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

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

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

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

Strap in, you uncultured heathens, because today we’re going to the fucking ballet.  Because we’ve got class, don’t we, dear reader?  Damn right.

Rewind to May 29, 1913, when Paris’s Théâtre des Champs-Élysées became ground zero for a creative detonation that’d leave the arts bleeding and begging for more. Igor Stravinsky, a mad Russian genius with a penchant for sonic mayhem, unleashed The Rite of Spring—a ballet so raw, so primal, it made the powdered-wig crowd lose their goddamn minds. No tutu-and-slippers affair, this; this is a feral, earth-shaking ritual that’d ripple into the literary sphere like a tidal wave crashing through a library.

The setup alone is a fever dream: Stravinsky’s score is nuts (at least it was considered so then), all jagged rhythms and dissonant howls, conjures a pagan rite where a young girl dances herself to death to appease the gods of spring.  The premiere was a straight-up scandal. The audience rioted—fists flying, boos drowning out the orchestra—because this wasn’t art as they knew it; this was a declaration of war on tradition. Stravinsky later said he’d never seen such a “terrifying” reaction, and Nijinsky (the choreographer) had to shout counts from the wings just to keep the dancers on beat amid the chaos.

Why does this matter to a literary fiend? Because in addition to pretty much breaking music and dance,  The Rite of Spring cracked open the cultural psyche, inspiring writers to chase that same raw, untamed energy. Modernist scribes like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, already stirring the pot with their own rule-breaking verse, found a kindred spirit in Stravinsky’s rebellion. You can draw a straight line from the ballet’s savage pulse to the apocalyptic undertones of Eliot’s The Waste Land, published just nine years later in 1922.

This event, a glorious middle finger to the establishment, redefined what art could be. It dared to be ugly, to be real, to rip the veil off human nature and show the blood beneath. On May 29, 1913, Stravinsky lit a fuse that’d burn through the century, and we’re still feeling the heat. In that same spirit, let’s write something today that’d make the old guard clutch their pearls all over again.

N.P.: “Hau Ruck 2025” – KMFDM

Listen up, my young, well-meaning, but benighted reader: someone wished me a “Happy Memorial Day” this morning, and I damn near lost my mind. Happy? No. This isn’t a frolic through a field of daisies, some Hallmark-sponsored excuse to crack open a cold one and pretend everything’s peachy. It’s not the “kick-off” of summer.  It’s not just a great time to get a great deal on a new car down at the Fecal Creek Auto Mall.  Today, May 26, 2025, is Memorial Day, dammit, a solemn call to remember the soldiers who bled out on battlefields so we could sit here arguing about the best hot dog toppings. It’s a day to honor the dead, not to slap a smiley face on sacrifice. So let’s cut the crap and dig into what this day actually means, beyond the shallow platitudes.

Memorial Day—originally Decoration Day, born in the shadow of the Civil War back in 1868—exists to commemorate the men and women who died in military service. We’re talking about the ones who didn’t come home, the ones who gave every last breath for a cause bigger than themselves, whether it was storming the beaches of Normandy, sweating it out in the jungles of Vietnam, or facing down hell in the deserts of Afghanistan. It’s not Veterans Day, which honors all who served; this is for the fallen, the ones whose names are etched on gravestones and whispered in prayers. The first official observance saw folks decorating graves at Arlington National Cemetery, a tradition that still holds, and it became a federal holiday in 1971, pegged to the last Monday in May. That’s the raw history, but the meaning runs deeper—it’s about facing the cost of freedom, the kind of cost that leaves families shattered and futures unwritten.

So how do we observe it without turning it into a quasi-patriotic circus? First, ditch the “happy” nonsense and start with respect. Visit a cemetery—Arlington if you’re near D.C., or your local veterans’ plot—and lay a flower on a soldier’s grave. If you can’t get to a cemetery, take a moment of silence at 3:00 PM local time, part of the National Moment of Remembrance, and let the weight of those sacrifices sink in. Fly the flag at half-staff until noon, as tradition demands, to signal mourning before the day shifts to resilience. And if you’re near a military base, listen for the bugle call of Taps at dusk—it’ll haunt you, in the best way.

Don’t just stop at gestures, though. Educate yourself on the stories of the fallen—read about someone like Sgt. William H. Carney, the first Black Medal of Honor recipient, who took a bullet to keep the flag flying during the Civil War, or Cpl. Jason Dunham, who threw himself on a grenade in Iraq in 2004 to save his squad. Their courage isn’t abstract; it’s the kind of raw, unflinching bravery that demands we live better, not just grill better. And if you’re moved, support organizations like the Wounded Warrior Project or the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors (TAPS), which help families of the fallen navigate their grief.

Memorial Day isn’t just about celebration—it’s a reckoning. It’s about staring into the abyss of loss and vowing to remember, to carry the torch for those who can’t. We can certainly celebrate the freedom the fallen provided for us, but let’s remember to honor the dead with the reverence they deserve. Anything less is a betrayal of the blood they spilled.

N.P.: “The Star Spangled Banner/4th of July Reprise” – Boston