The late 70s were a pretty wild time to be alive (especially if you were hoping to stay that way) in the U.S.  It didn’t just seem like there were suddenly serial killers everywhere…there really were suddenly serial killers everywhere.  My family took a summer vacation in 1976 that found us in New York City when the Son of Sam was doing his thing.  Shortly after that, the whole country learned that Ted Bundy was loose and driving around what seemed like the entire United States killing women.  Shortly after that, John Wayne Gacy was arrested and they started pulling dozens of bodies from under the crawlspace of his house.

Meanwhile, here in my own backyard in Sacramento, the man who would eventually become known as the Golden State Killer was known as the East Area Rapist, and each week, the news would report another attack in neighborhoods I was very familiar with.

And right in the middle of all that, a vampire came to Sacramento.

December 29th, 1977, while the rest of the nation was still wrestling with the bloated ghost of Christmas turkey past, something altogether less festive was uncording itself in the sun-bleached, spiritually bankrupt suburbs of Sac Town.

Enter Richard Chase, a man whose internal landscape was a topographical map of Hell designed by a committee of amphetamine-addled surrealists.  Here was a specimen of late-20th-century Americana so profoundly broken, so spectacularly miswired, that he makes your normal, friendly neighborhood psychopath look like a reasonable candidate for PTA president.  Chase was operating under a truly unique and, one must admit, poetically deranged mandate: his blood, he believed with unshakeable certainty, was turning to powder.  A fine, desiccated dust circulating through veins that ought to have been humming with life’s sweet crimson vintage.  The solution, as he saw it, was not a new diet or a trip to a specialist, but a simple, albeit socially frowned-upon, act of replenishment.

On this day, the theory was put into rather savage practice.  The first data point in Chase’s bloody thesis was a 51-year-old engineer named Ambrose Griffin.  Ambrose was just doing his part for the domestic dream – hauling groceries, probably thinking about football or the state of his lawn – when Chase, from the sanctum of his car, performed a lethal, long-distance act of radical phlebotomy via drive-by shooting. Griffin collapsed in his driveway while his wife unloaded groceries.

This was merely an overture.  The prelude to a month-long symphony of absolute mayhem that would see the official crowning of the “Vampire of Sacramento.”  The initial act, the shooting of Griffin, was a clumsy, almost impersonal transaction.  A proof of concept.  But Chase’s methodology evolved…it became intimate.  Over the next month, five more souls would be violently expropriated from their bodies to service his delusion.  In his head, he wasn’t killing: he was harvesting.  It was a panicked, frantic resource grab driven by a paranoid schizophrenia so profound it could wilt flowers from across the room.

He would later graduate from the relative sterility of firearms to something far more hands-on.  He would break into homes – unlocked doors being, in his scrambled calculus, a direct invitation – and turn domestic sanctuaries into abattoirs.  The accounts read like a Nyquil dream transcribed by a madman.  He didn’t only kill.  He drank.  He consumed.  He engaged in acts of such primal, stomach-churning grotesquerie that they defy neat, clinical language of criminology.  He was a walking, breathing refutation of all the tidy lies we tell ourselves about civilization and progress, all because of a little voice whispering that he was drying up from the inside out.  Another reminder that the suburbs are only peaceful if you don’t look too closely.  Another entry in the long, deranged anthology of people who believed their private madness required public sacrifice.

Raise a glass (preferably not of anything red) to the memory of Ambrose Griffin, the first victim of a month-long descent into vampiric chaos.  And raise another to the uncomfortable truth that history’s darkest chapters often begin not with a scream, but with a single, almost unnoticeable crack in the human mind.

N.P.: “Gimme Gimme Gimme” – Beseech

It is 04:00 and the typewriter is mocking me.  It sits there, a dull gray beast of burden, demanding tribute in the form of coherence, which is a commodity currently in short supply in this suburban bunker.  My head feels like it’s being compressed by the gravitational pull of a collapsing star, likely the result of a misguided attempt to mix a shitload of Ny-Quil with high-grade existential dread.  But we must press on, mustn’t we, dear reader?  We must push through the mire of our own synaptic failures because today – December 16th – is a holy day.  A day of reckoning.  A day when the cosmos, in a fit of absolute, unadulterated irony, decided to birth Arthur C. Clarke, the British Baron of the Space Elevator, and Philip K Dick, the Paranoia King of Point Reyes, onto the same spinning rock.

To understand the sheer statistical absurdity of this coincidence requires a level of mental gymnastics that usually results in a pulled groin muscle of the soul.  On one hand, you have Arthur C. Clarke.  The man who looked at the sky and saw geometry.  He was the sort of guy who could sit in a bungalow in Sri Lanka, sipping tea that probably cost more than my car, and calmly calculate the trajectory of humanity’s ascent into pure energy.  Clarke gave us the monolith.  The clean, black slab of infinite possibility.  He gave us a computer that murdered astronauts with the polite detachment of a DMV employee denying your license renewal.  His prose was like a freshly polished chrome fender reflecting a binary sunset – clean, scientific, and optimistic in a way that makes you want to check your wallet to see if you’ve been robbed.  He made us believe that if we just did the math right, we could all turn into giant space babies and float around the cosmos listening to Strauss.

And then. Then.  You have the other one.

If Arthur C. Clarke was the cleanroom of the future, Philip K. Dick was the grimy alleyway behind the simulation.  Dick didn’t look up at the stars; he looked at his neighbor’s window and wondered if the man inside was a robot sent by the government to steal his neuroses.  He was a creature of amphetamines and pink lasers, a man who wrote about the fluidity of reality because his own reality was melting like a Dali clock left on a dashboard in the Mojave.

He didn’t give us starships; he gave us empathy boxes and spray cans of reality-restorer.  He asked the question that haunts me every time I try to assemble IKEA furniture: Is any of this actually real, or am I just a brain in a jar hallucinating a particleboard bookshelf?

It is fundamentally unfair that one day gets to claim them both.  It’s like scheduling a chess match between Arthur C. Clarke – the supercomputer – and Philip K. Dick – the feral raccoon that just at a bag of espresso beans.  Clarke offers you a vision of technology as salvation; Dick offers you a vision of technology as a trap laid by a gnostic demon.  One is the Apollo program; the other is a bad trip in an Orange County strip mall.

So here I sit, surrounded by empty Ny-Quil bottles and half-finished manuscripts, trying to reconcile these two visions.  An I a Star Child, waiting to shed this fleshy husk?  Or am I just a replicant with a four-year lifespan and a cough syrup problem?

The truth, as usual, is somewhere in the static between the channels.  We need to cold, hard vacuum of Arthur  C. Clarke’s logic to keep us from dissolving into puddles of god, but we need the frantic, sweat-soaked panic of Philip K. Dick to remind us that the systems we build are just as broken as the people who build them.

I raise a plastic shotcup containing a green fluid of suspicious viscosity, to Arthur C. Clarke and Philip K. Dick.  To the Sentinel and the Scanner.  To the man who saw God in the machine, and the man who saw the Devil in the wiring.

Cheers.

N.P.: “No Feelings” – Sex Pistols

N.P.: “Anniversary” – Duran Duran

What a fine day!  Passed another belt test last night.  Woke up this morning, myriad bruises, everything hurt, and my voice was gone, but I passed.

Today is also the release date of Underworld’s new album.  I’ve been a fan of Karl Hyde for decades now…if there was a “soundtrack to my life,” it would be, surprisingly, probably be written by Underworld.  They’ve been one of the few constants in my adult life.

Six days ’til Halloween!  Shit!

For the English majors: today we’re going to pour some out for Geoffrey Chaucer who went on to his Great Reward on this day in 1400.  Back in the 14th century, where the air was thick with plague and poetry, Uncle Geoff was about to absolutely rock the English language.  He danced on the grave of Old English and came up with something quite new.

Dig if you will this picture: Chaucer, a civil servant by day, a linguistic alchemist by night, scribbling away at what would be his magnum opus, “The Canterbury Tales.”  This wasn’t just a collection of stories; Rolling Stone called it, “a full-on psychedelic trip through the mind of a medieval genius.”  They continue, “With a cocktail of pilgrims, each boasting their own tales as colorful as a peacock on acid, Chaucer has crafted a narrative that dares to expose the raw and raucous humanity of our time.”

The man had balls – he didn’t just dabble in satire: he swam naked in it.  He was the first guy to bring vernacular English into the spotlight.

Cheers.

N.P.: “Smack Yo” – Beltran

suppurate
verb
1. undergo the formation of pus; fester
Etymology: From the Latin “suppuratus,” past participle of “suppurare” which means “to form pus.” Isn’t Latin swell?

Now gather ’round, children (or maybe not, this one could get a bit icky), as we continue to delve into the delightful world of words that describe things we’d rather not think about. Today’s word is suppurate, a verb which, as you’ve just read, refers to the act of forming or discharging pus. Delicious, right?  Here we go:

Here’s why you should know and love this word: most obviously, it has to do with festering pus. Which would be plenty enough reason to deploy the word liberally in your daily business communication.  But wait…there’s more.  Though officially the word is pronounced “supp-yer-ate,” people in the Midwest (and yrs. truly) pronounce it “super ate.”  Yes…just like the franchise of cheap and sleazy motels.  So the next time you’re driving along and hear a commercial inviting you to spend a night at the Super 8 Motel, you should, like me, cackle adolescently.

Picture this: It’s a beautiful sunny day, you’re on a first date at the park, and you’ve just bitten into a tuna sandwich when suddenly, you feel a throbbing pain in your mouth. You excuse yourself, run to the nearest restroom, and are horrified to see that an old wisdom tooth extraction site has decided to suppurate at the most inconvenient time. The sight of it is like the Mt. Vesuvius of oral hygiene.

You rinse and rinse, but the taste of pus mixed with tuna is something you’ll probably never forget. You go back to your date, put on a brave face, and decide to stick to soft serve ice cream for the rest of the afternoon. Meanwhile, your date, blissfully unaware, continues to blather on about her love for, ironically, DIY dentistry. 

Suppurate – a word that sounds like a superhero power but, in reality, is about as far from it as you can get. Use this word with impunity…the average American won’t know what the hell you’re talking about anyway.  Feel superior…because you are.

N.P.: “Go Fuck Yourself” – Roxanne

Art by Tasty Piece,©️ The Safehouse Collection 2022

I’ve also been feeling rather vindicated lately, mostly about stuff that everybody’s bought into, stuff I’ve been saying is obviously wrong for decades.

If you grew up in the 70s like me, your formative years were likely spent being rhetorically bludgeoned about the absolute essential duty of all humans to recycle, and the most essential of that essential duty was to recycle plastics because holy shit are just the worst thing that could ever have happened to our planet…just look at these pictures of all the oceans of the world rapidly filling with plastic. Now look at these pictures of dead fish. That’s your fault if you failed to recycle one piece of plastic. You specifically were killing dolphins by the dozen, and you specifically were going to be responsible for the death of every human on earth due to global freezing if you failed to recycle all plastics. All of this I vociferously dismissed as idiocy when I was nine years old.

Well.

Well, well, well, well, well.

Last month, none other than Greenpeace finally admitted that plastic recycling doesn’t work in as much as it does exactly fuck all to help the planet. Plastic recycling doesn’t work, and, more importantly, it never has worked.

That rather stunning admission from the hippies at Greenpeace was cause enough for another Celtic Bacchanalian Goat Dance, but then the very next day, the vegetarian hippies (who showed up in the mid-70s, around the same time the planet hippies started making their annoying noise), were forced to admit that there ain’t a damn thing wrong with eating red meat, healthwise. You know, as I’ve been saying since I was eight. All previous misinformation was the result of healthy user bias, corrupt hippie scientists, and pathetically shoddy research. Despite all the useless “consensus” of the last few decades, there are “extremely weak links” between red meat consumption and cancer, heart disease, or diabetes. And exactly no evidence of association between red meat consumption and stroke.

Other obviousness to be revealed in another couple of decades: the laughable barbarity of orthodontia, and the stupid cruelty of Daylight Saving Time.

N.P.: “Misirlou (Metal Version)” – Leo

Cruel: Jussie Smollett Will Be Forced To Share A Jail Cell With His Attacker

CHICAGO, IL—People are protesting in the streets today after human rights groups revealed Jussie Smollett will be forced to share a jail cell with his racist attackers.

“This is an outrage!” said Reverend Jesse Jackson. “Not only was Mr. Smollett attacked by hateful racist bigots who want to tear our country apart, but now he has to share a jail cell with them? This is cruel and unusual punishment. This is the kind of thing that happens in our white supremacist country. Send me money!”

Criminal justice watchdogs also revealed that in addition to sharing a cell with his attackers, he will have to share his toothbrush, his bunk bed, and clothes. They expressed worry that this may lead to Jussie Smollet suffering further racist and homophobic attacks from other attackers named Jussie Smollett while in prison.

When asked for comment, Jussie Smollet angrily yelled “This is MAGA country!” before punching himself in the face.

https://babylonbee.com/news/cruel-jussie-smollett-forced-to-share-a-jail-cell-with-his-attacker