Today has been ridiculous, dear reader.  Started with coffee and a McRib.  Things only went downhill from there.  Still managed to work on the book a bit.  I have to go fight a bunch of guys in a bit (training, of course), but after that, I’ll be glad to see this day in the rearview mirror.

But before I can put this day to bed, we have a bit of D.P.S. business.  For you see, dear reader, on this day in 1865, Mark Twain – that literary, whiskey-soaked middle finger to Victorian decorum – published “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” in the New York Saturday Press.  It was a story about a frog.  A frog that jumps.  Or doesn’t.  Depending on whether someone has secretly filled it with buckshot.  And it is, in every sense that matters, the moment American literature stopped pretending to be British and started chain-smoking behind the barn.

The plot, such that it is, is a barroom anecdote nested inside a shaggy-dog story wrapped in some thick dialect.  A man named Smiley, who bets on everything from horse races to the lifespan of parsons, trains a frog named Dan’l Webster to jump farther than any other frog in Calaveras County (which county is about 70 miles from where yrs. truly is presently parked behind the Dissolute Desk).  Enter the stranger, the con, the existential cheap-shot: Dan’l gets sabotaged, stuffed with lead, and loses the bet.  Smiley is swindled.  The frog is betrayed.  The reader is left somewhere between hysterical laughter and a creeping suspicion that the whole damn country runs on this kind of absurdity.

This story is a blueprint for the American psyche: the pathological gambler, the weaponized anecdote, the amphibian as metaphor for hope and humiliation.  Twain’s genius here isn’t just the humor – it’s the architecture of the joke, the way he builds a cathedral out of frontier horseshit and then sets fire to it with a single punchline.  This was a bit of a tectonic shift: our literature stopped being about noble suffering and starts being about the guy who loses his ass because someone cheated at frog-jumping.

This was Twain’s breakout.  The moment the literary establishment looked up from its tea and said, “Wait, what the hell was that?”  It was the sound of the West elbowing its way into the stodgy parlor, with muddy boots, crooked sneer, frog in hand.

So raise a glass to Dan’l Webster, the frog who couldn’t jump because he was full of lead.  He is us.  He is America.  And Twain the guy in the corner, watching it all, scribbling furiously, and laughing like hell because he knows the joke is always on us.

N.P.: “Ain’t No Man Alive Can Handle Me” – Dumpster Grooves, Bertha Mae Lightning

Connectivity.
The internet’s an asshole.
Cloud cover too thick?

Hot damn, dear reader…there is light at the end of this long, circuitous, Byzantine, labyrinthine, and ludicrous writing process for the goddamn book.  I’ll officially begin shopping it around for a deal in early ’26.  Because 20 years between books is totally normal, right?  My hopes are high, but I’m trying to manage my expectations.  As always, I’ll be looking for Fuck You money for this thing, but what I’m really looking forward to, believe it or not, is finally being able just to talk about it.  Having to maintain this Masonic air of secrecy around the whole project for all these years hasn’t necessarily been difficult, but it has been a pain in the ass.

Speaking of pains in the ass, today’s date – November 16th – appears to be a sort of nodal point in the chaotic, often self-immolating timeline of literary insurrection.  Five seismic events, five big fuck-yous to the status quo, five reasons to believe that writing – real writing – is still the most dangerous thing you can do with your clothes on.

Exhibit A: We jump back to 1860, where a certain Fyodor Dostoevsky, fresh off a four-year sabbatical in the Czar’s least hospitable Siberian resorts and a mock execution…does my dear young reader even know what that is?  Imagine this: you’re blindfolded, standing in front of a firing squad, heart jackhammering like a meth-addicted woodpecker, and just as the rifles rise – a reprieve.  Not mercy, but bureaucratic sadism.  That’s the crucible Dostoevsky crawled out of before he wrote The House of the Dead, serialized today in 1860 in Vremya magazine.  Did you ever see HBO’s Oz?  Well, this makes that look like Sesame Street.  Russia banned it for “undermining authority,” which is apparatchik-speak for “telling a truth with a scalpel.”

Fast forward to Copenhagen, 1885.  This guy August Strindberg stages Miss Julie.  Class warfare, sexual humiliation, psychological evisceration – all in a goddamn kitchen.  Strindberg directed it himself, then tore ass out of Sweden when he knew the pitchforks were coming.  Critics called it “obscene,” which is rich coming from a country that invented IKEA.  The Swedes banned it until 1906.  But the damage was done: realism was dead, and theater would never be safe again.

Then 1938.  The world is going dark, goose-stepping toward oblivion.  Bertolt Brecht was holed up in exile in Denmark, fleeing the Gestapo with the ink still wet on his passport.  Fear and Misery of the Third Reich dropped today in 1938 – 24 scenes of quotidian Nazi terror disguised as cabaret.  It was agitprop performed in basements.  The Nazis, in a stunning lack of self-awareness, burned the book in Berlin, providing the most ringing endorsement a writer could ever hope for.

Jump to 1952.  Ernest Hemingway, holed up in Cuba and dodging the FBI between mojitos, publishes The Old Man and the Sea in a single issue of Life magazine.  It was 72 pages of ruthlessly stripped-down, sunburned prose.  He took a simple goddamn fishing trip and hammered it into a crucifixion myth.  Five million copies sold in 48 hours.  It was a cultural event, a literary knockout that won Papa the Pulitzer and, eventually, the Nobel.  The man mailed the manuscript from a bar, probably bleeding from a marlin gaff and muttering about grace under pressure.  Literature’s heavyweight champ, still swinging.

And finally, the cherry on this chaotic sundae: 1967.  Our favorite Kentucky-born degenerate, Hunter S. Thompson publishes Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga.  HST embedded with the Angels for a year, rode with them, drank with them,  until the inevitable, teeth-shattering climax where they stomped him into the dirt.    He lived the story, then wrote it while still bleeding, blurring the line between observer and participant until it ceased to exist.  The book got banned for “glorifying violence,” which, like all the others on this list, meant it was simply too honest for the delicate sensibilities of the people in charge.

So here’s to November 16 – a date that reads like a rap sheet for the literary criminally insane.  These were saboteurs, prophets, and beautifully deranged motherfuckers who made art dangerous again.  If you’re not pissing someone off, you’re probably just typing.

Stay tuned.  The book’s coming.  And when it drops, I want it to be quite a fucking thing.
Light your cigarettes.  Stockpile ammo.  The storm’s coming.

N.P.: “Listen To My Voice” – Gary Numan

Today is a great day, dear reader.  Not in the saccharine, Instagrammable, “live laugh love” horseshitty sense of the phrase, but in a way a thunderclap is great, or a freight train derailing into a fireworks factory is great – loud, messy, and absolutely unignorable.  Today is a great day because the sky over Anhedonia County has finally cracked open like a long-suffering ulcer, hemorrhaging a steady, blessed rain onto the parched bones of The Creek.  The gutters are gurgling like drunks in a confession booth, the air smells like wet asphalt and ozone, and the squirrels are losing their tiny minds.  It’s glorious.

Second, and this is not a drill, today is November 13th, the birthday of Robert Louis Stevenson – patron saint of duality, chronicler of pirates, and the man who taught us that every respectable gentleman has a snarling, libidinal monster just beneath the waistcoat.  Raise a glass of laudanum-laced absinthe in his honor, or at least mutter a curse at the mirror and see who blinks first.

But the third reason is the real meat of the matter, both literal and metaphysical.  The McRib is back.  Yes.  That unholy slab of reconstituted pork slurry, shaped like a rack of ribs by someone who’s only ever seen ribs in a dream, slathered in a sauce so sweet it could double as embalming fluid.  It’s back.  And I, for one, have already eaten two.  Possibly three.  I blacked out somewhere between the second and the third and woke up with barbecue sauce on my collar and a vague sense of spiritual renewal.

There’s something about the McRib’s seasonal resurrection that feels like a pagan rite – like Persephone clawing her way out of the underworld, except she’s made of pork and corn syrup and corporate nostalgia.  It’s a culinary Brigadoon, a meat mirage that appears just long enough to remind us that joy is fleeting, and then vanishes again into the marketing ether.  You don’t eat a McRib because it’s good.  You eat it because it’s back.  You eat it because you’re alive, dammit, and because the rain is falling, and because Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote about a man who turned into a beast and you, too, feel the beast stirring when you smell that tangy, smoky perfume wafting from the Golden Arches.

So yes, today is a great day.  The sky is weeping, the dead are remembered, and the McRib is back.  It that’s not enough to make you howl at the clouds and dance barefoot in the mud, then brother, I don’t know what the hell you’re doing here.

Now go forth.  Eat recklessly.  Write dangerously.  And if you see me in The Creek, sauce-stained and grinning like a pervert, just nod and keep walking.  Some days are too good to explain.

N.P.: “Simple Life” – Elton John