I shouldn’t be in such a fine mood today, dear reader…not nearly enough sleep last night, for no good reason at all.  Actually, the steroids may have had something to do with it.  Maybe not.  Regardless, I didn’t get to sleep until around 02:00.  Which would have been good enough if all else had been equal.  But all else wasn’t.

Fecal Creek is and always has been a railroad town.  This town formed around a massive Southern Pacific railyard which served as a central junction for all railroad traffic in California, but particularly between Sacramento to the west and the Gold Country to the east.  When officially founded during the Gold Rush, it was called Shotgun Junction, a rather badass tribute to the massive armed presence of militant civilians protecting the equally massive amount of gold flowing into and out of the town from bandits, river pirates, and thieving Mexicans.  Almost 200 years later, not much has changed: most of the civilian population is armed with shotguns, and the train traffic is heavier than ever.  Which train traffic was exactly what interrupted last night’s slumber, when it finally arrived.  Shortly after 04:15, some sort of disagreement apparently broke out between two engineers on two different trains over the right of way.  At least that’s what I’m guessing it was about…I have a police scanner that includes the Southern Pacific channel and probably could have clicked that thing on and found out exactly what was going on, but that would have involved getting out of bed, which was not something I was willing to do at that unholy hour of the night.  Anyway, whatever it was about, these two engineers decided to battle it out through a series of train-horn blasts lasting over 35 minutes.  I’m confident it woke the entire town up…certainly everybody in this house was brutally and rudely awakened by the sonic assault.  The goddamn puppy went all to pieces, choosing to run around in little circles in a pathetic effort to just deal with the pre-dawn nonsense.  It was awful, and by rights, the whole goddamn town should be cranky today.  And they probably are.  But not me.  I am mighty.  And smirking.  The writing is going extremely well.  Which brings us to the business of this day, March 16.

On March 16, 1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne detonated a goddamn literary bomb in the sanctimonious gut of Puritan America when he published The Scarlet Letter, a vicious, white-hot screed that left the moral fascists of Boston reeling. Ticknor, Reed & Fields couldn’t keep the thing on shelves—2,500 copies obliterated in ten days, a middle finger to the theocratic killjoys who thought they could brand Hester Prynne with their scarlet “A” and call it a day. Hawthorne was not fucking around; he was a man scorned, freshly canned from his gig at the Salem Custom House, his blood boiling with the kind of rage that doesn’t simmer—it erupts. He turned that fury into a blade, slicing through the Puritan hypocrisy that festered like a plague in early America, exposing their obsession with sin, shame, and conformity for the sadistic charade it was. The Puritans, those black-clad, joy-hating bastards, thought they owned morality—Hawthorne showed they were the real sinners, their hearts festering with cruelty masquerading as piety. Not only did The Scarlet Letter become a cornerstone of American lit—it rewrote the rules, flipping the script on moral storytelling with a snarl that still echoes.

Hawthorne saw the Puritans for what they were: the original thought police, the blueprint for every moral panic that’s choked the life out of this country since. They demanded absolute obedience, using the fear of hellfire to keep the flock in line, their sanctimonious fingers in every pie, policing behavior, speech, even thought itself. Now, in 2025, their ghosts are back, and they’ve got new skin to wear. The Woke have arrived, and they’re the new Puritans, now on steroids, only worse—more insidious, more relentless, armed with the digital guillotine of cancellation and a dogma so rigid it makes the old witch-burners look like they were just vibing. These self-appointed arbiters of virtue don’t just want to control what you do—they want to control what you think, their ever-mutating lexicon of “microaggressions” and “systemic harm” a weaponized scripture designed to keep you on your knees. They’ve traded the Puritan’s hellfire for the hellfire of public shaming, their Twitter mobs and callout posts the modern-day stocks, their performative tears and hashtag activism a mask for a power grab so blatant it’s obscene. They’re not here to liberate—they’re here to dominate, and they’ll crush anyone who doesn’t bow to their gospel of moral purity.

The hypocrisy is enough to make you scream until your throat bleeds. They rail against “oppression” while building their own empire of control, a Kafkaesque nightmare of speech codes and behavior policing that strangles free thought like a garrote. They demand “accountability” while ignoring their own sins—their complicity in the same capitalist machine they claim to despise, their selective outrage that spares their allies but damns their enemies, their own unexamined prejudices festering beneath the surface of their sanctimonious word-policing. They’re the new magistrates of Salem, hunting heretics with a zeal that would make Cotton Mather proud, their digital pitchforks dripping with the blood of the canceled. And they’ve been winning, goddammit—they’ve been winning because we’ve been too scared, too complacent, too busy scrolling to fight back.

But not me. Not now. We’ve just hit an inflection point in this country…more of a breaking point, and I’m not sitting this one out. We need a new Scarlet Letter, a book that doesn’t just whisper dissent but screams it from the rooftops, a literary Molotov cocktail to burn this Woke tyranny to the ground. And I’m writing it—right now, in this moment, my hands shaking with a fury that courses through my veins like wildfire. I’m mainlining adrenaline and deliciously powerful American whiskey, my pulse hammering with the urgency of a man who knows the clock is ticking, the testicularly-lacking enemy is at the gates, and the time for polite discourse is over. This book isn’t going to pull punches—it’s going to swing an electrified shithammer, smashing through the Woke’s sanctimonious facade to expose the rot beneath. It’ll be a feral, unhinged takedown of their egregious hypocrisy, a call to arms for anyone who still believes in the raw, chaotic beauty of free thought. I’m channeling Hawthorne’s rage, every ounce of my own disgust into this thing, and when it hits, it’s going to hit like a freight train that doesn’t need to rely on it’s horns to demand the right of way. The idiot Woke won’t see it coming—they’ll be too busy, as always, policing pronouns to notice the revolution at their door. But it’s coming, and it’s going to be a beautiful, terrifying thing to behold. Buckle up.

N.P.: “Euthanasia” – Psychotica