I would be remiss and my review of last Friday night’s Ghost concert would be incomplete if I didn’t mention the simply brilliant tambourine and cowbell skills of the Ghoulette pictured above.  She somehow managed to make it an even better show.

N.P.: “Umbra” – Ghost

The beauty of the duel in its ability to instantly curate the gene pool of the literati.  It forces a man to weigh his adjectives against the literal weight of his own mortality.

Let’s be honest about the current state of our collective national discourse, which has devolved into a fetid mess of tepid, womanly, high-pitched shrieking – a digital playground where the most egregious offense is a “ratio” and the primary weapon of choice is the anonymous report button.  We are living in an era of unprecedented, world-class cowardice.  The pussificaation of the modern man – and I use that term with a clinical, diagnostic precision – has led to a society where any low-rent hack can spout vitriol from behind a glowing rectangle without the slightest existential fear of a physical accounting.

We need more duels.  People need to be far more afraid of being shot than they presently are.  There, I said it.

The fundamental problem with the contemporary “cancel culture” ecosystem is its inherent lack of skin in the game.  It is a chickenshit, passive-aggressive avenue for the weak to tear down the bold.  In the 19th century, if you publicly maligned a man’s character or suggested his prose was the literary equivalent of a syphilitic fever dream, you didn’t just wait for a notification: you waited for a knock at the door from a “second” holding a box of polished mahogany.

Take, for example, the high-stakes, lead-based feedback loop of February 16, 1821.  John Scott (of whom the dear yet historically benighted has undoubtedly never heard), editor of The London Magazine, was a man who understood the recursive, high-velocity nature of accountability.  He had spent months engaging in a relentless, textually dense assault on the “Blackwood’s” crowd (you don’t know who the hell they were either) – specifically John Gibson Lockhart (him neither), a man whose talent for the literary hatchet job was matched only by his refusal to be “subtweeted” into submission.  Confused?  I know.  Suffice it to say, there was a lot a static between a couple of editors.

When the friction between these two reached a critical, thermodynamic mass, they didn’t exchange snarky GIFs.  They didn’t start a Change.org petition.  They recognized that some disagreements are so fundamental, so deeply rooted in the fiber of one’s honor, that they can only be resolved by the ballistic trajectory of a lead projectile.

The Protocol of Honor (A Lost Art)

The Challenge: A direct, masculine confrontation with pistols.  No “blocking,” no “muting.”
The Field: Chalk Farm at moonlight.  The ultimate IRL meeting.
The Result: Scott took a bullet to the guy from Jonathan Christie (Lockhart’s proxy).

The Virtue of Consequence

There is a profound, almost spiritual respectability in the way these men operated.  To stand at twelve paces and stare down a rifled barrel is the antithesis of the modern penchant for digital sabotage.  It is a rejection of the “refreshing for likes” dopamine loop in favor of the adrenaline-fueled of the duel.

When you know that lipping off to the wrong man might result in a surgical extraction of your liver via a dueling pistol, you tend to choose your words with a level of care that is currently nonexistent in our low-T, high-speed internet culture.  Scott died, yes – fatally wounded in a display of peak 19th-century bassassery – but he died with a level of dignity that a thousand “canceled” TikTokers could never hope to achieve.

We have traded the pistol for the post, and in doing so, we have sacrificed the only thing that kept the peace: fear.  A society that refuses to fight is a society  that deserves to be bored to death by its own mediocrity.  Give me the smoke-filled field at dawn over a passive-aggressive thread any day of the week.

So the next time you feel brave enough to launch a character assassination from the safety of your phone, ask yourself: would you pull the trigger at dawn, face-to-face with your target?  Because that, dear reader, is what it means to stand behind your words.

N.P.: “Mercy” – The Native Howl

Saturday night at The Splattered Cat, Fecal Creek’s only pub.  A cathedral of bad decisions and worse lighting, the kind of place where the jukebox only plays songs that make you want to punch your own reflection.  And there he was, this tragic, bloated oracle of poor life choices, perched on a stool that groaned under the weight of his sins.  His face was a roadmap of bad nights and worse mornings, and his eyes…those bloodshot, watery orbs…were like two tiny windows into a soul that had been evicted long ago.
Though he couldn’t focus on anything worth focusing on, he clearly wanted – needed – to be heard.  The kind of want that turns saliva metallic.  He took another magnificent swallow of the piss-warm domestic, the bottle neck gleaming under the bar’s hepatitis lighting like some low-rent Excalibur, and prepared to speak.
Then came the pronouncement, delivered with the grave gravitas of a man delivering a eulogy for his own shattered existence:
“You fuck one goat in this town…one fucking goat!  And you’re a goat fucker for life.”
He slammed his fist on the bar with the righteous indignation of a man who has been wronged by both God and Yelp, to properly punctuate the brutal, immutable State of Things.
The bar collectively winced, like a single organism recoiling from the sheer weight of his unsolicited confession.  A guy in the corner coughed into his beer, trying to stifle a laugh, but it came out as a wet snort.  The bartender, a woman with man-hands that looked like she could bench-press a Harley, just shook her head and went back to wiping down the counter with a rag that had seen more horrors than a war correspondent.  It was difficult not to notice that multiple patrons had pulled their phones out and were recording this man’s absurd breakdown.  He was doomed.
His words, those grotesque, utterly indefensible words, hung in the stagnant air like a weightless turd, defying gravity, defying decorum, defying the very notion of polite society.
I couldn’t take it anymore.  The sheer pathos of the moment was too much, like watching a dog try to hump a parked car.  I, a man not unaccustomed to such theatrical declarations, but nonetheless compelled by some archaic, deeply buried instinct for human connection (or perhaps just morbid curiosity), grabbed him by the sides of his head with both hands.  My fingers, accustomed to the tactile sensuality of a well-worn keyboard or the cold, indifferent smoothness of a whiskey glass, pressed firm against his temples, forcing his gaze to meet mine.  This rather aggressive, entirely unconventional act of forced interpersonal engagement seemed to penetrate the impenetrable fog of his stupor, sparking some faint, flickering ember of attention in the depths of his rheumy eyes.  I stared, really stared, deep into those bloodshot orbs, attempting to peer into the very marrow of his soul.  I try, you understand, dear reader, not to engage in such brazen acts of public psychoanalysis too often, as it completely freaks the normies out.  But sometimes certain circumstances demand you look straight through the corneal fog to whatever flickering pilot light is still burning behind the meat.  Besides, if a man is going to drop a nuclear-grade confession about livestock intimacy, you owe him at least one moment of genuine human attention.
And there it was: the human.  Small, panicked, blinking back at me from inside the cirrhotic wreck.  One of those poor bastards who still believes apologies might reactively unhappen a thing.  I could feel it radiating off him – the brutal, unforgiving physics of our current arrangement, where every anguished moment gets timestamped, reblogged, ratio’d, and preserved in cybernetic amber for future archaeologists to gawk at.  Where a single lapse, a solitary goat-related lapse, enters the permanent record at roughly the speed of light and exits only when the heat death claims the servers.
Every mistake nowadays is over-amplified to the point of absurdity.  One error dropped into the piranha tank of the internet becomes an instant life sentence served in reposts.  Several hundred million peers convene a drumhead court-martial in thirty-seven seconds flat and hand down the verdict: Goat Fucker.  Capital G, capital F. No parole.  No statute of limitations.  One goat.  One time.  I kept staring.  He kept blinking.  Somewhere behind us the jukebox had moved on to a song about trucks and broken hearts, which felt both cruelly appropriate and cosmically indifferent.
“Alright, listen to me,” I said finally, loosening my grip but not letting go, my voice low and steady, the way you’d talk to a feral animal or a toddler holding a loaded gun. “You’re not a goat fucker because you fucked a got.  You’re a goat fucker because you can’t seem to shut the fuck up about it.  You’re out here, broadcasting your shame like it’s a goddamn TED Talk, and for what?  Sympathy? Redemption?  Look around…do you think you’re going to get any of that in a sleazy place like this?”
His eyes widened, and for a moment, I thought I’d gotten through to him.  But then, he blinked, slow and deliberate, like a cow chewing its cud, and said, “But it wasn’t even a good-looking goat.”
Jesus Christ.
I let go of his head and leaned back, suddenly exhausted.  The weight of his stupidity was like a physical thing, pressing down on me, making it hard to breathe.  I glanced around the bar, hoping for some kind of divine intervention – a lightning bolt, a sinkhole, anything to put us all out of our misery.  But no, the universe is a cruel and indifferent place, and we were all stuck here, marinating in this man’s Capra-loving trauma.  That this man was able to discern levels of attractiveness from one goat to another was not something I was capable of artfully handling this night.
“Never mind what the goat looked like.  It doesn’t matter.  Just know this: you’re not the first idiot to trip over his own dick in public.  You won’t be the last.  But here’s the part nobody tells you while they’re screenshotting your obituary: the internet doesn’t forget, but it also doesn’t give a flying fuck.  Not really.  It’s just a mirror held up to a species that loves nothing more than watching itself bleed.  You gave it blood.  Congratulations.  Now it’s bored and scrolling to the next carotid.”
His eyes slid sideways, hunting for an exit that didn’t exist.  Ever since I’d let go of his head, it had been lolling about like a busted marionette.
“So what now?” he croaked.
“Now,” I said, “you either let them pin the goat-fucker badge on your lapel for the next forty years, or you wear it ironically until the irony itself becomes the new shame, or – here’s the dark-horse option…the one that I’d choose – you fucking own it.  Walk around with a T-shirt that says ONE GOAT ONE TIME in Comic Sans.  Lean in.  Make it performance art.  Turn the scarlet letter into a brand.  Because the only thing more terrifying to a mob than a sinner is a sinner who refuses to grovel.”  Which was true.
He laughed once – a short, ugly bark that died halfway out.
“You’re insane.”
“Oh, brother…you don’t know the half of it,” I said, draining the last of my snakebite.  “But I’m not the one getting doxxed over livestock.”
He began to sob, pitifully.
“Listen…you’re not a goat fucker.”
He blinked.  Twice.  Hope flickered.
“You’re a man who fucked a goat.”
The distinction mattered.  Philosophically.  Spiritually.  Semantically.  It was the difference between identity and incident, between destiny and detour, between a life sentence and a regrettable footnote.
But before he could respond, before he could process the liberation I was offering, the bartender leaned over, still wiping the counter, and said:
“Actually, it was two goats.”
My friend’s face collapsed like a dying star.
And I realized, with the clarity of a prophet in a blackout:
Some reputations aren’t injustices.
Some reputations are earned.
And some reputations are simply the universe saying,
“My man, you need to make better choices.”
I ordered another round.  He needed it.  I needed it.  The whole bar needed it.
Because in that moment…in that sacred, stupid, tragic tableaux…we were all goat-fuckers in one way or another.  Just trying to survive our own worst decisions in a world that never forgets a damn thing.
And the night rolled on.

N.P.: “GOING PLACES” – SICK PUPPIES

Let’s be honest about the mechanics of danger for a second.  Most of us, shuffling through the grayscale monotony of our Tuesday afternoons, equate “danger” with something kinetic – a drunk in a Camaro swerving across the median, a bar fight involving broken pool cues, or perhaps the existential dread of an IRS audit.  We do not generally associate the act of typing words onto a page with the sort of peril that requires round-the-clock armed guards and a decade of living in safe houses that smell like stale fear and old coffee.

But on this day in 1989 – a Valentine’s Day that was less about chocolates and more about a theological death warrant delivered via radio broadcast – the rules of the game shifted tectonically.

This was the day the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a man whose sense of humor was presumably surgically removed at birth, looked at a novel and decided it was a weapon of mass destruction.  He issued a fatwa against Salman Rushdie.  And in doing so, he accidentally bestowed upon literature the kind of terrifying, heavyweight legitimacy that most of us writers only dream of while nursing their third whiskey at 02:00.

The book in question, The Satanic Verses, is a dense, magical-realist sprawl that requires actual effort to read – a fact that seems hilariously ironic given that most of the people burning it in the streets of Bradford and Islamabad had likely never cracked the spine.  But that’s the thing about symbols, dear reader; they don’t require literacy to be combustible.

When the Supreme Leader of Iran put a price on a novelist’s head – something in the neighborhood of a few million dollars, which is a hell of a lot more than most publishers offer as an advance – he wasn’t just critiquing a text.  He was admitting, with a sort of accidental reverence, that fiction matters.  He was saying that a made-up story about two Indian actors falling out of a hijacked plane was potent enough to destabilize the spiritual equilibrium of a nation.

It was a staggering thought.  It is the literary equivalent of a guitarist hitting a chord so dissonant and loud that the government sends a SWAT team to unplug the amp.

Rushdie, to his eternal, badass credit, did not fold.  He didn’t issue some weeping apology and burn his own manuscripts in a public square while begging for forgiveness.  He did what all writers worth their salt when the going gets too weird: he went underground.

It’s important to remember Rushdie didn’t ask for any of this.  He wasn’t trying to be a martyr or a symbol or the protagonist of a geopolitical thriller.  He was just doing what writers do: poking the sacred with a stick to see what happens.  And what happened was a decade of hiding, bodyguards, safehouses, coded phone calls…yet the books kept coming.  Each new sentence he wrote was a middle finger raised from hiding.  The regime’s bounty hunters circled, translators were stabbed, publishers shot at, but the principle held: words do not kneel.

In a world where “edgy” usually means wearing a leather jacket or tweeting something mildly controversial about a superhero movie, Rushdie’s existence became a masterclass in actual, bone-deep rebellion.  To write a sentence that carries a death sentence is the ultimate achievement as far as I’m concerned.  It’s a terrifying validation of the pen’s might, a reminder that underneath the postmodern ennui and the commercial gloss of the bestseller lists, language is still a feral thing.  It has fangs.

So here we are, decades later, and you might think the story ends there.  You might think the world moved on, that the ink dried, the threat dissipated into the ether of forgotten news cycles.  You’d be wrong.  The ghost of that fatwa, it turns out, has a very, very long memory.  Just a few years ago, the kinetic danger we talked about finally caught up.  On a stage in, of all places, New York – a long way from Tehran – a man with a knife decided to finish the job that was started with a radio broadcast.  The attack was brutal, and it cost Rushdie an eye.  An eye for a book.  It’s a biblical, almost poetic level of savagery.

But here’s the kicker, the part that should give you chills.  They took his eye, but they couldn’t take the story.  They couldn’t take the words.  Rushdie survived, scarred but unbowed, and wrote another book – this one called Knife, about the very attack that was meant to silence him forever.  He is still, after all this time, turning their violence into our literature.

If that bleak Valentine’s Day in 1989 taught us that books are dangerous, the aftermath has taught us something more profound” you can’t kill an idea with a blade.  You can maim the author, you can burn the pages, but you can’t erase the story once it’s been told.  The man who wrote a book so powerful it earned him a death sentence is still here, staring back at the world with one good eye, and still refusing, after all this time, to shut up.  That, dear reader, is absolutely badass.

N.P.: “I Survive (feat. Steve Stevens)” – The 69 Eyes