Today has been ridiculous, dear reader.  Started with coffee and a McRib.  Things only went downhill from there.  Still managed to work on the book a bit.  I have to go fight a bunch of guys in a bit (training, of course), but after that, I’ll be glad to see this day in the rearview mirror.

But before I can put this day to bed, we have a bit of D.P.S. business.  For you see, dear reader, on this day in 1865, Mark Twain – that literary, whiskey-soaked middle finger to Victorian decorum – published “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” in the New York Saturday Press.  It was a story about a frog.  A frog that jumps.  Or doesn’t.  Depending on whether someone has secretly filled it with buckshot.  And it is, in every sense that matters, the moment American literature stopped pretending to be British and started chain-smoking behind the barn.

The plot, such that it is, is a barroom anecdote nested inside a shaggy-dog story wrapped in some thick dialect.  A man named Smiley, who bets on everything from horse races to the lifespan of parsons, trains a frog named Dan’l Webster to jump farther than any other frog in Calaveras County (which county is about 70 miles from where yrs. truly is presently parked behind the Dissolute Desk).  Enter the stranger, the con, the existential cheap-shot: Dan’l gets sabotaged, stuffed with lead, and loses the bet.  Smiley is swindled.  The frog is betrayed.  The reader is left somewhere between hysterical laughter and a creeping suspicion that the whole damn country runs on this kind of absurdity.

This story is a blueprint for the American psyche: the pathological gambler, the weaponized anecdote, the amphibian as metaphor for hope and humiliation.  Twain’s genius here isn’t just the humor – it’s the architecture of the joke, the way he builds a cathedral out of frontier horseshit and then sets fire to it with a single punchline.  This was a bit of a tectonic shift: our literature stopped being about noble suffering and starts being about the guy who loses his ass because someone cheated at frog-jumping.

This was Twain’s breakout.  The moment the literary establishment looked up from its tea and said, “Wait, what the hell was that?”  It was the sound of the West elbowing its way into the stodgy parlor, with muddy boots, crooked sneer, frog in hand.

So raise a glass to Dan’l Webster, the frog who couldn’t jump because he was full of lead.  He is us.  He is America.  And Twain the guy in the corner, watching it all, scribbling furiously, and laughing like hell because he knows the joke is always on us.

N.P.: “Ain’t No Man Alive Can Handle Me” – Dumpster Grooves, Bertha Mae Lightning