Alright, dear reader, if you don’t know what day it is, you should.  Somewhere, in the halls of bourbon-soaked eternity, sits a man who once pistol-whipped conventional journalism, shoved it down a sandpaper slide, and baptized it in a pool of acid-laced self-awareness.  That man, born on July 18, 1937, amid the southern gothic sprawl of Louisville, Kentucky, would erupt into existence nothing less than a human bunker buster for the literary world – Hunter Stockton Thompson.  Today, we light a ceremonial joint, shotgun a tallboy, and salute the King of Gonzo in all his unhinged chaos.

To properly talk about Thompson (and honestly, to even try to keep your adjectives in place while doing so), is to ride shotgun in a careening Cadillac speeding toward the sharp cliff edge of meaning itself.  His invention of gonzo journalism was less a writing style and more a manifest scrawled in blood-red Sharpie on the back of society’s Ikea instruction manual.  Objectivity be damned; Thompson wasn’t about observing the story – he was the story.  He waded into the filthy trenches with his subjects, mainlined their madness, and stitched his fractured psyche across every page he produced.  Subtle? Hell no.  Effective?  Absolutely.

Take Hell’s Angels, for example.  He didn’t just “write about” those smoke-belching, bar-brawling apostles of chaos.  Nope…Thompson got in the saddle, ate their dust, drank their beer, and got his face caved in for the privilege.  He emerged – bloody, patched up, and somehow syllabically sharper – with one of the most brutally honest dissections of America’s outlaw soul.  But did he stop there?  Shee-it.  HST didn’t dabble in rebellion – he deep-throated the shotgun of conformity and loaded both barrels himself.

And then, of course, there is Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.  If the American Dream was an actual physical object, that book would’ve taken a staple gun to it and lit it on fire.  It’s a masterpiece of gonzo depravity – a demolition derby held inside the fragile collective skull of a nation limping out of the 1960s, hungover and disillusioned.  Riding high on mescaline, ether, and enough high-proof liquor to get entire third-world nations drunk, Thompson peeled back the tacky, neon-lit veneer of Vegas and revealed…well, ourselves.  Ugly.  Greedy.  High as hell.  And blaming it all on everyone else.  And I found it all very relatable.

I was an undergrad trying to figure out whether to major in music or English, and was dividing most of my class time between subjects.  I was taking a couple of creative writing classes, and in those classes, people kept asking me after class if I’d heard of Hunter Thompson and/or Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.  Eventually I went to Tower Books and picked up a copy.  It was a Friday afternoon.  I went home to my apartment, got comfortable on the couch, and started reading.  And I read the entire thing straight through (which was something I’d never done before), howling and cackling throughout the entire thing.  But more importantly, aside from being the funniest thing I’d ever read to that point, Vegas kicked me in the mind.  The next night I was on a dinner date, and I drank Chivas with my meal.  When Monday morning rolled around, I went to the Registrar’s Office and changed my major from Music to English.  Dr. Thompson had just blown open the possibilities of writing in my head…I didn’t know you could do that with writing.

But it wasn’t just what he wrote that mattered.  It was how he burned himself, raw and live, into the fabric of the narrative.  He shredded the wall between the observer and participant, reporter and drug-fueled maniac, proving that some truths are so ugly you have to punch them straight in the throat to make them talk.  And right there, bleeding in the dirt, is where he lived.  Where most authors tiptoed around controversy or built polite little fences to sit on, Thompson set the whole field on fire and rode through it naked on a motorbike.

Thompson ultimately left the world the same way he moved through it, with a thunderclap and zero regard for everyone’s fragile sensibilities.  But even in his absence, his spirit lingers in some of us, in every defiant middle finger flipped at the bastards trying to quash originality and every word typed by a writer who refuses to “play nice.”

Today, we remember not just Thompson’s birth but the explosion that came with it.  A reminder that the best way to honor a literary outlaw who lived without brakes is to live: messy, loud, and unapologetic.  Because fear is boring, conformity is worse, and the truth, no matter how grotesque, always tastes better when served raw with a fifth of Jack.

Happy birthday, Hunter.  Wherever the hell you are, I hope they’re letting you smoke.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a bottle of bourbon and a typewriter calling my name.  It’s what the good doctor would have wanted.

N.P.: “Lawyers, Guns & Money” – Warren Zevon

Seventy-eight years ago, a 25-year-old kid with a notebook and a bad case of existential itch packed himself into a car headed straight for the raw, writhing guts of America.  That kid was Jack Kerouac, and what he did that summer wasn’t just a road trip.  It was an existential tantrum dressed up as adventure – a booze-drenched fever dream of freedom with jazz riffs for punctuation and a reckless sprint toward something like divinity.  Or maybe the whole thing was just a desperate stab at drowning out the noise in his own head.  Either way, what came out the other end was On the Road, a book more combustible than a jerrycan of gas in a bonfire.

Picture it, dear reader.  July heat, just like the kind baking wherever you are right now in the northern hemisphere.  The kind of heat that makes the pavement shimmer, as if the road isn’t  just something to be traveled but something alive and pissed off, daring you to drive faster.  Kerouac had the windows rolled all the way down, likely because the car was either without A/C or it was simply harder to breathe in when the windows were shut.  And there he was, pinballing across the country with the verve – and perhaps hygiene – of a man who needed this drive not just to live but to avoid imploding.  There’s probably a word for the energy he was chasing, but it’s not in English.  It’s a headspace between euphoria and collapse, where everything burns brighter and breaks harder.

And the kid?  He scribbled through it.  Through the truck stops and motel ashtrays, through the miles of asphalt stretching out ahead like some cosmic dare.  Jazz on the radio, junkie poets for company, and God knows what in the flask riding shotgun.  Kerouac wrote like a man possessed – not by demons, but by something much scarier: hope.  Not the easy Hallmark variety, but the bone-deep, terrifying kind that makes you wonder if somewhere, out there, there’s a way to fill whatever black hope keeps chewing through your insides.

When On the Road his shelves in 1957, it was a lit match in a room full of dynamite.  Suddenly, every Poor Bastard in America who’d been staring down the barrel of nine-to-five mediocrity had permission to trash the manual.  This wasn’t about winning; it was about searching.  About saying “fuck it” to the scripts we’re handed and chasing the kind of truth that burns like whiskey going down.

Many made the mistake of calling it romantic.  But the road isn’t about romance – it’s about friction.  [The same could be said about sex, of course.]  The kind of friction that leaves you scorched and skinned and shaking but alive in a way you forgot you could be.  Kerouac wasn’t glorifying anything.  He was giving us the messy, bloody glory of coming undone – and maybe finding God in the process.  Although, spoiler alert, it probably wasn’t the God you’re thinking of.

Fast forward to right now.  July 17, 2025.  Do the math, dear reader.  You’re not too old, too broke, or too goddamn civilized to take your own swing at this.  You won’t be Kerouac – good.  He already did it, and you wouldn’t survive on the kind of coffee and amphetamines that fueled him anyway.  But was you can do is crack open a notebook, climb into whatever vehicle you’ve got, and chase something that’ll look different from freedom but feel just as dangerous.

And maybe when you’re out there burning rubber through the sticky American night, you’ll catch a little of the jazzed-up chaos Kerouac found.  And I’ll be out there with you, chasing the same thing.  Just make sure when you catch it, write it down.

N.P.: “I Gotcha” – Eleven Triple Two, Ghostwriter

Forgive my absence here yesterday, dear reader, but it was simply too goddamn hot to write.  It was 107°F in The Creek yesterday, which is really too hot to do much of anything that requires any sort of mental clarity.  But never mind all that.  Today is a new day, and what a day it is.

July 12th should be a national holiday for anyone tired of sucking on the exhaust pipe of a world powered by conformity and crushing mediocrity.  This is the birthday of Henry David Thoreau – poet, philosopher, professional recluse, and mad prophet of the woods.  Born in 1817 in Concord, Massachusetts, Thoreau did more than carve his name onto the bark of American letters.  He set the whole goddamn tree on fire.

This is the man who walked away from the mechanical insanity of the 19th century to shack up in the woods near a pond, chopping his own firewood and minding his own business, only to emerge with Walden, a book so sharp and provocative it’s still noosed around the neck of English majors over a century later.  It’s not a polite book.  It doesn’t coddle you or ask for permission to be heard.  No, Walden is a defiant roar against the drivel of materialism, a full-frontal challenge to the hamster wheel of ambition and blind conformity.  Thoreau grabs us by the collar and demands we live simply and insists that we shed all the junk cluttering our lives and figure out what the hell it even means to live.

And if that wasn’t enough to piss off polite society, he doubled down with Civil Disobedience.  Written after Thoreau himself spent a night in jail for refusing to pay taxes to a government he deemed morally bankrupt (yes, the night in jail is an essential flex), this essay is nothing less than a flamethrower aimed at unjust authority.  Governments, he argued, exist to serve justice – not to prop up the petty tyrannies of the many or the corrupt whims of the few.  And when they fail?  Dissent isn’t just a right, it’s an obligation.

This is where Thoreau’s buckshot really hit the mark.  The ripples of his defiance carried far.

Gandhi mined Civil Disobedience to mount a nonviolent rebellion and kick the British Empire out of India, an achievement that still reverberates in history books and imperial nightmares.  Martin Luther King Jr. marched into the Civil Rights Movement with Thoreau’s words tucked into his back pocket, turning quiet disobedience into a wrecking ball against systemic oppression.  Think about that for a second – one guy, dollar-store journal in hand, wielding an influence so massive it could topple empires and rewrite history.

Thoreau didn’t write for fame – honestly, he would’ve rather burned most of us with a caustic one-liner than shake hands and schmooze at some literary soirée.  He wrote because the words were searing in his guy and demanded to be spit out, pure and undiluted.  His legacy?  It’s a challenge, flashing like a neon sign for misfits, the world-shakers, the ones who grind their teeth at the idea of “business as usual.”

Sure, the man got misunderstood.  Some called him misanthropic, others accused him of hypocrisy.  But Thoreau never pretended to be a saint.  He was furious, flawed, and human.  He philosophized about freedom, sure, but he also lived it, inhaled it, and scribbled it into permanence.

So today, on his birthday, throw up a toast to Thoreau.  Better yet, unplug for a couple minutes.  Forget the relentless scrolling, the email pings, the fluorescent-lit conveyor belt of modern living.  Step outside, breathe, touch grass, think, be.  Raise your middle finger to all the bullshit masquerading as progress.  That’s your present to man who lived deliberately, resisted relentlessly, and died unapologetically.

Happy Birthday, Uncle Hank…the rebel spirit lives on.

N.P.: “Smoke On The Water” – Calling All Astronauts

This Wednesday is for the more dark and twisted dear readers, for today is July 9, a date that seems to have been plucked from the blackened pages of some cosmic ledger, a day when the literary gods decided to birth their most deliciously deranged and shadow-dwelling progeny.  If you’re the sort of person who finds comfort in the flicker of a guttering candle and the whisper of something unspeakable just beyond the edge of the firelight, then this day is your holy feast.  Let’s raise a glass – hell, let’s raise the whole goddamn bottle – to three architects of the macabre who share this date as their entry point into the mortal coil.

First up, Ann Radcliffe, born in 1764, the original queen of Gothic fiction.  Before her, novels were polite little things, like tea parties with too much sugar and not enough gin.  But Radcliffe?  She dragged the genre into the shadows, draped it in cobwebs, and gave it a pulse that throbbed with dread.  The Mysteries of Udolpho was a blueprint for how to make readers sweat through their corsets.  She is The Voice for the whole haunted castles and moonlit moors crowd, of which I am proudly a member.  Without her, there’s no Poe, no Austen parodying her in Northanger Abbey, and certainly no modern horror as we know it.  She’s the reason you can’t walk past a crumbling mansion without imagining a ghostly figure in the window.  Cheers to you, Ann, you magnificent purveyor of dread.

Then there’s Matthew “Monk” Lewis, born in 1775, who took Radcliffe’s Gothic playbook, soaked it in absinthe, and set it on fire.  At 19 – an age when most of us were still figuring out how to fake our way through adulthood – he wrote The Monk, a book so scandalous it made Victorian prudes clutch their pearls and faint dead away.  Erotic, violent, blasphemous – it was the literary equivalent of a mosh pit in a cathedral.  Lewis obliterated boundaries with a sledgehammer.  He gave us depraved monks, demonic pacts, and enough moral ambiguity to make your head spin.  If Radcliffe was the architect of Gothic romance, Lewis was the punk rock anarchist who spray-painted obscenities on it’s walls.  Here’s to you, Matt – you magnificent, twisted bastard.

And finally, we land in 1945, the year Dean Koontz entered the scene.  Now Koontz might not be Gothic in the traditional sense, but let’s not split hairs while we’re three drinks deep.  The man has churned out more novels than most of us have had coherent thoughts, and his knack for blending suspense, horror, and a touch of the supernatural has made him a household name.  Odd Thomas, False Memory, and Phantoms are like rollercoasters in the dark: thrilling, disorienting, and just scary enough to make you question your life choices.  Koontz is the guy who reminds us that the monsters under the bed are real, but they’re probably just misunderstood.  Dean, you’re a machine, and we’re all just trying to keep up.

So here’s to July 9, a day that gave us three titans of the dark and the strange.  Radcliffe, Lewis, Koontz – each one a master of their own brand of literary mayhem.  If you’re not raising a glass to them today, you’re doing it wrong.  And if you’re not reading their work, you might as well be dead already.

N.P.: “KOOKSEVERYWHERE!!!” – AWOLNATION

Happy Tuesday, dear reader.  Today, we celebrate Hemingway’s baptism by shrapnel and the birth of a literary demi-god.

Picture this: it’s July 8, 1918, and an eighteen-year-old kid – not some grizzled veteran, not some stoic Roman statue carved by hardship, but a pimply, wet-behind-the-ears, not-yet-bearded version of Ernest Hemingway – is bumbling around Italy, driving ambulances for the Red Cross like some overeager Small Town Hero.  And then, boom!  Cue the Austrian mortar, a nasty piece of work that comes screaming in from afar like the wrath of God, raining shrapnel down on Hemingway’s youthful, squishy human form with all the subtlety of a freight train colliding with a fruit cart.  Over 200 fragments of metal embed themselves in his leg – not one, not a dozen, but 200, like some gratuitously overblown war souvenir he didn’t ask for.

But wait, it gets worse (or better, depending on whether you’re Hemingway or a future literary voyeur eager to psychoanalyze the trauma stew that would become his writing).  While he’s lying there, freshly perforated, our boy still has the nerve to drag an injured Italian soldier to safety because, apparently, even with half your leg turned into modern art, you can’t turn off the hero complex.  For this, he earns an Italian Silver Medal of Military Valor and a permanent VIP membership to the Survivors of Insane Shit Club.

Fast-forward to the aftermath, where Hemingway is convalescing in a Milan hospital, which is, in many ways, the haunting prologue to a novel you’ve already read.  Because it’s here, amidst the gauze and blood stains, he collides headfirst into actual romance – and by romance, I mean Agnes von Kurowsky, a no-nonsense nurse with enough poise to inspire Catherine Barkley, Hemingway’s star-crossed muse in A Farewell to Arms.  There’s something almost too well-scripted about it, like God’s editor handed Hemingway the perfect character arc for his fledgling authorial ambitions.

But here’s the kicker – it’s this exact sequence of war-monster violence and gooey human connection that calcifies into Hemingway’s whole literary thing.  If you’ve wondered why his prose reads like a direct line to the soul of struggle, the battle scars are the handwritten footnotes.  His stories don’t coddle or cajole; they slap you across the face with raw, unvarnished truth – that life is brutal and short, and yet, somehow, worth chasing even when despair has you by the throat.  The bleak endurance of The Old Man and the Sea, the grit-covered tenderness of For Whom the Bell Tolls – you don’t pull that kind of emotional theory out of thin air.  You write that because you’ve crawled through the mud and the blood and came out alive but not unscathed.

It’s almost poetic, really, that Hemingway would limp away from Italy with wounds that would heal wrong in all the right ways.  Those 200 fragments were more than just metal in his leg; they were ideas welded into the marrow of his bones.  By the time he scooped up the Nobel Prize in 1954, it was less a victory lap than an expectation fulfilled.  We knew, deep down, that no one could write about the weight of human suffering with such stark, battered honesty unless they’d once been shattered themselves.

And so, we’re left with the immense irony that Hemingway, the legendary tough guy of 20th-century literature, probably wouldn’t have become Hemingway without that mortar blast derailing his teenage innocence.  Funny how the universe hands you trauma like a baton and says, “Run with it.”

N.P.: “Venus” – Royal Republic