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ur just a walking corpse - first teaser from gough
Gut-check. There's blood in the air, thick, sanguine and metallic. Red Room type shit. Murder music. It's the motherfucking witching hour. Where the fuck are you? Look around. Fog's closing in. Darkness rising, circling. The shadows—they’re hunting. What’s your move? What the fuck are you gonna do when the dark swallows you whole?
This is the first offering from gough—signed exclusively to HOUDINI. You’ve been warned.
thought i was at a party, but i was in my bedroom
Burning Behind Bars: The Value of Human Life in the Empire
On the top: Gaza On the Bottom: LA
Let me ask you something: What’s the worth of a human life in the American Regime? No, don’t answer. Let me show you instead. Picture this. You’re 15 years old. Your cell is concrete. Your window, if you even have one, is coated with ash. The largest fire in California history is half a mile away. Half a goddamn mile. Every breath you take scratches your throat. The guards say nothing. The supervisors do nothing. Your cell is starting to feel less like a room and more like a coffin. You wonder if this place will turn into a crematorium. You wonder if anyone on the outside even knows you’re here.
You think about the stories. How they left people to die in Katrina. 2004, New Orleans—rotting bodies floating in flooded cells, water up to the waist, no food, no answers. Just the silence of being abandoned. That’s what it means to be one of the forgotten. One of the expendable. You’re not just locked up—you’re erased.
This is the darkest corner of the empire. The black hole where the regime dumps its deliquent kids, its poor, its lost, its angry. You’re a kid, but you’re locked up, and that makes you nothing. Just another body in the machine. This is what the regime does. This is what it's always done. Call it what you want—prison-industrial complex, systemic neglect, capitalist realism—but at its core, it’s rot. The kind of rot you can’t wash off.
Let it sink in. The flames don’t discriminate. They won’t stop at the prison gates. If that fire reaches the detention center, every one of those children could die. Burned alive in their cells. Cremated by a system that locked them up, tossed away the key, and now won’t even bother to unlock the doors when the fire comes.
What does that say about the American Regime? About the so-called social contract we're expected to believe in? Because this—this shitstorm of neglect and cruelty—is the fine print. This is what it looks like when you’re not the one society cares about. No safety net, no second chances, no dignity. Just fire and smoke and the faint hope that someone, anyone, will come for you.
But let’s be real: they won’t.
They’ve got prisoners fighting these fires, getting paid $1.45 a day for risking their lives to save the homes of millionaires who probably wouldn’t piss on them if they were on fire. Think about that. They’re out there choking on smoke, dragging hoses through hellish terrain, while the media worries about the Malibu beach houses. Oh no, P. Diddy’s mansion might burn. Oh no, the Bourgeois palaces might go up in flames. But those kids in the detention center? Fuck ‘em. They’re invisible.
This is what the regime is. Save the beach houses. Let the kids burn.
This isn’t a failure of governance. This is the system working exactly as designed. It’s a regime built on sacrifice—the sacrifice of the poor, the young, the voiceless, to keep the machinery running. It is a society built to protect Malibu’s mansions while imprisoning children and letting the detention centers burn to the ground with them in it. And how different is that, really, from the mass death we see pouring out of Gaza on our social media feeds every day? Children buried under rubble. Families obliterated by airstrikes. Lives erased in moments. The parallels are stark, and they’re horrifying. In both cases, the message is the same: these lives don’t matter to the regime. These deaths are acceptable. The system calculates, weighs, and shrugs.
Think about this: the only reason they care about beach houses burning down is because it’s profitable. The only reason they don’t care to evacuate these kids from the fire is because it’s profitable. And the reason mass death is being carried out in Gaza? Because it’s profitable. The only reason your neighborhood isn’t burning, drowning, or being shelled is because it’s not profitable to the capitalist regime—yet.
How long until it is? How much longer can we live under a system that places no value on human life? The fire is coming. For them. For you. For all of us. The question remains: Who will wield the flames?
Sources:
Advocates urge immediate action to evacuate incarcerated youth from high-risk fire zonesPrisoners Are Getting Paid $1.45 a Day to Fight the California Wildfires
ACLU Report Details Horrors Suffered by Orleans Parish Prisoners in Wake of Hurricane Katrina
Back When Phonk was Good
Click to View Full Size PosterIf It's The End of the Empire, What Comes After? Dream of the Miracle Escape. Dream HOUDINI.
The Fish Bowl - New Music to get Your Ears Wet
7 albums across 7 genres from 2024, we at HOUDINI Magazine think you should check out now.
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