As the dear reader well knows, today, November 5 is the day England almost got lit – literally.  Let us, you and I, consider the singular atmospheric conditions of London in the Year of Our Lord 1605, a city marinating in a soupy paranoia, a veritable gumbo of religious animus and political backstabbing so vicious it makes modern electoral cycles look like a game of schoolyard grab-ass.  The air was thick with soot and suspicion, the Thames sloshing like a drunk’s conscience, and under the cobblestone civility of Parliament’s sacred underbelly squatted a man with a name destined for fireworks packaging and adolescent rebellion tattoos: Guy Fawkes.  A man whose mustache would later be weaponized by anarcho-hacktivists and Hot Topic merch designers alike.  But back then, he was just a hard-case Catholic mercenary with a penchant for black powder and a rather terminal disagreement with the Protestant ascendancy.

You have to admire the sheer, unadulterated balls of the plan.  This was 36 barrels of gunpowder stacked like a theological middle finger aimed directly at the Protestant establishment.  Fawkes wasn’t alone – he was the flammable tip of a conspiratorial spear wielded by Robert Catesby and a cadre of disillusioned papists who’d had enough of Elizabethan hangovers and James I’s anti-Catholic chokehold.  They wanted revolution, not reform.  They wanted to turn Parliament into a crater and crown a puppet queen who’d genuflect to Rome while sipping sacramental wine from the skull of a dead Puritan.  Fuck yeah!

Spoiler: it didn’t work.

Fawkes got caught red-handed (or, more accurately, red-fisted) clutching matches and loitering near the powder like a pyromaniac at a birthday party.  Torture ensued.  They stretched him on the rack until his joints sang soprano.  He confessed, of course.  They all did.  The gunpowder treason and plot unraveled quickly, and the conspirators were executed with absolute, theatrical brutality.

The plot failed, of course, but the myth metastasized.  Guy Fawkes became the patron saint of beautiful failure.  A martyr not for religion, but for the idea that the system is rigged and sometimes the only sane response is to blow it to hell.

So tonight, while the sky over London blisters with government-sanctioned pyrotechnics, raise a glass of something flammable to Guido Fawkes—the man who proved that sometimes the most dangerous weapon isn’t gunpowder.

N.P.: “Notice” – Joe Grah

I’ve been sitting in this chair, typing, for so long I can’t remember the last time I could feel my ass.  Totally numb.  Maybe it got pissed off and left.  Nobody’s talking.  My Apple Watch has been chirping and buzzing and whining and bitching for hours now, giving my dire warnings about needing to stand the fuck up in order to avoid death by pulmonary embolism.  Alas.  Occupational hazard, I suppose.  Never mind.

I’ve been reading a lot of local history recently…it’s surprisingly violent.  Lots of gun fights, stagecoach robberies, showdowns…it was the Wild West.

Last night I was reading about this town a couple of dozen miles up the hills from where my ass is presently, seemingly, glued to this chair, called Copperopolis.  And on this day in 1883, there was badassery.

Dig, if you will, the picture, dear reader: the air hangs thick with the promise of gold dust and low-grade desperation, a uniquely Californian scent.  And somewhere in this sunblasted landscape, a man of letters, a gentleman of the road, is preparing his final act. There were plenty of roadside thugs waiting to bludgeon a driver for a his pocket watch (hell, there are even more of them now…California’s a shithole).  No.  This is Charles Boles, or maybe Bolton, or maybe some other name entirely, but known to the pants-wetting couriers of Wells Fargo as Black Bart.  A childhood role model of mine, he always seemed to understand that crime, true crime, is performance art.  Yes, he was a stagecoach bandit, but he was also an author, a character of his own meticulous creation.  Dapper, they said.  Never fired a shot, they said.  They said he wielded politeness like a weapon and poetry like a business card.  He robbed people with panache…just by being that badass.

Imagine it, man…the grinding wheels of the stagecoach, the exhausted breath of the horses, the sudden, theatrical appearance of a man in a flour-sack mask.  He’s not brandishing a cannon; he’s projecting an aura.  An aura that says, I am infinitely more interesting than you, and I’ll be taking your money now.  He robbed 28 of these things.  Twenty-eight.  All without so much of a hint of the violence that defined his contemporaries.  He was an artist working in the medium of highway robbery.

And like any good writer, he couldn’t resist leaving a note.  After this final smash-up, he left behind a fragment of his particular brand of doggerel, a little literary fuck you to the establishment he routinely plundered: “Here I lay waiting in ambush to make that goddamn coach a smash…”

The thing that finally brought that curtain down on our poet, bandit wasn’t something like a dropped pistol or a careless fingerprint.  It was a laundry mark (a tiny, coded symbol used back then) on the handkerchief he wrote his poem on.  Ultimately, this most prolific stagecoach robber was undone by his dry cleaning.

They caught him, of course.  Sent him away.  He did his six years, walked out of prison a free man, and then – poof.  Vanished.  He dissolved back into the American ether, leaving behind nothing but a string of perfectly executed robberies and a handful of terrible poems.  He became a ghost, a myth, a character who wrote himself out of his own story at the perfect moment.  I dunno…I thought it was cool.

N.P.: “Hell in the Hollow” – Gravel N’ Bones

Well, shit, dear reader…here we are again, you and I, caught in the temporal crossfire of a twice-yearly madness so profoundly stupid, so breathtakingly asinine, that it beggars belief.  We have just participated in that pitiful ritualistic act of national self-sabotage known as Daylight Saving Time (DST), a collective delusion that suggests, apparently, that we can somehow cheat the sun by dicking around with our clocks.  It’s a cosmic prank played on a continental scale, and the punchline, dear reader, is us.  Every single one of us, bleary-eyed and clutching our coffee like a life raft, stumbling through a Monday morning that feels like a Sunday night that’s been mugged in a dark alley. Daylight Saving Time is a flaming bag of legislative dogshit left on the doorstep of reason.  It’s the kind of idea that sounds clever if you’ve just huffed a gallon of leaded gasoline and decided clocks are your enemy.  Twice a year, we engage in this mass psychotic episode where we pretend that time is a rubber band we can stretch to fit our delusions.  And now I’m hearing some lobotomized time cultists want to make this madness permanent?  Jesus.

Let us, for a moment, peel back the layers of this particularly rancid onion.  I’ve always been told, often with the kind of condescending pat on the head reserved for small children and large dogs, that this is about saving daylight.  Saving it from what, exactly?  Is the sun on a payment plan?  Are we in danger of celestial foreclosure if we don’t hoard our precious photons?  The whole premise is a monument to human arrogance, the idea that we can bend the unyielding physics of planetary rotation to our will by collectively lying to ourselves about what time it is.

The arguments propping up this chronological heresy are so flimsy they’d disintegrate in a light drizzle.  Most members of our society are so slavishly accepting of what they’re told, they’ve never even thought to ask why put ourselves through this nonsense twice a year.  But if they did ask (I was demanding answers when I was 6, and still have not heard anything that makes any sense whatsoever).

First, there’s the grand old myth of the farmer.  Oh, the noble farmer!  Picture him, dear reader.  Straw hat, single piece of wheat dangling from his lips, rising with the roosters to till the soil.  The narrative is that DST gives this salt-of-the-earth hero more daylight to work his fields.  This is, to put it mildly, utter horseshit.  I lived on a farm for a few years, and I can personally attest to this: Farmers, by the very nature of their profession, work by the sun, not by the arbitrary numbers on a clock.  Cows don’t consult a Timex before they decide its milking time.  The sun rises, the work begins.  The sun sets, the work ends (but with lighting and farming equipment being what they’ve been the last several decades, work can go on all night (making this entire argument even more absurd)).  This whole agrarian justification is a folksy lie, a sepia-toned piece of propaganda from a time when people were apparently more gullible.  The truth is, most modern farmers find the time change a disruptive pain in the ass.

Second, consider the abject carnage this temporal shift inflicts upon our collective well-being.  That “lost” hour in the spring isn’t just a minor inconvenience; it’s a society-wide biological assault.  Studies and statistics all show a significant spike in heart attacks, strokes, and workplace injuries in the days following the “spring forward.”  We are, in essence, subjecting the entire population to a mandatory dose of jet lag for…what, exactly?  So that the goddamn suburbanites can get in another nine holes of golf before dusk?  So their kids can play more Little League?  We are literally sacrificing human health on the altar of evening leisure.  It’s a barbaric trade-off, a public health crisis we willingly inflict upon ourselves twice a year with the cheerful idiocy of a lemming convention.  Permanent DST would mean darker mornings year-round, which is a direct assault on your body’s natural light-based calibration system. And traffic accidents surge after the time change, especially in spring when people lose an hour of sleep and drive like caffeinated zombies.  I’m old enough to remember the 1974 experiment with permanent DST, and the wave of children who were hit by cars in the morning darkness  Congress had to yank the plug on that disaster after just a few months.  But sure, let’s do it again – because nothing says “progress” like sacrificing schoolkids on the altar of artificial sunshine.

And third, there’s the energy savings canard.  This is the one the bureaucrats love.  The original justification for DST was wartime fuel conservation.  The idea was that shifting daylight would reduce the need for artificial lighting in the evening, thereby saving precious energy.  It sounds plausible, right?  Logical, even.  Except it’s not true.  Not anymore. That was a century ago, when people lit their homes with whale oil and prayed to the gods of coal.  Today, we’re drowning in screens, air conditioners, and 24/7 electricity consumption.  Studies show DST increases energy use in some states.  Even if managed any miniscule savings in some fictional American city where they only use energy for lighting, that savings would be completely offset, and then some, by increased energy consumption in the dark, newly-colder mornings.  People wake up in the pitch-black and crank up the heat.  They turn on more lights to navigate their pre-dawn homes.  The net effect on energy consumption is negligible at best, and at worst, we’re actually burning more fuel to sustain this farce.  We’re not saving daylight by any stretch, we’re just shifting it around like a drunk trying to rearrange furniture in a burning house.

Which brings us to the real kicker: the Sunshine Protection Act.  A name so Orwellian it makes “hate speech” sound like Shakespeare.  This legislative turd, championed by the kind of politicians who think time zones are a racist, capitalist plot, would make DST permanent.  They want to lock us into permanent chronological dissonance, where the sun is at its highest point at 1 p.m. and school children are waiting for the bus in what feels like the dead of night.  It would be like living in a casino designed by Kafka.  It’s a special kind of madness to want to live your entire life on a lie, to permanently divorce your societal clock from solar reality.  These are people who would try to solve a flood by turning up the radio.  Their solution to a broken system is to make the brokenness permanent.

Sleep scientists, medical associations, and anyone with a functioning frontal lobe advocate for permanent standard time.  But no – some idiots want to keep the clocks jacked forward so they can play golf at 7 p.m. while the rest of us stumble through the morning like jet-lagged wombats.

So, dear reader, let us stand in unified, incandescent rage against this tyranny of the clock.  This is not a quaint tradition.  It’s a mass-scale, twice-yearly exercise in self-sabotage, a solution in search of a problem that no longer exists, propped up by lies and defended by fools.  It’s time to kill it.  Kill it with fire.  Let the clocks be, let the sun do its thing, and let us, for the love of all that’s holy, get some goddamn sleep.  When you wake up, tell your congressperson to stick DST where the sun don’t shine – because that’s exactly what it does.

N.P.: “You Don’t Turn Me On” – Bile

And so it arrives.  The Main Event.  Halloween proper, the zero hour of the Gallaway Calendar, which, if you’ve been paying attention (and I know most of you haven’t, because you were busy duct-taping fake intestines to your front porch or mainlining candy corn like it’s Adderall), marks not the end but the beginning.  The Big Bang of the weird.  The first tick of the cosmic clock that runs of mischief, masks, and the sacred art of pretending.  You want to be a sexy vampire?  A depressed cowboy?  A sentient bag of Doritos?  Today, the universe says: “Yes.”

Like any good New Year, today demands a resolution.  Not the gym membership kind.  Not the “I’ll stop doomscrolling after midnight” kind.  I’m talking about the real stuff.  The marrow-deep vow to live louder, weirder, and with more intentional chaos.  To reject the tyranny of the beige.  To embrace the sacred disorder of the human soul.

Because Halloween is the only day the world agrees to play by Gallaway rules: that masks reveal more than they hide, that fear is a form of worship, and that the line between comedy and horror is not a line at all, but a Mobius strip make out of rubber bats and existential dread.

So tonight, when you’re out there – whether you’re chaperoning sugar-addled goblins or dancing in a warehouse dressed as a haunted spreadsheet – remember this: you are not celebrating death.  You are celebrating the refusal to be dead.  You are ringing in the new year of the beautifully deranged, the spiritually feral, the unapologetically strange.

Happy Halloween, dear reader.  May your candy be spiked, your costumes be cursed, and your soul be just a little more unhinged than it was yesterday.

Now go howl at something.

N.P.: “This Is Halloween” – Marilyn Manson

Hot damn, dear reader!  Tomorrow is Halloween, the New Year’s Day of the damned, the divine, and the deliriously decorated.   The annual ritualistic disembowelment of the pumpkins is complete, carved with surgical precision and a touch of psychosis.  Their malignant grins, a series of jagged and frankly unsettling triangles that leer like they know something about you that you don’t (and they do…they absolutely do), now illuminate the porch of the Safe House, casting a light that feels less like a welcome and more like a warning.  Which is, of course, the point.  Out here, where the treeline get thick and the ambient weirdness is a constant, low-grade hum, the 30th of October serves as the true demarcation.  Forget that champagne-and-confetti horseshit at the end of December; tonight is New Year’s Eve on the Gallaway Calendar.

This is the precipice, the final, deep breath before the glorious plunge.  Tomorrow, the veil gets so thin you could poke a finger through it and touch something cold and long-dead on the other side.  Not that the vibe here at the command center every deviates far from this particular frequency.  We exist in a state of perpetual autumn, a kind of year-long Samhain simmer.  Which is to say: cobwebs are not seasonal, they’re structural.  Skeletons aren’t props, they’re roommates.  The Safe House doesn’t do transitions – it marinates in perpetual October.  The aesthetic is year-round: a curated chaos of thrift-store taxidermy, flickering orange lights, and the faint scent of cinnamon and brimstone.  If Martha Stewart and Aleister Crowley had a baby and raised it in a haunted bowling alley, that baby would call the Safe House “home.”  The difference now is the rest of the world, for one fleeting, candy-coated night, finally gets the memo.  They catch up.

And then, as if the cosmos itself decided to sweeten the deal with a temporal cherry on top, we get the Fall Back.  This weekend, we reclaim that stolen hour.  We bend time back to its proper, non-daylight-saving configuration – what can only be described as Real Time.  An allegedly “extra” hour to exist within the perfect, chaotic apex of the year.  An extra sixty minutes of darkness and possibility.  Could things possibly ascend to a higher plane of perfection?

Fuck yes, they could.  The forecast, that meteorological oracle of institutionalized guesswork, whispers of a potential deluge later this week.  A solid gray sky-opening wash of rain to cleanse the psychic palate and settle the dust.

So here we stand, on the threshold of our New Year, with carved gourds bearing witness and the promise of temporal normalcy and a biblical drenching on the horizon.  The air is electric with the correct kind of wrongness.  Let the saccharine charade of the straight world have its day.  We know what time it really is.

So light your candles.  Lace up your boots.  Put on something that makes you look like you escaped from a Victorian asylum or a failed goth band.  This is the night before the night.  The last gasp of the old year.  The first breath of the new.  And if you’re lucky,  you’ll wake up Sunday soaked, slightly hungover, and reborn.  Happy Halloween Eve.  Let’s get weird.

N.P.: “Night of the Wolf” – Nox Arcana

We don’t need to possess everyone. We don’t have to. We have useful idiots who do more damage than we ever could. They carry out our agenda without ever knowing it. They think they’re doing good. They think they’re enlightened. But they’re just pawns. Tools. And when they’re no longer useful… we discard them.  ~ Lord Nefarious

N.P.: “Coexist With My Fist” – Hard Archive

Good day, dear reader, literary degenerates, and word perverts of various species.  And what a day it is…a cool fall day in the Creek, all cloudy and drizzly.  And only six days until Halloween, the New Years Day of the Gallaway Calendar.  I like it.

For absolutely no reason at all, I’ve decided today’s Word of the Day is a lexical artifact, dredged up from the Mariana Trench of the English language, found in the sedimentary layers of Latin, polished with the spit of linguistic masochists, and flung into the modern lexicon like a grenade of nonsense and confusion.  [That was quite an introduction…all apologies, dear reader…yrs. truly had a big breakfast, and a bigger lunch.  Never mind.]  Ladies and gentlemen, I give you nudiustertian –  adjective – pertaining to the day before yesterday.  Yes, a whole word for a concept we’ve clumsily handled in three.  And it’s so perfectly useless it’s beautiful.
Etymologically, it’s a smash-and-grab from Latin: nudius = “now is the day” and tertius = “third.”  So nudiustertian means “the third day from now,” which, in the twisted logic of time travel and English grammar, lands you squarely in the day before yesterday.  You can almost hear some toga-clad senator slurring it after too much wine, trying to remember which day he misplaced his chariot keys.  It’s the kind of word that makes even seasoned lexicographers reach for the desk whiskey.

So there I was, sitting in a booth at the Pink Iguana, where the air was thick with the ghosts of myriad bad decision’s – a miasma of stale cigarette smoke, cheap whiskey, and Glitter Bomb body spray.  My present companion – stage name: Tropicana, real name: Bethany – is straddling a barstool like it owes her child support, wearing nothing but glitter and the kind of confidence that makes Wall Street brokers cry in the shower.
I tell her, “You remember what happened nudiustertian?”
She blinks.  “Is that a sex position?”
“No, it’s a word.  It means the day before yesterday.”
She squinted at me. It was the same look she gave a guy who tried to pay for a lap dance with a coupon.  “Why not just say ‘the day before yesterday’?”
“Because language is a weapon, Bethany.  And sometimes you need a sniper rifle instead of a butter knife.”
She started at me, a long, unnerving silence stretching between us, punctuated only by the frantic clatter of my own self-satisfaction echoing in my skull.  I felt brilliant.  A poet.  A warrior of words bringing light to the darkened corners of her vocabulary.
Finally, a slow, dangerous smile spread across her face.
“You know,” she said, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper.  “There’s a word for people who use words like that.”
I leaned in, genuinely curious.  “Oh yeah?  What is it?”
She leaned closer, her lips almost touching my ear.
“Unfuckable,” she breathed.
Then she took the bottle I had just paid for, winked, and sashayed away, leaving me alone with the sudden, crushing weight of my own magnificent vocabulary. 

So there it is, dear reader…nudiustertian.  Use it if you want to sound like a time-traveling Victorian ghost with a thesaurus addiction.
Use it to confuse your friends, alienate your enemies, and seduce someone who thinks etymology is foreplay.
Use it because words are weapons, and this one’s a dagger dipped in irony.

N.P.: “Rivers Laughing” – promptgenix

Woke up this morning and I got myself a beer,
The future’s uncertain and the end is always near. 
~ James Douglas Morrison

I’m not afraid of death, and I’m not afraid of dying, but the idea of not existing is kind of a weird one that I have some trouble getting my mental arms around some nights.  The whole issue of mortality has been very much on my mind, especially the last several years when various things have tried to kill me and I’ve had to ‘rassle them into submission.  Each time, I’ve had the advantage of knowing that whatever I was dealing with at the time was simply not cool or interesting enough to be the actual Thing That Takes Me Out.  Cancer?  Nah.  Heart attack?  Hell no.  Gunfight with federales at the Tijuana/San Ysidro border?  Fuck yes.  Losing a fight with a rattlesnake?  I’ll take it.

But let’s talk about a real goddamn exit.  Not the slow fade into nursing-home tapioca, but a final act that achieves the level of myth or legend.  October 24, 1926, in Detroit, a city of steel and fury, where Houdini took his last bow.  And what a bow it was.  The man was burning up, a furnace of a fever scorching him from the inside out, his own appendix having staged a rather nasty and decidedly unmagical rebellion.  A lesser mortal – say, you or I – would be curled up, mewling pitifully for a nurse.  Not Uncle Harry.

Houdini, the ur-escapologist, the man who treated chains and straitjackets like they were merely inconvenient suggestions, dragged his fever-racked carcass onto the stage of the Garrick Theatre because the show must go on, goddammit.  The contract was signed.  The audience was there.  And Harry Houdini, a man whose entire existence was a fuck you to limitations, wasn’t about to be undone by something as pedestrian as a ruptured internal organ.  He stumbled, he sweated, he nearly collapsed, but he finished the show.  A week later, the curtain came down for good.  Peritonitis.  A messy, biological trap even he couldn’t pick the lock on.

But the death seems almost incidental.  A footnote.  The legend is what matters.  Much more than just a magician, Houdini was a walking, breathing, fist-swinging piece of American folklore.  You can draw a straight, jagged line from Houdini’s on-stage battles to the very heart of certain narrative traditions.  He engaged in a public, ink-soaked war with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the world’s most logical mind, over the fuzzy, ectoplasmic nonsense of Spiritualism.  Houdini, the ultimate illusionist, dedicated his life to exposing the fraudulent tricks of others, a crusade that was equal parts public service and some pretty amazing, high-minded flexing.  He even put his money where his mouth was and wrote, peeling back the curtain with a surprising authorial flair.  His book, The Unmasking of Robert-Houdin, is a meticulously constructed argument, a writerly vivisection of the very art form he perfected.

Then you have the fictional echoes, with his shadow falling across the pages of guys like E.L. Doctorow.  In Ragtime, Houdini is a symbol of human defiance against the locked doors of class, race, and fate.

That final, agonizing performance in Detroit was the apotheosis of it all.  Battered, poisoned from within, but utterly unbowed.  He took the stage knowing, I’m sure, on some primal level, that this was the end of the road.  He faced the abyss not with a whimper, but with a card trick.  And that is rather badass.  He didn’t just escape handcuffs and water torture chambers.  On that last night, he made a damn good attempt at escaping mortality itself, turning his own death into the one story that, nearly a century late, still refuses to be buried.

N.P.: “Circle of Samhain” – Slaev