That warm and sun-soaked summer was the happiest time in my short and unhappy life.

We cruised the coastal highways and mountain backroads, top down and radio up, seeking adventure.

We stood hand in hand looking out over the edge of the continent, full of love for each other and love for our new home.

We trod brakish waters with bare feet, kicking at the warm shallows and splashing each other, giggling like schoolkids.

We stared up in awe at the towering firs draped in Spanish moss and populated by so many little birds.

We climbed misty mountain peaks, shivering against the cold and holding each other in the fog, each the other's world entire.

We cooked exotic dishes in our shabby little kitchen.

We picked out gaudy clothes at thrift shops and yard sales.

We listened to the crickets sing from our quiet little patio and sipped wine and talked about the world, our adventures past and adventures yet to come.

We laid down side by side at the end of each day and fell asleep in each other's arms.

You could never see my face, but my lips were always pursed in a smile.

My cheeks so often wet with tears when I beheld your majesty.

When I imagined our lives together, forever and ever.

What I would trade to see your smiling face again, your little black dress swirling in the wind as you danced and ran and laughed.

Oh, what I would trade to see my reflection in your soft brown eyes, wet with joy and narrowed by your smile.

But now you're gone, gone to bigger and better things while I rot and wither alone.

I wish I could say my happiest memories made me happy.

But all they do is remind me of how much I had, and how much I lost.

And now when I think joyful thoughts, I weep for days past.

We hurdle down the road, blasting past one another in a rush of wind and turbulence.

We are mere feet apart in two-ton missiles made of steel.

The only thing that standing between us and certain death

Is a painted yellow line on the blacktop

And a mutual agreement not to cross over to the other side.

The American West is regarded with wonder and longing by contemporary fans of historical fiction. Plucky folk heroes and enigmatic villains such as Buffalo Bill, Jesse James, Wyatt Earp, Bass Reeves, and countless others names have been etched into the annals of history, immortalized in film, literature, and popular culture. What is often misremembered - or indeed forgotten - about this transitional period of manifest destiny is what immersion into a lawless land populated by as many killers as pioneers does to the moral fabric of man. Droves of settlers set off westward across the Mississippi in search of a new beginning, but spurned from the civilized world of the east, murderers, outlaws, and degenerates followed suit in constant pursuit of fresh prey. This sets the blood-soaked stage for legendary author Cormac McCarthy's darkest and most morally questioning novel Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West.

Set in the brutal and destitute borderlands between Texas and Spanish-controlled Mexico in the midst of the 19th century, Blood Meridian follows an passive protagonist known only as "The Kid" as he falls in with a group of scalphunters led by the ruthless John Joel Glanton - a historical outlaw whose reign of terror across the sun-baked deserts of the American Southwest makes for a story one wishes was a pure work of fiction. Glanton, a veteran of the Mexican-American war, sought his fortune at the head of a company of lowlifes and degenerates, indiscriminately killing Apache Native Americans to collect the bounties that the fledgeling provincial governments of Mexico had placed upon them. Heavily armed and in a land lacking the laws of civilization and the government to enforce them, Glanton's gang became the ultimate authority in the region and before long were facilitating the wholesale slaughter of entire villages of Native Americans, Mexicans, and settlers alike. With military firepower, primal bloodlust, and a complete lack of morality Glanton and his gang gained infamy and inspired terror wherever their gruesome work took them next. Neither Glanton nor the novel's protagonist are the main focus, however. That role is played by one of literatures most legendary and terrifying villains: an outlaw known only as Judge Holden, or more simply, The Judge.

The Judge is as mysterious and fascinating as he is imposing and unquestionably evil. He is described as physically menacing - close to seven feet in height, rippling with muscle, and bald from head to toe. Whilst carving out a bloody legacy of terror as Glanton's right hand man, he is also a student of geology, anthropology, botany, and philosophy, recording each and every feature of that vast and lawless wilderness in a journal that is never out of reach. He speaks a dozen languages, dances with high society nobles, is a master draftsman, and plays each musical instrument he lays his enormous hands on as gracefully and skillfully as his six-gun. He is a character as cultured as he is vicious, as knowledgeable as he is ominous, and he is feared not only by his victims, but by each member of the Glanton gang as well. Throughout the narrative he toys with the outlaws, challenging their world views with his thoughts on the natural world, philosophy, and the inner workings of man. His lust for knowledge is not driven by curiosity but by a desire for domination, not unlike the original sin of Judeo-Christian tradition. Perhaps his motives can be best explained in his campfire monologue, in which he says to the gang:

"Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent. This is my claim, and yet everywhere upon in are pockets of autonomous life. Autonomous. In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation...the freedom of birds is an insult to me. I'd have them all in zoos."

It is through the juxtaposition, or indeed agreement, between The Judge's intelligence and voracious pursuit of knowledge and his animalistic dispensation towards violence and domination that the metaphor between him and the Devil appears, and in fact questions the ethics of the American ideals we hold so closely. In The Judge, we see a character who is a master practitioner of every trade, a scholar who has catalogued and committed to memory every plant, animal, and feature of the land in an effort to assert his complete dominance over it. As the Devil encouraged Adam and Eve to eat from the tree of knowledge so that they could become as powerful as God, The Judge abides. In this, he mirrors the goals and aspirations of American settlers moving west to pacify, subdue, ad eventually control the untamed wilderness of the new frontier. In a parallel that is chilling to realize, his motivations mirror that of man: understand the natural order of things so that we can impose our own order over it.

The Judge, as brutal as he is civil, is not merely a metaphoric embodiment of evil, but a symbol of man's timeless efforts to rule the unrulable. Subjugating the native population, ruling through violence and domination, and overriding the laws of nature are, after all, the same actions and objectives of the settlers or America's past. In understanding this metaphor, we see that the settlers who carved niches of society from the mountains and deserts of the American frontier may not be the plucky heroes we remember them as; rather they are the villains, imposing order where none exists save for the laws of nature.

The gratuitous violence and bloodshed punctuating McCarthy's most compelling novel is truly disturbing, but not as disturbing as the realization that the author's embodiment of all that is evil in the world so perfectly aligns with values of civilized society let loose in an uncivilized theater. It is the realization that somewhere deep in the darkest corners of human nature, the desire to rule, to dominate, and to destroy is intrinsic to all of us, and given the opporunity, can be let loose before we even realize what we are doing.

Original photography by Michael MacDonald

Twelve steps to recovery, eleven of them lies.

Ten desperate days bounded by nine sleepless nights.

Eight weeks past erasing seven years of memories.

Six heated arguments, five of them reconcilable.

Four times I fell and three times I rose.

Two paths to choose from.

One to move forward.

Zero excuses.

We are, all of us

Souls dipped in black ink.

Dragged helplessly along

An ivory backdrop of being.

Rigid arms, jagged ascenders where we struggle so.

Limp and lilting spines where we gave and bent.

Stresses and strokes and serifs

Carving out our stories in midnight black.

Spattered with droplets errant.

The typography of man

Draw by an invisible hand.

I know Death, I know him well.

I know we all must die.

Ascended to heaven or doomed to Hell

When in the Earth we lie.

I know Death, he’s everywhere

I see him all around.

But even so I am not scared

To be put in the cold, hard ground.

I know Death in many forms

More ways than I know Life.

Creeping as a ghost upon the forlorn

Accompaniment to strife.

Uncertainty is what we fear

When life comes to its end.

Perhaps that’s why I find it queer

To consider Death my friend.

Ah, to be an American living in the prosperous and picturesque backdrop of postwar growth. With its glistening art-deco architecture, austentatiously-designed luxury automobiles, and white picket fence suburban neighborhoods, the 50s are a decade oft looked upon with reminiscence by the old and intergenerational jealousy by the young in today's society. However Cormac McCarthy, a modern-day literary legend according to fans and scholars alike, offers a darker, grittier, and more visceral depiction of this mythical period of American history in his tragic, frank, and sometimes humoruous novel Suttree.

With a true talent for taking readers to the darkest corners of the human experience, McCarthy paints a backdrop and cast of characters that are drab and depressing - a nonlinear cacaphony of unfortunate events and even less fortunate individuals that one cannot help but look away from, like a train going off its rails. Set in Knoxville, Tenessee, the novel follows the adventures of one Cornelius Suttree, an educated and well-to-do vagabond who has abandoned both his family and his life of priviledge to live on the fringes of society to scrape a meager living as a fisherman, dwelling in a dilapidated houseboat on the Tenessee River. His adventures take the reader up and down the Tenessee's muddy banks, amongst the slums following its twisting path through the city, in and out of desolate prison cells and work camps, and through the dimly lit, dangerous bars and redlight districts of Knoxville's seedy underbelly. It is in this den of misfits and outcasts that we are introduced to a cast of characters, one as strange as the next.

Perhaps one of the strangest and most compelling characters of the novel is Suttree's unlikely companion Gene Harrogate, a young and naive outcast who remains painfully optimistic despite living a life that McCarthy paints as pittiably futile and decidedly delinquent. Having met the titular character during a short stint in jail (following a humorously strange arrest, the details of which I will leave the reader to discover), Harrogate follows the progression of the story like a mongrel dog begging for scraps - ugly, dirty, yet somehow too charming to shoo away. Throughout the novel he ensnares Suttree in bizarre schemes intended to lift them both from the grips of poverty, from poisoning bats to sell their carcasses for research to exploring the cities caves and sewers intent on tunnelling into a bank vault. In true McCarthy fashion, these plots and schemes are wrapped in futility and sometimes tragedy, yet never fail to surprise and leave the reader either chuckling or scratching their head. More than once I found myself shaking my head in disbelief as another ill-fated operation was revealed.

Perhaps the novel's most significant contribution, however, is how it serves to tear down the picturesque and falsely-constructed image modern Americans have of this transitional period in history. Set far from the white picket fences and manicured lawns of the growing suburbs, Suttree's world is punctuated by abject misery and absolute poverty; by overt racism, unapologetic criminality, and quiet desperation. Known best across the literary world for his dark and depressing scenery, perhaps most notably demonstrated in his more well-known works such as The Road and No Country for Old Men, McCarthy creates a world in which characters live on in a truly hopeless yet pragmatic and persistent state of being: where a cast of desperados scrounge the riverbanks for rusted car parts to sell, bands of prostitutes walk the dimly-lit streets of hobbled-together ghettos, and the downtrodden subside off of catfish and turtles exhumed from murky, sewage-filled waters. It is here among the desperate, the hungry, the criminal, and the intoxicated, that we see an unadulterated glimpse into the dark shadow cast by the prosperity of postwar America - a gritty reality that history books and evening sitcoms ignore and cast aside. This is an America in stark contrast to what the average citizen conjures up when fantasizing about this romanticized era of hot rods and wholesome family values. A reality that we have chosen to push out of our minds, to forget, lest we shatter the illusion. McCarthy remembers, however. He doesn't want us to forget, and her certainly has no qualms about shattering our illusions.

Original photography by Michael MacDonald

I told 'em life is pain, and I've got the cure.

Life is pain and I've got the cure.

It's nine millimeters wide,

Make's a racket that's hard to ignore.

They say it ain't so bad, you'd best be sure.

It ain't so bad, you'd best be sure.

I said the devil's got few friends,

Might as well give him one more.

Then they'll out me in the cold hard ground.

Then they'll put me in the cold hard ground.

And maybe things will get better,

But I won't know if I'm not around.

Years of aspirations I'll have killed.

Years of aspirations I'll have killed.

And all in the flash

Of a nine-millimeter pain pill.

Locked up, isolating ourselves from a world brimming with animalistic hostility, we recognize the shortcomings of the society we have constructed for ourselves.

We realize the house we have built with our avarice and self-righteousness has a foundation of sand and a frame of matchsticks and scotch tape, ready to unravel with the faintest breath of the wind. A pantry besieged by panicking hens, riled up in a frenzy and pecking one another to death over scraps. Beds that are too rough and too small. A yard littered with the bones of the less fortunate, bleaching out in the sun whilst those within shower them with scorn. All the while the house creaks and groans, threatening to collapse and indiscriminately bury one and all within its rubble.

They say tragedy has a way of bringing people together, but in a nation of individualistic beasts it has driven us further apart; galvinized us in our beliefs that we live and die alone. That one can only ascend by standing on another's shoulders until we are a hysteric mass, kicking and clawing and scrambling over each other to reach the top. Unaware that the top is miles out of sight, let alone reach.

This pandemic has not shattered our society, it has shown us that our society has been shattered for time immemorial. Throughout the nation and throughout the world, the masses fall to their knees and pray things can return to normal, not realizing that deep down, this is the way things always were.

The disease didn't change us, it exposed who we really are, deep in the dark corners of our persona that we ignore and hide and pretend never existed.

So ask yourself: is the world we left behind a world worth going back to?

"Just remember that the things you put in your head are there forever, he said.

You forget some things don't you?

Yes. You forget the things you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget."

This brief but powerful exchange between the Man and the Boy, father and son wandering a ruined, post-apocalyptic world, illustrates perfectly to me the flaws in our memory. We do not get to choose which memories stand salient in our minds, and sometimes the most difficult ones persist no matter how hard we try to move past them.

McCarthy is, in my opinion, a master at balancing a sort of rhythmic beauty with a blunt, unapologetic brutality in his writing. His novels are as beautiful and vibrant as they are disturbing and dark.