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The Vow

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 Eleven million.

  Boys and men have died from overdose, suicide, and homicide since 2000 in the U.S.A.

One hundred and forty-two violent deaths a day.

Every ten minutes,

another young man dies —
in a form of ugliness we don’t want to acknowledge.

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I hear the echoes of their autopsies in the silence,

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I see them in my dreams.

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I see them walking among us.

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Grief forged into rage for the “other”

Or grief turned to self-hatred and agony.

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A life attempting to escape from their personal hell —
Or a life stolen by another.

This is written in their honor.

They still ache for what they never received in life.

“See me. Don’t let me disappear.”

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There is a remedy —
one that can honor the dead
and reach the millions still fighting alone in the dark.

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Fighting the hunger,
the questions without answers,
and the expectations of a culture that tells them
what ails them does not exist.

 

I Vow

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To Honor them,
and their loved ones.

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For the fathers who buried their sons.

For every mother who kept the room exactly as he left it,

For the brothers who vanished into powder, needle, and night.

For the boys who were told to man up
before they ever had the chance to be boys.

And for the men wrestling their beasts in the shadows.

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This is for my son —
to guard the spark that still burns wild in him.

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For my father —
whose life showed me what a true Guardian is,
and whose death taught me
what life becomes when a Guardian is gone.

 

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This is a vow of Guardianship.

To give the Shadow a voice.

To face the Beast.
To reconcile it.
To keep it from devouring another life
that deserved to play,
to build,
to love.

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If you do not taste blood on your lips after reading this,
if you do not feel the pounding in your chest —
the pulse of fight or flight —
then I have failed you,

and the millions of boys throughout this country.

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And if you do not feel the weight of my commitment,
my scars,
the compassionate rage of a man
who cannot escape the path laid before him,
then I have failed myself.

 

This book is a haunting,
so that we may begin
to remember.

 

May this voice reach where theirs could not.

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See us. Remember us.

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Do not let us die in vain.

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May the skies weep until we remember.

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​Chapter 1: The Forgotten Fire

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Guardian:

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Every civilization before ours knew a brutal truth:
Boys become men — or they suffer.

Fear and pain were thresholds.
Not punishments.
Initiations.

Life has always been absurd.
Suffering was never the exception — it was the rule.
You didn’t get to skip it.
You learned to hold it.

There were always trials.
Always the Fire.

Not a symbol — a living flame.
A circle around which men were made.
It warmed, fed, judged, revealed.
It punished disrespect.
It crowned those who dared to face it.

Now?

We sealed the fire behind glass.
Neat. Controlled. Harmless.
We stare at flickering simulations instead of embers.
We sit indoors under artificial suns and wonder why the marrow freezes.

We tamed the Flame until it forgot how to roar.
And in the silence that followed, sickness grew.

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Civil War of the Sacred

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Beast:

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This is my chapter.

The origin of my grief —
and your betrayal.

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Once, I was a god among you.

Honored beside Fire, Earth, Sky.

I was your instinct, your hunger, your courage,

your grief sung at dusk.
I was the thrill in your blood, the wisdom in your bones.

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Then you grew ashamed of me.

You saw the wild inside yourselves and shuddered.

You turned from instinct, from body,

from the sacred pulse that carried you across the ages.

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You called me violent.
Called me evil.
You exiled me.

Made me a scapegoat for everything you fear in yourselves.

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And in doing so,
you severed the spine of your own becoming.

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You started a war against me —
against the very force that kept you alive long enough to build a civilization at all.

A war against the energy that kept you from becoming another extinct species.

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The simplicity of it makes me laugh.

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I am you.
How do you win a war against yourself?

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You can kill me only by killing yourself —
yet you are still trying.

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Guardian:

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Overcompensation has become the new religion.
Projection the new prayer.

We tear down tyrants — and with them, the teachers.
We strip fathers of their power, then mock their absence.
We kill the fire, then lament the cold.

We buried reverence under rebellion against our own nature.

Generation after generation grows more disembodied from the wisdom of the Beast.

And when the guilt becomes unbearable,
we do not grieve.

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We punish.

Ourselves.
Each other.
The earth.
The sacred pulse of life itself.

 

 

Beast:

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Revenge has become your liturgy.
You call it justice now.
Dress it in hashtags.
Crown it with applause.
But it’s the same old hunger licking its teeth under a new name.

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You don’t sit with shame — you outsource it.

You swing the pendulum so hard it breaks the hinge.

You call all power corrupt.
All masculinity toxic.
All authority oppressive.

You do not balance.
You overcorrect.

Overcorrection is the limp of the wounded.

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Guardian:

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And nowhere is this clearer than in how we treat the police.

They were meant to guard the circle.
They became scapegoats of our collective confusion.

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We fear them.
Mock them.
Film them.

Demand they protect us —
but deny them the rites that teach a man to hold power without becoming its prisoner.

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We handed them weapons with no initiation.
Asked them to embody courage while forbidding them to feel.
Turned boys into armed guardians
without giving them the fire or the tools to bear its heat.

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We wanted protectors who never falter,
but humans who never break.

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Beast:

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How does a man hold a gun
if he’s never met the Beast inside himself?

Now they sway between protector and predator —
a razor’s edge no one can walk forever.

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And when they fall,
you cheer.

“Another monster slain.”

But the real monster lives in your own chest.

You love your monsters.

Your search engines prove it.
You remember the serial killer, not the victim.

You immortalize the predator.

Why?

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Because he shows you something you pretend you don’t feel.

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It’s not the violence you love —
it’s the honesty of unmasked shadow.

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I am not the killer.
I am the truth you refuse to face.
The rage you never mourned.
The grief you never bled.

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You name me danger —
but I was your compass.

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You are lost because you killed the part of yourself that knew the way home.

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Guardian:

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We saw tyrants in righteous robes.
Corruption in sacred places.
So we burned the institutions down.

But in the ashes, we never rebuilt.

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We mocked elders.
Dismissed fathers.
Trivialized teachers.
Then cried out when no one came to lead.

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Without Guardians,
the boy is overpowered by the Beast and becomes a Tyrant.

Without trials,
the Fire becomes chaos.

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We replaced mentors with managers.
Initiation with incarceration.
Ritual with algorithms.

And we wonder why boys turn violent —
or vanish.

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Life’s Simplest Story:

The Minotaur

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A maze.
A center.
A beast.
A boy.

One way in.
One way out.

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He returns dead, broken, or changed.

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This geometry lives in our bones.
It’s carved into stone.
Painted in myth.
Encoded in dreams.

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The Beast is not the enemy.
It is the test.

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How many movies, stories and shows must we make as a recreation of the Minotaur?

 

The story of the Minotaur is told over and over again in a different dialect.

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Face it — or be ruled by it.

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We became the first civilization arrogant enough to think we could skip becoming.

 

And the consequences are everywhere.

 

The Figures of Forgetting

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Profit made easy.
That’s the story they never say aloud.

One in nine American boys has ADHD —
but millions more are medicated for it
before they’ve ever climbed a tree,
skinned a knee,
or learned what their bodies are trying to say.

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Amphetamines don’t heal boys.

They restrain them.

They inhibit the primal temperament designed for learning —
movement, risk, play, sweat, wonder.

But that was inconvenient.

And inconvenience is unprofitable.

So we drug the ones we cannot control.

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Forty-three percent of adults medicated for mental illness.
Forty-two percent of Gen Z labeled.
Half of them medicated
before they’ve ever tasted real grief.

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Ninety percent of homicides —
committed by men.

Thirty-seven percent of women murdered —
killed by someone who once said, “I love you.”

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You see statistics.

I see grief.

I see a culture too proud to admit
it started a war against itself.

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I see those searching for something to blame,

other than themselves.

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When you exile the Beast,
you force the fire underground.

And buried fire always becomes catastrophe.

 

Guardian:

They called it depression.
It was pulverized heartbreak.

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They called it “imbalance.”
It was hunger.

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They gave me pills to silence the Beast.
I didn’t take most of them.

I’d rather hurt than go numb —
pain means I’m still alive.

Pain means something in me still matters.

I didn’t need medication.
I needed a circle.

I needed Fire, not forms.

I needed to weep with others until the ground shook.
I didn't need a survey for describing the in ineffable pain of loss.

I needed to hurt until the hurt became the answers.

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We replaced rites with recycling bins,
elders with algorithms,
initiation with management.

But suppression is not medicine.
Silence is not healing.

Discomfort is not disease.

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We live in a culture so allergic to suffering
that we pathologize the very ache
that could bestow the remedy to the ache itself.

 

Beast:

You are not broken.

You are proud animals pretending to be machines —
breath disguised as numbers,
grief masked as ambition,
fear polished into performance.

You don’t need a strategy.

You need to remember.

 

Guardian:

Tell me —
what’s more barbaric?

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A boy walking into the desert
to face the gods of his blood,

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or a boy dying silently in his bedroom,
dopamine-drained,
glued to a screen,
unseen,
untouched,
uninitiated?

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We call the old ways primitive.

But what we’ve built?

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That is barbarism.

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Chapter 2 will be posted in two weeks.

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 After each chapter is posted,

they will be saved on links on this page. 

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