Dr. James Hooks

PTSD Life doesn’t end the way it does in stories.

Life doesn’t end the way it does in stories.

There’s no clean line, no orchestral swell, no soft fade to black. Most of the time, it just stutters. Stops mid-sentence. And you’re left holding the rest of the paragraph, wondering what it was supposed to say.

Ashes, Greed, and the Ghost of Lies We live in a country that no longer whispers about its greed; it shouts it through dividend declarations and war machines. It moans through boardroom ceilings and screams beneath stock tickers. It is…

Greed is the air we breathe, a currency of hunger coded into the genome of the American myth. Somewhere between the gated community and the mass grave, we learned to mistake consumption for character and inheritance for love.

The Cellar Beneath the Chapel There is a house that doesn’t creak. Not when the wind howls. Not when the bones beneath it shift.

The light didn’t follow me down.

It never does, when the truth is what you’re chasing.

Brother from Another Not just any man, not just any actor. We lost our brother. From the living room, from the Thursday night laughs, from the pages of our childhoods folded between homework and hope. Malcolm-Jamal…

We lost a brother.

My Fantastic Four.

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Put an adjective before X-Men, then come up with a roster.

*The Blasphemous X-Men*

Scarlet Witch
Moon Knight
Doctor Manhattan
Spawn
Optimus Prime
Elmo
Tilda Swinton
A hermit crab in a glass shell

Lessons of Love from the Man of Steel I learned to read on a red cape.

#Superman. The original outsider. Not born here. Not quite one of us. He could pass, yes, but only by hiding his whole self.

He’s not a fantasy of invulnerability; he’s a love letter to the marginalized. A myth of belonging written by those who knew what it meant to be cast out.

The Missing Floor In 1933, America was broken. A nation bent over its own undoing; fractured by greed, undone by its excess, and left breathless by the Great Depression. The economy had collapsed violently, like an…

This is a country that claims to be built on the principle that all are created equal, endowed with certain unalienable rights. In practice, we’ve created a system where life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are available only to those who can afford the pursuit’s map; a $200 AI-powered map.

The Cost of Breath I was eight. Maybe nine. My father had gone to work before the sun cracked open the sky. My mother had just returned from a trip to the plant store, a place she always enjoyed taking me but I…

Being Black, I would come to learn, meant being pre-written.

Before I ever opened my mouth, they had already filled in my dialogue.

Before I ever walked into a room, they’d planned the exits.

Before I ever made a mistake, they had built the gallows.

His arch nemesis is a billionaire.

Just my almost 19 year old dog. He’s a sweetheart

Even the most subtle scenes were incredibly impressive. I think back to The Agenda Part 2 often, and two scenes between two characters:

- Optimus Primal & Silverbolt
- Megatron & Ravage

There is a lender of theater and just strong acting in these scenes that impressed me more than any fight scene

The Demon I Sleep With The light from the streetlamp filters through shutters like prison bars, every shadow moving like it remembers me. I lie still. Sheets tangled around my legs. A soft sweat glosses my chest. I blink…

They say demons can be exorcised. But how do you exorcise a feeling? A memory? A once loved one’s voice telling you, “You’re overreacting” when you’re holding your father’s death in both hands and screaming into a locked door?

$3.3 trillion added to the national debt while slashing critical benefits for millions of working-class Americans.

All while bringing the budget for ICE to triple the annual budget for the Marine Corps.

“America First.”

Every Four Years, I Become Human Again In Algiers, 1954, a young boy watched from the shadow of a crumbling mosque as French soldiers kicked in his uncle’s teeth. He had no weapon. No flag. Just a name they could not pronounce and a face…

The machinery of white supremacy does not always need Trump. It just needs justices. And now it has six. #America

AI and the Books My Father Left Behind I found James Brulé’s Artificial Intelligence: Theory, Logic and Application in a makeshift bookcase my dad built, wedged between a worn copy of Electronic Circuit Design and a technical manual for a…

Dad was always a builder. He could assemble a car engine as easily as he replaced the roof of our family home when I was twelve. I wasn’t surprised by the craftsmanship of the bookcase; the decades-old wood, the pencil outlines still visible on the shelves.

What surprised me was the book.

a woman says i don 't know her on a tv show ALT: a woman says i don 't know her on a tv show

God:

“They explode” are the two words everyone’s actually thinking about right now

Is it still historic if no one will be left alive to remember it

I only know this exists because you posted this.

The Last Quiet Thing The light in the kitchen is broken. Not flickering…broken, like someone punched it, like it gave up halfway through shining. It casts a sickly, jaundiced hue over the dishes piled in the sink, the…

A short story.

The Day After Freedom By the time the Union arrived, the cotton fields had already been soaked in something thicker than sweat. June 19, 1865 came not with fanfare or parades, but with the long shadow of delay. It came on…

#Juneteenth has always been touched with irony.

It is liberation after, not during.

A celebration despite, not because.

An emancipation with teeth marks still fresh in the skin.

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