In reverse chronological order, all written my Mike Spies The Rat We All Avoid June 21st, 2025. There’s something quietly brutal about trying to make sense of death. Not the dramatic kind. Not funerals or last words or people crying in hospital rooms. I’m talking about the kind that just shows up. Stays there. Doesn’t explain itself. A few days ago, I was walking home and saw a dead rat on the sidewalk. Right in the middle of everything. Like it had just dropped out of the sky and landed there. My first reaction was kind of automatic. Gross. Diseased. Someone should move it. That shouldn’t be here. I even had this flash of thought like, should I be the one to deal with it? But almost immediately, that colder voice kicked in. Just leave it. Nature will sort it out. A dog or bird will take care of it. That’s how this works, right? But the next day, it was still there. Same spot. Same shape. Same awful little weight in the back of my head. I felt that mix of guilt and disgust again. That weird impulse to get rid of the thing, to clean it up, bury it, erase it. But I didn’t do anything. I walked by. I kept telling myself the same thing. It’s not my job. Let nature take over. Let the city handle it. Whatever. Then came day three. Still there. But now it had started to change. The skin was pulling back. The smell had settled into the air, low and heavy. That was the moment I realized I was never going to do anything about it. I’d had a window where I maybe could’ve helped, could’ve stepped in and done the hard, gross, uncomfortable thing. But that window had closed. I wasn’t touching it now. That was clear. And honestly, I felt like shit about it. Not in some dramatic, soul-searching way. Just this kind of dull, petty shame. The kind that lingers in your stomach. I’d convinced myself I was doing the “right” thing by leaving it alone. But if I’m being real, I just didn’t want to deal with it. I didn’t want to get my hands dirty, or look weird kneeling down on the sidewalk next to a dead rat. And I started wondering, why me? Why am I the one thinking about this? How many other people passed it and did nothing? Did they feel the same flicker of guilt? Or did they not even look? It’s easy to say, yeah, I should’ve done something. But honestly? So should everybody else. And no one did. The world didn’t stop. Life kept going. We all just walked past it, day after day, pretending it was somebody else’s problem. I saw it again today. Worse now. Skin peeling off in patches. Bones showing through. Hair clumped up in little bits like soggy carpet. Flies everywhere. I didn’t stop. Didn’t stare. I just kept walking. The Runway of What Might Have Been April 30th, 2025 At 6:30 a.m., the runway and I are the only ones awake—both of us waiting for something to happen, neither quite sure what. The morning air bites with the kind of cold that clings just long enough to make you regret a jacket by noon. I stand outside the locked glass doors of work, hands in pockets, the sky still soft with sleep. Across the street, the airport begins to stir beneath the early light. Sunlight strikes the tarmac in long golden ribbons, giving the concrete a strange, otherworldly glow. Even the dew—clinging delicately to the grass between runways—shimmers like something holy. It’s a familiar sight, this small airport, though strangely distant. I’ve been to its outskirts countless times, lured by airshows and the low roar of engines slicing through the sky. But I’ve never stepped inside the terminal. Not once. For most of my life, I thought you couldn’t—unless you owned the plane or knew someone who did. The idea of commercial flights coming and going felt impossible, like stumbling across a subway station in a cornfield. That illusion cracked about five years ago, when I saw an Alaska Airlines jet land there. A real plane, full of real people who had simply bought a ticket and traveled. It stopped me cold. All this time, I had been watching from the edge of something I didn’t realize was open to me. And somehow, that moment lodged itself in my ribs—not just the error, but the metaphor of it. How many other things in life had I decided were out of reach, simply because I didn’t understand the door had never been locked? I haven’t flown since 2012. Not because I couldn’t, necessarily. But because the world began shrinking in my mind—its wide horizons folding inward until the idea of leaving felt less like an adventure and more like an act of disloyalty to the life I’d settled for. When I was a kid, I wanted to be someone whose name showed up in places I’d never been. Not a celebrity, maybe, but something bigger. Someone for whom airports were merely punctuation between chapters, not symbols of what-ifs. I used to watch the Travel Channel like scripture—wanted to see the ancient bones of Petra, the cherry blossoms of Kyoto, the electric veins of Manhattan from the sky. But here I am—thirty-four, standing in the parking lot of a retail store, staring at an airport I love but never used. A life I admired but never chased. And yet, I still look. I still feel that stir when a plane noses upward, carving through the morning haze. Not envy. Not regret. Something quieter. A wondering. A flicker of hope that maybe, just maybe, the gate was never locked. I only forgot to knock. Snow and Symmetry February 14th, 2025 The snow began falling yesterday while I was at work, a quiet, relentless cascade that blanketed the world in white. It should have been a perfect day—snow has always been my favorite kind of weather, my favorite landscape, my favorite feeling. But instead, it coincided with a stomach pain flare-up, sharp and unrelenting, forcing me to leave work early. As I clocked out, I couldn’t help but wonder: do my managers think I left to go play in the snow? Do they believe me when I say my stomach was killing me, or do they assume I’m just another adult chasing the childlike thrill of a snow day? Either way, I found myself stepping out into the winter air, the cold biting at my cheeks, and immediately realizing the challenge ahead: riding my bicycle to the train station in the snow. Somehow, I made it home—obviously, since I’m writing this—but the journey was a reminder of how much harder these things feel as I get older. Snow has always felt like a part of me, as if it’s woven into my DNA or tied to some woo-woo metaphysical nonsense. I love it in a way that feels innate, like my soul is calibrated for cold climates. If given the option, I’d live in a place where snow blankets the ground year-round. But age has a way of complicating things. Closing in on 35 this year, I’ve noticed how the cold weather makes my joints and bones ache, especially the ones that have been broken in the past. The bone in my hand that suffered a boxer’s fracture a few years back now feels like a weather barometer, throbbing in time with the dropping temperatures. My bad ear, too, chimes in like an internal meteorologist, alerting me to pressure changes and incoming cold fronts. Still, despite the aches, I can’t help but marvel at the snow. It transforms the world into something quiet and pristine, a temporary reprieve from the chaos of everyday life. What baffles me, though, is how people who experience snow every year seem to forget how to exist in it the moment the first flake touches down. It’s as if that singular snowflake, landing somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, fractures some collective hive mind, causing everyone to lose all sense of how to drive, walk, or function in snowy weather. To be fair, the same could be said for rain after a dry summer. The first downpour always seems to catch people off guard, as if they’ve never seen water fall from the sky before. But snow feels different. It demands a kind of reverence—a slowing down, a recognition of its power. Maybe that’s why I love it so much—it forces us to pause, to adapt, to remember that we’re not as in control as we like to think. As I sit here now, the snow still falling outside my window, I’m struck by the symmetry of it all. The way something so beautiful can also bring discomfort. The way it reminds me of both my youth and my aging body. The way it unites us in collective wonder and collective incompetence. Snow, in all its complexity, feels like a mirror—reflecting not just the world, but ourselves. Of Chords and Codes February 7th, 2025 Today is Friday, February 7th, 2025. It’s colder than usual for this time of day. I’ve been working on getting back into website coding recently. It’s been well over a decade since I last used Geocities or MySpace, so this has been an enlightening experience. It’s fascinating to see how much I remember and to realize just how bad I was at it. The learning curve is steep for me. I guess part of me wishes I could take on coding with the same instinctive approach I had toward guitar and drums. For some reason, music always felt completely natural to me. My father originally taught me how to play guitar when I was three years old, and by the time I was ten, I could pick up any instrument in front of me and play something halfway decent. Guitar and drums were second nature by the time I was that age. By the time I was sixteen, I could play any song you requested, just as long as it fit into my hyper-niche obsession with ’70s to ’80s metal and progressive rock. My biggest regret was allowing myself to change paths based on the direction the music industry seemed to be heading in around 2008. That year, I started making hip hop beats and instrumentals, using the same software I had already learned to use for my metal music that I had been recording for the past eight years. I spent about a year perfecting and obsessing over the beats I made, so much so that I completely neglected to touch any of my real instruments and focused primarily on the laptop screen in front of me. By 2009, I had made a name for myself in the Portland hip hop scene, but my anxiety and compulsion to always tweak songs until they were perfect led me to not only fear being on stage but also slow down my productivity, burning bridges with rappers and other artists around Portland, as well as with people who were extremely close to me. By 2010, I completely abandoned any hopes of making a name for myself in hip hop and decided to refocus all my energy on creating metal. Metal had always been my lifelong obsession. It was the reason I continued to play guitar until I was 18 before taking a year off to mess around with hip hop music. So in 2010, I doubled down and started focusing on writing and recording metal and alternative rock. I recorded and released a few decent songs, but nothing great came of it. It was mostly just stuff that inevitably became the seeds for songs I would workshop years down the line. Skip to 2012, and for some reason, the universe decided that dubstep was going to be the next big thing. I spent about a month or so with my nose to the computer, learning every trick of the game as far as dubstep creation went. I actually found some success, and some of my songs were used in pretty big YouTube productions that year. But much like a firecracker, dubstep fizzled out just as quickly as it arrived, and any relevance I had built up vanished. Luckily, I kept working on metal and alternative rock behind the scenes while creating dubstep tracks. I doubled down once again and forced myself to stick to what I knew best. Over the next three years or so, I wrote and released a few metal songs under various project names that only saw minor success through SoundCloud plays. In 2016, I auditioned for a band I knew little about, and while that didn’t pan out, I forged a lasting friendship with the drummer. Together, we created a project that flourished with our combined efforts. We wrote and recorded everything ourselves, and our full-length album gained traction, selling around 90 copies—nothing to complain about, really. The experience was stressful yet rewarding, and those years of collaboration brought a joy I hadn’t expected. Since the release of that album, we’ve decided to step back from the stressful “got to go right now” mentality we had while writing and recording it. Over the past year or so, I’ve been dipping my toes into new hobbies, one of which is web coding. And that brings me full circle: music always felt so natural to me that I reached a point where I believed there was no instrument I couldn’t play at a somewhat above-average level. So now, diving back into web coding like I did in my teenage years has been mildly frustrating. I’m still stuck in the musician mentality, and when something doesn’t go how I expect with coding, it feels jarring because I’m expecting it to go smoothly. Retraining my brain to be a learner again rather than a teacher has been a wild experience. You get so good at something that sometimes you slip into the mindset of “this is a piece of cake; how hard could that other thing be?” only to realize how far up shit creek you really are, with your paddle miles behind you. And all you can do is dive in and start swimming. A Winter Morning December 11th, 2024 It’s early… 6:24 a.m. on December 11th, 2024. The world still feels half-asleep, wrapped in the kind of silence that lingers before the day officially begins. Strangely, I feel more rested than I should, considering I barely scraped together five hours of sleep. My alarm had been set for 4:00 a.m., but my mind refused to shut off until exhaustion finally won sometime around midnight. Now I’m outside my workplace, shivering in the predawn cold, waiting for my supervisor to show up and unlock the door. Above me, the sky is an unbroken stretch of black, vast and empty except for the scattered lights of the airport runway across the street. It’s a small airport, mostly home to Cessnas and private jets, the occasional larger plane making an appearance like an unexpected guest. As I wait, my thoughts drift. This airport holds a strange nostalgia for me. Long before this building even existed, my dad used to take me to the summer airshow here. Back then, the place felt alive—crowds packed between rows of aircraft, people peeking inside open cabins, kids running ahead of their parents, eyes wide with excitement. But the real magic was in the sky—the acrobatic planes twisting through the air, the grand finale of the Blue Angels slicing overhead in perfect formation. And yet, out of all those big, dazzling memories, one small, stupid moment always sticks with me. It shouldn’t, but it does. I was eight, holding my dad’s hand as we wandered through the airshow. We came across a booth running the Pepsi-Coke Challenge, one of those early 2000s marketing gimmicks where you’d do a blind taste test and pick your favorite. My dad thought it’d be fun for me to try. But for some reason, the idea filled me with an irrational kind of dread. Two teenage girls were working the booth, looking as bored as you’d expect. No one else was paying attention to me, but in my head, it felt like the entire airshow had stopped to watch. I froze. My dad nudged me forward, tried to reassure me, but the more he encouraged me, the worse it got. The moment stretched too long, the silence too heavy. Eventually, we just walked away. At first, I thought he was giving me space to shake it off, but I quickly realized we were leaving for good. Just like that, our father-son day was over. In his eyes, I had ruined it. My inability to do something as simple as sip two cups of soda had made the entire outing pointless. Now, standing here in the freezing dark, I find myself turning that memory over in my mind again, seeing it differently. It was never about the soda or the embarrassment. It was the first sign of something deeper—anxiety, shame, the feeling of failure I couldn’t quite name back then. That kid who thought the whole world was watching and judging? He’s still with me. So is the weight of my dad’s disappointment, as heavy as it felt that day. Across the street, the runway lights flicker. A private jet lands, its wheels hitting the ground with quiet finality. The past is a lot like this morning air—cold, sharp, unavoidable. But maybe that’s just how it works. It stings, it wakes you up, and maybe, if you let it, it teaches you something too. A Cold Afternoon December 10th, 2024 The afternoon of December 10th, 2024, is cold in a way that feels ancient, like a chill that has existed forever and will never leave. The sky is mostly gray, but here and there, small patches of blue try—and fail—to break through. The sun is nowhere to be seen, just a faint glow behind the clouds, a reminder that it still exists somewhere beyond the gloom. On the horizon, a muted, golden light flickers, distant and unreachable, like a fire burning in another world. The wind cuts deep, sharp enough to feel personal, like the cold has taken offense at my presence. Traffic hums along the freeway, the engines blending into the wind, stirring up brief, biting gusts that make me pull my jacket tighter. The fog is getting thicker now, rolling in slow but steady, swallowing the landscape piece by piece. The hills in the distance fade into shadows, their colors drained until they barely exist. Above them, radio towers rise through the mist, their skeletal forms standing watch over a world dissolving into white. Something about the fog feels hypnotic. It pulls me into another time, another place—a world of cobblestones and flickering gas lamps, of Victorian streets where danger lurks in the haze. It’s the kind of setting that makes you expect to see a figure in a long coat disappear into the mist, leaving behind only questions. But then I blink, and reality snaps back into place. No mystery here, no romance—just a freezing day and a road lined with tired buildings. Lately, I’ve been fixated on a color—Prussian Blue. There’s something about it that lingers in my mind, a shade deep with history and meaning. I learned about its presence in the work of Zdzisław Beksiński, the Polish painter who turned his nightmares into art. His pieces are haunting, full of twisted forms and endless voids, and Prussian Blue appears in many of them, like a silent witness to horror. It’s the same pigment that stains the walls of gas chambers, a residue of suffering too great to put into words. Beksiński spent his life painting human darkness, and in the end, he became part of it—murdered over a debt of barely $100. There’s a bleak symmetry to it, like the final stroke on a canvas that had already told the worst kind of story. His art was an unfiltered look at cruelty, and cruelty found him in the end. Thinking about it chills me just as much as the wind. I keep walking, my thoughts as heavy as the fog settling in around me. The cold bites harder, the sky grows darker, and the hills disappear completely. This is winter in its purest form—cold, gray, and indifferent. Reflections on a Rain-Soaked Night November 12th, 2024 It’s 5:18 p.m. on a Monday, and I’m making my way through the parking lot of a hotel that has always felt out of place. My neighborhood is mostly low-income apartments and subsidized housing, so the sight of a Marriott sitting right off the freeway like it belongs here has never stopped feeling weird. The cold is settling in for real now. If my hands stay out of my pockets too long, my fingers start to ache. It’s been raining on and off all day—mostly on—and the asphalt is slick, reflecting headlights and street lamps like a stretched-out black mirror. For a second, there’s a break in the clouds—a thin sliver of lighter blue squeezed between the stormy gray. People around me move quickly, heads down, focused. Every crosswalk feels like a gamble, that split second where I have to decide whether a driver sees me or if they’re too busy scrolling through their phone. I glance over my shoulder every few steps, just in case. The store sign glows through the trees, getting closer. Overhead, the clouds are getting darker, heavier. I tell myself we might make it home before the rain starts again, but the sky doesn’t look like it’s in the mood to cooperate. Everything around me has that dramatic, movie-like quality—wet pavement catching neon reflections, headlights slicing through the mist, the whole scene like something straight out of an ‘80s film. It would almost be cool if it didn’t smell like garbage and car exhaust. I reach the entrance and hesitate for a second, breathing in the cold air. My cheeks are numb. One last glance at the sky—it’s going to pour any second. I push open the door, hoping the heater inside is still working.