What If Everything Isn't Connected?

paint markers and dead billionaires

A man dies, goes to heaven, and finds himself in the presence of God — not a metaphor, not a feeling, but the actual capital-G God.

The clouds are plush. The air smells like warm pine and fresh bread. Angels hum in a key no human throat can hold.

And God — radiant, eternal, and a little taller than expected — smiles gently at him.

“Welcome, son. Eternity in My presence awaits. But first, as is our custom here, you may ask Me any question.”

The man stares, slack-jawed, caught somewhere between reverence and cosmic stage fright.

God gives him an encouraging nod.

The man clears his throat, bows his head, and finally asks the question he’s carried all his life:

“Who really killed JFK?”

God doesn’t miss a beat. “Lee Harvey Oswald. Acting alone.”

The man blinks. Nods. Stares into the divine light for a long moment.

Then slowly shakes his head and mutters, “Damn. The Deep State runs deeper than I thought.”

Why Conspiracy Hypotheses Elicit Contempt

With the Epstein saga back in the news, I’ve been thinking more than I’d like to about conspiracy hypotheses — not just specific ones, but the whole genre.

I’m more open to them than most of my friends. But that’s a low bar. I still reject the overwhelming majority of the ones I come across.

What does that actually mean?

It means I fully believe evil bastards make plans. That part’s not hard to swallow. I believe there are secrets, power hoarding, and coordination behind the scenes of plenty of things.

But a belief in occasional coordination doesn’t obligate me to believe every Reddit-thread fever dream about the Denver Airport.

I reject conspiracy hypotheses when other explanations — boring, bureaucratic, humanly flawed explanations — make more sense and offer better predictive power.

Sometimes the real answer is: people are tired, dumb, or under pressure. Or simply that bureaucracies are huge, unwieldy messes, and coincidences are a thing.

Still, these hypotheses show up constantly now.

I encounter more of them in a single day than I did in an entire year before COVID. They’re everywhere — Instagram slideshows, Substack Notes, the occasional YouTube autoplay spiral.

A few therapy sessions ago, I was ranting about one in particular when my therapist interrupted. “This is far more activating to you than stupidity usually is. Why does this make you so angry?”

It took a minute, but we figured it out. It’s why I opened with the joke.

Conspiracy hypotheses — the serious kind, the ones people build identities around — elicit contempt because they are unfalsifiable.

There’s no off-ramp. No way to lose the argument. Any evidence against it is either part of the cover-up or a carefully planted misdirection.

“Is that what’s really going on, or did someone just do a good job of making it look that way?”

And underneath that is a kind of smug certainty I find viscerally repellent: I’m right, not because I can prove it, but because I’ve already decided.

Evidence is decorative; reality is just a riddle to decode.

I find it enraging because I grew up inside a religion that operated the same way.

And watching grown adults wrap themselves in conspiracy thinking is like watching them voluntarily join a cult — but with worse music and fewer potlucks.

At least the God I grew up with wasn’t something you found in your own mirror.

The Moon Landing Was Real, Y’all

One of the easiest conspiracy hypotheses to dismiss — and yet one of the most persistent — is the idea that the moon landing was faked.

Let’s set aside the physics, the telemetry, the retroreflectors, and every painstakingly restored reel of footage.

Let’s instead look at the most unassailable disproof of all: Southern women.

Much of the work that made the Apollo program possible didn’t happen in glamorous California labs or secret bunkers—it happened in Langley, Virginia, and Huntsville, Alabama. Thousands of engineers, technicians, and mathematicians were involved, most of them men, almost all of them married.

This was the 1960s. Women didn’t have careers.

They had bridge clubs. Rotary lunches. Telephone trees.

And they talked.

Southern women in particular are kept alive by gossip the way jellyfish are kept alive by saltwater. They are information circulators.

They’re the social web before the web. Knowing something before the other women did was their primary, and often sole, source of status.

They knew whose kid was doing poorly in math and which neighbor’s pound cake mysteriously tasted store-bought.

You’re telling me that not one single engineer ever muttered over a whiskey sour, “Well, technically it was a sound stage in Nevada,” and that no wife ever called her sister? That there was an airtight, multi-agency, decades-long cover-up involving thousands of people — and nobody’s wife so much as hinted at it?

Please.

That’s not just improbable. It’s inhuman.

“But they were under NDA!” someone always says.

As though that means anything at all to a woman whose husband came home and said, “Don’t ask where I’ve been,” while smelling faintly of rocket fuel and moral compromise.

“But maybe they didn’t know!” someone else will chime in.

And look, maybe some of them didn’t. But a cover-up on that scale wouldn’t require silence from a few technicians — it would require silence from everyone. For decades. Across administrations.

Across divorces.

And if you think no bitter ex-wife ever tried to sell a story to a reporter, then I need you to go outside. Touch grass. Meet an actual human woman. Date someone. Live a little.

Conspiracies most often collapse under their own human weight. People are leaky. They’re vengeful, careless, prideful, and bored.

Which means, inevitably, they talk. The idea that this one time, during the most testosterone-fueled pissing match of the Cold War, nobody did?

Honey. No.

Bless your heart.

Big Data, Big Bible, Big Bullshit

A few months ago, I got moved to a new team and now work almost exclusively with federal data. Since the 2018 implementation of the DATA Act, that data is actually… pretty damn good. Comprehensive, standardized, traceable. I work with the whole thing — datasets so massive that my employer had to drop serious money on a machine normally reserved for teenage boys who livestream themselves headshotting zombies.

This is not your average Excel spreadsheet. These are files so big that my housekeeping is now at hotel standard — I work from home, and every code block takes a minimum of five full minutes to run.

And because of that, I’ve had the opportunity to reverse-engineer how other people came to some truly unhinged conclusions.

Let me tell you: the bigger and messier something is, the easier it is to prove anything.

It’s not just data. It’s human nature. It’s theology. It’s fear.

When I was a kid, I got obsessed with the idea of missing the Rapture. (If you weren’t raised in the evangelical fever swamp, congratulations — but suffice it to say that “being left behind” was considered a fate slightly worse than death and slightly better than Catholicism.)

So I went to a pastor — not mine, some visiting guy in a shiny suit — and asked about it. I wanted certainty. Answers. Reassurance. Instead, he opened the Bible and, in sequence, used Scripture to prove pre-trib, mid-trib, and post-trib Rapture timelines. One after another. Seamless. Convincing.

I sat there in silent horror and finally whispered, “How do we know what’s true, then?”

He closed the Bible and said, “We trust God and get on with the business of doing what He wants us to do today.”

I’ve never forgotten that. Because his point was both deeply unnerving and, weirdly, comforting: the text is big enough to build any story you want.

And so is the world. So is the internet. So, especially, is social media.

We did not evolve to know what’s happening in every part of the world — every genocide, every missing child, every mass shooting, every government scandal — all in real time.

And our brains are pattern-detectors. They are hyperactive agency-finders.

This is why you’ve never once mistaken a snake for a stick, but you’ve definitely mistaken a stick for a snake. Many times.

Our information ecosystem is messier than our minds are built to handle.

So is federal procurement data, for that matter.

You want to “prove” that aliens helped build the Capitol dome? That Fauci personally signed off on injecting bat DNA into kids at Burning Man? That a defense contractor in Ohio has been quietly funneling funds to a secret underground sea base? If you start with the conclusion, you can always find the data points that get you there.

Especially if your audience doesn’t check your work.

Especially if you can cherry-pick from ten million rows and no one else wants to open the CSV.

And especially if you confuse “making a story out of data” with “making sense of the world.”

Which, to be fair, we all do sometimes. But there’s a difference between finding meaning — and finding a mirror.

The Real Conspiracy Was Keeping Him Alive

Let me be crystal-fucking-clear: I have no problem believing that our government fed child rape victims to the powerful in order to collect kompromat. None.

I’m not naïve. I’m just not theatrical.

I know how lightly people take the sexual abuse of children. I know how quickly it becomes a joke, a punchline, or a shrug. The most frequent response to finding out a girl was sexually abused, in pop culture, is a joke about “Daddy issues” and speculation on how easy it would be to get her into bed.

The most-trafficked adult site on the internet — the one I won’t name because email filters are funny that way — has been sued repeatedly by minors whose rapes were filmed and uploaded. Not amateur porn. Not blurry consent from a 17-year-old. Actual rape. And it’s still a top-ten site worldwide.

Our porn-soaked culture just…doesn’t care.

So when it comes to what actually happened on Epstein’s island, I’m agnostic only in the sense that I don’t pretend to know the specifics. It was probably less cinematic than the more lurid conspiracy threads — no underground tunnels, no cloned babies in tanks — but almost certainly more evil than most people want to imagine.

I believe unspeakable things happened.

I just don’t believe Jeffrey Epstein was murdered to keep them quiet.

I believe he killed himself.

And frankly, why wouldn’t he?

This was a man used to private jets, Paris townhomes, and underage concubines. He lived in god-mode.

And suddenly, he was looking at life in prison — not just any prison, but prison as a convicted child sex offender. Which is a caste system all its own.

The man wasn’t Jason Bourne. He wasn’t a mastermind.

He was a soft, cosseted coward who knew what was coming. He didn’t have the spine for it.

People act like suicide requires complexity. But sometimes, it’s the simplest outcome. It’s Occam’s razor in a jumpsuit.

I know what it’s like to have a personal do-not-cross line. I’m deaf. I have no family. And I am hyper-protective of my eyesight. People who know me know this — I flinch when anything gets near my eyes, I have rules about who’s even allowed to touch my face.

I’m not proud of what this suggests about my resilience, but I’m being honest: if I lose my vision, I’m done. That’s it. That’s my line.

Some things are just not worth trying to live with.

For Epstein, prison wasn’t a test of endurance. It was the thing he couldn’t imagine surviving — not physically, and not psychologically.

His power, his access, his identity — all gone. He made the only decision he felt he had left.

The real conspiracy, if there was one, was that anyone managed to keep him alive as long as they did.

The Comfort of Small Things

My favorite art YouTuber mentioned acrylic paint markers once, so after finding a fabulous Prime Day deal on the Ohuhu brand, I got some.

I’ve tried painting with brushes.

Really tried. Bought good ones. Watched videos. Practiced with swatches like a well-behaved YouTube viewer who still believes in growth mindset (which I do; it’s a game-changer).

And I just...don’t like it.

Brush painting is slippery in a way I find joyless. The paint never goes where I want it to go. It feels like trying to do calligraphy with a mop.

But these acrylic paint markers — the Ohuhu set I’m using now is in the picture at the top of this post — are different. They use drawing skills to create painting effects, and that makes them fun. Immediate. Responsive. They don’t require me to become a whole new kind of artist. They let me use the hands I already have.

I’ve been playing with them on the cover of my current sketchbook — nothing polished, just a Halloween scene that looked nice against the black cover.

It’s not a big deal. Just screwing around with color and having fun. I had an idea for a new scene to add to my collection of pieces that sometimes become print sales, so it’s the productive kind of creative-screwing-around — which is nice.

But that’s just a bonus. It doesn’t have to be productive at all. And that kind of small pleasure — the kind that doesn’t explain anything, doesn’t connect to a Grand Narrative — feels increasingly precious.

Same with The Victors Project, a fanfic I’ve been reading. It invents backstories for each of the past Hunger Games victors — how they ended up in the arena, what choices they made, what it cost them to win. It’s thoughtful, brutal, and far more emotionally intelligent than most of what passes for literature.

I do read fanfiction — see my Fanfic 101 here if you have no idea what I’m talking about — and this one hit a nerve. It’s about the machinery of power, yes, but more than that, it’s about the quiet heartbreak of being part of something you didn’t choose.

The small decisions that spiral.

The way people carry on.

And maybe that’s the thread that ties all of this together — dead billionaires, dumb theories, rage, data, religion, paint markers, and stories about trauma survivors who keep going:

Not everything is a symbol. Not everything is connected.

Some things are exactly what they look like.

Some things are tiny and true.

I get why conspiracy hypotheses are so attractive. We live in a terrifying world, and COVID — with its institutional failures, garbled messaging, and the speed at which everything unraveled — made that terror feel justified.

For a lot of people, it was a first glimpse behind the curtain. A sudden realization that nobody’s really in charge. That almost nobody knows what they’re doing.

But…it was always that way.

That’s the real horror, and the reason conspiracy thinking can feel like a lifeline. Because if someone is pulling the strings, even for evil, then at least someone is holding the map.

At least the chaos is deliberate. (And sometimes it is.)

But most of the time, it isn’t.

Life isn’t a puzzle to solve. There’s no master key. No final decoding.

It’s a sketchbook full of weird little drawings, most of them unfinished. Some of them layered over earlier mistakes. Some of them accidentally beautiful.

Some things are just trauma, acrylic paint, and bad lighting.

And the rest?

The rest is up to you.

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Print Sales Now Live

My DIY Student Loan Exorcism, in the form of sales of prints of my drawings (with the printing done by a subscriber who really cares about the quality — they look great!), are now ongoing. Choices include a pay-what-you-want Texas bluebonnet, several Halloween images, and “Fight!”, shown below. Links to purchase, Coming Soon, shipping times and available countries, etc., can all be found here.

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