Happy Friday, dear reader.  There was a weird amount of helicopter traffic in the skies over Fecal Creek this morning…first a Blackhawk, followed by a Little Bird, followed shortly thereafter by a big-ass Chinook, all heading southwest.  I saw these while I was waiting with saint-like patience in the drive-thru line of Dunkin for my Triple Mocha Frozen Coffee which, I crushingly found out later, was somehow ill-prepared.  Not enough chocolate.  It tasted more like a Single-and-a-Half Mocha Frozen Coffee.  I still drank it…shit yes, dear reader…I drank the hell out of it.  But it didn’t provide me with the usual joy.  My blood sugar level was only raised to maybe semi-dangerous levels, rather than the usual and expected “my heart feels like a great white shark that is about to explode” levels that I have grown to know and love.  Alas.  The world continues to turn.  And so much for that.  Now down to business.

On this day in 1719, Daniel Defoe dropped Robinson Crusoe, a novel that’s pure survivalist grit.  Dig: a man, shipwrecked on a desolate island, staring down the abyss of nature’s indifference, cannibals circling like vultures, and his own teetering sanity threatening to jump ship.  Crusoe not only endures his 28-year exile; he wrestles it into submission, building shelters, taming goats, and even converting a local he dubs Friday to Christianity.  This is not some twee castaway tale like Alexander Selkirk’s, the real-life marooned sailor who inspired Defoe.  No.  Defoe cranks the stakes all the way to 11, weaving a narrative so raw and immediate that 18th-century readers swore it was nonfiction, cementing him as a progenitor of the novel form.  What makes Crusoe such a badass isn’t just that he survives – it’s him telling despair to fuck right off as he carves out a life from nothingness.

Defoe’s genius lies in his ability to make the mundane feel mythic.  Crusoe’s daily grind – salvaging shipwreck scraps, planting crops, crafting tools – becomes a Homeric odyssey of self-reliance.  But beneath the surface, there’s a simmering tension: the psychological toll of isolation and the existential dread of a man who’s both god and prisoner of his own domain, a feeling that I’ve been uncomfortably familiar with in the past.  Defoe doesn’t flinch from the ugly bits, and that’s what makes Robinson Crusoe a timeless beast – it’s not just about surviving the wilderness; it’s about surviving yourself.  The book’s realism was so potent it birthed a genre, but its real legacy is in showing us that heroism isn’t capes and swords; it’s the quiet, ferocious will to keep going when the world’s gone to hell.  Damn right.

Now let’s pivot, and fast-forward exactly 306 years to this very day, dear reader, and the cause of much celebration and head-banging around the Safe House today: Ghost’s new album Skeleta, which dropped today and has my aorta all atingle after a single listen.  The Swedish group, helmed by the preternaturally talented Tobias Forge, has delivered a record that’s both a banger and a revelation – no filler to be found here, but also no interstitial musical interludes (a departure from their previous album’s penchant for atmospheric detours), just 10 songs of pretty much unadulterated brilliance.  My standout after one spin is Cenotaph.  It’s just a brilliant pop song.

One of the things that fascinates me about Ghost – and Skeleta in particular – is how their image has a death metal band, complete with corpse paint and Satanic theatrics, probably scares off listeners who’d otherwise be dare I say enraptured by their sound.  Whatever references to headbanging I made supra…forget it. There’s no actual headbanging going on here (though I will confess to brief air-guitar this afternoon when Majesty came on). Forge isn’t channeling the guttural nihilism of death metal: he’s closer to Andrew Lloyd Webber, crafting operatic, melody-drenched compositions that wouldn’t feel out of place in a West End musical.  Fans of Phantom of the Opera or Jesus Christ Superstar would likely lose their minds over Ghost’s entire catalog, from Opus Eponymous to this latest gem.  On the one hand, it’s a damn shame the metal label might alienate the theater-kid demographic that’d eat this up with a spoon.  On the other hand, fuck ’em…the timid and weak don’t deserve good music.  They deserve Taylor Swift.  Uncultured heathens.

The writing continues apace, or at least as apace as can be realistically expected.  Of course, what reality expects and what Mgmt expects are completely different things.  That “difficult” chapter I mentioned the other day?  I’m not going to be able to write that straight through…I’m going to have to work on other chapters and then come back to this as ideas occur or I’m more “ready.”  So I’m shifting the schedule around to a much more non-linear arrangement, which gives Mgmt the Angst.  For which I deeply apologize but feel compelled to say also tough titty.  This whole process is like giving birth: I don’t have a whole lot of control over how long things take or when certain things happen.  Thou Shalt Deal With It.
#UnculturedHeathens

N.P.: “Bible” – Ghost