Author Archives: Jayson Gallaway

November 1, 2025

Well, thank Christ that’s over.  What a fucking flop!  Last night’s so-called “celebration” was less a perverted bacchanal of costumed chaos and more a pathetic exercise in suburban futility.  Two kids.  Two!  As in, one pair.  As in, not even enough to form a quorum for a haunted game of Duck Duck Goose.  Last year, the Safe House was a sugar-slick war zone – doorbell ringing like a fire alarm, candy flying like ticker tape, tiny goblins and superheroes swarming like locusts.  So naturally, this year, I prepared.  I went full Costco.  Bought enough candy to induce a diabetic coma in a mid-sized village.  And what did I get?  A couple of half assed Elsa knockoffs and a lingering sense of betrayal.

Why the ghost-town turnout?  Maybe the neighborhood kids unionized and declared our porch “too spooky.”  I’d suspect the local HOA banned fun or something, but they were all executed by firing squad in 2023.  Maybe there was a TikTok trend warning that the Safe House was haunted by the ghost of last year’s dentist.  Or maybe the children of Fecal Creek have evolved beyond candy, now subsisting entirely on influencer merch and weed.  Whatever the reason, I’m left with a mountain of uneaten sugar and a soul full of rage.  But never mind all that.

Today, November 1st, is National Author’s Day – a Hallmarkian nod to the ink-slingers, the word-jockeys, the caffeine-addled typists who dare to make meaning out of the chaos.  It’s a day for celebrating literary contributions, which is a polite euphemism for “thank you for bleeding onto the page so we don’t have to.”  And while the usual suspects will be trotted out – your novelists, your poets, your memoirists (those pains in the ass) with their trauma-for-breakfast – today we raise a glass (or a Hustler-branded flask full of rotgut bourbon) to one of the most subversive authors this country ever produced: Larry Claxton Flynt, Jr.

Born in Lakeville, Kentucky, in 1942, Flynt emerged from the American South like a libidinous banshee with a printing press.  He didn’t write novels.  He didn’t write essays.  He wrote Hustler.  And Hustler was a glossy, sticky dirty bomb unleashed directly on the sanctimonious façade of American decency.

Flynt understood something most authors only flirt with in the MFA programs before retreating to the safety of metaphor: that the First Amendment is not a polite suggestion.  It’s a weapon, and in 1988, he proved it.  Hustler Magazine v. Falwell was more like constitutional poetry than a court case.  The Supreme Court ruled that parody – even the kind that makes televangelists cry into their gold-plated bathtubs – is protected speech.

And let’s not forget, dear reader: the man took a bullet in 1978.  A literal bullet.  Not a metaphorical one.  Not a bad review or a mean tweet.  A real, spinal-cord-shattering, life-altering slug from a maniac.  But that didn’t even slow Uncle Larry down.  He kept publishing.  Fram a wheelchair.  With a golden gun and a mouth full of legal venom.  He became the wheelchair-bound warlord of the First Amendment, rolling through courtrooms and editorial meetings like a tank made of smut and jurisprudence.

So on this National Author’s Day, while your sipping your pumpkin spice latte and posting quotes from dead poets on Instagram, take a moment to honor the man who reminded us that literature isn’t always pretty.  Sometimes its profane.  Sometimes its naked.  Sometimes its waving your middle finger while quoting the Constitution.  Larry Flynt bulldozed boundaries, lit them on fire, and published the photos.

Happy birthday, Larry, you old pervert.

N.P.: “Get Em Up” – Paul Oakenfold, Ice Cube

October 31, 2025

And so it arrives.  The Main Event.  Halloween proper, the zero hour of the Gallaway Calendar, which, if you’ve been paying attention (and I know most of you haven’t, because you were busy duct-taping fake intestines to your front porch or mainlining candy corn like it’s Adderall), marks not the end but the beginning.  The Big Bang of the weird.  The first tick of the cosmic clock that runs of mischief, masks, and the sacred art of pretending.  You want to be a sexy vampire?  A depressed cowboy?  A sentient bag of Doritos?  Today, the universe says: “Yes.”

Like any good New Year, today demands a resolution.  Not the gym membership kind.  Not the “I’ll stop doomscrolling after midnight” kind.  I’m talking about the real stuff.  The marrow-deep vow to live louder, weirder, and with more intentional chaos.  To reject the tyranny of the beige.  To embrace the sacred disorder of the human soul.

Because Halloween is the only day the world agrees to play by Gallaway rules: that masks reveal more than they hide, that fear is a form of worship, and that the line between comedy and horror is not a line at all, but a Mobius strip make out of rubber bats and existential dread.

So tonight, when you’re out there – whether you’re chaperoning sugar-addled goblins or dancing in a warehouse dressed as a haunted spreadsheet – remember this: you are not celebrating death.  You are celebrating the refusal to be dead.  You are ringing in the new year of the beautifully deranged, the spiritually feral, the unapologetically strange.

Happy Halloween, dear reader.  May your candy be spiked, your costumes be cursed, and your soul be just a little more unhinged than it was yesterday.

Now go howl at something.

N.P.: “This Is Halloween” – Marilyn Manson

October 30, 2025

Hot damn, dear reader!  Tomorrow is Halloween, the New Year’s Day of the damned, the divine, and the deliriously decorated.   The annual ritualistic disembowelment of the pumpkins is complete, carved with surgical precision and a touch of psychosis.  Their malignant grins, a series of jagged and frankly unsettling triangles that leer like they know something about you that you don’t (and they do…they absolutely do), now illuminate the porch of the Safe House, casting a light that feels less like a welcome and more like a warning.  Which is, of course, the point.  Out here, where the treeline get thick and the ambient weirdness is a constant, low-grade hum, the 30th of October serves as the true demarcation.  Forget that champagne-and-confetti horseshit at the end of December; tonight is New Year’s Eve on the Gallaway Calendar.

This is the precipice, the final, deep breath before the glorious plunge.  Tomorrow, the veil gets so thin you could poke a finger through it and touch something cold and long-dead on the other side.  Not that the vibe here at the command center every deviates far from this particular frequency.  We exist in a state of perpetual autumn, a kind of year-long Samhain simmer.  Which is to say: cobwebs are not seasonal, they’re structural.  Skeletons aren’t props, they’re roommates.  The Safe House doesn’t do transitions – it marinates in perpetual October.  The aesthetic is year-round: a curated chaos of thrift-store taxidermy, flickering orange lights, and the faint scent of cinnamon and brimstone.  If Martha Stewart and Aleister Crowley had a baby and raised it in a haunted bowling alley, that baby would call the Safe House “home.”  The difference now is the rest of the world, for one fleeting, candy-coated night, finally gets the memo.  They catch up.

And then, as if the cosmos itself decided to sweeten the deal with a temporal cherry on top, we get the Fall Back.  This weekend, we reclaim that stolen hour.  We bend time back to its proper, non-daylight-saving configuration – what can only be described as Real Time.  An allegedly “extra” hour to exist within the perfect, chaotic apex of the year.  An extra sixty minutes of darkness and possibility.  Could things possibly ascend to a higher plane of perfection?

Fuck yes, they could.  The forecast, that meteorological oracle of institutionalized guesswork, whispers of a potential deluge later this week.  A solid gray sky-opening wash of rain to cleanse the psychic palate and settle the dust.

So here we stand, on the threshold of our New Year, with carved gourds bearing witness and the promise of temporal normalcy and a biblical drenching on the horizon.  The air is electric with the correct kind of wrongness.  Let the saccharine charade of the straight world have its day.  We know what time it really is.

So light your candles.  Lace up your boots.  Put on something that makes you look like you escaped from a Victorian asylum or a failed goth band.  This is the night before the night.  The last gasp of the old year.  The first breath of the new.  And if you’re lucky,  you’ll wake up Sunday soaked, slightly hungover, and reborn.  Happy Halloween Eve.  Let’s get weird.

N.P.: “Night of the Wolf” – Nox Arcana

October 29, 2025

Let’s talk about devotion, dear reader.  Not the quiet, prayer-hands kind, but the type of all-consuming, synapse-frying, 20-year obsession that births a legend.  Today we raise a glass – probably several, let’s be honest – to James Boswell, born on this day in 1740.  He was the ultimate literary wingman, the patron saint of biographers, and a man whose personal journals read like a depraved field guide to 18th-century London.

Imagine, if you will, dedicating your life to another human being.  Not just as a friend, but as a kind of human recording device.  For two decades, Boswell attached himself to the literary giant Samuel Johnson, like a barnacle with a notebook.  Johnson was the great intellectual wolverine of his age, with a mind that was a cathedral of genius and whose social graces were more or less those of a cornered badger.  And Boswell was right there, scribbling it all down.  Every thunderous insult or pronouncement, every witty comeback, every depressive sigh.  He stalked Johnson through taverns, print shops, and drawing rooms, his pen (well, quill) flying, capturing the man in all his flawed, human glory.

The result was The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., a book that mainlined Johnson’s life directly into readers’ veins.  That biography and its detail rawness basically invented the form as we know it.

But when Boswell wasn’t chronicling Johnson’s genius, he was conducting his own frantic, balls-deep experiments in the human condition.  His private journals, found long after his death, are a scandalous mess of high philosophy and low-life pursuits.  Philosophical benders, existential crises, orgies, hangovers, and an almost heroic number of STDs.  It’s the diary of a man wrestling with God and prostitutes, often in the same week, sometimes on the same night.  The man had impressive appetites – for fame, for booze, for flesh, and for Life.

Whatever he did, he dove in headfirst.  My favorite Boswell-Johnson moment was the two of them, deep in their cups, getting into a ferocious, slurring argument about the age-old philosophical question: if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound.  I’m confident I have drunkenly held forth on this exact questions many times, but, like most people would have, I’m sure, I have forgotten this drunken exchange by morning.  Boswell went home and wrote it all down.

So cheers to James Boswell.  He proved that sometimes the most important story you can tell is someone else’s, but that your own story – the really messy, chaotic part of it – is just as vital.  Go read his work, dear reader.  Let me know if you don’t think he makes our modern lives feel beige by comparison.

N.P.: “Superhero” – Johnny Hollow

Word of the Day: jentacular

Fuckin’ Tuesdays, dear reader…am I right?  Anyway, today’s lexical artifact, plucked from the dusty, cobwebbed archives of words that ought to be used more, is jentacular.

Jenatacular (adjective): Relating to breakfast.

Yes, really.  There exists a specific, glorious, and for my money tragically underutilized word just for things pertaining to the first meal of the day.  It’ a Latin hand-me-down, derived from ientaculum, which means, you guessed it, breakfast.  The Romans, between bouts of conquering and plumbing innovations, apparently had enough time to coin a dedicated term for their morning nosh.  And we, in our infinite wisdom, have let it wither on the proverbial vine.  A crime against language, I tell you.  Now, for a practical application.
The alarm – a sonic atrocity that sounded  less like a chime and more like a pterodactyl being fed into a woodchipper – had already done its unholy work.  I peeled on eye open to a world rendered in the depressing grayscale of pre-dawn misery.  My head throbbed with the ghosts of shitty decisions past, each pulse a tiny hammer on the back of my eyes.  This, I thought with a profound sense of cosmic injustice, is the price of admission.
The kitchen was a war zone.  The toaster, a malevolent chrome cube with a death wish, had immolated its bread-based hostages, belching a plume of acrid smoke that now clung to the ceiling like a lost soul.  A Jackson Pollock of coffee grounds decorated the counter, the result of a fumbled, pre-caffeinated attempt to operate the grinder.
I stood there, barefoot on the cold floor, observing the tableau of my domestic failure.  The smoke detector chirped a single, mocking note.  My stomach growled, a low, guttural protest against the very concept of continued existence.  I looked at the blackened toast, the coffee-splattered carnage, the existential void staring back at me from the bottom of an empty mug.  It was in the moment, surveying the smoldering ruins of my morning ambitions, that the full, unvarnished horror of the entire jentacular catastrophe truly landed.  I sighed, grabbed the bottle of whiskey from the cabinet, and decided to just start the day over tomorrow. 

N.P.: “No Yes More Less” – PIG

October 27, 2025

Today, dear reader, we hoist one high for a true heavyweight of the written word, the Welch wizard of verse, Dylan Thomas.  Born on this day in 1914, he took what can too often be the mundane art of poetry, wrestled it into submission, drank with it, and then bellowed it from the rooftops.  He was a force of nature whose voice was, as he put it, “loud as a sea-gull.”

If you spent any time in undergrad poetry class, you know you can’t talk about Dylan Thomas without talking about the sheer, untamable power of his language.  His was poetry with its sleeves rolled up, ready for a fight or a passionate fuck.

You know the hits.  Even if you think you don’t, you do.  “Do not go gentle into that good night,” was him…the definitive war cry against the dying of the light.  It’s a poem written for his dying father, but it’s a defiant roar for all of us.  He’s telling us that we should face the end not with a whimper, but with the full-throated rage of a life fiercely lived.  Old age, he tells us, should “burn and rave at the close of day.”  Goddamn right.

And there was the flip side of the coin: “Fern Hill.”  There, Thomas was raging…he was remembering childhood, when he was “young and easy under apple boughs.”   That poem’s final lines, realizing that time had him “dying” even as he “sang in my chains like the sea,” are a liver kick of heartbreaking truth.

Of course, the legend of Dylan Thomas is as much about the living as it is about the writing.  His life was a whirlwind tour of pubs, lecture halls, and bedrooms on both sides of the Atlantic.  He lived with the same ferocity with which he wrote, a trait that would ultimately lead to his final, tragic curtain call.

In November 1953, the tour ended at the Chelsea Hotel in New York City, that infamous sanctuary for artists and misfits.  After a long night at the White Horse Tavern, he returned to his room, and the world lost one of its most unique voices.  The story goes he downed eighteen (18) straight whiskies.  He raged, and then the light went out.

So today, on his birthday, let’s celebrate the whole man.  The genius who gave us words that soar and the flawed human who lived without a safety net.

N.P.: “223” – Rok Nardin, Frank William

October 25, 2026

We don’t need to possess everyone. We don’t have to. We have useful idiots who do more damage than we ever could. They carry out our agenda without ever knowing it. They think they’re doing good. They think they’re enlightened. But they’re just pawns. Tools. And when they’re no longer useful… we discard them.  ~ Lord Nefarious

N.P.: “Coexist With My Fist” – Hard Archive

Word of the Day: nudiustertian

Good day, dear reader, literary degenerates, and word perverts of various species.  And what a day it is…a cool fall day in the Creek, all cloudy and drizzly.  And only six days until Halloween, the New Years Day of the Gallaway Calendar.  I like it.

For absolutely no reason at all, I’ve decided today’s Word of the Day is a lexical artifact, dredged up from the Mariana Trench of the English language, found in the sedimentary layers of Latin, polished with the spit of linguistic masochists, and flung into the modern lexicon like a grenade of nonsense and confusion.  [That was quite an introduction…all apologies, dear reader…yrs. truly had a big breakfast, and a bigger lunch.  Never mind.]  Ladies and gentlemen, I give you nudiustertian –  adjective – pertaining to the day before yesterday.  Yes, a whole word for a concept we’ve clumsily handled in three.  And it’s so perfectly useless it’s beautiful.
Etymologically, it’s a smash-and-grab from Latin: nudius = “now is the day” and tertius = “third.”  So nudiustertian means “the third day from now,” which, in the twisted logic of time travel and English grammar, lands you squarely in the day before yesterday.  You can almost hear some toga-clad senator slurring it after too much wine, trying to remember which day he misplaced his chariot keys.  It’s the kind of word that makes even seasoned lexicographers reach for the desk whiskey.

So there I was, sitting in a booth at the Pink Iguana, where the air was thick with the ghosts of myriad bad decision’s – a miasma of stale cigarette smoke, cheap whiskey, and Glitter Bomb body spray.  My present companion – stage name: Tropicana, real name: Bethany – is straddling a barstool like it owes her child support, wearing nothing but glitter and the kind of confidence that makes Wall Street brokers cry in the shower.
I tell her, “You remember what happened nudiustertian?”
She blinks.  “Is that a sex position?”
“No, it’s a word.  It means the day before yesterday.”
She squinted at me. It was the same look she gave a guy who tried to pay for a lap dance with a coupon.  “Why not just say ‘the day before yesterday’?”
“Because language is a weapon, Bethany.  And sometimes you need a sniper rifle instead of a butter knife.”
She started at me, a long, unnerving silence stretching between us, punctuated only by the frantic clatter of my own self-satisfaction echoing in my skull.  I felt brilliant.  A poet.  A warrior of words bringing light to the darkened corners of her vocabulary.
Finally, a slow, dangerous smile spread across her face.
“You know,” she said, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper.  “There’s a word for people who use words like that.”
I leaned in, genuinely curious.  “Oh yeah?  What is it?”
She leaned closer, her lips almost touching my ear.
“Unfuckable,” she breathed.
Then she took the bottle I had just paid for, winked, and sashayed away, leaving me alone with the sudden, crushing weight of my own magnificent vocabulary. 

So there it is, dear reader…nudiustertian.  Use it if you want to sound like a time-traveling Victorian ghost with a thesaurus addiction.
Use it to confuse your friends, alienate your enemies, and seduce someone who thinks etymology is foreplay.
Use it because words are weapons, and this one’s a dagger dipped in irony.

N.P.: “Rivers Laughing” – promptgenix

October 24, 2025

Woke up this morning and I got myself a beer,
The future’s uncertain and the end is always near. 
~ James Douglas Morrison

I’m not afraid of death, and I’m not afraid of dying, but the idea of not existing is kind of a weird one that I have some trouble getting my mental arms around some nights.  The whole issue of mortality has been very much on my mind, especially the last several years when various things have tried to kill me and I’ve had to ‘rassle them into submission.  Each time, I’ve had the advantage of knowing that whatever I was dealing with at the time was simply not cool or interesting enough to be the actual Thing That Takes Me Out.  Cancer?  Nah.  Heart attack?  Hell no.  Gunfight with federales at the Tijuana/San Ysidro border?  Fuck yes.  Losing a fight with a rattlesnake?  I’ll take it.

But let’s talk about a real goddamn exit.  Not the slow fade into nursing-home tapioca, but a final act that achieves the level of myth or legend.  October 24, 1926, in Detroit, a city of steel and fury, where Houdini took his last bow.  And what a bow it was.  The man was burning up, a furnace of a fever scorching him from the inside out, his own appendix having staged a rather nasty and decidedly unmagical rebellion.  A lesser mortal – say, you or I – would be curled up, mewling pitifully for a nurse.  Not Uncle Harry.

Houdini, the ur-escapologist, the man who treated chains and straitjackets like they were merely inconvenient suggestions, dragged his fever-racked carcass onto the stage of the Garrick Theatre because the show must go on, goddammit.  The contract was signed.  The audience was there.  And Harry Houdini, a man whose entire existence was a fuck you to limitations, wasn’t about to be undone by something as pedestrian as a ruptured internal organ.  He stumbled, he sweated, he nearly collapsed, but he finished the show.  A week later, the curtain came down for good.  Peritonitis.  A messy, biological trap even he couldn’t pick the lock on.

But the death seems almost incidental.  A footnote.  The legend is what matters.  Much more than just a magician, Houdini was a walking, breathing, fist-swinging piece of American folklore.  You can draw a straight, jagged line from Houdini’s on-stage battles to the very heart of certain narrative traditions.  He engaged in a public, ink-soaked war with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the world’s most logical mind, over the fuzzy, ectoplasmic nonsense of Spiritualism.  Houdini, the ultimate illusionist, dedicated his life to exposing the fraudulent tricks of others, a crusade that was equal parts public service and some pretty amazing, high-minded flexing.  He even put his money where his mouth was and wrote, peeling back the curtain with a surprising authorial flair.  His book, The Unmasking of Robert-Houdin, is a meticulously constructed argument, a writerly vivisection of the very art form he perfected.

Then you have the fictional echoes, with his shadow falling across the pages of guys like E.L. Doctorow.  In Ragtime, Houdini is a symbol of human defiance against the locked doors of class, race, and fate.

That final, agonizing performance in Detroit was the apotheosis of it all.  Battered, poisoned from within, but utterly unbowed.  He took the stage knowing, I’m sure, on some primal level, that this was the end of the road.  He faced the abyss not with a whimper, but with a card trick.  And that is rather badass.  He didn’t just escape handcuffs and water torture chambers.  On that last night, he made a damn good attempt at escaping mortality itself, turning his own death into the one story that, nearly a century late, still refuses to be buried.

N.P.: “Circle of Samhain” – Slaev

Word of the Day: perendinate

It’s confession time, dear reader: I have had, for quite some time, a likely pathological problem with procrastination.  It’s always been an issue, but lately, it’s become more of a lifestyle.  This last year, I have begun working in procrastination the way the Inuit work in scrimshaw.  I have seemingly, inadvertently, elevated it to an art form.  A philosophy.  Someone trusted recommended seeing a hypnotherapist for help dealing with it…and this idea is being seriously considered.

This was all very much on my mind when I picked today’s Word of the Day: perendinate.  This verb means “to put off until the day after tomorrow.”  Not tomorrow.  Not later.  The day after tomorrow.  The procrastinator’s procrastination.  The Olympic-level delay.  The art of kicking the can so goddamn far down the road it ends up in a different zip code.

From the Latin perendinare, rooted in perendie meaning “the day after tomorrow.”  It’s what the Romans did when they didn’t want to deal with Ceasar’s wine hangover or Brutus’s existential dread.  They perendinated.  Like superstars.

So I wake up in a Motel 6 in San Ysidro with a mouth that tastes like a bum’s nutsack and a head full of regret, tequila, and what I hope was consensual karaoke.  There’s a note duct-taped to my chest that says, “You promised to fix the bidet.  It’s still screaming.”  No signature.  Just a drawing of a crying avocado.
I stumble into the bathroom, which smells like a crime scene and a botanical garden had a baby and left it to rot in a bus-station urinal.  The bidet is indeed screaming.  Not metaphorically.  It’s emitting a high-pitched whine like a banshee trapped in a plumbing seminar.  It’s awful.  I consider fixing it.  I really do.  But then I remember I have a half-written blog post about the sociosexual implications of furries at political protests due yesterday, and what I’m guessing is half-an-order of carne asada in my boot. 

So I do what any self-respecting American Man of Letters would do: I perendinate.  I light a cigarette with a scented candle, pour myself a shot of the expired cough syrup I keep on hand for Times Like These, and whisper sweet nothings to the iguana in the sink.  His name is Carlos.  He’s in the country both illegally and involuntarily.  He’s wearing my sunglasses.  He’s dead, but he seems to be judging me. 

N.P.: “Touché” – Tigerblood, Jewel