December 20, 2025

 

The Democracy of Dirt

The streetlights flicker their last tired breaths

as the night settles in, thick as damp velvet.

Somewhere beyond the trees,

a siren wails and then thinks better of it.

The world exhales.

Here, in this forgotten cemetery

where the city’s glow dies at the gate,

the gravestones lean like old drunks

whispering secrets to the moss.

The names carved into them have been sanded down

by rain, wind, and the indifference of passing centuries.

No one remembers these people. No one visits.

Even the crows have moved on to better neighborhoods.

And yet the place hums.

Not with ghosts — nothing so theatrical —

but with the quiet, stubborn dignity of

lives that never made the history books.

The butcher who sang to himself while sharpening knives.

The seamstress who dreamed of Paris but never made it past the county line.

The boy who wrote poems no one read and

buried them under his mattress like contraband hope.

They lie here now, equal in the democracy of dirt.

The world never saw what they could’ve been.

Maybe one of them had a mind sharp enough to split atoms or write epics.

Maybe one carried a heart big enough to save someone who needed saving.

But poverty, circumstance, and the grinding machinery of daily

survival swallowed their brilliance before it ever sparked.

The city rushes past them,

headlights slicing through the fog,

unaware that it drives over a thousand unwritten stories.

And the speaker — me, you, whoever wanders here at dusk —

feels the tug of that anonymity. The reminder that

ambition is a fragile thing, easily crushed under the weight of

rent, illness, heartbreak, or the simple fact of being born in the wrong century.

In the end, the grave doesn’t care about résumés.

But there’s a strange comfort in that. A leveling. A mercy.

So I stand here, listening to the wind thread itself through the iron gate,

and imagine my own epitaph — not carved in marble,

but drifting somewhere between the branches:

A wanderer who tried.

A voice that cracked but kept speaking.

A heart that beat, stubbornly, against the dark.

And whatever walks here — memory, time, the echo of the forgotten — walks with me.

 

N.P.: “Worlock” – Skinny Puppy

December 16, 2025

 

It is 04:00 and the typewriter is mocking me.  It sits there, a dull gray beast of burden, demanding tribute in the form of coherence, which is a commodity currently in short supply in this suburban bunker.  My head feels like it’s being compressed by the gravitational pull of a collapsing star, likely the result of a misguided attempt to mix a shitload of Ny-Quil with high-grade existential dread.  But we must press on, mustn’t we, dear reader?  We must push through the mire of our own synaptic failures because today – December 16th – is a holy day.  A day of reckoning.  A day when the cosmos, in a fit of absolute, unadulterated irony, decided to birth Arthur C. Clarke, the British Baron of the Space Elevator, and Philip K Dick, the Paranoia King of Point Reyes, onto the same spinning rock.

To understand the sheer statistical absurdity of this coincidence requires a level of mental gymnastics that usually results in a pulled groin muscle of the soul.  On one hand, you have Arthur C. Clarke.  The man who looked at the sky and saw geometry.  He was the sort of guy who could sit in a bungalow in Sri Lanka, sipping tea that probably cost more than my car, and calmly calculate the trajectory of humanity’s ascent into pure energy.  Clarke gave us the monolith.  The clean, black slab of infinite possibility.  He gave us a computer that murdered astronauts with the polite detachment of a DMV employee denying your license renewal.  His prose was like a freshly polished chrome fender reflecting a binary sunset – clean, scientific, and optimistic in a way that makes you want to check your wallet to see if you’ve been robbed.  He made us believe that if we just did the math right, we could all turn into giant space babies and float around the cosmos listening to Strauss.

And then. Then.  You have the other one.

If Arthur C. Clarke was the cleanroom of the future, Philip K. Dick was the grimy alleyway behind the simulation.  Dick didn’t look up at the stars; he looked at his neighbor’s window and wondered if the man inside was a robot sent by the government to steal his neuroses.  He was a creature of amphetamines and pink lasers, a man who wrote about the fluidity of reality because his own reality was melting like a Dali clock left on a dashboard in the Mojave.

He didn’t give us starships; he gave us empathy boxes and spray cans of reality-restorer.  He asked the question that haunts me every time I try to assemble IKEA furniture: Is any of this actually real, or am I just a brain in a jar hallucinating a particleboard bookshelf?

It is fundamentally unfair that one day gets to claim them both.  It’s like scheduling a chess match between Arthur C. Clarke – the supercomputer – and Philip K. Dick – the feral raccoon that just at a bag of espresso beans.  Clarke offers you a vision of technology as salvation; Dick offers you a vision of technology as a trap laid by a gnostic demon.  One is the Apollo program; the other is a bad trip in an Orange County strip mall.

So here I sit, surrounded by empty Ny-Quil bottles and half-finished manuscripts, trying to reconcile these two visions.  An I a Star Child, waiting to shed this fleshy husk?  Or am I just a replicant with a four-year lifespan and a cough syrup problem?

The truth, as usual, is somewhere in the static between the channels.  We need to cold, hard vacuum of Arthur  C. Clarke’s logic to keep us from dissolving into puddles of god, but we need the frantic, sweat-soaked panic of Philip K. Dick to remind us that the systems we build are just as broken as the people who build them.

I raise a plastic shotcup containing a green fluid of suspicious viscosity, to Arthur C. Clarke and Philip K. Dick.  To the Sentinel and the Scanner.  To the man who saw God in the machine, and the man who saw the Devil in the wiring.

Cheers.

N.P.: “No Feelings” – Sex Pistols

December 14, 2025

 

Sobriety, dear reader, has been a trip.  Not the fun, kaleidoscopic kind where you’re riding a wave of serotonin and questionable decisions, but the kind where your brain decided to chuck a I.E.D into your circadian rhythm just for the fuck of it.  In the early days, I became what I can only describe as “insomniatic.”  [Yes, I know it wasn’t (previous to today) a recognized English word, but I found the English language to be lacking in this specific instance, so I created this neologism.  You’re welcome.]  Sixty-two hours.  That’s how long I was awake.  Sixty-two hours of raw, unfiltered consciousness.   It was like being trapped in a David Lynch film, minus the jazz and creepy dwarves.  Fascinating, sure, but also the kind of fascinating that has you questioning the nature of reality itself.

Then came the dreams.  Those annoyances had been gone for decades, and they weren’t missed.  But they’ve come back now, in 4K resolution, Dolby surround sound, and full fucking Technicolor.  And they sucked.  Not in a “wake-up screaming” kind of way – I don’t do nightmares, thank you very much – but in a “why is my subconscious so goddamn annoying?” kind of way.  They were petty, irritating little vignettes that stuck to my brain like gum on a hot sidewalk.  But last night?  Last night, my dreams finally got their act together.  They started with a delightful little scene of vengeance – me, absolutely eviscerating a certain pitiful bitch who had the stupid audacity to approach me in a restaurant.  It was glorious.  Then, a hard cut to something far more wholesome: a dream about the release of my next book, the one I’m about to hurl into the publishing void.  No spoilers, of course, but let’s just say I woke up feeling like a goddamn superhero.

That feeling didn’t last.  Because, as is the way of the world, reality came knocking with its usual bag of horrors.  The news of the antisemitic terrorist attack in Australia hit like a liver kick.  Utterly vile.  My hat’s off to the badass who wrestled one of the attacker’s guns away – and act of courage that deserves more than a passing mention.  Would that he had finished the job, though.  My thoughts are with the victims, their families, and my Jewish friends around the world on this first day of Hanukkah.  It’s a bitter reminder that the world is still full of monsters, and not the fun, fictional kind.

On a brighter note, let’s talk about Shirley Jackson.  Today marks the birth of one of the most ferocious minds to ever put pen to paper.  If you didn’t read The Lottery in school, stop what you’re doing and fix that.  It’s a short story that will slap you across the face and leave you questioning everything you thought you knew about human nature.  And then there’s The Haunting of Hill House, a gothic masterpiece that opens with one of the most chilling paragraphs in all of literature:

No living organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.  Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more.  Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone. 

Chills. Every damn time.  That opening is a masterclass in atmosphere, a slow, deliberate tightening of the noose before you even realize it’s around your neck.  Jackson dissected the human condition with the precision of a surgeon and the malice of a cat toying with its prey.  Suburban conformity, psychological terror, the uncanny – she turned these into her playground, and the results were nothing short of devastating.  She was, in every sense of the word, a literary badass.

I aspire to write something even a fraction as haunting, as sharp, as utterly unforgettable as her opening paragraph to Hill House.  Until then, I’ll keep hammering away at these keys, dreaming in 4K, and occasionally indulging in a little dream-world vengeance.

Here’s to Shirley Jackson, to the courage of those who stand against Islamic-extremist hate, and to the strange, maddening, beautiful journey of sobriety.  Stay weird, stay wild, and for the love of all things holy, stay awake for less than 62 hours at a time.

Happy Sunday, Merry Christmas, and Happy Hanukkah.

N.P.: “I Stay Away” – Alice In Chains

December 13, 2025

 

Okay, confession time, dear reader: if you’re reading this on December 13th, congratulations – you’re three days late to the party, just like me (and frankly, just like Faulkner would’ve preferred).  But hey, what’s a Nobel speech anniversary without a little tardiness and existential disarray?  Time is a flat circle, calendars are a social construct, and whiskey tastes the same on any day ending in Y.
So, let’s rewind to December 10th, 1949, and picture it: in the icy, buttoned-up heart of Stockholm, a gaggle of Nordic royalty and tuxedoed stiff-shirts are waiting.  Waiting for a small, mustachioed man from the humid, gothic morass of Mississippi to stumble up to a podium, likely completely shit-housed, and accept the shiniest of all literary hood ornaments: the Nobel Prize.  The man is William Faulkner, author of The Sound and the Fury and cartographer of the broken human soul, and he very nearly told them to all to shove it.
This whole affair, this trans-Atlantic flight into the glacial maw of European high culture, was, for Faulkner, the type of bullshitty literary root canal he had zero intention of undergoing.  The man hated speeches.  Hated them with a passion usually reserved for tax collectors and people who dog-ear pages.  His initial, and let’s be honest, deeply admirable plan was to dispatch a two-sentence telegram.  Something along the lines of, “Fuck off.  I’m busy.” and then get back to the serious business of drinking whiskey and wrestling sentences into submission.
But pressure, for some  people, can be a hell of a thing.  Family, friends, maybe the ghost of Conrad himself, they all conspired.  So Bill gets on the goddamn plane, a tweed-clad ghost haunting the fuselage, probably already marinating his liver for the ordeal ahead.  He arrives in Stockholm, a place as alien to his Rowan Oak porch as a Marian landscape, and proceeds to do what any sane man would do when faced with a week of stilted small talk and ceremonial pomp: he gets absolutely, unequivocally hammered.
And then comes the moment.  The culmination of a year-long delay and a lifetime of torturing typewriters.  He’s shuffled to the dais, looking less like a literary titan and more like a man searching for the nearest exit and a stiff drink.  The world holds its breath, expecting a mumbled thank you, a polite nod, and a quick escape.
What they get instead is five minutes of pure, uncut, lightning-in-a-bottle prophecy.  This titan of tragedy, this man who writes novels so dense with despair you could drown in them, stands up there, swaying, and delivers the single most potent dose of secular scripture in modern history.  He talks about the atom bomb, the fear, the universal dread hanging over everyone like a shroud.  Here’s the core:
“I feel that this award is not made to me as a man, but to my work…Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it.  There are no longer problems of the spirit.  There is only the question: When will I be blown up?  Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart…
I decline to accept the end of man…I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail.  He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.”
It’s a speech so powerful, so fundamentally at odds with the bleakness of his own work, that it feels like a cosmic joke and a profound truth all at once.  Faulkner, in that moment, becomes the reluctant prophet of postwar literature.  He tells the world that the writer’s duty is to remind humanity of its courage, its honor, its hope, and its capacity for compassion.  He says this while still metabolizing a truly heroic amount of whiskey.
He drops the mic, pockets the prize money, fucks off back to Mississippi , and goes right back to writing labyrinthine masterpieces that most of America wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole.  Back to the porch and the typewriter and the dogs and the ghosts.
He keeps writing.
Books that no one buys.
Books that confuse people.
Books that bleed.
So today, we raise a glass (cheap bourbon preferred, neat, no ice) to the man who took the Nobel, told the world to get its shit together, and then went back to the swamp to keep doing the work.
He didn’t endure.
He prevailed.
And he did it broke, drunk, and brilliant.

N.P.: “Bellum Terrae Mediae” – Dogukan Ozturk

Word of the Day: eldritch

 

Here I am again, sinister reader, entombed in the perpetual, soupy miasma that my humble hamlet of Fecal Creek. CA, has apparently decided to adopt as its permanent personality.  You see, this town, indeed the entirety of Anhedonia County, has been swallowed whole by fog for at least three weeks now, fog so thick you could spread it on toast and call it despair.  Nights are a wet, milky blindness where streetlamps die at twenty paces and every dog refuses to bark because even they know something is listening.   Days are just a brief negotiation with a sun that is now more a rumor than a fact.  Everything drips.  It’s the kind of weather that seeps into your bones, a damp that clings not just to your clothes but to your spirit.  And what does a self-respecting, newly and brutally sober, quasi-hermetic literary type do when faced with such an atmospheric siege?  One leans in, naturally, toward the only honest literature for weather like this.  Because I’m nothing if not a masochist for mood, my reading has become a direct reflection of the meteorological morass outside.  It started, as it must, with Poe, because of course Poe; the man who knew how to weaponize atmosphere understood that the real horror is when the architecture itself wants you dead.  His tales of premature burial and sentient abysses read less like fiction and more like a local weather report.  From there, it was almost a predestined slide back into the embrace of Stoker’s Dracula, because nothing says “cozy” like aristocratic necrophilia in a castle that smells like a crypt’s taint (and because fog and vampiric dread are basically peanut butter and jelly).  Carpathian menace felt perfectly at home here, his vaporous transformations mirroring the air I was breathing.
Now, I find myself deep in H.P. Lovecraft’s The Shunned House, a choice so fitting it borders on cosmic satire.  The story’s fungal horrors and subterranean emanations are in terrifying synchronicity with the damp decay that seems to have become the Creek’s primary export.
The combination of these particular fictions with the perpetually unsettling atmosphere has rendered my world a place of profound and disquieting strangeness, a place where the veil between the mundane and the monstrous feels perilously thin.  Which, conveniently, brings us to today’s word, the only one that still works when the air itself feels like it’s conspiring:

Eldritch (adj.)
/weird and sinister or ghostly; unearthly; uncanny; strange, eerie, and unnatural in a way that provokes fear, unease, or dread/
From Scots, probably from Middle English elrich, itself maybe from Old English ælf-rīce “elf-realm” + a twist through centuries of border ballads where the fairies weren’t cute and the night had teeth.  First citation 1508, but it feels older, like it crawled out of a peat bog still wearing the face of something that should have stayed drowned.
And now, because the fog demands tribute, a short story showing the word at work in the wild:
The fog never lifted; it merely thinned to the consistency of a dying man’s breath on a mirror.  I walked the cracked spine of Miner’s Ravine Road where the blackberry brambles had grown so bold they’d begun knitting themselves into arches, forming a thorny cathedral that no priest would ever consecrate.  Somewhere behind the veil, Fecal Creek’s lone traffic light blink its yellow eye, like a warning it had forgotten the point of.  The house at the bend, everyone knew the house, had stood empty for decades, yet every third night its attic window glowed the color of spoiled buttermilk.  I told myself I was only cutting through the yard to shave forty seconds off my trudge to the liquor store, but the fog had other curricula.  Halfway across the weed- choked lawn the ground exhaled.  Not a wind, not a scent; something between a sigh and a belch, centuries of basement rot rising through the soles of my boots.  The mist folded around me until the world reduced to a single wet coin of visibility.  And in that coin, for one heartbeat only, the house was not a house.  It was a face, vast and fungal, its shingles the scales of something that had learned carpentry the way leukemia learns bone marrow.  Its windows were eyes filmed with cataract and ancient hunger, and from the black porch gaped a mouth that had never bothered with doors.  The entire structure leaned forward the way a praying mantis leans before it remembers it is allowed to be cruel.  That was the moment, the single systolic throb, when the night revealed its true and eldritch geometry.
Then the fog inhaled, the face collapsed back into clapboard and neglect, and I was running, lungs full of grave-damp, boots slapping through puddles that reflected no moon because the moon had apparently filed a restraining order.  I did not stop until the neon of the liquor store bled across my retinas like a mercy killing.
I bought two bottles of the cheapest red wine and drank one in the parking lot just to remind my heart it was still allowed to beat.
Fecal Creek is still out there, sopping, listening.
The fog is not hiding anything.
It is showing us, very patiently, what was always here. 

So here we are, spooky reader: a town marinated in fog, a reader marinated in gothic dread, and a word marinated in centuries of linguistic strangeness.  If the weather doesn’t break soon, I’ll be forced to reread House of Leaves and start scribbling paranoid diagrams on my walls.

N.P.: “Temple of Love 1992” – Sisters of Mercy

Pearl Harbor Day: America’s Original FAFO Sermon

Today is Pearl Harbor Day, dear, young, likely historically ignorant reader.  And this morning, with the right kind of awareness, you can still smell the cordite and betrayal, even eighty-four years later.  Imagine the Pacific sun rising over Oahu, sailors still half-drunk on Saturday night liberty, and then the sky itself vomiting steel and fire courtesy of those treacherous, rotten, shit-sucking Imperial Japanese bastards who thought they’d invented the concept of a sucker punch.  Spoiler: they hadn’t.

Pearl Harbor was a cosmic joke gone lethal, a nation’s collective hangover suddenly cured by the shriek of dive bombers and the sight of battleships belching smoke like dying dinosaurs.  America, caught pants-down, coffee not yet brewed, suddenly found itself staring into doom.  And that doom was painted with the Rising Sun.

Cue the doctrine that would later be branded FAFO – though back then it was more primal, less acronymic, more like the raw animal snarl of a country that had just been cock-punched across the Pacific.  You mess with the sleeping giant, you wake up in a nightmare.  And the nightmare came in the form of two massive fuck-off mushroom clouds, each one a vengeful sermon preached from the pulpit of modernity.  Hiroshima.  Nagasaki.  Cities turned into ashtray metaphors, the ultimate “don’t try this at home” PSA.

It wasn’t pretty.  It might not have been noble.  It wasn’t the sanitized heroism of war movies where the trumpet swells and the flag waves in slow motion.  It was brutal, humiliating, and final.  Japan went from swaggering imperialist bully to shivering, sniveling, kneeling supplicant in less time than it takes to say “unconditional surrender.”  The lesson was scorched into the earth itself: America doesn’t just retaliate; America retaliates with biblical fury, with the kind of overkill that makes future enemies pause, sweat, and complete reconsider their life choices.

Pearl Harbor Day isn’t just about remembering the dead – though we must, always – it’s about remembering the moment America decided to stop playing nice.  The day we got sucker-punched and responded by inventing the most terrifying mic drop in human history.

So raise a glass today, not in celebration but in defiance.  To the sailors entombed in steel coffins at the bottom of the harbor.  To the civilians who never saw the bombers coming.  And yes, to the awe-inspiring fire that ended the war.  Pearl Harbor was the opening act.  Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the encore.

But here’s the part that curdles my bourbon, the rotgut truth that keeps me pacing the floorboards at 3 a.m.: the America that once answered treachery with firestorms and unconditional surrender papers now looks like it’s been neutered by its own self-appointed moral hall monitors, the ones who think hashtags are strategy and empathy for narco-terrorists is diplomacy.  We’ve gone from steel-jawed brawlers to therapy-session sissies, from a nation that could vaporize two cities before breakfast to one that can’t even decide if its borders are real.

Because let’s be honest: the left has been busy sanding down the teeth of the beat, turning the war machine into some sort of pitiful daycare center where Teletubbies go to fuck…where illegal immigrants, cartel apologists, and anti-American imports get tucked in with warm milk while the citizens who’d actually bleed in the next war are told to shut up and check their privilege.  It’s a grotesque inversion of priorities, a carnival of cowardice dressed up as compassion, and it makes me wonder it the next Pearl Harbor will be met not with mushroom clouds but with strongly worded press releases and congressional hearings that drag on until the enemy has already planted their flag on our soil.

The spiraling nightmare is this: we’ve traded resolve for rhetoric, fury for focus, and the raw animal snarl of a wounded giant for the mewling of bureaucrats who thing “restraint” is a virtue when the sky is on fire.  Imagine the next sucker punch – missiles streaking, ships burning, civilians screaming – and instead of the old America rising from the smoke with clenched fists, we get committees, hashtags, and a chorus of “this is not who we are.”

But history doesn’t give a shit who we are.  History only cares who wins.  And if we’ve lost the will to win – if we’ve let the pussification of America become our defining trait – then the next Pearl Harbor won’t be remembered as the day we woke up.  It’ll be remembered as the day we rolled over, pulled the blanket up, and let someone else write the ending.

So here’s the mic drop, the blistering sermon carved into the bones of this day: Pearl Harbor was the warning, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the answer, and the only question left is whether we still have the guts to answer again.  If not, then the obituary of America will read like a parody: a nation that once nuked its enemies into submission but later surrendered to its own cowardice.

N.P.: “Funeral March” – 2WEI

Word of the Day: epicaricacy

 

Epicaricacy is a noun referring to the quiet, delicious, morally indefensible little orgasm you get when some smug motherfucker finally eats the exact shit sandwich he or she spent years force-feeding everyone else.
German has schadenfreude, sure, but that’s the tourist version, the Disneyland of malice.  Epicaricacy is the back-alley, no-safe-word edition.  Think of it as schadenfreude’s eccentric cousin who insists one wearing velvet pants to funerals and ordering wine in Latin while correcting your pronunciation of “bruschetta.”
It’s etymology is a straight up Latin/Greek smash-and-grab:
epi– (“upon”)
chara (“joy”)
Kakos (“evil” or “misfortune”)
So, literally: joy-upon-evil, with a hard middle-finger detour through the medieval habit of pretending you’re enjoying someone’s downfall for “pedagogical reasons.”  The word itself was basically invented in 1715 by some wigged Brit who wanted to sound smarter than the Germans while still getting his rocks off watching dukes slip on ice.  Respect.

The sign outside the cantina flickered like a dying insect: “Carnaval de Gasolina.”¹ Nobody cared. By midnight, the joint was a pharmacological zoo—cheap mezcal poured into motor oil cans, cocaine cut with talcum powder, and tabs of acid shaped like Biden’s neck waddles.²
I was three shots past coherence when Frankie “Dos Cuchillos” decided to rob the bar.³ He didn’t bother with a mask—just stormed in waving machetes like he was auditioning for a narco telenovela. The jukebox kept playing “Sweet Caroline,” which made the whole thing feel like a parody of violence.
Somebody threw a chair. Somebody else threw up. Frankie screamed about “redistributing wealth” while pocketing pesos and half a bag of Doritos. Then the federales showed up, already drunk from the bowling alley across the street. One officer tried to tase Frankie, missed, and electrocuted the jukebox instead. Neil Diamond died mid-chorus.
As Frankie got tackled into a puddle of spilled mezcal, the entire bar erupted in laughter. Not nervous laughter, not relief—just pure, uncut joy at watching chaos eat itself alive. That’s when I realized the word for this exact moment existed: epicaricacy.⁴ The pleasure of watching someone else’s disaster, the giddy schadenfreude of seeing a man with two knives get flattened by his own stupidity.
I lit a cigarette off the sparking jukebox, raised my glass to the carnage, and thought: Mexico, you beautiful bastard, never change.

Footnotes & Citations

  1. See “Semiotics of Neon Failure in Border Economies,” Journal of Applied Cantina Studies, Vol. 12, No. 3 (1998), pp. 45–67.
  2. For a comparative analysis of Biden iconography in psychedelic paraphernalia, consult “Sleepy Joe and the Acid Tab: A Psychoactive Presidency,” Annals of Illicit Semiotics, Vol. 7 (2024).
  3. Nicknames in Tijuana function as both biography and prophecy. Cf. “The Ontology of Narco Sobriquets,” Revista de Crimen y Cultura, Vol. 2, No. 1 (2011).
  4. Epicaricacy: see “Obscure Lexicons of Schadenfreude,” Proceedings of the International Symposium on Pretentious Vocabulary, Vol. 1 (2009).

N.P.: “Sad But True” – Mexican Institute of Sound

Season’s Beatings: Das ist Krampusnacht!

 

Even back when I still believed Santa Claus was an actual dude with an actual mailing address inside the Arctic Circle, with an actual toy shop staffed mostly by elves (blah blah blah), I felt, deep down in that dark and vacant space where my soul should have been, that Things Weren’t Right.

Children know monsters exist. Even toddlers understand that evil lurks [see Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment and that study where kids were given fairy tales with the scary parts removed, and they got so pissed off they attacked their teachers’ kneecaps]. Rugrats resent the hell out of adults who pretend otherwise. I certainly did. Which is why the unipolar morality of the Santa story never sat well with me: goodness is rewarded, but evil goes unpunished.

All year long, the promise of every materialistic dream a child may have coming true on Christmas morning is dangled in front of their beady little eyes on the condition of “good” behavior. I always assumed there was some kind of sliding scale: if your behavior was saintly all year, you get everything on your list plus bonus loot. If you were decent for eight months but a prick the rest of the time, maybe you only get a third. But what of the little bastard who is rotten every single day? According to the Santa story, nothing. Not a gpddamn thing. Santa still shows up, maybe leaves a lump of coal. Big deal.

So the neighborhood terror can spend all year lowering property values and ruining lives, then stroll over to Goody Two-Shoes’ house on December 26th, whack him over the head with a board, steal his toys, and swagger home. Ludicrous. Unjust. Existentially unsound. There can be no light without darkness, no goodness without evil. Children know this innately.

But in Disneyfied, bubble-wrapped America, parents quake at the thought of damaging their little snowflakes’ eggshell psyches. Teachers are told not to grade in red pen because red is “too violent.” Little league games don’t keep score because someone might lose. And the results are tragic: entire generations who cannot conjugate the verbs “to lose” or “to fail.”

I say Enough. Ya basta! Children are far hardier than they’re given credit for. Which is why I propose we reset Christmas and celebrate it properly — by resurrecting the full story from Europe: the tale of Santa’s dark counterpart, Krampus.

If Santa Claus is a right jolly old elf, then Krampus is a bad-ass Christmas demon. If Saint Nick is benevolent generosity, Krampus is divine retribution. He’s a satanic-looking satyr with massive horns and a bifurcated tail, draped in noisy chains and cowbells, wielding pointy sticks with which he beats the hell out of children who’ve been assholes all year. And if the offenses are more than venial? Krampus doesn’t just beat them — he drags them to hell, dismembers them, or eats them right there in front of God and everybody. Don’t bother running to Santa for help. Santa and Krampus are drinking buddies, existential pals who clink steins at the biergarten while swapping stories about naughty brats.

And Krampus doesn’t stop at punishing kids. No, when he’s not dispensing yuletide justice, he’s goosing attractive women and licking faces like Rick James on a crackful night. Krampus is a straight-up poon hound. Unlike that grandfatherly twat Santa Claus, ever the family man, Krampus crushes mad ass on the reg. There is no Mrs. Krampus. He doesn’t need one. He’s got game, and he wants to fist your mother after he eats your soul.

Speaking of eating, don’t bother leaving cookies and milk. Krampus is lactose intolerant and immune to baked goods bribery. Whiskey and steak might buy you a few seconds, but ultimately, there’s only one way to avoid his wrath: walk the path of righteousness, and avoid assholishness the rest of the year.

 

N.P.: “Overlord” – Thorr

The Marquis Checks Out

 

For a certain subset of us – the literary degenerates, the philosophical deviants, the connoisseurs of exquisite moral wreckage – this date marks the anniversary of an exit.

There’s something perversely satisfying about the fact that Donatien Alphonse François – the Marquis de Sade, aristocrat, pornographer, philosopher, lunatic, prophet of the flesh, the ayatollah of rock’n’rolla – died on this day in 1814, tucked away in the asylum at Charenton like a dangerous animal finally caged, though still scribbling until the last.  The man whose name became a synonym for deriving pleasure from another’s pain.  A name whispered in polite society with the same horrified glee as a newly discovered plague.  The Marquis.  The original.  He went out not with guillotines or mobs with pitchforks and torches, but with the slow rot of institutional confinement.

This wasn’t a gentle passing.  This was the extinguishing of a human firestorm, a man who spent a significant portion of his 74 years (something like three decades, if you’re keeping score) locked away.  Kings, revolutionaries, and emperors all took one look at this dude and his…proclivities…and decided he was better off behind very thick walls.  And what did our boy de Sade do with all that quiet time?  He wrote.  His novels – Justine, Juliette, 120 Days of Sodom – are endurance tests, labyrinths of cruelty and desire where the reader is both voyeur and victim.  They are quite obscene, of course, but also philosophical in the most unnerving sense: they ask whether freedom means anything of it doesn’t include the freedom to be monstrous.

Picture him, dear reader: powdered wig askew, ink-stained fingers, eyes glittering with the manic glee of someone who knows he’s already been damned and is determined to make damnation art.  And when he finally died – December 2, 1814 – the world didn’t breathe easier so much as pretended not to notice.  Because to notice is to admit that the abyss he described is still there, yawning under our feet.  He argued that the ultimate liberty was the freedom to pursue one’s own pleasure, no matter the consequence, no matter the cost to others.  He posited a universe that was not merely indifferent but actively hostile, and the only sane response was to become an engine of pure, unadulterated will.

And so, on this day in 1814, the engine finally sputtered out.  The great blasphemer fell silent.  He left behind a last will and testament that requested his body be left to rot in a forest, his grave unmarked, so that all trace of him would vanish from the memory of men.

Nice try, Marquis.

Because here we are, centuries down the line, and the shadow he cast is longer than ever.  His name is a household word and a psychological term.  His ideas, scrubbed clean and repackaged for academic consumption, bubble up in philosophy seminars and late-night dorm room debates about the nature of freedom.  The man who wanted to be forgotten is utterly unforgettable.  He’s the abyss that, when you stare into it, not only stares back but asks if you’ve got any good ideas for a Tuesday afternoon.

So pour one out for the old pervert.  If you need an entry-level ticket to the madhouse, I highly recommend you check out Quills (starring Geoffrey Rush in all his unhinged glory) – it’s as riotously entertaining as it is sharp.

He was a literary terrorist, dear reader.  And in the sanitized, terrified, and terminally boring landscape of our current moment, you have to admit: there was a certain horrifying magnificence to his ride.  He went all the way.

N.P.: “An American Murder Song” – American Murder Song