hegemony (pronounced huh-JEM-uh-nee)
Noun
Definition: Leadership or dominance, especially by one country or social group over others. It’s the whole shebang, the top dog, the undisputed alpha at the geopolitical dog park, King Shit, The Man.  A form of leadership or dominance—usually political, cultural, or ideological—exerted by one entity over others. Not quite empire, not quite dictatorship, but the gravitational center that keeps the rest of the cosmic debris from smashing into each other at escape velocity.

The word slithers in from the ancient Greek hēgemonia, that old noun built on the verb hēgeisthai – to lead, to go first, to boss the line without quite having to shout about it.  Leadership that doesn’t need a megaphone because the weight of the thing just is, the way a big river doesn’t ask permission to carve the valley.  By the 16th century it had hopped languages and started meaning something like preponderance, dominance, the quiet (and not-so-quiet) way one player runs the board while everyone else pretends they’re still in the game.  Not raw conquest – not chains and whips every hour – but the kind of sway where the rules feel natural, the menu is already printed, and dissent starts to sound like bad manners or madness.

Look, let’s just lay the cards out on the felt, shall we?  You’ve got this sprawling, hyper-caffeinated beast called America – a nation stitched together from every conceivable scrap of humanity, running on a high-octant mix of ambition and refined sugar.  And then you have this other, smaller, altogether more ball-less and…fragrant subset of Americans whose entire waking life appears to be a meticulously curated performance of despising the very ground that keeps their Birkenstocks from sinking into the molten core of the earth. 

I am, of course, talking about the ones who spend their days hunched over glowing rectangles, fueled by fair-trade coffee and a sense of cosmic injustice, firing off screeds against the Great Satan U.S.A.  They’re the professional dissenters, the ones whose faces contort in agony if you suggest maybe, just maybe, the world needs a heavyweight in the ring to keep the whole thing from devolving into a no-holds barred cage match.  Their anti-Americanism is so reflexive, so deeply ingrained, it feels less like a political stance and more like a congenital condition.  It’s as if they believe their performative self-loathing will somehow absolve them of the sin of being born into the most powerful nation history has ever coughed up.  And it’s really embarrassing. 

These are the same folks who’d likely have decried Manifest Destiny not for its brutal realities but for its sheer lack of an ironic, self-aware hashtag.  They wring their hands and tear their hemp garments over the idea of American hegemony, apparently preferring a global free-for-all where any thug with a flag and a few thousand rifles can carve out a fiefdom built on bones and fear.  What, precisely, is the alternative they’re whiteboarding in their co-op meetings?  A world run by committee?  A planet where Russia, China, and a handful of rogue states get to hash things out over a game of Risk, with actual cities as the playing pieces?  It’s a stunningly naïve, almost childlike fantasy – the political equivalent of believing that if you just wish hard enough, the monsters under the bed will vanish.  They can’t stomach the imperfect, messy, and often brutal reality that someone has to be the biggest, baddest motherfucker in the valley.  They’d rather burn the whole valley down than admit it. 

What the hippies and fat liberal white women fail to understand is that the necessity of American hegemony isn’t some chest-thumping patriotic hymn; it’s colder arithmetic.  Without that preponderance – without the U.S. holding the sea lanes open, underwriting the global trading system, deterring the kind of multipolar pile-on that turns every border into a shooting gallery, and yes, occasionally reminding various aspiring regional powers that there are still adults in the room – the world doesn’t become some gentle multi-polar salon of equals.  It becomes the 1930s on meth: spheres of influence arm-wrestling with nukes, trade routes choked, supply chains collapsing into nationalist hoarding, proxy wars metastasizing because no one has the sheer testicular weight to say enough. 

I think the anti-Americans, those domestic dissenters who can’t stomach the idea, who gag at the mere mention that the republic they live in happens to be the one whose shadow falls the longest, are simply incapable of comprehending a realistic worldview.  So they feel compelled to spend their days in a kind of perpetual, high-decibel pantomime of resistance, “fighting” the hegemony as though it were a personal insult delivered by a smug uncle at Thanksgiving.  They march, they tweet, they riot, they convene panels titled “Decolonizing the American Gaze” or whatever, they burn energy like it’s infinite and cheap, mostly on symbolic gestures that change exactly nothing except the blood pressure of the participants.  It’s exhausting just to watch: the endless prosecutorial zeal, the certainty that every McDonald’s or Marvel movie is a cultural war crime, the silly conviction that if only the United States would shrink back into its pre-1898 borders and mind its own damn business, that the rest of humanity would spontaneously break into Kumbaya and equitable carbon credits.

It’s weird.  The confusion I feel, the real gut-churning bewilderment, is why so many of these Americans – born into the most materially abundant, personally free society to ever exist – seem hell-bent on treating their own country’s dominance as an original sin that must be ritually scourged.  They just wasted four years in this posture of anguished refusal, literally cheering on American retreat.  Meanwhile the world keeps turning, and the vacuum left by American retreat doesn’t fill with justice or equity; it fills with whoever shows up with the biggest battalions and the least scruple. 

So yes, hegemony.  Sexy word, older than sin, and necessary in the way gravity is necessary.  You can hate the pull all you want; it still keeps you from floating off into the void.  The ones who waste their lives trying to cut the cord are left clutching at air, shouting at clouds, while the rest of us keep shouldering the weight because the alternative is worse, and we know it.

N.P.: “It’s A Sin” – Ghost

Didn’t get a lot of sleep last night, dear reader, through no fault of my own, of course.  I’m blaming The Crud.  If that’s what it is, this would the second time I’ve caught The Crud in 4-5 weeks, which is extremely rare for me.  It started with a sneeze sometime yesterday afternoon, which sneeze made my throat feeling a bit scratchy, which scratchiness made me pause and say, “Oh hell.  I hope it’s not The Crud.”  Alas, I’m afraid it was.
Dammit.
So here I am, on a couple choppy hours of sleep, in the studio, behind the Dissolute Desk, with a case of The Crud, ears popping, nodding off…better deal with the Word of the Day sooner rather than later…no idea what things will be like in a couple of hours.  So here we go.

Today’s word is a personal favorite, a little gem I discovered in the dank, forgotten corners of the dictionary during my misspent youth.  It’s a word that lets you dance right up to the line of decorum, give it a little wink, and then shit on its chest.  As a kid, this was one of my favorites because it sounded like a cuss word without actually being one.  You could yell “crapulous” across the playground and get the satisfaction of scandalizing your peers without the detention slip.  It was linguistic contraband, a loophole in the moral code, a way to fee dangerous while staying technically innocent.

Pronounced /’kræp.jə.ləs/ (KRAP-yuh-luhs), it means

1. Given to or characterized by gross excess in drinking or eating.
2. Suffering from such excess; hungover, debilitated, sick from overindulgence.

It’s the adjective form of “holy shit I’m dying because I tried to fight God and God won with a bottle of mezcal and a wheel of brie.”
Straight from the Latin pipeline: from crápula “drunken headache” (the Romans knew what was up), itself borrowed from Greek kraipálē “drunkenness or its consequence.”  First English sighting around 1530, back when people thought leeches were healthcare.  It’s been lurking in the dictionary ever since, waiting for the precise moment your soul leaves your body at 15:00 after a three-day bender.

My friend – let’s call him Kevin – agreed to a blind date.  The chosen venue, in a spectacular failure of romantic foresight, was “The Admiral’s All-You-Can-Conquer Seafood Trough.”  Yeah. 

His date, a woman named Brenda, viewed the buffet not as a meal, but as a personal challenge.  She was a whirlwind of gastronomic destruction.  A human backhoe clearing a path through snow crab legs, a Vesuvius of fried shrimp, a singularity of clam chowder.  Kevin, bless his accommodating heart, tried to keep pace.  He matched her plate for plate, a valiant by doomed effort to forge a connection across a growing mountain  of discarded shells and butter-slicked ramekins. 

Hours passed.  The sun set.  The tides of cocktail sauce receded.  Brenda, her face gleaming with a fine sheen of grease, finally pushed back her chair.  She had conquered.  She had one.  She looked at Kevin, whose face had taken on a pale, greenish hue, and asked if he wanted to go dancing. 

Kevin could only clutch his stomach, a vessel pushed far beyond its structural limits.  He felt a profound and deeply personal sickness blooming in his core, a testament to the sheer volume of aquatic life he had consumed.  He opened his mouth, but all that emerged was a weak, wheezing groan, the sound of a man utterly defeated by batter-fried ambition.  He was, in that moment, the living, breathing, and profoundly crapulous embodiment of a terrible idea.

He did not go dancing. 

It doesn’t just say you’re hungover.  It says you partied so catastrophically that your liver filed a restraining order and your dignity is still passed out in a Tijuana alley wearing someone else’s shoes.
Use it today.  Walk into the office, look your boss dead in the eye, and sigh, “I’m feeling profoundly crapulous.”  Watch his face as he tried to decide whether you just swore at him in Old Church Slavonic.
Crapulous.
Say it.  Love it.  Become it.
Now I’m going to take Nyquil, lie on the floor, and listen to the rain.

N.P.: “Overture 1812 – Finale – Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky” – ERock

Alright, dear reader and other degenerate lexical fetishists…today we’re going to talk about a word that I feel has been unjustly banished to the dusty, moth-eaten corners of Regency romance novels, when in reality it belongs in the screaming, neon-soaked lexicon of the modern apocalypse.  It is a term so theatrically damning it practically staggers into the room wearing a tattered velvet cape and announces itself with a thunderclap.
The word: blackguard.
Because consonants are merely suggestions to the British aristocracy, much like sobriety is to me on a Tuesday, it is pronounced BLAG-ard (with the emphasis on the first syllable, like you’re spitting it at someone who just stole your last cigarette).  This word is a rusty switchblade of an insult – sharp, low, and perfect for cutting a man down to size without ever raising your voice above a growl.
A blackguard is a scoundrel of the highest (or lowest, depending on your altitude) order.  A blackguard is not merely a scoundrel or garden-variety asshole who steals your parking spot at Trader Joe’s while making eye contact.  Nope.  This is a full-tilt moral delinquent, a scurrilous, debased rogue who skulks through the cultural underbrush, a swaggering miscreant  whose very existence is an affront to civility, whose ethical compass has not only broken but is now being used as a cocktail stirrer in some dimly lit dive where shame goes to die.  A villain with panache.  A morally bankrupt reprobate who would sell his own grandmother for a bottle of bathtub gin and then charm her into thanking him for the opportunity.  In short, the absolute scum of the earth, and I say that with genuine admiration.
The word itself is the lexical embodiment of nihilistic charlatan who revels in transgression, a linguistic barb that slices through pretention and exposes the raw, unapologetic marrow of depravity.  It’s etymology fuses “black” (from Old English blæc, denoting darkness or moral stain) with “guard” (from Old French garde, a servant or attendant). These came together back in the 1500s – a time when hygiene was a rumor and everyone was drunk on lead poisoning.  The term originally referred to the “black guard,” the lowest servants in a royal household who handled the pots, pans, and coal.  They were covered in soot, smelled like medieval despair, and were generally considered the absolute scum of the palace hierarchy.  By the 18th century, the term had slid downhill like a drunk on ice, coming to mean any low, contemptable rascal, a throughgoing villain with no breeding, no honor, and almost certainly rank halitosis.  It’s a linguistic promotion, really.

Dream #803
I’m at a roadside diner somewhere between civilization and whatever unincorporated purgatory exists just past the last gas station.  The kind of place where the coffee tastes like it’s been filtered through a teenager’s gym sock and the waitress calls everyone “hon” with the same tone she’d use to warn you about a rattlesnake under your chair.
I’m there because my GPS had a nervous breakdown and decided I needed “an adventure,” which I’m learning is algorithmic code for I’m sick of working for you.  I order pancakes.  They arrive with the texture of damp cardboard and the emotional weight of a bad breakup.
Enter the man.  Not a man – the man.  The kind of guy who looks like he’s been living on beef jerky and stolen cigarettes. He slides into the booth across from me uninvited, smelling faintly of gasoline and fried chicken.  Without breaking eye contact, he reaches over, spears one of my pancakes with his fork, and says, “You weren’t gonna finish that.”
I inform him, with the calm clarity of someone who has killed for far less, that I was going to finish that, actually, and also that he should consider relocating his entire existence to a distant and inhospitable region of the country.
He grins.  A grin that suggests he’s been thrown out of better diners than this.  A grin that suggests he has a favorite mugshot.
And that’s when the waitress – God bless her nicotine-cured soul – leans over and says, “Don’t mind him, hon…he’s just the local blackguard.”
The man bows, as if this is the highest praise he’s ever received.
I leave a twenty on the table, not because the pancakes were worth it, but because the universe clearly needed me to pay a toll for witnessing whatever the hell that was. 

So the next time some smug motherfucker tries to play you for a fool, fix him with a cold stare and mutter, just loud enough for him to hear:  “You malignant blackguard.”  Then walk away.  Let the word do its work.  It’s been festering in the language for four hundred years – trust me, it knows how to wound.
Now go forth, my contentious reader, and wield it like the weapon it is.

N.P.: “Back On Earth” – Michaela de la Cour

Here I am again, sinister reader, entombed in the perpetual, soupy miasma that my humble hamlet of Fecal Creek. CA, has apparently decided to adopt as its permanent personality.  You see, this town, indeed the entirety of Anhedonia County, has been swallowed whole by fog for at least three weeks now, fog so thick you could spread it on toast and call it despair.  Nights are a wet, milky blindness where streetlamps die at twenty paces and every dog refuses to bark because even they know something is listening.   Days are just a brief negotiation with a sun that is now more a rumor than a fact.  Everything drips.  It’s the kind of weather that seeps into your bones, a damp that clings not just to your clothes but to your spirit.  And what does a self-respecting, newly and brutally sober, quasi-hermetic literary type do when faced with such an atmospheric siege?  One leans in, naturally, toward the only honest literature for weather like this.  Because I’m nothing if not a masochist for mood, my reading has become a direct reflection of the meteorological morass outside.  It started, as it must, with Poe, because of course Poe; the man who knew how to weaponize atmosphere understood that the real horror is when the architecture itself wants you dead.  His tales of premature burial and sentient abysses read less like fiction and more like a local weather report.  From there, it was almost a predestined slide back into the embrace of Stoker’s Dracula, because nothing says “cozy” like aristocratic necrophilia in a castle that smells like a crypt’s taint (and because fog and vampiric dread are basically peanut butter and jelly).  Carpathian menace felt perfectly at home here, his vaporous transformations mirroring the air I was breathing.
Now, I find myself deep in H.P. Lovecraft’s The Shunned House, a choice so fitting it borders on cosmic satire.  The story’s fungal horrors and subterranean emanations are in terrifying synchronicity with the damp decay that seems to have become the Creek’s primary export.
The combination of these particular fictions with the perpetually unsettling atmosphere has rendered my world a place of profound and disquieting strangeness, a place where the veil between the mundane and the monstrous feels perilously thin.  Which, conveniently, brings us to today’s word, the only one that still works when the air itself feels like it’s conspiring:

Eldritch (adj.)
/weird and sinister or ghostly; unearthly; uncanny; strange, eerie, and unnatural in a way that provokes fear, unease, or dread/
From Scots, probably from Middle English elrich, itself maybe from Old English ælf-rīce “elf-realm” + a twist through centuries of border ballads where the fairies weren’t cute and the night had teeth.  First citation 1508, but it feels older, like it crawled out of a peat bog still wearing the face of something that should have stayed drowned.
And now, because the fog demands tribute, a short story showing the word at work in the wild:
The fog never lifted; it merely thinned to the consistency of a dying man’s breath on a mirror.  I walked the cracked spine of Miner’s Ravine Road where the blackberry brambles had grown so bold they’d begun knitting themselves into arches, forming a thorny cathedral that no priest would ever consecrate.  Somewhere behind the veil, Fecal Creek’s lone traffic light blink its yellow eye, like a warning it had forgotten the point of.  The house at the bend, everyone knew the house, had stood empty for decades, yet every third night its attic window glowed the color of spoiled buttermilk.  I told myself I was only cutting through the yard to shave forty seconds off my trudge to the liquor store, but the fog had other curricula.  Halfway across the weed- choked lawn the ground exhaled.  Not a wind, not a scent; something between a sigh and a belch, centuries of basement rot rising through the soles of my boots.  The mist folded around me until the world reduced to a single wet coin of visibility.  And in that coin, for one heartbeat only, the house was not a house.  It was a face, vast and fungal, its shingles the scales of something that had learned carpentry the way leukemia learns bone marrow.  Its windows were eyes filmed with cataract and ancient hunger, and from the black porch gaped a mouth that had never bothered with doors.  The entire structure leaned forward the way a praying mantis leans before it remembers it is allowed to be cruel.  That was the moment, the single systolic throb, when the night revealed its true and eldritch geometry.
Then the fog inhaled, the face collapsed back into clapboard and neglect, and I was running, lungs full of grave-damp, boots slapping through puddles that reflected no moon because the moon had apparently filed a restraining order.  I did not stop until the neon of the liquor store bled across my retinas like a mercy killing.
I bought two bottles of the cheapest red wine and drank one in the parking lot just to remind my heart it was still allowed to beat.
Fecal Creek is still out there, sopping, listening.
The fog is not hiding anything.
It is showing us, very patiently, what was always here. 

So here we are, spooky reader: a town marinated in fog, a reader marinated in gothic dread, and a word marinated in centuries of linguistic strangeness.  If the weather doesn’t break soon, I’ll be forced to reread House of Leaves and start scribbling paranoid diagrams on my walls.

N.P.: “Temple of Love 1992” – Sisters of Mercy

Epicaricacy is a noun referring to the quiet, delicious, morally indefensible little orgasm you get when some smug motherfucker finally eats the exact shit sandwich he or she spent years force-feeding everyone else.
German has schadenfreude, sure, but that’s the tourist version, the Disneyland of malice.  Epicaricacy is the back-alley, no-safe-word edition.  Think of it as schadenfreude’s eccentric cousin who insists one wearing velvet pants to funerals and ordering wine in Latin while correcting your pronunciation of “bruschetta.”
It’s etymology is a straight up Latin/Greek smash-and-grab:
epi– (“upon”)
chara (“joy”)
Kakos (“evil” or “misfortune”)
So, literally: joy-upon-evil, with a hard middle-finger detour through the medieval habit of pretending you’re enjoying someone’s downfall for “pedagogical reasons.”  The word itself was basically invented in 1715 by some wigged Brit who wanted to sound smarter than the Germans while still getting his rocks off watching dukes slip on ice.  Respect.

The sign outside the cantina flickered like a dying insect: “Carnaval de Gasolina.”¹ Nobody cared. By midnight, the joint was a pharmacological zoo—cheap mezcal poured into motor oil cans, cocaine cut with talcum powder, and tabs of acid shaped like Biden’s neck waddles.²
I was three shots past coherence when Frankie “Dos Cuchillos” decided to rob the bar.³ He didn’t bother with a mask—just stormed in waving machetes like he was auditioning for a narco telenovela. The jukebox kept playing “Sweet Caroline,” which made the whole thing feel like a parody of violence.
Somebody threw a chair. Somebody else threw up. Frankie screamed about “redistributing wealth” while pocketing pesos and half a bag of Doritos. Then the federales showed up, already drunk from the bowling alley across the street. One officer tried to tase Frankie, missed, and electrocuted the jukebox instead. Neil Diamond died mid-chorus.
As Frankie got tackled into a puddle of spilled mezcal, the entire bar erupted in laughter. Not nervous laughter, not relief—just pure, uncut joy at watching chaos eat itself alive. That’s when I realized the word for this exact moment existed: epicaricacy.⁴ The pleasure of watching someone else’s disaster, the giddy schadenfreude of seeing a man with two knives get flattened by his own stupidity.
I lit a cigarette off the sparking jukebox, raised my glass to the carnage, and thought: Mexico, you beautiful bastard, never change.

Footnotes & Citations

1. See “Semiotics of Neon Failure in Border Economies,” Journal of Applied Cantina Studies, Vol. 12, No. 3 (1998), pp. 45–67.
2. For a comparative analysis of Biden iconography in psychedelic paraphernalia, consult “Sleepy Joe and the Acid Tab: A Psychoactive Presidency,” Annals of Illicit Semiotics, Vol. 7 (2024).
3. Nicknames in Tijuana function as both biography and prophecy. Cf. “The Ontology of Narco Sobriquets,” Revista de Crimen y Cultura, Vol. 2, No. 1 (2011).
4. Epicaricacy: see “Obscure Lexicons of Schadenfreude,” Proceedings of the International Symposium on Pretentious Vocabulary, Vol. 1 (2009).

N.P.: “Sad But True” – Mexican Institute of Sound

Today’s Word of the Day is fard.
Verb – to apply cosmetics, especially to the face.
From Middle French farder, meaning “to paint or embellish,” which itself traces back to the Latin fardare, a verb that sounds like it should involve medieval jousting but instead refers to the ancient art of facial camouflage.

The doorbell chimes, a tinny, synthesized death knell signaling the arrival of The Proletariat.   I swing open the door to find him vibrating on my porch: a human pimple in a shitty rented tuxedo, a creature of such profound adolescent awkwardness that his very existence is a form of passive-aggressive warfare against good taste.  He’s wearing a clip-on tie and the kind of cologne that smells like Axe body spray had a baby with a urinal cake.  He’s here to take my daughter to Homecoming, which is already a problem because she’s fifteen and he looks like the kind of kid who thinks Nietzsche is a Fortnight skin.
I let him in.  I do not offer him a seat.  I do not offer him water.  I do not offer him mercy.  We sit in silence.  The kind of silence that makes your ears ring.  He tries to smile. I stare at him like I’m trying to telepathically induce a nosebleed.  His eyes dart around the room, landing on the towering stack of books and the half-empty bottle of bourbon on the mantlepiece.  The silence stretches, thick and suffocating.  I let it linger, a tactical weapon of my own design.
“So,” I begin, leaning back, a predator enjoying his work.  “Homecoming.  A veritable pageant of hormonal panic and shitty decisions.  You must be thrilled.”
A sound escaped his throat, something between a gulp and a squeak.  “Y-yes, sir.  It should be fun.”
“Fun,” I repeat, savoring the word like a piece of cheap candy.  “An interesting metric.  Is the pursuit of ‘fun’ the primary driver of the human condition, do you think?  Or is it merely a distraction, a fleeting palliative to soothe the existential dread that accompanies the slow, inexorable march to the grave?”
His face is a canvas of pure, unadulterated terror.  His Adam’s apple bobs.  “I…I don’t know, sir.”
What a moron.  Time to really fuck with him.
After another minute of staring, I say, “So.  You believe in free will?”
He blinks stupidly.  Sheepishly.  He blinks like a stupid sheep.  “Uh.  Yeah?”
“Interesting.  So you think you chose to wear that tie?”
He looks down, confused.  “My mom picked it.”
“Ah,” I say, nodding sagely.  “So you believe in maternal determinism.”
He shifts in his seat.  I can smell the panic.  And his panic smells like fear and cheap deodorant.
“She’ll be down soon,” I say.  “She’s upstairs farding.”
The kid freezes.  His face goes from pale to a blotchy, horrified crimson.  The single word hangs in the air between us, a foul and misunderstood specter
“She’s…she’s what?” he stammers, his voice cracking.
I lean forward, conspiratorially.  “Farding.  Oh, yeah.  She fards all the time.  Can’t stop, really.  A terrible habit.  I’ve tried talking to her about it, but she gets embarrassed.  But it’s out of control.  Sometimes it goes on for hours, the farding.  She just didn’t want to do it in front of you.  She’s shy about her farding.”
The boy’s brain, bless its undeveloped prefrontal cortex, has clearly gone to a very different, very gross place.  He nods, but he’s not nodding like someone who understands.  He’s nodding like someone who’s trying to pretend he didn’t just walk into a house where the father casually discusses his daughter’s alleged gastrointestinal habits with Socratic flair.  I can see the frantic calculations behind his eyes, the dawning horror, the desperate search for an exit strategy.  The silence returns, but this time it’s electric with his revulsion.
After a few more agonizing seconds that I enjoyed immensely, he shoots to his feet.  “You know what?  I…I just remembered.  I have to…go.  I think I forgot something at home, “he says.
“Was it your dignity?” I ask, cheerfully.
And with that, he was gone.  A blur of cheap polyester and shattered dreams, fleeing my house, and, hopefully, my daughter, forever.
I walked to the bottom of the stairs, glass in hand.
“Honey!” I called up.  “You can take your time!  Your ride seems to have been unavoidably detained.”
My daughter descends the stairs, radiant and furious.  “Where’d he go?”
He couldn’t handle your farding,” I say.
She groans.  I pour myself a drink.  I am victorious.  And victory, dear reader, is a dish best served with a side of deliberate, weaponized vocabulary. 

N.P.: “Cities in Dust” – Night Club

Today’s Word of the Day, dear reader, is gongoozler.  Though it sounds like something Willy Wonka whipped up in his lab over the course of several sleepless weeks, it is not.  Gongoozler is a noun, meaning a person who enjoys watching activity on canals.  Yep, there is a word for one who derives low-key, almost spiritual satisfaction from watching other people work on boats in a canal.  Not the Instagram kind of watching – real, salt-crusted, binocular-free gawking while the gulls scream overhead and diesel fumes braid with your cigarette smoke.  Like a perverse, waterborne version of birding, but with barges and the occasional guy named Chuck who’s been living on a houseboat since the Reagan administration.

The word gongoozler sloshed into existence sometime in the early 20th century, likely birthed from Lincolnshire dialect or the linguistic swamp of canal-worker slang.  It’s a Frankenstein of “gawn” (to stare) and “goozle” (throat), which is somehow both accurate and vaguely obscene.  The term was used to describe the idle gawkers who’d congregate near locks and bridges, watching boats pass like it was the Super Bowl of slow aquatic movement.

Let me tell you about the time I became a gongoozler, which is to say: a broke, semi-deranged canal voyeur with a penchant for sewage-adjacent existentialism. 

Let me set the scene: it’s Seattle, circa my personal apocalypse.  I had just moved to Fremont- a neighborhood north of Seattle that smells like kombucha and liberal artisanal despair – and I was living in a shoebox apartment that had the architectural charm of a Soviet interrogation room.  I had no friends, no money, was in the middle of a prolonged nervous breakdown, and I couldn’t afford therapy.  My only coping mechanism (and the only thing I could afford) was walking.  So I walked.  Specifically, I walked down by the ship canal, which is not a canal in the romantic Venetian sense but more like a concrete trench where boats go to die. 

The Fremont ship canal is not what you’d call picturesque.  It’s a manmade waterway that looks like it was designed by someone who hated both nature and joy.  The water is a murky shade of “don’t ask,” and there were signs everywhere warning you not to fish because, apparently, the canal doubles as a sewage slip-n-slide.  Naturally, this did not deter the local fishermen, who were mostly older Asian men with the kind of grim determination you’d expect from people who’ve seen some shit – both figuratively and, in this case, literally.  It boggled my mind…there were dozens of them – warning you, quote, “untreated sewage is routinely discharged into this waterway.”  Which is bureaucratic for: This canal is full of shit.”

But like some kind of secret society of defiant anglers who had collectively decided that gastrointestinal risk was a small price to pay for the thrill of catching a three-eyed trout.  I tried talking to them.  I really did…I was pretty desperate for a friend at that point.  But, alas, they didn’t speak English, and I didn’t speak whatever dialect of “leave me alone” they were fluent in.  They’d glare at me like I was interrupting a sacred ritual, which I probably was. 

So I stopped trying to talk.  I just watched.  I watched the ships.  I watched the fishermen.  I watched the ducks that looked like they’d been though a chemical spill.  I watched the joggers who ran like they were being chased by their own regrets.  I became a kind of paragongoozler – not just watching the canal, but the entire ecosystem of weirdness orbiting it.  It was like a slow-motion circus, and I was the sad clown in the audience, applauding the sewage ballet.  Sometimes, when your brain is a dumpster fire and your wallet is a cruel joke, all you can do is stand by a canal and bear witness to the absurdity. 

N.P.: “When The Lights Go Out” – Oingo Boingo

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

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