Monthly Archives: August 2025

August 19, 2025

 

The United Nations is as useless as tits on a bishop and it’s high time the United States withdrew from the U.N. and kick the entire corrupt institution out of New York City, demolish the building, and salt the earth where it formerly stood.

Anyone still harboring romantic notions about international cooperation probably believes in tooth fairies and functional democracy, and likely doesn’t read my stuff anyway, but just in case you do, we need to have a little chat about the United Nations, that sprawling, septuagenarian monument to humanity’s capacity for self-deception that squats like a modernist toad on Manhattan’s East Side.

Dig, if you will (and you must, because the alternative is madness), an organization conceived in the post-apocalyptic hangover of World War II, birthed by men who’d witnessed industrial-scale human barbarity and thought, “Hey, what this world needs is more committees!”  The UN emerged from this historical moment like some beautiful, naïve child stumbling into a den of wolves wearing three-piece suits and diplomatic immunity.  Except now, 79 years later, that child has grown into a grotesquely bloated bureaucratic hydra that couldn’t organize a coherent response to a toilet paper shortage, let alone genocide.

The Art of Failing Spectacularly: A Masterclass in International Incompetence
The UN’s track record over the past five decades reads like a satirical novel written by someone with an exceptionally dark sense of humor and an intimate understanding of institutional paralysis.  We’re talking about failures so profound, so systemically comprehensive, that they transcend mere incompetence and enter the realm of performance art.

Consider Rwanda, 1994: While nearly 800,000 human beings were being systematically slaughtered – that’s roughly one person every eleven seconds for one hundred days straight, a fact that should make your stomach drop into your shoes and stay there – the UN responded with the kind of bureaucratic hand-wringing that would make Pontius Pilate look decisive.  General Romeo Dallaire, a man whose desperate cables from the ground read like dispatches from hell itself, begged for intervention while UN headquarters debated the semantic implications of the word “genocide.”  Because apparently, when people are being hacked to death with machetes, the real priority is maintaining definitional precision.

The UN’s response was to reduce the peacekeeping force.  I’m not making this up – you couldn’t make this up, because reality has surpassed the darkest satirical imagination.  They literally pulled troops out while the killing accelerated, as if the solution to a house fire is fewer firefighters.

Then there’s Srebrenica, where UN peacekeepers – and I use that term with all the irony I can muster – stood by with their blue helmets and their impotent mandates while Bosnian Serb forces systematically murdered over 8,000 men and boys in what was designated a UN “safe area.”  The term “safe area,” it turns out, was about as meaningful as a chocolate teapot or a campaign promise.  The peacekeepers watched – literally watched – as buses loaded with condemned men drove past their checkpoints toward mass graves.

These aren’t bureaucratic oopsies or administrative fuck-ups.  These are moral catastrophes of such magnitude that they should have triggered some kind of institutional self-immolation, a collective organizational seppuku performed in shame before the world’s television cameras.

The Human Rights Council: A Comedy of Errors Written in Blood
Speaking of institutional comedy, let’s examine the UN Human Rights Council, an entity so completely divorced from its stated purpose that it makes reality TV look authentic.  This is a body where China, Cuba, and Saudi Arabia – nations whose understanding of human rights extends roughly as far as “humans have the right to obey the state” – sit in judgement of actual democracies like they’re moral authorities instead of, you know, oppressive regimes with track records that would make Orwell’s Big Brother take notes.

Between 2006 and 2022, this moronic body passed fully one-third of its resolutions condemning Israel while maintaining an almost Buddhist-like silence regarding Syria (where Assad has been conducting his own masterclass in creative population reduction), North Korea (the hermit kingdom that makes medieval feudalism look progressive), and Eritrea (which has achieved the remarkable feat of making its citizens nostalgic for Italian colonialism).

This isn’t selectivity; it’s moral blindness so complete it borders on the pathological.  It’s like having a fire department that exclusively responds to reports of birthday candles while ignoring five-alarm fires.

Oil-for-Food: Or How to Monetize Humanitarian Disaster
The Oil-for-Food Program – and doesn’t that name just roll off the tongue, like “Arbeit macht frei” or “I’m from the government and I’m here to help” – represents perhaps the UN s most spectacular achievement in transforming humanitarian aid into a corruption buffet.  Between 1995 and 2003, approximately $10 billion disappeared into some sort of black hole.

The program, ostensibly designed to provide humanitarian relief to Iraqi civilians suffering under sanctions, instead became Saddam Hussein’s personal ATM machine, complete with UN officials acting has helpful tellers.  Again, this wasn’t mere administrative incompetence – this was systematic corruption so brazen it would make a Biden blush.

And let’s not forget the sexual abuse scandals that have plagued UN peacekeeping operations like a particularly virulent strain of institutional syphilis.  In Haiti, the Central African Republic, and elsewhere, peacekeepers – the men supposedly sent to protect vulnerable populations – instead exploited them with the kind of impunity typically reserved for Somali warlords.

The UNRWA Files: When Humanitarian Aid Meets Terrorist Infrastructure
But if you really want to understand the depths of UN dysfunction, you need to look at the UNRWA scandal surrounding the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack – an event that revealed the organization’s relationship with terrorism to be less “unwitting accomplice” and more “enthusiastic co-conspirator.”

Israel intelligence uncovered evidence so damning it reads rather like a rejected screenplay from a movie about institutional corruption.  UNRWA employees – people whose paychecks come from international humanitarian funds – didn’t just look the other way while Hamas planned its attack; they actively participated.  A school counselor helped kidnap Israelis.  An elementary school teacher joined the assault on Re’im.  Another teacher spent the night before the attack equipping himself with anti-tank weapons, presumably not for use in lesson plans about conflict resolution.

These weren’t isolated incidents of individual radicalization; this was systematic infiltration so complete that UNRWA facilities were being used to store weapons and harbor hostages.  Emily Damari, held captive for 15 months, reported being detained in multiple UNRWA facilities.  The Israeli Defense Forces found assault rifles, grenades, and missiles hidden in UNRWA institutions, plus a tunnel beneath UNRWA’s main Gaza headquarters complete with computer servers and industrial batteries – because apparently, when you’re running a humanitarian organization, you need a secret underground lair.

And what was the UN’s response to these revelations?  A half-assed investigation that concluded nine staff members “may have been involved” while admitting they couldn’t independently verify the evidence because it remained in Israeli custody.  This is roughly the equivalent to investigating a bank robbery by asking the robbers if they did it and then shrugging when they don’t provide you the security footage.

The Case for Institutional Euthanasia
Here’s where things get interesting – and by interesting, I mean “apocalyptically obvious.”  The United States, which provides roughly 25% of the UN’s regular budget and approximately $18 billion annually to the broader UN system, is essentially funding its own diplomatic humiliation while subsidizing terrorism through organizations like UNRWA.

We’re paying over $18 billion a year – yep, billion with a “B” – to maintain an organization that has achieved the remarkable triple crown of being simultaneously ineffective, corrupt, and actively harmful to American interests.  This is like paying a contractor to burn down your house while charging you extra for the matches.

The security implications of hosting this carnival of dysfunction in New York City are particularly delicious.  We’re providing diplomatic immunity to representatives of regimes that would cheerfully see America reduced to radioactive ash, then expressing surprise when they engage in espionage and other recreational forms of national hostility.

A Modest Proposal for Urban Renewal
The solution is as elegant as it is overdue: withdraw American funding, revoke the UN’s lease on Manhattan real estate, and dismantle its headquarters.  Not out of petty spite – though deep spite would be entirely justified – but as a statement of moral clarity that transcends diplomatic niceties.

The current UN building should be razed through explosion.  One B2 strike will be sufficient.  Then the leaders of the five main religions should exorcise and bless the grounds as the rubble is cleared.  Once that is done, that piece of earth should be salted so that nothing may grow there, like the Romans did to Carthage, except without the genocide and with better construction permits.  Then perhaps it could be converted into something more useful – a shopping mall, a casino, or a memorial to complete institutional failure.

This isn’t about abandoning international cooperation; it’s about recognizing that the current system is so fundamentally broken that reform is impossible.  You don’t fix a car that’s been totaled in a head-on collision with reality – you scrap it and start over.

Conclusion: The Twilight of Illusions
The United Nations has evolved from humanity’s great experiment in collective security into a monument to bureaucratic dysfunction, moral cowardice, and institutional corruption.  Its failures aren’t unfortunate accidents; they’re predictable outcomes of an organization designed by committee to satisfy everyone while serving no one.

The time for pretending otherwise has passed.  The time for hoping that somehow, magically, fundamental structural reform will emerge from an organization that can’t even reform its own humanitarian agencies has passed.  The time for continuing to fund this elaborate performance of international cooperation while real crises unfold with deadly consequences has definitely passed.

What we need now is the kind of brutal honesty that recognizes when an institution has outlived any possible usefulness and become actively harmful to the values it was created to protect.  The UN’s headquarters should be demolished not only in anger, but in acknowledgment – a concrete recognition that humanity deserves better than this expensive, ineffective theater of diplomacy.

Let the rubble serve as a reminder: good intentions, no matter how noble, are no substitute for competence, accountability, and moral courage.  And sometimes, the most humanitarian thing you can do is put a failed institution out of its misery before it fails anyone else.

N.P.: “Hypnotic” – Dead Sara

August 18, 2025

Happy Monday, dear reader, as I sit behind the Dissolute Desk in the Safe House.  Today we raise a glass (or a bottle, or hell, a whole goddamn keg) to two wildly different but equally audacious moments in the annals of literary history.

First up, 1958.  The year Vladimir Nabokov unleashed Lolita on unsuspecting American readers, a book so incendiary it might was well have come with a warning label: “Caution: May cause apoplectic pearl clutching, moral outrage, and existential crises.”  This novel was a bunker-buster of prose hurled directly at the glass house of societal norms.  Nabokov, that sly, butterfly-chasing bastard, took the English language, bent it over his knee, and spanked it into submission.  The result was a story about Humbert Humbert, a man so charmingly vile you almost forget he’s the literary equivalent of a trainwreck you can’t turn away from.

But here’s the thing: Lolita is a masterpiece because it doesn’t give a damn what you think.  It exists on its own terms, unapologetic and unflinching, like a middle finger raised to the heavens.  And that, dear reader, is the kind of literary badassery I still aspire to.

Now, let’s pivot from the sublime to the ridiculous, because August 18 is also National Bad Poetry Day.  Indeed, a whole day dedicated to the art of writing poetry so atrocious it makes your high school emo phase look like Shakespeare.  This is the day we celebrate the cringeworthy couple, the mangled metaphor, the rhyme so forced it might as well be wearing a ski mask.  And I find a great deal of shabby glory in the whole thing.

Because bad poetry is the ultimate act of rebellion against the pretentious gatekeepers of “serious” literature.  And let’s face it, modern American poetry is almost universally shit, and has been for decades.  Bad Poetry Day is basically a day we get to drop the façade and quit pretending verse has been anything but dreck and dross for most of your lifetimes, even if it took the poet years to finish the poem.  It’s a reminder that writing doesn’t always have to be profound or polished or Pulitzer-worthy.  Sometimes, it’s enough to just let the words spill out, messy and imperfect and gloriously human.  So go ahead, write that haiku about your cat’s ass.  Pen that sonnet to your morning hangover.  Embrace the absurdity, because bad poetry is proof that even when we fail, we’re still creating.  And that, dear reader, is always a victory worth celebrating.

So here, then, is a truly bad poem from yrs. truly about Nabokov’s Lolita, just to show you how it’s done.

Oh, Lolita, you scandalous book,
With Humbert’s gaze, so creepy it shook.
A tale of obsession, taboo, and despair,
But mostly just Humbert being a nightmare.
Your prose is like butter, so smooth and divine,
But the subject?  Shit.  It Crosses The Line.
A nymphet, he calls her, with a wink and a grin,
But we all know, bro, that’s a helluva sin.
Butterflies flutter, metaphors soar,
But Humbert, my dude, you’re rotten to the core.
Nabokov, you genius, you wordsmith supreme,
Why’d you make us root for this fever dream?
So here’s to Lolita, both brilliant and grim,
A literary masterpiece…about him.
It’s art, it’s scandal, it’s a moral grenade,
And now I need a shower.  Pass the Kool-Aid.

Yowza.  That is truly shit.  Doesn’t get much worse than that.  Or does it?  If you think you can do worse, dear reader, by all means…this is the day to let it fly.

So here’s to August 18, a day that reminds us why we fell in love with words in the first place.  Whether it’s Nabokov’s razor-sharp prose or a dirty limerick so bad it makes your teeth hurt, today is the day to revel in the chaos, the beauty, and the sheer audacity of literature.

Cheers.

N.P.: “Carry On” – Mr. Strange

Word of the Day: rathskeller

Happy Sunday, dear reader.  Let me introduce you to rathskeller: a basement restaurant or tavern, typically one serving beer and hearty Germanic fare, where the lighting is dim, the atmosphere thick with the promise of shitty decisions, and the clientele ranges from the questionably employed to the aggressively unemployable.

We stole it from the German Ratskeller, literally “council cellar” – because apparently even medieval bureaucrats needed somewhere to drink themselves into legislative oblivion.  The word combines Rat (council) and Keller (cellar), though let’s be honest, the only council happening in most modern rathskellers involves debating whether that fifth shot of Jägermeister was a diplomatic triumph or an act of war against one’s liver.

Speaking of questionable decisions, I once found myself in such an establishment during what I’ll generously call my “young and stupid” phase (as opposed to my current “older and marginally less stupid” phase).  Picture this: It’s 2 AM, I’m three schnapps deep, and my date – a charming woman who claimed to be “between careers” but whose LinkedIn profile suggested she was between decades – decides we should order the house specialty.  Now, in any respectable rathskeller, you’d expect schnitzel or bratwurst.  But this place?  They brought us what can only be described as a crime against both German cuisine and the Geneva Convention: a pretzel the size of a steering wheel topped with what they optimistically called “artisanal cheese” but smelled suspiciously like corpse feet. 

My date took one bit, declared it “rustic,” and proceeded to eat the entire thing while maintaining eye contact.  It was weird.  I knew right then I was either witnessing true love or a serial killer testing my resolve.  It was neither.  She stuck me with the $47 tab and disappeared into the night like some sort of overpriced pretzel bandit.  For no good reason at all, I went back the next week.  Apparently, my standards for both food and romance had officially hit rock bottom, and they were serving it with a side of regret and mustard that definitely wasn’t Grey Poupon. 

N.P.: “Touch” – Wolfsheim

August 16, 2025

 

So here we are again, dear reader, gathered around the literary campfire like a couple of degenerate scholars clutching our bottles of cheap wine and expired dreams, ready to sing the praises of the man who taught us that poetry doesn’t have to wear a tuxedo to a funeral – that sometimes it’s perfectly acceptable, even preferable, for verse to show up drunk, unshaven, and reeking of yesterday’s poor decisions.

Today marks the anniversary of August 16, 1920, when some cosmic chair-puller decided the world needed a man who would transform hangovers into haikus, who would alchemize the base metals of human failure into literary gold [Note: Honestly, dear reader, who else is going to give you alchemical references on a Saturday?  No one, that’s who.  Just sayin’.], and who would prove once and for all that you don’t need to be tortured by your art when life is perfectly willing to do the torturing for you.

Charles Bukowski – or Hank to those of us who like to pretend we knew him personally despite being more decades too late and several tax brackets too high – was the kind of writer who made the rest of us feel simultaneously inferior and relieved.  Inferior because, let’s face it, none of us will ever achieve that perfect synthesis of raw brutality and surprising tenderness that characterized his best work.  Relieved because thank God we don’t have to live through the kind of beautiful disaster that produced Post Office, Factotum, and Ham on Rye.

The man was essentially a one-person writing workshop for everyone who ever thought literature was too precious, too sanitized, too concerned with proper semicolon usage when what we really needed was someone to grab us by the literary lapels and scream, “Look, you pretentious fucks, this is what it actually feels like to be human!”  and he did this while maintaining a work ethic I can only dream about – thousands of poems, six novels, countless short stories, all produced while working dead-end jobs and drinking enough alcohol to float a small yacht.

But here’s where it gets complicated, because celebrating Bukowski means acknowledging the uncomfortable truth that separates the dilettantes from the devotees: the man wasn’t just playing at being a degenerate for artistic effect.  His was not some carefully cultivated persona designed to move units at Barnes & Noble.  This was authentic self-destruction, the Real Deal, unfiltered and unforgiving.  He lived the kind of life that most of us romanticize from the safety of our temperature-controlled offices, the kind of existence that looks glamorous in retrospect but probably felt like being slowly digested by a particularly sadistic snake.

What made Bukowski genuinely dangerous – and by dangerous I mean the kind of writer who forces you to reevaluate your entire relationship with both language and existence, as it did with me – was his refusal to apologize for any of it.  Not the drinking, not the gambling, not the brutal honesty about human relationships, not the way he could make a trip to the grocery store sound like a descent into one of Dante’s lesser-known circles of hell.  He wrote about ordinary humiliation with the kind of precision usually reserved for surgical procedures, and he did it without the safety net of ironic distance that most of us hide behind when confronting our own spectacular failures.

Let’s take Post Office, his semi-autobiographical novel about working for the United States Postal Service, which reads like Catch-22 if Joseph Heller had been raised on cheap beer and disastrous decisions instead of intellectual sophistication.  Bukowski transformed the mundane, banal bureaucratic nightmare of mail delivery into something approaching epic literature, proving that you don’t need to witness the fall of the Roman Empire to write about the human condition – sometimes all you need is a supervisor named Jonstone and the crushing realization that this job might not be temporary after all.

Or take his poetry, which achieved that rare feat of being simultaneously accessible and profound, like finding a twenty-dollar bill in a pair of jeans you were about to throw away.

Lines like “the free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it – basically because you feel good, very good, when you are near or with them” hit me hard, with the force of recognition.  The kind of truth that makes you stop whatever you’re doing and think, “Shit, this guy gets it.”

The irony, here, of course, which irony I suspect would have made Bukowski himself cackle 0 is that this man who spent his life running from respectability, who viewed literary establishment types with the same enthusiasm most people reserve for dental surgery, has becoming something approaching required reading in creative writing programs across the country.  College kids who’ve never worked a manual labor job in their lives are now studying his technique, analyzing his use of line breaks and discussing his “aesthetic choices” as if alcoholism were a literary device rather than a progressive disease.

But maybe that’s the point.  Maybe the ultimate joke is that Bukowski’s work survives not despite its rough edges but because of them, not because it fits neatly into academic categories but because it explodes them.  In an age where so much contemporary literature feels focus-grouped to death, workshopped into bland submission, and designed to offend absolutely no one while saying absolutely nothing, Bukowski’s voice still cuts through the noise like a rusty blade through a silk nightie.

So today, as we raise our glasses – and let’s be honest, we’re probably raising them anyway, Hank’s birthday or not – let’s toast the man who proved that literature doesn’t have to be polite to be powerful, that poetry can smell like cigarettes and still move mountains, and sometimes the most profound truths come from the people society has written off as the most hopeless cases.

Here’s to Charles Bukowski: patron saint of the perpetually hungover, laureate of the legitimately lost, and reminder that sometimes the most beautiful flowers grow in the ugliest soil.  The man who showed us that rock bottom has excellent Wi-Fi and that the view from the gutter includes some spectacular sunsets.

Happy birthday, you bastard.  Know that the bar is still open, the typewriter still works, and somewhere in California, the spirit of honest literature is still stumbling through the streets, looking for the next great story and probably needing a ride home.

N.P.: “Night Has Turned to Day” – Fantastic Negrito

August 15, 2025

 

It’s not easy working on a book that you believe no publisher will ever touch.  There are morale issues with such an endeavor.  It can get tough to summon the energy and dedication to create something that may never see the light of day due to societal pusillanimity.  We live in the age of cowards, dear reader, which is wrist-slittingly depressing for some of us.  American society needs this book, but they are too afraid to even crack it.   Of course, if it does get published, it will be pretty revolutionary, if I may say so myself.

Here’s the thing about literary revolutions – they usually happen on Tuesday afternoons when  nobody’s paying attention, involving men with bad lungs and worse attitudes toward authority.  Which brings us, in that meandering way that all good stories eventually stumble toward their point (assuming they have one, which this one does, I think), to August 15th, 1945, when a certain skinny Brit named Eric Blair – though you probably know him by his pen name, the infinitely more ominous George Orwell – unleashed what might be the most savage takedown of totalitarian bullshit ever disguised as a children’s book about barnyard animals.  Animal Farm.  Two words that would make commissars shit themselves for decades to come.  Now, you might be thinking (and who am I to stop you from thinking, though the habit has become dangerous since this shitty decade began): “What’s so revolutionary about talking pigs?”  First you need to understand that this isn’t your average Charlotte’s Web situation.  This is literary napalm wrapped in the deceptively simple packaging of a fairy tale, which is exactly what makes it so goddamn brilliant.

Dig, if you will, this picture: It’s the middle of World War II, and here’s Orwell – already establishing himself as the kind of writer who looked at power structures the way an entomologist looks at particularly disgusting insects – crafting this razor-sharp allegory while the world burns around him.  The man had seen the writing on the wall (literally, considering his later work), and that writing spelled out the uncomfortable truth that maybe, just maybe, our glorious Soviet allies weren’t the freedom-loving champions of the proletariat they claimed to be.

But here’s where it gets interesting (and by interesting, I mean the kind of publishing nightmare that would make modern literary agents reach for the bourbon): Nobody wanted to touch this thing.  Publishers circled it like it was radioactive – which, in a sense, it was.  Political sensitivities were running higher than a meth-addled bat, and here comes Orwell with his talking pigs basically calling out Stalin as just another power-drunk pig in a different trough.

The rejection letters must have been poetry in their own right.  “Dear Mr. Blair, while we admire your allegorical approach to critiquing totalitarian regimes through the lens of barnyard democracy, we feel that now might not be the optimal time to publish what amounts to a literary assassination attempt on our wartime ally’s political system.  Also, talking animals are weird.  Sincerely, Cowardly Publishing House.”

But Orwell, bless his stubborn soul, kept pushing.  Because that’s what real writers do when they’ve got something to say: they say it, consequences be fucked.  The man had already taken a bullet fighting fascists in Spain (literally, through the throat), so a few nervous publishers weren’t about to stop him from exposing the porcine nature of power.

And then, finally, August 15th, 1945.  Secker and Warburg – publishers with enough testicular fortitude to recognize genius when it came wrapped in barnyard satire – released this literary dirty bomb into the world.  The timing was almost poetic: Japan had just surrendered, the war was ending, and suddenly everyone was free to start asking uncomfortable questions about what exactly they’d been fighting for.

The beauty of Animal Farm…the sheer, devastating brilliance of it…is how it works on multiple levels simultaneously.  Kids can read it as a simple story about farm animals.  Adults can appreciate it as a scathing indictment of Soviet totalitarianism.  Political scientists can analyze it as a meditation on the corruption of revolutionary ideals.  And cynics (like yrs. truly) can admire it as proof that sometimes the best way to tell the truth is to dress it up as a lie.

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”  If that line doesn’t make you simultaneously laugh and want to burn down the nearest government building, you might want to check your pulse.

The book’s impact was immediate and massive.  Here was someone finally saying what a lot of people had been thinking but were too polite (or terrified) to articulate: that power corrupts absolutely, regardless of the ideology used to justify it.  That revolutionary leaders have an unfortunate tendency to become the very thing they overthrew.  That the pigs, quite literally, end up indistinguishable from the humans.

What makes this whole story even more tasty is the context: while Orwell was writing this devastating critique of Soviet communism, the Western world was still largely enchanted with Stalin and company.  The man was essentially committing literary treason against the prevailing narrative, and he did it with such style and wit that by the time people realized what he was doing, it was too late to stop him.

The book became a phenomenon – banned in Soviet countries (natch), embraced by Western readers hungry for someone to finally call bullshit on the whole utopian communist experiment, and studied in schools worldwide as an example of how literature can be both entertaining and subversive as hell.

So raise a glass (or 12) to George Orwell, literary badass and professional pain-in-the-ass to tyrants everywhere.  The man who proved that sometimes the most revolutionary act is simply telling the truth, even when – especially when – nobody wants to hear it.  He gave us talking pigs that tell us more about human nature than most humans ever will.

And that, dear reader, is how you stage a literary revolution.

Because in the end, we’re all just animals in someone else’s farm.  The question is: are we going to be the sheep, or are we going to be the ones exposing the pigs?

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need another drink.  All this talk of revolution and talking pigs has left me thirsty for desk bourbon and suspicious of barnyard animals.

N.P.: “My Angel” – Binary Park

August 14, 2025

Back on dry land after yesterday’s nonsense, thank Christ.
Yesterday, in the midst of the just-mentioned nonsense, I overheard some jackass say Queen was “the most overrated band ever.  That guy can go fuck himself.
I started to write something for you about Berthold Brecht, who died on this day in 1956, but I’d be willing to bet a testicle that you have no idea whom that is.  It was going to be this whole thing about the Theater of the Absurd, and then I was really going to focus on the influence Brecht had on Jim Morrison of The Doors.  Then I realized I could probably safely bet my other testicle that you haven’t heard of him/them either.
And then I got busy with some other writing, and then tonight I have to fight a bunch of people.  So Berthold doesn’t get his due again this year.

N.P.: “Alabama Song (Whisky Bar)” – The Doors

August 13, 2025

Travel day.  I have a strong dislike for travel days.  Wrote a haiku on a cocktail napkin:

Planes, trains, endless waits,
Lost my bag and my damn mind
Where’s the fucking bar?

Things will be back to “normal” tomorrow.

N.P.: “Head Over Heels” – J.D. McPherson

August 12, 2025

I don’t even know why I try to do any serious writing in the summer…I have never been able to artfully express myself in this ridiculous and oppressive heat.  The higher the temperature, the lower the (good) word count.  That said, I shall continue to press, continue trying.  What the hell else am I going to do.

Today is a Triple Death Day on the D.P.S. calendar, so pour some out and throw some back for three literary badasses who have gone on to their Great Reward.  Unfortunately, I’ll have to be shamefully brief for each one, as this goddamn book is demanding attention, and I’m in no position to deny it.

Up (or perhaps down) first is William Blake.  This visionary poet and artist passed away on August 12, 1827.  If you’re not familiar, I highly recommend checking out Songs of Innocence and of Experience and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, both being absolutely revolutionary, blending mysticism, some pretty radical politics, and raw creativity.  Blake’s defiance of conventional norms along with his unapologetic exploration of human nature and spirituality make his legacy patently badass in its fearless originality.  His death marked the end of a fascinating life spent challenging the status quo through art and words.

Next we have Thomas Mann, the German novelist and Nobel Prize winner who died on August 12, 1955.  If the dear reader is not familiar with him, check out Death in Venice and The Magic Mountain.  These both tackle some pretty big ideas – desire, morality, and the human condition – unflinchingly.  Mann showed a lot of courage in critiquing his society, especially during the rise of actual Nazism.  He has earned his place here for myriad reasons, with one of the biggest being impressive intellectual bravery.

Lastly is Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, who died on August 12, 1964.  The Bond novels, starting with Casino Royale, redefined spy fiction with their suave, gritty, and unapologetically adventurous style.  Fleming used his own experiences as a naval intelligence officer to fuel his stories with a raw, larger-than-life energy – think fast cars, high stakes, and a hero who’s cool under pressure.  His death marked a pivotal moment for a franchise that still dominates pop culture, though now more for controversy than solid storytelling…recent efforts to make James Bond female have been met with bitter and brutal backlash from those of us who understand that you can’t swap the gender of a beloved character without profoundly changing that characters in ways that would make the original creator reach for a weapon in his grave.

Alright, dear reader…back to it.

N.P.: “Skeletal Parade” – Santa Hates You

Word of the Day: hokum

Today’s word is so delightful in its phonetic jaunt that you might be tempted to think it’s a term of endearment – it is not.  At its core, “hokum” is a linguistic middle finger dressed up in folksy clothing.  It’s the sweet-sounding assassin of shitty ideas, bad writing, and con-artist theatrics.  Merriam-Webster, may God have mercy on their stuffy woke souls, defines it as “nonsense” or “unsubstantial material presented as if it were significant.”  More pointedly for our purposes, it’s also a literary indictment – a tire iron to the knees of hacky prose and storytelling cliches.  I’m looking at you, James Patterson industrial complex?
It’s a term that slinks out of the American vernacular like a whiskey-soaked conman, promising truth but delivering a swift kick to the cerebral cortex with a steel-toed boot of bullshit.  The word dates back to 1917, birthed from the American theater scene.  It likely evolved from “hocus-pocus,” which itself is just medieval bullshit Latin for “I’m fooling your dumb ass.”  Hokum came to refer to the corny, manufactured sentimentality peddled on stage by second-rate vaudevillians.  Flash forward, and today we have hokum in chain bookstores, high-school drama productions, and at every Netflix-funded rom-com Bulgarian dump yard.

Hector Mengel was drunk in a way that would make Hemingway sit up in his grave, slack-jawed with secondhand liver pain.  The Mountain Lion Saloon was his temple, tequila the sacrament, and the congregation was a couple of barflies who hadn’t seen sobriety since Woodstock ’99.
“Writing’s gotta be real,” Hector slurred to Marty, the kind of tragically bald bartender who always looked like he just lost a fight to a squirrel.  “You start doing it for the clicks and the algorithms, you’re no better than those hokum-slinging MFA pricks who keep comparing their stepdads to the mists of Yorkshire.”
“Inspiring,” Marty droned as he chipped away at what could have either been line rind or unclaimed dental work.
Hector tipped his chair back – weightlessly at first, until gravity got possessive.  The crash was museum worthy.  Flat on his ass and buried under an avalanche of spilled booze and shame, Hector waved blindly toward a pack of peanuts someone kicked out of reach.  The crowd of zero laughed with gusto.
Just as he lumbered upward, muttering curses that would make sailors call HR, the door flung open.  Enter Brittney Stone, her reputation a howling storm known across two counties and recently defamed at the Yellow Pages Yelp party.
“Hector, you bigoted windbag!” she shouted, slapping a dog-eared printout of his latest op-ed on the bar top.  The title appeared to be “Is Dipshit the Only Flavor Modern Poetry Knows Anymore?  Discuss.”  She jabbed her toothbrush-thin finger at his use of the word “triteness.”  “Your metaphors are rotten cheese!”
“I’ll have you know,” Hector wheezed, retrieving his now-drenched fedora from the floor, “that my metaphors are artisanal cheese.  Funky by design but adored in Paris.”
“This?  This right here?”  She held up the printout like a preacher flaunting sins in the Psalms.  “It’s hokum – pure, cattle-grade, waffle-stomping hokum.”
Hector stood.  The bar stilled.  “Says the woman who rhymed ‘ablaze’ with ‘my gran-pappy’s malaise’ in Fecal Creek’s poetry mag.”
It devolved quickly after that.  A couple of punches were thrown, Brittney chugged someone else’s gin, and Hector left with both a black eye and four new haikus rattling in his whiskey-slick head. 

N.P.: “Camino” – Calva Louise

August 10, 2025

 

Fecal Creek, this sweltering armpit of a town, is a place where the heat doesn’t just sit on you – it climbs inside you, like some malevolent spirit, and starts rearranging your organs for sport.  It’s the kind of heat that makes you question your life choices, your ancestors’ life choices, and whether or not you’re actually in some kind of purgatorial simulation designed by a sadistic deity with a grudge against mammals.  But hey, 105F is practically a cold front compared to the usual Dante’s Inferno we call summer.  So, I guess we’re supposed to be grateful?  Grateful that the sun has decided to only lightly roast us this year instead of slow-cooking us like a brisket?  Sure.  Fine.  Whatever.

But let’s talk about the real problem here: the goddamn wildlife.  The coyotes, the mountain lions, the feathered sociopaths with wingspans that blot out the sun when they fly over.  They’re all out there, lurking, scheming, waiting for the moment you let your guard down.  And let me tell you, dear reader, these fuckers are getting bold.  The mountain lion on the Ring cam at 3 a.m.?  That’s not just a thirsty cat looking for a drink.  That’s a declaration of war.  That’s nature saying, “Hey, remember when you paved over my hunting grounds and built your little stucco McMansions?  Yeah, well, I’m here to collect.”

And those goddamn hawks.  These aren’t just majestic symbols of freedom soaring through the skies.  They are airborne thugs, feathered enforcers of some avian mafia, circling overhead like they’re auditioning for a Hitchcock reboot.  They don’t just look at you; they size you up.  They calculate angles, trajectories, wind speeds.  They’re running the numbers on whether they can snatch your 7-pound puppy and still make it back to their perch without breaking a sweat.  And the bastard turkey vultures are the cleanup crew, the ones how show up after the hawks have done the dirty work, picking the bones clean and leaving nothing but cold Darwinism.

It’s not just the animals, though.  It’s the principle of the thing.  The sheer audacity of these creatures to act like they own the place.  And maybe they do.  Maybe they’ve earned it, what with us humans being too busy sipping oat milk lattes and debating pronouns to remember that we’re supposed to be the apex predators here.  But I’m not about to let some coyote or hawk or mountain lion punk me out in my own backyard.  Not today.  Not ever.  Fuck no.  I’ve got a sidearm, a shitty attitude, and a deep-seated need to remind the animal kingdom that opposable thumbs and firearms trump fangs and claws every time.

So, yeah, dear reader, I suppose I’ll be out there until the rain comes again, scanning the skies, patrolling the yard like some deranged suburban commando, ready to thrown down with anything that moves.  Because this is Fecal Creek, goddammit, and if the heat doesn’t kill you, the wildlife just might.

Post Script:  Holy shit, dear reader!  I was talking about the arrogant wildlife in The Creek with a friend over lunch, and said friend told me something I could not believe: there are both scorpions and tarantulas in Fecal Creek.  Jesus!  Of course I assumed he was fucking with me, because I’ve lived in this part of California for almost all of my life, and I have not once seen either scorpions or tarantulas.  I just assumed we were too far north for such wicked creatures, but no!  I was wrong.  According to the interwebs: “the California common scorpion, Northern scorpion, and the Black hairy scorpion can be found around residential homes.”  And “the tarantulas around here live in burrows and come out at night to hunt for food, which can include insects, lizards, and even small mammals,” like 7-pound puppies!  So this means during full moons when I go out back wearing nothing but a sheen of Vaseline, a cowboy hat, and a smile, and dance around like a savage that I might be trodding upon a fucking tarantula?  Well, fuck that, dear reader!  I’m going to have to find more suitable accommodations post haste.

N.P.: “Headhunter” – La Muerte