There’s a particular species of well-meaning interpersonal pablum – a kind of linguistic airbag – that has been growing increasingly common since the Covidiots started demanding everybody wear masks all the time.  It’s a verbal plague – a contagion of concern-trolling that has somehow become the default sign-off for every human interaction – that really descends upon you the moment the calendar even thinks about flipping to a new year.  It arrives in texts, in emails, in the brittle small talk of relatives who haven’t had an unsupervised thought since the Obama administration.  “Stay safe,” they chirp, from the checkout clerk to your own mother, their faces arranged in masks of earnest, suffocating care.  “Have a safe New Year.”  “Be safe out there.”

And I find myself, with a frequency that is becoming frankly alarming, wanting to grab them by their responsibly-sourced lapels and scream, “No.  Absolutely not.”  My goal is not safety.  My primary directive is not the careful preservation of this mortal coil in a hermetically sealed container until its warranty expires.  What, precisely, is the grand prize for accumulating the most days lived without a single scratch, a solitary misstep, a glorious and ill-advised leap into the unknown?  A slightly longer stay in a little room, waiting for the Jell-O cup?

Because here’s the thing nobody seems to want to admit in polite society: safety is boring.  Safety is the beige carpeting of human aspiration.  Safety is the spiritual equivalent of lukewarm tap water.  Safety is the bureaucratic memo stapled to the front of your soul reminding you to please refrain from doing anything interesting, alarming, or remotely alive.

This relentless, wallpaper-thin mantra of safety is a uniquely modern sickness and demonstrative of the wristslittingly depressing pussification of the entire culture.  It’s a linguistic anesthetic designed to numb us to the glorious, terrifying, and fundamentally unsafe business of being alive.  Every jagged edge of existence must be sanded down.  Every exhilarating risk must be mitigated into a spreadsheet of predictable outcomes.  We are encouraged, no, commanded, to wrap ourselves in bubble wrap and float gently down the river of life, avoiding all the sharp rocks and thrilling rapids where the actual living happens.

And yet, this holiday season, I was bludgeoned – rhetorically, repeatedly, and with the kind of  passive-aggressive cheer that should be classified as a misdemeanor – by people insisting I have a safe New Year.  As if the highest imaginable human achievement is to tiptoe through the next twelve months like a Victorian governess afraid of scuffing the parquet.

Well, fuck that.

I don’t want a safe New Year.  I don’t even want a safe Tuesday.  I don’t want a safe anything.  I want a year with teeth.  A year that lunges.  A year that leaves claw marks on the drywall.

The entire reason I do the so-called “unsafe” things I do –  the impulsive road trips to failed narco-states, the all-night creative benders, the questionable home-improvement experiments, the general refusal to live like a laminated instruction manual – is precisely because they’re unsafe.  Because they remind me that I’m not a domesticated appliance humming obediently in the corner.  Because they jolt the nervous system awake in a world that keeps trying to sedate it with ergonomic chairs and HR-approved slogans.  The entire point of doing anything worthwhile involves a calculated, and sometime not-so-calculated, dance with disaster.  The best stories don’t begin with “So, I conducted a thorough risk assessment.”  They begin with a bad idea, a shot of questionable liquor, and a magnificent disregard for the probable consequences.  They are forged in the fires of imprudence.  I don’t know about you, dear reader, but the memorable moments – the ones that flash behind your eyes when you’re horizontal with a tube in your nose at The End – are not the times you successfully followed the safety instructions.  They are the moments you threw the manual into the fire and Went For It.

The very concept of a “safe New Year” is an oxymoron of the rankest vintage.  A new year should be a wild, untamed frontier, a 365-day stretch of pure, chaotic potential.  It should be a minefield of opportunity and beautiful mistakes.  It should be dangerous.  It should be something you survive, not something you merely endure.

I think 2026 is going to be amazing – but only for the people who understand that “amazing” and “safe” rarely occupy the same sentence without one of them choking the other to death.

So here’s my counter-blessing, my anti-benediction, my heretical toast to the coming year:
May your 2026 be dangerous.
May it be unruly, ungovernable, and uninsurable.
May it terrify the people who think “safety” is the apex of human ambition.
May it leave you breathless, scraped, exhilarated, and unmistakably alive.
May it violently reject the soft, padded prison of a life lived in perpetual caution.
And if someone tries to tell you to stay safe, smile politely, nod once, and then go do something that would make them clutch their pearls so hard they leave dents.
Because safety is for appliances.
Danger is for humans.
And I intend to live like one.
I’ll take being alive.

N.P.: “In the Hall of the Mountain King” – Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross

Dispatches from the Western Edge of the Republic: A Double Dose of Liberty Unleashed

Friends, countrymen,  and dear readers, let it be recorded that in the span of a single rotation of this weary planet – a mere twenty-four hours – the gears of history have ground forward with a ferocity that leaves one breathless, exhilarated, and not a little vindicated.

First, out of the fog-shrouded chambers of the Ninth Circuit, that erstwhile bastion of coastal restraint, comes a thunderclap: California’s long-standing prohibition on the open carry of arms in the populous counties – those teeming hives where ninety-five percent of the state’s souls reside = has been declared null, void, and contrary to the plain text and historical marrow of the Second Amendment.  A panel of judges, applying the Supreme Court’s unyielding Bruen standard, has affirmed what any honest reading of the Founders’ intent has always whispered: the right to bear arms in the open manner, visible and unapologetic, is no modern indulgence but a tradition woven into the very fabric of this nation’s birth.  The state’s attempt to confine this right to rural backwaters, while denying it to the urban millions, collapses under the weight of its own ahistorical pretense.  One can almost hear the collective sigh of relief from us law-abiding citizens who have chafed under this selective disarming, this bureaucratic emasculation of a core liberty.

And then – hot on the heels of this judicial reclamation – comes the second bolt, raw and audacious (just how we like ’em), from the south: the United States military, in a swift, overwhelming nocturnal operation, has seized Nicolás Maduro, the entrenched cartel leader and strongman of Venezuela, along with his consort, and extracted them from Caracas amid a barrage that lit the sky like a reckoning.  The dictator, long indicted for narco-terrorism and the systematic plunder of his people, now finds himself blindfolded in the back of a boat, en route to American soil, bound for the stern accounting of New York justice.  Explosions echoed through the capital; special forces descended; and by the dawn’s early light, the palace that sheltered tyranny stands breached.  Venezuela, that once-proud nation bled dry by socialist delusion and cartel collusion, now teeters on the precipice of deliverance – or at least the removal of its primary parasite.  The implications cascade: oil fields no longer siphoned for private jets and Swiss accounts, a people tasting the first unfiltered air of possibility in decades.

What a glorious, savage symmetry in these twin events.  On one hand, the restoration of an ancient American right to arm oneself openly against the caprices of power; on the other, the direct application of power to unseat a foreign despot who mocked sovereignty and flooded borders with poison.  Both strike at the heart of the eternal tension: the citizen’s defense against overreach, and the nation’s resolve against those who would export chaos.

We stand at a juncture where the republic flexes muscles long atrophied – judicial clarity slicing through regulatory overgrowth, and kinetic force reminding the world that certain lines, once crossed, invite swift and unsparing consequences.  Let the hand-wringers wring; let the apologists for socialism and tyranny howl from their ivory perches.  The last twenty-four hours were a reminder that the ground beneath us is never stable, that liberty is a vault you sometimes have to crack open with dynamite, and that tyrants – whether cloaked in bureaucracy or military fatigues – eventually face the reckoning.

And if you’re not celebrating, if you’re not at least a little electrified by the chaos, then maybe you’re already embalmed. Because this, dear reader, is what it looks like when history decides to stop whispering and start swinging.

N.P.: “Get Back” – We Three Kings

Already January 2nd.  Huh.  Not much going on around here today.  I mean, the usual book-work and a tragicomic wrestling match with a synthesizer, but that’s about it.

So let’s talk about 1979, specifically the slow-motion train wreck involving Simon John Ritchie, known to the spitting masses as Sid Vicious.  The Sex Pistols’ bassist – a job title that implies he actually played the instrument, which is generous – found himself on trial for the murder of Nancy Spungen.  Sid was out on bail, wandering through the New York winter like a terrifying puppy, only to OD on heroin before the gavel came down.

It’s like the punk rock equivalent of a Greek tragedy, if Oedipus had worn a padlock around his neck and couldn’t play three chords.

But then if we go back to January 2, 1939…this is where my headache really starts to throb behind the left eye.

TIME Magazine, that bastion of journalistic integrity and shiny paper, decided to name Adolf Hitler their “Man of the Year.”  Yeah, that actually happened.  Apparently, the editors looked at the burgeoning geopolitical nightmare in Europe, squinted really hard, and though, “You know who’s really crushing it right now?  The guy screaming at stadiums.”

I can picture the editorial meeting.  A room full of men in suspenders and fedoras, smoking cigarettes indoors, debating between the inventor of the toaster oven and the architect of the Third Reich.  “Well, Frank,” one of them says, puffing a cloud of blue smoke, “Adolf certainly has…presence.  He’s very dynamic.”  It took a special kind of myopia, a failure of imagination so profound it’s almost impressive.

So much for all that…time for round 9 with this goddamn synth.

N.P.: “Awake” – The Joke Jay