The Audio Companion to No Shortcuts to Now
This one’s a Field Note — not a full Waypoint, but a reflection. A moment to catch our breath and track the tremors.
Originally written before recent events, it might land a little differently now.
If it moves you, like it. If it stirs something, share it — with a friend, a fellow traveler, or someone watching the mask slip.
Hey friends — welcome. Today I’ve got a Field Note for you — not a full Waypoint, but a reflection. A way to unfold recent ideas and tie them to what’s happening in the world around us.
I wrote this one in early June — before the No Kings protests flooded our streets, before the National Guard and Marines were deployed here in California, and before the strike on Iran.
It all began with a strange exchange: Trump and Musk, trading jabs on social media. But what caught my attention wasn’t what they said. It was what they didn’t. So here it is — that Field Note, now read aloud. And in light of what’s happened since… it might ring louder now than it did before.
Field Note 1.3 (b): The Ratatoskr Files
Recently, we’ve witnessed two mythic tricksters — Trump and Musk — battling not with banjos, but with social media posts, each vying for control of the cultural script.
The greatest blow came when Musk claimed that Trump’s administration had failed to release the Epstein files because Trump himself was named in them. Not a good look. The post was explosive — but what followed was more revealing.
On Air Force One, Trump responded with an almost eerie calm. He said he hadn’t given Musk much thought, that he’d been busy with more important affairs, and that he wished him “well.”
But the camera caught more than his words. And what it caught, the media tends to overlook. We joke about his makeup — and with good reason. It’s absurd. But as observers, we do well to pause when the laughter subsides, and consider what this profound psychological reflex — laughter — reveals. We do, after all, closely associate the fool with the philosopher.
In that eerie calm, I noticed something else: Trump’s makeup looked unusually thick — hastily, heavily, even desperately applied. Beneath his white, performative hat, he hid his face. Something deep inside had been hit.
Have you ever sat in a room, looked up, and noticed a light fixture swaying — the subtle sign that a seismic event has passed, that somewhere deep beneath you, a fault has shifted?
Think of Trump’s makeup as a kind of seismogram — registering a tremor in his earthen heart. And what I read in that cryptic, caked-on mask wasn’t guilt. It wasn’t anger.
It was shame.
Now, reading this seismogram, we have to distinguish guilt from shame. Guilt means regret — the presence of conscience. But shame? Shame isn’t about something you’ve done. It’s about who you are.
And on this day, the foundation of Trump’s mask looked like the foundational kind — the kind laid down in childhood, to shield a boy from his authoritarian father’s cold, unforgiving, omnipresent glare, a terrible god-like glare from ten thousand feet above.
Musk didn’t just bruise Trump’s ego. He struck the central wound — the narcissistic wound — the buried source of shame upon which the president has built his compensatory persona: bold, brash, even bulletproof.
But what happens when, under immense pressure, that persona begins to slip — not just crack, but fracture — along its oldest, deepest fault line?
What happens when the man who has achieved near-dictatorial power finds himself mocked again — as he once was, as he always feared — and reawakens that helpless boy beneath his father’s rule?
What happens when Musk’s blows land not on the man, but on the boy inside — and in some dark, subterranean chamber, begin to echo the most terrifying, unholy of rhetorical questions:
Who’s your daddy?
Behind the caked-on mask, the fire rages. Pressure builds. And if he blows — if shame overtakes the performance — the fallout won’t just singe one man’s legacy.
It could burn through the body politic itself.
This was Field Note 1.3 from No Shortcuts to Now. Since I first wrote this, Trump has escalated: deploying the military, flexing power, and retreating behind an ever-thickening mask.
But the deeper question remains: What happens when shame — not strategy — drives the man in power?
Thanks for listening. If the ideas here resonate, feel free to share this with someone who’d appreciate the conversation.
And of course — I’ll see you at the next Waypoint.
☕ No java, no justice! ☕
Even a small gesture makes a difference.
🧭 Want to follow the journey? Miss the last Waypoint?
📘 Begin here | ⬅️ Waypoint 1.3 | ➡️ Waypoint 1.4
🗂️Chapter 1 Index: Standing in The Ancient Shadow
