Monthly Archives: September 2025

Word of the Day: Xanthippe

Today’s Word of the Day is Xanthippe.  It’s a noun meaning a shrewish, ill-tempered woman; a scold whose tongue cuts like my switchblade through butter.  Named after Socrates’ wife, reputedly a harpy of such mythic proportions she could make a philosopher question existence itself.

Derived from the Greek Xanthippe (Ξανθίππη), the name of Socrates’ spouse, whose alleged nagging became the stuff of ancient Athenian gossip.  First used in English around the 16th century to denote a woman whose vitriol could curdle wine.  From xanthos (yellow, fair-haired) and hippos (horse), though the etymological irony of “fair horse” for a termagant is a linguistic middle finger to decorum.  It’s either a weird flex or a sick burn, depending on how you look at it.

So there I am, three whiskeys deep into a Wednesday dusk, my typewriter humming like a junkyard Pontiac, when the air splits with the bellow of my neighbor, Brianna (we call her Big Brian), a “woman” built like a linebacker with the charm of a hungover wolverine.  She’s pounding on my door, her meaty fists rattling the hinges, hollering about a late-night drum circle that got going with some friends just back from Burning Man and the “goddamn jungle cacophony” of my half-feral parrots.  I fling open the door, shirt unbuttoned, a Camel dangling from my lip, ready to parry her outrage with my own.
“Brianna,” I snarl, “you miserable twat!  Your complaints are unwelcome.  Go back under your bridge and wait for your prandial goat to wander by, you troll.”
She looms, her face a topographic map of rage, eyes glinting like the business end of a chrome-plated shotgun.
“You degenerate goddamn scribbler,” she roars, “your noise is peeling the paint off my walls!”
The parrots, sensing blood, screech their approval from the living room, a feathered Greek chorus egging us on.  What ensues is a verbal cage match, a linguistic demolition derby.  She accuses me of harboring “a zoo for lunatics”; I counter that her nighty outdoor showers after swimming in her pool are traumatizing the local wildlife.  Her jowls quiver, her voice a foghorn of indignation, and I’m half-convinced she’s about to bench-press me into the next county.  But I’m no wilting poet – I lean in, whiskey breath and all, and lob a  barb about her grotesque yard décor, specifically her stupid fucking lawn gnomes, those “creepy ceramic bastards” staring into my soul.  She gasps, clutching her imaginary pearls, and I know I’ve hit the mark.
Then, in a moment of pure, unscripted glory, she unleashes her inner Xanthippe.  “You think you’re clever, you booze-soaked word-monger?” she thunders, her voice a sonic boom that sends the parrots into a flapping panic.  I’ll have your lease revoked faster than you can misquote Kerouac!”  It’s magnificent, her fury a force of nature, like a hurricane with a perm and a grudge.
“Lease?  I own this bitch!”  I cackle, salute her with my glass, and retreat to my typewriter, making a mental note to shit in their pool again the next time they leave town. 

N.P.: “One Way Or Anther” – Broken Peach

September 3, 2025

 

Greetings from the Dissolute Desk, dear reader – this is your captain speaking, though, let’s be honest, the term “captain” implies a level of control over this particular vessel that would make Ahab weep with envy.  Today is Hump Day, that blessed Wednesday phenomenon that sits like a literary critic at a poetry slam – uncomfortable, slightly drunk, and desperately trying to find meaning in the chaos.

Just a brief update today – and my brief, I mean the literary equivalent of what pharmaceutical companies call “brief” side effects, which somehow manage to include everything from mild nausea to spontaneous combustion – since I’m currently submerged in the proverbial full-court press on this goddamn book.  And yes, to the one dear reader who thinks I should cuss less, I said “goddamn” because sometimes the English language requires the theological weight of profanity to adequately capture the Sisyphean absurdity of the creative process.

You know how, as an adult, everything becomes a Byzantine maze of bureaucratic torment designed by someone who clearly never had to navigate said maze while suffering from the literary equivalent of erectile dysfunction?  That’s to say: the persistent, maddening, inability to get your metaphors up when you need them most?  So that’s going on, but still – and here’s where my inherent optimism battles my well-documented pessimism like two drunk philosophers arguing about the meaning of existence at 3 AM – progress is being made.

Meeting my goals today is a pretty big deal when it comes to getting a draft done by September 8, which looms before me like a literary deadline should: with all the warm, welcoming energy of a proctological examination performed by someone with exceptionally large hands and a questionable understanding of personal space.

But let’s talk about this Wednesday celebration business, shall we?  Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my years of professional literary  debauchery – and by professional, I mean I occasionally get paid for this madness, though not nearly enough to justify the liver damage – it’s that midweek celebrations require a certain philosophical commitment to the absurd.

Think of it, man: it’s 2:17 PM Wednesday afternoon.  You’re three cups deep into what your local coffee shop optimistically calls their “house blend” but which tastes suspiciously like it was filtered through a gym sock that’s seen better decades.  Your manuscript stares back at you from the computer screen with all the judgement of a disappointed parent who just discovered your college transcript.  The cursor blinks.  Blinks again.  Taunts you with its rhythmic insistence that something should be happening here, some magical alchemy of words and ideas that transforms the mundane suffering of existence into something approaching art.

And then – miracle of miracles – the worse come.  They’re okay words.  Not the kind of luminous prose that makes readers weep and critics genuflect.  But words nonetheless.  Honest, slightly deranged words that capture something essential about what it means to be a human being stumbling through the cosmic joke of modern life with nothing but caffeine, stubbornness, and an inexplicable faith that somehow, against all evidence to the contrary, this particular arrangement of sentences might matter.

The adult world, you see, operates on the principle that nothing should ever be simple, straightforward, or remotely pleasant.  Need to renew your driver’s license?  That’s be a three-hour odyssey through a government office that apparently hasn’t been updated since the Carter administration.  Want to submit a manuscript?  Here’s a 17-page submission guide that contradicts itself no fewer than 43 times and requires you to format your work in a font that doesn’t exist on any computer manufactured after 1987.

But writing – actual writing, the kind that matters – operates on different principles entirely.  It demands that you show up, day after day, to face the blank page with nothing but your wits and whatever chemical assistance you can legally obtain.  It requires a kind of courage that’s simultaneously heroic and utterly ridiculous, like charging into battle armed only with a thesaurus and a profound sense of existential dread.

So yes, dear reader, progress is being made.  Slow, painful, occasionally hallucinogenic progress, but progress nonetheless.  Each sentence wrested from the void feels like a small victory against the forces of entropy and editorial bitching.  Each paragraph that doesn’t make me want to delete everything and take up accounting represents another step closer to that September 8 deadline, which approaches with all the subtlety of a methamphetaminic rhinoceros.

And if that’s not worth celebrating on a Wednesday afternoon, then I clearly don’t understand the fundamental principles of either celebration or Wednesday, both of which seem increasingly arbitrary the longer I contemplate them.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a book to finish and a hump day to properly honor.  The words won’t write themselves, though fuck knows I’ve asked them nicely.

Transmission ends.  Resume your regularly scheduled existential crisis. 

From the Dissolute Desk, where the coffee’s strong, the deadlines are stronger, and the metaphors occasionally achieve escape velocity. 

N.P.: “Pissed Off and Mad About It” – Texas Hippie Coalition

Word of the Day: imprecation

 

Today’s Word of the Day is “imprecation.”  It’s a noun meaning “a spoken curse; an invocation of evil or misfortune upon someone; a profane oath or malediction hurled with the specific intent of summoning cosmic retribution upon one’s enemies, rivals, or that idiot who cut you off in traffic while you were already running late for your court-mandated anger management session.

From the Latin imprecatio, meaning “to invoke” or “to call down upon,” which itself derives from im- (upon) + precari (to pray).  Because apparently, even our ancestors understood that sometimes prayer needs a little…creative direction.  The word first slithered into English around the 15th century, presumably when people realized that simply muttering “darn” wasn’t quite cutting it anymore.

Picture this, dear reader: it’s Friday night, and in a move I can only blame on equal parts bourbon and catastrophic optimism, I invited Tasha – hot, terrifying, and probably allergic to commitment – back to my lair for a “home-cooked dinner.”  My definition of “home-cooked” being whatever hellish combination of fire and bad decisions I could wrangle from a Dudes Living Alone recipe blog. 

The kitchen was already a goddamn war zone.  I’d tried to wipe up yesterday’s ramen explosion with a sock.  The smoke detector hung in the corner like a pissed-off ex, daring me to make one wrong move.  On the stove: a pan of bananas foster that looked less like “dessert” and more like “evidence in an arson investigation.” 

So what do I do?  I pour twice as much rum into the pan “for flavor,” which we all know is culinary code for “to see God.”  I light the match, and an eruption of blue flames whooshes to the ceiling.  Within seconds, I have set fire not only to dessert by also to my decrepit linoleum, part of the curtains, and possibly the lower atmosphere. 

Tasha – credit where it’s due – doesn’t scream.  She doesn’t even flinch. She just watches, stone-faced, as my IKEA spatula melts into ’90s plastic goo and my dog (Beelzebub) bolts straight out of the dog-door at Mach 2.  The fire alarm is bellowing like Satan’s kazoo, and I’m slap-dancing at the flames with a wet Rolling Stone back issue, which is not both on fire and somehow stuck to my jeans. 

My neighbors are banging on the front door.  Beelzebub is barking somewhere in the alley, possibly summoning lesser demons.  Smoke fills the house like I’m auditioning for “Worst Hotboxer in America.”  And all I can do is unleash a spectacular torrent of imprecation at the universe, the smoke alarm, the goddamn bananas, and honestly, at myself – creative profanity so loud and sustained I’m pretty sure the Pope just renounced me by proxy. 

Tasha orders an Uber in three silent swipes without losing eye contact – bold power move, honestly – and walks out, stepping over my flaming vinyl copy of “Bat Out of Hell” like it’s another Tuesday.  I’m left shirtless, coughing, and considering whether calling the fire department or moving to Guam is less humiliating. 

Dinner was ultimately pizza.  The dog came home eventually, smelling like brimstone and judgment.  And every time I walk into that kitchen, the burn mark on the ceiling still spells out “Never Try.” 

N.P.: “We All Scream” – Five Alarm Funk

September 1, 2025

 

Happy September, dear reader.  Yo rent is due.

So picture this…September 1, 1952, and some editor at Life magazine is probably chain-smoking Lucky Strikes while wondering if they’ve just committed career suicide by dedicating an entire issue to what amounts to an extended fishing story.  I’m talking, of course, about Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, a novella so deceptively simple it makes you wonder if maybe, just maybe,  you’ve been overthinking this whole literature thing your entire booze-addled existence.  Or maybe that’s just me.  Anyway, the editor mentioned above need not have worried, because the story’s success was absurd: five million copies.  In two days.  Two!  As if the entire American reader public suddenly developed an inexplicable craving for tales of Cuban fisherman wrestling with marlins the size of small automobiles.  Which, when you think about it, is exactly what happened, and isn’t that just the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever heard?

Now, I know what you’re thinking – because I’m thinking it too – what kind of masochistic genius does it take to craft a story that’s essentially one old guy versus one big fish and somehow make it feel like the entire human condition is hanging in the balance?  The answer, it turns out, involves the kind of narrative compression that would make a neutron star jealous, each sentence so dense with meaning it threatens to collapse into a literary black hole.

Santiago – our weathered protagonist who’s gone eighty-four days without catching so much as a sardine (which, let’s be honest, is the kind of professional dry spell that would drive most of us to day-drinking and career reconsideration) – embodies this magnificent futility that defines the human experience.  Here’s a man who knows, knows with the certainty of sunrise and hangovers, that he’s probably going to lose this battle.  The marlin is bigger, stronger, operates in its natural element while Santiago is basically a land mammal with delusions of aquatic grandeur.  And yet – and this is where Hemingway’s genius reaches levels of almost pornographic intensity – he fights anyway.

Because what else is there to do?  Surrender to the inevitable mediocrity of a fisherman who can’t catch fish?  Accept that maybe the universe is just one giant cosmic joke and we’re all the punchline?  Hell no.  Santiago straps himself to that boat and engages in what amounts to a three-day death match with a creature that represents everything he’ll never be – young, powerful, at home in the vast indifference of the sea.

The beauty of this whole setup – and by beauty I mean the kind of terrible beauty that makes you want to simultaneously laugh and cry and pour another drink – is how Hemingway strips away every unnecessary word, every flowery metaphor, every literary flourish that might distract from the essential brutality of the confrontation.  This is prose as sharp and unforgiving as a gaff hook, sentences that cut straight to the bone of meaning without bothering with the courtesy of anesthesia.

And the kicker?  Santiago wins and loses simultaneously.  He catches the goddamn fish – this magnificent beast that represents everything noble and wild and free in the world – only to watch the sharks reduce it to a skeleton during the long journey home.  Which is, of course, exactly what life does to all our grand ambitions and noble struggles.  We fight the good fight, we occasionally triumph, and then reality shows up like a pack of hungry sharks to remind us that victory is always temporary and defeat is the only universal constant.

But here’s what those five million readers understood, consciously or not, when they devoured this story faster than Americans consume processed cheese: Santiago’s defeat isn’t really a defeat at all.  It’s defiance.  It’s the middle finger raised to a universe that seems designed to crush the human spirit.  It’s the refusal to go gentle into that good night, even when you’re 84 years old and your hands are cramping and the sharks are circling and every rational part of your brain is screaming that this is madness.

When the formerly prestigious Pulitzer committee awarded Hemingway the prize in 1954, they weren’t just recognizing technical mastery – though God knows the technical mastery is there, every sentence calibrated with the precision of a Swiss chronometer.  They were acknowledging something deeper, more essential: the recognition that great literature isn’t about happy endings or moral clarity or the comfortable illusion that virtue is rewarded and evil punished.  Great literature is about the futility of human effort in the face of cosmic indifference, and finding beauty in that futility.

So today let’s raise a glass to Santiago and his marlin, to Hemingway and his impossible brevity, to the five million readers who recognized greatness when it slapped them across the face like a salty wave.  In a world that increasingly rewards mediocrity and celebrates participation trophies, The Old Man and the Sea stands as a monument to the idea that sometimes the most heroic thing you can do is fight a battle you know you’re going to lose.

Because in the end, isn’t that what we’re all doing anyway?

N.P.: “Sunglasses On At The Dollar Store” – Shockwire