Sciurine (adjective) – Pertaining to, characteristic of, or resembling squirrels.  Think bushy tails, frenetic energy, and the kind of manic focus that only a rodent with a nut-based retirement plan can muster.

From the Latin sciurus, meaning “squirrel,” which itself traces back to the Greek skiuoros (skia = shadow, oura = tail) because apparently ancient Greeks thought squirrels were just little guys who lived in the shade of their own tails.  Cute, right?  Also mildly existential.

I’m bummed out today, dear reader.  Bummed Out!  ::sigh::  Where should I start?
Whenever I kill something, I typically prefer for it to have been on purpose.  You know, with dark intention and malice aforethought.  ”Twas not always thus: in my late teens I used to kill just…er, never mind that for now.  That is probably best left for the book.  Suffice it to say, over the decades, I have developed a better appreciation for life and the right for non-Jayson things to exist than I used to have.  As a result, I am very careful to protect most critters in my world, so long as we are able to coexist.  Mostly meaning that as long as they stay out of my house, we’re good.  Faithful followers here have heard me talk with great affection about Bath Salts the squirrel, who, along with her adorable family, have a nest under the eaves of the Safe House.  There are multiple and surprisingly large lizards living in, on, and about my central AC unit.  I watch them climb up the walls, chasing the direct sunlight throughout the day.  I am down with the critters.  Which is why, dear reader, I’m so bummed today.

Earlier this morning, I was driving skillfully, even expertly through downtown Fecal Creek, obeying the posted speed limit and all relevant traffic laws, when an evidently suicidally depressed yet hyperactive and manic squirrel ran into the street in front of my car, which was going exactly 33mph, down an otherwise untrafficked road.  Had the squirrel simply maintained his speed and direction across the street, everything would have been fine…not even a near miss.  But no.  This sciurine shithead stops exactly in the middle of my lane, front legs rather splayed as if ready for action, and stares at the grill of my car.  I hit the brakes, natch, and, if this thing had a brain any larger than a crouton, would have allowed ample time for it to pick a direction and haul ass, totally unmolested.  Which, it seemed, to do, for a second.  It decided to reverse course, and head back to the side of the street from whence it came.  I instantly turned the wheel slightly, to the opposite side of the road Mr. Squirrel is heading.  But then, a split second later, it does a 180, and runs back in its original direction.  So, again, with the compassion of St. Francis, I turn the wheel slightly in the other direction, planning on missing the squirrel entirely.  But just as it’s about to disappear under the front of my car, it changes directions again, appearing to very intentionally dive under the car.  Despite my braking, what happened next was an apparently unavoidable double-thud as I drive over this goddamn thing.  It was horrible, and I felt like a nazi the rest of the afternoon.  I was guilty of involuntary squirrelocide. 

But then, somehow, things got even worse.  I went to get the mail, and on my second step out the door, I stepped on a baby frog, flattening it damply and instantly.  In and of itself, this accidental act was no big deal…there are literally thousands of these little fuckers jumping around the yard, and usually, despite the frogs having significantly smaller brains than the squirrels, they jump quickly out of your way when you walk down the sidewalk.  So what the hell was wrong with this one?  We’ll never know.  But that was the second unintentional critter kill of the day.  I still had writing to do, so I couldn’t let myself get too depressed about any of it.  In the end, I remembered that I am nothing more than an enforcement agent of Darwinism, taking out the trash. 

Still…I really would prefer my killings be on purpose. 

N.P.: “Captain Love” – The Winery Dogs

Chiropteran (kai-ROP-ter-an):  Any member of the order Chiroptera, the winged mammals more scandalously known as bats.  These critters range from the adorably snack-sized fruit bats to the nightmare-fuel megabats that might make off with your steak if you’re picnicking too close to the equator.

Derived from the Greek works cheir (hand) and pteron (wing), chiropteran describes the bat’s uniquely unsettling wing structure, which, upon closer inspection, can evoke the terrifying realization that you’re essentially staring at a flying skeleton hand.  Congratulations, dear reader, you know have one more trivia fact to ruin cocktail parties with.

The thing about Sheila – the one thing, the starting point, the narrative axis around which all her small-town notoriety would eventually orbit – was that she had, since moving to Fecal Creek, been the sort of upstanding neighbor who inexplicably prompted suspicion.  Not for anything actionable, of course.  Her lawn was mowed (by HOA standards, which is to say: with the frequency and fervor of a contract killer erasing forensic traces), her recycling bin was a Platonic ideal of sustainable virtue, and her invitations to potlucks were legendary in the way only a three-bean salad that doubles as an existential dare could be. 

So when she started walking her neurotic  schnauzer, Milton, at exactly 2:04 a.m. every night – yes, every night, like clockwork, like something out of a pharmaceutical ad for insomnia with a side effect of paranoia – the Fecal Creek gossip-mongers began to stir.  At first, there was mere whispering about the “strange glimmer” of her porch light and how her eyes “caught the moon weirdly, in a way you don’t see much outside Victorian novels.” 

Words like “oddball” and “eccentric” gave way to phrases like “creature of the night.”  Then came the Nextdoor thread.  There were accusations (unsubstantiated, frequently typo-ridden), hashtags (#Batwoman or, bafflingly, #BananaMan), even a poem posted by someone calling themselves “Concerned4Christ.”  It all crescendoed one evening when, as Sheila ambled around the block in sweatpants, rain boots, and a T-shirt that read “I Am Not a Morning Person,” a black blur (local wildlife?  suburban nightmare?) swooped beneath the buttery glow of a streetlamp and right into the whirring blades of suspicion.

That blur – wingspan like patent-leather gloves, little body jerking erratically like a cursed wind-up toy – was, of course, a thoroughly mundane chiropteran, though you’d never know it from what happened next.  Lila Eisenberg, the Creek’s undisputed Czarina of Gossip, shrieked so magnificently that birds in three time zones checked their watches. 

Rumor that Sheila was either harboring – if not actively mothering – nocturnal “familiars” was officially launched, and nothing would ever be the same.  The sheer choreography of horror on the neighbors’ faces whenever she waved good morning (which was never actually morning) from her mailbox was a thing to behold.  When Halloween rolled around, Milton wore a hot-dog costume, Sheila carried a thermos labeled “Definitely Just Coffee,” and not a single kid braved her sidewalk for candy. 

Sheila, knowing exactly what was up and deriving a savage delight from the spectacle, started adding plastic bats to her lawn décor.  All treats, no tricks, yet somehow she became legend – the guardian of Fecal Creek’s midnight, the matron saint of insomnia, and the reason the three-bean salad as, from then on, always left untouched. 

N.P.: “King Volcano” – Bauhaus

Rara avis in terris (noun phrase): Latin for “a rare bird in the land,” used metaphorically to describe an extraordinary or unusual person or thing, the kind of phenomenon that doesn’t just defy expectation but detonates it.  Someone or something so unique that they’re effectively a cosmic statistical error, like seeing a double rainbow while getting hit by lightning and winning the lottery all at once.

As mentioned supra, this phrase comes straight from Latin, baby, because antiquity had a flair for the dramatic.  The phrase hearkens back to Juvenal’s Satires (6.165, for you grad students who actually like footnotes), where it was used to lament the improbability of finding a woman simultaneously beautiful, rich, faithful, and talented.  Essentially, “rara avis in terris” became shorthand for spotting a unicorn in rush-hour-traffic.  Over time, it expanded to mean any anomaly that made you stop, gawk, and question your place in the universe for a hot second.  Yes, it’s pretentious.  Yes, it’s amazing.

On of the more white trash denizens of Fecal Creek was Paulie “Numbers” Karpinski, who was known for punching above his weight in all areas of his life.  Legend had it that he had won $150K in the lottery a dozen years ago, and had, since the moment he won, considered himself a professional gambler, and also “well-to-do,” even though his lottery winnings had been completely burned through years ago.  It was all he could do to scrape a couple bucks together to buy half-a-dozen scratchers every Friday night.  And this Friday night, just like the 50 previous Friday nights, Paulie didn’t win shit. 

Nevertheless, Paulie still considered himself a professional gambler, and professional gamblers have an appreciation for odds.  Which is why, when he stumbled into Le Seraphin, a new French bistro incongruously tethered to the edge of a Wal-Mart parking lot, he figured his luck could only go up. 

Le Seraphim was absurd on principle.  It had chandeliers decked out like Liberace’s fever dream.  Waiters in suits that probably cost more than Paulie’s car flitted from table to table like tuxedoed dragonflies.  The menu was one of those single-sheet masterpieces where the fonts did more heavy lifting than the food descriptions, except for the prices written in what might as well have been micro-aggressive hieroglyphics. 

Paulie, being Paulie, didn’t care.  He dumped his ass into the nearest chair and ordered the first thing he saw, a $175 steak tartare described as having been “massaged” to perfection. 

But the highlight of the evening wasn’t the raw meat appetizer masquerading as culinary enlightenment.  It was the woman three tables over, who Paulie swore – even while drunk and prone to hotboxing his own imagination – was some kind of divine mistake.  Her hair was the color of every bad decision he’d made at sunset, and her body was what Botticelli would’ve dreamed up if he weren’t so distracted by goddamn seashells.  She laughed like she’d invented oxygen.  Her dress looked like something sewn directly onto her skin by a team of sacrilegious angels.  She was, without question, a rara avis in terris, the rarest of rare birds in the landfill of mediocrity that was Paulie’s life. 

Unfortunately, Paulie being Paulie meant his idea of “charming” involved a lot of slurred metaphors and overly familiar hand gestures.  He sauntered toward her table with the grace of a hedgehog juggling chainsaws. 

“Hey there,” he said, leaning in as if conspiratorial proximity would make him seem suave rather than mildly rabid.  “Are you Google? ‘Cause you’ve got everything I’m searching for.”

Her smile froze, the way someone’s smile does when they’re mentally flipping coins between fight or flight.  Without missing a beat, she turned to the towering French waiter by her side and said, in clipped, elegant syllables, “Jean-Luc, I believe this gentleman is lost.  Would you kindly…redirect him?”

Paulie didn’t hear the rest because Jean-Luc had grabbed his elbow with the precision of someone who hadn’t just earned a tip tonight but had earned all the tips, forever.  Paulie found himself rehomed curbside faster than you could say hors d’oeuvres.

He watched her through the window as she tossed back a glass of wine so red it looked like arterial punctuation.  Paulie muttered something half-hearted about “class warfare” and called an Uber, deciding then and there that rare birds weren’t for him. 

“Back to the bar on 7th,” he told the driver.  And as he leaned back into the ripped leather seat, he decided that steak tartare tasted like chalk dipped in regret anyway. 

N.P.: “Head Spin – Signals Mix” – Collide

Triskaidekaphobia (noun): The irrational fear of the number 13.  Though it may sound like something invented to spice up Scrabble night, this phobia is alarmingly real and has been blamed for everything from mysteriously absent 13th floors in hotels to the collective existential dread that surfaces whenever Friday the 13th looms on the calendar.

This Frankenstein’s monster of a word is stitched together from Greek origins.  Tris (three), kai (and), deka (ten), and phobos (fear) were patched together to create a term that is frankly way too long to be yelled in a panic.

N.P.: “J.B. Witchdance” – Masters of Reality

Oomska (noun): An undefined, usually intangible something that’s funky, messy, or generally in a state of chaotic absurdity.  Originating as a sort of nonsense placeholder word, it evokes the linguistic vibe of an odd, gooey clutter that defies categorization.

The word “oomska” seems to exist in the shadowy, anarchistic corner of the language reserved for pure whimsy.  With no traceable root in Indo-European traditions or otherwise, it’s suspected to be a syntactical UFO, possibly birthed in literary or comedic obscurity by minds too caffeinated for their own good.  Whoever coined it likely did so with the philosophical hand-waving of someone avoiding an actual explanation with flair.

If you’ve never tried explaining to a Border Patrol officer why you’re transporting a cooler full of what looks like radioactive gazpacho across state lines, I can tell you right now there is no winning version of this interaction.
“So you’re saying…it’s soup?” the officer asked, each syllable soaked in the kind of skepticism reserved for conspiracy theorists and people who pronounce “bagel” wrong.
“It’s more of a…prototype?” I ventured.  A shaky move at best.  I couldn’t tell him it was food-colored cocaine base, so I decided to take a hippy tack.  His eyes flicked to the cooler and narrowed like he was trying to Mission Impossible his way into its contents using pure suspicion.
“And this ‘prototype’ contains…?”
I figured telling him this toxic brew was homemade kombucha, but whether your describing kombucha or cocaine base straight from Mexico, there’s a point where your explanation tips from reasonable into the grammatical equivalent of jazz improv.  I could feel that moment approaching like a very fast tank.
“It’s part fermented culture, part nutrient blend.  Honestly?  It’s kind of an oomska situation.”
He blinked. “A what-now?”
My brain scrambled for a respectable synonym.  None came.
“Look, it’s organic, non-toxic, possibly probiotic.  You know, like quinoa but…wetter.”  I was praying he didn’t ask me to consume the stuff.
The officer stared, visibly weighing the costs of harassing me further versus enduring whatever hellish scent lived inside the cooler.  After an excruciating beat, he waved me through with the universal expression for, “I don’t get paid enough for this kind of weird.”
I have no idea what ultimately convinced him.  Maybe it was the aura of unhinged sincerity, maybe the word “oomska” had successfully short-circuited his skepticism, or maybe he just didn’t want to get “kombucha” dribbles on his boots.  Whatever the case, I drove away victorious, hauling my cargo of questionable liquids and hubris into the sunrise.
Which is why, to this day, I firmly believe some messes can only be described with freshly invented vocabulary.  Oomska.  It explains everything and nothing at once.

N.P.: “Blues and Cocaine (feat. Michale Graves)” – Me And That Man

Sounder (noun): A group or herd of swine.  Yes, pigs.  Not the kind of word you’d toss around at a suburban Chili’s while the server microwaves your queso (which is where I am and what’s going on as I’m writing this), but a term with just enough feral heft to make you feel briefly alive in this fluorescent hellscape we call modernity.  A sounder, per the dusty tomes of lexicography, refers to a collective of wild boars – those tusked, bristly agents of chaos rooting through the underbrush, snorting and shoving with zero regard for decorum.

Etymologically, it’s Old English, from sundor, meaning “apart” or “special group,” which got mangled through Middle English into this delightfully specific collective noun, mostly for pigs that’d sooner gore you than pose for your Instagram.  But language, being the slippery beast it is, lets us repurpose it for other herds of the uncivilized – say, the teeming masses at a shopping mall on a Saturday.

The mall smells like stale pretzels and despair, which is to say it’s exactly how I remembered it.  My therapist suggested I browse a public space as some sort of exposure therapy for my alleged “antagonistic worldview.”  Her words, not mine.  I got here, parked 300 feet away from the entrance because the parking garage is less “convenient structure” and more “Pit of American Gladiator Doom,” and stepped inside to witness that special kind of chaos only retail capitalism can birth.

The escalators were broken, naturally, which meant the central artery of this shiny consumer mausoleum had coagulated into an angry vein of foot traffic.  Children squealed, parents shouted, teens scrolled, and boomers yelled at the phantom of customer service, all moving with the unified chaos of a sounder tearing into a discount trough.  I paused by the fountain.  Some sad kid had tossed a giant pretzel into the water, and it bobbed there in existential resignation, soggy and forgotten, like me on every date I’ve been forced to endure. 

I braved the first store, and it was everything I expected (awful).  A labyrinth of racks, blaring pop music that felt like punishment for having ears, and mannequins with faces so dead-eyed they made me nostalgic for the comforting judgement of Victorian portraits.  A sales associate hounded me until I muttered something vague about “just looking” and fled, leaving her with my bad vibes and zero commission. 

Somewhere between the perfume-spritz hellscape and the food court littered with ketchup-streaked sadness, I realized I had made a grave mistake.  Therapy?  Overrated.  Public spaces?  Designed to break the human spirit.  I should’ve just stuck to online shopping and left the sounder to their pasture of artificial light and clearance bins. 

By the time I navigated out of Sears (yes, it still exists, and no, I don’t know why), my dysanthropy had solidified to the tensile strength of anti-tank steel.  If people are going to herd together like pigs, is it too much to ask for mud pits and apple cores to complete the aesthetic? 

Needless to say, that’s the last time I’m listening to advice involving either “immersion” or “society.”

N.P.: “Return of the Mack” – Mark Morrison

To immure means to enclose or confine someone or something within walls, often in a literal sense, like being bricked up in a dungeon, but it can also lean metaphorical – think trapping someone in a situation they can’t escape.  It’s got a deliciously dramatic vibe, perfect for tales of gothic intrigue or self-imposed isolation.

The word immure comes from the Latin in- (meaning “in” (duh)) and murus (meaning “wall”), so it literally means “to wall in.”  It slipped into English via Old French emmurer around the late 16th century, carrying a medieval flavor of castle keeps and secret chambers.  Picture a monk scribbling by candlelight, deciding someone’s fate with a quill and a stone wall – that’s the energy immure brings.

Brother Thaddeus, the monastery’s most insufferable know-it-all, had a peculiar habit of correcting everyone’s Latin chants – mid-verse, no less.  One frosty evening, the monks, fed up with his sanctimonious droning, decided to immure him in the abbey’s oldest wine cellar with nothing but a crust of bread and a particularly judgmental rat for company.  By morning, Thaddeus was chanting apologies through the keyhole, promising to keep his pedantry to himself if they’d only let him out to finish his turnip stew. 

N.P.: “Set It Free” – Buckcherry

Phantasmagoria (noun): An extravagant or rapidly shifting series of images, scenes, or events.  Often surreal, like the fever dream offspring of Salvador Dali and a fog machine that accidently got doused in absinthe.

This six-syllable beast is French by the way of Italian (phantasma, meaning apparition) and Greek (phantazein, “to make visible”).  It originally described spooky lantern shows in the last 1700s, where ghastly apparitions cavorted on the walls to the audiences who clearly hadn’t discovered Netflix yet.  Fast-forward a couple of centuries, and now the word applies to anything dazzling, surreal, or chaotic enough to make you question what you just saw.

Last Tuesday, I found myself on a regrettably misjudged blind date at a “conceptual sushi” bar.  The walls were painted in migraine-inducing hues of magenta.  Tiny drones floated around distributing soy sauce, landing in your palm like mutant fireflies.  Somewhere about us, a DJ dressed as a sixteenth-century plague doctor spun trance tracks that sounded like a Roomba choking on a harmonica.  My date, a professional “life coach,” was Instagramming her un-photoshoppable sashimi while babbling at me that mercury was in retrograde.
Somewhere amid all this aesthetic carnage, the dried seaweed I was chewing achieved an unfortunate synergy with the sake I’d been guzzling wholesale to cope.  And then, like clockwork, the bathroom hit me with an urgency that felt almost biblical in its scope.  On the way there, I tripped over an LED art installation of “origami tigers,” clawed at a neon bonsai tree, and landed in front of a video montage projected onto the bathroom door.
It was a phantasmagoria of winding anime pandas, old Godzilla clips, and stock footage of oil spills.  “Experience Transcendence Through Crisis,” the caption advised.  I stared at it, utterly destroyed by existential malaise and the sushi equivalent of a bad acid trip.
Needless to say, there won’t be a second date.  

N.P.: “Living For The City feat. Tash Neal” – Slash

Ah, dear readers, there are words in the English language that truly earn their spot in the lexicon of greatness.  We’re going to get cheeky with today’s word of the day.  This one isn’t just another vocab word—it’s a full-on celebration of the posterior, a literary wink at the kind of beauty that makes heads turn and jaws drop. So, let’s slap some knowledge on this fine asset, an absolute poetic masterpiece, dedicated to the glorious curves of the human form. A word so niche, so delightfully specific, you’ll want to drop it into casual conversation just to see eyebrows fly off foreheads. Ladies and gentlemen, meet callipygous.

Callipygous (adj): Having a beautifully shaped, downright glorious backside. We’re talking about a rear so fine it could stop traffic, inspire poetry, or make a sculptor weep. It’s the kind of word you whip out when “nice ass” just doesn’t cut it, and you need to class up your admiration with some ancient flair.
This gem comes straight from the Greeks, who knew a thing or two about appreciating beauty and, well, ass. It’s a mashup of kallos (beauty) and pygē (buttocks), so it literally means “beautiful butt.” The term popped up in English around the early 1800s, likely thanks to some randy scholar who couldn’t resist bringing a bit of classical spice to the language. Think of it as the Greeks’ gift to anyone who’s ever been mesmerized by a perfect peach.  Next time someone fires off a lazy “dat ass,” you hit ’em with ‘why, what an exquisitely callipygous figure you’ve got there, good sir/madam.’ See how fast they Google it.

Dr. Thaddeus P. Whittlebottom, Ph.D., tenured professor of 18th-century English literature at the lesser-known but viciously pretentious St. Agrippina’s Liberal Arts College, found himself – through a series of unfortunate events involving a tenure review committee’s sadistic sense of humor, three gin martinis too many at the faculty mixer, and a dare from a junior colleague who’d clearly read too much Lacan – seated on a cracked vinyl stool in the pulsating, strobe-lit cavern of the Glittering Garter Gentlemen’s Lounge, a name which, Thaddeus noted with a grimace that could only be described as philologically pained, misused the possessive form in a way that suggest either gross ignorance or a deliberate affront to grammar, though he suspected the former, given the clientele, which included a man in a camouflage trucker hat who’d been shouting “yee-haw” at irregular intervals for the past 27 minutes, a duration Thaddeus had tracked on his wristwatch with the kind of obsessive precision typically reserved for annotating the metrical irregularities in Pope’s Essay on Man. 

The air was thick with the mingled scents of cheap body spray, stale beer, and existential despair, and Thaddeus, whose usual habitat consisted of leather-bound tomes and seminar rooms where the most risqué topic was the latent homoeroticism in Donne’s Holy Sonnets, felt his tweed blazer (elbow patches and all) adhering to his skin with a clammy insistence that made him long for the dry, papery solace of his office, where the most scandalous thing he’d encountered in recent memory was a misplaced comma in a student’s thesis on Defoe.  But here he was, clutching a glass of what the bartender had called “bourbon” but which tasted suspiciously like diluted regret, watching a dancer who’d introduced herself as “Saffire” (though Thaddeus, ever the etymologist, suspected her real name was something more pedestrian, like Amber or Michelle, derived perhaps from the Old English sǣwynn, meaning “sea-joy,” a though that brought him no joy whatsoever) gyrated atop a pole with the kind of mechanical enthusiasm that suggested she’d rather be anywhere else, a sentiment Thaddeus shared as he tried to calculate the exact moment his life had veered into this neon-lit circle of Dante’s Inferno, which he reckoned was somewhere around the third martini, when he’d agreed to this outing under the mistaken impression that “team bonding” involved a discussion of Milton’s Areopagitica  over a nice Pinot. 

But then – oh, then – Sapphire turned, and Thaddeus, whose aesthetic sensibilities had been honed by years of analyzing the sublime in Wordsworth and the grotesque in Swift, found himself momentarily transfixed by the sheer anatomical precision of her posterior, a vision so arrestingly callipygous that it seemed to transcend the tawdry surroundings, as if her gluteal curves were a living ode to the Grecian ideal, a Platonic form of beauty that might have inspired Praxiteles to chuck his chisels and take up pole dancing instead, though Thaddeus immediately chastised himself for the thought, not because it was inappropriate (which it was), but because the anachronism of imagining a 4th-century BC sculptor in a 21st-century strip club was the kind of historical sloppiness he’d fail a freshman for, and also because he was pretty sure Sapphire had just caught him staring and was now glaring at him with a look that suggested she’d happily trade her platform heels for a copy of The Second Sex and a chance to lecture him on the male gaze, a concept Thaddeus was familiar with but had never felt so viscerally implicated in until this precise moment. 

He fumbled for his wallet, intending to tip her as a gesture of penance, but in his gin-addled state, he accidently pulled out a crumpled page of lecture notes on Gulliver’s Travels instead, which Sapphire accepted with a bemused smirk before twirling away, leaving Thaddeus to wonder if he’d just committed the gravest sin of his academic career – not the act of ogling, but the unintentional dissemination of his intellectual property in a venue that was decidedly not peer-reviewed, a thought that sent him scrambling for the exit, his elbow patches catching on the doorframe as he fled into the night, vowing to never speak of this night again, though he knew, with the fatalistic certainty of a man who’d read too much Hardy, that the junior colleague would never let him live it down. 

N.P.: “Alone Again Or” – The Damned

Today’s Word of the Day is bedevil, because I like it.  I’m in a bit of a mood, and it just fits.

Definition: (v.) To torment, harass, or plague someone or something with devilish persistence—like a gremlin in your brain or a prankster deity who won’t quit. Think relentless irritation with a side of infernal flair.

Etymology: This spicy little verb sashays in from the mid-18th century, born from “be-” (to thoroughly mess with) and “devil” (that horned troublemaker himself). It’s Old French and Latin flirting with English, with “diabolus” (devil) whispering chaos in the background. By 1768, it was officially bedeviling folks in print.

He couldn’t help but shake his head in a sort of amused disbelief: he could not believe that people still fucked with him.  Did his reputation not precede him?  Maybe they hadn’t heard.  Perhaps they were simply misinformed.  Regardless, he couldn’t believe this was happening.  He almost felt sorry for them.  Almost.  But not quite.  “Nope,” he thought.  “Fuck them.”  There’s no way they’d be doing this if they knew that at best they had just bought themselves seven years of absolutely brutal and cruel bedevilment.  At worst…well, that would be much worse. 

N.P.: “Now These Days Are Gone” – Shriekback