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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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. 
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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

February 22, 2026

 

“My mission in life is to make everybody as uneasy as possible.  I think we should all be as uneasy as possible, because that’s what the world is like.”  E.G.

The day has arrived once more, dear reader – February 22, that faintly shuddering hinge in the calendar – on which we commemorate the birth of Edward St. John Gorey, who in 1925 emerged (one imagines) from some drafty New England parlor already wearing a fur coat and already regarding the world with that particular expression suggesting both polite interest and terminal disappointment.

It is customary, on such occasions, to offer felicitations, though in Gorey’s universe such gestures tend to be met with a sort of wan, sidelong glance, as though the recipient were quietly calculating the statistical likelihood of a chandelier collapsing or a large, ill-tempered creature appearing at the door.  Nevertheless, one persists.

For Gorey – illustrator, writer, designer, and unrepentant purveyor of gothic whimsy – constructed an oeuvre in which calamity was not so much an interruption as a houseguest.  His pen-and-ink lines, so fine as to resemble the hairs of an anxious moth, arranged themselves into parlors, staircases, and desolate moors where children expired with alarming regularity, adults behaved with inscrutable malaise, and creatures of uncertain taxonomy lurked with impeccable manners.

The Peculiar Legacy of a Man Who Made Tragedy Charming

  • The Gashlycrumb Tinies, that alphabet of diminutive doom, remains a sort of primer for the aesthetically morbid.
  • The Doubtful Guest, who overstays its welcome by several decades, is perhaps the most accurate portrait of the human condition ever committed to paper.
  • The Loathsome Couple, with its unnervingly calm depiction of monstrous behavior, demonstrates Gorey’s talent for presenting horror with the emotional temperature of a tepid cup of tea.

To celebrate Gorey is to celebrate the art of the omission.  In his world – a world of heavy urns, sprawling Edwardian manors, and questionable footwear – the most terrifying things are the ones left unsaid, or rather, the ones left just outside the frame of the pen-and-ink border.

  • The Victorian Aesthetic: He rendered the nineteenth century not as it was, but as it should have been: populated by melancholy bearded men in floor-length fur coats and children who meet their demise with an almost admirable lack of protest.
  • The Deadpan Disposition: There is a certain psychopathic indifference to his work that we, the gloom-inclined, find deeply comforting.  When little Amy tumbles down the stairs, there is no weeping; there is only the impeccable line-work of the banister.
  • The Theatricality: Beyond the page, his Tony-winning designs for Dracula and the wobbling, fainting silhouettes of PBS’s Mystery! Introduction remind us that the gothic is not just a style, but a choreography.

Let us reflect on the essential Gorey-esque truths that govern our blog today:

  • Objects are often more reliable than people.  Especially if the object is an inexplicable stone or an iron figuring.
  • The weather is perpetually ominous.  If the sun is shining, it is merely doing so to highlight the precariousness of a nearby cliffside.
  • Adverbs are to be used with surgical precision.  One does not simply walk; one wanders distractedly, or gazes reproachfully.

His work is not cruel; it is indifferent, which is far more unsettling.  The universe, in Gorey’s hands, is a place where dreadful things happen with the same inevitability as dust accumulating on a velvet curtain.  The effect is both chilling and oddly comforting, like discovering that the abyss has impeccable posture.

How to Gorey-fy Your Life (or Determine If You’re Already a Character in a Gorey Book)
Living in an Edward Gorey story is marked by a pervasive, whimsical macabre aesthetic, featuring Edwardian/Victorian fashion (furs, boots), inexplicable gloomy weather, and a sense of “wistful murder mysteries” or quiet, absurd, and often fatalistic happenings.  Expect to encounter strange creatures, sudden, matter-of-fact misfortunes, and a generally eerie, black-and-white, highly detailed world.

Key Signs You Are in a Gorey Narrative:

  • The Setting is Uncannily Dreary: You live in a drafty Victorian house, a foggy, desolate seaside town, or a room furnished only with a single, bizarre object.
  • Fashion is Strict and Somber: You wear long fur coats, dark tailored clothing, high collars, and perhaps small gold hoop earrings regardless of the weather or activity.
  • Inexplicable Guests: A strange, silent creature or a “doubtful guest” has arrived and refuses to leave, occupying a corner or disrupting daily routines.
  • A “Goreyesque” Atmosphere: Everyday, mundane activities are overshadowed by a dark, surreal, and quiet dread.
  • Unusual Cat Behavior: Cats are omnipresent, sometimes acting as, or resembling, cryptic observers in your daily life.
  • Accidents are Prevalent: Family members or neighbors constantly, yet calmly, succumb to absurd, tragic, or mysterious mishaps.
  • Detailed, Monochromatic Existence: The world feels like a cross-hatched, ink-drawn illustration where even the most dire evens are depicted with meticulous, artistic precision.
  • Unsettling Humor: You find yourself laughing at things that are undeniably creepy, absurd, or morbid.

If you feel your life is a mix of a quiet, elegant nightmare and a, frankly, somewhat confusing game of Clue, you are likely inhabiting an Edward Gorey world.

So on this day, we raise a glass – preferably something faintly dusty, in a room where the wallpaper seems to be watching – to Edward Gorey, who taught us that morbidity need not be grotesque, that elegance can coexist with calamity, and that the world is far more bearable when one accepts that doom, like a persistent houseguest, will eventually sit down and ask for tea.

N.P.: “The Passenger” – Emily Autumn

Review: Ghost’s Skeletour 2026

Ghost: Skeletour 2026

Reviewed by Jayson Gallaway on 21 February 2026 .

5 out of 5

Due to an unexpected ticket from an unexpected and well-connected friend, I was in attendance at the latest stop on Ghost’s Skeletour 2026 last night, February 20, where the Nameless Ghouls and Papa V Perpetua turned what could have been just another large-room rock show into something approaching a genuine, sweat-soaked, incense-heavy liturgical experience that left me grinning like an idiot for hours afterward and still feeling faintly buzzed the next morning.

The set was a beautifully calibrated thing, opening with the slow-burn grandeur of “Peacefield” that immediately set the tone for the whole evening – those opening chords hitting like a velvet hammer – and then rolling straight into “Lachryma,” which felt sharper and more vicious live than on the record, the whole arena seeming to lean in as the riffs thickened.  From there it was a masterclass in dynamics: the brooding pomp of “Spirit,” the anthemic life of “Faith,” “Call Me Little Sunshine” turning into this massive, sing-along catharsis that had even the most stoic floor-section types swaying like they were at some inverted revival meeting.  “The Future Is a Foreign Land” landed with real emotional weight, “Devil Church” brought the theatrical instrumental weirdness, “Cirice” absolutely crushed with its slow-build menace, and “Darkness at the Heart of My Love” was an amazing mixture of haunting and tenderness.  The whole two-hour set felt like it had actual narrative arc rather than just a string of bangers.  Here’s the full setlist:

  • Peacefield
  • Lachryma
  • Spirit
  • Per Aspera ad Inferi
  • Faith
  • Call Me Little Sunshine
  • The Future Is a Foreign Land
  • Cirice
  • Devil Church
  • Darkness at the Heart of My Love
  • Satanized
  • Satan Prayer
  • Umbra
  • Year Zero
  • He Is
  • Rats
  • Kiss the Go‑Goat
  • Mummy Dust
  • Monstrance Clock
  • Mary on a Cross
  • Dance Macabre
  • Square Hammer

But listen, dear reader – none of that, not even the pyro, the robes, the masks, the sheer sonic immensity of the Ghouls locked in and delivering, would have mattered half as much if the place had been the usual sea of uplifted rectangles that has turned so many arena shows into a kind of collective digital documentation project instead of a shared, in-the-moment ritual.  And here’s the part where I have to say, with genuine, almost embarrassing enthusiasm: Ghost’s decision to enforce a phone-lock policy (those little Yondr pouches handed out at entry, sealed tight, phones trapped until you hit the exit) was the single biggest factor in making the night transcendent rather than merely very good.

For the past twenty years or so, my default stance toward big-venue rock has been one of low-grade disgust bordering on refusal: the spectacle of tens of thousands of people paying premium prices to stand elbow-to-elbow watching a performance through the two-inch screen they’re holding aloft at arm’s length, half-trying to film it, half-trying to live it, but mostly succeeding at neither.  The result is always this weirdly depersonalized event where everyone’s simultaneously present and absent, recording proof-of-attendance instead of actually attending, and the band ends up playing to a forest of tiny glowing screens rather than to faces.  It’s exhausting, it’s tragic, it’s the opposite of what live music is supposed to be about.

Last night, though?  None of that.  The policy was standard – phones locked away, small bags screened, no sneaking – yet the execution felt almost revolutionary in its simplicity and effectiveness.  And crucially, they didn’t just lock you down and leave you there; they had designated “cell phone use” zones out on the patios, little outdoor holding pens where you could step outside, get your device unlocked by staff, doomscroll or text or whatever for a song or two, then re-lock and return.  It was smooth, it was civilized, it was – dare I say – almost elegant in how un-intrusive it managed to be while still solving the problem.  No one seemed pissed about it; people just adapted, and the result was an audience that was actually watching the show, eyes up, bodies moving, voices raised in unison instead of thumbs poised for the record button.

I can’t overstate how much that changed everything.  The energy in the room was feral and focused and communal in a way arena gigs almost never are anymore.  You could feel the collective attention sharpen during the quiet moments, swell during the choruses, crest when the lights hit just right.  No forest of phones meant no visual distraction, no low-level resentment bubbling under the surface, no sense that half the crowd was more interested in content than experience.  It was just…people, together, losing their minds to music that demands to be felt in real time.

 

So yeah: this Skeletour stop was the best large-scale rock show I’ve seen in decades, not just because Ghost were firing on all cylinders (they were), but because the band and venue together managed to strip away the single most annoying, soul-deadening element of modern arena concerts and let the ritual breathe.  If every big act adopted this approach tomorrow, I’d start going to more of them again without hesitation.  As it stands, I’m still riding the high, replaying “Lachryma” in my head, and quietly plotting how to finagle tickets to whatever they do next.  Ghost didn’t just put on a phenomenal concert—they restored my faith in the live music experience itself.

N.P.: “Faith” – Ghost

February 20, 2026

On February 20, 2005, Hunter S. Thompson – doctor of gonzo, lifelong enemy of dullness, consumer of staggering quantities of Chivas Regal and Dunhill cigarettes and whatever else happened to be within arm’s reach – put a .45 to his head in the kitchen at Owl Farm and ended the whole messy, exhilarating, frequently terrifying ride at sixty-seven.  The act was not, strictly speaking, a surprise to anyone who’d followed the trajectory even halfway closely.  The man had spent decades living at a pitch of psychopathic intensity that most people can only approximate on particularly bad acid trips or in the third act of particularly bad action movies.  He embodied the mayhem he wrote about…courted it, occasionally tried to outrun it on two wheels with a bottle in one hand and a typewriter in the other.  And then, when the body finally began to betray him – broken leg, hip replacement, the creeping boredom that arrives when the fun starts costing more than it delivers – he decided, with characteristic decisiveness, that Enough was Enough.

The note he left, scrawled in black marker and discovered by his wife Anita four days earlier, bore the title “Football Season Is Over.”  It reads, in full:
No More Games.  No More Bombs.  No More Walking.  No More Fun.  No More Swimming.  67.  That is 17 years past 50.  17 more than I needed or wanted.  Boring.  I am always bitchy.  No Fun – for anybody.  67.  You are getting Greedy.  Act your old age.  Relax – This won’t hurt. 

There is something almost embarrassingly elegant about the brevity, the flat refusal to sentimentalize or explain or apologize.  No long confession, no hand-wringing over legacy or loved ones left behind, just a curt ledger of what’s finished and a curt permission slip for the rest of us to stop pretending it could have gone any other way.  The line about being “always bitchy” lands with the same casual brutality as one of his best rants; even in signing off he couldn’t resist the jab.  And that final “Relax – This won’t hurt” functions as both reassurance and punchline, the last smirk from a man who spent his life grinning into the teeth of American nightmares.

The funeral, such as it was, took place months later on August 20, 2005, and it was exactly the sort of spectacular, over-the-top valediction the corpus of work demanded.  Johnny Depp – friend, portrayer of the good doctor on screen, and apparently the only person in Hollywood with both the cash and the stomach for it – footed the bill (rumored at three million dollars) for a 150-foot tower erected on the property.  Atop the tower sat a giant fist, with two thumbs, of course, clutching a peyote button: Thompson’s personal sigil, obscene and defiant.  The ashes were loaded into a cannon and fired skyward amid fireworks while a crowd of celebrities, politicians, and hangers-on watched the gray cloud disperse over Woody Creek.  It was ridiculous, vulgar, expensive, and oddly moving – the gold standard, really, for what a literary exit can look like when the author has spent a lifetime insisting that literature ought to be dangerous, participatory, and at least a little bit insane.

What makes the whole business feel so indelibly badass isn’t the violence of the death itself (plenty of people shoot themselves; precious few turn the aftermath into performance art), but the absolute refusal to let age or decay or the ordinary humiliations of the body dictate the terms.  Thompson had always insisted on control – of the narrative, of the chemicals, of the chaos – and in the end he seized control of the ending too.  No slow fade into irrelevance, no pathetic decline into nostalgia tours or university lectures.  Just a clean break, a final “No more,” and then the cannon roar sending what was left of him back into the thin mountain air he loved.

We are left, inevitably, with the question of whether it was tragic or triumphant or some irreducible mixture of both.  The easy answer is tragedy: a brilliant mind undone by pain, depression, the long tail of excess.  But the easy answer feels wrong here, inadequate to the scale of the life.  Thompson didn’t drift into The Void; he aimed himself at it, eyes open, middle finger raised.  And if that isn’t the ultimate fuck-you to entropy, to the slow grinding down of everything interesting, then it’s hard to imagine what would be.

So here’s to The Doctor, who lived louder and weirder and more dangerously than almost anyone, and who left on his own terms with a note that reads like a haiku written by a man too impatient for poetry.  The bats are everywhere. But the Doctor is out. He saw the game was rigged, the season was over, and he punched his own ticket. And in doing so, he left behind the ultimate lesson: if you’re going to go, go out on your own goddamn terms, with a bang big enough to echo through eternity.

N.P.: “Weird and Twisted Nights” – Hunter S. Thompson

Word of the Day: bovinity

I had dark business at the DMV this morning.  There was nothing inherently dark about the actual business I had, but any day I am forced to darken the doors of the DMV, is, necessarily, dark.  I have long referred to the DMV as the LCD: the Lowest Common Denominator.  Because that’s what it is.  The Great Equalizer.  Everybody has to come here at some point.  And the only thing any of us has in common is the need to drive legally.  Other than that, I have no idea who any of these people are.  I know that we have exactly nothing in common.

Anyway, rather than go on one of my usual misanthropic rants, I’ve decided to let my experience determine the Word of the Day.  So let’s get to it.

Today’s lexical payload is a heavy one, specifically designed for those of you who’ve spend any amount of time observing the slow-motion car crash of human consciousness in the modern age.

The word is “bovinity.”

It’s a noun, meaning the quality or state of being bovine; a certain dull-eyed, slugging, and intensely phlegmatic disposition that suggests a total absence of cognitive friction.  It is the spiritual equivalent of chewing cud while the house burns down.

Derived from the Late Latin bovinus, from bos (ox/cow).  It’s an ancient way of saying someone has the intellectual velocity of a damp brick.

The fluorescent lights in the DMV waiting room didn’t just illuminate the space; they seemed to actively dissolve the remaining gray matter of everyone trapped within the four-minute-loop of the “Safety First” monitor.  At the center of this existential vacuum sat Brenda.
Brenda was a woman who’d “helped “me at my appointment here last week, whose primary engagement with reality appeared to be a series of involuntary autonomic functions – breathing, blinking, and the occasional, inexplicable wet noise of her tongue hitting the roof of her mouth.  She was currently staring at a potted fern on the counter in front of here with an intensity that suggested she was waiting for it to recite the Gettysburg Address or something.
I stood there, vibrating with a high-octane mixture of cheap espresso and righteous indignation, watching today’s clerk, Kevin, try to explain – for the fourth goddamn time – that I didn’t need the form that Brenda had sent me home to fill out last week.  Brenda didn’t even flinch.  She just sat there in her bovinity, looking more stupid than usual (which, just based on my very limited experience with her, is pretty fucking stupid), her jaw slightly slack as if her brain had finally decided to go on a permanent sabbatical to a place where thoughts are illegal and logic is a capital offense.  It was a terrifying display of sheer, unadulterated emptiness; a vacuum of such density that I feared my own IQ might start leaking out of my ears just by standing in her psychic splash zone. 

N.P.: “Cry of Love” – Crippled Black Phoenix