There’s a particular species of well-meaning interpersonal pablum – a kind of linguistic airbag – that has been growing increasingly common since the Covidiots started demanding everybody wear masks all the time.  It’s a verbal plague – a contagion of concern-trolling that has somehow become the default sign-off for every human interaction – that really descends upon you the moment the calendar even thinks about flipping to a new year.  It arrives in texts, in emails, in the brittle small talk of relatives who haven’t had an unsupervised thought since the Obama administration.  “Stay safe,” they chirp, from the checkout clerk to your own mother, their faces arranged in masks of earnest, suffocating care.  “Have a safe New Year.”  “Be safe out there.”

And I find myself, with a frequency that is becoming frankly alarming, wanting to grab them by their responsibly-sourced lapels and scream, “No.  Absolutely not.”  My goal is not safety.  My primary directive is not the careful preservation of this mortal coil in a hermetically sealed container until its warranty expires.  What, precisely, is the grand prize for accumulating the most days lived without a single scratch, a solitary misstep, a glorious and ill-advised leap into the unknown?  A slightly longer stay in a little room, waiting for the Jell-O cup?

Because here’s the thing nobody seems to want to admit in polite society: safety is boring.  Safety is the beige carpeting of human aspiration.  Safety is the spiritual equivalent of lukewarm tap water.  Safety is the bureaucratic memo stapled to the front of your soul reminding you to please refrain from doing anything interesting, alarming, or remotely alive.

This relentless, wallpaper-thin mantra of safety is a uniquely modern sickness and demonstrative of the wristslittingly depressing pussification of the entire culture.  It’s a linguistic anesthetic designed to numb us to the glorious, terrifying, and fundamentally unsafe business of being alive.  Every jagged edge of existence must be sanded down.  Every exhilarating risk must be mitigated into a spreadsheet of predictable outcomes.  We are encouraged, no, commanded, to wrap ourselves in bubble wrap and float gently down the river of life, avoiding all the sharp rocks and thrilling rapids where the actual living happens.

And yet, this holiday season, I was bludgeoned – rhetorically, repeatedly, and with the kind of  passive-aggressive cheer that should be classified as a misdemeanor – by people insisting I have a safe New Year.  As if the highest imaginable human achievement is to tiptoe through the next twelve months like a Victorian governess afraid of scuffing the parquet.

Well, fuck that.

I don’t want a safe New Year.  I don’t even want a safe Tuesday.  I don’t want a safe anything.  I want a year with teeth.  A year that lunges.  A year that leaves claw marks on the drywall.

The entire reason I do the so-called “unsafe” things I do –  the impulsive road trips to failed narco-states, the all-night creative benders, the questionable home-improvement experiments, the general refusal to live like a laminated instruction manual – is precisely because they’re unsafe.  Because they remind me that I’m not a domesticated appliance humming obediently in the corner.  Because they jolt the nervous system awake in a world that keeps trying to sedate it with ergonomic chairs and HR-approved slogans.  The entire point of doing anything worthwhile involves a calculated, and sometime not-so-calculated, dance with disaster.  The best stories don’t begin with “So, I conducted a thorough risk assessment.”  They begin with a bad idea, a shot of questionable liquor, and a magnificent disregard for the probable consequences.  They are forged in the fires of imprudence.  I don’t know about you, dear reader, but the memorable moments – the ones that flash behind your eyes when you’re horizontal with a tube in your nose at The End – are not the times you successfully followed the safety instructions.  They are the moments you threw the manual into the fire and Went For It.

The very concept of a “safe New Year” is an oxymoron of the rankest vintage.  A new year should be a wild, untamed frontier, a 365-day stretch of pure, chaotic potential.  It should be a minefield of opportunity and beautiful mistakes.  It should be dangerous.  It should be something you survive, not something you merely endure.

I think 2026 is going to be amazing – but only for the people who understand that “amazing” and “safe” rarely occupy the same sentence without one of them choking the other to death.

So here’s my counter-blessing, my anti-benediction, my heretical toast to the coming year:
May your 2026 be dangerous.
May it be unruly, ungovernable, and uninsurable.
May it terrify the people who think “safety” is the apex of human ambition.
May it leave you breathless, scraped, exhilarated, and unmistakably alive.
May it violently reject the soft, padded prison of a life lived in perpetual caution.
And if someone tries to tell you to stay safe, smile politely, nod once, and then go do something that would make them clutch their pearls so hard they leave dents.
Because safety is for appliances.
Danger is for humans.
And I intend to live like one.
I’ll take being alive.

N.P.: “In the Hall of the Mountain King” – Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross

Dispatches from the Western Edge of the Republic: A Double Dose of Liberty Unleashed

Friends, countrymen,  and dear readers, let it be recorded that in the span of a single rotation of this weary planet – a mere twenty-four hours – the gears of history have ground forward with a ferocity that leaves one breathless, exhilarated, and not a little vindicated.

First, out of the fog-shrouded chambers of the Ninth Circuit, that erstwhile bastion of coastal restraint, comes a thunderclap: California’s long-standing prohibition on the open carry of arms in the populous counties – those teeming hives where ninety-five percent of the state’s souls reside = has been declared null, void, and contrary to the plain text and historical marrow of the Second Amendment.  A panel of judges, applying the Supreme Court’s unyielding Bruen standard, has affirmed what any honest reading of the Founders’ intent has always whispered: the right to bear arms in the open manner, visible and unapologetic, is no modern indulgence but a tradition woven into the very fabric of this nation’s birth.  The state’s attempt to confine this right to rural backwaters, while denying it to the urban millions, collapses under the weight of its own ahistorical pretense.  One can almost hear the collective sigh of relief from us law-abiding citizens who have chafed under this selective disarming, this bureaucratic emasculation of a core liberty.

And then – hot on the heels of this judicial reclamation – comes the second bolt, raw and audacious (just how we like ’em), from the south: the United States military, in a swift, overwhelming nocturnal operation, has seized Nicolás Maduro, the entrenched cartel leader and strongman of Venezuela, along with his consort, and extracted them from Caracas amid a barrage that lit the sky like a reckoning.  The dictator, long indicted for narco-terrorism and the systematic plunder of his people, now finds himself blindfolded in the back of a boat, en route to American soil, bound for the stern accounting of New York justice.  Explosions echoed through the capital; special forces descended; and by the dawn’s early light, the palace that sheltered tyranny stands breached.  Venezuela, that once-proud nation bled dry by socialist delusion and cartel collusion, now teeters on the precipice of deliverance – or at least the removal of its primary parasite.  The implications cascade: oil fields no longer siphoned for private jets and Swiss accounts, a people tasting the first unfiltered air of possibility in decades.

What a glorious, savage symmetry in these twin events.  On one hand, the restoration of an ancient American right to arm oneself openly against the caprices of power; on the other, the direct application of power to unseat a foreign despot who mocked sovereignty and flooded borders with poison.  Both strike at the heart of the eternal tension: the citizen’s defense against overreach, and the nation’s resolve against those who would export chaos.

We stand at a juncture where the republic flexes muscles long atrophied – judicial clarity slicing through regulatory overgrowth, and kinetic force reminding the world that certain lines, once crossed, invite swift and unsparing consequences.  Let the hand-wringers wring; let the apologists for socialism and tyranny howl from their ivory perches.  The last twenty-four hours were a reminder that the ground beneath us is never stable, that liberty is a vault you sometimes have to crack open with dynamite, and that tyrants – whether cloaked in bureaucracy or military fatigues – eventually face the reckoning.

And if you’re not celebrating, if you’re not at least a little electrified by the chaos, then maybe you’re already embalmed. Because this, dear reader, is what it looks like when history decides to stop whispering and start swinging.

N.P.: “Get Back” – We Three Kings

Already January 2nd.  Huh.  Not much going on around here today.  I mean, the usual book-work and a tragicomic wrestling match with a synthesizer, but that’s about it.

So let’s talk about 1979, specifically the slow-motion train wreck involving Simon John Ritchie, known to the spitting masses as Sid Vicious.  The Sex Pistols’ bassist – a job title that implies he actually played the instrument, which is generous – found himself on trial for the murder of Nancy Spungen.  Sid was out on bail, wandering through the New York winter like a terrifying puppy, only to OD on heroin before the gavel came down.

It’s like the punk rock equivalent of a Greek tragedy, if Oedipus had worn a padlock around his neck and couldn’t play three chords.

But then if we go back to January 2, 1939…this is where my headache really starts to throb behind the left eye.

TIME Magazine, that bastion of journalistic integrity and shiny paper, decided to name Adolf Hitler their “Man of the Year.”  Yeah, that actually happened.  Apparently, the editors looked at the burgeoning geopolitical nightmare in Europe, squinted really hard, and though, “You know who’s really crushing it right now?  The guy screaming at stadiums.”

I can picture the editorial meeting.  A room full of men in suspenders and fedoras, smoking cigarettes indoors, debating between the inventor of the toaster oven and the architect of the Third Reich.  “Well, Frank,” one of them says, puffing a cloud of blue smoke, “Adolf certainly has…presence.  He’s very dynamic.”  It took a special kind of myopia, a failure of imagination so profound it’s almost impressive.

So much for all that…time for round 9 with this goddamn synth.

N.P.: “Awake” – The Joke Jay

There comes a moment, dear reader – usually sometime between the third whiskey and the creeping suspicion that the universe is laughing at you rather than with you – when a person must plant a flag in the scorched earth of his own life and declare, loudly, profanely, and with the kind of reckless optimism that borders on a diagnosable condition, that next year will be different.

And by Christ, 2026 is going to be different.  This is the year I ascend.  This is the year I transcend the mundane filth of mediocrity and carve my name into the bedrock of history with a rusty spoon if I have to.
Resolutions are usually the lies we tell ourselves to stave off the crushing weight of our own inadequacy, little sticky notes of hope we slap onto the refrigerator of our souls.  “Eat more kale.”  “Call mom.”  “Stop arguing with strangers on X about the socio-economic implications of Freddy Got Fingered.”  Pathetic.  No, my resolutions for 2026 are not mere suggestions; they are commands issued from the burning bush of my own ego.  They are tripartite, a holy trinity of self-actualization that will either kill me or make me a god.

1. Sell the Goddamn Book
   The publishing industry is a shark tank filled with people who wear scarves indoors and use the word “synergy” unironically.  I hate them.  I need them.  My resolution is to sell this damn thing…to force some poor, unsuspecting editor at a major house (expect a phone call, Luke) to look at my genius and weep tears of joy and terror.  All the folks on X have been wondering why I’m going the traditional publishing route rather than self-publishing.  Their arguments are compelling.  And one never knows.  One thing is certain: Ima get paid!

2. Get My Black Belt
I’ve been training for years, and I now have a red belt – the one before black. I can disarm a knife- or gun-wielding lunatic before my morning coffee and fight my way out of an attempted bear hug from a Russian mobster built like a refrigerator, all while composing a pithy inner monologue.  Though the red belt is pretty sexy, I want the belt that says: this man has kicked enough metaphorical and literal ass to be dangerous in polite company.  The belt that requires sweat, blood, bruises, discipline, and the occasional moment of clarity while face-down on a dojo mat.  By the end of 2026, I want to tie that thing around my waist and feel the quiet, smug satisfaction of someone who has weaponized his body and his attitude.

3. Become Unbeatable at Chess
I’ve been locked in an all-out blitzkrieg campaign to drag my chess game out of the primordial ooze and up onto Grandmaster Beach all year, and honestly, the results are frightening – for my opponents, anyway.  Heh.  Gone are the days where I’d blunder a rook because I was too distracted plotting my next snack run.  This year was about openings, endgames, tactical drills that melted my corneas, and embarrassing a fair few cocky strangers (and at least one exceptionally smug AI that now twitches at the name Carlsen).

But 2026?  That’s the year I bring utter annihilation to the 64 squares. Frankly, I’m tired of losing to online avatars with names like “KnightDaddy420.”  I’m coming for your bishops, your pawns, your dignity.  I will turn trash talk into an art form, sprinkle humiliations like confetti at a Soviet New Year, and my Queen’s Gambit will haunt your dreams.  Prepare to be obliterated.
So, dear reader, wish me luck.  Or don’t.  I’ll do it anyway.
Here’s to 2026: the year I sell the book, earn the belt, conquer the board, and generally behave like a man who refuses to accept the small, quiet life the universe keeps trying to hand him.
Raise a glass.  Light a fuse.  Kick the damn door in.  We’re coming in loud.

N.P.: “Kiss This” – The Struts

Christmas 2025 was another great one, spent overindulging in both food and drink with family (with one conspicuous absence).  Meteorologically, it may have been the best Christmas in Fecal Creek history.  Holy shit!  Truly violent storms on both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day…biblical thunder and lightning, lashing winds, multiple inches of rain, extensive flooding…it was beautiful.

But today, the goddamn sun is out, dear reader…the skies are clear.  And there’s nothing left to talk about except the Day After.  The Great Hangover.  That weird, gray, interdimensional fart of a day squashed between the forced cheer of Christmas and the looming dread of New Year’s Eve.  I speak, of course, about December 26th, a day, according to my calendar, some of our more, shall we say, monarchically-inclined cousins across the pond have apparently christened “Boxing Day.”  I know this only because it pops up every year on my calendar with a parenthetical “UK” next to it, as if I’m supposed to know what it is and how to celebrate it.

I’ve traditionally ignored it, but this year, I’ve decided it was high time I figure this horseshit out.

I started with this fact: nobody in America knows what the hell Boxing Day is.  Not really.  Not in any way that would survive even the gentlest cross-examination by a bored customs agent or a half-sober pub historian.  At best we treat it like some cryptic British ritual involving foxes, tweed, and the ghost of Queen Victoria handing out coupons for discounted marmalade.  And yet – every December 26th – there it is on the calendar, staring at us like a smug, overfed cat.  Boxing Day.  A holiday that sounds, for my money, like a mid-tier UFC event sponsored by a failing energy drink.

Which is what I was hoping for as I began to dissect this calendric pustule.  Because taken at face value, the name itself suggests some sort of officially sanctioned, post-yuletide pugilism, which I could absolutely get behind.  A national holiday dedicated to settling familial scores that had been building up all year.  Maybe it involves bare-knuckle brawls in a parking lot behind a pub.  Or at least some quality fisticuffs after Uncle Tommy starts whining and bitching like some old lady about Republicans over the turkey carcass.  That would be the shit.  Uncle Randy made another crack about your “creative” career path?  Fine.  To the ring.  Grandma Mildred weaponized her disapproval with a strategically gifted bathroom scale?  Lace up, Mildred, it’s time for the main event when you get your dentures knocked out of your octogenarian skull.  Hell yes.  A glorious, kingdom-wide festival of fights, with the King himself officiating from a gilded ringside seat, perhaps nodding sagely as a cousin gets a well-deserved right hook for snatching the last pig-in-a-blanket.

Yes, this I could get behind.  This has a certain raw, cathartic honesty to it.  It’s a vision of beautiful, state-sponsored chaos.

But no.  A quick and deeply disappointing dive into the digital muck reveals a truth far more mundane, more depressingly…British.  The theories are as limp as thirty-day-old tinsel.  One story claims it’s the day the landed gentry, their bellies swollen with swan and their hearts filled with microscopic drops of noblesse oblige, would box up their leftovers and gift them to the downstairs staff.  Here you go, Jeeves.  Enjoy this gnawed-on drumstick and a half-eaten terrine.  A spectacular display of generosity that I’m sure made up for a year of serfdom.

Another, equally soul-crushing theory suggests it’s about alms boxes in churches being opened and distributed to the poor.  Which, again, has a certain Dickensian charm if you’re into institutionalized pity.  But it lacks the unadulterated madness the name promises.

The modern reality, of course, is a monster of a different stripe entirely.  It’s a day of rabid, foam-mouthed consumerism.  A retail-driven bloodbath where otherwise sane people trample each other for 40% off a 73-inch television they don’t need.  It’s the Black Friday of the Commonwealth, a second, even more pathetic lap in the unending marathon of buying shit. We’ve just finished a holiday centered on the ritual of giving and receiving objects, and now, not even a full 24 hours later, we’re back in the trenches, wrestling a stranger for a discounted Nespresso machine.

It seems to be a holiday that feels like a symptom of a deeper sickness.  A cultural glitch.  An excuse to either A) do absolutely nothing, melting into the sofa like a forgotten cheese sculpture, watching sports and picking at the desiccated carcass of the Christmas feast, or B) participate in a full-scale assault on the local shopping mall.  There is no middle ground.  There is only sloth or savagery.

No.  This will not do.  I say we reclaim this hollowed-out husk of a holiday and give it some real American spirit.  Let’s create our own “American Boxing Day,” where the name isn’t just some quaint, dusty relic of classist charity.  No, our Boxing Day would be a glorious, nationwide catharsis.  The “Boxing” would be a mere vestigial nod to tradition, as we’d embrace all forms of glorious combat to settle our post-holiday grievances.  Did your brother-in-law burn the roast?  Settle it with a round of arm-wrestling.  Neighbor’s inflatable snowman still blinking obnoxiously?  Challenge him to a duel, swords or pistols, his choice.  From organized jousting tournaments in suburban cul-de-sacs and martial arts showdowns in public parks to the satisfying finality of a disagreement resolved with Mac-10s, this would be a day for clearing the air.  It’s the American way: turning a confusing and stupid foreign custom into a spectacular, heavily-armed festival of personal expression.

N.P.: “Body Burn” – Cubinate

Merry Christmas, dear reader!

N.P.: “The Twelve Days of Christmas” – Gary Hoey

Here we are, dear reader…Christmas Eve 2025.  All is quiet on the West Coast…almost boringly so.  I was bitching about being bored at a bar today when I was reminded of the Eggnog Riot of 1826 and I thought, “Hot damn!  That’s right.  This is something my dear reader needs to be reminded of.”  So let’s get to it.

It was Christmas Eve, 1826, and the United States Military Academy at West Point was sitting on a powder keg of repressed adolescent testosterone and enforced sobriety.  The administration, in a fit of puritanical buzz-killing pique, had declared the campus dry.  No booze.  Nary a drop.  Which, if you know anything about military history or just human nature in general, is sort of like trying to stop a tidal wave with a sternly worded memo and a napkin.  You are essentially begging the universe for catastrophe.

Which, of course, is precisely what they got.

The cadets – one of whom was a young Jefferson Davis, who would later go on to make some arguably poor career choices involving secession, decided that a Christmas without spirit(s) was unconstitutional.  Or at least un-American.  So, they did what any self-respecting group of future leaders would do: they pooled their resources, bribed a sympathetic enlisted man (bless his mercenary heart), and smuggled in gallons of whiskey.  Gallons.  Enough rotgut to pickle a horse.

This illicit nectar was destined for the holiday eggnog.  Of course, eggnog is a polarizing beverage at the best of times – a sludge of dairy and regret that sits in your stomach like a concrete block – but when spiked with contraband whiskey by a bunch of sexually frustrated cadets in wool uniforms, it becomes a revolutionary accelerant.

The evening started quietly enough, presumably with some light caroling and the surreptitious passing of cups.  But as the ethanol hit the bloodstream, the shit hit the fan, and the decorum disintegrated faster than a cheap tent in a hurricane.  By the witching hour, North Barracks had transformed into a scene from a Bosch painting, if Bosch had been really into muskets and drunken singing.

The logistical grandeur of the chaos is staggering to contemplate.  This was about 70 cadets – roughly a third of the student body – getting absolutely, catastrophically shithoused.  Far beyond tipsy, they were operating on a plane of existence where gravity was a suggestion and authority was a hilarious abstract concept.  Around here, we refer to people in this state as Alconauts.

When the officers (the poor, beleaguered “tactical officers” whose job it was to maintain order) tried to intervene, things went sideways.  Captain Hitchcock, a man who probably just wanted to go to bed, burst into a room to find a party raging.  He tried to read the Riot Act.  In response, a cadet tried to shoot him.

Let me repeat that for the folks in the back: a cadet tried to shoot a superior officer over eggnog.  The pistol misfired, or Hitchcock would have been the first casualty of the War on Christmas.

The riot spread.  Windows were smashed – glazing being apparently being the enemy of liberty.  Banisters were torn from staircases.  Furniture becomes airborne.  Muskets – actual functioning muskets – are waved around with the kind of reckless theatricality that suggests both a deep commitment to chaos and a total misunderstanding of firearms safety.  Additional officers attempting to restore order are greeted not with obedience but with slurred threats, drunken philosophy, and the kind of belligerent holiday cheer that makes you wonder whether the entire institution was built on a cursed ley line.

Swords were drawn.  One cadet reportedly tried to duel a superior officer.  Another attempted to lead a breakaway faction of equally hammered comrades in what can only be described as a proto-revolutionary splinter movement.  It was Animal House with bayonets.  At one point, Jefferson Davis, thoroughly pickled, stumbled into a room to warn his comrades that the officers were coming, only to realize the officers were already there.  He shouted, “Put away the grog, boys!” which is 19th-century slang for “Hide the evidence, we are so fucked.”

The “Eggnog Riot,” as it was later dubbed by historians with a flair for the absurd, raged until Christmas morning.  When the sun rose over the Hudson, the barracks looked like they had been shelled.  The hangover was no doubt biblical.  The commandant was apoplectic.  The court-martial that followed was one of the largest in U.S. military history.  Nineteen cadets were expelled, though many, including Davis – managed to wiggle out of serious punishment because they hadn’t actually broken anything important or successfully murdered anyone.  Nonetheless, careers teetered.  And the academy’s reputation is dragged through the snow like a corpse.

And yet, American survives.  Hell, America thrives.  Some of the riot’s participants go on to be  respected officers, engineers, and public servants.  The republic doesn’t crumble because a bunch of 19-year-olds got black-out drunk on weaponized eggnog and tried to overthrow their dorm monitors.

It’s a beautiful, stupid reminder that even the most disciplined institutions are only ever one bad decision and two gallons of whiskey away from total anarchy.  And I kind of respect the commitment.  If you’re going to ruin your military career, you might as well do it while defending your right to get wasted on spiced milk punch.

So raise a glass – preferably one not spiked with enough whiskey to trigger a congressional inquiry – and toast the cadets of 1826, who gave us the greatest holiday riot on U.S. military history.

And if I don’t see you tomorrow, have a very merry Christmas.

N.P.: “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch” – Gary Hoey