Happy birthday, Mary.  ❤️

Well, well, well, dear reader, it’s Monday again, that cruel, coffee-sucking beast that lurches into our lives like a hungover, ‘roided out bouncer at a dive bar.  And here I am, your battle-scarred scribe, fresh off a nine-day bender of a writing marathon – call it a full-throttle, no-brakes assault on this sprawling, hydra-headed bastard of manuscript I’ve been wrestling like some demonic rodeo bull.

The mission was simple, or so I thought: take this shaggy, half-feral draft of a book – my latest attempt to claw some truth out of the chaotic void – and beat it into something resembling coherence.  Nine days of caffeine-fueled, sleep-deprived madness, hammering the keys until my fingers ached like the keys had been hammering back.  And the verdict?  Victory, of a sort.

There’s a draft now, a real, tangible beast, rough as a three-day bender and twice as messy, but it exists, goddamn it, in the digital ether.  An exceedingly rough draft, for my taste, with all the structural integrity of a sandcastle in a shitstorm.  But here’s the bright side, the one big, beautiful, undeniable fact I’m clinging to like a drunk to a lamppost: it’s good.  It’s not the polished diamond it needs to be before I put it out, but the fundamental shape of it, the raw architecture, is the best it has ever been.  So I’ll take it.  I will snatch that win from the jaws of chaos and hold it aloft, even as the to-do list stretches on into what feels like infinity.

One of the biggest successes of the week came from me experimenting with the chapter order.  This has been bugging me a long time.  I tried arranging them thematically, which, while common in memoirs, failed as badly as I thought it would here.  I tried arranging things purely chronologically, but that didn’t work either.  Ultimately, I had it arranged the way it’s supposed to be.  It jumps all over hell, timewise, but there’s no other way to tell it.

Of course, because the universe is a sadistic prick with a twisted sense of humor, nothing in this adult world of ours ever goes down smoothly.  The last week was a parade of distractions, obligations, and cosmic middle fingers – everything from Wi-Fi betrayals to existential crises that hit like a liver kick.  So, yeah, I didn’t check every box on my grandiose and erumpent to-do list.  The dream was to emerge from this nine-day gauntlet with a draft so tight it could swagger into a publisher’s office and demand a corner suite.  Reality, as always, has other plans.  But I’m not flogging myself too hard over it.  Perfection’s a myth, a siren song for suckers, and I’d rather have a flawed, fighting draft than a pristine fantasy that never leaves the page.

So here we are, Monday night, the world still spinning, the book still breathing.  I’m battered but unbowed, ready to dive back into the fray with a sharper blade and a meaner grin.  Stay tuned, sexy reader – you’re riding shotgun on this weird ride, and I promise you, it’s gonna be one hell of a show.

N.P.:  “Tron Ares – As Alive As You Need Me To Be – Metal Version” – Artificial Fear

Alright, strap in, dear reader, because we’re about to tear into the quivering, gelatinous underbelly of one very vaginal Malcolm Gladwell, the pop-sociology huckster who’s been peddling his slick, airport-bookstore pablum to the gullible masses for far too long.  This week, the man who made a career out of repackaging obvious truths as revelatory “tipping points” has finally shown his true colors, and they’re a repulsive hue of pusillanimity.  On a podcast – The Real Science of Sport, no less – Gladwell admitted he was “cowed” into supporting the absurd notion that men, by some perverse alchemy of ideology, can compete as women in sports.  Cowed.  Like a fucking farm animal.

Let that sink in.  Let the full, wretched, and frankly hilarious implications of that statement marinate in the primordial ooze of your consciousness.  This is a man who built a career on explaining the hidden mechanics of everything from ketchup to success, the guru who supposedly sees the intricate threads connecting outliers and dogwalkers and Jamaican sprinters.  Yet, when faced with a cultural blitzkrieg demanding he assent to a proposition as biologically sound as a flat earth, he tucked his pathetic tail so far between his legs it was tickling his famously frizzy chin.

He was bullied.  Intimidated.  Pressured into nodding along with a fantasy so complete, so utterly detached from observable reality, that a reasonably bright toddler could debunk it with a crayon and a rudimentary understanding of anatomy.  The alleged intellectual heavyweight, the celebrated thinker, apparently possesses a spine with the structural integrity of warm Jell-O.  He saw the mob, torches aflame and pronouns sharpened, and decided that the path of least resistance was to simply shut his mouth and pretend the emperor’s new genitalia, were, in fact, stunning and brave.  Now he’s backtracking, natch, whining that he’s “ashamed” of his silence at a 2022 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference where he played moderator to a panel stacked with trans activists.  Apparently, he sat there, nodding a long like a bobblehead, while some tranny athlete turned to panelist Ross Tucker and demanded, “You have to let us win.”  Imagine it, dear reader: a grown-ass man, a supposed intellectual, heard that bald-faced lunacy and didn’t say a fucking word.  Didn’t push back.  Didn’t call out the absurdity of a man demanding a free pass to dominate women’s sports.  Instead, he played the good little progressive, keeping his mouth shut because…why?  Fear of the Twitter mob?  Worried he’d lose his invite to the next Davos circle-jerk?  Whatever the reason, he admits he was “dishonest,” letting “howlers” pass without comment, all because he was too spineless to speak the truth he claims he believed along: that males have no place competing in female sports categories.

Boo-fucking-hoo, Malcolm.  This isn’t about tipping points or the 10,000-hour rule.  This is about a complete and utter abdication of the one thing a writer – a thinker – is supposed to have: courage.  The courage to look at a thing, a real thing, and describe it as it is, not as a screeching mob of idiots on social media demands it be described.
It occurs to me now that my dear reader may not know much, or anything at all, about our boy Malcolm.  So, for those of you who’ve been too busy actually reading something worth a shit to notice his rise to fame, Gladwell, a Canadian scribbler with a mop of hair that screams “I’m trying too hard to be quirky,” burst onto the scene with The Tipping Point (2000), a book that took the radical stance that – get this – ideas spread like viruses.  Wow.  How groundbreaking.  He followed it up with Blink (2005), where he told us trusting your gut is sometimes a thing, and Outliers (2008), where he “discovered” that success involves hard work and luck.  No shit.  The guy’s built an empire on stating the obvious with just enough jargon to make middle managers feel like they’re reading Foucault.  A staff writer for The New Yorker and a podcast darling, he’s been coasting on this faux-intellectual schtick for decades, wrapping commonsense observations in a veneer of statistical razzle-dazzle that collapses under scrutiny faster than a house of cards in a hurricane.  His work is the literary equivalent of a Ted Talk: flashy, shallow, and designed to make you feel smarter without actually challenging what you think.

This isn’t just a lapse in judgment; it’s a betrayal of reason itself.  We’re talking about a guy who’s made millions pontificating on human behavior, yet when push came to shove, he folded like a cheap lawn chair under the weight of ideological bullying.  Again, a five-year-old with a basic grasp of biology knows that boys are not and can never be girls, that men’s bodies – packed with testosterone, denser bones, and more muscle mass – give them a physical edge in sports that no amount of “identity” can erase.  This isn’t rocket science; it’s not even high school biology.  It’s the kind of truth so glaringly obvious it’s embarrassing to have to articulate it.  Yet Gladwell, this self-styled guru of insight, claims he was “cowed” into silence.  The man’s 62 years old, an alleged literary heavyweight with a platform bigger than most, and he’s whimpering about being bullied into silence?  Pathetic.

This confession doesn’t just torch his credibility; it proves he never had any to begin with.  A writer – a real writer – doesn’t just regurgitate trendy narratives or cower before the zeitgeist.  A real writer wields his pen like a machete, cutting through bullshit to get to the truth, no matter who’s screaming what.  Gladwell’s admission reveals him as a fraud, a man so desperate to stay in the good graces of the cultural elite and their luxury beliefs that he’d rather lie than stand up for what he claims to believe.  And now he’s “ashamed”?  Fuck you.  This isn’t shame; it’s damage control.  He’s seen the wind shifting – people like Riley Gaines and Amy Hamm calling him out on X for his flip-flopping – and he’s scrambling to save face.  Too late, jackass.  You’ve shown your hand, and it’s pitiful.

The kicker here is that he’s not even apologizing for the right reasons.  He’s not sorry for propping up a narrative that undermines fairness in women’s sports or for gaslighting female athletes who’ve been forced to compete against deluded males.  Nope.  He’s sorry he didn’t speak up, sorry he got caught looking like an absolute coward.  It’s the intellectual equivalent of a politician saying, “I regret if anyone was offended.”  Weak sauce, Malcolm.  If you’re going to take a stand now, at least have the balls to own the harm your silence caused.  Female athletes have been cheated out of opportunities, podiums, and scholarships because of this nonsense, and you sat there, complicit, while it happened.

What is the value of a mind that can be so easily herded?  What are we to make of his entire body of work now, knowing that the author’s primary operating principle isn’t intellectual curiosity, but a deep-seated fear of being yelled at?

His books now read like artifacts from a different, more chickenshit dimension.  Blink becomes the story of a man who makes a snap judgement to save his own skin.  Outliers seems less a study of success and more a roadmap for conforming to the prevailing groupthink to avoid ostracism.  This confession re-contextualizes everything.  It reveals the man behind the curtain is not a wizard, but just a very nervous publicist with a good haircut, frantically pulling levers to maintain an illusion.

So he feels bad about it now.  He’s seen the tide turn just enough that he can peek his head out of his Canadian foxhole and whisper, “Um, for the record, I was a scared little bitch.”  Fine.  Good for him.  But absolution is not on the menu.  You don’t get a cookie for admitting you abandoned your post when the shooting started.  You get contempt.  You get whatever is beneath contempt.  You get the acidic, burning realization that the people we were told were our intellectual navigators were just reading from a script handed to them by the most aggressive and least coherent people in the room.

So where does this leave Gladwell’s legacy?  In the fucking toilet, that’s where.  If he was ever a legitimate writer – and that’s a massive “if,” given his track record of repackaging platitudes as profundity – this episode proves he’s nothing more than a brainless weather vane, spinning whichever way the cultural winds blow.  A real writer doesn’t need to be bullied into believing bullshit; they call it out, loud and proud, even when it’s inconvenient.  Gladwell’s spent his career dodging hard truths in favor of palatable narratives, and this latest fiasco is just the cherry on top of a career built on intellectual cowardice.  He’s not a thinker; he’s a performer, a snake-oil salesman who’s finally be caught with his pants down.

To the readers still clutching their dog-eared copies of Blink: wake up.  Your boy Malcolm’s been exposed as a fraud who’d rather kowtow to ideologues than stand up for what’s right.  And to Gladwell himself: next time you’re tempted to play the objective observer, do us all a favor and keep your lying mouth shut.  Or better yet, try to retrieve your testicles out of whatever tranny’s purse you left them in and say what you mean.  Until then, you’re just another chickenshit hack, cowed by the mob and unworthy of the page.

The whole pathetic spectacle leaves a taste in your mouth like cheap gin and cowardice.  The man was never a danger, never a threat to the established order.  He was its court jester, its high-gloss flatterer.  And then the court demanded he believe that two plus two equals fish, he didn’t even have the balls to argue.  He just asked what kind of fish.

N.P.: “God’s Gonna Cut You Down (feat. Adoration Destroyed)” – Dead Animal Assembly Plant

Greetings from the Dissolute Desk, dear reader – this is your captain speaking, though, let’s be honest, the term “captain” implies a level of control over this particular vessel that would make Ahab weep with envy.  Today is Hump Day, that blessed Wednesday phenomenon that sits like a literary critic at a poetry slam – uncomfortable, slightly drunk, and desperately trying to find meaning in the chaos.

Just a brief update today – and my brief, I mean the literary equivalent of what pharmaceutical companies call “brief” side effects, which somehow manage to include everything from mild nausea to spontaneous combustion – since I’m currently submerged in the proverbial full-court press on this goddamn book.  And yes, to the one dear reader who thinks I should cuss less, I said “goddamn” because sometimes the English language requires the theological weight of profanity to adequately capture the Sisyphean absurdity of the creative process.

You know how, as an adult, everything becomes a Byzantine maze of bureaucratic torment designed by someone who clearly never had to navigate said maze while suffering from the literary equivalent of erectile dysfunction?  That’s to say: the persistent, maddening, inability to get your metaphors up when you need them most?  So that’s going on, but still – and here’s where my inherent optimism battles my well-documented pessimism like two drunk philosophers arguing about the meaning of existence at 3 AM – progress is being made.

Meeting my goals today is a pretty big deal when it comes to getting a draft done by September 8, which looms before me like a literary deadline should: with all the warm, welcoming energy of a proctological examination performed by someone with exceptionally large hands and a questionable understanding of personal space.

But let’s talk about this Wednesday celebration business, shall we?  Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my years of professional literary  debauchery – and by professional, I mean I occasionally get paid for this madness, though not nearly enough to justify the liver damage – it’s that midweek celebrations require a certain philosophical commitment to the absurd.

Think of it, man: it’s 2:17 PM Wednesday afternoon.  You’re three cups deep into what your local coffee shop optimistically calls their “house blend” but which tastes suspiciously like it was filtered through a gym sock that’s seen better decades.  Your manuscript stares back at you from the computer screen with all the judgement of a disappointed parent who just discovered your college transcript.  The cursor blinks.  Blinks again.  Taunts you with its rhythmic insistence that something should be happening here, some magical alchemy of words and ideas that transforms the mundane suffering of existence into something approaching art.

And then – miracle of miracles – the worse come.  They’re okay words.  Not the kind of luminous prose that makes readers weep and critics genuflect.  But words nonetheless.  Honest, slightly deranged words that capture something essential about what it means to be a human being stumbling through the cosmic joke of modern life with nothing but caffeine, stubbornness, and an inexplicable faith that somehow, against all evidence to the contrary, this particular arrangement of sentences might matter.

The adult world, you see, operates on the principle that nothing should ever be simple, straightforward, or remotely pleasant.  Need to renew your driver’s license?  That’s be a three-hour odyssey through a government office that apparently hasn’t been updated since the Carter administration.  Want to submit a manuscript?  Here’s a 17-page submission guide that contradicts itself no fewer than 43 times and requires you to format your work in a font that doesn’t exist on any computer manufactured after 1987.

But writing – actual writing, the kind that matters – operates on different principles entirely.  It demands that you show up, day after day, to face the blank page with nothing but your wits and whatever chemical assistance you can legally obtain.  It requires a kind of courage that’s simultaneously heroic and utterly ridiculous, like charging into battle armed only with a thesaurus and a profound sense of existential dread.

So yes, dear reader, progress is being made.  Slow, painful, occasionally hallucinogenic progress, but progress nonetheless.  Each sentence wrested from the void feels like a small victory against the forces of entropy and editorial bitching.  Each paragraph that doesn’t make me want to delete everything and take up accounting represents another step closer to that September 8 deadline, which approaches with all the subtlety of a methamphetaminic rhinoceros.

And if that’s not worth celebrating on a Wednesday afternoon, then I clearly don’t understand the fundamental principles of either celebration or Wednesday, both of which seem increasingly arbitrary the longer I contemplate them.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a book to finish and a hump day to properly honor.  The words won’t write themselves, though fuck knows I’ve asked them nicely.

Transmission ends.  Resume your regularly scheduled existential crisis. 

From the Dissolute Desk, where the coffee’s strong, the deadlines are stronger, and the metaphors occasionally achieve escape velocity. 

N.P.: “Pissed Off and Mad About It” – Texas Hippie Coalition