Author Archives: Jayson Gallaway

November 18, 2025

 

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

November 16, 2025

Connectivity.
The internet’s an asshole.
Cloud cover too thick?

Hot damn, dear reader…there is light at the end of this long, circuitous, Byzantine, labyrinthine, and ludicrous writing process for the goddamn book.  I’ll officially begin shopping it around for a deal in early ’26.  Because 20 years between books is totally normal, right?  My hopes are high, but I’m trying to manage my expectations.  As always, I’ll be looking for Fuck You money for this thing, but what I’m really looking forward to, believe it or not, is finally being able just to talk about it.  Having to maintain this Masonic air of secrecy around the whole project for all these years hasn’t necessarily been difficult, but it has been a pain in the ass.

Speaking of pains in the ass, today’s date – November 16th – appears to be a sort of nodal point in the chaotic, often self-immolating timeline of literary insurrection.  Five seismic events, five big fuck-yous to the status quo, five reasons to believe that writing – real writing – is still the most dangerous thing you can do with your clothes on.

Exhibit A: We jump back to 1860, where a certain Fyodor Dostoevsky, fresh off a four-year sabbatical in the Czar’s least hospitable Siberian resorts and a mock execution…does my dear young reader even know what that is?  Imagine this: you’re blindfolded, standing in front of a firing squad, heart jackhammering like a meth-addicted woodpecker, and just as the rifles rise – a reprieve.  Not mercy, but bureaucratic sadism.  That’s the crucible Dostoevsky crawled out of before he wrote The House of the Dead, serialized today in 1860 in Vremya magazine.  Did you ever see HBO’s Oz?  Well, this makes that look like Sesame Street.  Russia banned it for “undermining authority,” which is apparatchik-speak for “telling a truth with a scalpel.”

Fast forward to Copenhagen, 1885.  This guy August Strindberg stages Miss Julie.  Class warfare, sexual humiliation, psychological evisceration – all in a goddamn kitchen.  Strindberg directed it himself, then tore ass out of Sweden when he knew the pitchforks were coming.  Critics called it “obscene,” which is rich coming from a country that invented IKEA.  The Swedes banned it until 1906.  But the damage was done: realism was dead, and theater would never be safe again.

Then 1938.  The world is going dark, goose-stepping toward oblivion.  Bertolt Brecht was holed up in exile in Denmark, fleeing the Gestapo with the ink still wet on his passport.  Fear and Misery of the Third Reich dropped today in 1938 – 24 scenes of quotidian Nazi terror disguised as cabaret.  It was agitprop performed in basements.  The Nazis, in a stunning lack of self-awareness, burned the book in Berlin, providing the most ringing endorsement a writer could ever hope for.

Jump to 1952.  Ernest Hemingway, holed up in Cuba and dodging the FBI between mojitos, publishes The Old Man and the Sea in a single issue of Life magazine.  It was 72 pages of ruthlessly stripped-down, sunburned prose.  He took a simple goddamn fishing trip and hammered it into a crucifixion myth.  Five million copies sold in 48 hours.  It was a cultural event, a literary knockout that won Papa the Pulitzer and, eventually, the Nobel.  The man mailed the manuscript from a bar, probably bleeding from a marlin gaff and muttering about grace under pressure.  Literature’s heavyweight champ, still swinging.

And finally, the cherry on this chaotic sundae: 1967.  Our favorite Kentucky-born degenerate, Hunter S. Thompson publishes Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga.  HST embedded with the Angels for a year, rode with them, drank with them,  until the inevitable, teeth-shattering climax where they stomped him into the dirt.    He lived the story, then wrote it while still bleeding, blurring the line between observer and participant until it ceased to exist.  The book got banned for “glorifying violence,” which, like all the others on this list, meant it was simply too honest for the delicate sensibilities of the people in charge.

So here’s to November 16 – a date that reads like a rap sheet for the literary criminally insane.  These were saboteurs, prophets, and beautifully deranged motherfuckers who made art dangerous again.  If you’re not pissing someone off, you’re probably just typing.

Stay tuned.  The book’s coming.  And when it drops, I want it to be quite a fucking thing.
Light your cigarettes.  Stockpile ammo.  The storm’s coming.

N.P.: “Listen To My Voice” – Gary Numan

November 13, 2025

Today is a great day, dear reader.  Not in the saccharine, Instagrammable, “live laugh love” horseshitty sense of the phrase, but in a way a thunderclap is great, or a freight train derailing into a fireworks factory is great – loud, messy, and absolutely unignorable.  Today is a great day because the sky over Anhedonia County has finally cracked open like a long-suffering ulcer, hemorrhaging a steady, blessed rain onto the parched bones of The Creek.  The gutters are gurgling like drunks in a confession booth, the air smells like wet asphalt and ozone, and the squirrels are losing their tiny minds.  It’s glorious.

Second, and this is not a drill, today is November 13th, the birthday of Robert Louis Stevenson – patron saint of duality, chronicler of pirates, and the man who taught us that every respectable gentleman has a snarling, libidinal monster just beneath the waistcoat.  Raise a glass of laudanum-laced absinthe in his honor, or at least mutter a curse at the mirror and see who blinks first.

But the third reason is the real meat of the matter, both literal and metaphysical.  The McRib is back.  Yes.  That unholy slab of reconstituted pork slurry, shaped like a rack of ribs by someone who’s only ever seen ribs in a dream, slathered in a sauce so sweet it could double as embalming fluid.  It’s back.  And I, for one, have already eaten two.  Possibly three.  I blacked out somewhere between the second and the third and woke up with barbecue sauce on my collar and a vague sense of spiritual renewal.

There’s something about the McRib’s seasonal resurrection that feels like a pagan rite – like Persephone clawing her way out of the underworld, except she’s made of pork and corn syrup and corporate nostalgia.  It’s a culinary Brigadoon, a meat mirage that appears just long enough to remind us that joy is fleeting, and then vanishes again into the marketing ether.  You don’t eat a McRib because it’s good.  You eat it because it’s back.  You eat it because you’re alive, dammit, and because the rain is falling, and because Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote about a man who turned into a beast and you, too, feel the beast stirring when you smell that tangy, smoky perfume wafting from the Golden Arches.

So yes, today is a great day.  The sky is weeping, the dead are remembered, and the McRib is back.  It that’s not enough to make you howl at the clouds and dance barefoot in the mud, then brother, I don’t know what the hell you’re doing here.

Now go forth.  Eat recklessly.  Write dangerously.  And if you see me in The Creek, sauce-stained and grinning like a pervert, just nod and keep walking.  Some days are too good to explain.

N.P.: “Simple Life” – Elton John

Word of the Day: fard

Today’s Word of the Day is fard.
Verb – to apply cosmetics, especially to the face.
From Middle French farder, meaning “to paint or embellish,” which itself traces back to the Latin fardare, a verb that sounds like it should involve medieval jousting but instead refers to the ancient art of facial camouflage.

The doorbell chimes, a tinny, synthesized death knell signaling the arrival of The Proletariat.   I swing open the door to find him vibrating on my porch: a human pimple in a shitty rented tuxedo, a creature of such profound adolescent awkwardness that his very existence is a form of passive-aggressive warfare against good taste.  He’s wearing a clip-on tie and the kind of cologne that smells like Axe body spray had a baby with a urinal cake.  He’s here to take my daughter to Homecoming, which is already a problem because she’s fifteen and he looks like the kind of kid who thinks Nietzsche is a Fortnight skin.
I let him in.  I do not offer him a seat.  I do not offer him water.  I do not offer him mercy.  We sit in silence.  The kind of silence that makes your ears ring.  He tries to smile. I stare at him like I’m trying to telepathically induce a nosebleed.  His eyes dart around the room, landing on the towering stack of books and the half-empty bottle of bourbon on the mantlepiece.  The silence stretches, thick and suffocating.  I let it linger, a tactical weapon of my own design.
“So,” I begin, leaning back, a predator enjoying his work.  “Homecoming.  A veritable pageant of hormonal panic and shitty decisions.  You must be thrilled.”
A sound escaped his throat, something between a gulp and a squeak.  “Y-yes, sir.  It should be fun.”
“Fun,” I repeat, savoring the word like a piece of cheap candy.  “An interesting metric.  Is the pursuit of ‘fun’ the primary driver of the human condition, do you think?  Or is it merely a distraction, a fleeting palliative to soothe the existential dread that accompanies the slow, inexorable march to the grave?”
His face is a canvas of pure, unadulterated terror.  His Adam’s apple bobs.  “I…I don’t know, sir.”
What a moron.  Time to really fuck with him.
After another minute of staring, I say, “So.  You believe in free will?”
He blinks stupidly.  Sheepishly.  He blinks like a stupid sheep.  “Uh.  Yeah?”
“Interesting.  So you think you chose to wear that tie?”
He looks down, confused.  “My mom picked it.”
“Ah,” I say, nodding sagely.  “So you believe in maternal determinism.”
He shifts in his seat.  I can smell the panic.  And his panic smells like fear and cheap deodorant.
“She’ll be down soon,” I say.  “She’s upstairs farding.”
The kid freezes.  His face goes from pale to a blotchy, horrified crimson.  The single word hangs in the air between us, a foul and misunderstood specter
“She’s…she’s what?” he stammers, his voice cracking.
I lean forward, conspiratorially.  “Farding.  Oh, yeah.  She fards all the time.  Can’t stop, really.  A terrible habit.  I’ve tried talking to her about it, but she gets embarrassed.  But it’s out of control.  Sometimes it goes on for hours, the farding.  She just didn’t want to do it in front of you.  She’s shy about her farding.”
The boy’s brain, bless its undeveloped prefrontal cortex, has clearly gone to a very different, very gross place.  He nods, but he’s not nodding like someone who understands.  He’s nodding like someone who’s trying to pretend he didn’t just walk into a house where the father casually discusses his daughter’s alleged gastrointestinal habits with Socratic flair.  I can see the frantic calculations behind his eyes, the dawning horror, the desperate search for an exit strategy.  The silence returns, but this time it’s electric with his revulsion.
After a few more agonizing seconds that I enjoyed immensely, he shoots to his feet.  “You know what?  I…I just remembered.  I have to…go.  I think I forgot something at home, “he says.
“Was it your dignity?” I ask, cheerfully.
And with that, he was gone.  A blur of cheap polyester and shattered dreams, fleeing my house, and, hopefully, my daughter, forever.
I walked to the bottom of the stairs, glass in hand.
“Honey!” I called up.  “You can take your time!  Your ride seems to have been unavoidably detained.”
My daughter descends the stairs, radiant and furious.  “Where’d he go?”
He couldn’t handle your farding,” I say.
She groans.  I pour myself a drink.  I am victorious.  And victory, dear reader, is a dish best served with a side of deliberate, weaponized vocabulary. 

N.P.: “Cities in Dust” – Night Club

November 9, 2025

So you think you know what it takes to be a writer.  You’ve got your little Moleskine, your artisanal coffee, your carefully curated suffering that looks great on an author bio.  That’s cute.  Let’s talk about November 9th, a date that serves as a goddamn benchmark for the kind of beautiful, high-octane derangement that actually forges words into weapons.  Writing, dear reader, isn’t about tweed jackets; it’s about the howling chaos at the core of the human machine.

First, we rewind the tape to London, 1938.  The air is thick with fascist foreplay and impending war as the city holds its breath before the Luftwaffe turns the sky into fire.  Dylan Thomas (whose birthday we just celebrated here on October 27), 24, the Welsh wunderkind with a voice like God gargling gravel, incandescently drunk on love and existential rage, decides to get hitched.  He makes a quick, unceremonious trip to the registry office with Caitlin Macnamara.  A lesser man night have called it a day, maybe had a nice dinner, and worried about the existential dread of both matrimony and aerial bombardment.

Not Dylan…fuck no, thank you very much.  This is Dylan Thomas.  He drags his new bride to a pub, fueled by a cocktail of love, booze, and pure defiance, and proceeds to hammer out the final lines of “And death shall have no dominion,” a poem so defiant it might was well have  been written in whiskey and gunpowder.  That’s how it’s done.  While the world is gearing up for mass slaughter, Thomas is scribbling a poem that gives the concept of death The Finger.

“Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again” – a line that got read over BBC airwaves while London burned, carved into war memorials, tattooed on soldiers, screamed at protests, and became a mantra for a people staring into the abyss.

Fast forward to 1965, New York City.  The scene shifts from Blitz-era balls to a different type of explosion: the psychic detonation of Norman Mailer.  After a party saturated with that special 60s blend of intellectual preening and pharmaceutical excess, Mailer, high on coke and ego and profoundly misguided artistic rage, stabs his wife Adele Morales with a penknife.  I fear the young and temporally myopic dear reader may not know what a penknife is: it’s a small, folding knife originally designed for sharpening quill pens, hence the name.  Over time, it evolved into a compact, pocket-sized blade used for general utility tasks like cutting string, opening packages, pretty much a contemporary pocket-knife.

She survives, miraculously.  He pleads guilty to assault.  So what does this literary lion, the heavyweight champion of American letters, do next?  He writes An American Dream.  It’s a novel about a man who – and you can’t make this up – murders his wife and gets away with it. This book is not safe.  It’s certainly not sane.  It’s a literary psych ward with no exit signs.  Critics screamed and called it monstrous.  Feminists demanded his head on a platter.  Mailer, with a shrug that could curdle milk, called it “the most honest thing I’ve ever written,” which is like Charles Manson saying he finally found his truth in finger painting.  It immediately sold 800,000 copies.  Because America loves its monsters, especially when they write well.  Literature rarely gets more dangerous than this, unless you could the times when Burroughs shot his wife in the face or when Hemingway tried to wrestle a shark for his manuscript.  Forget your “edgy” campus novels.  This was a man wrestling his own demons on the page for all the world to see, and daring you to look away.

Which brings us, dear reader, twitching and grinding our teeth, to today.  November 9, 2025.  Right here, right now.  Your humble narrator, Jayson Gallaway – yes, the literary berserker with the limo-tinted eyes (“he can see out, but no one can see in”) and a keyboard soaked in venom and heartbreak, is engaged in a similar, if less publicly felonious, form of literary combat, slaving over a manuscript so unhinged it makes American Psycho look like a coloring book.  The masterpiece is taking shape, a psycho-symphony of words pried from the clammy darkness   The day’s schedule is a testament to the modern writer’s balanced life: a hyper-caffeinated morning spent wrestling sentences into submission, a brief pause for a sandwich that tastes like ash, and then the obligatory trip to the local asylum to visit a loved one whose grip on reality makes my own seem downright respectable.

And then, the real work.  An unscheduled detour into pest control.  Last night, a raccoon – a fat, insolent little fucker with the eyes of a tiny, furry gangster – had the sheer temerity, the stupid audacity, the unmitigated gall to sass me while I was defending the family trash can.  There are lines, you see.  An unspoken contract between man and beast that this particular creature violated with gusto.  As always, I choose violence.  So tonight, under the cold glare of a November moon, justice will be served.  I’m going to murder that little motherfucker.  Not metaphorically.  Not poetically.  Just good old-fashioned trashcan vengeance.  It’s a small, violent, and frankly necessary act of reclaiming order in a universe that constantly threatens to spin out of control.  Granted, it’s not stabbing your wife, and it’s not defying the Third Reich, but it’s the same goddamn impulse.  It’s the primal scream against the chaos, whether that chaos comes from a bomber, a marriage, or a chittering idiot thief in the night.

Today is a hallowed day of for the beautifully deranged, the dangerously honest, and the creatively unhinged.  If you’re not writing something that could get you arrested, excommunicated, or canonized, then what the hell are you doing?  On this day of literary madness, raise a glass to the lunatics: to Thomas, Mailer, and all the other maniacs who understood that writing isn’t about telling a story.  It’s about grabbing life by the throat, staring into its wild, bloodshot eyes, and refusing to be the first one to blink.

N.P.: “Edie (Ciao Baby) – The Cult

November 8, 2025

Today, dear reader, I’d like to talk about two of my favorite books, for both of which today’s date is significant.  On this day, Fate coughed up one literary vampire and swallowed a master swordsman whole.

First, let’s spin the globe to Higo Province, Japan, circa 1656.  Miyamoto Musashi – a name that should be spoken with a clenched jaw – is checking out.  Not with a blade in his gut, as anyone who faced him would have bet, but from thoracic cancer.  The universe, as always, has a sick sense of humor.  This is a man who clocked over 60 dules, dispatching rivals with everything from a katana to a carved-up boat oar, only to be taken down by his own cellular mutiny.  Zero losses on the battlefield, one big L to biology.
Of course, badass Musashi wasn’t about to go quietly.  Propped up and dying, he dictated Go Rin no Sho, or The Book of Five Rings, to a disciple.  Dictated.  As in, too busy dying to write, but not too dead to drop a metaphysical nuke on the philosophy of combat.  It was a philosophical kill shot aimed at the heart of mediocrity.  “The true science of martial arts,” he wrote, “means practicing them in such a way that they will be useful at any time.”  It’s the samurai versions of “stay ready so you don’t have to get ready.”
Musashi fought his last duel with a boat oar, not because he had to, but because he could.  Because when your kill count reads like a census, you start improvising with driftwood just to keep things interesting.  Then he retired to paint, sculpt, and write.  Real warriors don’t just kill their enemies; they outlive them in ink and stone.

Now, spin the globe again and fast-forward 191 years to Dublin, where a sickly boy named Bram Stoker is born.  He spends his first seven years horizontal, marinating in fever dreams and Victorian gloom – the perfect origin story for the man who would birth Dracula, the literary equivalent of a black velvet glove filled with broken glass.
Stoker grew up to be a respectable civil servant, a man seemingly destined for quiet mundanity.  But beneath his tweed-vested exterior, a different beast was stirring.  He stalked London’s grimy underbelly for research (as we do), interviewed sailors about the spectral horror of shipwrecks, just soaked in the city’s dread like a junkie.  He poured this Victorian anxiety – colonial dread, sexual, repression, the terror of syphilis – into one aristocratic, blood-sucking fiend from the Carpathians.
The result was a cultural contagion so unsettling that Queen Victoria’s own librarian allegedly tried to have it banned.  Fat chance, monkey girl.  His line, “Listen to them – children of the night.  What music they make,” is the ultimate horror flex, a sentence of pure, uncut goth swagger.  Carve that shit into obsidian.  Every vampire that his flickered across the screen since owes a debt to the sickly Irish boy who dreamed of a monster that could never be truly vanquished.

So here we are, dear reader, on a day and night of death and birth, a sword and a stake.  One wrote the manual for killing with purpose; the other wrote the manual for living with fear.
Raise a glass.  Sharpen your pen.  And remember: immortality isn’t about living forever.  It’s about leaving behind something that refuses to die.

Happy Deathday, Musashi.  Happy Birthday, Stoker.  The night is yours.

N.P.: “Secret Skin (Extended PIG Version) – PIG

November 5, 2025

As the dear reader well knows, today, November 5 is the day England almost got lit – literally.  Let us, you and I, consider the singular atmospheric conditions of London in the Year of Our Lord 1605, a city marinating in a soupy paranoia, a veritable gumbo of religious animus and political backstabbing so vicious it makes modern electoral cycles look like a game of schoolyard grab-ass.  The air was thick with soot and suspicion, the Thames sloshing like a drunk’s conscience, and under the cobblestone civility of Parliament’s sacred underbelly squatted a man with a name destined for fireworks packaging and adolescent rebellion tattoos: Guy Fawkes.  A man whose mustache would later be weaponized by anarcho-hacktivists and Hot Topic merch designers alike.  But back then, he was just a hard-case Catholic mercenary with a penchant for black powder and a rather terminal disagreement with the Protestant ascendancy.

You have to admire the sheer, unadulterated balls of the plan.  This was 36 barrels of gunpowder stacked like a theological middle finger aimed directly at the Protestant establishment.  Fawkes wasn’t alone – he was the flammable tip of a conspiratorial spear wielded by Robert Catesby and a cadre of disillusioned papists who’d had enough of Elizabethan hangovers and James I’s anti-Catholic chokehold.  They wanted revolution, not reform.  They wanted to turn Parliament into a crater and crown a puppet queen who’d genuflect to Rome while sipping sacramental wine from the skull of a dead Puritan.  Fuck yeah!

Spoiler: it didn’t work.

Fawkes got caught red-handed (or, more accurately, red-fisted) clutching matches and loitering near the powder like a pyromaniac at a birthday party.  Torture ensued.  They stretched him on the rack until his joints sang soprano.  He confessed, of course.  They all did.  The gunpowder treason and plot unraveled quickly, and the conspirators were executed with absolute, theatrical brutality.

The plot failed, of course, but the myth metastasized.  Guy Fawkes became the patron saint of beautiful failure.  A martyr not for religion, but for the idea that the system is rigged and sometimes the only sane response is to blow it to hell.

So tonight, while the sky over London blisters with government-sanctioned pyrotechnics, raise a glass of something flammable to Guido Fawkes—the man who proved that sometimes the most dangerous weapon isn’t gunpowder.

N.P.: “Notice” – Joe Grah

Word of the Day: gongoozler

Today’s Word of the Day, dear reader, is gongoozler.  Though it sounds like something Willy Wonka whipped up in his lab over the course of several sleepless weeks, it is not.  Gongoozler is a noun, meaning a person who enjoys watching activity on canals.  Yep, there is a word for one who derives low-key, almost spiritual satisfaction from watching other people work on boats in a canal.  Not the Instagram kind of watching – real, salt-crusted, binocular-free gawking while the gulls scream overhead and diesel fumes braid with your cigarette smoke.  Like a perverse, waterborne version of birding, but with barges and the occasional guy named Chuck who’s been living on a houseboat since the Reagan administration.

The word gongoozler sloshed into existence sometime in the early 20th century, likely birthed from Lincolnshire dialect or the linguistic swamp of canal-worker slang.  It’s a Frankenstein of “gawn” (to stare) and “goozle” (throat), which is somehow both accurate and vaguely obscene.  The term was used to describe the idle gawkers who’d congregate near locks and bridges, watching boats pass like it was the Super Bowl of slow aquatic movement.

Let me tell you about the time I became a gongoozler, which is to say: a broke, semi-deranged canal voyeur with a penchant for sewage-adjacent existentialism. 

Let me set the scene: it’s Seattle, circa my personal apocalypse.  I had just moved to Fremont- a neighborhood north of Seattle that smells like kombucha and liberal artisanal despair – and I was living in a shoebox apartment that had the architectural charm of a Soviet interrogation room.  I had no friends, no money, was in the middle of a prolonged nervous breakdown, and I couldn’t afford therapy.  My only coping mechanism (and the only thing I could afford) was walking.  So I walked.  Specifically, I walked down by the ship canal, which is not a canal in the romantic Venetian sense but more like a concrete trench where boats go to die. 

The Fremont ship canal is not what you’d call picturesque.  It’s a manmade waterway that looks like it was designed by someone who hated both nature and joy.  The water is a murky shade of “don’t ask,” and there were signs everywhere warning you not to fish because, apparently, the canal doubles as a sewage slip-n-slide.  Naturally, this did not deter the local fishermen, who were mostly older Asian men with the kind of grim determination you’d expect from people who’ve seen some shit – both figuratively and, in this case, literally.  It boggled my mind…there were dozens of them – warning you, quote, “untreated sewage is routinely discharged into this waterway.”  Which is bureaucratic for: This canal is full of shit.”

But like some kind of secret society of defiant anglers who had collectively decided that gastrointestinal risk was a small price to pay for the thrill of catching a three-eyed trout.  I tried talking to them.  I really did…I was pretty desperate for a friend at that point.  But, alas, they didn’t speak English, and I didn’t speak whatever dialect of “leave me alone” they were fluent in.  They’d glare at me like I was interrupting a sacred ritual, which I probably was. 

So I stopped trying to talk.  I just watched.  I watched the ships.  I watched the fishermen.  I watched the ducks that looked like they’d been though a chemical spill.  I watched the joggers who ran like they were being chased by their own regrets.  I became a kind of paragongoozler – not just watching the canal, but the entire ecosystem of weirdness orbiting it.  It was like a slow-motion circus, and I was the sad clown in the audience, applauding the sewage ballet.  Sometimes, when your brain is a dumpster fire and your wallet is a cruel joke, all you can do is stand by a canal and bear witness to the absurdity. 

N.P.: “When The Lights Go Out” – Oingo Boingo