February 14, 2026 – Valentine’s Day

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

February 8, 2026

You know what today is, dear reader: The Big Day! So let’s get to it. Let us raise a glass – preferably something volatile, possibly hallucinogenic, and definitely poured from a copper decanter with unnecessary gauges – to the undisputed godfather of speculative badassery. Today marks the 1828 genesis event in Nantes, France, of one Jules Goddammit Verne. [Author’s note: his middle name wasn’t really Goddammit – it was Gabriel – profanity added for enthusiasm.] And frankly, if you don’t think this man deserves a twenty-one-gun salute fired from the deck of a submarine that doesn’t exist yet, maybe you’re better off watching professional sport or some such.

Because this man essentially reverse‑engineered the future using nothing but ink, obsessive research, and a brain wired like a Victorian supercomputer running at unsafe voltages while everyone else was still trying to figure out how to keep their pantaloons from catching fire near a candle.

Verne was doing the heavy lifting before “science fiction” was eve a glint in a publisher’s eye. He looked at the world – a world obsessed with steam engines and top hats – and said, “That’s cute, but what if we shot three guys out of a cannon and landed them on the moon?” And he did it with such meticulous, neurotic research that you almost feel bad for the lesser mortals trying to write adventure stories today. It’s the literary equivalent of building a functioning internal combustion engine out of paper clips and cider-driven hubris.

The man didn’t predict the future so much as he bullied it into existence. Every submarine hatch that ever hissed open in the real world owes something to Captain Nemo’s brooding Nautilus, that gothic iron leviathan gliding through abyssal darkness like a floating cathedral of revenge. Every rocket that punched through the atmosphere carries the echo of Verne’s lunar shell, that audacious brass-and-gunpowder dream. He mapped the thrill of the unknown onto the grid of known fact, and made speculation feel like engineering homework. Verne predicted the electric submarine at a time when electricity was basically just magic that killed you if you touched it wrong. He saw the deep-sea exploration, the crushing pressure, the isolation – he saw it all through a haze of cigar smoke and French ennui.

Consider, sexy reader, From the Earth to the Moon. The man basically calculated escape velocity on the back of a napkin while sipping absinthe. He predicted the launch site (Florida, obviously) and the splashdown method. It’s almost annoying how right he was. It’s the kind of prescience that makes you wonder if he had a time machine stashed in his basement next to the wine rack.

Then there is Around the World in Eighty Days. Phileas Fogg is the patron saint of punctuality and anxiety. The idea of global connectivity, of shrinking the world until it fits in your pocket watch – Verne saw the internet coming. He didn’t call it that, of course. He called it steamships and railways and pure bloody-minded determination, but the spirit is the same. He understood that the world was getting smaller, faster, and infinitely more dangerous.

So here’s to Jules Verne, the man who taught us that exploration is 10% science, 40% madness, and 50% just refusing to admit that going to the center of the Earth is a terrible idea. He is the reason we look at the stars and think, “Hell, I bet I could build a ship and go up there,” instead of just, “Pretty lights.”

Now go build something impossible. Or at least read something that makes you feel like you could.

N.P.: “The King’s Court” – Kristofer Maddigan

February 7, 2026

California on the Brink: A Symphony of Self-Inflicted Wounds

It’s a strange and beautiful kind of damnation out here, dear reader, watching an empire of golden dreams and sun-bleached asphalt methodically, almost artistically, disembowel itself. California, the great shimmering mirage on the western edge of the continent, is not so much collapsing as it is performing a spectacular act of public suicide, funded, it seems, by an infinite supply of pilfered cash and weaponized apathy. And the best part, the truly chef’s-kiss-perfect part, is that nobody seems to give a flying fuck.

Let’s just, for a moment, peel back the veneer of organic kale markets and performative outrage to gaze upon the writhing, maggot-infested carcass of the state’s finances. It’s a real Bosch painting of bureaucratic depravity. Take Los Angeles County, a place where the sun shines bright on a truly breathtaking hospice care fraud scheme. We’re talking billions – with a ‘B’ – siphoned off by ghouls who bill the state for comforting the terminally ill, who, upon closer inspection, are not only not dying but are often blissfully unaware they’ve been enrolled in their own final act. It’s a perfect, closed-loop system of grift: exploit the dying, bill the taxpayer, and cash the check before the Reaper can even sharpen his scythe.

But why stop at the nearly-dead when you can monetize the illegals? The sheer scale of the Medi-Cal fraud is a thing of grotesque beauty. Billions more vanish into the gaping maw of healthcare for those who shouldn’t even be in the fucking system. It’s a humanitarian shell game where the only sure bet is that the house – a shadowy network of phantom clinics and complicit paper-pushers – always wins. This state bleeds money, and anyone who dares to point it out gets branded with some scarlet letter of xenophobia.

Oh, but we’re barely scratching the surface, dear reader. Let’s talk about the goddamn homeless, the state’s official mascot of compassion. Billions upon billions have been shoveled into a black hole of nonprofits and initiatives with all the accountability of a three-card monte dealer in a back alley. The number of people living on the streets only goes up, yet the river of money flows unabated. Where does it go? Does it evaporate into the smog? Is it used to build tiny homes out of pure, uncut virtue? Who the fuck knows? The people in charge sure as hell don’t know, or, more accurately, don’t want you to know.

And then there’s the high-speed rail. This stupid, non-existent train. A pharaonic monument to ineptitude. A multi-billion dollar fever dream of connecting L.A. to San Francisco in a futuristic blur, which has so far produced exactly zero miles…hell, zero feet of functional track between those two points. It’s the ultimate metaphor for the modern Californian condition: a promise of sleek, efficient progress that is, in reality, a colossal, money-burning hold in the ground in the middle of nowhere. It’s a project so profoundly stupid, so audaciously wasteful, that you almost have to admire the sheer balls it took even to propose it.

And let us not forget, fed-up reader, the pièce de résisitance, the unemployment fraud during the unemployment fraud during the “pandemic.” A cool thirty-plus billion dollars – a sum that could fund a small nation – casually handed out to international crime syndicates and prison inmates. The state’s Employment Development Department, a name so Orwellian it’s almost poetic, basically left the vault door open with a “help yourself” sign taped to it.

The cumulative effect is a state budget that resembles the aftermath of a cartel war. A fiscal bloodbath. And the citizens? The tanned, smiling, idiotic, Prius-driving masses? They wander through the wreckage like placid livestock, their faces illuminated by the glow of their phones, their brows furrowed not by the wholesale looting of their future, but by the existential dread that the Bad Orange Man or some other far-off boogeyman in D.C. might cute the federal allowance that props up this whole pathetic charade.

It is my sincere hope that this entire beshitted state gets DOGEd out of existence and immediately forgotten about.

You can almost hear the collective whine: “But who will pay for our subsidized incompetence if Washington turns off the spigot?” It’s a level of cognitive dissonance so profound, so complete, that it ceases to be merely pathetic and ascends to the level of high art. They stand in the burning ruins of their own house, complaining about the price of fire extinguishers. It’s a glorious, moronic spectacle, and from this vantage point, all you can do is pour another whiskey, light a cigarette, and watch the whole corrupt, fucked-up experiment burn.

N.P.: “Destroyer” – The Birthday Massacre

February 5, 2026 – Letter to Control

REPORT TO CONTROL -ANNEXIA FIELD NODE
FROM: GALLAWAY, JAYSON (WILD BOY CLASS-C OPERATIVE)
SUBJECT: BURROUGHS – THE ORIGINAL VIRUS ENGINEER – BORN THIS DAY, 1914

Control –
I transmit this communiqué from the rust-eaten balcony of the Annexia Safehouse, where the air tastes like burnt typewriter ribbon and the boys are sharpening their bones for the night’s operations. The Interzone static is thick today – something in the grid humming like a junk-sick wasp – and I know why. The date. The birth signal. The old man’s frequency rising from the sewer of time like a coded cough.
William Seward Burroughs – born February 5, 1914, St. Louis, Missouri – patron saint of the deranged, the dispossessed, the chemically re-engineered.
A man who wrote like a virus thinks.
A man who saw the Control Machine before the rest of us even knew we were plugged into it.
I file this report in the proper Annexia format: unreliable, unstable, and unfit for bureaucratic digestion. Just how he’d want it.

I. ORIGIN OF THE SPECIMEN
Burroughs arrived on this planet in the respectable husk of a Midwestern boy, but the larval stage didn’t last. Something in him cracked early – maybe the St. Louis humidity, maybe the ancestral cash, maybe the simple fact he could see the invisible strings jerking the meat-puppets around him. He drifted toward the outlaw circuits like a moth toward a neon “NO VACANCY” sign.
By the time he hit Tangiers – our beloved Annexia – he was already a walking cut-up, a man spliced from junk, queer desire, and cold surgical detachment. A field agent of the forbidden.

II. THE INCIDENT (CONTROL FILES SEALED, BUT WE KNOW)
You know the story, Control. Everyone does, though they whisper it like a curse.
The William Tell routine.
The drunken angle.
The bullet that didn’t respect the myth.
Joan Vollmer – shot through the skull in a Mexico City apartment.
She lived long enough to haunt him.
He lived long enough to weaponize the guilt.
Burroughs always said that killing Joan forced him to write.
If that’s true, then literature owes its most radioactive prophet to a single catastrophic misfire.

III. NAKED LUNCH – THE VIRUS TEST
When Naked Lunch hit in 1959, the censors screamed like bureaucrats discovering a cockroach in their coffee. They banned it in Boston, the UK, Australia – anywhere the Control Machine still believed it could keep the human psyche tidy.
But the book wasn’t meant to be read.
It was meant to infect.
A non-linear fever-script of addiction, talking assholes, mugwumps, liquified morality, and the eternal struggle between the Body and the State. A manual for escaping the soft police of the mind.
Cronenberg tried to film it decades later and wisely didn’t even attempt a straight adaptation. He made a hallucination about a hallucination. Burroughs would’ve approved.

IV. THE AFTERMATH – PUNK, CYBERPUNK, AND THE WILD BOYS
Burroughs didn’t simply influence other writers – he rewired entire subcultures.
– Punk kids scrawled his name on bathroom walls like a sigil.
– Cyberpunks treated him as the proto-hacker of consciousness.
– Kurt Cobain recorded with him, like a disciple seeking benediction from a skeletal oracle.
– Every outlaw writer since has stolen at least one trick from his kit.
And the Wild Boys – my cadre, my brothers in the dust, trace our lineage straight to him.
He taught us that language is a weapon.
That Control is a parasite.
That the only sane response to a world of invisible masters is to laugh, cut the tape, and run.

V. CLOSING TRANSMISSION
So here’s my official report, Control:
On this day, February 5, we mark the birth of the man who cracked the code of the human condition and found nothing inside but wires, needles, and a cosmic joke.
Burroughs stared into the void and didn’t flinch.
He wrote like man carving escape routes into the walls of a prison he knew was infinite.
He remains the most dangerous kind of visionary:
the one who tells the truth about the machinery running the world.
Control, the signal is fading.
The mugwumps are restless, and the black meat is calling.

I send this dispatch with full Wild Boy authorization.
Interzone trembles.
The old man’s ghost is on the line.

N.P.: “Bug Powder Dust” – Bomb the Bass

Word of the Day: tenebrous

Around the turning of the New Year, I decided to make a directional change to my wardrobe. It was time to step up my clothing game, I felt. Part of it was for me, of course…I just thought it was high time for a change, and with all the changes happening this year, it seemed like a good time to do it. A lot of the reason for the change, though, was a reaction to exactly how trashy this culture has become. When I go about anywhere, it seems the bulk of the herd has become unapologetically out of shape, sloppy, and stupid. They lack any sort of critical thinking skills, and their vocabularies are pitifully small.

We need to get serious about the vocabulary situation because the current state of linguistic affairs is frankly embarrassing. It’s a wasteland out there. People walking around with five-dollar haircuts and ten-cent vocabularies, content to grunt monosyllabically while the English language – that great, sprawling beast of expression – gets slowly suffocated by emojis and corporate buzzwords. Not on my watch. Today we are digging into the dark stuff. The heavy stuff. The kind of word that sits in your mouth like a piece of lead shot before you spit it out at some unsuspecting bureaucrat.

Today’s word is tenebrous. It means dark. But not just “I turned off the light” dark. We’re talking about something shadowy, obscure, and generally gloomy (which, now that I think about it, describes my last 20 years pretty accurately). It’s the kind of darkness that implies difficult comprehension, moral ambiguity, or the specific lighting conditions of a San Francisco bondage club at 03:00 on a Wednesday when the bartender has stopped making eye contact.

It comes from the Latin tenebrosus, which itself crawls out of the primordial sludge of tenebrae (darkness). The French got their sticky fingers on it (ténèbreux) somewhere in the Middle Ages before it landed in English in the 15th century, presumably dragged there by some brooding poet who found “dark” too pedestrian for his specific brand of suffering.

I was halfway through a plate of eggs that looked like they’d been cooked in a radiator when the realization hit me that I was essentially vibrating. The coffee in this place was less a beverage and more a tactical assault on the central nervous system, a tar-like substance that tasted of burnt rubber and cancer. I was trying to ignore the man in the booth next to me, who was loudly explaining the geopolitical significance of Bitcoin to a waitress who clearly just wanted to go home and watch the Real Housewhores of Wherever-the-Fuck, but the brutal, unadulterated madness of the situation was becoming impossible to ignore.

My own head felt like a bag of cats. I had spent the previous night arguing about the inherent dishonesty of modern brutalist architecture with an English major who kept trying to buy me shorts of cheap tequila…Cuervo, specifically, which I am medically forbidden from consuming but which I, once enough social pressure is applied by the right girl, inevitably consume in quantities that will kill a lesser apex predator. The sun outside was offensively bright, a glaring, accusatory glare in the sky that seemed personally offended by my hangover, but inside the diner, things were different.

The air conditioning was rattling like a dying lung, and the smell of old grease was so thick you could almost chew it. I looked down at my notebook, where I had scrawled three incoherent sentences about the declining intelligence quotient in America’s universities and a drawing of a lizard wearing a top hat. It was garbage. Absolute trash. But then the door swung open, blocking out the painful daylight, and for a second, the entire back corner of the diner was plunged into this weird, heavy shadow, a sudden, tenebrous gloom that seemed to swallow up the sound of the Bitcoin enthusiast and the clatter of silverware, leaving me alone with my palpitations and the sudden, terrifying clarity that I should probably order more toast.

N.P.: “Faxed Invitation” – Underworld

Review – A Better Life by Lionel Shriver

A Better Life

Reviewed by Jayson Gallaway on 3 February 2026 .

5 out of 5

A Better Life
Lionel Shriver
Harper, February 2026
(304 pages of unfiltered badassery)

Straight up, dear reader, I love this book. Something finally that has the balls to ask all the seemingly unasked questions this rotten culture has been dodging since the borders started bleeding sympathy and the headlines turned into a perpetual guilt trip.

You know that moment when the polite liberal dinner party – candles flickering, everyone nodding along to the gospel of compassion while secretly calculating the equity in their house perched on “stolen” land – you know that moment when someone finally says the quiet part out loud, the part about how maybe, just maybe, inviting the whole world into your foyer isn’t an act of saintliness but a slow-motion home invasion dressed up in humanitarian drag? Lionel Shriver doesn’t just say it…she loads it into a cannon, lights the fuse with a grin, and blows the whole goddamn table to kingdom come. And then she rebuilds the rubble into a mirror, forcing you to stare at your own complicit reflection.

A Better Life is the novel we’ve been waiting for since the first cargo plane full of South American illegals touched down in 2022 and the talking heads started competing to see who could furrow their brow the deepest while explaining why borders are just lines on a map drawn by evil white men. Shriver, one of my favorite contrarians, a walking provocation in sensible shoes, takes the premise – an actual proposal (never implemented, thank Christ) from New York’s idiot mayor to pay citizens $110 a day to billet asylum seekers in their own homes – and turns it into a domestic siege thriller that reads like a paranoid yuppie fever dream crossed with the sharpest satire since American Psycho decided to get political, turning her character Gloria’s sprawling Queen Anne in Ditmas Park into a bloated, creaking metaphor for the United States itself: a once-grand edifice, built on borrowed glory, now sagging under the weight of its own open-door illusions, rooms filling with strangers while the original inhabitants squabble over the thermostat and pretend everything’s fine.

I’m getting ahead of myself here. So assuming my dear reader hasn’t read it yet:

Gloria Bonaventura, 62, freshly divorced from a husband who bolted for greener pastures (or maybe just a condo without drafts), flush with this inherited pile that’s more liability than legacy – she decides she’s going to Do The Right Thing. Signs up for Big Apple, Big Heart (the program’s actual Orwellian moniker – Shriver doesn’t invent: she transcribes), and welcomes Martine Salgado, Honduran, soft-spoken, saintly-eyed, into the house. Martine is helpful. Martine is grateful. Martine cooks pupusas that make Gloria’s mouth water and her conscience sing. Martine charms Gloria’s adult daughters, all childless themselves, drifting through their forties and fifties like ghosts in the machine of delayed adulthood: one a corporate drone too busy climbing ladders to procreate, another an artist chasing grants instead of legacy, the third a perpetual grad student pondering the ethics of reproduction in a warming world. They’re all barren branches on the family tree, a subtle Shriver jab at how the West’s fertility drought leaves us wide open to demographic takeovers, our houses – and nations – echoing with the footsteps of others’ offspring.

And then there’s Nico, Gloria’s 26-year-old son, the basement-dwelling slacker with a philosophy degree gathering dust and a vape habit that’s his only reliable companion. Nico smells the rat from day one, but here’s the genius twist: he can’t quite articulate why. It’s not racism…it’s this gnawing, inchoate dread, a confusion that manifests in stammered objections and half-formed rants about “boundaries” and “sustainability” that Gloria waves off as millennial entitlement. Nico paces the halls, watching Martine’s brother Domingo show up unannounced, then Domingo’s “associates,” then a cousin or two, the house swelling like a balloon about to pop. He senses the wrongness – the way goodwill curdles into obligation, how one act of kindness metastasizes into a full-scale occupation – but every time he tries to voice it, it comes out muddled, drowned in Gloria’s platitudes about empathy and shared humanity. It’s Shriver’s cruelest cut: Nico’s impotence mirrors our own cultural paralysis, where calling out the erosion feels like shouting into a void lined with accusations of bigotry.

What follows is a masterclass in escalation, plot twisting like a knife in the brainstem. Martine’s sob story about kidnapped children back home, a $30,000 ransom demanded by shadowy cartels. Gloria’s frantic scramble to wire money she doesn’t have, dipping into retirement funds while her house (the metaphor ramps up here) starts to resemble America writ small: porous borders (that unlocked back door), overburdened resources (the fridge emptying faster than it fills), cultural clashes (Domingo’s crew blasting reggaeton while Gloria’s classical records gather dust), and a host of uninvited guests who arrive with needs that multiply like unchecked deficits. The daughters pop in, coo over the “diversity,” then vanish back to their sterile apartments, leaving Gloria to foot the bill. Nico tries to rally, but his warnings fall flat – too vague, too hesitant, too afraid of sounding like the villain in his own story.

Shriver’s immigration themes aren’t preached as much as they are vivisected. She leans hard into the paralysis of her characters, especially Gloria’s fatal flaw: her inability – or unwillingness – to actually do anything to stop the unraveling. Gloria could call the authorities, could draw a line, could say “enough” when the living room turns into a dormitory and the utilities spike like a national debt crisis. But she doesn’t. Why? Because that would make her the bad guy, the one who turns away the huddled masses. Shriver skewers this with surgical glee: it’s the liberal elite’s Achilles’ heel, this ridiculous addiction to moral vanity, where virtue-signaling trumps self-preservation. The house-as-America metaphor hits peak resonance as the foundation cracks – literally, in one scene where an overloaded beam groans under the weight – symbolizing how unchecked influx strains infrastructure, dilutes identity, and leaves the hosts depleted, their own progeny absence or ineffective. Shriver doesn’t demonize the migrants; Martine and her kin are survivors, opportunists in a Darwinian game, playing the system because the system invited them to. The tragedy is in the hosts’ complicity, their failure to act until the locks are changed from the inside.

In an era when every novel about immigration either weeps piously or screams nativist slogans, A Better Life does something rarer: it laughs while the house burns down, then hands you the matches and asks if you’d like to roast something over the flames. It exposes the hypocrisy of open borders from the comfort of gated communities, the way good intentions pave the road to domestic apocalypse, and how our collective Nico-like confusion – knowing something’s off but choking on the words – dooms us to watch it all unfold.

This is a book that will make people throw it across the room, then pick it up again because they have to know how far she’ll push it. It’s cruel, it’s funny, it’s terrifyingly smart. It’s Lionel Shriver saying, once again, that reality doesn’t give a shit about your feelings, and neither does she.

Buy it. Read it. Argue about it in bars until someone punches someone else. Then read it again, and wonder why your own house feels a little less secure.

Five stars, no footnotes required. Though it I were forced to append one, it would be: finally, someone had the balls to write the ending we all knew was coming, where inaction is the real invasion.

N.P.: “Immigrant Song” – Super Sonic Temple

February 2, 2026

It is, perhaps, a testament to the sheer entropic force of the universe that John Simon Ritchie – better known to the constabulary and the terrified mothers of Great Britain as Sid Vicious – managed to survive on this spinning rock of sadness for as long as twenty-one years. When he finally shuffled off this mortal coil on February 2, 1979, having ingested enough heroin to sedate a mid-sized rhinoceros with emotional baggage, the collective sigh of the establishment was audible from London to New York. It wasn’t a tragedy in the classical, Aristotelian sense, because tragedy implies a fall from grace, and Sid never really had any grace to begin with. He had a bass guitar he barely knew how to play and a sneer that could wilt flowers at fifty paces.

To understand the death, one must first attempt to parse the life, which was less a biographical narrative and more a series of violent spasms interrupted by periods of unconsciousness. Sid was the id of punk rock made flesh – a walking, spitting, safety-pinned monument to the idea that if you can’t be good, you should at least be loud and possibly infectious. He was the poster boy for a movement that didn’t just want to watch the world burn but wanted to be the one holding the match while flipping off the fire brigade.

The scene in the Greenwich Village apartment where he checked out was grim, but also possessed of a certain dark inevitability. He had been out on bail for the alleged murder of Nancy Spungen, a relationship that makes Romeo and Juliet look like a sensible e-harmony match. Their love was a chemical fire, fueled by codependency and substances of questionable purity.. When he woke up that morning – or rather, failed to wake up – it was the final punctuation mark on a sentence that had been screaming itself hoarse since 1977.

One might argue, whilst adjusting one’s spectacles and attempting to sound profound, that Vicious was a victim of the very machine he raged against. That he was a lost boy looking for a father figure and finding instead a manager who treated him like a circus bear with a drug habit. And there’s probably a kernel of truth in that sociological analysis, assuming the dear reader cares for that sort of thing. But to reduce him to a victim is to strip him of his agency, however self-destructive that agency was. Sid chose chaos. He embraced the void with the enthusiasm of a golden retriever jumping into a mud puddle.

His death wasn’t just the end of a man; it was the symbolic closing of the casket on the first wave of punk. The anger had turned inward, the nihilism had become literal, and the “No Future” slogan had transformed from a rebel yell into a bleak prophesy. He left behind a legacy that is equal parts embarrassment and inspiration – a reminder that you don’t need talent to change the world, just an unshakeable belief in your own refusal to conform and a leather jacket that smells like stale beer and resentment.

So here we are, dear reader, decades later, still talking about a kid who couldn’t play bass, couldn’t sing, and couldn’t stay alive, but who somehow managed to become an icon. It’s funny, really, in a way that makes you want to laugh until you start coughing us something suspicious. Sid Vicious didn’t die for our sins; he died because he lived life with the safety catch off and the throttle stuck wide open. And in a world that increasingly demands we color inside the lines, there is something undeniably, terrifyingly respectable about that level of commitment to making a mess.

N.P.: “Pretty Vacant – Remastered 2007” – Sex Pistols

February 1, 2026

I am in a foul mood this morning, dear reader…foul! I woke up this morning in the kind of mood that makes small children cry and grown mean cross to the other side of the street – an existentially foul, sleep-deprived snarl of a mood – because I made the catastrophic tactical error of letting the puppy sleep in the bed. A choice that, in the moment, felt like benevolent paternal bonding but in practice became a kind of canine waterboarding session conducted in hourly installments. Starting at 01:00, the little beat launched a precision-engineered campaign of nocturnal harassment: toenail scritching, repositioning with the subtlety of a bowling ball, and the occasional full-body flop that suggested she believed gravity was optional. The coup de grace arrived at 04:45, when a warm, unapologetic tongue made direct contact with my inner ear canal, a sensation so profoundly violating it should be classified as at least a misdemeanor in California. Everything else is illegal here, might as well add this to the pile.

And but so anyway, in this state of bleary, half-feral irritability, I remember that today marks the death of Mary Shelley – who, unlike me, managed to produce world-altering literature while presumably getting more than ninety consecutive minutes of sleep. She died in 1851 at the age of 53, taken out by a brain tumor, which feels cosmically unfair given that she’d already gifted the world Frankenstein, the primordial ooze from which all modern science fiction crawled. She was eighteen – eighteen – when she conjured the monster during that infamous ghost-story challenge at Lord Byron’s villa, while the rest of us at eighteen were barely capable of coherent thought, let alone inventing a genre. Shelly was a literary titan disguised as a human, a woman who understood ambition and monstrosity and the terrible of loneliness of creation long before the rest of us caught up.

I have a brain tumor, too. It’s external, weighs about 6 lbs., is shaped uncannily like a chihuahua and is attached to my hip with the clingy devotion of a barnacle that’s read too much self-help literature. It’s not fatal, but it can be loud, and it is responsible for the fact that I am typing this with the emotional stability of a Victorian ghost.

I hate this goddamn dog right now.

The calendar, in its infinite appetite for chaos, also reminds us that February 1 marks the first proven murder committed by Ted Bundy in 1974. Proven being the operative word, since Bundy’s whole biography is basically a Choose Your Own Nightmare of unconfirmed horrors. On this night, he broke into the basement apartment of Lynda Ann Healy in Seattle, bludgeoned her unconscious, and abducted her. Her remains wouldn’t be found for a year, a grim punctuation mark on a story that was already too bleak to bear. Bundy is the kind of guy who forces you to confront the abyss with no guarantee the abyss won’t wink back.

And honestly – given my current state of sleep deprivation – I’m starting to suspect that Bundy’s entire homicidal career might have been catalyzed by a dog that wouldn’t let him sleep either. I’m not saying it excuses anything (it does not), but I am saying that after being woken up every hour on the hour by a creature who weighs less than a Thanksgiving turkey, I understand how a person’s grip on sanity can begin to fray like a Temu extension cord.

I just burned my tongue on the tea. Fucking dog.

Which brings us back to the present moment, for good or ill: me, the puppy, the lingering psychic residue of Mary Shelley’s genius, and the grim anniversary of Bundy’s first confirmed atrocity. All braided together in the strange, sleepless braid of February 1. Honestly, after the night I’ve just endured, I’m starting to understand the primal murderous rage that can brew in the heart of a man denied the sweet oblivion of unconsciousness. Just saying, if I see one more dog-shaped shadow, or hear one more soft, wet sound, somebody’s gonna pay. And it won’t be me. Or Mary Shelley. Or, probably, Bundy. But someone. Someone will pay.

Okay, fuck it: the puppy is snoring again. I’m wide awake. The monster in my head is probably just caffeine withdrawal and sleep debt, probably. But if it starts whispering in German about galvanism and reanimation, I’m calling it quits and moving to Geneva. Or at least to the couch. Maybe I’ll sleep, maybe I won’t. The hour hand keeps moving either way.

N.P.: “Sellf Help” – Offbeat, Greg Blackman

January 31, 2026

Hot damn, dear reader…today we raise a whole goddamn bottle to Norman Kingsley Mailer, the literary titan who swaggered into the world on this day in 1923 (the same year my father was born) and spent the next 84 years punching, writing, and philosophizing his way into the annals of American letters. There are certain figures in the literary cosmos – cosmos here meaning that sprawling, barely governable constellation of egos, neuroses, and typewriter shrapnel – whose birthdays feel less like commemorations and more like controlled detonations. Mailer was a force of nature, a human hurricane of ego, intellect, and testosterone who made it his business to provoke, challenge, and occasionally terrify anyone who dared stand in his way.

Mailer was an absolute badass. Not the Instagram-filtered, hashtagged kind, but the real fucking deal – the kind who wrote like his typewriter was on fire and lived like he had a personal vendetta against boredom. This is the man who gave us The Naked and the Dead, a WWII novel so raw it smells like gunpowder and sweat. He followed that up with The Executioner’s Song, a Pulitzer-winning masterpiece that turned the grim, true-crime story of Gary Gilmore into a sprawling, novelistic epic.

Mailer dissected the human condition with the precision of a surgeon and the brutality of a barroom brawler.

Mailer wasn’t just about the words. He was a walking, talking, headline-generating spectacle. He ran for the mayor of New York City (on a platform that included seceding the city from the state), headbutted his way through literary feuds, and once famously decked a critic at a party. He was the kind of guy who could charm you with a perfectly turned phrase one minute and make you want to throw a drink in his face the next.

Mailer’s genius (and his madness) lay in his refusal to play it safe. He bulldozed boundaries, set them on fire, and then wrote a 10,000-word essay about the ashes. He was a pioneer of New Journalism, blending fact and fiction in a way that made journalistic purists clutch their pearls and readers care more deeply about the stories. He was a messy, complicated, infuriating pain in the ass, but he was never boring.

So here’s to the man who turned literature into a compact sport, who made us think, argue, and occasionally cringe, and who reminded us that great writing isn’t about being polite – it’s about being alive.

Happy birthday, Mr. Mailer

N.P.: “Smack My Bitch Up” – Aytkact

January 27, 2026

Welp, here we are again, dear reader, another Tuesday spinning around the sun on this mud-ball of consequence and cheap wine, and the calendar, that merciless tick-tocking ledger of our own slow decay, informs us that it is January 27th. A day that would, if I were in charge of things, be a global holiday of mandatory, state-sponsored debauchery. Why? Because on this day, back in 1756, the heavens smiled (maybe smirked) down at humanity, and out popped – fully formed, one assumes, with a tiny powdered wig and a head full of symphonies that would make angels weep into their celestial cognacs – one Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart. [Preemptive response to any snarky freshman insisting Mozart’s middle name was Amadeus…you’re not wrong: it’s in there. “Theophilus” translates to “lover of God” or “beloved of God,” which he often rendered as “Amadeus” in Latin. Now quit whining and pay attention.]

Wolfie. The Kid from Salzburg, that smug little Archbishopric town, a baroque snow-globe of a city that probably didn’t deserve the cosmic anomaly it was hosting. This was the starting block of a thirty-five-year rampage of such concentrated, supernova-grade talent that it still scorches the ears and baffles the mind. Almost instantly beyond merely composing music, he mainlined the divine, scribbling down dispatches from a dimension the rest of us can only glimpse in our most profound moments of chemical or emotional excess. He committed a kind of ecstatic arson on the very idea of what music was supposed to be, torching the rulebook while humming counterpoint so perfect it bishops shit and aristocrats rethink their live choices. Dude was basically a human high-pressure hose of melody, spraying the 18th century with a recursive, self-referential brilliance that, frankly, most dear readers are too intellectually malnourished to even process. He spat out concertos like sunflower seeds. He tossed off operas that contained more human truth in a single aria than most novels manage in 400 pages of tortured prose. All this while navigating the powdered, perfumed, and profoundly perilous viper pit of Viennese court society. It’s been 270 years of the little bastards ghost still owning the room, still making every subsequent composer sound like they’re trying to hot-wire a harpsichord in the back of a stolen carriage while Mozart’s already three towns ahead, laughing in perfect sonata form. You listen to the Jupiter Symphony or the Requiem and you realize the rest of us are just dicking around with tuning forks while he was out there rewriting the laws of emotional physics.

And then, the flameout. The big, ugly stop. Thirty-five. An age when most of us are just starting to figure out how to properly file our taxes, Mozart was already a legend being shoveled into a pauper’s grave. The official story is as thin as cheap soup, some horseshit about a fever. But we know better, don’t we, dear reader? The darkness that always nibbled at the edges of his brightest compositions finally came to collect.

Was it Salieri, the patron saint of mediocrity, finally succumbing to a fit of murderous envy? A plausible, almost operatic, narrative. Or was it something more sordid, more human? A bad plate of pork, a dose of trichinosis turning his guts into a warzone? A grimly ironic end for a man who lived his life at forte fortissimo. Or maybe it was mercury, the fashionable cure-all of the day, a slow-acting poison administered by a jealous husband or a quack doctor. Regardless, we know it was no grand operatic exit, no dramatic farewell aria – just a genius reduced to a shivering, swollen husk in a rented room while the city outside kept right on waltzing without him.

But here we are, centuries later, still blasting his stuff in concert halls and headphones and car stereos at 3 a.m. when the world feels too stupid to live in. The music doesn’t age, doesn’t date, doesn’t give a flying fuck about your theories or your playlists or your fragile ego; it just sits there, eternal and smug, daring you to keep up.

So today, raise a toast to the Wolf…not of some polite Riesling, but of something with a kick: whiskey, cheap red, black coffee laced with spite. Happy birthday, Wolfie. He burned twice as bright, and if he only lasted half as long, well, maybe that was the point. He crammed a hundred lifetimes of pure, uncut genius into three and a half decades, leaving behind a body of work so perfect, so impossible, that it serves as a permanent middle finger to the quiet desperation of an ordinary life. (And if you’re reading this while some string quartet is sawing through Eine Kleine Nachtmusik in the background, crank it louder. Let the uncultured heathens next door know the dead genius is still winning).

N.P.: “Mozart” – Trans Siberian Orchestra