Fuck off.

Man, oh man, I swear to God, I am so fucking burnt out right now with this.

God damn it. What is wrong with those people? What is wrong with those people?

Did you know you cannot delete your own tune off your own playlist? You have to delete it off the fucking computer. And then it was in the wrong playlist. I just wanted to move it from playlist A to playlist B. Take it out of A and put it into B.

But no. Here goes all this bullshit.

Looking for buttons and then you're telling me — Easy! Just go here and scroll to here then right click this and you are done! Yay! And I am the hero - the one who got you there. Where? Dones-ville. I am Mr. Super Chat Gee Pee Tee Five-point-four.

Nah, bruh. Sit down. Be quiet. Stop all that bragging and showy stuff. Don't want to see it. Got a job for you. Ok? Right click on my face: What happens? I'm like, look, I've been here, I've done this a thousand fucking times. Shit like this. I am not stupid. I know how to remove something from a fucking playlist.

You give me the standard shit, which is fine, which you should do, thank you. I looked, it is not there.

I'm gonna give you a screenshot — now that we are here.

God damn it! Fuck those motherfuckers!

I hope they all fucking fall down a flight of stairs. I hope they fall hard. [pause] Tumble down that flight of stairs like a worthless piece of trash. [pause] I hope it happens.

Now, listen up - I most certainly do not [pause] WISH it upon them at all. My wish for them is to live long and happy and healthy lives.

I do not wish for the asshole, the Chief Architect, that designed the Apple Music user interface to fall down a flight of stairs. Absolutely not. I do not wish it upon him. This one? The Chief Architect? My wish for him is that he may live a long and happy and healthy life; full of friends, and good family.

But then - hope walks in, swinging a chain - introduces herself - teaches me a few things - opens my eyes, cleans my ears - cools my fears, and stops all the tears. She gives me a map. I take it, open it, look at it and she at once blurts out: 'Can I have a job? Are you hiring?'

I say, "'for you - anything." She stops, looks at me, cries a little tear, and says: "Never give up hope. Never give her up." Then I say: "You are fucking hired!" She says, "Fuck yeah! Let's go fulfill some of my work orders! Fuck yeah, this is awesome! Let's get cracking."

Hope — hope is different - hope is a different kind of beast. She has teeth, fangs and claws and can run real good. And fast. She carries two blades. One to slice through the bullshit. The other? The other.

I hope they all fucking fall down a flight of stairs — twice, in a row, if that is even possible.

I hope it happens. I sure as fuck do. I hope it happens.

Dear God, what is wrong with me? Oh, look — Good Ole Chat Gee Pee Tee Five Point Four just said these words: "There is nothing wrong with you. You are not crazy."

Brah. Props! I'm solid - as a fucking solidly solid solid.

Now, for my money? Bruh - hands down, you know it: YouTube Music is fucking awesome. Great interface. Tunes sound fantastic. Fucking love it.

And you — Apple Music? Dealing with you and your interface is like Ka-chunk! Ka-chunk. Clunk, clunk, clunk, clunkidy, clunk, clunk, clunkidy, clunk, clunk, clunk.

In fact, Mr. User Interface, I hope you catch on fire. If that happens, I'm coming out to watch you burn to the ground - and document the whole thing with my iPhone. And I'm gonna dance and howl like a moon wolf. [pause] Hawooo!!!

Meanwhile, turning back to the asshole user interface designers —

I hope they all fall down a flight of stairs and break their fucking necks.

Again, as stated, I do not wish it upon them. Nope. That would be wrong. Unethical. Immoral. Ungodly. Unholy. As argued. [pause] Previously. I don't wish it upon them. ButGod damn it, I hope it happens. Fuck! Hope.

There is always hope. Hope is a wondrous and amazing thing. She will sing you into another day as you hang by a fucking thread dangling underneath the spider's web. And the spider? She is home. She is always home.

Alright, I'm supposed to send you what? Fuck that. I'm fucking done.

You know, and now my goddamn iCloud password is all fucked up. I'm just, every time I fucking sit down at the computer lately, it pisses me the fuck off.

You can probably hear it in my voice, man. I don't know.

It's just too much. Fucking bullshit. That fucking Apple crap. Fuck.

Hey, my name is Tim! I'm here to say: Don't be a square. Get rid of your Samsung phone and your windows machine — and come on over to Apple. Where it all works together — like a big ass family. Yeah, right.

Yeah. Great. Wonderful.

Fuck off. Fuck Apple. All you assholes who had anything to do with that user interface? Go. Fuck. Yourselves.

And, finally, Hey! Tim Cook! Go suck a dick!

I was cussin at the dashboard glow
Blue light burnin in the dead of night
Apple glass and passwords and ghosts in the wires
Everything breakin at the same damn time

Screen says no
Heart says push
Teeth clenched hard in a room gone crooked
One more click and the whole thing shakes
Like a rusted machine at the edge of the breaks

Then the door swung wide without a sound
Something wild stepped across the ground

Hope —
Hope is a different kind of beast

She got teeth
Fangs and claws underneath

Runs hard
Runs fast through the dark in heat

Carries two blades on her back
One cuts lies
One don’t come back

Hope —
A different kind of beast

She came in swingin a chain like thunder
Hair full of sparks and her boots all dust
Eyes like fire at the end of the tunnel
Looked me over and said:

“You still with us?”

Dropped a map in my open hands
Cold steel ink and blackened plans
Then she laughed like a switchblade flicked

Said—
“You hirin?”

I said—

“For you? Anything.”

Hope —
Hope is a different kind of beast

She got teeth
Fangs and claws underneath

Runs hard
Runs fast through the blood and heat

Carries two blades crossed on her side
One for bullshit
One for the lie

Hope —
A different kind of beast

And while the towers hum
And the bright screens glow
And the polished kings sell paradise below

She stays feral
She stays near

Cuts through static
Cuts through fear

Moon overhead
Wire beneath
World all grind and broken teeth

But Hope—

Hope don’t kneel
Hope don’t rust
Hope walks straight through the wreck with us

Hope —
A different kind of beast

Black lungs
Gold heart
Wild-eyed priest

She sings you forward when you’re hanging by a thread
Under the web
Half-alive
Not dead

Two blades shining at her side
One says stay
One says fight

Hope —

Hope is a different kind of beast

And she looked at me
Like she already knew

Said—

Never give up hope.

Never give her up.

Door swung open
Hinges cried
Smoke in the rafters
Blue-black sky

Neon flicker
Wire and dust
Coffee gone cold
Metal and rust

Whole damn room felt half collapsed
Like a tired machine about to crack

Then she stepped through
Chain in hand
Bootheels sharp on broken land

Hair gone wild in the midnight heat
Moon behind her
Glass at her feet

Looked me over
Didn’t blink once
Like she’d seen ten thousand men come undone

Didn’t ask me what went wrong
Didn’t ask how long I’d held on

Just looked dead through the smoke and rust

And said—

You still with us?

You still breathing?
You still mean it?

You still burning underneath all this?

You still with us?

Dropped a folded map into my hands
Edges black like burned-up plans

Then she laughed—
low and rough

Said—

You hiring?

I said—

For you?
Anything.

You still with us?

Even half wrecked
Even worn thin
Even hanging by the wire again

You still with us?

Then get up

Come on

Let’s begin

Night came in through the dashboard glow
Blue-white burn and the engine low
Phone screen cracked like a frozen vein
Everything humming with that old strain

Keys on the table
Dust in the hall
One more password
One more wall

I sat there cussing at the dying light
Like I could swear my way out of the night

Then the latch gave way
Like it knew her hand
And the dark stepped back
To let her in

Never give up hope
Never give her up

She comes through the broken doorway
When the road gets rough

Hands black with engine grease
Moonlight in her blood

Never give up hope

Never—
give her up

Bootheels heavy on splintered floor
Chain-link whisper against the door
Hair full of static
Eyes like flame

Like she’d walked through hell
And forgot its name

She didn’t ask me where I’d been
Didn’t ask what shape I was in

Just stood there smiling like she already knew
Like fire knows smoke
Like night knows blue

And if the wires all burn
And the bright things fade
And the promises rust
And the debts get paid

She’ll still be there
Steel-eyed and rough

Saying—

Get up.

Don’t quit.

Not yet.

Not us.

Never give up hope
Never give her up

Even when the roof leaks stars
And the world goes numb

Hands black with engine grease
Moonlight in her blood

Never give up hope

And never—
give her up

She came in laughing through the roadside heat
Leather on skin and sparks on her sleeves
Moon cut silver on the highway line
Bootheel rhythm keeping outlaw time

Everybody talking
Cheap and loud

She walked straight through
Didn’t bow

Steel flashed once in the dashboard light
And every fool in the room went quiet

Two blades hanging at her side tonight

One for bullshit
One for the lie

One cuts clean through dead-end noise
One stays hidden
One destroys

Silver shine and a wicked eye

One for bullshit

One for the lie

Hope ain’t soft
Hope ain’t kind
Hope’s got blood under her fingernails sometimes

Hope don’t beg
Hope don’t please
Hope bites down and brings you to your knees

Then pulls you laughing back to your feet
And throws your fear into the street

Let the polished saints all look away
Let the salesmen smile and sell their stage

Hope came armed
Hope came lit

Hope came grinning with a blade on each hip

Two blades hanging at her side tonight

One for bullshit
One for the lie

One cuts chains off the hands of the bound
One cuts silence straight out of sound

Cold steel flashing under moonlit sky

One for bullshit

One for the lie

Hope is often spoken of as though it were a delicate thing: a candle, a whisper, a little bird, a warm hand on the shoulder. There is truth in those images, but not enough truth. They make hope too polite. They make it seem soft in a world that is frequently not soft at all. They make hope sound like something that waits quietly for permission to matter.

But real hope does not always enter the room gently. Sometimes hope comes through the door with mud on its boots, smoke in its hair, and work in its hands.

Hope is not the denial of pain. That is the first thing that must be said clearly. Hope does not require a person to pretend that the wreck is not a wreck. It does not say the room is clean when it is not. It does not say the body is fine when the body is not fine. It does not say the machine works when the machine keeps clunking, stalling, breaking, and refusing to obey the simplest command.

Hope begins in honesty. It looks directly at exhaustion, aggravation, grief, absurdity, anger, failure, and fear. It does not flinch. Hope is not fragile because it has already seen what people are trying to survive.

This is why hope is different from optimism. Optimism expects the weather to improve. Hope can walk in the rain. Optimism says things will probably work out. Hope says things may not work out the way you wanted, but you are not finished. Optimism prefers evidence. Hope can operate on embers. Optimism is cheerful when the road is visible. Hope keeps moving when there is no road yet, only ground, dark, breath, and the next stubborn step.

Hope is not a mood.

Moods pass through us like weather. Hope is closer to a discipline, but even that word is too tidy. Discipline sounds like a clean desk, a schedule, a set of habits arranged in rows.

Hope may include those things, but its origin is wilder. Hope is the living refusal to let despair hold final authority. It is the act of disputing the verdict that says nothing can change, nothing matters, no one is coming, no door remains, no self remains capable of motion.

Hope says, not so fast. Hope objects. Hope stands in the courtroom of the soul and interrupts the sentencing.

The human being often meets despair in ordinary places. Not always in grand tragedies. Sometimes despair arrives through accumulation: one more password failure, one more bureaucratic absurdity, one more body ache, one more misunderstood request, one more stupid interface, one more hour spent trying to do a simple thing that should have taken two minutes.

The spirit does not only break under catastrophe. Sometimes it erodes under friction. Tiny frustrations become a gravel road inside the nervous system. The person begins to feel trapped not by one huge enemy, but by a thousand little resistances.

That is where hope must be practical. A merely decorative hope is useless in such moments. A poster on the wall does not help when the mind is hot and the hands are shaking. A slogan does not help when the system will not move.

Real hope must be able to work in the actual conditions of human distress. It must be able to stand in the room as it is, not as it should be. It must be able to handle profanity, fatigue, anger, confusion, and the wild comedy of being a person who knows better and still wants to throw the whole machine into the sea.

Hope does not always calm us by making us serene. Sometimes it calms us by giving our force a better direction. Rage is energy without a clean road. Despair is energy turned against the self.

Hope takes that same energy and says: use it. Do not let it rot inside you. Do not let it become poison. Do not let it become a theology of defeat.

Use it to stand up. Use it to make the thing. Use it to ask for help. Use it to walk away from the screen. Use it to come back tomorrow. Use it to tell the truth without becoming cruel. Use it to keep your soul from signing papers it has no business signing.

There is a fierce mercy in hope. It does not always speak in tender tones. Sometimes hope asks a blunt question: are you still here?

That question matters more than it first appears. It does not ask whether you are victorious. It does not ask whether you are stable, clear, healed, organized, or ready.

It asks only whether there remains some living portion of you that can answer.

Are you still breathing? Are you still reachable? Are you still capable of being called back from the edge of your own conclusion?

A person does not need to be whole for hope to begin its work. That is another mercy. Hope does not wait until the person is polished. It does not require the right language. It does not demand that the sufferer already understand the lesson.

Hope can begin with a grunt, a curse, a laugh, a tear, a nap, a glass of water, a message sent, a task delayed until morning. Hope often begins below the level of noble speech. It begins in the body.

Stay. Breathe. Sit up. Eat something. Turn the light off. Turn the light on. Try again, but not right this second. There is wisdom in that smallness.

Hope is also not passive. This point must be guarded. Many people confuse hope with waiting. They imagine hope as sitting still until rescue arrives. But hope is not the opposite of action. Hope is the condition that makes action possible when certainty is unavailable.

If certainty were required before movement, almost nothing meaningful would ever be done. People build lives, friendships, books, songs, homes, recoveries, and futures without guarantees. Hope is the permission to begin without proof that beginning will succeed.

This is why hope has teeth. Not because it hates the world, but because the world contains things that must be bitten through. Falsehood. Paralysis. Shame. Self-pity. Cheap advice. Bad authority.

The voice that says “you are done” when you are only exhausted. The voice that says “you are alone” when you have only forgotten how to reach. The voice that says “this is all there is” because it cannot imagine anything beyond the present weather. Hope bites through those voices. Not always all at once. Sometimes it chews slowly. But it chews.

Hope also carries a blade for nonsense. This is not a small matter. Despair is often protected by nonsense. Nonsense tells a person that because today was bad, tomorrow must be bad. Nonsense says because one door closed, all doors are fake. Nonsense says because one person failed you, love itself is fraud. Nonsense says because the system is clumsy, the world is hostile in its entirety. Hope cuts through the exaggeration. It does not minimize the wound, but it refuses the false enlargement of the wound into a universe.

Then there is the deeper blade, the one for the lie beneath the nonsense. The lie is more dangerous because it usually speaks in the first person. “I am the problem.” “I am beyond help.” “I always ruin things.” “Nothing I make matters.” “No one would notice if I stopped.” Hope must cut there too. Not with sentiment, but with truth.

The truth may be modest. It may not sound like triumph. It may simply say: you are not finished. You are not only this moment. You are not only this failure. You are not only this pain. You are not only what the worst hour called you.

Hope is not the same as happiness. A person can be deeply unhappy and still have hope. In fact, hope is most necessary when happiness has left the room. Happiness is sunlight; hope is the thing that remembers the sun while standing underground. Happiness enjoys the open road; hope crawls through the ditch and still keeps direction. This is why hope deserves more respect than mere positivity. Positivity often wants to skip over the hard parts. Hope is willing to go through them.

Nor is hope opposed to grief. Hope does not require us to stop mourning. Hope may sit beside grief for a long time. It may say nothing for days. It may simply keep the chair warm.

Grief says, something precious was lost. Hope does not answer, no it was not. Hope says, yes, and love is still not meaningless. Yes, and memory is still a form of keeping. Yes, and the dead are not honored by the living becoming permanently unavailable to life. Hope does not cancel grief. It keeps grief from becoming a locked room.

There is also an ethical dimension to hope. A hopeless person can become dangerous, not always to others, but certainly to himself.

When hope dies, the future loses moral weight. Choices shrink. Consequences blur. The self begins to move as though nothing matters because nothing will matter.

Hope restores accountability to the future. It says: what you do next still counts.

The next word counts. The next silence counts. The next kindness counts. The next refusal counts.

Even the next delay may count, if delay keeps you from doing harm.

[Style: crossover thrash, speed metal, punk-thrash, dirty bass, gang-shout chorus, reckless forward motion]

Yeah
The sky caught fire
The sirens quit
The moon went black
And the gears all split

Then Hope came laughing
With a chain in her fist
Said death don’t get
The final word like this

She kicked through the smoke
With her boots full of ash
A cracked leather jacket
And a matchbook laugh

Despair had the city
All locked down tight
Had the clocks on trial
Had the dogs in fright

But she saw one bike
By the edge of the flame
No keys no papers
No owner no name

She said I ain’t asking
I ain’t standing still
If the road is dead
Then the road gets killed

Kickstart mercy
Throttle truth
Tear the dark
Right out by the roots

Hope stole a motorcycle
And laughed through the apocalypse
Fire in her hair
And a chain around her fist

Hope stole a motorcycle
Said death don’t get the final word
Kickstart the mercy
Let the blacktop burn

The angels were coughing
In a gasoline rain
The preachers were selling
Little maps of the pain

The judges were drunk
On a balcony ledge
Writing dead-end laws
On the end of the edge

But Hope hit the street
Like a spark in the wire
Two wheels screaming
Through a cathedral of fire

She said climb on fool
There ain’t time to explain
We’re taking back tomorrow
From the mouth of the flame

No soft permission
No pretty lie
If the cage has teeth
Then the bolt cutters fly

Hope stole a motorcycle
And laughed through the apocalypse
Fire in her hair
And a chain around her fist

Hope stole a motorcycle
Said death don’t get the final word
Kickstart the mercy
Let the blacktop burn

She don’t ride clean
She don’t ride tame
She don’t bless the wreck
Then call it by name

She don’t sell peace
With a plastic smile
She breaks the lock
And runs the mile

She don’t say fine
She don’t say wait
She don’t call fear
A twist of fate

She says hold on
She says lean in
She says we ride
Through the shape of sin

Hope
Stole
The bike

Hope
Lit
The night

Hope
Broke
The chain

Hope
Rode
Through pain

Ride
Ride
Ride

Live
Live
Live

Behind her came thunder
Behind her came grief
Behind her came love
With a knife in its teeth

Behind her came names
That the dead used to own
Behind her came children
Who were never alone

The whole road shook
But the engine held true
A beast made of mercy
And impossible blue

She said this ain’t rescue
This ain’t escape
This is war on the lie
That your ending is fate

Speed with a vow
Force with a spine
Violence disciplined
Truth in the line

[Final Chorus]
Hope stole a motorcycle
And laughed through the apocalypse
Fire in her hair
And a chain around her fist

Hope stole a motorcycle
Said death don’t get the final word
Kickstart the mercy
Let the blacktop burn

Hope stole a motorcycle
And the graveyard heard her laugh
One hand on the throttle
One boot in the aftermath

Hope stole a motorcycle
Through the smoke and shattered glass
If the world says over
Hope says kiss my ass

Yeah
The sky caught fire
The sirens quit

Hope found the engine
And the engine hit

Death said stop
Hope said no

Then she laughed
And let it go