April 7, 2026

Throwin’ up the set again today, dear reader. I know you Get It, but there a couple of folks who frequent this website and get all consternated and grouchy and bitch at me when I do this.

So listen.

You sit there in the flickering blue light of whatever screen you’ve chosen as your personal electronic pacifier, doom-scrolling through the usual carnival of performative outrage and algorithmic horseshit, and somewhere in the back of your reptile brain you still feel it, don’t you? I know you must – the low, electric hum of something bigger than your mortgage, bigger that your politics, bigger than the latest flavor of ideological syphilis that’s eating the culture from the inside out. That hum is the United States Armed Forces pulling two of their own – a pilot and a Weapon Systems Officer, call signs irrelevant because the only thing that matters is they were alive and behind enemy lines – out of the meat grinder of hostile territory like it was just another Tuesday. And right alongside that hum, louder still, is the bone-rattling thunder of Artemis II’s crew riding a pillar of American fire farther into the black than any human beings have ever gone before, looping around the moon and staring straight into the face of the infinite with the same calm, psychotic competence that used to define test pilots and moonwalkers and every other magnificent bastard who ever looked at the horizon and said, Yeah, I’ll take that too.

The rescue itself was the sort of operation that makes you understand why the rest of the world still whispers the phrase American special operations the way medieval peasants used to whisper dragon. Night-vision, rotor wash, suppressed weapons, the whole lethal ballet executed with the kind of surgical swagger that looks, from the outside, like pure fucking magic and, from the inside, like months of rehearsals, contingency plans stacked on contingency plans, and the absolute refusal to leave anybody behind. The pilot and the WSO – two men who climbed into a jet knowing full well the sky might try to kill them – got yanked back into friendly hands while the people who wanted them dead were still trying to figure out what the hell had just happened. No press conference grandstanding, no made-for-TV speeches. Just the quiet, terrifying efficiency of professionals who treat “impossible” the way the rest of us treat “Tuesday.” You want competence porn? This is it. This is the real thing. The kind that doesn’t need hashtags.

And then – Christ – Artemis II.

While the rest of the idiots of the species were busy arguing about pronouns and carbon offsets and whether the latest celebrity had the correct opinion on the Epstein files, four American in a capsule built by American hands and American sweat rode the most powerful rocket ever launched by anyone, anywhere, and went farther than Apollo ever did. Farther. Let that sink in. We didn’t just repeat history; we lapped it. They crossed the translunar injection point, they looped the moon, they looked down at the pale blue dot that contains every war, every love song, every petty grievance we’ve ever had, and they did it while the whole planet watched like it was the goddamn Super Bowl. The courage required is almost obscene. Not the cartoon courage of movies. The real kind: the kind that sits in a tin can on top of several million pounds of explosives and says, Light the fucking candle.

And here’s the part that makes the professional hand-wringers and the campus revolutionaries and the professional anti-Americans start clutching their pearls and muttering darkly about “militarism” and “nationalism” and whatever other ten-dollar words they’ve been taught to use as substitutes for actual thought: both of these things – the rescue and the flight – happened because this country, for all its flaws and contradictions and self-inflicted wounds, still produced people who are willing to strap themselves into machines of incomprehensible power and risk everything so the rest of us don’t have to. They do it without asking for your approval. They do it without caring whether the latest TikTok moralist thinks it’s “problematic.” They do it because that’s who they are.

You can sneer if you want. You can post your little memes about the military-industrial complex or the evils of space colonization or whatever fashionable nihilism is trending this week. You can pretend that greatness is passé, that competence is suspect, that the only authentic response to human achievement is a knowing, ironic deconstruction. Fine. But when the rotors thump in the dark and the rocket lights the sky like the wrath of God, those noises don’t give a single shit about your deconstruction. They just happen. And they happen here, under this flag, because we still – barely, miraculously – have the balls and the brains and the sheer goddamn nerve to make them happen.

If those two things don’t make you want to go out front and wave an American flag, I simply don’t know what kind of anti-American pussy you are, but if we’re ever at the same bar, you’re paying for your own lukewarm rosé or Bud Light or kombucha or whatever your kind is drinking these days.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to stand outside and look up at the sky like a goddamn lunatic, because somewhere out there four Americans are still farther away from the rest of us than any humans have ever been, and somewhere down here two more of us just got dragged back from the jaws of the enemy by the best people this country still knows how to make.

And for one incandescent moment, the republic doesn’t feel like it’s dying.

It feels like it’s just getting started.

N.P.: “Do You Ever Get Tired?” – King Willonius

Happy Easter!

April 4, 2026

The Seconds Learned to Run (Pure Distillation)

The day began as a pale shimmer,
a thin ribbon of light unraveling
across the floorboards
as if it had forgotten how to be morning.
The air tasted faintly of old flowers
and something sweeter —
a memory that hadn’t happened yet,
pressing its forehead against the window
as though asking to be let in.

The clocks kept their distance,

hovering in the corners

like shy animals

that no longer trusted their own instincts.

Their faces glowed faintly,

not with purpose,

but with the soft embarrassment

of creatures who know

they’ve lost the race

to the very thing they were built to measure.

You appeared beside me

with that drifting, half-awake grace,

your outline wavering

as if the room couldn’t decide

whether to keep you or dream you.

Your hand brushed mine

and the moment stretched —

thin as a soap bubble,

fragile as a whispered apology —

before snapping back

with a quiet, startled gasp.

Outside, the sky folded into itself,

a slow, deliberate motion

like someone closing a book

mid-sentence.

The trees leaned inward,

their branches trembling

with the weight of too many seasons

arriving all at once.

Even the wind seemed confused,

carrying fragments of conversations

that hadn’t been spoken yet.

I felt the hours slipping past my ribs,

soft and luminous,

like fish moving through shallow water.

They didn’t hurry out of malice —

only inevitability.

The minutes blurred into streaks of color,

gentle and insistent,

as if painting over the edges

of everything I thought I recognized.

You rested your head on my shoulder

and the world tilted,

just slightly,

just enough for the future

to spill a little into the present.

We breathed in unison,

trying to anchor ourselves

to something slower,

something kinder,

something that wouldn’t dissolve

the moment we touched it.

But the seconds had already learned to run.

They darted through the room

like silver insects,

leaving trails of warmth

that faded almost instantly.

I reached for one,

just to feel its shape,

but it slipped through my fingers

with a soft, apologetic hum.

And still we sat there,

two silhouettes in a room

that couldn’t hold still,

listening to the quiet acceleration

of everything around us —

the gentle, unstoppable rush

of a world forgetting

how to move slowly.

N.P.: “A Different Drum” – Peter Gabriel

April 3, 2026

Dream #3326 – The Archivist at the End of the Garden

I found the Archivist again tonight,
kneeling in the frostbitten garden,
feeding passwords to the snails.
He said the moon was misfiled,
that someone had switched its label
with a jar of counterfeit memories
left humming on the back shelf
of the sky.

He asked if I remembered the Agreement.
I told him I’d misplaced the paperwork
somewhere between the dream
with the burning carousel
and the morning I woke up
with someone else’s heartbeat
ticking in my throat.

He nodded –
as if this were the most predictable
of catastrophes –
and handed me a cracked teacup
full of static.
“Drink,” he whispered,
“before the clocks notice you’re awake.”

So I drank.
And the garden folded inward
like a paper fortune-teller,
and all the snails began reciting
the names of people
I haven’t become yet.

The Archivist smiled,
wiped the moonlight from his hands,
and told me gently
that the world would end
three times tonight,
but only one version
would remember to write it down.

N.P.: “Early To Bed” – Bjorn Berge

Review: Primate

Primate

Reviewed by Jayson Gallaway on 29 March 2026 .

2.5 out of 5

Someone recently asked me about my “guilty pleasures”…what they are and why. I suspect they were expecting me to mention some chick flick I secretly adored or a couple of cuts off the Journey’s Greatest Hits album that I couldn’t get enough of, because they seemed a bit surprised/uncomfortable/put-off with my actual response. Lately, I’ve been deriding inordinate and likely perverse satisfaction from videos of idiots trying to take selfies with and/or pet and/or somehow intimately interact with wild animals/apex predators in the wild or in captivity, doesn’t matter. These hopeless, phone-addicted dolts who haven’t touched grass in decades who deludedly think the world is here for them to judge and react to on YouTube or Reels so they can have content seem perfectly comfortable – entitled, even – approaching some gigantic beast on its home territory, where its family/pack lives, fully expecting this apex predator to just stand still and passively let some bipedal turd of a person get next to it, put his/her arm around it, and be involuntarily selfied. And then they are shocked – shocked, dear reader – when they are immediately gored in the groin or bitten in the face. These videos always seem to have some warning at the top about “graphic” or “violent” content, but I find these warnings childish, ridiculous, and pathetic. Where others are apparently repulsed, I find great humor. The truth is that when I watch these vids, I crack the fuck up. Yesterday I blew a not-insignificant amount of Jack and Coke™ through my nose as I cackled like a bastard as I watched some ignorant ballbag climb into a European zoo enclosure and get brutally and unlubricatedly violated by a whole colony of purple-assed spider monkeys in estrus. Where others see tragedy and violence, I simply see nature at work…Darwin taking out the trash.

Anyway, I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised when this same person I was talking with about guilty pleasures didn’t seem to interested in watching “Primate” with me. Which was fine. They didn’t miss much anyway.

“Primate” is basically a formulaic, trope-allegiant slasher movie, except instead of a homicidal maniac in a hockey mask, we get a rabid chimpanzee. Which is, for all practical purposes, the same thing.

The movie opens with a very promising (albeit brief) foreshadowing of the aforementioned rabid chimp ripping a veterinarian’s face off. Then, as per our usual arrangement with slasher tropes, we switch to a group of overly attractive, clueless, airheaded, entitled teens going home to Hawaii. They’re not returning from a vacation in paradise – no – they already live there. And not in some tropical hovel or hut…nope…a modern mansion at the edge of a ridiculous cliff, with an infinity pool going right to the edge of said cliff, which cliff then immediately drops off about 1000 feet directly into the Pacific. Two minutes into this film and I cannot wait for Mr. Chimp to rip every one of these cast members limb from limb.

Things proceed predictably, which isn’t the worst thing, but some opportunities are missed. But one can only have so many expectations of a movie about a rabid chimpanzee, I suppose. I think the biggest disappointment for yrs. truly is that the screenwriter’s/filmmaker’s weakening of the chimp for the sake of a few scenes and plot points. Here’s what I mean: an adult male chimpanzee is 4 to 6 times stronger than a human of the same size. That means that a chimp’s strength is equivalent to that of 5 adult men. So, if the chimp in “Primate” (he’s named Ben) – if Ben was truly rabid and on a killing spree, he would annihilate everyone within reach without exerting any serious effort. Toward the end of the movie, there are several physical fights between various humans and Ben the rabid chimpanzee. These are depicted as these sort of blow-by-blow, punch-counterpunch brawls that are disappointingly unrealistic. At one point, Ben back-hands a teenage girl that weighs about 90lbs hard across the face. In reality, this would decapitate the girl. Instead, she just gets knocked down, not even losing consciousness. Lame.

In another scene near the end of the movie, Ben gets ahold of the keys to an SUV the “final girl” is hiding in. She locks the doors – Ben uses the fob to unlock the doors. I guess the filmmakers want us to be impressed by how smart Ben is, being able to use a remote control, but in reality, Ben could easily rip the door completely off of the SUV and disembowel Lucy in one, fluid motion, and Lucy has a good disemboweling coming for the entire movie.

Which is the film’s real sin, if we’re being honest: it wants credit for being clever while refusing to commit to the one honest premise it has, namely that a chimpanzee is not a man in a rubber mask but a compact, tendon-laced meat-grinder with the bite force of a crocodile’s impatient cousin and the social temperament of a drunk uncle who just lost his pension. The script keeps pulling its punches, or rather pulling Ben’s punches, because the producers apparently decided that an hour and twenty minutes of insipid teenagers getting turned into wet confetti would be “too mean.”¹ Too mean for whom, exactly? The audience that bought tickets to watch a movie called “Primate”? Shee-it.

There is, however, one sequence – mid-film, right after the inevitable poolside ketamine-and-White Claw montage – where the movie briefly remembers what it is. Ben, still damp from chewing through the vet’s mandible in the cold open, slips into the house through the floor-to-ceiling glass that some architect with a death wish installed six inches from the infinity pool. The kids are doing what kids in these things always do: they are filming each other, they are narrating their own lives in the third person, they are mistaking volume for charisma. Ben does not monologue. He does not stalk. He locomotes, which is polite way of saying he moves like a cannonball made of muscle and bad intentions. He grabs the golden retriever-looking boyfriend (his name is either Chase or Bryce; the distinction is purely ornamental), lifts him by the throat with one hand, and uses the other to peel the kid’s jaw sideways off his skull like it’s the lid on a can of tennis balls. The sound design here – credit where it’s due – is fantastic: a wet, fibrous rip that lands somewhere between celery and a phonebook. For thirty seconds “Primate” is exactly the movie it should have been: mean, fast, uninterested in your feelings about it.

Then it apologizes.²

It apologizes by giving Lucy – the designated Final Girl, who wears her trauma like a tasteful necklace and keeps repeating “we have to stay together” in the tone of someone who has read exactly one article about group survival – the aforementioned SUV to hide in, and by letting her wind a shoving match with Ben over the center console. She kicks him. He recoils. She screams. He looks confused. Confused! A rabid chimpanzee, an animal whose entire evolutionary resume is “rip, tear, dominate,” is written as if he’s just been told his favorite band broke up. The camera lingers on his eyes, big and wet, while sad piano dribbles in, and for a moment you can feel the film begging you to consider Ben’s interiority. Fuck that. If you wanted interiority you should have case human. You cast a chimp (sure, a human named Miguel Torres Umba in a chimp suit) so you could watch him turn a poolside cabana into a Jackson Pollock made of viscera. Own it.

The teens, as a unit, are assembled from the same factory that produces reality-TV contestants and vape-shop employees: symmetrical faces, asymmetrical morals, zero impulse control. They speak in a patois that is 60% acronym, 30% upspeak, 10% genuine confusion about what year it is. Their dialogue is the kind of recursive self-reference that makes you want to diagram the sentence on a whiteboard just to prove it doesn’t mean anything: “Like, literally, I can’t even, like, literally can’t.” Ben, to his credit, doesn’t give a shit. He kills two of them by accident while trying to get to a bag of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos that someone left on the counter. Okay…he doesn’t…he would have if I had written this ridiculousness, which would have been the only honest product placement to happen all year.

By the time the third act rolls around – sunset, cliff, infinity pool turning pink with blood and hibiscus petals – “Primate” has settled into the rhythm of every other slasher: false scares, a monologue (in sign language) from the adult authority figure who arrives late and should have died faster, and a final confrontation that is supposed to feel cathartic and instead feels like a negotiated settlement. Lucy, bloodied but still camera-ready, chucks been off a deck. One of the table’s thick, jagged legs punch through his chest and abdomen like a dull spears. He hangs there for a beat, impaled, eyes wide, hands twitching at the wood as if he could negotiate with it. Lucy just stares, breathing through her mouth, while Ben makes a noise that is not a roar and not a whimper but something in between, a wet exhale that sounds like air leaving a punctured tire. He dies. Blah blah blah.

So do I recommend it? Sure, in the same way I recommend watching those selfie clips: not because it’s good, but because there’s a particular, feral pleasure in watching entitlement meet consequence and lose. Just don’t expect “Primate” to have the courage of its own premise. It wants to be nasty, but it keeps flinching. It wants to be a parable, but it can’t decide whether the moral is “don’t build houses on cliffs” or “don’t underestimate primates.” In the end it’s a middling slasher with an inspired casting choice, a few glorious seconds of honest carnage, and a whole lot of nervous hedging. Watch it with the sound up, the lights down, and a drink you can afford to snort through your nose when Ben finally – briefly – gets to be the animal he is.

¹ Which is rich, coming from a studio whose last three releases were all subtitled variations on “People Get Murdered In A House.”

² The apology is structural: the film cuts away from the aftermath of the jaw-peel to a slow-motion flashback of Ben as a baby, bottle-fed by the vet whose face he will later remove. It’s supposed to humanize. It humanizes the way a taxidermist humanizes a deer.

N.P.: “Guns/Steel” – Metal Scar Radio, Hybrid

March 22, 2026

Here’s the thing about the festering American culture in this otherwise glorious year of 2026: it’s not just bad – it’s aggressively, unapologetically, soul-suckingly bad. It’s like the collective consciousness of this country woke up one morning, decided to mainline Mountain Dew Code Red, and then just never stopped. The people? Trash. The way they dress? Trash. The way they speak? Trash. It’s like they’ve all agreed to participate in some kind of unspoken performance art piece called How Low Can We Go? Spoiler alert: they’re still digging.

Now, I know what you’re thinking, dear new reader: “Oh, but who are you to judge?” Well, let me stop you right there, Scooter. I am exactly the person to judge. I’ve got a PhD in Judgmental Arts with a minor in Not Giving a Fuck. While the rest of you are out here clutching your pearls and wringing your hands over whether it’s “okay” to have an opinion about the human trainwrecks around you, I’m over here with a megaphone and a lawn chair and a handle of Jack, narrating the carnage like it’s the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. I judge with the serene, almost monastic clarity of a man who has accepted his role as a cultural executioner. On any given day, I let the judgement flow like some Old Testament river of fire, cleansing the land of Crocs and linguistic incompetence.

My criteria for judgment are simple, elegant, and ruthlessly effective. First, your ability to drive. If you can’t merge without causing a 12-car pileup or you think the left lane is for leisurely Sunday strolls, or you enter some sort of weird contemplative mode for a while after the light turns green, you’re already on my list. Second, your command of the English language. If you can’t string together a coherent sentence that doesn’t start with “I feel like,” you’re dead to me. And if you’re one of those people who says “irregardless” or “I could care less,” congratulations, you’ve just won a one-way ticket to damnation in my personal hellscape.

But let’s say you manage to avoid those two pitfalls. Maybe you’re a decent driver. Maybe you can conjugate a verb without breaking into a sweat. Good for you. But here’s the rub: I still have to look at you. And statistically speaking, if you’re in California, you’re probably wearing pajamas and Crocs in public, which means you’ve already failed. I mean, come on. Pajamas? In public? What are you, an incontinent toddler? And Crocs? Goddammit! They’re not shoes; they’re a cry for help. If you’re out here shuffling around in those rubber abominations, you might as well tattoo “I’ve totally given up” on your forehead and call it a day.

This is not mere sloth; this is ideology made sartorial. The pandemic apparently gave permission, sure – everyone retreated into loungewear as if comfort were the final civil right – but what stuck was the refusal to re-emerge. Why put on real pants when the republic itself has decided that effort is optional, that dignity is a luxury good, that the only remaining public performance is the performance of not caring? Airports now host earnest (and occasional satirical) debates about whether pajamas should be banned outright; Transportation Secretaries issue gentle scoldings about “dressing with respect” while the nation collectively yawns and adjusts its drawstring waistband. Tampa International Airport even joked about outlawing the combo – pajamas plus Crocs – as if humor could shame what shame itself has already abandoned.

And don’t think I didn’t notice the vape. Oh, I noticed. You’re not fooling anyone with that little USB stick of shame. You’re out here puffing clouds of artificially flavored despair like a dragon whose given up on hoarding gold and decided to hoard crippling insecurity instead. Mango Tango? Fuck off. That’s the hill you’re dying on? Go ahead, blow your sad little smoke rings and pretend you’re cool. Meanwhile, I’ll be over here, judging you from the moral high ground, which, incidentally, smells like bourbon and victory.

The thing is, it doesn’t have to be this way. Once upon a time, we had standards. We had style. We had dignity. Now? Now we’ve got people wearing Snuggies to the grocery store and calling it “self-expression.” We’ve got influencers who can’t spell “influencer” telling us how to live our lives. We’ve got a culture that celebrates mediocrity and calls it authenticity. And the worst part? Most of you seem fine with it. You’ve accepted the trash. You’ve embraced the trash. You’ve become the trash.

Well, not me. I refuse. I will not go gently into that good landfill. I will rage, rage against the dying of the taste. And if that makes me a snob, so be it. Better a snob than a slob. So go ahead, America. Keep wearing your jammies. Keep vaping your Mango Tango. Keep butchering the English language like it owes you money. Just know that somewhere out there, I, and others like me, are watching. And we’re judging.

N.P.: “I’m Afraid of Americans – Nine Inch Nails V1 Mix” – David Bowie

Word of the Day: pestilential

Pestilential, adj

Relating to or tending to cause infectious diseases; producing or tending to produce infectious or contagious disease.
Morally harmful or pernicious.
Annoyingly troublesome; a colossal, unrelenting pain in the ass.

Basically a plague, a moral contagion, or an atmosphere so toxically, soul-rottingly foul that it makes the very air feel it’s been gang-raped by a committee of lesser demons and then left to fester in the sun. Not merely bad. Not merely evil. Something that spreads corruption, contamination, or general human misery. Also a person whose mere presence seems to lower the property value of the room.

Dragged kicking and screaming into Middle English around the late 15th century, derived from the Late Latin pestilentialis, which itself mutated from pestilentia (plague, unwholesome atmosphere). Ultimately, it all boils down to the Latin pestis, meaning a deadly disease, plague, or destruction. A long, noble lineage of words used to describe things that make you regret having a nose.

Thursday night in some dim-lit felony lounge off Mission Street, the kind of place where the jukebox only play Tom Waits B-sides and songs about dead hookers. The air is thick with the perfume of spilled PBR, regret sweat, and the faint metallic tang of someone’s fresh tattoo infection. I’m there because writing is a disease that requires cheap liquor and worse company, and tonight the disease has prescribed both.
She not so much slides as much as oozes onto the stool next to me like gravity owes her money. Hair the color of bad decisions at 2 a.m., lips painted the shade of arterial spray, wearing a tank top that says “Let’s Fuck” in rhinestones that have mostly fallen off, much like her standards.
“I like you shirt,” I say, because that’s what I’m supposed to do.
“It likes you,” she says, looking me directly in the eye. Because of course.
She smells like vanilla body spray trying heroically to cover the scent of three different men’s cologne and one pack of close cigarettes. Her eyes are the glassy, predatory blue of a Great White that’s already decided I’m chum.
She orders a shot of Jameson and sidecar of desperation, then turns those eyes on me like I’m the last functioning cock in the zip code.
“You look like you write things,” she says, voice raspy from too many Marlboros and not enough apologies. I want to retort, “You look like you inspire massive regret.” But I don’t. So she continues: “Bet you’re deep.”
I tell her I’m shallow as a puddle in hell but I’ve got a library card and a drinking problem, which is close enough. She laughs – sounds like a hyena gargling broken glass – and puts her hand on my thigh like she’s checking my pulse for later reference.
We talk. Or rather, she talks and I nod while calculating the half-life of my dignity. She sounds like Keith Richards’ older sister and has man hands. She tells me about her ex who’s in county for something involving a chainsaw and a Pomeranian, about the OnlyFans tier she’s about to unlock called “Emotional Damage,” about how she once fucked the dead lead singer of Type O Negative (unclear if the alleged coitus was posthumous or not). Every sentence is a small war crime against taste.
She leans in. Breath like an ashtray soaked in peach schnapps. “You wanna get out of here? My place is only six blocks and the roaches are usually quiet this time of night.”
I look at her – really look. At the track marks disguised as “artistic freckles,” at the way her pupils are doing the backstroke in whatever she’s on tonight, at the smile that’s equal parts invitation and eviction notice. She looks very much like a mistake I would have made in the ’90s. And something in me, some last scrap of self-preservation wired directly to the lizard brain, finally fires.
I stand up. Slowly. Like a man who’s just remembered he has bones.
“Go give somebody else AIDS, you pestilential twat,” I say. Not loud. Not angry. Just clear. Like Jesus would if he were in my situation. The kind of clear you get right before the guillotine drops and you realize the blade’s already falling.
The bar goes quiet for half a second, the way rooms do when someone says the thing everyone was thinking but nobody had the testicular fortitude to voice. She blinks. Once. Twice. Then she laughs again – that same broken-glass laugh – but this time it’s thinner, cracked down the middle.
“Fuck you, Hemingway,” she spits, but there’s no heat in it. Just the sad fizz of a firework that didn’t quite launch.
I walk out into the San Francisco night, which is cold and smells like urine and possibility in roughly equal measure. My heart is hammering like it’s trying to escape my rib cage and join the witness-protection program. I light a cigarette with shaking hands and think: That was the cleanest kill I’ve made in years.

N.P.: “Voodoo Child” – Tom Morello

March 15, 2026 – Beware the Ides, You Bastards: Tentacles, Treason, and the Death of Cosmic Sanity

We need to get one thing absolutely and unequivocally straight before the coffee hits your bloodstream on this spectacularly cursed Sunday morning: the universe is actively conspiring against you, and it has circled March 15th on its celestial calendar with a thick, red Sharpie. The soothsayers were not just blowing smoke up the collective togas of the Roman elite when they whispered about the Ides of March. They were tapping into a fundamental, chronologically recurring frequency of sheer, unadulterated doom. You know the story (or at least you’d better, dear reader). Julius Caesar – a man who, by all historical accounts, possessed an ego large enough to require its own zip code – wandered into the Theatre of Pompey and caught 23 sharp pieces of Senate-approved metal in the ribs. The lesson here is not merely about the pitfalls of imperial ambition or the staggering unreliability of coworkers. The lesson is that mid-March is a phenomenologically toxic wasteland, a temporal sinkhole where bad things happen to people who forget to check their blind spots.

Beware the Ides, dear reader. Lock your doors, pour yourself a violently strong beverage, and trust absolutely no one who approaches you wearing a poorly tailored bedsheet.

But the bleeding out of a Roman dictator is merely an appetizer in this buffet of historical madness. If a Roman assassination isn’t enough to curdle your morning gin, remember it was on this exact day, in the thoroughly bleak and unforgiving year of 1937, in the quiet, respectable, Providence, Rhode Island gloom that smelled of mildew and unnamable regret, Howard Phillips Lovecraft – H.P. to the initiates, the Old Gent to the cultists – finally shuffled off this mortal coil and into whatever squamous, non-Euclidean dimension waits for the truly committed materialists who accidently invented a new kind of religious terror.

And brother, did he ever.

The man weaponized the absolute indifference of the universe and turned it into prose so dense, so feverish, so baroque in its despair that reading him feels like having your amygdala French-kissed by something that has no business existing in three dimensions. While the rest of the pulp hacks were busy slapping vampires and werewolves into tidy little morality plays – good triumphs, evil gets a stake through the heart, roll credits – Lovecraft looked at the night sky and said, No. Fuck that. The real terror is that the sky is looking back and it doesn’t even register you as a protein. He gave us entities that didn’t want your soul, didn’t want your women, didn’t even want your worship in any meaningful way. They simply Were, vast, ancient, cyclopean, and utterly, serenely uninterested in the screaming little primates who’d accidentally poked the wrong corner of reality. Cthulhu doesn’t rise to rule us; he rises because his nap alarm went off. The color out of space doesn’t corrupt the countryside for sport; it corrupts in the way radiation corrupts tissue – because that’s what it does. There is no moral. There is no catharsis. There is only the slow, inexorable realization that the universe is not hostile, which would at least be dramatic. It’s worse. It’s bored.

And the motherfucker did it all while half-starved, writing letters to anyone who’d listen, nursing grudges the size of Azathoth’s court, and maintaining a prose style so ornate it makes Victorian wallpaper look minimalist. He was a walking contradiction: a materialist who dreamed like a mystic, a racist who created a mythology so transcendently misanthropic it eventually outgrew every ugly personal tic that birthed it, a recluse who accidentally founded a literary religion that now has more true believers than most actual religions.

So today, on the Ides that also happens to be the anniversary of his exit, raise whatever you’re drinking – coffee, whiskey, the black bile of existential nausea, whatever – and tip it toward Providence. Not in mourning, exactly. Lovecraft would have hated that. More like a salute between two people who both know the joke, and the joke is that there is no punchline, on the endless, star-strewn, indifferent dark.

And beware the Ides. Not because you’ll be stabbed in a senate – though, hey, read the group chat – but because March 15 is an annual reminder that two things are true at once: power gets checked, and the universe does not care about your press release. Light a cheap candle for Lovecraft today, then go outside and notice how ordinary the sky looks, which is exactly what makes it terrifying.

N.P.: “Ritual” – Ghost

March 9, 2026

On March 9, 1994, the universe finally collected the tab on the “Dirty Old Man” himself, Charles Bukowski, who checked out of this absurd mortal coil in San Pedro, California. At 73, leukemia accomplished what decades of catastrophic whiskey consumption, violently cheap cigars, and the existential horror of the United States Postal Service could not. He died having thoroughly dismantled the polite, cellophane-wrapped fiction of the American Dream, leaving behind a staggering mountain of visceral, beautifully unvarnished poetry that made the literary establishment collectively clutch its pearls.

The man spent the vast majority of his adult life operating aggressively on The Fringe. He was a creature of the racetrack and the dive bar, a guy who effectively treated his own liver like a hostile combatant while typing out literature that bypassed the brain entirely and punched you squarely in the balls. He was the patron saint of the spectacularly flawed, the chronically unemployable, and anyone who ever looked at a nine-to-five job and felt the urgent, biological need to vomit.

The most magnificent detail of his departure – the absolute chef’s kiss on a life lived with middle fingers permanently raised – is his gravestone. It features the silhouette of a boxer and exactly two words: DON’T TRY.

Now, some saps, the ones who write poetry about dew drops and puppy dogs and other such horseshit, will interpret that as a resignation, a surrender to the inevitable crushing weight of existence. And if you think this was some sort of slacker mandate or an endorsement of perpetual lethargy, you are entirely missing the point. Those of us who’ve actually read the man, who’ve tasted the bile and beauty in his sprawling, messy oeuvre, know better. This was certainly not an invitation to lie back and let the world roll over you. It was the opposite of laziness, a middle finger to effort that pretends, to straining after immortality or Cadillacs or applause. Don’t force it. Don’t posture. Don’t grind your teeth and squeeze out art likes it’s a dump you scheduled. Wait. Watch. When the thing – the line, the image, the liver-kick truth – crawls close enough, you reach out and slap it down or pet it, depending. But you don’t chase it down the street waving a net made of MFA workshops and ambition. You do it because it’s there, aching to get out, not because you’re trying to be somebody.

He believed real art should feel effortless, gritty, unforced. No pretentions. No counterfeited depth. Just the raw spill of whatever was rattling around in the skull after the bars closed. And if didn’t come? You waited. You drank. You typed anyway. But you didn’t try.

And then came the funeral, a masterclass in cosmic irony. You might expect a man who chronicled the chaotic, grease-stained realities of Post Office and Factotum to be sent off with a violently rowdy wake involving broken bottles and cannons (a la H.S.T). Instead, his funeral was conducted by Buddhist monks. Yes, a chorus of serene, chanting ascetics offered up a profoundly quiet, surreal contrast to a lifetime defined by spectacular, screaming chaos. It is exactly the kind of wildly unpredictable punchline the old man would have loved.

He left behind a body of work that still smells like sweat and cigarette ash and the inside of a bus station at 2 a.m. He wrote about losers, drunks, gamblers, the chronically unlucky – and in doing so, he made them mythic. Not heroic, not redeemed, but seen. He carved out a literary kingdom for the people who never get statues, only arrest records.

And maybe that’s why he still matters. Because in a culture obsessed with polishing itself into oblivion, Bukowski remains a reminder that the truth is usually found in the stains, the cracks, the parts of life that don’t photograph well.

So raise a terribly cheap glass to Bukowski today. He was a glorious, infuriating disaster of a man who accidently captured the rawest elements of the human condition while actively trying to ignore them. And whatever you do today, just don’t try.

N.P.: “Hot Stuff” – Mythic Prophesy

March 7, 2026

Tomorrow morning, dear reader, we are voluntarily plunging headfirst into a temporal hallucination of our own making, and frankly, it makes me deeply, profoundly embarrassed to be a card-carrying member of the human race.

When you really strip it down to the studs, Daylight Saving Time is the most shamefully stupid endeavor our species collectively partakes in. We are a supposedly advanced civilization that split the atom and put golf carts on the moon, yet twice a year we engage in this mass psychotic delusion that we can somehow manipulate the very fabric of the cosmos by manually turning a tiny piece of plastic on our kitchen walls. It is a spectacular monument to human idiocy.

Picture this: you wake up – already pissed because the alarm is screaming at what your body insists is an hour earlier than God and nature intended – and the sun is sitting there smugly, like it’s been up for hours judging your groggy ass. Your melatonin is still partying in your bloodstream while cortisol is late to the meeting. You stagger around, stub your toe on the same fucking dresser you’ve owned for a decade, and somewhere in the back of your skull a tiny primal scream begins: Why the fuck are we still doing this?

Because we are idiots. Collective, consenting, clock-fucking idiots.

If you want to fully grasp the sheer, unadulterated absurdity of this practice, you have to look at its idiotic history. The concept didn’t emerge from the brilliant mind of some grand temporal physicist. Nope…the modern nightmare of DST was initially pitched by a New Zealand entomologist named George Hudson in 1895, simply because the Kiwi jackass wanted more daylight after his shift at the post office to hunt for goddamn bugs. Decades later, the German Empire weaponized the idea during World War I in a desperate, ultimately flawed attempt to save coal for their war machine. We are literally tethering our modern, hyper-connected circadian rhythms to the eccentricities of a 19th-century bug catcher and Kaiser Wilhelm’s wartime austerity measures. It is a joke that has metastasized into a global psychological disease. I remember when the U.S. tried to make it permanent in the ’70s during the Nixon-era energy panic, and now it lingers like a bad tattoo you got in Vegas. The original energy-saving claim has been debunked so thoroughly it’s basically a corpse in the corner of the room everyone politely ignores. Modern studies show the savings are negligible at best – a fraction of a percent, if that – while the costs pile up in hospital beds, wrecked cars, and productivity craters.

We need to pull the plug on this charade right now. Here are seven objectively irrefutable reasons why this temporal circle-jerk needs to be outlawed immediately:

It is biological warfare against our own bodies.
In fact, it fucks your health like a cheap motel mattress. That one-hour spring-forward theft triggers a measurable spike in heart attacks (up around 24% the following Monday in some data), strokes, workplace injuries, and even digestive fuckery. Your poor circadian rhythm – evolved over millennia to sync with the actual sun, not some congressional fiat – gets misaligned, melatonin production delays, cortisol surges wrong, inflammation markers climb. Sleep scientists and the American Academpy of Sleep Medicine have been screaming for years: permanent Standard Time aligns better with human biology. DST is chronic low-grade jet lag imposed on 330 million people annually. We are literally sacrificing human lives on the altar of a fake, legislated hour.
It turns roads into rolling death traps.
Fatal car accidents jump – 6% or more in the week after the change – because drivers are sleep-deprived zombies with slowed reaction times. Add darkness to morning commutes (because we’ve stolen daylight from the front of the day and slapped in on the ass-end), and you’ve got higher crash risk, especially for pedestrians and cyclists. We already have enough ways to die on American highways; we don’t need Congress mandating extra ones.
The great “energy saving” lie is total bullshit.
I mentioned it supra, but it deserves further examination. The entire premise of the practice is built on a myth. Modern studies consistently show that any microscopic savings in artificial lighting are immediately and violently obliterated by the massive surge in heating and air conditioning use. We aren’t saving a goddamn thing: we are just shifting the thermodynamic deck chairs on the Titanic.
It absolutely massacres human productivity.
Productivity tanks harder than a drunk uncle at Thanksgiving. It’s pointlessly expensive and disruptive. Employees lose 40-60 minutes of sleep per night for days after the shift. That means more errors, more slacking, more “I’m just gonna stare at this spreadsheet until it makes sense.” Workplace accidents spike. Decision-making degrades. And don’t even start on the mood disturbances – irritability, depression flares, seasonal affective bullshit amplified because we’re forcing unnatural light exposure patterns on a species wired for sunrise-triggered wakefulness. The economic cost of this collective exhaustion is staggering, purely because some bureaucrat decided we needed to pretend the sun rises at a different time. Think of the sheer administrative drag: IT departments scrambling to patch systems that didn’t auto-update right, scheduling SNAFUs for international calls, missed flights, confused kids showing up an hour early (or late) to school. Farmers – yes, the people this was supposedly for – hate it; the cows don’t give a shit about your clock, they milk when the sun says so. The whole exercise is a bureaucratic circle-jerk with zero net upside.
It is the height of arrogant, bureaucratic hubris.
There is a profound sickness in the belief that legislation can simply override the planetary rotation of the Earth. You cannot legislate sunshine. Moving the hands of the clock does not magically grant us more daylight; it just cruelly redistributes the misery of darkness, completely disregarding the natural rhythms that biology spent millions of years perfecting.
It turns parents and pet owners into hostages.
Try explaining the nuances of the geopolitical time-shift to a screaming toddler or a hungry chihuahua at what is now arbitrarily 5:00 AM. They don’t give a singular, solitary shit about the Kaiser’s coal. They operate on biological reality, entirely exposing the flimsy, pathetic illusion we have forced upon ourselves.
We could just stop.
Permanently. No more biannual ritual humiliation. Pick Standard Time (the healthier option per circadian experts) and stop the absurd twice-yearly charade. Most of the planet doesn’t do this anymore. Hawaii and Arizona laugh at us. Europe’s flirting with ditching it. Yet here we are, still springing forward like lemmings with a calendar.

Enough is enough. The time for polite debate has long since passed. We need to drag our lawmakers out of their comfortable, chronologically confused stupors and demand an immediate end to this madness. We must return to Standard Time, lock it in permanently, and burn the key. Quit fucking with the clocks. Let time just be time.

So tomorrow morning, dear reader, when your phone betrays you and advances an hour while you sleep, when you drag your carcass out of bed feeling like someone roofied your soul, remember: this isn’t inevitable. It’s policy. It’s chosen. It’s stupid.

And if you’re still defending it, kindly go fuck yourself with a sundial.

N.P.: “Links 2 3 4” – Rammstein