On This Day in Doom

Let’s be honest, dear reader: history is a malfunctioning carnival ride operated by a meth-addled gibbon, and December 22 stands as a particularly glitchy gear in the machine.  It’s a day that grabs you by the lapels, shakes the loose change out of your pockets, and whispers, “Hey kid, wanna see something really fucked up?”
Because on this specific calendar square – separated by roughly 130 years and several thousand miles of icy/suburban wasteland – we have two distinct flavors of nightmare fuel.  One involves the near-death of literature’s gloomiest heavyweight, and the other involves a clown who wasn’t joking.
Strap in.  The brakes were cut miles ago.

The Great Siberian Psych-Out (1849)
First up, we have Fyodor Dostoevsky, the guy who made existential dread fashionable before French people ruined it with cigarettes and turtlenecks.
Imagine this: you’re 28, a literary upstart with a naïve taste for utopian socialism who’s been arrested for reading banned books and talking too much about justice.  The Tsar doesn’t like that.  So you’re sentenced to death, natch.
It is cold.  Not “put on a sweater” cold, but “your soul is freezing into a jagged little icicle” cold.  You’re dragged out to Semyonov Square.  You and your Petrashevsky Circle buddies are lined up.  You are read your death sentences.  You are given the white shirts of the condemned, which is a fashion statement no one wants to make.  You’re blindfolded.  You hear the click of rifles being raised.  The drums roll.  The priest does his mumbling bit with the cross.  You feel the cold breath of eternity on your neck.  You stand there, probably thinking, “Well, this is going to severely impact my ability to write 800-page novels about guilt.”  This is it.  The Big Sleep.  The dirt nap.  And then a messenger gallops in – presumably in slow motion, possibly while an eagle screeches overhead – waving a piece of paper.  “Psych!” screams the Tsar (paraphrasing).  “Just kidding!  You aren’t dying today!  You’re going to Siberia for four years of hard labor.  Four years of frostbite, dysentery, and theological whiplash.  Enjoy!”
It was a mock execution.  A prank.  A piece of psychological theater designed to break his sprit so thoroughly that he’d be sweeping up the shards of his own psyche for decades.  And it worked, sort of.  He walked away from the firing squad with a rewired brain.  Dostoevsky went to the klink, got epileptic, found Jesus, and came back to write Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov and other breakup letters to God.
Essentially, the Tsar’s twisted sense of humor gave us the entire canon of Russian existentialism.  If the command to “Fire!” had been given three seconds earlier, your college lit syllabus would look drastically different, and we’d have fewer metaphors for suffering.  The Tsar played Russian roulette with a writer’s soul and lost.

The Clown in the Crawl Space (1978)
Fast forward to 1978.  We trade the frozen wasteland of Russia for the frozen wasteland of Des Plaines, Illinois.  Different continent.  Different kind of horror.
Enter John Wayne Gacy.  A contractor.  A precinct captain for the Democrats.  A guy who dressed up as “Pogo the Clown” to entertain sick kids, which in retrospect is the darkest irony in the history of polyester costumes.
By December 22, the cops had been buzzing around Gacy like flies on roadkill.  He’d been playing this cat-and-mouse game, strutting around with an arrogance that suggested he thought he was smarter than the collective moral universe.  He wasn’t.  He was just a contractor with a really bad smell coming from his heating ducts.
On this day, the dam broke.  Gacy, likely realizing the jig was up or perhaps getting tired of the charade, started talking.  And once he started, he didn’t stop.  He admitted to killing 33 young men and boys.  He drew a map.  He pointed to the crawl space beneath his house – a ranch-style suburban home that looked exactly like every other ranch-style suburban home – and essentially said, “Yeah, they’re down there.”
It’s hard to process the logistical horror of it.  Twenty-nine bodies buried under the floorboards while he ate dinner and watched TV about them.  It’s the ultimate suburban gothic nightmare: the monster isn’t in the closet; the monster is the guy checking your permits, and he’s literally built a life on top of his victims.

N.P.: “Scarecrow” – Meg Lee Chin

Sobriety, dear reader, has been a trip.  Not the fun, kaleidoscopic kind where you’re riding a wave of serotonin and questionable decisions, but the kind where your brain decided to chuck a I.E.D into your circadian rhythm just for the fuck of it.  In the early days, I became what I can only describe as “insomniatic.”  [Yes, I know it wasn’t (previous to today) a recognized English word, but I found the English language to be lacking in this specific instance, so I created this neologism.  You’re welcome.]  Sixty-two hours.  That’s how long I was awake.  Sixty-two hours of raw, unfiltered consciousness.   It was like being trapped in a David Lynch film, minus the jazz and creepy dwarves.  Fascinating, sure, but also the kind of fascinating that has you questioning the nature of reality itself.

Then came the dreams.  Those annoyances had been gone for decades, and they weren’t missed.  But they’ve come back now, in 4K resolution, Dolby surround sound, and full fucking Technicolor.  And they sucked.  Not in a “wake-up screaming” kind of way – I don’t do nightmares, thank you very much – but in a “why is my subconscious so goddamn annoying?” kind of way.  They were petty, irritating little vignettes that stuck to my brain like gum on a hot sidewalk.  But last night?  Last night, my dreams finally got their act together.  They started with a delightful little scene of vengeance – me, absolutely eviscerating a certain pitiful bitch who had the stupid audacity to approach me in a restaurant.  It was glorious.  Then, a hard cut to something far more wholesome: a dream about the release of my next book, the one I’m about to hurl into the publishing void.  No spoilers, of course, but let’s just say I woke up feeling like a goddamn superhero.

That feeling didn’t last.  Because, as is the way of the world, reality came knocking with its usual bag of horrors.  The news of the antisemitic terrorist attack in Australia hit like a liver kick.  Utterly vile.  My hat’s off to the badass who wrestled one of the attacker’s guns away – and act of courage that deserves more than a passing mention.  Would that he had finished the job, though.  My thoughts are with the victims, their families, and my Jewish friends around the world on this first day of Hanukkah.  It’s a bitter reminder that the world is still full of monsters, and not the fun, fictional kind.

On a brighter note, let’s talk about Shirley Jackson.  Today marks the birth of one of the most ferocious minds to ever put pen to paper.  If you didn’t read The Lottery in school, stop what you’re doing and fix that.  It’s a short story that will slap you across the face and leave you questioning everything you thought you knew about human nature.  And then there’s The Haunting of Hill House, a gothic masterpiece that opens with one of the most chilling paragraphs in all of literature:

No living organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.  Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more.  Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone. 

Chills. Every damn time.  That opening is a masterclass in atmosphere, a slow, deliberate tightening of the noose before you even realize it’s around your neck.  Jackson dissected the human condition with the precision of a surgeon and the malice of a cat toying with its prey.  Suburban conformity, psychological terror, the uncanny – she turned these into her playground, and the results were nothing short of devastating.  She was, in every sense of the word, a literary badass.

I aspire to write something even a fraction as haunting, as sharp, as utterly unforgettable as her opening paragraph to Hill House.  Until then, I’ll keep hammering away at these keys, dreaming in 4K, and occasionally indulging in a little dream-world vengeance.

Here’s to Shirley Jackson, to the courage of those who stand against Islamic-extremist hate, and to the strange, maddening, beautiful journey of sobriety.  Stay weird, stay wild, and for the love of all things holy, stay awake for less than 62 hours at a time.

Happy Sunday, Merry Christmas, and Happy Hanukkah.

N.P.: “I Stay Away” – Alice In Chains

Okay, confession time, dear reader: if you’re reading this on December 13th, congratulations – you’re three days late to the party, just like me (and frankly, just like Faulkner would’ve preferred).  But hey, what’s a Nobel speech anniversary without a little tardiness and existential disarray?  Time is a flat circle, calendars are a social construct, and whiskey tastes the same on any day ending in Y.
So, let’s rewind to December 10th, 1949, and picture it: in the icy, buttoned-up heart of Stockholm, a gaggle of Nordic royalty and tuxedoed stiff-shirts are waiting.  Waiting for a small, mustachioed man from the humid, gothic morass of Mississippi to stumble up to a podium, likely completely shit-housed, and accept the shiniest of all literary hood ornaments: the Nobel Prize.  The man is William Faulkner, author of The Sound and the Fury and cartographer of the broken human soul, and he very nearly told them to all to shove it.
This whole affair, this trans-Atlantic flight into the glacial maw of European high culture, was, for Faulkner, the type of bullshitty literary root canal he had zero intention of undergoing.  The man hated speeches.  Hated them with a passion usually reserved for tax collectors and people who dog-ear pages.  His initial, and let’s be honest, deeply admirable plan was to dispatch a two-sentence telegram.  Something along the lines of, “Fuck off.  I’m busy.” and then get back to the serious business of drinking whiskey and wrestling sentences into submission.
But pressure, for some  people, can be a hell of a thing.  Family, friends, maybe the ghost of Conrad himself, they all conspired.  So Bill gets on the goddamn plane, a tweed-clad ghost haunting the fuselage, probably already marinating his liver for the ordeal ahead.  He arrives in Stockholm, a place as alien to his Rowan Oak porch as a Marian landscape, and proceeds to do what any sane man would do when faced with a week of stilted small talk and ceremonial pomp: he gets absolutely, unequivocally hammered.
And then comes the moment.  The culmination of a year-long delay and a lifetime of torturing typewriters.  He’s shuffled to the dais, looking less like a literary titan and more like a man searching for the nearest exit and a stiff drink.  The world holds its breath, expecting a mumbled thank you, a polite nod, and a quick escape.
What they get instead is five minutes of pure, uncut, lightning-in-a-bottle prophecy.  This titan of tragedy, this man who writes novels so dense with despair you could drown in them, stands up there, swaying, and delivers the single most potent dose of secular scripture in modern history.  He talks about the atom bomb, the fear, the universal dread hanging over everyone like a shroud.  Here’s the core:
“I feel that this award is not made to me as a man, but to my work…Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it.  There are no longer problems of the spirit.  There is only the question: When will I be blown up?  Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart…
I decline to accept the end of man…I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail.  He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.”
It’s a speech so powerful, so fundamentally at odds with the bleakness of his own work, that it feels like a cosmic joke and a profound truth all at once.  Faulkner, in that moment, becomes the reluctant prophet of postwar literature.  He tells the world that the writer’s duty is to remind humanity of its courage, its honor, its hope, and its capacity for compassion.  He says this while still metabolizing a truly heroic amount of whiskey.
He drops the mic, pockets the prize money, fucks off back to Mississippi , and goes right back to writing labyrinthine masterpieces that most of America wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole.  Back to the porch and the typewriter and the dogs and the ghosts.
He keeps writing.
Books that no one buys.
Books that confuse people.
Books that bleed.
So today, we raise a glass (cheap bourbon preferred, neat, no ice) to the man who took the Nobel, told the world to get its shit together, and then went back to the swamp to keep doing the work.
He didn’t endure.
He prevailed.
And he did it broke, drunk, and brilliant.

N.P.: “Bellum Terrae Mediae” – Dogukan Ozturk

Today has been ridiculous, dear reader.  Started with coffee and a McRib.  Things only went downhill from there.  Still managed to work on the book a bit.  I have to go fight a bunch of guys in a bit (training, of course), but after that, I’ll be glad to see this day in the rearview mirror.

But before I can put this day to bed, we have a bit of D.P.S. business.  For you see, dear reader, on this day in 1865, Mark Twain – that literary, whiskey-soaked middle finger to Victorian decorum – published “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” in the New York Saturday Press.  It was a story about a frog.  A frog that jumps.  Or doesn’t.  Depending on whether someone has secretly filled it with buckshot.  And it is, in every sense that matters, the moment American literature stopped pretending to be British and started chain-smoking behind the barn.

The plot, such that it is, is a barroom anecdote nested inside a shaggy-dog story wrapped in some thick dialect.  A man named Smiley, who bets on everything from horse races to the lifespan of parsons, trains a frog named Dan’l Webster to jump farther than any other frog in Calaveras County (which county is about 70 miles from where yrs. truly is presently parked behind the Dissolute Desk).  Enter the stranger, the con, the existential cheap-shot: Dan’l gets sabotaged, stuffed with lead, and loses the bet.  Smiley is swindled.  The frog is betrayed.  The reader is left somewhere between hysterical laughter and a creeping suspicion that the whole damn country runs on this kind of absurdity.

This story is a blueprint for the American psyche: the pathological gambler, the weaponized anecdote, the amphibian as metaphor for hope and humiliation.  Twain’s genius here isn’t just the humor – it’s the architecture of the joke, the way he builds a cathedral out of frontier horseshit and then sets fire to it with a single punchline.  This was a bit of a tectonic shift: our literature stopped being about noble suffering and starts being about the guy who loses his ass because someone cheated at frog-jumping.

This was Twain’s breakout.  The moment the literary establishment looked up from its tea and said, “Wait, what the hell was that?”  It was the sound of the West elbowing its way into the stodgy parlor, with muddy boots, crooked sneer, frog in hand.

So raise a glass to Dan’l Webster, the frog who couldn’t jump because he was full of lead.  He is us.  He is America.  And Twain the guy in the corner, watching it all, scribbling furiously, and laughing like hell because he knows the joke is always on us.

N.P.: “Ain’t No Man Alive Can Handle Me” – Dumpster Grooves, Bertha Mae Lightning

Connectivity.
The internet’s an asshole.
Cloud cover too thick?

Hot damn, dear reader…there is light at the end of this long, circuitous, Byzantine, labyrinthine, and ludicrous writing process for the goddamn book.  I’ll officially begin shopping it around for a deal in early ’26.  Because 20 years between books is totally normal, right?  My hopes are high, but I’m trying to manage my expectations.  As always, I’ll be looking for Fuck You money for this thing, but what I’m really looking forward to, believe it or not, is finally being able just to talk about it.  Having to maintain this Masonic air of secrecy around the whole project for all these years hasn’t necessarily been difficult, but it has been a pain in the ass.

Speaking of pains in the ass, today’s date – November 16th – appears to be a sort of nodal point in the chaotic, often self-immolating timeline of literary insurrection.  Five seismic events, five big fuck-yous to the status quo, five reasons to believe that writing – real writing – is still the most dangerous thing you can do with your clothes on.

Exhibit A: We jump back to 1860, where a certain Fyodor Dostoevsky, fresh off a four-year sabbatical in the Czar’s least hospitable Siberian resorts and a mock execution…does my dear young reader even know what that is?  Imagine this: you’re blindfolded, standing in front of a firing squad, heart jackhammering like a meth-addicted woodpecker, and just as the rifles rise – a reprieve.  Not mercy, but bureaucratic sadism.  That’s the crucible Dostoevsky crawled out of before he wrote The House of the Dead, serialized today in 1860 in Vremya magazine.  Did you ever see HBO’s Oz?  Well, this makes that look like Sesame Street.  Russia banned it for “undermining authority,” which is apparatchik-speak for “telling a truth with a scalpel.”

Fast forward to Copenhagen, 1885.  This guy August Strindberg stages Miss Julie.  Class warfare, sexual humiliation, psychological evisceration – all in a goddamn kitchen.  Strindberg directed it himself, then tore ass out of Sweden when he knew the pitchforks were coming.  Critics called it “obscene,” which is rich coming from a country that invented IKEA.  The Swedes banned it until 1906.  But the damage was done: realism was dead, and theater would never be safe again.

Then 1938.  The world is going dark, goose-stepping toward oblivion.  Bertolt Brecht was holed up in exile in Denmark, fleeing the Gestapo with the ink still wet on his passport.  Fear and Misery of the Third Reich dropped today in 1938 – 24 scenes of quotidian Nazi terror disguised as cabaret.  It was agitprop performed in basements.  The Nazis, in a stunning lack of self-awareness, burned the book in Berlin, providing the most ringing endorsement a writer could ever hope for.

Jump to 1952.  Ernest Hemingway, holed up in Cuba and dodging the FBI between mojitos, publishes The Old Man and the Sea in a single issue of Life magazine.  It was 72 pages of ruthlessly stripped-down, sunburned prose.  He took a simple goddamn fishing trip and hammered it into a crucifixion myth.  Five million copies sold in 48 hours.  It was a cultural event, a literary knockout that won Papa the Pulitzer and, eventually, the Nobel.  The man mailed the manuscript from a bar, probably bleeding from a marlin gaff and muttering about grace under pressure.  Literature’s heavyweight champ, still swinging.

And finally, the cherry on this chaotic sundae: 1967.  Our favorite Kentucky-born degenerate, Hunter S. Thompson publishes Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga.  HST embedded with the Angels for a year, rode with them, drank with them,  until the inevitable, teeth-shattering climax where they stomped him into the dirt.    He lived the story, then wrote it while still bleeding, blurring the line between observer and participant until it ceased to exist.  The book got banned for “glorifying violence,” which, like all the others on this list, meant it was simply too honest for the delicate sensibilities of the people in charge.

So here’s to November 16 – a date that reads like a rap sheet for the literary criminally insane.  These were saboteurs, prophets, and beautifully deranged motherfuckers who made art dangerous again.  If you’re not pissing someone off, you’re probably just typing.

Stay tuned.  The book’s coming.  And when it drops, I want it to be quite a fucking thing.
Light your cigarettes.  Stockpile ammo.  The storm’s coming.

N.P.: “Listen To My Voice” – Gary Numan

Today is a great day, dear reader.  Not in the saccharine, Instagrammable, “live laugh love” horseshitty sense of the phrase, but in a way a thunderclap is great, or a freight train derailing into a fireworks factory is great – loud, messy, and absolutely unignorable.  Today is a great day because the sky over Anhedonia County has finally cracked open like a long-suffering ulcer, hemorrhaging a steady, blessed rain onto the parched bones of The Creek.  The gutters are gurgling like drunks in a confession booth, the air smells like wet asphalt and ozone, and the squirrels are losing their tiny minds.  It’s glorious.

Second, and this is not a drill, today is November 13th, the birthday of Robert Louis Stevenson – patron saint of duality, chronicler of pirates, and the man who taught us that every respectable gentleman has a snarling, libidinal monster just beneath the waistcoat.  Raise a glass of laudanum-laced absinthe in his honor, or at least mutter a curse at the mirror and see who blinks first.

But the third reason is the real meat of the matter, both literal and metaphysical.  The McRib is back.  Yes.  That unholy slab of reconstituted pork slurry, shaped like a rack of ribs by someone who’s only ever seen ribs in a dream, slathered in a sauce so sweet it could double as embalming fluid.  It’s back.  And I, for one, have already eaten two.  Possibly three.  I blacked out somewhere between the second and the third and woke up with barbecue sauce on my collar and a vague sense of spiritual renewal.

There’s something about the McRib’s seasonal resurrection that feels like a pagan rite – like Persephone clawing her way out of the underworld, except she’s made of pork and corn syrup and corporate nostalgia.  It’s a culinary Brigadoon, a meat mirage that appears just long enough to remind us that joy is fleeting, and then vanishes again into the marketing ether.  You don’t eat a McRib because it’s good.  You eat it because it’s back.  You eat it because you’re alive, dammit, and because the rain is falling, and because Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote about a man who turned into a beast and you, too, feel the beast stirring when you smell that tangy, smoky perfume wafting from the Golden Arches.

So yes, today is a great day.  The sky is weeping, the dead are remembered, and the McRib is back.  It that’s not enough to make you howl at the clouds and dance barefoot in the mud, then brother, I don’t know what the hell you’re doing here.

Now go forth.  Eat recklessly.  Write dangerously.  And if you see me in The Creek, sauce-stained and grinning like a pervert, just nod and keep walking.  Some days are too good to explain.

N.P.: “Simple Life” – Elton John