Category Archives: Lucubrations

June 16, 2025

Happy Monday, dear reader.  Today is June 16th.  A day like any other for most, but for a certain breed of literary masochist, this isn’t just another ripple in the mundane tide of the Gregorian calendar.  Nope.  For them, today is Bloomsday, that annual carnival of intellectual flexing, literary cosplay, and public displays of knowing exactly what “ineluctable modality of the visible” means (spoiler alert: most of them don’t).

If you’re unfamiliar, Bloomsday is the hallowed celebration of James Joyce’s Ulysses.  This 700-something-page modernist behemoth, set entirely on June 16th, 1904, captures a single day in the life of Leopold Bloom, a humble Dublin ad salesman with a thing for kidneys and an uncanny knack for making his deeply weird interior monologue your deeply weird interior monologue.  Why June 16th?  Well, legend has it that Joyce picked the date in honor of his first outing with Nora Barnacle, the woman who’d eventually become his wife and soulmate in stubborn eccentricity.

Since 1954, when a pack of particularly ambitious Joyce fans retraced the steps of Bloom and his moody sidekick Stephen Dedalus through the cobblestone streets of Dublin, Bloomsday ha spiraled into a global phenomenon.  Dublin itself is ground zero, morphing into a labyrinth of tweed-clad academics, aspiring novelists, and tourists pretending to understand what “Molly’s soliloquy” really means.  The day’s menu features marathon readings, theatrical performances, and pub crawls where Guinness and existential dread flow in equal measure.  But Bloomsday isn’t confined to the Irish capital…it’s gone international.  New York has its own event.  Budapest, too.  Chances are, there’s someone in your city right now butchering a Joyce passage in public.

Here’s the thing about Ulysses, though: it’s an entire ecosystem of narrative rebellion.  At its most basic level, this is a novel about a guy, kind of a schlubby everyman, wandering Dublin for a day while mulling over infidelity, bodily functions, and the cosmic messiness of existence.  Describing Ulysses as “just a book” is like calling the Grand Canyon a “neat hole” or fireworks “nice little explosions.”  Joyce scrapped the blueprint for what novels could be, melted it in acid, and reconstructed it as a linguistic rollercoaster built for causing epileptic fits in English majors.

It’s a book where style isn’t just substance; it’s spectacle.  Stream-of-consciousness prose drenched in linguistic gymnastics?  Check.  Entire chapters mimicking everything from 19th-century romance novels to overwrought legal rhetoric?  Yep.  A narrative that stops being linear the minute Joyce decides he’s bored?  Oh yeah.  And through all of it, you’re left marveling at its audacity, its wit, and its refusal to make itself easy for you.

Which is exactly why Ulysses has earned its badass reputation.  It doesn’t care if you understand it.  Hell, it seems to actively hope you won’t.  It’s confrontational, unrelenting, and defiantly weird.  And yet, buried under its dense wordplay and chaotic structure is a keenly human portrait of love, loneliness, sex, guilt, and spiritual yearning.  It’s about what it means to be alive, absurd and messy as it is.

And maybe that’s what makes Bloomsday so resonant.  Beyond the cosplay, the debates over whether Leopold Bloom or Stephen Dedalus is the superior antihero (Bloom, obviously), and the whispered apologies to unread copies of Finnegans Wake, Bloomsday is a celebration of literature that refuses to be ignored.  It’s a collective act of tribute to the kind of art that challenges, confuses, and maybe even pisses you off, but changes you in the process.

Whether you’re in Dublin following Bloom’s hypothetical footsteps, or just cracking open Ulysses for the twentieth time only to quit two pages into “Oxen of the Sun,” Bloomsday isn’t about mastery.  It’s about grappling with brilliance on its own terms, about raising a pint to impossibly large ideas compressed into impossibly difficult prose.

And it that’s not worth celebrating, then neither is art itself.

N.P.: “Looking for a Fight” – The Cold Stares

June 14, 2025

 

Partial Transcript of Emergency Strategy Meeting, Saturday, 14 June 2025, In The War Room Of The Safehouse.  Participants: Jayson Gallaway, Author and Speculative Gubernatorial Candidate and Boochie Collins, Drug Dealer and Political Analyst/Advisor.

Boochie: Helluvan idea, chief…I think it’s got teeth.  Audacious as shit, though.  But audacious is good.  Fuck yes.  Let’s do this.
Jayson: Excellent!  I’m so glad we’re on the same page.  What have you got for me?  Where do we start?
Boochie: We start with making sure you’re qualified.
Jayson: Of course I’m qualified.  Probably over-qualified, all things considered.  I should probably be looking into running for President in ’28.  Yeah.  Why am I messing around with this itty-bitty-shitty state.
Boochie: California is neither itty nor bitty.  Third largest state, isn’t it?
Jayson: See…that’s what I’m talking about.  Third.  Third.  Rhymes with turd.  Why aren’t we first?
Boochie: Square milage.
Jayson: Balls!  We will be first!  Day One, we invade Oregon.  Annex that miserable state.  Drive all those hippies into the sea.
Boochie: Well, if you’re going to annex the state, you should probably keep the people…they’ll be part of your constituency.
Jayson:  Oooooo!  “Constituency.”  Fancy words from the Booch, all of a sudden.
Boochie: I use fancy words all the time.
Jayson: Horseshit.  Can you even spell constituency?
Boochie [caught off guard]: Shut up.  You can’t drive the people of Oregon into the sea; they are potential voters.
Jayson: No, they’re not.  They are not people, they are hippies.  And not one of those hippies will ever vote for me, potentially or otherwise.  They are not My People.  Buncha vegans who can’t pump their own gas.  Damnedest thing.  Fuck ’em…they shall be driven into the sea.
Boochie: We’d still be smaller than Alaska.
Jayson: Shit. Really?
Boochie: Even still, we are not itty or bitty.
Jayson: Fine.  But we are shitty, though.  You have to admit that.
Boochie: Shittiest state in the union.
Jayson: But not for much longer.  We’re gonna make history, Booch!  Come on…what do I have to do to govern this bitch?
Boochie: Qualifications.
Jayson: Still?  I thought we just covered that.
Boochie [rifles through papers and pulls one aside]:  Okay…”To run for Governor of California in 2026, you must meet the following criteria…”
Jayson: Bring it.
Boochie: Citizenship.  Are you a U.S. citizen?
Jayson: Damn skippy.  What’s next?
Boochie: Check.  Next is Residency.  Are you a registered voter in California?
Jayson: You know it.  Killing this, so far.  What’s next?
Boochie: Lessee…No Other Office…
Jayson: I’ve got one office, and you’re sitting in it.
Boochie: No, not “office” as a place.  “You cannot hold any other public office, engage in lobbying, or accept honoraria during your term as governor.”
Jayson: Cool.  I find those terms acceptable.
Boochie: Then that’s it…you qualify to run for governor.
Jayson: That’s it?  Shit, this is easy.  Feels like fate.
Boochie: I always thought you’d be a great governor.
Jayson: Thanks, Booch.  I’ll be better than what we’ve been stuck with for the last several idiotic years. So what’s next?
Boochie: Not exactly sure…this is my first gubernatorial campaign.  You still have that attorney on retainer?  With the weird name?
Jayson: Which one?  Finger?  Yeah, I’ve got his number.
Boochie: We should probably consult with him about next steps.
Jayson: I’ll call him.
[Jayson pulls out cell phone, scrolls, taps the screen, then puts phone on speaker.  The sound of repetitive rings heard over speaker].
Jayson: Fucker never answers his phone.  He’s probably over there in his loft, smoking drugs or whatever he does, ignoring the goddamn phone.
[Ringing stops, a recorded message plays over the speaker]
Finger [recorded, over speaker]: You have reached the voicemail of Jimmy Finger, Finger & Diddle, Attorneys at Law.  Leave a message.
Jayson [under his breath to Boochie]: Asshole.  [Then, after the beep into the phone]: Jimmy Finger!  It’s been a minute.  This is Jayson, I’m over here with Boochie…listen, I’m going to run for Governor in ’26, and could use some guidance to navigate this process.  Call me back at this number.
Jayson [hanging up]: Asshole.  I bet he starts picking up the phone once I’m goddamn Governor of this dump.

N.P.: “Fuck Everything” – Hairy Soul Man

June 12, 2025

The skies over California are inappropriately sunny today.  Just after sunrise, when I was in the backyard looking for the carcass of whatever it was I shot last night that I heard rifling through the trash, I turned the sun, that hateful star of ours, with disgust and umbrage and told it to, “Read the room.”  These are dark days indeed, dear reader.  My beloved state is under attack from both ends: a mob of foreigners and paid anti-American sheep on one end, and a moronic, botoxic, sociopathic governor who seems to think that prioritizing foreigners’ fictitious right to wave Mexican and Palestinian flags while assaulting police and burning American flags and what’s left of L.A. down over the safety and rights of legal residents will somehow make him a viable candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination.  Approval ratings, shmapproval ratings.

I’ve been doing what I can, but to no avail.  I’ve tried communicating with Gavin using every method available.  In much of that communication, I have been polite and civil, even friendly.  In others, I’ve lampooned him viciously, challenging him to MMA fights, public debates…I even invited him to participate in the pilot program of a new sport I’m developing tentatively called Whiskey Croquet (I’m still workshopping the name and most of the rules).  And what has his response been?  Nothing.  Nada.  Squat.  Even his office has been non-responsive: not even a courtesy form letter.

Not knowing what else to do, I sat down this morning to pen yet another letter of invective to this idiot, hoping maybe this will be the one to break through.

Dear Governor Newsom,
You fucking putz.  You festering clot of political hubris. You sanctimonious trainwreck. You’ve spent the last seven years gleefully torching California into a smoldering ash-heap of your own making, and I am here for the public excoriation you’re just starting to receive, that you so richly deserve.
I watched your dumbass “national address” the other night.  Jesus.  You couldn’t even figure out your audio.  Clown.
This state, once a glittering beacon of  innovation and freedom, now staggers under your pitiful reign of error – economy gutted by your hypocritical lockdowns, streets drowning in a fetid soup of homelessness you’ve ignored with the callous shrug of a dilettante dictator.  Taxes?  Skyrocketing like your ego, you preening weenie, while small businesses collapse under the weight of your ludicrous regulatory overreach.  Wildfires rage, water dries up, and you smirk through it all, posing with your artisanal French Laundry receipts as if governance were nothing more than a photo op.
You stupid douche.  Seven years of your blundering, self-aggrandizing misrule have turned the Golden State into a cautionary tale, a punchline spat out by a nation watching in disgusted awe.
I’m done.  I’m packing my bags, you insufferable charlatan, and heading for a state where competence isn’t a foreign concept – maybe Wyoming…fuck it, maybe even Idaho, ferchrissake!  Somewhere where sanity still draws breath.  This rotten cesspool you’ve sculpted with your incompetent, clammy hands isn’t worth the psychic toll anymore.
But wait – damn it to hell – logistics rear their ugly heads, and as my assistant just delicately pointed out, I can’t just up and move.  Not any time soon, anyway.  To which I said (and say) “balls!”  She makes a valid point.  So I’m shackled here, at least until 2028, trapped in your dystopian circus like a rat in a maze of your own inept and perverse design.
So, fine.  You win this round, you smug architect of ruin.  But mark my words, Newsom – I’m not slinking away.  No…if I can leave, then I’m turning this rage into a campaign.  In 2026, I’m throwing my hat into the ring, running for governor to wrest this state from your greasy paws.  I’ll campaign with the fire of a thousand suns, promising to undo your catastrophic legacy – restore jobs, clean the streets, and govern with a spine, not a fucking selfie stick.  Get ready, shitbag, because the reckoning’s coming, and you will finally be sent packing back to your Napa wine caves. 

Yr. brother in Christ,
Jayson

Nice.  Subtle, but not too.  I felt better, but I knew it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.  It seems clear, now, after I’ve had a few shots of Jack to calm down, that I must run for Governor of California.  I have to make today’s wordcount on the book, so I can’t do anything today, but tomorrow!  Shit yes…tomorrow we begin.

N.P.: “Fighting Trousers” – Professor Elemental

June 9, 2025

Today we pour some out for Charles Dickens, who dropped dead on June 9, 1870.  His death was likely due to a stroke, though the exact cause remains a subject of historical speculation.  He had been in declining health, suffering from fatigue and possibly a prior minor stroke, before collapsing at his home in Gad’s Hill Place, England.

Uncle Chuck, an absolute beast behind the quill, left behind an unfinished masterpiece, The Mystery of Edwin Drood.  His works, his sprawling epics and a certain dual-city saga, went beyond simple entertainment…they sliced through the fog of Victorian pretense with razor-sharp wit and characters so vivid they practically leap off the page, reshaping the literary landscape forever.  He wasn’t some polite putz scribbling tame tales…he was a bona fide literary rockstar who flipped the script on the status quo, dragging the gritty, unvarnished truths of poverty, class, and corruption into the spotlight.  With a narrative weave so compelling it could hypnotize, he roared for social reform.  Dying mid-novel only amps up the enigma, leaving a legacy that still echoes like a thunderclap through time.

In more temporally local news, my work continues apace.  I’m busy as hell, but getting it done.  On a sidenote, the degree to which my day-to-day existence is dictated and controlled by an 8lb girl puppy is the source of great shame and embarrassment.

N.P.: “Barbaras Rhabarberbar” – Bodo Wartke, Marti Fisher, Matthias Kräutli

June 8, 2025

 

The minivan is the automotive equivalent of those ugly-ass Crocs™: both are purchased by those who prioritize convenience and comfort over everything else, including personal dignity, self-respect, and consideration of others.  Both are purchased by people who are In No Hurry.  Which puts those of us who are in a hurry in dark states of piss-off, because if it wasn’t for you, we’d likely already be wherever it is we’re trying to go.

There is simply no excuse for minivans, yet they seem to be everywhere, particularly in front of me in the fast lane.  I simply cannot take it anymore, so I’m going to hold forth on the subject. Will it be offensive?  Likely, but only if you own one of these hunks of shit.  Offensive or not, hear me out.  I call this Contemptus Minivani.  ::clears throat::

Behold the minivan, a vehicular abomination so flagrantly designed to broadcast one message to the world at large – that its owner has abdicated all pretense of living a life of intrigue, adventure, or aesthetic discernment.  The minivan, in its lumpy, hand-held-vacuum-like, humpbacked obscenity, is the mechanized version of sweatpants worn out to a restaurant, a limp white flag raised high in the culture war against mediocrity.  These things, these bloated tin cans on wheels, traverse our streets as lumbering, impassable testaments to the most grievous sin of all time and space: not caring.  And worse still, turning that lack of care into a personality trait.

This motorized beige, this four-wheeled apology, reeks of surrender.  Surrender to practicality.  Surrender to “Oh, but little Harper has soccer at 3.”  Surrender to the numbing siren song of suburban America’s quiet desperation.  If cars were people, the minivan would be the shambling uncle who corners you at family dinners to explain the superior fuel efficiency of CVT transmissions while you frantically scan the room for an escape hatch.  And yes, I mean that literally and figuratively, because minivan drivers somehow manage to clog roads all while moving at speeds that would embarrass a glacier.

And what’s with their owners?  These people, let’s call them what they are, vehicular sadists, are out here in the wild parking lots of life pulling twelve-point turns like they’re conducting a symphony of awkwardness. What is this fetish for obstructing an entire grocery store exit with a reverse maneuver that takes so long, whole civilizations could rise and fall before their backup camera finally aligns with the perfect spot?  Is parking a minivan some sort of perverse art form?  No.  It’s vehicular Sudoku for people with a startling lack of spatial awareness and too much faith in their “blind spot detection system.”

“But oh,” you say, “Isn’t it wonderful for families?  You can fit half a T-ball team and a Costco run in the back!  Sliding doors are so convenient!”  Sure.  And it’s also very convenient to quit your job, move to Idaho, and live off canned beans, but you don’t see throngs of respectable adults lining up for that lifestyle.  There’s a line, dear reader!  At some point the unchecked excess of convenience morphs into a soul-siphoning lack of standards.  Minivans aren’t cars; they’re moving mausoleums for ambition.  You don’t drive a minivan; a minivan drives you…off the cliff of everything you once held dear.

Perhaps I can help you with a bit of perspective taking: picture this grim monstrosity from the outside.  That grotesque silhouette, a rolling  box of despair with headlights.  Minivans have contouring like they were sketched by drunk engineers with a special fetish for rectangles.  Their color palettes?  “Boring gray,” “depressing silver,” and “crime scene beige.”  Aerodynamics?  About as streamlined as a refrigerator taped to a cinder block.  And yet these behemoths seem to overtake the roads come school drop-off hours and Saturday errands, gumming up traffic like arterial plaque in the freeways of human progress.  They are rolling handbrakes on society.

Don’t get me started on the fucking interiors.  Have you seen the upholstery?  Jesus, it’s like someone spilled oatmeal on a beige carpet and then said, “Yes, this is ready for production.”  Hundreds of sticky cup holders, discarded Happy Meal toys lurking under the seats like plastic vermin.  The vague, sour musk of stale fries and crushed dreams, forever embedded in the floor mats.  People who drive these things live in oxymoronic captivity; their lives are bigger and emptier at the same time.  Expansive seating, sure, but for what?  It’s all hollow.  Their kids don’t even appreciate it.  No one in that vehicle is happy.

And look, I get it.  Not everyone’s destined to drive an Aston Martin or even something as aspirationally thrifty as a Honda Civic.  But there’s a line!  You can live a practical life without driving what is essentially an unlicensed school bus for emotionally defeated grown-ups.  The minivan, with all of its sliding doors and rear-seat “entertainment systems.” is the last refuge of the resigned.  It is automotive Stockholm Syndrome.

Do me a favor.  If you’re reading this while sitting behind the wheel of your rolling midlife crisis on autopilot in the Chick-fil-A drive-thru, just ask yourself one question.  Be honest about it: how did it come to this?  And while you’re pondering that, pull over.  Maybe sell the bastard.  Go test drive something with a semblance of personality, even if it’s just a clunky old station wagon.  Anything but this beige purgatory on wheels.  We deserve better.  You deserve better.  And for the love of all that’s decent, we’d all get to where we’re going faster if you just stopped hogging the goddamn left lane.

N.P.: “Crying’s Just a Thing You Do” – JD McPherson

June 7, 2025

I learned in this morning’s Fecal Creek Witness that Mayor Skutchinson has issued an executive order establishing a new town motto.  “Fecal Creek – A Place to Live.”  What absolute pedestrian drivel.  This new “motto” is an affront, a limp-wristed platitude so devoid of imagination it could only spring from the dullest crevice of the Mayor’s bureaucratic skull.  A place to live?  Would that not properly apply to literally any municipality?  Is that the best Mr. Mayor’s puny intellect could muster?

To be fair, it’s probably not his fault.  Not entirely, anyway.  I know Skutch.  He lives about 5 houses down from me.  We’ve gotten heroically drunk together; we play the occasional round of golf.  He’s an alright guy, and I’m confident, given the correct circumstances, he could come up with a superior motto, dripping with the sardonic flair our town deserves.  But he’s dealing with constraints, limits only residents of the Creek know about.  Until now.

Here’s the deal: prior to about 1992, Fecal Creek was known as Shotgun Junction.  The town popped up during the Gold Rush as a railroad junction between Sacramento and the gold-filled foothills.  Obviously, with all that gold flowing through it, the town became a target for outlaws, smugglers, Mexicans, and all manner of ne’er-do-wells.  Which led to the over-arming of the residents, and their overwhelming preference for arming themselves quickly became the shotgun.  Thence, obviously, the name.  It was a badass town with a badass name.  But around ’92, the idiocy of political correctness came to town, and those nefarious forces successfully berated the town’s leadership into dropping the “Shotgun” from the name, leaving it known as simply “Junction.”  Far less poetic and badass, but still acceptable to most folks.  Despite the abbreviated name, not much had changed in the town since its founding in 1850.  The population remained below 50K, and virtually everybody worked for the railroad in some capacity, or they worked In services to support the railroad workers.

But big change came in 1994, when the Clinton administration seemed to suddenly take interest in the town.   The exact mechanisms used to implement the administration’s will remain classified and guarded, so we may never know, but what we do know is that almost overnight, the name of the town was arbitrarily and capriciously changed to Fecal Creek.  Just as suddenly, Fecal Creek State Prison was built on the northern outskirts of the town, and then, everybody who lived in the town seemed to work for either the railroad or the corrections department.  Fine.  But the biggest change went unspoken and unnoticed for a couple of years: when the name was changed to Fecal Creek, the town was quietly but officially designated as not only a federal witness protection town, but it was to be the largest federal witness protection town in the country.  In other words, pretty much every federal witness was given a new name and sent to live in Fecal Creek.  The population exploded to well over 100K, most of which were fairly dangerous criminals or at best, vaguely shady characters.  With this influx of basically random shitbags, the town (having graduated to the level of small city), the identity of the place got watered down and muddy.
And now we’re getting shit like this motto: a Place to Live.

I think it’s high time that we return to our wild west roots.  We are and always have been hard-drinking, meat-eating, gun-toting badasses. All of the adults (and many of the children) are drunk and heavily armed.  It’s time we lean into our violent heritage.  I’m considering starting a petition to change the name back to Shotgun Junction.  And I minor alteration to this stupid motto would improve it exponentially: “Shotgun Junction – A Place to Die.”  Fuck yes.  Or something more aggressive, more reflective of popular sentiment in the city.  Yes.  I’ll come up with some suggestions to send to Skutch.

N.P.: “Till the Day I Die” – Halford

June 6, 2025

Hot damn!  I just love Fridays, dear reader.  I’m especially pleased with this Friday because yesterday, as I was working on the book…breakthrough!  The progress has been slow for the last month, which has been frustrating, but yesterday afternoon, significant forward movement on a chapter that has been particularly tricky.  Today was already fully scheduled, but I managed to keep things going today.  So that’s all good.

But it means that I did not, however, get to write the simply bitchin’ thing I was going to right about D-Day, which is, as I’m sure you know, dear reader, today.  This was as far as I got:

Let’s talk about June 6, 1944: D-Day, the Normandy invasion, the big ugly pivot of the Second World War, the moment when a bunch of shivering, seasick kids from Kansas and Birmingham and Winnipeg decided—or, more accurately, were decided for—to storm a beach that looked like the mouth of hell itself.

Not nearly the remembrance or tribute the day the Americans began to beat back those rotten Nazis and ultimately stomp them out in Berlin deserves, but that’s all I could do today.  I wanted to at least give it a nod.

And with that, back to it  Not sure why, but I really like writing on Friday nights.  Always have.

N.P.: “Gun for You” – Black River Delta

June 4, 2025

 

Well, shit, dear reader…no point in trying to ignore it anymore…it’s my birthday.  For the record, I hate my birthday and think that, like all birthdays past the age of 21, it is a completely pointless thing to acknowledge.  Which opinion I made most crystalline to Mgmt on this morning’s call.  But they were, as usual, insistent.
“I don’t even want to acknowledge my birthday, let alone write about it,” I said with all the authority I could muster at 06:00.
“Your readers want to know about you.  They want to celebrate things like your birthday.”  Which is simply bullshit of the lowest order.  “Let them think I was created in a lab,” I told them, already fairly drunk for that time of morning.
I know you don’t think I was created in a lab, dear reader, but I also know that adults who put significant emphasis on their birthdays, especially men, come across as, well, rather pathetic and weird to the rest of the adults who have been far too busy with real concerns to worry about anyone’s random-ass birthday for decades.
I don’t mean to be a killjoy, another curmudgeon yelling at the damn kids to get off his lawn and please, dear God, quit singing Happy Birthday at him.  [Note to self: the lyrics to that insipid fucking song should be changed to “Happy birthday at you.”  Because that’s really what’s going on here.  Most people over the age of 30, certainly 35, would really rather you not make any kind of big deal about it.  After a certain point, the “celebratory” nature decreases to almost nil, and birthdays become rather brutal and cruel reminders another year of the rapidly decreasing number of years we have in this life is gone forever.  The Clock is ticking, and there is no denying that the hour is growing late.
Of course, I know people are just trying to be nice.  It’s the one day out of the year when people are comfortable telling you that they’re glad you’re around.  And that’s great.  But a simple, maybe, dare I wish, discreet “Happy Birthday,” is plenty.  But I get it…and despite whatever bluster you read here, being wished happy birthday doesn’t actually make me conniptive or cause me to launch a cake in anger.  I like being Happy Birthdayed as much as anyone else.
I guess it’s just my age and stage of life.  Children’s birthdays are milestones and therefore almost demand celebration.  They have all these things they want to do but can’t until they’re older/taller/heavier/whatever.  They have Goals.  But in middle age, whatever goals you still have to accomplish are typically not related to or dependent upon age, outside of the rather dark “I’d better get this done before I drop dead.”  But once you’ve been adult for a good long while, and most milestones are distant in the rearview mirror, the only milestone left is Death.  And at that point, birthdays start to pack a bitter punch.
But never mind all that, dear reader…today we shall celebrate!  My personal celebration shall include lunch with the fuckin’ loved ones at some inappropriately ritzy steakhouse, getting absolutely shithoused on a wicked whiskey flight or two, and over-priced deserts that are literally on fire.  Then back to the Safe House for an orgy of homemade chocolate cupcakes, Jack Daniels, and writing.  As your mentor/role model/ersatz life-coach, I advise you to do the exact same thing.  Let’s get weird.

N.P.: “Happy Birthday – Epic Version” – Rok Nardin

June 1, 2025

 

Happy June, dear reader.  Yo rent is due.

I’m once again running behind on the production schedule for the two books I’m working on (one officially, the other not), so I’m going to keep things on the brief side today.

Today we pour some out for literary badass Edith Wharton.  The details and timeline of the final events of her life seem to vary greatly depending on which source one consults, but all accounts agree: on this day in 1937, Edith collapsed from a heart attack.  Some sources say this happened at her French country home, while others insist it happened at the home of Ogden Codman, a big-deal architect and designer.  She survived the heart attack, but she dropped dead two months later from a stroke, hitting her at Le Pavillon Colombe in Saint-Brice-sous-Foret, France, where she died at 5:30 p.m.  But that moment on June 1 marked the beginning of the end for a writer who wielded her words like a blade, carving out truths about wealth, class, and the human condition which still sting today.

Wharton didn’t dick around with pretty illusions. Books like The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth aren’t polite little tea-party reads—they’re a liver-kick, peeling back the suffocating traditions and quiet savagery of a world obsessed with appearances. She wrote with a fierce, clear-eyed intensity that makes you feel the rot beneath the polish, the ache behind the opulence. In 1921, she became the first woman to snag a Pulitzer for The Age of Innocence, which winning was a fuck-you to anyone who thought a woman couldn’t cut to the bone of the human condition.

Her death was the end of an era for a writer who made us see the cracks in the American Dream, the ones we’re still tripping over today. Wharton’s legacy demands we face the mess of our own making, unblinking. So here’s to the literary titan who never flinched, whose words still burn with a clarity that’ll wake you up faster than a shot of Jack. Let us pour some out today for Auntie Edith.

N.P.: “Black Betty” – The Dead Daisies

May 31, 2025

 

Today is hot as balls in Fecal Creek.  Day two of triple digits, dear reader, and its technically not even June!  All the prognostications, scientific and otherwise, indicate that this is going to be a violently and punitively hot summer.  As I may have mentioned before, I’m actually going to try to lean into the heat this year.  Sort of an “if you can’t beat it, join it” resignation, I suppose.  To that end, I may road trip to Death Valley this summer.  If I’m feeling really ballsy, I might even book a stay at the notorious Tarantula Ranch.  After a couple of days dealing with scorpions and vipers in 120F+ heat, coming back to The Creek will feel downright autumnal.  Such drastic measures may be ill advised though…even a couple of days in those sorts of conditions can permanently scramble a person’s mind, even if it doesn’t kill him.  Rumor has it that Charles Manson was a pretty reserved, well-adjusted dude before he decided to take up residence in Death Valley.  I dunno.  We’ll see.

There’s no getting around the fact that aside from personal misery and discomfort and swamp ass, this heat makes life around here difficult.  I’m pretty much stuck in the Safe House for the time being…the asphalt on the street outside is so hot that it causes tires to melt completely in a couple of blocks.  Regrettably, I didn’t stock up on booze before the heat wave hit, so I’m shit out of luck in the tequila and whiskey department.  The heat seems to block satellite signals, so there’s no reliable internet connection.  The garage door quit working, though that might be due to demonic possession rather than extreme heat…who knows.  No one’s talking.  Even my Mexican puppy, who was whelped in the brutal Tijuana heat, finds the present conditions untenable.  She’s on strike, refusing to even be cute until the situation improves.

But never mind all that…today is massive on the Dead Poets Society calendar.  On this wild, untamed day—May 31, 1819—a raw force of nature roared into being in West Hills, New York. Walt Whitman, the untethered soul who’d soon carve his name into the beating heart of poetry, came kicking and screaming into the world. This isn’t our usual birthday nod, dear reader…it’s a full-throated howl for the man who’d become the father of free verse, a literary outlaw who tore through the stuffy rules of his time with the reckless abandon of a storm. His work, sprawling and sweaty like Leaves of Grass, doesn’t play nice with polite society—it’s transcendental, sure, but it’s also got the grit of realism, the kind of voice that makes you feel the dirt caked under your nails and the thrum of your own pulse.

Whitman’s words aren’t here to coddle you. They’re a call to the wild, a dare to embrace the messy, beautiful chaos of the human spirit and the body electric. His poems still get hauled into classrooms, thank Christ, not because they’re tame or safe, but because they’ve got the kind of fire that makes you feel alive, line after line. It’s the sort of fearless, in-your-face brilliance that keeps poetry kicking through the ages.

To demonstrate Whitman’s current cultural significance, remember, dear reader, that it was Walt Whitman who ultimately brought down Walter White.  If it hadn’t been for Uncle Walt, Breaking Bad would likely be into its 10th amazing season by now.

So here’s to Whitman, the rugged bard who showed us how to sing our own song, unapologetically, with every ounce of our being. Let’s raise a glass (unfortunately the strongest thing on hand is lemonade) to the man who’s been shaking things up for over two centuries—may his spirit keep us restless, always.

N.P.: “The Heat” – The Bones of J.R. Jones