Tomorrows

Arguments with my wife. Arguments with myself. Arguments with the past, present and future. But then there was some kind of movement. And here I am. In a new city, fresh; on a new continent, fresh. Sat in a booth in the corner of some kind of conference room. One light broke, the other one shining me up askew. Working on my stuff. I was here a few days ago too, but that was before all the argument. I’m here as if for the first time. Actually talking to people. Having things to say. And whatever I went through earlier, I know there will be much harder times ahead.

Originally published in the Schemattic digital garden

Canada, Exclusive to COTW, Reflections

About shame

May 25, 2026July 21, 2026 !Epic Tomorrows

Submitted to COTW anonymously from QC, Canada; translated from the French using ChatGPT

Shame is the emotion associated with the feeling of being inadequate, defective, or unworthy of belonging to the group. A painful, even debilitating emotion, it is fundamentally social in nature. From as early as age 3–5, it brands with a hot iron the behaviors deemed socially reprehensible. It is the ultimate physiological punishment for having “acted wrongly.” The sentence: exclusion from the group and the anticipated loss of one’s humanity. For the nervous system of a social animal, exile is death. Shame, therefore, is the feeling of imminent death. No wonder we constantly pass it around like a hot potato — both a source of power when imposed on others (symbolic murder) and a source of deep suffering when endured ourselves (living is killing me).

The physical consequence of shame is the inhibition of the motor system, the protection of internal organs (shoulders curving inward), and a painful tightening in the chest or stomach. The internal message is: if I keep acting, I will die. In its primary function, shame is essential to social regulation. It is likely the first regulator of our instinctive violence. We will all experience shame many times throughout our lives. As long as it is felt occasionally, in response to deviant, violent, or destructive behaviors, it is an emotion that has its place in the normal conditioning of human beings.

Shame becomes problematic when it is experienced systematically, with no symbolic possibility of correction, repair, or lasting return to inclusion. When one endures shame continuously, one ends up living in a state of constant chronic stress. Cortisol, at high doses and for long periods of time, becomes neurotoxic. Executive functions diminish, as does our capacity to self-regulate and return to a “rest and digest” state. In some cases, it kills. At best, it generates trauma.

As with any stressor, the nervous system will typically seek a fight-or-flight response to cope. When physical escape from the shame-generating environment is impossible — or when shame has become internalized and follows us wherever we go — two other options arise: chemical regulation (drugs) and/or dissociation (inhibition of the circuits associated with pain and emotion). On the “fight” side, it is generally through contempt or violence that one seeks to silence shame. Contempt is the psychological belittling of the person generating shame — in other words, the externalization of shame: It’s not me who should be ashamed — it’s you. Violence is the desire to subjugate, psychologically or physically, the perceived source of one’s shame: If you disappear, I will no longer feel ashamed. All of these strategies temporarily dispel the feeling of shame, but if the source of shame is not addressed and resolved, the pendulum almost inevitably swings back.

This duality of shame and contempt/violence may be at the root of the worst facets of human experience. It is a self-fueling pendulum, naturally and indefinitely oscillating between one state and the other, as long as the underlying issue — internal or external — remains unresolved. When two shame-carrying individuals live in close proximity, their pendulums tend to synchronize.

Sometimes the pendulum stays in relative equilibrium, sometimes for many years, with each party managing to counteract the other’s contempt in a roughly symmetrical way. These are painful, loveless partnerships, but relatively functional ones — not without their good moments, between each swing of the pendulum, when both parties find themselves at a standstill.

One day, however, in such dynamics, a vulnerability appears: one party cracks, asks for forgiveness, and promises to change. The pendulum, established over years, will not stop for that. This time, contempt will meet vulnerability, driving a little deeper with each swing. Contempt — the antithesis of shame, or rather, externalized shame — is strangely addictive. It confers a sense of power on the one who expresses it. Left unchecked, it tends to grow, naturally escalating into violence.

Eventually, the party in the weaker position within this dynamic will seek to flee, appease, or retaliate. Flight, without external support, will not always be possible, or at least not immediately. Flight also means the unknown. Letting go of familiar bearings, even unhealthy ones, is always a painful experience. Appeasement works in the short term, calming the aggressor’s impulses, but at the same time, by avoiding conflict, legitimizes them. Retaliation, costly in energy, becomes increasingly difficult as the victim’s resources are depleted. The experience of violence, and the shame that follows from it, is inherently incapacitating and traumatic.

It is generally through a combination of these strategies that the victimized party manages to extract themselves from the dynamic. If sufficient distance is achieved and an adequate support network exists, and with appropriate psychological help, each party’s pendulum will gradually return to equilibrium.

In the absence of such a support network or sufficient distance, the dynamic will not stop. The violent party, convinced of their superiority and frustrated at not being able to exploit the dynamic for longer, will want more. Violence, and the sense of power it produces, is addictive. If they can no longer reach the victimized party in their immediate environment, they will do so through that person’s social circle —spreading rumors, rallying as many people as possible to their cause, positioning themselves as the victim. The violence becomes communal.

In a healthy community, mechanisms would exist to regulate such processes. The victimized party could draw from their social circle the additional strength needed to provide adequate counterweight to the violent party. The violent party would be brought back into balance by their own circle, or threatened with sanctions. Eventually, if the damage was relatively superficial, after both parties had stabilized, a process of mutual understanding — and perhaps even repair — could be envisioned.

Unfortunately, we do not live in healthy communities, but in a social environment that perpetuates violence and shame across the full breadth of human experience — domestic, geographic, and in working relationships. We have become isolated, inhibited, selfish, and/or full of shame in relation with ourselves. It is no surprise that the far right, which makes its business out of channeling violence and contempt toward marginalized social groups, is flourishing in the current context. Behind the social mechanisms — capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy — that fuel this system, one constant remains: the human propensity to maintain or consolidate one’s status, and to flee from suffering. Dehumanizing the other is simply a means among many to achieve that end. To my knowledge, there is only one remedy to this psychological cancer: connection, community, and love. In the current social and economic environment, opportunities for these are fragile — but not nonexistent. They must be protected and carefully tended.

COTW journey & strategy, Featured blogs, sites & lit works, Libertarian socialism & social ecology, Reflections, Sense-making crisis

The hegemony is everywhere, but so is counter-hegemony

May 25, 2026 !Epic Tomorrows

THE hegemony is getting me down.

If you’re on the right side of theirstory, you know which hegemony I’m talking about.

It makes me want to go all out for…nothing. Because it seems that anything I go ‘all out’ for has to be either totally for profit –which I couldn’t bring myself to do– or totally anti-capitalist, totally anti-hegemony. Anything in-between only supports the hegemony in various insidious ways. This is what we all have to live with. (Better, perhaps, to go all out for profit, and then make some kind of big break from the hegemony to spend the winnings on counter-hegemonic initiatives, further down the line.)

This is what I have been led to believe. Yet I know that I cannot live my whole life in a totally anti-capitalist way (even if I were to ‘drop out’ entirely). No-one can.

Apparently, all (or most?) activists have to separate their lives between acceptance of the hegemony (including, ‘making a living’ or ‘earning a wage’) and educating / acting against the hegemony. Apparently, we have to compartmentalise counter-hegemony into a corner, small or large, of our lives. Otherwise, the argument goes, we convince ourselves that the half-measures or ‘relatively good’ or charitable initiatives (if we’re lucky) or wage labour we get involved with or are subject to, for much of our time, could somehow, somewhere be revolutionary i.e. deeply necessary.

This is indeed, what a respected teacher of mine seemed to say recently. But isn’t this nonsense? Doesn’t dividing off our counter-hegemonic work from the rest of our lives amount to accepting the divide-and-conquer, atomising, compartmentalising tactics and effects of the capitalist hegemony? And is true compartmentalisation of counter-hegemony even possible, when the hegemony is supposed to be so all-pervasive, even in our most intimate of thoughts?

Wouldn’t it be better to understand ourselves as holistic beings, always carrying both hegemony and seeds of counter-hegemony within us, wherever we are? (Even those, I might add, who claim to be out-and-out capitalists). Isn’t that closer to the truth? And if us counter-hegemonists –perhaps a nicer and fresher term than the crude-sounding ‘anti-capitalist’–are walking, talking dialectical conversations between hegemony and counter-hegemony, then doesn’t there open up the possibility, in every moment, for the nuanced growth or construction of STRATEGY for defeating hegemony, not just in counter-hegemonic spaces, but in ALL spaces, and at all times?

The hegemony is everywhere, even in our most private thoughts, but so is counter-hegemony. We simply cannot afford to relegate counter-hegemony to the ‘radical’ corners of our lives. We can instead go all out for strategising to manifest this dialectic in increasingly liberatory ways, whatever moment or space we are in.

Originally published in the Schemattic digital garden

DIARIES & MEMOIRS: COUNTRIES A-Z, South Korea

Do Not Be Ill, If Spring Must Come After All (아프지 마라, 기어이 올 봄이라면)

May 24, 2026 !Epic Tomorrows

By Pak Jong-hee

A gentle breeze brushes past, carrying a scent that feels like an old memory. This pungent, slightly fishy aroma that fills my nostrils is the breath of mugwort, rising in clusters as it leans against the spring sunlight. In a corner of the park, on a sun-drenched mound, I see a woman crouched low, picking mugwort. Each time a tender shoot—hardly larger than a baby’s fingertip —is placed in her basket, a warmth like the earth’s own body temperature quietly spreads to my feet.

The woman speaks to me in an excited voice, saying the sky is flawlessly clear today. Looking up, I see that the hue of the sky is indeed different from before. Where the achromatic winter has retreated, has the delicate texture of the pale green grass ever been this vivid? Yet, the brighter the world becomes, the more Spring has always been a precarious guest to me. It is as if I can hear the moans of living things breaking through the stubborn ice of winter.

Spring never arrives for free. The backs of the new shoots tearing through the frozen earth are hunched, and the gestures of the trees squeezing out every drop of their essence to bloom are nothing short of desperate. Whenever I see petals trembling under the lash of a late-frost gale, my heart grows anxious, thinking that such brilliance might actually be a final, frantic struggle bartered for death.

This sense of peril stems from the duality of Spring. On the surface, a hymn of vitality seems to resound, but beneath it, withered grasses and ancient trees—baring their gaunt skeletons—lie scattered like the wreckage of winter. Upon that threshold where warmth and cold intersect, fragile lives cross the boundary between life and death several times a day. To me, Spring has always been a season of pity. Like the late-winter cold that strikes just when you think you’ve arrived, it resembles the seasons of trial that visited me without warning at every turning point in my life.

Spring was just beginning to show its face even at the place where my mother left this world. Perhaps because the void of loss was so deep, I suffered from a severe, aching malaise every Spring. Living with a dry cough throughout the winter, I could only manage to stand up again when the cherry blossoms burst into pink buds, as if tearing their own bodies open. To me, Spring was not a season of vitality but a cold current that I had to swim against with my whole body, year after year.

Looking back, my childhood was also a succession of chilly Springs where I couldn’t even take a single clean breath. Time spent in a village beside a cement factory. Every morning when we opened the door, a thick layer of dust, white as snow, had settled in the yard. The lids of the clay jars, polished to a shine by my mother’s hands, would soon hold their breath under a shroud of gray powder, which would harden like stone after a few days.

Dusting off the particles that settled on each other’s hair was our family’s simplest and warmest kindness in those days. Yet, the fine powder that seeped through that kindness was quietly taking root deep within my mother’s lungs. As a child, I did not know. I did not realize that those hours spent living beneath the factory chimneys were gnawing away at my mother’s breath.

The dry cough that began in her forties became chronic, eventually pinning her to a hospital bed under the name ‘pulmonary edema.’ By the time the environmental lawsuits began, Mother had already passed away. All that remained for me was a Spring illness that resembled her cough and a single scar in my heart that flared up every change of season.

I quietly watch the fingertips of the woman picking mugwort. I try to imagine how long those tender shoots must have endured before pushing up through the hard earth. The vitality of mugwort, erupting through frozen ground, is by no means docile. It is a force of struggle, ultimately heaving the very crust of the earth upward. Like the mugwort that perfects its fragrance even while swaying in the biting wind, perhaps our lives only gain a subtle radiance after passing through the tunnels of ordeal.

The woman suddenly holds out a bag of mugwort toward me as I stand still. With a soft smile, she tells me that if I boil a bowl of soup with some soybean paste, it will be better than any medicine. That smile is as gentle yet sturdy as the pale green shoots that rose after steadfastly enduring all manner of cold.

Returning home with the bag, I fill the kitchen sink with water. As I wash the mugwort several times, bits of dirt and dried leaves float up, and the clear water soon turns a faint green. Dissolving soybean paste in a pot and adding a handful of mugwort, a pungent aroma slowly rises amidst the savory scent. The moment a spoonful of soup enters my mouth, a bitter yet sweet taste lingers on the tip of my tongue.

A sense I had long forgotten awakens. Amidst the rising steam, the memory of sitting on the edge of the wooden porch as a child, blowing on the mugwort soup my mother had boiled for me, comes vividly back to life. Back then, not knowing what this fragrance had endured to rise, I probably just rejoiced that spring had come.

Silently, I set down my spoon and wrap both hands around the bowl where the warmth remains. Then, I step outside again. The wind brushing against my skin is still spicy and cold. But now I know. One must endure this precarious wind for flowers to bloom, and only after passing through this cold does the mugwort truly complete its fragrance.

I lower my mask for a moment and breathe in the air deeply. Leaning my heart into the pungent breath of Spring that seeps deep into my lungs, I whisper softly:

“Do not be ill. If spring must come after all, shouldn’t you cross this season safely?”

If I am still in pain, then this radiant Spring is ultimately nothing more than a season of pain. Today, the green shoots swaying in the breeze appear exceptionally clear. Each of those pale green textures is swaying quietly, yet firmly, as if remembering the freezing seasons they have passed through. Standing before that vitality, I reverently inhale all the pain and endurance dwelling within this fragrance of Spring and this breath of green.