Apologies for my absence, dear reader.  The book has me busy, life is constantly happening, and I had unusual social obligations to meet.  They were unusual because I usually ignore most social obligations, since they seem to me to be pointless and silly.  Anyway, I’ve been busy.  More on the book soon, but for now…today’s business.

September 30, 1924.  Somewhere in the humid, gothic sprawl of New Orleans, a baby was born who would grow up to be the kind of writer that makes other writers want to either quit or drink themselves into oblivion trying to keep up.  Truman Capote, the man, the myth, the walking contradiction in a bespoke suit, was born on this day.  And if he were here, you can be your last cigarette he’d be holding court at some dimly lit bar, sipping something expensive, and eviscerating everyone in the room with that razor-sharp tongue of his.

Capote was a goddamn spectacle.  A high-wire act of wit, charm, and venom, all wrapped up in a voice that could cut glass.  He gave us Breakfast at Tiffany’s, an almost perfect novella, and In Cold Blood, a book that basically invented a whole new genre while making us all question whether we’re the good guys or just slightly better-dressed villains.

But let’s not kid ourselves – Truman wasn’t just about the words.  He was a true scenester…he was about the drama, the show.  He threw parties that make Gatsby look like a PTA meeting.  He burned bridges with the kind of flair that made you want to applaud even as the flames licked at your own feet.  He was the best kind of genius: a troublemaker, a provocateur, a man who knew that being boring was the only real sin.

So here’s to you, Truman…the man who taught us to turn your life into art and turn that art into legend.  Like any great author, he made us laugh, cry, and occasionally want to punch him in the face.  Happy birthday…the world’s a little duller without you.

I might go re-read Music for Chameleons and drink something that burns on the way down.  Because, as Truman taught me, life’s too short for cheap booze and bad prose.

N.P.: “Skulls” – Pearce Roswell

Some days are for quiet reflection, dear reader.  This is not one of them.  This is a day for the guys who bet the whole goddamn farm, the ones who drew the maps, and the one who chronicled the beautiful, roaring decay of it all.  So pour a glass of whatever vintage your desk whiskey is this month, and let’s get to it.

First up: 1493.  Christopher Columbus, not a year after stumbling upon what he insisted was the scenic route to India, decides to double down.  Forget one rickety voyage; this time he’s back with a goddamn armada.  Seventeen ships and 1,200 men, all chomping at the proverbial bit to colonize the New World.  It was a high-seas hostile takeover bid, funded by royals who were probably just tired of hearing him talk.  This second trip was about planting flags and laying claim, a sort of primordial manifest destiny with more scurvy.

Fast forward to 1789.  The smoke from the revolution has barely cleared, and the ink on the Constitution is still wet.  So, being on a bit of a roll, the founding fathers created the Judiciary Act.  They conjure the Supreme Court and the Attorney General out of thin air.  With these, the founders created a legal framework meant to put a leash of the very power they’d just fought to seize.  It’s the moment the wild, screaming spirit of rebellion put on a robe and picked up a gavel.

And then, the main event for our kind of degenerate: 1896.  F. Scott Fitzgerald is born in St. Paul, Minnesota.  This is the origin story of the man who would document the glittering rot at the core of the American Dream.  Mainlining the Jazz Age, Scott and Zelda burned through life with the kind of glorious, self-destructive velocity that lesser souls can only read about.  His prose was sharper than a broken champagne glass.  And his life was a cautionary tale wrapped in glamour.  He partied with Hemmingway, wrestled with his own demons in public, and wrote it all down in sentences so perfect they make you want to drink and cry.  He was an amazing failure, and the patron saint of anyone who’s ever believed that a little excess is the only way to live.  Amen.

So here’s to September 24.  A day that reminds us that neither history nor great art are made by the timid.

N.P.: “Back in Black (Soul)” – FAKE MUSIC

Goddammit…it’s Monday again, dear reader.  But this particular Monday happens to be September 22nd, which is a date when the cosmic tumblers clicked into place to reveal a pageant of death, art, and the messy, ink-stained business of freedom.  It’s a day for the poets with blood on their knuckles and the presidents with the weight of a nation’s soul on their shoulders.  So let’s get to it.

First, let’s teleport back to 1598, to a London stinking of gin and plague, where the original literary badass, Ben Jonson, found himself in what those limey gits would call “a spot of bother.” See, old Ben, a man whose plays were as dense and layered as his liver was probably cirrhotic, got into a duel.  With swords.  Not some bullshit metaphorical duel of wits on the stage or something, but a real, cold-steel-in-the-guts affair with an actor named Gabriel Spenser.  Fucking actors.  Jonson, a bricklayer’s son with a poet’s rage, ran Spenser through.  Killed him dead.  So, British law, in its infinite and typically idiotic majesty, slapped him in irons for manslaughter.  For winning a legitimate, accepted duel!  Things were dark for Ben.  The gallows loomed.  But, in more English jurisprudential silliness, there existed a get-out-of-jail free card for the literate reprobate: something called “benefit of clergy.”  Jonson, standing before the executioner, probably nursing a world-ending hangover, claimed his clerical privilege.  He recited a psalm in Latin – the so-called “neck verse” – proving he could read and was thus, by some twisted British logic, too valuable to hang.  He walked away with a mere branding on his thumb, a permanent reminder that sometimes, the only thing separating a genius from a corpse is the ability to conjugate a dead language.  A lesson for us all, I think.

Fast forward about 178 years, across the pond to the nascent, screaming birth of America.  September 22, 1776.  The air is thick with gunpowder and revolutionary fervor.  A young captain named Nathan Hale, 21 years old, is about to be stretched by the neck by the insipid British.  His crime was espionage.  He was a spy, a ghost in the enemy’s machine, caught behind the lines.  Before they kicked the stool out from under him, he uttered the most badass, patriotic, and noble line ever: “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.”  Fuck yes.

You have to respect the balls of that statement.  No goddamn whining, no pleading, just pure, crystalline conviction.  It’s the kind of quote that gets carved into granite, the kind of sentiment that fuels nations.  It’s a far cry from Jonson’s linguistic loophole, a different brand of courage altogether.  One man uses words to save his own skin; another uses them to martyr it.  History, dear reader, is a study in contrasts.

Then, the calendar pages keep turning, relentlessly, as they do, until we land on 1862.  The nation Hale died for is now tearing itself apart at the seams.  Republican President Abraham Lincoln, sat in his office, the air thick with cigar smoke and the ghosts of thousands of dead boys.  On this day, he unsheathes his own weapon, not a sword or a spy, but a document: the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.

This was a strategic masterstroke wrapped in a moral imperative – a piece of paper that weaponized freedom.  It declared that as of the new year, all slaves in the Confederate territories would be “then, thenceforward, and forever free.”  It was a promise, a threat, and a seismic shift in the very definition of the war.  It was the moment the conflict stopped being just about preserving a union and started being about forging a new one, one cleansed however imperfectly, of its original sin.  It was the dirty, necessary, and world-altering work of a Republican president who understood that history is written not just with ink, but with blood and righteous fire.

And just to prove that the universe has a flair for the dramatic, let’s skip over to Munich, 1869.  While America was still binding its wounds, Germany was birthing a different species of monster.  Richard Wagner, the man with the titanic ego and even more titanic talent, unleashed the first part of his magnum opus, Das Rheingold.  This was a four-part, fifteen-hour mythological apocalypse set to music, a saga of gods, dwarves, and a cursed ring that would make Tolkien blush.

The premiere itself was a spectacle of chaos, staged against the composer’s wishes.  But it was the beginning of The Ring Cycle, an artistic undertaking so vast and utterly megalomaniacal that it still feels impossible.  Wagner was trying to forge a new German mythology from scratch, using trombones and sopranos instead of hammers and steel.  It was the ultimate artistic flex, declaring that art could be as powerful and world-shaping as any proclamation or revolution.

So there you have it.  September 22nd: a day of saved necks and sacrificed lives, of freedom declared and myths born.  It’s a chaotic cocktail of human brilliance and brutality, a reminder that the people who leave a mark on this wretched, beautiful world are the ones who aren’t afraid to duel, to spy, to sign the damn paper, or to write the impossible opera.
What did you do today?

N.P.: “Dagegen” – Eisbrecher

Well, here we are again, dear reader, spinning around the sun on this cosmic Tilt-A-Whirl, and what a day for the history books…September 21st.  A date that frankly feels pregnant with a kind of manic, paradoxical energy, a temporal crossroads where the universe decided to drop a couple of absolute atom bombs on the literary landscape before liver-kicking us with the present.

First, let’s hoist one to the granddaddy of tripping the light fantastic, Herbert George Wells.  Born today in 1866, this was the dude who looked at the stiff, corseted Victorian era he was stuck in and said, “You know what this needs?  A goddamn time machine.”  And then, not content to merely invent the future, he gave us invisible maniacs, Martian invaders with heat-rays that could turn a London bobby into a puff of steam, and surgically-mangled beast-men lamenting their lost humanity on some forgotten island.  The sheer, balls-out audacity of it.  Wells was running a high-voltage current through the placid pond of English letters, electrocuting the frogs and making the rest of us see stars.  He built the sandbox that nearly every sci-fi writer since has played in, whether they know it or not.  So raise a glass of whatever high-proof solvent you have on hand to H.G. – the man who saw tomorrow and had the balls to write it down.

And then, on this very same day in 1937, 71 years later, a quiet Oxford professor unleashed a creature of arguably equal cultural gravity, albeit a smaller one.  J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit hit the shelves.  Suddenly, we’re not peering into the future but into a hold in the ground, and in that hole lives a short, comfort-loving fellow with hairy feet.  From this impossibly cozy starting point, we get launched into a world so vast, so detailed, and real that it’s still the benchmark for an entire genre.  Bilbo Baggins.  A small guy who’d rather be worrying about his next meal gets tangled up with dragons and elves and ancient evils.  It’s the ultimate tribute to the idea that the most profound courage isn’t found in the chiseled hero, but in the reluctant little guy who does the right thing anyway, grumbling all the way.  It’s a fairy tale, technically, but it has the weight of myth…a reminder that even the smallest person can change the course of the future.

Which brings us, I guess, to the future we’re actually in.

Because today is also a day of memorials.  Today is the day the public gathers to remember Charlie Kirk.  And the transition from celebrating fictional words to confronting the brutal and cruel realities of our own is a kind of whiplash that I usually try to avoid here, but here we are.  Charlie Kirk was an American author who was assassinated eleven days ago.  Murdered in public, while discussing ideas.  Taken out of this world by a pathetic tranny activist because of the words he wrote, the ideas that he dared string together.  We can celebrate the power of the pen all we want, but we also have to face the fact that some people who aren’t capable of coherent thought can only answer ink with bullets.

There’s a dreadful silence where Charlie’s voice should be.  A future he should have been writing has been violently erased.

This  shameful assassination has changed things in this country.   I’m working on a response to this, but I’ve been holding off finishing…I’m still watching, still be let down and disappointed.  As disgusting as Charlie’s murder was, the reaction to it by the left has been even more disgusting.  More on that soon.  Today is for mourning a colleague who used words as weapons so effectively, his opposition saw they could never beat him with words, so they shot him.  And we are left holding our books, the beautiful, harmless-looking objects, and wondering about the terrible cost of filling them.

N.P.: “Leifr Eiriksson” – Domsgard

Happy Saturday, degenerate reader.  Today, September 20th, delivers a one-two punch to the  glass jaw of the status quo, birthing two titans who picked up the pen and decided to use it as a weapon: a sledgehammer and a goddamn Valyrian steel sword.  We’re talking about Upton Sinclair and George R.R. Martin – two men from significantly different eras, working in different genres, but share the same raucous, fire-breathing, tiger-blood DNA of the American Badass.  Shall we?

First up, we have Upton Sinclair, born on this day in 1878 in Baltimore, Maryland.  Perhaps the original MAHA author, Sinclair had zero interest in entertaining the gentlefolk; he wrote to kick over the tables and set the whole casino on fire.  His masterpiece, The Jungle, was a visceral, stomach-churning dive into the meatpacking industry’s disgusting underbelly.

Sinclair’s book was so brutally honest and potent that it literally changed the law.  The Pure Food and Drug Act and the creation of the FDA were both direct results.  You can thank this guy for making sure your hot dog isn’t (entirely) made of sawdust and rat parts.  To be honest, dear reader, I (like I’m assuming you were) was exposed to The Jungle on a high school reading list.  I kinda thought Uncle Upton was a one-hit wonder, but it turns out the man was a literary machine, pumping out over 90 books, each one a take-down of corruption, greed, and injustice.  He proved that a writer does a lot more than just tell stories…a writer can literally change society.  So here’s to Upton Sinclair, from back when activists could wage war with words and win.

Now, we fast forward to 1948, Bayonne, New Jersey.  George Raymond Richard Martin, a man who would look at the fairy-tale castles of fantasy, snicker and sneer, and then proceed to blow them up with dragonfire and political intrigue.  Before GRRM, fantasy had become, in far too many cases, a predictable waltz of shining heroes, cackling villains, and tidy endings.  Martin shredded off of that sort of stuff and replaced it with moral ambiguity which lead directly to your favorite character’s unexpected and brutal demise.

With A Song of Ice and Fire, starting with A Game of Thrones, he built a world so complex, and so viciously real, that it felt less like fantasy and more like a historical account from a place you’re glad you don’t live in.  Antiheroes to root for, noble men who lose their heads, and a universe where nothing can be reasonably expected.

In more local news, late last night I suddenly decided that I could not write another word in this office until I rewired part of the room and drastically improved both the number and location of speakers and Get The Music Right.  Dear reader will be forgiven if they do not understand or appreciate the importance of music in my processes.  Whatever I’m doing – writing, driving, training – I mean, I can do those things without music, sure…but they go a whole hell of a lot better when The Music Is Right.

So, to the fist-shaking and snarky-remarking chagrin of all occupants of the Safe House, I got out some tools and the inordinately noisy vacuum, and got to work.  Wires were pulled, tangled, and untangled.  Weird, only vaguely identifiable shit that had been living rent-free behind the Dissolute Desk for what I can only assume was a decade were evicted with extreme prejudice.  The vacuum roared like a jet engine, and I thought I heard bitching and protestations coming from other parts of the house, but I didn’t give a shit.  But I couldn’t be stopped by whining.  I was on a mission.  A mission to create the perfect sonic environment.

The first step was figuring out the proper speaker placement.  Now, I’m no sound engineers, but I know a bunch of them, and I used to work in a recording studio, and I’ve watched enough YouTube tutorials to know that speaker positioning is an exacting and unforgiving art.  Too close to the wall and the bass gets muddy like a swamp.  Too far apart and you lose the stereo effect.  After a lot of trial and error and bad noise (and a few near-death experiencing precariously balanced bookshelves), I finally found the sweet spot for all 17 of these things.

Next came the wiring.  In hindsight, I recognize that getting higher than an SR-71 to figure out the sweet spot mentioned slightly supra might not have been the best idea when about to attempt an unlicensed, unpermitted wiring project after midnight.  Yet there I was, crawling under the Desk at 1 a.m., flashlight in mouth, trying to figure out which cable goes where.  It’s like a high-stakes game of Twister, but with the added thrill of possibly electrocuting yourself.  Heh.  But eventually, the chaos of the cables started to make sense.  The speakers were all connected, the power strips were organized, and I even managed to label a few cords for future me.

And then, the moment of truth: the first test track.  I hit play, and the room filled with the opening notes of Boston’s The Launch.  It was glorious.  The sound was crisp, the bass was punchy and made your guts pucker, and for the first time in ages, the office felt like a place where I could finish a book.

Of course, by this point, the rest of the house was in a dark state of piss-off, audibly wishing me ill, uttering disturbing promises of retribution and vengeance for my late-night DIY project.  But as I sat there, basking in the glow of my newly optimized sound system, I knew it had all been worth it.  Now I can finish the book.

Because here’s the thing: when The Music Is Right, everything else falls into place, somehow.  Words flow more easily, ideas come faster, and even the most mundane tasks get significantly more interesting if they’re being done with a soundtrack.   Speaking of which, I need to get back to work.  And seeing how loud these speakers can actually get.

N.P.: “Innuendo” – Queen

Good evening, dear reader.  I’ve been in a not-great mood about generally everything for a week now, so I’ve been avoiding spending much time online, but I thought I’d take a break from the darkness for a bit and say hello.  Besides, today is a date of some not-inconsiderable import, a day of historical gravitas.  On this day, some 238 years prior to this present moment of typing, a clutch of bewigged and justifiably sweaty men in Philadelphia signed their names to a document of such audacious, world-reconfiguring ambition that it still causes spasms in the global body politic.  The United States Constitution.  It was a radical blueprint, a schematic for a republic scribbled down in the face of monarchical certainty, a glorious albeit flawed attempt to bottle lightning.

And yet.

On this same day, in 1935, another kind of American lightning was born out in La Junta, Colorado.  A different sort of founding father.  Ken Kesey.  The Chief.  The man who hotwired the novel and drove it straight into the psychedelic heart of the 20th century.  While those dudes in Philly were arguing about bicameral legislatures, Kesey was busy mapping the far-flung territories of the human mind, first with the cuckoo’s nest and then with the sprawling, rain-soaked, timber-striking saga of the Stamper clan.  He mainlined the American experience and spat it back out as high-voltage prose.

I had the profound and frankly reality-bending good fortune to see the man himself, live and in the flesh on a Friday the 13th in ’96, in San Francisco.  He was on stage with the Pranksters, or what was left of them.  They had a movie they had shot, and Kesey wanted to record crowd reactions…cheers, boos, the usual.  He was there with a Bay Area band called Jambay (if memory serves).  It was a chaotic explosion of light and noise and rambling, prophetic poetry.  Kesey, even then, was a titan.  He had this physical presence, a charisma that felt less like charm and more like electrical current.  Years later, not long before the final curtain fell for him, I managed a brief, halting email correspondence.  A note or three, a quick response.  At the time, for me, it was like getting a postcard from God, if God wore a funny hat and had a permanent twinkle in his eye that suggested he knew the punchline to the whole cosmic joke.

Which brings us, via a particularly noxious detour of logic, to the third and arguably most spiritually cleansing event of this day: the reported, blessed, and long-overdue demise of Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night shit show.  A true cause for national rejoicing.  Absolutely fuck Jimmy Kimmel.  I was supposed to be on his shitty show in 2005, but he cancelled.  I’m glad to have never been associated with that shitbag.  To witness the end of that suffocating pageant of obsequious celebrity interviews and steady, completely unfunny Trump Derangement Syndrome propaganda that felt more insulting than honest – it feels like a cultural fever is finally beginning to break.  Thank Christ.

So let’s raise a glass.  To the bewigged radicals in Philly who dared to dream up a nation.  To Ken Kesey, the wild-eyed Chief who showed us what it meant to be truly, anarchically free.  And to the sweet, sweet silence replacing one more smarmy, woke-infected voice in the night.  Happy Birthday, Ken.  The asylum is still running itself, but we’re still listening for your laugh in the static.

N.P.: “Electric Head, Pt 2 – Sexational After Dark Mix (Explicit)” – White Zombie

What’s crackin’, dear reader.  As you ought to know by now, I’m an unapologetic patriot, just like you, and am looking forward enthusiastically to next year’s America 250 celebration.  But my style is being cramped in extremis by what seems to be a growing number of anti-American shitbags.
One recent egregious example – recent only to me, apparently, because I couldn’t care less about professional football and would rather have my intestines extracted with a dull spoon than sit through an entire football game – is that the NFL has allegedly been solemnly piping in some so-called “Black National Anthem” before kickoff.  That there hasn’t been a total boycott of the NFL until they knock that ridiculous shit off.  Half of the country seems to have collectively overdosed on anti-patriotism and cable-news outrage.  Spare me the racial separatism masquerading as “unifying gestures,” and you can stick your “two nations under God” horseshit all the way up your ass.

Today we’re going to talk about the actual, blood-and-black-powder origin story that stitched together the ragged, brawling entity we call the United States – a country a knows goddamn well there is only one national anthem that’s worth a shit, and that’s the one with rockets and bombs in it.  And that one was written on September 14, 1814.
So let’s descend, shall we, dear reader, into the muck and the mire of the Patapsco River, where the air is thick with the sulfurous stench of war and the taste of shitty rum.  It is here, dear reader, amidst the skull-rattling percussion of British naval cannons, that a lawyer named Francis Scott Key finds himself in what one might charitably call a jam.

Dig: a man, a lawyer no less – bobbing about on a sloop.  He’s technically a guest of the enemy, having just negotiated a prisoner release.  A gentleman’s errand, as we call it.  But the British, not being ones for letting a good surprise go to waste, decide to keep him for the night.  Why would those rotten British bastards do such a thing?  Because they’re about to unleash a fireworks display of apocalyptic grandeur upon Baltimore’s Fort McHenry.  Treacherous gits.

So there’s our guy, Frankie Key.  Trapped.  A spectator to the systematic, twenty-five-hour-long pulverization of his homeland.  It must have been sheer sensory overload.  The rockets – not the sexy, sleek, guided things of today, but fat, wobbly cones of incandescent rage – screaming across the sky.  The “bombs bursting in air,” which are actually hollow iron shells packed with enough black powder to disembowel a small building, arcing in beautiful, deadly parabolas before detonating with sound and fury.

The Shit is absolutely making sudden and brutal impact with the proverbial Fan.  The explosions are a relentless, psychedelic strobe.  The noise is physical, a pressure wave that vibrates throughout the ship and into his marrow.  And through it all, through this cacophony of imperial might, what is Key doing?  Cowering?  Praying?  Trying to bribe a royal marine for a belt of grog?  Probably.  But he is also watching.  His gaze is fixed, almost pathologically, on one thing: a magnificently oversized American flag fluttering over the fort.  It’s so big it requires a whole legion to hoist, a gigantic middle finger stitched from wool and cotton.  And as the night wears on, that flag becomes his focal point.  His North Star in a constellation of chaos.

When the dawn finally cracks, the bombardment ceases.  An eerie, ringing silence descends.  And Key, squinting through the smoke and the haze and probably a monster headache, sees it.  The flag.  Still fucking there.  A bit tattered and singed around the edges, but defiantly, miraculously, still there.

And in that moment of bleary-eyed, sleep-deprived, existentially pummeled relief, words begin to bubble up in the lawyer’s brain, fueled by adrenaline and whatever passes for patriotism when you’ve just watched your country take a 25-hour beating.  He scribbles them down on the back of a letter: the perilous fight, the ramparts, the rockets’ red glare.  Shit yes.

Your English professor, if they ever discussed this poem, which, let’s face it, likely will never happen, would probably call the poem, “Defence of Fort McHenry” a bit of a mess.  They’d say it’s wordy, the meter is clunky, and it’s set to the tune of a British drinking song, the irony of which is deliciously rich.  But you should tell your professor to get bent.  The poem is a genuine artifact, written in a moment of pure, unadulterated terror and awe.  It’s the sound of a man trying to make sense of the senseless, to find a sliver of meaning in the chaos of that night.  And for that, I propose we raise a glass to the old boy.  He saw the abyss, and all he could do was write a song about the light on the other side.

N.P.: “I Can’t Explain” – Scorpions