Oh, dear reader…your boy has stepped in it now.  In fecus profundis, if you will.  Dig: me, a guy who cackles at Saw traps, quasi-admires Art the Clown for his creativity, and reads American Psycho over breakfast tacos and finds it funnier each time I read it, thinking I’m untouchable.  Then, today, I lose a lunchtime bet (don’t ask…it involved rather a lot of tequila and a dog-eared copy of Naked Lunch) and now my punishment is a single-sitting marathon of all three Human Centipede movies.  Yeah, those movies.  I think I’ve finally recovered from seeing the first one back in ’09, when Tom Six’s ass-to-mouth nightmare left me, Mr. “Nothing Fazes Me,” genuinely rattled.  That creepy-ass doctor, those silent screams, that feeding scene?  It was like Kafka and Cronenberg had a perversely deformed love child.  The content of the movie was bad enough, but I remember being more disturbed by the mind could conceive of this atrocity.  Now I’m staring down three of these cinematic war crimes, and I’m sweating like a vampire in a tanning booth.  I’ve gotta make a plan – maybe this weekend, maybe with bucket of whiskey and a priest on speed dial.  Send thoughts, prayers, or a time machine so I can un-lose this bet.

In other news, there were an annoying amount of uncalled-for setbacks today.  These days I usually get bad news of things like setbacks and just smirk and say, “Good,” because ultimately the outcome will be good, even though that outcome may take years to happen.  Such is life.  But then, out of the blue, Mgmt calls and cuts a month off our previous established deadline.  In fact, they want this proposal as soon as possible.  I thought I had months, now I have weeks.  Today was not my favorite Monday ever.

N.P.: “Are Friends Electric? (Grey Mix) – Gary Numan

Today, dear reader, let us celebrate the anniversary of the publication of Kafka’s The Trial.  Let’s set the stage: it’s 1924, Berlin’s a cauldron of post-war malaise, and Franz Kafka’s The Trial hits the world, published posthumously thanks to his friend Max Brod, who – bless his defiant heart – ignored Kafka’s dying wish to torch his manuscripts.  If my best friend did that, I might be inclined to haunt his ass ruthlessly for the rest of miserable life.  Be that as it may, I’m quite glad old Max did what he did…this book is amazing.  Josef K., a regular bank clerk, wakes up one morning to find himself arrested for a crime he doesn’t know, by authorities he can’t comprehend, in a world that refuses to explain itself.  Kafka constructs a suffocating machine of bureaucratic dread and existential terror, slicing through the veneer of order with surgical precision.  This sort of raw, unfiltered work became a cornerstone of modernist literature, its influence being seen over everyone from Orwell’s 1984 to Camus’ The Stranger.

Kafka is able to turn the mundane into the macabre, to take the everyday – courtrooms, paperwork, faceless officials – and render it as a Kafkaesque (yes, he birthed the term) descent into absurdity.  Josef K. isn’t battling dragons or gods; he’s battling a system so opaque, so indifferent, that it might as well be a deity of apathy.  Kafka strips away any comforting illusions of justice or reason.  K.’s arrest isn’t dramatic – it’s banal, a couple of low-level bureaucrats eating his breakfast while they detain him.  From there, the story spirals into a fever dream of endless corridors, stifling attics, and cryptic conversations with characters who seem to know more than they’ll ever say.  Kafka’s prose forces you to feel K.’s mounting paranoia as he’s ground down by a machine he can’t fight because he can’t even see it.  It’s the psychological vivisection of the terror of being alive in a world that doesn’t care if you understand it.

That’s all I have time for today, dear reader…the book is calling, and so, regrettably, is Mgmt wanting a progress report and to see today’s work.

N.P.: “X the Eyes” – Mr. Strange

Happy Friday, dear reader.  There was a weird amount of helicopter traffic in the skies over Fecal Creek this morning…first a Blackhawk, followed by a Little Bird, followed shortly thereafter by a big-ass Chinook, all heading southwest.  I saw these while I was waiting with saint-like patience in the drive-thru line of Dunkin for my Triple Mocha Frozen Coffee which, I crushingly found out later, was somehow ill-prepared.  Not enough chocolate.  It tasted more like a Single-and-a-Half Mocha Frozen Coffee.  I still drank it…shit yes, dear reader…I drank the hell out of it.  But it didn’t provide me with the usual joy.  My blood sugar level was only raised to maybe semi-dangerous levels, rather than the usual and expected “my heart feels like a great white shark that is about to explode” levels that I have grown to know and love.  Alas.  The world continues to turn.  And so much for that.  Now down to business.

On this day in 1719, Daniel Defoe dropped Robinson Crusoe, a novel that’s pure survivalist grit.  Dig: a man, shipwrecked on a desolate island, staring down the abyss of nature’s indifference, cannibals circling like vultures, and his own teetering sanity threatening to jump ship.  Crusoe not only endures his 28-year exile; he wrestles it into submission, building shelters, taming goats, and even converting a local he dubs Friday to Christianity.  This is not some twee castaway tale like Alexander Selkirk’s, the real-life marooned sailor who inspired Defoe.  No.  Defoe cranks the stakes all the way to 11, weaving a narrative so raw and immediate that 18th-century readers swore it was nonfiction, cementing him as a progenitor of the novel form.  What makes Crusoe such a badass isn’t just that he survives – it’s him telling despair to fuck right off as he carves out a life from nothingness.

Defoe’s genius lies in his ability to make the mundane feel mythic.  Crusoe’s daily grind – salvaging shipwreck scraps, planting crops, crafting tools – becomes a Homeric odyssey of self-reliance.  But beneath the surface, there’s a simmering tension: the psychological toll of isolation and the existential dread of a man who’s both god and prisoner of his own domain, a feeling that I’ve been uncomfortably familiar with in the past.  Defoe doesn’t flinch from the ugly bits, and that’s what makes Robinson Crusoe a timeless beast – it’s not just about surviving the wilderness; it’s about surviving yourself.  The book’s realism was so potent it birthed a genre, but its real legacy is in showing us that heroism isn’t capes and swords; it’s the quiet, ferocious will to keep going when the world’s gone to hell.  Damn right.

Now let’s pivot, and fast-forward exactly 306 years to this very day, dear reader, and the cause of much celebration and head-banging around the Safe House today: Ghost’s new album Skeleta, which dropped today and has my aorta all atingle after a single listen.  The Swedish group, helmed by the preternaturally talented Tobias Forge, has delivered a record that’s both a banger and a revelation – no filler to be found here, but also no interstitial musical interludes (a departure from their previous album’s penchant for atmospheric detours), just 10 songs of pretty much unadulterated brilliance.  My standout after one spin is Cenotaph.  It’s just a brilliant pop song.

One of the things that fascinates me about Ghost – and Skeleta in particular – is how their image has a death metal band, complete with corpse paint and Satanic theatrics, probably scares off listeners who’d otherwise be dare I say enraptured by their sound.  Whatever references to headbanging I made supra…forget it. There’s no actual headbanging going on here (though I will confess to brief air-guitar this afternoon when Majesty came on). Forge isn’t channeling the guttural nihilism of death metal: he’s closer to Andrew Lloyd Webber, crafting operatic, melody-drenched compositions that wouldn’t feel out of place in a West End musical.  Fans of Phantom of the Opera or Jesus Christ Superstar would likely lose their minds over Ghost’s entire catalog, from Opus Eponymous to this latest gem.  On the one hand, it’s a damn shame the metal label might alienate the theater-kid demographic that’d eat this up with a spoon.  On the other hand, fuck ’em…the timid and weak don’t deserve good music.  They deserve Taylor Swift.  Uncultured heathens.

The writing continues apace, or at least as apace as can be realistically expected.  Of course, what reality expects and what Mgmt expects are completely different things.  That “difficult” chapter I mentioned the other day?  I’m not going to be able to write that straight through…I’m going to have to work on other chapters and then come back to this as ideas occur or I’m more “ready.”  So I’m shifting the schedule around to a much more non-linear arrangement, which gives Mgmt the Angst.  For which I deeply apologize but feel compelled to say also tough titty.  This whole process is like giving birth: I don’t have a whole lot of control over how long things take or when certain things happen.  Thou Shalt Deal With It.
#UnculturedHeathens

N.P.: “Bible” – Ghost

I was working on a perfectly lovely post about lady ass [technically it was about ass in general, but, being the straight guy I am, I prefer lady ass] when some dirty goddamn hippy reminded me that today is Earth Day, that tiresome festival of dirt-worshipping drivel where we’re supposed to genuflect to a third-rate planet that’s been coasting on its own hype since the Cambrian.  Personally, obviously, I’d rather be writing about lady ass, but if I must address this silly day, I’m torching the hippy script.  No more fawning over this cosmic has-been.  Earth’s a dump, and we, the gloriously unbowed Home sapiens, deserve better.  The theme for Earth Day 2025?  Make Mars Our Bitch.  Elon is, as usual, right: it’s time to ditch this played-out orb and seize a red-hot future on a planet that doesn’t suck.

Point 1: Earth’s a Shithole, and Always Has Been
Let’s be honest: the only reason the hippies like this place is because it’s all they know.  If they’d spend any time on literally any other planet, they’d know that Earth is a galactic embarrassment, a petri dish of mediocrity that’s been phoning it in for eons.  Oh, sure, it’s got oceans and forests and all that postcard crap, but peel back the Instagram filter, and what do you see?  A temperamental hellscape that’s been trying to kill us since we crawled out of the primordial ooze.  Volcanoes spewing ash, earthquakes flattening our cities, hurricanes treating our coastlines like punching bags – Earth’s got the temperament of a hungover wolverine.  And don’t start with the “but nature’s so beautiful” horseshit.  Nature’s a sociopath, red in tooth and claw, serving up plagues, locusts, and tsunamis like a cosmic middle finger to our ambitions.

The planet’s rap sheet is longer than a Pynchon novel.  Ice ages that froze our ancestors’ balls off.  Meteor strikes that turned dinosaurs into fossilized ash.  An atmosphere so stingy with oxygen it took billions of years to make itself even halfway livable.  And those vaunted ecosystems?  Fragile as a trust-fund poet’s ego, collapsing at the first whiff of change.  Earth’s not some benevolent mother; it’s a landlord from hell, jacking up the rent with every tectonic shrug.  We humans, with our incandescent ingenuity, our Promethean chutzpah, have been propping up this loser rock for millennia – building cities, inventing penicillin, splitting the atom – while Earth just sits there, sulking like a washed-up diva.  It’s not our fault this place is a mess; Earth was broken from the jump.

Point 2: Make Mars Our Bitch
So why keep slumming it on this cosmic lemon when we’ve got Mars, that sexy, rust-red renegade, just begging for the human touch?  Earth Day 2025 is our chance to flip the bird at this planetary slumlord and stake our claim on a world that’s got potential.  Mars is the ultimate blank canvas, a tabula rasa untainted by Earth’s baggage – no whiny ecosystems to coddle, no fault lines throwing tantrums, just pure, unadulterated opportunity.  We’re not here to grovel, goddammit; we’re here to conquer, to bend a whole damn planet to our indomitable will.  And holy monkey, does that feel good.

Picture it, man: domed metropolises gleaming under a Martian twilight, fusion reactors humming like the gods’ own mixtape, hydroponic farms churning out bespoke arugula for our interstellar elite.  We’ll terraform the crap out of that dusty wasteland, pumping atmosphere into its bony skies and carving canals deeper than Burroughs’ fever dreams.  Mars is harsh-radiation, thin air, dust storms that’d choke a lesser species – but we’re not lesser.  We’re the bastards who tamed fire, mapped the genome, and invented the McRib (which, btw, McDonald’s really needs to bring that back…it’s been months).  Making Mars our bitch isn’t just doable; it’s our birthright.  No more kowtowing to Earth’s fickle bullshit.  We’ll build a civilization that makes the Red Planet box, a monument to human badassery that’ll echo through the cosmos.

Sure, there’s work to do – shielding habitats, cracking the water problem, keeping the colonists from going full Lord of the Flies.  But we’re the species that put a man on the moon while Earth was busy coughing up tornadoes.  Elon’s out there, yeeting rockets and dreaming of Martian zip codes.  Let’s channel our inner imperialists, and make Earth Day a middle finger to a planet that never deserved us.  Mars is our destiny, our chance to flex our species-level swagger and build something that doesn’t come with a built-in eviction notice.

Coda:
Here’s the deal: Earth Day 2025 ain’t about singing odes to a planet that’s been flipping us off since the Pleistocene.  It’s about celebrating us – humanity, the only thing in this universe with the balls to dream bigger than its circumstances.  Earth’s a has-been, a cosmic dive bar with bad lighting and worse service.  Mars?  That’s our Penthouse suite, waiting for us to kick in the door.  So raise a flask of hypothetical Martian hooch and toast to the future, where we’re not tenants but overlords, turning a barren rock into humanity’s magnum opus.  Make Mars Our Bitch, you glorious bastards.

N.P.: “The Killing Moon” – Stabbing Westward