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

March 1, 2026

Yesterday and today have blurred into one, dear reader, at least over here. I know there is separation somewhere, but you will hopefully forgive if I have trouble finding it.

A day like this demands the kind of emotional bifurcation that would make a saner man pull over, vomit into the nearest ditch, and reassess his life choices. But not us, dear reader. No, we ride the razor’s edge with a kind of reckless, wide-eyed gratitude, because history has finally decided to stop mumbling into its sleeve and instead shout something worth hearing.

The Persians are dancing. Not metaphorically, not in some wistful, diaspora-poetry way, but literally dancing, bodies unshackled, hair uncovered, wine flowing like the collective bloodstream of a people who have waited far too long for the boot to lift. The downfall of the Islamic Regime, that decades-long monolith of fear and clerical sadism, is cracking open like a rotten pomegranate, and the seeds spilling out are incandescent with possibility. I’ve been drinking Syrah with people who haven’t tasted freedom in their homeland for generations, and let me tell you, the stuff hits different when it’s paired with the sound of theocracy collapsing under it own sanctimonious weight (and the military might of the United States and Israel, both commanded by the only men in my lifetime with the sack to actually do something beyond hand-wringing and moralistic bitching). There’s a kind of cosmic justice in the air, the sort that makes you believe the universe occasionally remembers to do its goddamn job.

But the universe, being the fickle, bipolar bastard it is, never gives without taking. And so, while the streets of Tehran hum with the electricity of rebirth, the halls of the Dead Poets Society have gained a new resident.

Dan Simmons is gone.
Seventy-seven years old, felled by a stroke, and suddenly the world feels a little less sharp, a little less dangerous, a little less willing to stare into the abyss and report back with something other than platitudes. Simmons was one of the rare ones, the kind of writer who carved his stories, chisel to bone, leaving behind works that felt like they’d been smuggled out of some forbidden archive where the librarians carried knives. Song of Kali, one of my all-time favorites, remains one of the most unsettling, intoxicating pieces of fiction ever unleashed on the unsuspecting public, a book that doesn’t just frighten you but contaminates you. And Hyperion – that cathedral of myth, machinery, and metaphysics – was proof that science fiction could still punch holes in the sky and let the dark matter leak through. And then there was Children of the Night….

To lose him on a day like this feels like some cosmic accountant balancing the ledger with cold, bureaucratic precision. A regime falls, a titan falls. A people rise; a voice goes silent. Celebration braided with sorrow, like barbed wire wrapped in silk.

And yet, dear reader, maybe that’s the only way days like this can exist. Maybe joy without grief is too flimsy to trust, and grief without joy is too heavy to bear. Maybe the only honest way to live in this absurd, flaming carnival of a world is to raise a glass to the living, pour one out for the dead, and keep marching forward with the kind of defiant swagger that would make both the Persians in the streets and Dan Simmons in whatever cosmic library he’s haunting nod in approval.

So drink. Mourn. Celebrate. Rage. Repeat.

N.P.: “I Know You Can Feel It – Working Men’s Club Remix” – Nine Inch Nails

February 27, 2026

Today marks a monumental day on my personal calendar, dear reader—one of the most significant in my life. Twenty years ago, Mary, my Original Other—the extraordinary woman I met as a child and who gave me the space to become the person I am—was tragically killed in a traffic accident. That loss was devastating in itself, and the moment I heard the news, I knew life would never be the same. But what I couldn’t have imagined in that instant was the depth of the damage that lay ahead.

That day was the beginning of a long, harrowing descent—a protracted nervous breakdown that unraveled my personality and left it in ruins over the next ten years. If you’ve ever wondered why there was no follow-up to my first book, why I stopped teaching, or why I seemed to vanish just as everything appeared to be going so well—there’s your answer.

I fell down that hellish rabbit hole for a full decade. It should never have lasted that long, but for reasons I’ll likely never fully understand, many of the people closest to me—those in a position to help—saw my vulnerability and chose to attack instead. And they didn’t stop. The spiral deepened, and it wasn’t until 2016 that I finally recognized the malignancy and treachery that had taken over my life. That year, I made the painful but necessary decision to cut it out entirely.

This process was excruciating. It left me with no family and permanently estranged from people I once thought were my closest allies. But it was essential. While those who could have “saved” me in 2006 did the opposite, by 2016, a handful of old and new friends emerged. They could have run the other way—and maybe they should have—but they didn’t. They stood by me as I began to rebuild. Just as the betrayals will never be forgiven, the loyalty and love of this new family will never be forgotten.

The hemorrhaging stopped in 2016, but the rebuilding took another ten years. I started from the ground up, without a blueprint or even a clear plan—only the determination that this time, what I built would be impenetrable and indestructible.

It’s been a hellish yet extraordinary journey. To condense a 20-year odyssey like this into a few paragraphs feels absurd, I know. The full story is a major part of my next book, which I’ve been working on for some time. I thought it was nearly finished, but I realized it needed more care, so that’s where my focus has been this month. I can’t wait to share it with you, along with all the other stories from these past two decades.

But today is today, and it deserves acknowledgment.
As of today, mourning is over. Defensiveness is over. Reactivity is over.
The worm has turned. Edmond Dantès has emerged as The Count. Tomorrow starts today.
Brace yourself.

Word of the Day: spatulate

Alright, dear reader: today’s Word of the Day is spatulate. (ˈspætʃələt or ˈspætʃəˌleɪt if you’re feeling particularly pedantic about your diphthongs), the adjective that sneaks into the language like a spatula sliding under a half-burnt pancake you were too proud to admit was ruined.

It means having a broad, rounded end, shaped like – you guessed it – a spatula, that humble kitchen implement whose very name descends from Latin spatula, diminutive of spatha (a broad flat blade, sword-ish thing), which itself traces back through Greek spathē to something broad and flat enough to whack weave threads or row a trireme or just generally assert dominance over dough. Entered English proper around 1760 via Modern Latin spatulatus, because nothing says “I’m a serious botanist describing a leaf” like borrowing from dead languages to sound like you know what you’re doing.

The word hangs around mostly in botany (spatulate leaves: narrow stalk exploding into a fat rounded tip, like nature got bored of pointy and decided to go full ladle), anatomy, and the occasional descriptive flex when someone’s fingers or features demand more precision than “thick” or “stubby” can deliver. Example straight from the usage canon: “his thick, spatulate fingers.”

But let’s get real, because precision without application is just intellectual foreplay.

There she was, mid-stride across the sticky floorboards, hips swinging with the slow, inevitable authority of tectonic plates deciding to fuck shit up, her lower half a masterpiece of broad, rounded geometry that made every barstool occupant briefly forget how to blink. Not heart-shaped, not apple-bottomed, not any of those coy euphemisms people trot out when they’re afraid of the truth: no, hers was a spatulate ass – broad at the business end, tapering just enough upstream to suggest engineering rather than accident, the kind of posterior that could flip an omelet from across the room.

She caught the stare of one poor bastard nursing a warm IPA and a grudge against optimism. He froze, glass halfway to lips, eyes locked on the impossible physics of it all, the way the denim strained and surrendered in equal measure, the rounded flare catching the low neon like a signal flare from some distant, more honest civilization. He tried to look away – failed spectacularly – then tried again, this time with the doomed concentration of a man attempting to defuse his own libido using only willpower and bad posture. The ass didn’t care. It just kept moving, broad and rounded and utterly indifferent to the wreckage it left behind: one spilled drink, two dropped jaws, and a suddenly very expensive tab because nobody could remember how to signal for the check.

She reached the door, paused – perhaps sensing the atmospheric pressure drop – then pushed through into the night, leaving behind the faint scent of vanilla body spray and the lingering echo of collective male failure. The bar exhaled. Someone muttered “Jesus,” though it wasn’t clear if it was prayer or curse. The jukebox clicked to the next track, something with too much reverb and not enough mercy.

Use spatulate today. Deploy it like a weapon. Let it sit there on the page, fat and rounded and refusing to apologize. Because language, like anatomy, is better when it’s shameless.

N.P.: “Protocol Flow” – Metal Scar Radio, Hybrid

February 23, 2026

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

N.P.: “Umbra” – Ghost