So you think you know what it takes to be a writer.  You’ve got your little Moleskine, your artisanal coffee, your carefully curated suffering that looks great on an author bio.  That’s cute.  Let’s talk about November 9th, a date that serves as a goddamn benchmark for the kind of beautiful, high-octane derangement that actually forges words into weapons.  Writing, dear reader, isn’t about tweed jackets; it’s about the howling chaos at the core of the human machine.

First, we rewind the tape to London, 1938.  The air is thick with fascist foreplay and impending war as the city holds its breath before the Luftwaffe turns the sky into fire.  Dylan Thomas (whose birthday we just celebrated here on October 27), 24, the Welsh wunderkind with a voice like God gargling gravel, incandescently drunk on love and existential rage, decides to get hitched.  He makes a quick, unceremonious trip to the registry office with Caitlin Macnamara.  A lesser man night have called it a day, maybe had a nice dinner, and worried about the existential dread of both matrimony and aerial bombardment.

Not Dylan…fuck no, thank you very much.  This is Dylan Thomas.  He drags his new bride to a pub, fueled by a cocktail of love, booze, and pure defiance, and proceeds to hammer out the final lines of “And death shall have no dominion,” a poem so defiant it might was well have  been written in whiskey and gunpowder.  That’s how it’s done.  While the world is gearing up for mass slaughter, Thomas is scribbling a poem that gives the concept of death The Finger.

“Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again” – a line that got read over BBC airwaves while London burned, carved into war memorials, tattooed on soldiers, screamed at protests, and became a mantra for a people staring into the abyss.

Fast forward to 1965, New York City.  The scene shifts from Blitz-era balls to a different type of explosion: the psychic detonation of Norman Mailer.  After a party saturated with that special 60s blend of intellectual preening and pharmaceutical excess, Mailer, high on coke and ego and profoundly misguided artistic rage, stabs his wife Adele Morales with a penknife.  I fear the young and temporally myopic dear reader may not know what a penknife is: it’s a small, folding knife originally designed for sharpening quill pens, hence the name.  Over time, it evolved into a compact, pocket-sized blade used for general utility tasks like cutting string, opening packages, pretty much a contemporary pocket-knife.

She survives, miraculously.  He pleads guilty to assault.  So what does this literary lion, the heavyweight champion of American letters, do next?  He writes An American Dream.  It’s a novel about a man who – and you can’t make this up – murders his wife and gets away with it. This book is not safe.  It’s certainly not sane.  It’s a literary psych ward with no exit signs.  Critics screamed and called it monstrous.  Feminists demanded his head on a platter.  Mailer, with a shrug that could curdle milk, called it “the most honest thing I’ve ever written,” which is like Charles Manson saying he finally found his truth in finger painting.  It immediately sold 800,000 copies.  Because America loves its monsters, especially when they write well.  Literature rarely gets more dangerous than this, unless you could the times when Burroughs shot his wife in the face or when Hemingway tried to wrestle a shark for his manuscript.  Forget your “edgy” campus novels.  This was a man wrestling his own demons on the page for all the world to see, and daring you to look away.

Which brings us, dear reader, twitching and grinding our teeth, to today.  November 9, 2025.  Right here, right now.  Your humble narrator, Jayson Gallaway – yes, the literary berserker with the limo-tinted eyes (“he can see out, but no one can see in”) and a keyboard soaked in venom and heartbreak, is engaged in a similar, if less publicly felonious, form of literary combat, slaving over a manuscript so unhinged it makes American Psycho look like a coloring book.  The masterpiece is taking shape, a psycho-symphony of words pried from the clammy darkness   The day’s schedule is a testament to the modern writer’s balanced life: a hyper-caffeinated morning spent wrestling sentences into submission, a brief pause for a sandwich that tastes like ash, and then the obligatory trip to the local asylum to visit a loved one whose grip on reality makes my own seem downright respectable.

And then, the real work.  An unscheduled detour into pest control.  Last night, a raccoon – a fat, insolent little fucker with the eyes of a tiny, furry gangster – had the sheer temerity, the stupid audacity, the unmitigated gall to sass me while I was defending the family trash can.  There are lines, you see.  An unspoken contract between man and beast that this particular creature violated with gusto.  As always, I choose violence.  So tonight, under the cold glare of a November moon, justice will be served.  I’m going to murder that little motherfucker.  Not metaphorically.  Not poetically.  Just good old-fashioned trashcan vengeance.  It’s a small, violent, and frankly necessary act of reclaiming order in a universe that constantly threatens to spin out of control.  Granted, it’s not stabbing your wife, and it’s not defying the Third Reich, but it’s the same goddamn impulse.  It’s the primal scream against the chaos, whether that chaos comes from a bomber, a marriage, or a chittering idiot thief in the night.

Today is a hallowed day of for the beautifully deranged, the dangerously honest, and the creatively unhinged.  If you’re not writing something that could get you arrested, excommunicated, or canonized, then what the hell are you doing?  On this day of literary madness, raise a glass to the lunatics: to Thomas, Mailer, and all the other maniacs who understood that writing isn’t about telling a story.  It’s about grabbing life by the throat, staring into its wild, bloodshot eyes, and refusing to be the first one to blink.

N.P.: “Edie (Ciao Baby) – The Cult