We need to get one thing absolutely and unequivocally straight before the coffee hits your bloodstream on this spectacularly cursed Sunday morning: the universe is actively conspiring against you, and it has circled March 15th on its celestial calendar with a thick, red Sharpie.  The soothsayers were not just blowing smoke up the collective togas of the Roman elite when they whispered about the Ides of March.  They were tapping into a fundamental, chronologically recurring frequency of sheer, unadulterated doom.  You know the story (or at least you’d better, dear reader).  Julius Caesar – a man who, by all historical accounts, possessed an ego large enough to require its own zip code – wandered into the Theatre of Pompey and caught 23 sharp pieces of Senate-approved metal in the ribs.  The lesson here is not merely about the pitfalls of imperial ambition or the staggering unreliability of coworkers.  The lesson is that mid-March is a phenomenologically toxic wasteland, a temporal sinkhole where bad things happen to people who forget to check their blind spots.

Beware the Ides, dear reader.  Lock your doors, pour yourself a violently strong beverage, and trust absolutely no one who approaches you wearing a poorly tailored bedsheet.

But the bleeding out of a Roman dictator is merely an appetizer in this buffet of historical madness.  If a Roman assassination isn’t enough to curdle your morning gin, remember it was on this exact day, in the thoroughly bleak and unforgiving year of 1937, in the quiet, respectable, Providence, Rhode Island gloom that smelled of mildew and unnamable regret, Howard Phillips Lovecraft – H.P. to the initiates, the Old Gent to the cultists – finally shuffled off this mortal coil and into whatever squamous, non-Euclidean dimension waits for the truly committed materialists who accidently invented a new kind of religious terror.

And brother, did he ever.

The man weaponized the absolute indifference of the universe and turned it into prose so dense, so feverish, so baroque in its despair that reading him feels like having your amygdala French-kissed by something that has no business existing in three dimensions.  While the rest of the pulp hacks were busy slapping vampires and werewolves into tidy little morality plays – good triumphs, evil gets a stake through the heart, roll credits – Lovecraft looked at the night sky and said, No.  Fuck that.  The real terror is that the sky is looking back and it doesn’t even register you as a protein.  He gave us entities that didn’t want your soul, didn’t want your women, didn’t even want your worship in any meaningful way.  They simply Were, vast, ancient, cyclopean, and utterly, serenely uninterested in the screaming little primates who’d accidentally poked the wrong corner of reality.  Cthulhu doesn’t rise to rule us; he rises because his nap alarm went off.  The color out of space doesn’t corrupt the countryside for sport; it corrupts in the way radiation corrupts tissue – because that’s what it does.  There is no moral.  There is no catharsis.  There is only the slow, inexorable realization that the universe is not hostile, which would at least be dramatic.  It’s worse.  It’s bored.

And the motherfucker did it all while half-starved, writing letters to anyone who’d listen, nursing grudges the size of Azathoth’s court, and maintaining a prose style so ornate it makes Victorian wallpaper look minimalist.  He was a walking contradiction: a materialist who dreamed like a mystic, a racist who created a mythology so transcendently misanthropic it eventually outgrew every ugly personal tic that birthed it, a recluse who accidentally founded a literary religion that now has more true believers than most actual religions.

So today, on the Ides that also happens to be the anniversary of his exit, raise whatever you’re drinking – coffee, whiskey, the black bile of existential nausea, whatever – and tip it toward Providence.  Not in mourning, exactly.  Lovecraft would have hated that.  More like a salute between two people who both know the joke, and the joke is that there is no punchline, on the endless, star-strewn, indifferent dark.

And beware the Ides.  Not because you’ll be stabbed in a senate – though, hey, read the group chat – but because March 15 is an annual reminder that two things are true at once: power gets checked, and the universe does not care about your press release.  Light a cheap candle for Lovecraft today, then go outside and notice how ordinary the sky looks, which is exactly what makes it terrifying.

N.P.: “Ritual” – Ghost

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