Rise and Grind
They cannot chain this spirit, ladies and gentlemen.
Just remember, every day I’m still on air is a miracle.
Because of your prayers.
Because of your support.
~The Voice
Morning
Exertion 5:00—7:00
The Voice startles you awake from the first nightmare you’ve had in months. The girl. You’ve been dreaming of her more often lately. You wonder if you’ve been talking in your sleep again, a slight embarrassment lingering over what you might have said. Have they heard you? Have you been speaking in tongues?
But you shake those feelings away. Take your medicine. Tongkat, creatine, zinc, magnesium. Rhodiola rosea, Siberian ginseng. Get that testosterone up. You’ve got work to do. Stay on The Great Path. You let The Voice start up again. You’re careful to check any of the latest news from the outside as you get ready for your first set of reps.
Iron sharpens iron. The gym awaits. But first you’re going to need a healthy microdose of psilocybin to get your mind right. Remember, just half a gram, at the very most. You’ll need to save your full doses in case you ever have to go outside. You can’t get into a proper Berserker Viking rage without at least three grams of the good stuff, and you’ll need it for outside. When the time comes. Murder doesn’t come natural, but on the right dose, it can at least come easier.
Kettlebell swings, Russian twists, muscle-ups. You feel the mushrooms creeping up on you, your bowels quivering as the colors of your great big blue exercise-room pop and brighten. Dips, Neck curls, reverse neck curls. Bench. Then hit the rower and push and push and push until you scream. That’s right. Get the sillies out.
You open the window, smell the poison of the outside world, your breath coming in heaving gasps as you try to puzzle what’s wrong with you today. You usually do another three sets of skullcrushers, but you can’t muster up the will. What is wrong? As your breath returns you chalk it up to low T. Perhaps you slept too deeply, woke up in the middle of a cycle? That must be it. But the feeling, that creeping notion that you’ve forgotten something, lingers. You can’t figure it out. There’s no time in your scheduled routine for this. And you can’t break routine. Can you?
They tell me that I’m unhinged.
That I’m crazy.
So this is how I know that this, this must be true.
That I am the sanest man on the planet Earth right now
Time is running out.
Humanity is at the crossroads.
This is happening right now.
The fight for humanity is happening.
Now.
~The Voice
Sunlight 7:00—7:20
You need the sun. That’s what you need. You wait for the dawn like a goddamned tree, silent and unmoving as a praying mantis. Vitamin D graces you for the first time this day, and though the sun might not have the same power it had of yesteryear, you take what you can get. Get that lux, bruh. Align that circadian rhythm. Serotonin levels, leveling out now from those late-evening dreams, get a boost from this interaction as well.
The first car alarm of the morning sounds off from the window, followed in close proximity by a whole chorus of calamity, angry shouting, but even this can’t bring you down. You’re too exhausted to care. You brighten like a flower in the half-sunlight that penetrates the thick haze of smoke and filth that surrounds the earth. A masculine flower. A flower with six-pack abs and massive fucking traps that have their own massive fucking traps.
But even the sun can’t shake you out of the funk you’ve felt since you first woke up. There’s something wrong, and not just with the world outside. It’s inside you, something missing. The Voice keeps on churning, keeping you from thinking too deeply about it, but it’s there, haunting the back of your mind. When the next ad-read comes, you switch off for a moment, but the silence just seems to make things worse.
They can’t let our light, as the dark of the night comes, stay on.
So this lighthouse, out on this promontory with the waves smashing into it, was built to do this.
And we’re still standing.
Only because of your prayers.
We are in this together.
And the minute we realize that, that our red blood binds us forever, is the day we touch God’s face.
~The Voice
Meditation 7:20—7:45
Transcendental is for squares. Shikantaza, now that’s meditation. No mantras, no bullshit koans. No thinking. Just straight sitting there counting your breaths until each number is as meaningless as the next. This is for you. This is for all. This is for nothing. Twenty minutes of nothing and you’ll be ready for anything.
But the nothing never comes. Your mind drifts away from that sweet oblivion, ancient images of women floating through your mind, untouchable, vibrant girls with eyebrows suggestively arched. Tempting you. You haven’t felt this off in years, and after ten minutes you give up, a guttural growl of anger rolling through your chest as you stand up and pace. You know now. You’ve forgotten something for sure. Some essential element of your routine. But you can’t identify it, no matter how hard you stomp around your manor. You try to focus on your breathing, to lie to yourself, to tell yourself that you’re just catastrophizing, that you’ve remembered it all.
But you know that’s not true. There’s something wrong. Something you’ve been forgetting. But for how long? You can’t remember. Another ad-read interrupts your process and you sigh. Dig deeper.
A lot of us rely on rainwater and we need to be concerned with acid rain, ash.
What we learned was that there was in fact unhealthy levels of heavy metals and acidity in the rainwater.
Next, we tested the water from our gravity filter.
And not only were the heavy metal levels within safe measure, but the pH was also restored to optimal levels.
Only $399.95!
Installment plans available!
~The Voice
Hydration 7:45—7:55
You drink most of the water in your cache, filtered down from the roof of the building. Normally you’d save some, but you feel like you haven’t been getting enough hydration lately. Maybe that’s what’s missing? It tastes funny, and you wonder if somebody has slipped up trying to get in here again and drowned. Probably just another dead bird. They’ve been falling more regularly lately. You’ll have to go fish it out when your routine is over. But for now you drink deep, like the camels used to before the deserts turned to glass. Drink. Chug that shit like it’s the last liquid refreshment you’ll ever know.
I’m here for you.
Broadcasting, fourteen hours a day.
Seven days a week.
I’m betting on you.
And you’re incredible.
Those of you that are awake are amazing.
We’re the good guys.
And everybody knows it.
~The Voice
Fuel 8:00—8:30
One Cosmic-crisp apple, cut into fifths. Your solid food for breakfast. Delicious, plus it’s great for your metabolism, gut microbiome, gastric emptying time, all that shit. You languidly lay them on your tongue like an emperor as you read from Meditations, marking the moments when Aurelius went too light as you chomp, chomp, chomp. You can’t keep your mind off the fact that this batch might be the last for a while. Amazon hasn’t had apples available for a whole week now. But the apple’s most important job is to keep some fiber in your stool, anyway, keep those hemorrhoids at bay. Your real breakfast starts here:
Fish Oil
Omega-3’s are hard to come by these days with the ocean near boiling point and all. You swallow them down, three 200 mg pills, saving one for later. Handy having all these pills around still, at least until they run out. You can always switch to flaxseed when they run out.
White Kidney Bean Extract
You can block any of the carbs that sneak through your system with this stuff. You don’t like the starchy taste, but so long as it keeps you in ketosis, you can deal with the flavour.
Dark Chocolate
The phenylethylamine in the chocolate is a great dopamine kick, for those days when your depression is up. The taste also helps you wash out the flavour from the extract, and you can’t help but smile at the sweetness. Nothing with too much sugar, though. You don’t need that fucking poison inside you. There’s probably enough there already, Lord knows.
Ashwagandha
This stuff reduces those pesky cortisol levels, helps you get that 7.1 hours that eludes you most nights when the noise in your head gets unbearable. It gives a nice boost to your T-levels as well. You can’t forget about your T-levels. You swallow down 1500 mg with the last of the water you plan to consume until the evening.
Marijuana (Sativa)
Need to prime that hunger. One giant toke from the bucket bong has you coughing like a street-dweller. That’s when the paranoia starts to sink in. Normally, this slight indulgence calms you. Keeps you level. But today a wave of suspicion overwhelms you, and for a few minutes you sit in it, unable to move. That helpless feeling of forgetting takes over, and you can’t break free. Tears start to form near the corners of your eyes and you get up to pace, to try to run away from whatever has gotten into you, like a worm drilling to the centre of your consciousness.
That’s just what they want. They want you scared. They want you a coward, a quisling, hiding, afraid to activate your atavistic essence and optimize your well-being. Listen to The Voice. Breathe deep. Focus. Don’t give them what they want. You put the weed away, head downstairs, eyes panning obsessively for threats on the horizon.
Suicide is spiking.
It is time we get food on the shelves.
Because if you’re not concerned about this food supply problem, you better be.
Meat plants are closing at a rapid rate.
I’m talking about nothing at the store.
I mean, power going off.
I mean, babies starving to death.
I mean, not getting your medicine.
I mean, it’s done.
If we don’t assess blame, they’re going to blame us when it all goes down.
~The Voice
Gorging 8:30—9:30
The meat-machine shows up every morning around this time. You barter with him over bullets. Flour. Sugar. Coffee. The necessities. It tries to talk to you sometimes. Tell you things about the outside, that things aren’t so bad, that it’s really getting better all the time. Goddamned AI creeps. You tap the weapon at your hip, let it know you won’t be indoctrinated in that fashion. Its dumb, phony eyes widen and it continues to dole out the plastic-wrapped packages, one after the other, into the drop-box you’ve fashioned into the heavy metal door.
You don’t question where the meat comes from. It tastes like pork, doesn’t it? Good enough. It is pork, you remind yourself with every bite. You sauté it with the sunflower oil that you’re slowly running out of, swallow it down until you’re full, then force yourself to take down another plateful. Have to hit those macros. One day you know the meat-machine might not show up. You might have to become your own meat-machine. A meat-man, if you will. You look up at the compound bow on the wall, sigh. Cardio, though. Might not be so bad.
In about seven days, almost everyone commits murder for food.
Within 14 days, almost everyone resorts to cannibalism or commits suicide.
The point is, have you thought about it yet?
Because I’m starting to think about it.
~The Voice
Nap 9:00—9:15
When you’re finished, you wash up. Doze. Your fast has officially begun. Twenty-three hours of nothing but black coffee, water, and ketosis. You set the timer. If you sleep anymore than fifteen minutes you’ll wake up groggy, so nothing past theta waves for right now. Just enough to keep your energy up. There’s still so much to do.
Because like I said, if it came down to me alone, I’d starve to death before I did it.
We’re going to dig you out of those bunkers.
We’re going to dig you out of those holes.
I swear to God, if it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to get my hands around your elitist throats.
~The Voice
Deprivation Tank 9:15-10:45
Meditation can only do so much for the unquiet mind. If you really want to get to your inner eye, you’ve got to go under. You prep with nootropics: 500 mg of caffeine, 8 mg of nicotine. You sit there shaking in the dark, the salt, and the silence, listening to your blood beat through your body. Houris creep into your mind again, taunting you. You cry, your salty tears mixing with the brine of the tank. You stay down there a long time, but when you finally rise from the depths of your mind, your mind is racing even faster than before, that vague, amnesiac pulsing at the back of your mind still eating at you.
In earlier times, it was easier to control a million people, literally, than physically, to kill a million people.
Today it is infinitely easier to kill a million people than to control a million people.
It is easier to kill than to control.
~The Voice
Afternoon
Grocery Shopping 12:15-13:15
Creeping out onto the patio in full gear, masked up, your eyes alight for outsiders, your rifle sighted ten stories down where they usually congregate, your Kevlar vest tight around your massive chest. You wait for the Amazon packages to arrive, the telltale buzzing in the air your signal to set down covering fire. Not too much now. Bullets aren’t on sale this week. Just enough to keep the street-scum from shooting down too many. Even with the suppressing fire, a few packages get taken. Goddamned gangs. You pray its not the CBD. It’ll be hell trying to fall asleep tonight without it, and you’re completely out. You collect your remaining packages and fire the rest of your mag into the indiscriminate masses below as the sirens begin to howl. You retreat back down, pull the respirator from your face. You’re not even breathing heavy this time. Shopping is over for the day.
The ruling elite are a death cult.
Look around you.
Everything benefits them.
They look at us as parasites that need to be controlled and killed.
The elite are becoming restless and are now out in the open with who they really are.
Corruption in the government is just the tip of the iceberg.
~The Voice
Sauna 13:15-13:35
Nothing gives the old immune system a boost like good old-fashioned heat shock proteins. You push the temp high as it can go, till you’re roasting in your little wooden room like a hunk of brisket, brain baking, blood boiling, big dollops of sweat splashing on the rocks as you suck hot oxygen into your lungs, in and out. They say you can’t kill disease with heat, but everyone who said that is probably dead already. What do they know?
Most of humanity is asleep and distracted by meaninglessness.
The weak and the fearful will succumb to it.
They will go to the slaughterhouse alone.
~The Voice
Cold Plunge 13:35-13:50
Fight or flight hits you as you hit the water, dopamine, epinephrine, and norepinephrine spiking as you shiver like a Siamese cat in Siberia. You can almost feel the mitochondria in your cells multiplying, the brown fat activating, parallel neural pathways opening up, making you stronger through the suffering. Discomfort is the only real comfort, the only way to know you’re still really alive. Her face comes up when you close your eyes in the cold and you jerk from the icy water, afraid and alone.
It must be done for the sake of the future of the whole.
So be it.
Prepare for the selection process, which is now beginning.
To take action.
To cut out this corrupted element in the human, in the body of humanity.
It is like watching a cancer grow.
Something must be done before the whole body is destroyed.
~The Voice
Maintenance 13:50-17:30
Disassembling, cleaning, and relubricating your rifle takes time. You take the brush to the inside of the barrel, the trigger housing, breech, hammer, slide, bolt and cylinder, ridding them of any evidence of carbon or gunpowder. You apply the solvent with a rag, wipe each piece down, then apply a thin layer of lube to all the moving parts—the bolt, the bolt carrier, and firing pin assembly—and reassemble the whole works, checking and rechecking the action.
You take a shower, using fragrance-free soap and conditioner. After toweling off and applying generous dollops of coconut oil to each and every orifice, you get to the laundry, washing your clothes with fragrance-free detergent—no nonylphenol ethoxylate, no VOC’s—then hanging them in the house to dry. Dishes take a little elbow grease with the non-toxic, phosphate-free, NTA-free soap, but you’re a big guy. You manage.
The floors, the counter-tops, the rugs, the bathrooms—all get a good once-over, before you can finally convince yourself that it’s all clean. Well, clean enough for today. On Sunday, you’ll go through it all more thoroughly, dusting and polishing until the whole place sparkles with phthalate-free freshness and purity. A sigh shudders through you. Now you can relax.
But you can’t. Not today. It’s still there, picking at your subconscious, this underlying feeling of unevenness, wrongness. Sin. What have you forgotten? You’ve done everything right! You know you have. You’re self-actualized, a chapel of homeostasis, your body a perfect replication of God-shaped clay, all systems go.
And you’re broken. A husk. Why?
Know your enemy, ladies and gentlemen.
Look into the places they don’t want you to see.
And when they tell you their stories.
Know that the opposite of what they say must be the truth.
~The Voice
Research 17:30-19:00
Scouring the internet for answers, for distraction, for relief, you sip at your Americano as you watch the smug reportage sedate the population with the same lies as the day before. The same sick propaganda. You see the hidden agenda behind it all, The Voice pulling the cobwebs from your eyes as the caffeine makes your legs bounce up and down as you consume media, letting it drive you into a fury, a borderline panic of existential hatred and angst. When you can take it no longer you turn off the PC and sit in the anger for a while, enjoying it, letting it wash over you like a warm dream. Letting it distract you from this feeling you can’t shake, that wants to take you down. That feeling that something is missing in your life.
The power grid relies on the internet to coordinate power plants.
Without it, each country’s national grid will become unbalanced, and local outages escalate into a blackout for most of the world.
A society slipping into chaos will allow the elite to reset and rebuild a world for themselves.
A world without us.
The real people.
~The Voice
Evening
Introspection 19:00-19:30
You let The Voice roll on about the day’s events on the outside. The chemical rain showers affecting the east coast. The famine. The banker families behind it all, the machinations. You feel your mind wander as The Voice prattles, the female forms from before intruding into your third eye; seductive succubi, daring you to release. You can’t give in. Sexual release means the loss of precious T, and you can’t let them take that from you. That’s what they want. They want you to be weak. You tear at your skin, bite your cheek, flex your thighs, but nothing seems to work to bring your rising tumescence down. You panic, think of the girl, that one girl, that one night, and the sense of revulsion the scene brings you takes the urge away at last.
The function of all life is survival.
Left to our own devices, the ego will try and convince us to think only of ourselves.
As we think, so we become.
Which is why it is called The Great Path to change it.
The Great Path is the work of awakening the masses to the true nature of the ego mind.
Encouraging each and every individual to find the courage to face their own inner shadow and to practice natural law.
~The Voice
Cardio 19:30-20:30
Night is the time of rest. But you need to earn it. You need to be tired. Exhausted. Run it out of you, all the pain, all the sadness, all the anxiety. Run away from it. The treadmill drones under your feet, your custom, barefoot shoes pulling you forward on a slight incline. Heavy sprints on steep incline every ten minutes for forty-five second intervals to really push yourself. Really get it all out. Run. Run it all out of you. Run from yourself. Run from her.
I don’t have all the answers.
But you need to reach for those higher levels in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
Because society and the culture that we’re subjected to does everything in its power to distract you from achieving self-actualization.
Reject this vulgar culture that pretends to offer you everything, yet only ever leaves you empty and isolated.
Reject this idea that depression is a fait accompli, that you just have to accept and tolerate.
Reject the normalization, glorification, and fetishization of mental illness.
~The Voice
Wind-down and Sleep Prep 20:30-21:50
You head to the balcony and finish off the last of the water in your cache, sipping slowly, savouring every last sundry satisfaction out of the hydration. Drying off in the dark of the night, naked to the world, letting the salty sweat seep back into your skin, tasting it on your lips as you watch the neighbouring buildings with night-vision goggles, inspecting each window for intruders. You know one day you’ll see them, government agents, hiding in the dark recesses of one of these abandoned shitholes that surround your property like zombies. But for now they are empty of all but the pigeons, the rats, and the roaches. You creep back down to your loft. Get ready for sleep, swallowing 100 mg CBD, 200 mg valerian root. Three 48 mg capsules of magnesium threonate and one piece of dark chocolate for the serotonin. Twelve grams of tryptophan.
You’re the real heroes.
That’s why your prayers are paramount.
You spreading the word is penultimate.
But beneath that is the financial support.
You pray, that’s number one.
You spread the word, that’s number two.
And then that little added magic is the money.
~The Voice
Sleep 21:50-5:00
The temperature drops to sixty on the automatic timer, to help your core body temp stay low throughout the night. The lights drop away slowly, mimicking the natural light of a forested area that has long ago been logged out of existence. You’re sure you can feel your pineal gland releasing your daily dump of melatonin, your third eye opening into the darkness. But still, you can’t sleep. You’re so tired, but you can’t turn off. Can’t rest. And you wonder and you wonder why. You switch off your mic, let The Voice rest. You can almost hear the disappointed millions, and the thought of their dismay at your absence usually brings you a vague sense of warmth, community. But as you lay your head into your ergonomic pillow all you really feel is hollow, that hole in the back of your mind eating away at the very thing that makes you, you. You look at the phone across the room. You rise, lift it, search for the number. Call her.
But no one answers. And it’s just as well. You wouldn’t know what to say anyway.
Derek Wagner is a writer and the current owner/operator/stooge of Arctic Deliveries (2010) Ltd. in Yellowknife, NT, Canada. He is a graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop (2023) and dabbles in fantasy, science-fiction, horror when he isn’t playing online poker, making snide comments about his wife’s shows, or taking his kid to hockey practice.