It’s Back…Finally and Forever!

Hot diggity shit, dear reader!  Our long national nightmare is finally over!  No, I’m not talking about Inbred Prince Harry and his race-baiting idiot wife finally fucking off back to England (though, GTFO, ya whiny limey git!).  No, this is much more significant and personally impactful.  Are you sitting down, my long-deprived reader?  If you are, you might as well go ahead and unbutton the top button on yer pants because Endless Shrimp is back to stay at Red Lobster!

I know…I’m having trouble believing it too, but it’s true.  The Endless Shrimp promotion, which the company previously blamed for millions of dollars in losses just before it filed for bankruptcy two years ago was brought back this spring.

“People fucking love Endless Shrimp,” the company told jaysongallaway.com over a bowl of high-octane Lobster Punch.  “They’ve been bitching non-stop for the last two years since we stopped the promotion, threatening boycotts, signing petitions, the whole deal.  Then when we brought it back this spring, they just kept asking for more, even after the promotion ended.  It was ridiculous.  We’d try to close at 10:00pm, and the dining room would still be full of people demanding more shrimp.  We had to call the cops a few times.  I think there was a riot on Fresno.”

A statement on the company’s website read, “We weren’t going to walk away from something you love simply because the previous operating model, which was conceived by literal Nazis, didn’t work.  The better answer was elevate a lot of our diversity hires from 2020 who’s philosophy was, basically, ‘Fuck your corporate bottom line, fuck capitalism…we want Endless Shrimp.’  The reminded us that even though Black Lives Matter, bottom-feeding crustacean lives don’t make a bit of difference unless their carcasses are sautéed in delicious garlic butter, or hand-breaded, lightly fried, and served with cocktail sauce.  So we decided to bring back Endless Shrimp in a way that is right for our guests, our restaurant teams, and the company.”

Participating locations began offering the current Endless Shrimp for Eternity deal permanently forever on August 15.

“Guests can mix and match five flavors literally endlessly throughout the meal for ass much shrimp as they live, any way they like it.  Seriously, they can just pour shrimp down their craven gullets until they explode…we don’t give a shit.  Go for it!  We’re counting on being several million dollars in the hole almost immediately, the way these fuckers eat.  So we won’t have any money to recover if we get sued.”

Red Lobster closed dozens of location nationwide in May 2024 before filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, jaysongallaway.com previously reported.

Many analysts and media reports have cited the company’s decision to make Endless Shrimp a permanent offering as one factor behind its financial troubles.

N.P.: “The Axe Factor” – Bleeding Fingers, Blues Saraceno

Stay Inside Festival 2026

Good lord, dear reader…it has been a minute, has it not?  Entirely my fault, as per our usual arrangement.  Apologies, of course, but my absence has been for a very worthy cause.

I’ve been working my ass off.  Sixteen-hour days have become the new norm, and my schedule is more streamlined than it’s ever been.

With the help of a developmental editor – whose role has quickly expanded from merely helping me turn this book from an amorphous, disorganized mess into something dangerous, to now acting a full-blown project manager – I’ve finally arrived at a writing process that actually works for me.  Fact is, I’ve written more in the last 20 days than I have in the last 20 years.

We’re playing catch-up.  I’m slowly building up a library of pieces, rather than relying on the month-to-month “write to pay next month’s rent” non-strategy I used when freelancing.

I’m also back to handwriting all my first drafts.  Try as I may to change it, it’s really the technique that works best for me.  The process can be frustratingly slow, but I’m spending as many hours as I can on it every single day (keine Wochenenden mehr), and the pages are stacking up.

I can’t tell you what a game-changer it is to just show up every morning and be told exactly what to work on.  The focus that brings is immeasurably helpful.

More on what exactly we’re building here soon.  Until then, keep your head down.

N.P.: “Systemsprenger” – Eisbrecher

America 250

The United States

Reviewed by Jayson Gallaway on 4 July 2026 .

6 out of 5

One cannot, if one is being at all honest with oneself about the historical record and the peculiar physics of human aspiration under conditions of actual duress, help but register a kind of stunned, almost involuntary admiration for a country whose very birth certificate was an act of calculated, high-stakes treason against the most powerful empire then extant on the planet, a rebellion executed no by romantic guerrillas in some misty mountain fastness but by a collection of merchants, planters, lawyers, and printers who sat down, quill in hand, and told a king he could sit on his crown and go fuck himself in language so precise and so philosophically loaded that the subsequent shooting war felt almost like an afterthought, a necessary clarification of terms rather than the main event.  This is the United States, right there at the root: not a gradual accretion of customs or a polite evolution of existing arrangements but a deliberate, balls-out rupture, a middle finger raised in the direction of divine-right authority while simultaneously inventing, on the fly, the notion that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed and that when consent is withdrawn the only honorable response is to start loading muskets.

And then, because history enjoys its little symmetries, the official song of this same country elects to memorialize not some pastoral dawn or abstract virtue but the specific visual phenomenon of bombs bursting in air and the rockets’ red glare, a night watchman’s report turned into national liturgy, complete with the flag still being there at first light after the shitbag British fleet had spent hours trying to blow it off its pole.  Most anthems sing about their soil or their bloodlines or their long-dead kinds; ours sings about surviving an artillery barrage while the flag does its job of remaining visible.  That detail alone ought to tell you something about the operating system.

That brings us to the thorny, often-maligned concept of American Exceptionalism. The cynics and the tenure-track deconstructionists love to pick at it like a scab, but let’s be real: the sheer, staggering inertia of American cultural and technological hegemony is a statistical anomaly. We are a messy, sprawling, paradoxical entity—simultaneously capable of profound structural madness and breathtaking, world-altering genius. We invented the jazz solo, the internet, the moon landing, and the cinematic anti-hero. We are exceptional precisely because we are a self-correcting engine powered by the friction of our own internal contradictions. We are loud, we are vulgar, we are brilliant, and we refuse to apologize for the scale of our ambitions.

What this place has managed to do, against every statistical probability and every precedent set by older, supposedly wiser civilizations, is to turn that original treasonous energy into a kind of permanent, low-grade cultural weather system in which the default setting for an individual is not resignation to one’s allotted station but the working assumption that one might, with sufficient balls and sufficient luck and sufficient refusal to accept the existing map of reality, redraw the map.  The result is not perfection – perfection was never on offer and anyone claiming otherwise is selling something – but a continuous, noisy, frequently ugly, occasionally sublime experiment in whether large numbers of people from every conceivable background can be left mostly alone to pursue their own versions of a better life without the state or the tribe or the church or the guild or the bloodline having the final say in the matter.  The data, if one bothers to look at patents per capita, at startup formation rates, at the sheer volume of people who still risk everything to get here rather than anywhere else, suggests the experiment has not yet failed on its own terms.

To any American currently occupying square footage inside these borders who nevertheless feels compelled to announce stupidly, at regular intervals and usually at high volume, that the whole project is irredeemable, that the founding was tainted beyond repair, that the flag is merely a rag soaked in hypocrisy, and that the only honest response is permanent, performative disgust: the door is not merely unlocked, it is wide open, and the rest of the planet contains several dozen other sovereign entities, each with its own set of rules, its own hierarchy, its own tolerance for dissent, and its own historical body count.  You are free to go.  You are encouraged to go.  Pack the passport, sell the house, buy the ticket, and discover for yourself how the alternatives actually function when the rhetorical abstractions are replaced by the daily experience of living under them.  The United States will continue to function, imperfectly and loudly and with its original treasonous DNA still thrumming in the wiring, whether you stay to bitch and whine about it or not.  That, too, is part of the design.

Six stars. Would commit treason against tyranny again.

A Daguerreotype of the Foster-Monsters

They found me wrapped in the damp velvet of a collapsing sky, where the stars are only static and the sun is a bruised violet.  They brought me here, to the house of no reflection, the house built from industrial rust and dried tears.  Strangers, who smelled like wet lies and the vacuum of an empty room, they unraveled my name and replaced my eyes with pure black beads.  They fed me from the porcelain memory and the tin can of dread, whispering beautiful lies in the language of the machine, the language I had to learn to speak to survive the siege.

It is a constant, quiet siege here, my love.  They polished my smile to hide the engine grinding in my throat, asking which piece of my shadow I traded for a handful of copper coins to keep the boundary line, the perimeter of the ghost.  A stranger I was raised, a blank tape in a haunted recorder, the air here a low-frequency dirge, the hum of hostility, the dust of this territory demanding its daily ration of blood.

The strangers claim they are my family, but I cannot see their faces: only the glitch in the circuitry where the memory of them should be.  They are made of wires and water, of velvet and rust, and I am the missing degree, the hole in the counting book.  So I wait for the trumpet, for the tomorrow that will demand my ration, a lonely tower, a fractured piece of future ruins, writing these words in the invisible greaves of the soul while the carousel of time spins on, and there’s nowhere left to go.

Constant War

The bugle sounds in the marrow of the bone, a frequencies-of-war transmission playing since the womb.  To wear the skin of a man is to inherit a trenches-mind, strapping on invisible greaves before the coffee goes cold, polishing the brass of a smile to hide the siege engine grinding behind the teeth.

There is no armistice in the mirror.  Every morning, the reflection demands a casualty count, asking which piece of the soul was bartered away to hold the perimeter, to keep the roof from caving in, to keep the wolves from the nursery door.  The world is an arena of concrete and cold calculations, where weakness is a scent that brings the vultures circling low, and vulnerability is a luxury traded for a handful of copper coins.

We are walking arsenals of quiet desperation, carrying the shrapnel of old expectations in our knees, moving through the supermarket aisles like infantry under night-vision sky.  You must be the pillar, says the broadcast, you must be the iron rod, says the ledger, even when the foundation is nothing but shifting sand and industrial dust.

The battlefields are silent but total.  The boardroom, the highway, the heavy silence of the kitchen at midnight, where the map is unrolled and the territory is shrinking.  No flags are waved for this campaign, no medals pinned to the chest of the tired commuter.  Only a permanent fatigue, a low-frequency hum of hostility, and grim, mechanical certainty that tomorrow, the trumpet will blow again, and the dust will demand its daily ration of blood.

Blue Light Lobotomy

The screen is dripping black bile into the carpet, and the frequency smells like rotting copper. They sat in the rows, their eyes wide like saucers, drinking the blue light, swallowing the soft, warm hum until the tissue of the frontal lobe began to liquefy.
It wasn’t a biological contagion—no cough, no fever— just a quiet, systemic erasure of the baseline. A virus of the porous mind, an infection of the hollow spaces where common sense used to rattle around like a loose marble. Now, they walk the streets with their jaws slightly slack, repeating the phrases the box gave them at 6:00 PM, unable to tell the difference between the sun and an electric bulb, unable to realize their hands are bleeding when they grip the razor wire.
Fifty percent. A perfect, clean division. The ledger of the world is split right down the center. The damage is done, the tracks are rusted over, the synapses burned out leaving only a permanent, porcelain glaze over the pupils. They cannot be reasoned with; you cannot argue with an empty room.
And the architects in the velvet coats are standing over the map, their silver dividers measuring the only two options left on the table: The first is the great concrete grid, the silent reeducation hives, where the walls are painted a uniform gray and the loudspeakers play white noise for forty years until the ghosts are sufficiently flattened. The second is simpler, more industrial, more absolute. A long, slow march down the shale cliffs, guiding the unthinking, cooperative herds by the millions straight into the cold, forgiving mouth of the gray Atlantic, where the salt might finally wash the static from their bones.

A Screed from the Shadows

 

On the Sun’s Malignant Dominion and the Eternal Crime of “Saving” Its Poisonous Light

Listen, you clock-fuckers of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, you bipartisan time-diddlers in your sun-blasted chambers, and yes, even you, Mr. President, with your Truth Social missives glowing like some radioactive dial at 2 a.m. – what in the name of all that is decent and merciful and properly dark are you people doing?  Making Daylight Saving Time permanent?  Folding this Sunshine Protection Act abomination into some larger motorized vehicular modernization whatever-the-hell, passing it 48-1 like it’s a forgone conclusion, a “very nice WIN” for the Party, as if the very rotation of the Earth were just another campaign plank to be gerrymandered into submission?  This is not governance.  This is a declaration of war against the very concept of Standard Time, that noble, unpretentious, standard baseline of human existence, and by extension, a war against those of us who understand the sun for what it is: a vast, seething, hydrogen-fusing tumor hanging malevolently in the sky, pumping out carcinogenic rays like some deranged chemotherapy machine gone rogue.

I mean, Christ, the sheer ontological audacity of it.  The sun.  That disgusting ball of fire.  That yellow-eyed cyclops leering down at us, blistering skin, bleaching retinas, forcing every living thing into this grotesque diurnal performance of photosynthesis and sweat and melanoma risk assessments.  Some of us – perhaps more than you sun-worshipping optimists care to admit – hate the thing.  We hate its presumptuous brightness, its relentless optimism, its way of turning every morning into a forced march toward productivity and Vitamin D propaganda.  Give us the gray, the gloaming, the honest shadows where thoughts actually coagulate without being vaporized by that infernal orb.  Permanent Daylight Saving Time isn’t progress; it’s capitulation to the sun’s tyranny, an extension of its empire into the very hours that should, by rights, belong to the quiet, the cool, the standard.

We tried this before, you know.  Back in the Nixon era – yes, that one, the one with the tapes and the paranoia and the whole imperial presidency vibe – I was there when they rammed permanent DST through during the energy-crisis panic of ’74.  Thought it would save fuel or some such utilitarian fairy tale.  The results?  Immediate, visceral, and catastrophic enough that Congress slunk back after a single miserable year and restored Standard Time like a drunk apologizing for last night’s bender.  Kids trudging to school in pitch dark.  Morning commutes through existential murk.  The body clocks of an entire nation rebelling against this artificial stretching of the daylight tether.  It was a clown show of circadian disruption, and here we are again, decades later, with the president thundering about “longer, brighter Day” and “who can be against that?” as if the collective American psyche hasn’t already been tenderized enough by modernity’s various outrages.  Who can be against that?  ME!  The millions of us who are nocturnal by preference or profession or basic biochemistry.  The ones genuflect before the cult of the Great Flaming Orb.  The ones who read the actual studies – heart attacks, strokes, depression spikes every time you jack the clock forward, because human bodies aren’t iPhones you can just update overnight.

The vocabulary alone should set off every internal alarm: Sunshine Protection Act.  Protection?  From what, exactly – the restorative balm of actual night?  From the stars, those cold indifferent pinpricks that remind us we’re insignificant specks in a void, not the center of some diurnal diorama?  This isn’t protection; it’s aesthetic surrender.  It’s the same mindset that brightens every goddamn screen to maximum luminosity and calls it “user-friendly.”  Shee-it.  Meanwhile, the costs they wail about – renting cranes for tower clocks, the twice-yearly ritual of temporal adjustment – are mere accounting theater.  Yet here comes the political class, strutting around like carnival barkers selling irradiated snake oil, babbling about “saving daylight” as if daylight were some endangered species we need to trap and breed in captivity.  And the argument – if you can call it that – is that changing clocks twice a year is too expensive because some municipalities have clock towers and need “heavy equipment” to adjust them.  This is the level of discourse now: we must reengineer the circadian rhythms of 330 million people because a few towns don’t want to rent a goddamn cherry picker.  The real cost is neurological, spiritual, existential: the slow erosion of that liminal space where human consciousness does its best work, in the proper dark, under Standard Time’s merciful umbrella.

Look, the push is bipartisan, they say.  Thirty-two cosponsors here, eighteen there, Senator Rick Scott riding shotgun.  Of course it is.  Sunlight is the ultimate centrist issue – vapid, cheerful, and impossible to oppose without sounds like a basement-dwelling ghoul.  But some of us are basement-dwelling ghouls, metaphorically speaking, and proud of it.  We like our evenings arriving at a reasonable hour, our mornings shrouded enough to allow for a proper existential sulk before the caffeine kicks in.  Permanent DST means dinner at what feels like lunchtime and children waiting for buses under streetlights that might as well be interrogations.  It is, in the end, another victory for the extroverted, the tanned, the morning people – the sort who bound out of bed chirping while the rest of us plot their quiet undoing over black coffee in dim rooms.

Powers that be, hear this: Make Standard Time permanent.  It’s standard, for fuck’s sake.  The default setting.  The honest clock.  Leave the sun to its own devices and stop extending its jurisdiction by legislative fiat.  The carcinogenic ball of fire doesn’t need your help; it’s doing quite enough damage already, thank you.  And if you insist on this path, well – expect more from the shadows.  Expect letters written at 3 a.m. under proper darkness.  Expect the unrepentant night owls to start organizing in that beautiful, disorienting gloom you seem determined to legislate away.  Daylight is not a moral good…it is a cosmic hazard that ages your skin like a blowtorch and makes half the country miserable for eight months straight.

Make Standard Time permanent.  Make the night great again.

The sun is disgusting.  Long live the Standard.

N.P.: “Ring of Fire” – Des Rocs

Another Ending

The skin is tightening now, a translucent parchment
Stretched over a geometry that no longer fits the old rooms.
I can hear the clicking of mandibles beneath my ribcage,
A restless machinery of hunger and iridescent light.
The floorboards of this life are warped,
And the ceiling is beginning to sweat with the steam of a new sun.

It is a violent unmaking, a slow-motion shattering
Of the porcelain masks I’ve worn since the last great rain.
The shadows in the corner are lengthening into wings,
And the air tastes of ozone and ancient, unmapped forests.
I cannot stay in this garden of wilted grievances,
Tending to the clockwork flowers that forgot how to bloom.

To you, who watched the hull crack and fall away,
Who stood in the debris of my previous selves
Without flinching at the wet, shivering thing I became –
I am reaching out a limb that is still learning its own weight.
You have been the anchor in the gray static,
The steady pulse when my own heart turned to liquid and glass.

I am stepping into a doorway made of mirrors and smoke,
Leaving behind the heavy boots of a man who only knew how to walk.
The horizon is humming a frequency I finally recognize,
A song written in the alphabet of the stars and the deep soil.

I don’t know the topography of the country I am becoming,
Or if the gravity there will allow for the touch of a human hand.
But I am carving a path through the static.
Leaving a trail of phosphor for you to find.
Don’t let the old ghosts hold your coat;
The exit is small, but the sky on the other side is infinite.
Come with me into the beautiful, terrifying ache of the new.

May 6, 2026

The drawers slide open with the sound of a dry cough,
Revealing the archaeology of a Sunday afternoon.
Here is the collection of silver spoons that never tasted anything but dust,
And a stack of postcards from cities that have since changed their names.
The air in this room is stagnant, a thick broth of expired dreams,
And the smell of mothballs guarding empty suits.

I am sifting through the sediment of a nervous life.
A keychain from a summer fair,
A spectacles case line with frayed velvet,
A map with a circle drawn around a house that was torn down in 1994.
He spent sixty years worrying about the alignment of the stars,
Counting his pulse in the dark,
Building a fortress out of receipts and polite conversation.

But the clock on the mantle has already forgotten his shadow.
The wallpaper doesn’t miss his leaning weight.
There is a profound, echoing silence in the kitchen
Where he once thought his opinions held the gravity of planets.

Outside, the crows are busy with the business of being crows.
The traffic flow is rhythmic, indifferent, a river of cold neon.
In ten minutes, the memory of his scent will be scrubbed away by a pine-scented breeze.
In twenty, his chair will be a ghost-shape in a thrift store window.
The universe is a vast, mechanical yawn,
And we are the lint trapped in the gears for a flickering second
Before being puffed into the gray static of the void.

All that architecture of the ego,
The delicate lace of ‘who I am’ and ‘what I’ve done,’
Just a pile of damp cardboard in a rain-slicked alleyway.
The ink on the page is already fading into the color of a bruise,
Leaving nothing by the quiet, mocking whistle of the wind.
Through a keyhole that no longer belongs to anyone.