What’s crackin’, dear readers…you ink-drunk degenerates and barstool metaphysicians, you hyper-literate wolves circling the flickering campfire of American letters with your cheap whiskey and even cheaper opinions: today we jam a live wire straight into the soft pink meat of your collective vocabulary and call it persiflage.

Persiflage – that noun, slippery as a greased eel in a Baptist baptismal font – denoting a species of light, frivolous, often mocking banter; the kind of airy, insouciant raillery that feints at civility while slipping the shiv between the ribs of the its target, all surface sparkle and subsurface evisceration, the verbale equivalent of foreplay administered with a straight razor and a shit-eating grin.

It slouched out of eighteenth-century France like a louche aristocrat fresh from the powder room: persiflage, direct descendant of the verb persifler, to tease or banter, itself a per- intensified stiffler, to whistle, as though the whole refined art of verbal vivisection began with some bewigged prick pursing his lips to blow a little tune while he verbally castrated his rival over a game of cards and a bottled of watered claret.  Elegant, no?  French as a blowjob in the Louvre.

Look, I am the first to admit that my baseline state of existence is a recursive loop of catastrophic decision-making, mostly fueled by a cocktail of overpriced espresso, questionable pharmaceuticals, and the kind of existential dread that usually requires a prescription to manage.  But even I have limits. 

It was 3:42 AM in the absolute bowels of a neon-drenched casino lounge in Reno, a carpeted purgatory smelling aggressively of stale gin and cheap floor wax.  I was wedged into a vinyl booth that felt like it had been specifically engineered by sadists to compress the human spine, trying my absolute hardest to politely ignore a spectacularly unhinged man named “Chet.”  Chet was wearing a velvet blazer that looked like it had been salvaged from a 1970s pimp’s estate sale, and he was sweating with the kind of hyperactive, saucer-eyed intensity that suggested his bloodstream was currently operating at a dangerously high pH level. 

For the better part of two hours, I had been a captive audience to his unrelenting, machine-gun barrage of bullshit.  The man was oscillating wildly between explaining the metaphysical implications of crypto currency and detailing the deeply disturbing mechanics of his recent divorce, punctuating every third sentence by aggressively stabbing a maraschino cherry with a plastic sword. 

“So then the bitch tells the judge – and I swear to Christ, buddy, the judge is looking at me like I’m the one who parked the Volvo in the swimming pool – she tells him that my entire personality is nothing but an elaborate defense mechanism,” Chet howled, spraying a fine mist of cheap scotch across the sticky laminate table. 

I started into the lukewarm dregs of my drink, entirely devoid of the chemical stamina required to process this monumental tidal wave of unfiltered, hyper-manic garbage.  I simply wanted to slip into a quiet, heavily medicated coma, but instead, I was trapped in the fluorescent hellscape, drowning in a sea of godawful persiflage while my brain cells committed mas suicide one-by-one. 

I finally stood up, my knees cracking like a cheap glowstick.  “Chet,” I said, leaning in close enough to smell the chemical fire burning behind his eyes.  “You are a magnificent disaster of a human being, but if you speak one more syllable about your ex-wife’s Volvo, I am going physically fold you into a shape that will confuse your mother.” 

And with that, I walked out into the cold desert might, leaving him to whistle his absolute nonsense to the slot machines. 

N.P.: “I Have To Leave My Wife” – King Willonius