March 17, 2025

Top o’ the mornin’, dear reader! Today, March 17th, we raise our glasses—brimming with the emerald elixir of Guinness or a fiery shot of Jameson—to celebrate the most badass of Irish brethren to ever don a shamrock: St. Patrick, patron saint of Ireland. But this isn’t your gran’s Sunday school story, oh no. We’re diving deep, rewinding the clock to 461 CE, to a time when this holy hellraiser kicked the bucket on the very day we now paint the town green. So, strap in for a tale of rebellion, redemption, and sheer, unadulterated Irish grit that’ll make your liver quiver and your mind explode with the ferocity of a thousand fiddles at a Galway hoedown.

The year is somewhere around 405 CE, and young Patrick—born Maewyn Succat, a name that sounds like a Celtic sneeze—is just a snot-nosed teenager living in Roman Britain. Life’s peachy until a gang of Irish pirates—yes, fucking pirates—swoop in like a swarm of whiskey-soaked locusts, kidnap the lad, and drag him across the Irish Sea. He’s sold into slavery, forced to tend sheep on the rugged hills of County Antrim, where the wind howls like a banshee trying to collect back rent. For six years, this poor bastard endures the elements, starvation, and the kind of soul-crushing isolation that’d make even Nietzsche weep into his mustache. But does Patrick break? Hell no! He gets tougher. He prays, he schemes, and he dreams of freedom, channeling a spiritual ferocity that’s pure, unfiltered proto-punk energy—think Iggy Pop snarling through “Search and Destroy,” but with a shepherd’s crook.

Then, in a moment of divine intervention—or sheer ballsy determination, depending on your theological bent—Patrick hears a voice. It tells him to haul ass to the coast, where a ship awaits to carry him back to freedom. This isn’t some passive, sandal-wearing Jesus shit; this is a jailbreak, a middle finger to his captors, a teenage runaway saga that’d make Jack Kerouac proud. He treks 200 miles—200 fucking miles—through hostile terrain, dodging raiders and starvation, and somehow, against all odds, makes it to that ship.

But here’s where the story gets really wild. Patrick doesn’t just go home, crack open a mead, and call it a day. No, he doubles down. He studies, becomes a priest, and—get this—chooses to return to Ireland, the very hellhole that enslaved him, to spread Christianity. This ain’t forgiveness; this is revenge through redemption, a spiritual Molotov cocktail hurled at the pagan kings and druids who thought they could break him. By 432 CE, he’s back on the Emerald Isle, armed with nothing but a staff, a Bible, and a set of brass balls the size of Galway Bay. He’s not just preaching; he’s fighting. The druids, those mystical bastards with their oak groves and human sacrifices, try to take him down. They curse him, they plot his death, but Patrick? He laughs in their faces, allegedly using the shamrock to explain the Holy Trinity in what can be best described as a theological mic drop.

Patrick’s life reads like a 5th-century punk rock epic—a raw, autobiographical screed that lays out his trials with an anarchic defiance. His Confessio, a memoir of sorts, isn’t another flowery hagiography; it’s a gritty, unapologetic account of a man who stared down kings, druids, and his own demons, all while converting an entire nation.

He dies on March 17th, 461 CE, in Saul, County Down, but his death isn’t the end—it’s the capstone of a saga that’s been spun into legend ever since. The Irish, we indomitable, poetic, hard-drinking bastards, take his legacy and run with it, turning a missionary’s life into a cultural juggernaut that’s got the whole damn world wearing green and chugging stout every spring.

Now, let’s talk about the Irish themselves, because St. Patrick’s story is just one thread in the tapestry of their ferocious, whiskey-soaked history. These are a people who’ve been through the wringer—Viking raids, Norman invasions, British oppression, the Great Famine—and yet they’ve never lost their fire. They’re the underdogs who always come out swinging, with a pint in one hand and a poem in the other. From the ancient Celts who painted themselves blue and charged into battle buck-naked, to the rebels of 1916 who stared down the British Empire with nothing but rifles and a dream, the Irish have a knack for turning suffering into art, pain into song. Think of the literature—Joyce’s labyrinthine Ulysses, Beckett’s bleak fucking genius, Heaney’s peat-soaked poetry. Think of the music—those haunting ballads that can make a grown man cry into his Bushmills, or the Pogues’ raucous anthems that’ll have you trying to dance a jig whilst puking in the alley.

And let’s not forget the drinking, because if there’s one thing the Irish do better than anyone, it’s throwing a party that’d make Dionysus himself blush. St. Patrick’s Day isn’t just a holiday; it’s a global middle finger to sobriety, a day where the world gets to channel the Irish spirit of excess and exuberance. In Dublin, the streets are a sea of green, with fiddles wailing and glasses clinking. In Boston, the Southies are three sheets to the wind by noon, singing “Sweet Caroline” like it’s a goddamn hymn. Even in Tokyo, they’re dyeing the rivers green and sipping sake with a side of Irish stew. It’s chaos, it’s beautiful, and it’s all thanks to a 5th-century badass who refused to let the bastards grind him down.

At least that’s how it’s supposed to be, and how it has always been until about 5 minutes ago.

The Ireland of today is facing a crisis that’d make even St. Patrick himself weep into his holy ale. The Emerald Isle, that bastion of green glory, is under siege—not by Viking longships or British redcoats, but by a tidal wave of illegal immigration that’s threatening to drown its very soul. In 2024 alone, asylum seeker numbers in Ireland surged by nearly 300% compared to five years prior, a statistic that’s got the rural towns of this proud nation reeling. These aren’t just numbers; these are entire communities—places where the Irish have become minorities in their own ancestral lands, overrun in what feels like a single, devastating swoop. The government, accused of zero action and zero accountability, is allegedly funneling money overseas while the voices of the Irish people are left to scream into the void.

Enter Conor McGregor, the notorious MMA fighter and, from this American Mick’s perspective, a modern-day embodiment of Irish defiance, who’s taken it upon himself to sound the alarm. Today, March 17th, 2025, on this very St. Patrick’s Day, McGregor strutted into the White House to meet with President Trump, a man he admires for his work ethic and no-nonsense approach. McGregor, decked out in a green three-piece suit, didn’t mince words in the briefing room, calling the situation in Ireland a “travesty” and warning that the country is on the cusp of losing its “Irishness” to what he terms an “illegal immigration racket.” He’s not just there to complain; he’s there to learn, to listen, and to plead for America—Ireland’s “big sibling”—to help its little bro get back on its feet. McGregor’s got big plans: he’s eyeing a run for President of Ireland later this year, aiming to take on the establishment with an anti-immigration platform that’s as fiery as a shot of poteen. Though he’s a long shot—needing the backing of 20 parliament members or four local councils to even get on the ballot—McGregor’s got the kind of populist, middle-finger-to-the-system energy that could just shake things up. Irish leaders like Taoiseach Micheál Martin and Tánaiste Simon Harris have been quick to distance themselves, claiming McGregor doesn’t speak for Ireland, but the man’s got a following, and he’s not backing down.

So, here’s to St. Patrick, you magnificent bastard—patron saint of Ireland, proto-punk icon, and the guy who turned a slave’s suffering into a nation’s salvation. Here’s to the Irish, a people who’ve taken every punch the world could throw and still come up laughing, with a story to tell and a drink to share. And here’s to Conor McGregor, who’s fighting to preserve the Ireland that St. Patrick built, even if it means ruffling some feathers in the process. On this St. Patrick’s Day, let’s honor them all the only way that matters: with a glass raised high, a curse on our lips, and a fire in our hearts. Sláinte, you brilliant fuckers—may your day be as wild as Patrick’s life, and may your hangovers be the stuff of legend.

N.P.: “In the Name of the Father” – Bono, Gavin Friday

March 16, 2025

I shouldn’t be in such a fine mood today, dear reader…not nearly enough sleep last night, for no good reason at all.  Actually, the steroids may have had something to do with it.  Maybe not.  Regardless, I didn’t get to sleep until around 02:00.  Which would have been good enough if all else had been equal.  But all else wasn’t.

Fecal Creek is and always has been a railroad town.  This town formed around a massive Southern Pacific railyard which served as a central junction for all railroad traffic in California, but particularly between Sacramento to the west and the Gold Country to the east.  When officially founded during the Gold Rush, it was called Shotgun Junction, a rather badass tribute to the massive armed presence of militant civilians protecting the equally massive amount of gold flowing into and out of the town from bandits, river pirates, and thieving Mexicans.  Almost 200 years later, not much has changed: most of the civilian population is armed with shotguns, and the train traffic is heavier than ever.  Which train traffic was exactly what interrupted last night’s slumber, when it finally arrived.  Shortly after 04:15, some sort of disagreement apparently broke out between two engineers on two different trains over the right of way.  At least that’s what I’m guessing it was about…I have a police scanner that includes the Southern Pacific channel and probably could have clicked that thing on and found out exactly what was going on, but that would have involved getting out of bed, which was not something I was willing to do at that unholy hour of the night.  Anyway, whatever it was about, these two engineers decided to battle it out through a series of train-horn blasts lasting over 35 minutes.  I’m confident it woke the entire town up…certainly everybody in this house was brutally and rudely awakened by the sonic assault.  The goddamn puppy went all to pieces, choosing to run around in little circles in a pathetic effort to just deal with the pre-dawn nonsense.  It was awful, and by rights, the whole goddamn town should be cranky today.  And they probably are.  But not me.  I am mighty.  And smirking.  The writing is going extremely well.  Which brings us to the business of this day, March 16.

On March 16, 1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne detonated a goddamn literary bomb in the sanctimonious gut of Puritan America when he published The Scarlet Letter, a vicious, white-hot screed that left the moral fascists of Boston reeling. Ticknor, Reed & Fields couldn’t keep the thing on shelves—2,500 copies obliterated in ten days, a middle finger to the theocratic killjoys who thought they could brand Hester Prynne with their scarlet “A” and call it a day. Hawthorne was not fucking around; he was a man scorned, freshly canned from his gig at the Salem Custom House, his blood boiling with the kind of rage that doesn’t simmer—it erupts. He turned that fury into a blade, slicing through the Puritan hypocrisy that festered like a plague in early America, exposing their obsession with sin, shame, and conformity for the sadistic charade it was. The Puritans, those black-clad, joy-hating bastards, thought they owned morality—Hawthorne showed they were the real sinners, their hearts festering with cruelty masquerading as piety. Not only did The Scarlet Letter become a cornerstone of American lit—it rewrote the rules, flipping the script on moral storytelling with a snarl that still echoes.

Hawthorne saw the Puritans for what they were: the original thought police, the blueprint for every moral panic that’s choked the life out of this country since. They demanded absolute obedience, using the fear of hellfire to keep the flock in line, their sanctimonious fingers in every pie, policing behavior, speech, even thought itself. Now, in 2025, their ghosts are back, and they’ve got new skin to wear. The Woke have arrived, and they’re the new Puritans, now on steroids, only worse—more insidious, more relentless, armed with the digital guillotine of cancellation and a dogma so rigid it makes the old witch-burners look like they were just vibing. These self-appointed arbiters of virtue don’t just want to control what you do—they want to control what you think, their ever-mutating lexicon of “microaggressions” and “systemic harm” a weaponized scripture designed to keep you on your knees. They’ve traded the Puritan’s hellfire for the hellfire of public shaming, their Twitter mobs and callout posts the modern-day stocks, their performative tears and hashtag activism a mask for a power grab so blatant it’s obscene. They’re not here to liberate—they’re here to dominate, and they’ll crush anyone who doesn’t bow to their gospel of moral purity.

The hypocrisy is enough to make you scream until your throat bleeds. They rail against “oppression” while building their own empire of control, a Kafkaesque nightmare of speech codes and behavior policing that strangles free thought like a garrote. They demand “accountability” while ignoring their own sins—their complicity in the same capitalist machine they claim to despise, their selective outrage that spares their allies but damns their enemies, their own unexamined prejudices festering beneath the surface of their sanctimonious word-policing. They’re the new magistrates of Salem, hunting heretics with a zeal that would make Cotton Mather proud, their digital pitchforks dripping with the blood of the canceled. And they’ve been winning, goddammit—they’ve been winning because we’ve been too scared, too complacent, too busy scrolling to fight back.

But not me. Not now. We’ve just hit an inflection point in this country…more of a breaking point, and I’m not sitting this one out. We need a new Scarlet Letter, a book that doesn’t just whisper dissent but screams it from the rooftops, a literary Molotov cocktail to burn this Woke tyranny to the ground. And I’m writing it—right now, in this moment, my hands shaking with a fury that courses through my veins like wildfire. I’m mainlining adrenaline and deliciously powerful American whiskey, my pulse hammering with the urgency of a man who knows the clock is ticking, the testicularly-lacking enemy is at the gates, and the time for polite discourse is over. This book isn’t going to pull punches—it’s going to swing an electrified shithammer, smashing through the Woke’s sanctimonious facade to expose the rot beneath. It’ll be a feral, unhinged takedown of their egregious hypocrisy, a call to arms for anyone who still believes in the raw, chaotic beauty of free thought. I’m channeling Hawthorne’s rage, every ounce of my own disgust into this thing, and when it hits, it’s going to hit like a freight train that doesn’t need to rely on it’s horns to demand the right of way. The idiot Woke won’t see it coming—they’ll be too busy, as always, policing pronouns to notice the revolution at their door. But it’s coming, and it’s going to be a beautiful, terrifying thing to behold. Buckle up.

N.P.: “Euthanasia” – Psychotica

March 15, 2025

Beware the Ides of March, dear reader!  Today is March 15, also known as the Ides of March, a time to remember that your best friends, your closest confidantes, even your immediate family can and in all likelihood will betray you just when you need them the most.  Thus, it is a darkly significant day on the Gallaway calendar, and it should be on yours as well.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, and/or you weren’t an English major, allow me to elucidate while once again including you in my nightly prayers. Let’s set the scene: March 15, 44 BC, and Rome’s power-hungry Senate is a pressure cooker ready to explode. Julius Caesar—conqueror, dictator, and all-around larger-than-life legend—strides in, blissfully unaware of the betrayal brewing. A pack of senators, led by his so-called friend Brutus, decide it’s time for a regime change. In a flash, they turn the Senate floor into a crime scene, stabbing Caesar 23 times in a frenzy of blood, treachery, and ambition. Shakespeare immortalized this savage betrayal in Julius Caesar (1599), giving us the haunting line, “Et tu, Brute?” (“And (even) you, Brutus?”)—a gut-punch that echoes through time. The Ides of March became the ultimate symbol of backstabbing doom, inspiring literary giants from Dante to Robert Graves. Caesar’s epic rise and brutal fall lit a fire under centuries of writers, proving that the rawest dramas aren’t fiction, but the messy, bloody stuff of history.

If you have ever been betrayed by your entire personal cohort, you (should) know well the lessons of the Ides of March.  If you have not yet been devastated by betrayal by those closest to you…you need to pay special attention to this, because no matter how immune you think you and your life are from this sort of treachery, you are overdue, greatly increasing the likelihood that It Is Coming: someone close to you is plotting behind your back.

With that in mind, here are my 5 Tips to Avoid Betrayal This Ides of March:

  1. Trust Sparingly If At All: Keep your inner circle tighter than a duck’s pucker and your trust even tighter than that. Caesar trusted Brutus, and look where that got him—23 stab wounds! Vet your allies like a Roman general sizing up a legion.
  2. Limit Your Circle: The fewer associates, the fewer knives at your back. Logically, your circle will be more of a stick: a single person, if you must have that.  But as Kobayashi reminds us in The Usual Suspects. “One cannot be betrayed if one has no people.”  An absolute minimalist, fiercely loyal crew beats the hell out of a big, fickle crowd every time.
  3. Stay Ruthless When Needed (And Ruthlessness Is Always Needed): Don’t hesitate to cut ties with anyone showing shifty eyes. Caesar’s leniency with his enemies was his downfall—show strength, not mercy, when the stakes are high.
  4. Watch for Signs: Keep an ear to the ground. Whispers, odd alliances, or sudden flattery? Those are red flags. Caesar ignored the soothsayer’s warning—don’t make the same mistake!
  5. Control the Narrative: Stay one step ahead by shaping what others know about you. If they can’t predict your moves, they can’t plot against them.

The key behind this seemingly paranoid strategy is surviving the betrayal because you were expecting it, as opposed to Ceasar, who only realized the extent of his betrayal as his best friend was sliding a knife fatally into his back, when it was far too late.

The Ides of March whisper a blood-soaked truth: “When you come for the king, you best not miss.”  Emerson said that in “Self-Reliance.”  The more popular, punchy version – “When you strike at a king, you must kill him” – comes from a 20th-century paraphrase of Emerson by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.  Hesitate, flinch, or falter, and the crown doesn’t just endure – it crushes.  I’m sure Ceasar’s ghost would agree.  When the conspirators draw steel, but their trembling hands spare their empire’s tyrant a moment too long, what follows isn’t mercy – it is the king’s justice, a vengeful tide of retribution that will drown them all.

N.P.: “Auf die Zunge (feat. Schattenmann)” – Eisbrecher

March 14, 2025

Herr Direktor wants one of the projects I’m working on to go in a more “splatterpunk” direction.  Until maybe two weeks ago, I had no idea what that actually meant, but I thought it sounded pretty cool, so I just went along with it.   Since then, I’ve been on a strict diet of splatterpunk movies and books.  Turns out I knew what it was, I just didn’t know what it was called.  For those dear readers who may have been as in the dark as I was about this subgenre, if you’re a Tarantino fan, in Kill Bill Pt1, when Beatrix goes to Japan and Samurai-sword-fights 99 Kato-masked Yakuza guys, and the entire interior of the massive club they’re in is literally drenched and dripping with blood from the firehose-like arterial spray from the myriad dismemberments occurring during the fight, and the entire floor is covered with bodies and limbs…that is what I’m talking about.

So the movies from the last week:
Tokyo Gore Police
Ichi the Killer
Battle Royale
The Machine Girl
Audition
Meatball Machine
Meatball Machine Kodoku

Up next will be:
Zombie Ass: Toilet of the Dead
Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart to Hades
Tetsuo: The Iron Man

As may be obvious from this list, I’m leaning into the Japanese take on SP because I think that approach will work better for this project.  The Japanese style is so wildly over the top as to be cartoonish, thus, absurd and thus, funny.  American splatterpunk movies would likely be things like The Terrifier movies Damien Leone or the Human Centipede sequence from Tom Six.  While I am a huge fan of Art the Clown, the SP aesthetic of the Terrifier movies is almost completely different than the Japanese version: there’s nothing funny about it.  I mean, I get it…the joke is an the absurdity of the lengths Art goes to inflict pain on his victims (e.g., leaving the room of a vicious multi-limb mutilation to retrieve a massive sack of salt from the other room so that he can shove it into wounds by the fistful…I admit I actually chuckled at that when I first watched it.  But that humor is waaaaaaay darker.  Put it this way: your 10-year-old kid walks into Kill Bill Pt I, they will likely laugh and be untraumatized because it is so obviously not real.  That same 10-y.o. walks into Terrifier 2, and you’ll probably be shelling out a bunch of cash for therapy after a bunch of dark behavioral reports from school.

Anyway, this new approach has breathed new energy into this project, and I’m pretty excited about it.

[Tangentially related note: it occurs to me that I haven’t done a proper movie review here for a bit.  For no valid reason whatsoever, I’m suddenly thinking about doing a marathon triple review of The Human Centipede (First Sequence), The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence), and The Human Centipede (Final Sequence).  Just get hammered drunk and sit through all three of those horrendous creations taking breaks only to pee or get a refill.  Just a thought for now, but if that changes, you’ll be the first to know.]

N.P.: “Man of Constant Sorrow” – Jonathan Young

March 13, 2025

It’s March 13, and the Beats keep on beating.  Yesterday we delved into the mind of Jack Kerouac…today we focus on one Allen Ginsberg.  On this day in 1970, Beat poet Allen Ginsberg arrested by Miami cops for “obscenity” during a reading.  (I tried a couple times to get arrested for obscenity during a couple of readings…didn’t work.)  Ginsberg – shaggy, bearded, and unapologetic – was reciting his raw, boundary-smashing poetry, like Howl or something equally unfiltered.  He’d put a weed up the establishment’s ass since the ’50s, and this arrest was just another badge of honor.  As I mentioned yesterday, The Beats didn’t just write – they lived their defiance, and Ginsberg’s willingness to face cuffs for his words was perfectly typical.  He beat the charge later, natch, proving the pen’s might over the paddy wagon.

Born June 3, 1926, in Newark, New Jersey, Ginsberg became the Beat Generation’s howling prophet, a poet who ignited a cultural shift.  His work, especially Howl and Other Poems (1956) – smashed through mid-century America’s buttoned-up norms, blending jazz rhythms, spiritual hunger, and a middle finger to conformity.

Ginsberg’s masterpiece, Howl, dropped like a bomb in 1955 when he first read it at San Francisco’s Six Gallery.  “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked” – that opening line hit like a freight train, a wail for the misfits, junkies, and dreamers chewed up by post-war America.  It’s a three-part epic: Part 1 mourns the lost, Part II curses the industrial “Moloch” devouring souls, and Part III chants solidarity with Carl Solomon, a friend from the psychiatric ward.

The poem’s free-verse sprawl – long, breathless lines echoing Walt Whitman and jazz improv – broke every rule of tidy, academic poetry of the time.  It was visceral, sexual, and loud, landing publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti in an obscenity trial in 1957 (he won, cementing its legend).  Howl truly roared, giving voice to a generation that felt suffocated.

Of course, Ginsberg wasn’t a lone wolf – he was the glue of the Beats.  He met Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs at Columbia University in the ’40s, and their friendship fueled a literary uprising.  Kerouac’s road rambles inspired Howl’s energy; Burrough’s dark surrealism pushed its edges.  Ginsberg turned their shared ethos – spontaneity, authenticity, rebellion – into some pretty electric verse.  He also mentored younger Beats like Gregory Corse and amplified their work, hosting readings that turned poetry into a communal act.  That arrest in 1970 – just one of many run-ins – showed he was a threat to the status quo.

Ginsberg didn’t stop with Howl.  Kaddish (1961), a gut-wrenching elegy for his mother Naomi, who battled mental illness, digs into personal grief in a uniquely deep way.  Lines like “Dreams! adorations! Illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!” mix reverence and irreverence, hallmark of Ginsberg’s style.

Ginsberg’s biggest flex was making poetry dangerous again.  Before him, the 1950s poetry scene was getting a bit stiff (think T.S. Eliot’s cerebral puzzles or Robert Frost’s rather pastoral polish.  Bob Dylan cited Howl as a spark; the hippies really dug his bearded guru vibe.  His readings, often with music or chants, turned poetry into performance art.

Ginsberg co-founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in 1974, mentoring poets will Anne Waldman.  Punk icons like Patti Smith and The Clash’s Joe Strummer drank from his well…his rhythm and defiance echo in their work.  Critics bitched, as they do: he was too crude, too loud.  But that was the point.  He died in 1997, but his chants still haunt open mics.

Pour some out for Uncle Allen…for keeping it real.

N.P.: “Werewolves of London” – Cat Mantra

March 12, 2025

Happy Hump Day, dear reader.  Today is a rather significant day on the Dead Poets Society calendar, so let’s get to it.  Today is Jack Kerouac Day!

Ever heard of Jack Kerouac and/or the Beat Generation?  How about On the Road?  Ever get shit-housed on a bottle of cheap Port and try to write a book by the time that rotten sun comes up?  I certainly have.  But you’re a No?  Well, shit.  I guess I’m no longer surprised by such things, but I shall include you in my nightly prayers nonetheless.

On March 12, 1922, Jack Kerouac burst onto the scene in Lowell, Massachusetts.  The Beat Generation’s wild child, he wrote On the Road in a three-week amphetamine-fueled spree, hammering it out on a single scroll of paper.  [I’ve recently wondered about how Kerouac would have viewed the endless digital paper now available to all writers.  My guess is he’d be thrilled.]  It’s a raw, kinetic hymn to freedom – hitchhiking, jazz, and living fast – capturing the restless spirit of post-war America.  Kerouac was not another mincing desk-bound scribe; he lived the chaos he wrote, drinking hard and rambling with icons like Neal Cassady.  His spontaneous prose kicked the door down for a new kind of literature, making him a rebel king whose influence still roars.  He turned the road into a revolution.

Kerouac’s influence on the Beat Generation was seismic – he was its pulse, its voice, its restless soul.  He crystallized a post-war counterculture that rejected the tidy, consumerist 1950s American Dream for something rawer, freer, and messier.  The Beats were poets, writers, and wanderers (Allen Ginsburg, William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady – who craved authenticity over suburbia, and Kerouac was their reluctant poster boy.

The Beat Generation – coined from “beaten down” or “beatific,” depending on who you ask – was about shaking of the shackles of convention.  Kerouac gave it legs with On the Road (1957), a semi-autobiographical novel tracking his cross-country treks with Cassady (recase as the wild Dean Moriarty).  It’s less a story, more a vibe: jazz riffs, cheap diners, and the open highway as a middle finger to the 9-5 grind.  He tapped into a post-WWII restlessness – vets, dreamers, and misfits who felt the world was too big to stay put.  His mantra of “spontaneous prose” – writing without revision, like a jazz-solo – became the Beat calling card, urging writers to let it rip, unfiltered.

Kerouac’s style was his rebellion.  He hated the polished, academic prose of the time, so he wrote how he talked – fast, loose, and alive.   As mentioned supra, he famously banged out On the Road on a 120-foot scroll of taped-together paper, single-spaced, over three Benzedrine-fueled weeks in 1951 (though he’d been sketching it for years).  Lines like “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved” hit like a drumbeat – urgent, unapologetic.  He pulled from jazz giants like Charlie Parker, aiming for that same improvisational flow.  On the Road was a manifesto for living without a net.  His other works – like The Dharma Bums (1958), with its Zen-tinged mountain rambles, or Big Sur (1962), a darker dive into his unraveling – kept the Beat fire burning.  They showed the flip side: the spiritual hunger, the burnout, the cost of freedom.  Ginsberg called him the “King of the Beats,” and you see it in how his voice bled into Howl (1956) or Burroughs cut-up chaos in Naked Lunch (1959).

Kerouac’s influence wasn’t just on the page – it was how he lived  He hitchhiked with Cassady, crashed in San Francisco’s North Beach, and drank with poets in Greenwich Village.  His French-Canadian roots and Catholic guilt gave his work a haunted depth, but he chased the now – booze, Buddhism, and all-night rants.  Cassady was his muse, their letters and road trips were Beat gospel.  Kerouac’s refusal to settle down – until fame and alcohol wore him out – mirrored the characters he wrote, making him a walking symbol of the movement’s highs and lows.

The Beats didn’t stay small.  Kerouac’s work lit a fuse for the 1960s counterculture – hippies, Dylan’s lyrics, even Hunter S. Thompson’s gonzo style.  On the Road sold millions, turning gas stations into pilgrimage stops for kids craving escape.  Critics sneered, as they do – Truman Capote thought it was “typing, not writing” – but I think he missed the point: Kerouac made literature feel dangerous again.  He influenced everyone from Tom Waits to Patti Smith, who called him a “wilderness saint.”

Kerouac didn’t wear the crown easily.  By the late ’50s, he was a reluctant celebrity, hounded by fans and mocked by squares.  He drank harder, retreated to Lowell, and died at 47 in 1969 from a liver wrecked by years of excess.  The Beat flame he lit burned him out – but it never dimmed his mark.

Happy birthday, Uncle Jack!

N.P.: “October in the Railroad Earth (with Steve Allen) – Jack Kerouac

March 11, 2025

After many years, apparently Morpheus has decided to end his absence from my life.  I’ve recently started dreaming again and I don’t care for it.  In fact, I find it rather annoying.  I guess I should consider myself lucky: Uncle Morphy has never plagued me with nightmares, night terrors, or the hellish-sounding sleep paralysis. But a good panic-inducing nightmare might actually be refreshing at this point.  My dreams, dear reader, have become extraordinarily mundane.  Typical, even. Take last night, for example. I dreamt that I was back in community college as a student, showing up after a long absence only to find it was final exam day, and I was woefully unprepared. Sound familiar? That’s what I mean…who hasn’t had the same or similar dreams hundreds of times in their lives? Back in my adolescent years, this terror-inducing trope was at least somewhat applicable to my waking world. But now it has grown positively boring. I keep dreaming about common interactions that apparently my subconscious thinks are relevant, but I can assure you they are not. But while I’m in the dream, I’m having to deal with someone’s whining, or some issue someone has with me, and trying to resolve the issue, which stresses me out and causes disruption in my sleep. Then I wake up, immediately realize the problem and people (typically) don’t even exist, and the entire dream was just a lame fuck-around. What once would have brought on cold sweats and heart palpitations now barely warrant a yawn as I open my eyes at dawn. Maybe Morpheus is just messing with me. But I refuse to relinquish my hard-won peace of mind to the whims of a capricious dream-weaver. I can only surmise that Morpheus is attempting to lull me back into a state of complacency before unleashing his more twisted creations upon me. But I don’t know…nobody’s talking.

And so much for all that.  We have a bit of DPS business to attend to today.  Because on this day in 1544, Italian poet Torquato Tasso was born in Sorrento, near Naples.  I’m sure you’ve never heard of him, literate reader, but you can trust me on this one: dude was a literary firebrand – his epic Jerusalem Delivered (1581) is a blood-and-guts tale of the First Crusade, packed with heroic knights, clashing swords, and a defiant spirit.  Tasso’s life was as wild as his work: he battle mental illness, got locked up in a madhouse by the Duke of Ferrara for seven years, and still managed to crank out verse that’s revered still.  He was set to be crowned “King of Poets” by the Pope in 1595, but he died just days before the ceremony – talk about a tragic, badass exit.  His mix of brilliance and chaos make him a legend.  Happy Birthday, Uncle Torq!

N.P.: “Hot Stuff” – Voxxx

Word of the Day: parvenu

Parvenu (n): A person who’s clawed their way up from humble beginnings to wealth or status, often with all the subtlety of a bullhorn in a library. Think nouveau riche with a side of try-hard—someone who’s got the cash but not the class, and everyone fucking knows it.
Straight from the French, parvenu comes from the verb parvenir, meaning “to arrive” or “to succeed,” rooted in Latin pervenire (“to come through”). It’s been strutting around English since the early 19th century, sneering at old money while flashing its gaudy new watch. The vibe? Freshly minted swagger with a whiff of desperation.
So, picture this: Jimmy “Two-Toes” Malone—yeah, he lost the other eight in a lawnmower incident he doesn’t talk about—hits the Powerball for $87 million and goes full parvenu overnight. We’re talking a guy who used to shotgun Busch Light in a trailer park, now strutting into a Michelin-starred joint in a leopard-print tuxedo, reeking of Axe body spray and entitlement. He’s got a date—some chick named Tiffani with an “i” who’s already mentally spending his winnings on a yacht called Titz McGee—and he’s barking at the waiter, “Bring me the fuckin’ caviar, none of that cheap shit!” The waiter, a wiry dude named Claude who’s seen it all, just smirks and drops a $400 spoonful of fish eggs in front of him. Jimmy shovels it in, gags like he’s choking on a golf ball, and yells, “Tastes like salty asshole!”—loud enough the whole place goes silent. Tiffani’s mortified, Claude’s plotting revenge, and Jimmy, oblivious, slaps a wad of hundreds on the table, hollering, “Keep the change, peasant!” as he stumbles out, leaving a trail of spilled champagne and shattered dignity. Moral? Money buys a lot, but it don’t buy you a goddamn clue.
N.P.: “Helter P.T.2 – Apoptygma Berzerk Remix” – kinGeorg

March 9, 2025

Today, dear reader, we pour some out for the legendary Charles Bukowski.
Charles Bukowski—born Heinrich Karl Bukowski on August 16, 1920, in Andernach, Germany, and dying on March 9, 1994, in San Pedro, California—is a literary figure who embodies the gritty, unpolished spirit of the American underclass. He’s the kind of writer you either love or hate, no in-between, because he doesn’t just write—he bleeds onto the page with a mix of cynicism, humor, and brutal honesty.

Early Life: A Rough Start
Bukowski’s childhood was a mess. His family moved to Los Angeles when he was two, escaping post-WWI Germany. His father was a domineering, abusive figure—think beatings with a razor strop—and his mother was passive, leaving young Bukowski to fend for himself emotionally. Add severe acne that left him scarred and ostracized, and you’ve got the recipe for an outsider from the jump. He started drinking young, a habit that became his lifelong companion and muse. By his teens, he was already scribbling stories, but it wasn’t until later that he’d hit his stride.

The Hustle: Writing and Survival
Bukowski didn’t glide into literary fame—he clawed his way there. After dropping out of college, he bounced around doing odd jobs: dishwasher, truck driver, mail carrier. The U.S. Post Office gig—over a decade of soul-crushing monotony—became the backbone of his first novel, Post Office (1971). Before that, he was a drifter, living in flophouses, getting arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct, and writing whenever he wasn’t blackout drunk or broke. In the 1940s, he started publishing short stories in small magazines, but a near-fatal ulcer from booze in 1955 forced a reset. He came back swinging, focusing on poetry—raw, free-verse stuff that read like a barstool confession.

The Breakthrough: Dirty Realism
The 1960s were his turning point. He hooked up with the underground press— mimeographed zines and counterculture rags like Open City—and started churning out poems and columns. His big break came when John Martin of Black Sparrow Press saw his potential and offered him $100 a month to quit the post office and write full-time. Bukowski took the leap at 49, and the result was a flood of work: Post Office, Factotum (1975), Women (1978), and hundreds of poems collected in books like Love is a Dog from Hell (1977). His style—labeled “dirty realism”—was all about the unglamorous: skid row, sex, gambling, and the grind of working-class life. No flowery metaphors, just gut punches.

The Man: Flawed and Fearless
Bukowski wasn’t a saint. He was a womanizer, a brawler, and a self-proclaimed “dirty old man” by the time he hit his 50s. His live readings were legendary—half poetry, half stand-up, often sloshed on whiskey, heckling the crowd right back. He’d piss people off, charm them, or both. His alter ego, Henry “Hank” Chinaski, starred in his semi-autobiographical novels, letting Bukowski air his demons without apology. Critics called him crude or misogynistic; fans called him a truth-teller. Either way, he didn’t care—he wrote what he lived.

Later Years and Legacy
By the 1980s, Bukowski was a cult hero. His novel Ham on Rye (1982) dug into his brutal youth, while Hollywood (1989) skewered the film industry after his screenplay for Barfly (1987) got him some mainstream cred (Mickey Rourke played Chinaski—perfect casting). He kept writing until leukemia took him in ’94, leaving behind over 60 books. Posthumously, his work’s been adapted into films, studied in universities, and quoted by everyone from punks to poets.

Why He’s a Badass
Bukowski’s badassery isn’t capes and heroics—it’s survival. He turned a life of rejection, poverty, and addiction into art that spits in the face of pretense. He didn’t write to impress; he wrote to breathe. Lines like “Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead” (Barfly) capture his ethos: embrace the mess or miss the point. He’s the patron saint of misfits, proving you don’t need polish to leave a mark—just guts.

To Uncle Chuck!

N.P.: “All That Medicine” – Tax The Heat

March 8, 2025

Well, hell, dear reader.  I can’t believe it’s already time to talk about the sheer, unadulterated lunacy of Daylight Saving Time (DST). This biannual ritual of clock-twisting isn’t just a minor annoyance; it’s a relic of idiocy that kills, maims, and maddens us, all while clinging to justifications so outdated they belong in a museum next to Edison’s first light bulb.  I’m here, once again, to rip this farce apart. Spoiler alert: the only sane fix is locking the clocks on Standard Time—permanently—and telling DST to take a long walk off a short pier.

The Body Count of Clock-Changing
Let’s start with the grim stats, because we might as well face the ugly truth head-on. Every spring, when we “spring forward” and lose an hour of sleep (i.e. tonight), the world doesn’t just groan—it bleeds. Studies—like a 2014 Michigan hospital analysis—show heart attacks spike 24% the Monday after the switch. Strokes? Up 8% in Finland, per a 2016 study. Traffic accidents? A 2020 University of Colorado-Boulder report pegs a 6% jump in fatal crashes, adding about 30 extra deaths a year. Why? Our circadian rhythms get sucker-punched. We’re groggy, irritable, and stumbling into the day like drunks after last call. Sleep deprivation isn’t a quirky plot twist—it’s a killer, and DST is the trigger.
Then there’s the “fall back” in November. You’d think gaining an hour would be a reprieve, but nope—it’s just a different flavor of chaos. Darkness creeps in earlier, and suddenly deer collisions and pedestrian pile-ups spike as drivers fumble through the gloom. Workplace injuries climb too, because tired hands and dim light don’t mix. This is a public health crisis dressed up as tradition. We’re not saving daylight—we’re sacrificing lives.

The Dumbass Origins of DST
So why the hell did we start this madness? Rewind to World War I, when Germany flipped the clocks in 1916 to stretch daylight and save coal. The U.S. jumped on the bandwagon in 1918, sold on the idea that more evening light would cut energy costs and boost wartime efficiency. Farmers, they said, would love it (spoiler: they universally hated it—cows don’t read clocks). Then, in World War II, it came back as a patriotic duty. Fine, you say—war’s desperate times called for desperate measures. But here’s the deal: those reasons don’t hold water in 2025.
Coal? We’ve got electricity humming through every socket—our society’s been electrified since Truman was in diapers. Energy savings? A 2008 Department of Energy study found DST shaves a measly 0.03% off electricity use—peanuts in a world of LED bulbs and 24/7 grids. Farming? Modern agribusiness runs on tractors and tech, not sunrise prayers. The original pitch—conserve fuel, align daylight with work—was flimsy even then, and now it’s laughable and embarrassing. We’re not rationing for the Kaiser anymore; we’re just screwing ourselves for no reason.

Standard Time: The Only Sane Rebellion
Here’s the truth: locking the clocks on Standard Time is the only fix that doesn’t make us look like fools. Why? It’s the closest thing to “real” time—aligned with the sun’s arc, not some arbitrary shift. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine backs this hard, saying permanent Standard Time syncs with our body’s natural clock, cutting the health risks of DST’s jolts. No more heart attacks from sleep loss, no more kids dodging cars in pre-dawn dark because sunrise is at 9 a.m. under permanent DST. It’s simple, it’s logical, and it’s got science in its corner.
Permanent DST?  Don’t even start.  That’s just DST’s smug cousin, pretending to be progress.  Sure, you get later sunsets – great for barbecues – but winter mornings turn into a gothic nightmare.  Sunrise at 8:45 a.m.?  Kids trudging to school in pitch black?  That’s not efficient; that’s dystopian.  We tried it in 1974 – Nixon’s energy crisis stunt – and people revolted after a few months of predawn misery.  Standard Time isn’t sexy, but it’s steady.  It’s the temporal equivalent of a no-nonsense narrator – reliable, grounded, and done with bullshit.

Musk, Trump, and the Poll That Missed the Plot
Enter Elon Musk and the Republican Party, riding in like modern-day Don Quixotes tilting at DST’s windmill. Trump’s been barking about it on Truth Social since December 2024: “Daylight Saving Time is inconvenient, and very costly to our Nation.” Musk, co-leading Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency), has been hyping it too. On March 5, 2025, he dropped an X poll: “If daylight savings time change is canceled, do you prefer an hour earlier or an hour later?” Over 1.2 million voted, with 58% picking “an hour later.” Cue the applause from the uninformed.
Here’s the rub: that question’s a literary trainwreck. “An hour later” means permanent DST—shifting clocks forward year-round—which is exactly what no serious person should want. It’s not ending DST; it’s enshrining it, trading one stupidity for another. “An hour earlier” at least gets us to Standard Time, but Musk’s framing muddies the waters like a bad metaphor. The real choice isn’t “more or less”; it’s Standard vs. DST, and Standard wins every time if you’ve got a pulse and a brain. Musk’s poll isn’t a solution—it’s a distraction.

The Final Word
Daylight Saving Time is a farce—a killer cloaked in nostalgia, propped up by reasons that crumbled decades ago. It’s not efficient to cling to it; it’s lazy. Permanent Standard Time isn’t just the smart play—it’s the only play. Let’s lock the clocks, ditch the chaos, and tell the ghosts of 1918 to shove it. Musk and the GOP might fumble the execution, but if they actually kill DST, I’ll raise a glass—provided they don’t botch it with some half-assed “hour more” nonsense. Time’s too precious for this crap. Let’s live like we mean it.

N.P.: “All Shook Up” – Ry Cooder