We don’t need to possess everyone. We don’t have to. We have useful idiots who do more damage than we ever could. They carry out our agenda without ever knowing it. They think they’re doing good. They think they’re enlightened. But they’re just pawns. Tools. And when they’re no longer useful… we discard them.  ~ Lord Nefarious

N.P.: “Coexist With My Fist” – Hard Archive

Good day, dear reader, literary degenerates, and word perverts of various species.  And what a day it is…a cool fall day in the Creek, all cloudy and drizzly.  And only six days until Halloween, the New Years Day of the Gallaway Calendar.  I like it.

For absolutely no reason at all, I’ve decided today’s Word of the Day is a lexical artifact, dredged up from the Mariana Trench of the English language, found in the sedimentary layers of Latin, polished with the spit of linguistic masochists, and flung into the modern lexicon like a grenade of nonsense and confusion.  [That was quite an introduction…all apologies, dear reader…yrs. truly had a big breakfast, and a bigger lunch.  Never mind.]  Ladies and gentlemen, I give you nudiustertian –  adjective – pertaining to the day before yesterday.  Yes, a whole word for a concept we’ve clumsily handled in three.  And it’s so perfectly useless it’s beautiful.
Etymologically, it’s a smash-and-grab from Latin: nudius = “now is the day” and tertius = “third.”  So nudiustertian means “the third day from now,” which, in the twisted logic of time travel and English grammar, lands you squarely in the day before yesterday.  You can almost hear some toga-clad senator slurring it after too much wine, trying to remember which day he misplaced his chariot keys.  It’s the kind of word that makes even seasoned lexicographers reach for the desk whiskey.

So there I was, sitting in a booth at the Pink Iguana, where the air was thick with the ghosts of myriad bad decision’s – a miasma of stale cigarette smoke, cheap whiskey, and Glitter Bomb body spray.  My present companion – stage name: Tropicana, real name: Bethany – is straddling a barstool like it owes her child support, wearing nothing but glitter and the kind of confidence that makes Wall Street brokers cry in the shower.
I tell her, “You remember what happened nudiustertian?”
She blinks.  “Is that a sex position?”
“No, it’s a word.  It means the day before yesterday.”
She squinted at me. It was the same look she gave a guy who tried to pay for a lap dance with a coupon.  “Why not just say ‘the day before yesterday’?”
“Because language is a weapon, Bethany.  And sometimes you need a sniper rifle instead of a butter knife.”
She started at me, a long, unnerving silence stretching between us, punctuated only by the frantic clatter of my own self-satisfaction echoing in my skull.  I felt brilliant.  A poet.  A warrior of words bringing light to the darkened corners of her vocabulary.
Finally, a slow, dangerous smile spread across her face.
“You know,” she said, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper.  “There’s a word for people who use words like that.”
I leaned in, genuinely curious.  “Oh yeah?  What is it?”
She leaned closer, her lips almost touching my ear.
“Unfuckable,” she breathed.
Then she took the bottle I had just paid for, winked, and sashayed away, leaving me alone with the sudden, crushing weight of my own magnificent vocabulary. 

So there it is, dear reader…nudiustertian.  Use it if you want to sound like a time-traveling Victorian ghost with a thesaurus addiction.
Use it to confuse your friends, alienate your enemies, and seduce someone who thinks etymology is foreplay.
Use it because words are weapons, and this one’s a dagger dipped in irony.

N.P.: “Rivers Laughing” – promptgenix

Woke up this morning and I got myself a beer,
The future’s uncertain and the end is always near. 
~ James Douglas Morrison

I’m not afraid of death, and I’m not afraid of dying, but the idea of not existing is kind of a weird one that I have some trouble getting my mental arms around some nights.  The whole issue of mortality has been very much on my mind, especially the last several years when various things have tried to kill me and I’ve had to ‘rassle them into submission.  Each time, I’ve had the advantage of knowing that whatever I was dealing with at the time was simply not cool or interesting enough to be the actual Thing That Takes Me Out.  Cancer?  Nah.  Heart attack?  Hell no.  Gunfight with federales at the Tijuana/San Ysidro border?  Fuck yes.  Losing a fight with a rattlesnake?  I’ll take it.

But let’s talk about a real goddamn exit.  Not the slow fade into nursing-home tapioca, but a final act that achieves the level of myth or legend.  October 24, 1926, in Detroit, a city of steel and fury, where Houdini took his last bow.  And what a bow it was.  The man was burning up, a furnace of a fever scorching him from the inside out, his own appendix having staged a rather nasty and decidedly unmagical rebellion.  A lesser mortal – say, you or I – would be curled up, mewling pitifully for a nurse.  Not Uncle Harry.

Houdini, the ur-escapologist, the man who treated chains and straitjackets like they were merely inconvenient suggestions, dragged his fever-racked carcass onto the stage of the Garrick Theatre because the show must go on, goddammit.  The contract was signed.  The audience was there.  And Harry Houdini, a man whose entire existence was a fuck you to limitations, wasn’t about to be undone by something as pedestrian as a ruptured internal organ.  He stumbled, he sweated, he nearly collapsed, but he finished the show.  A week later, the curtain came down for good.  Peritonitis.  A messy, biological trap even he couldn’t pick the lock on.

But the death seems almost incidental.  A footnote.  The legend is what matters.  Much more than just a magician, Houdini was a walking, breathing, fist-swinging piece of American folklore.  You can draw a straight, jagged line from Houdini’s on-stage battles to the very heart of certain narrative traditions.  He engaged in a public, ink-soaked war with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the world’s most logical mind, over the fuzzy, ectoplasmic nonsense of Spiritualism.  Houdini, the ultimate illusionist, dedicated his life to exposing the fraudulent tricks of others, a crusade that was equal parts public service and some pretty amazing, high-minded flexing.  He even put his money where his mouth was and wrote, peeling back the curtain with a surprising authorial flair.  His book, The Unmasking of Robert-Houdin, is a meticulously constructed argument, a writerly vivisection of the very art form he perfected.

Then you have the fictional echoes, with his shadow falling across the pages of guys like E.L. Doctorow.  In Ragtime, Houdini is a symbol of human defiance against the locked doors of class, race, and fate.

That final, agonizing performance in Detroit was the apotheosis of it all.  Battered, poisoned from within, but utterly unbowed.  He took the stage knowing, I’m sure, on some primal level, that this was the end of the road.  He faced the abyss not with a whimper, but with a card trick.  And that is rather badass.  He didn’t just escape handcuffs and water torture chambers.  On that last night, he made a damn good attempt at escaping mortality itself, turning his own death into the one story that, nearly a century late, still refuses to be buried.

N.P.: “Circle of Samhain” – Slaev

Good evening, dear reader.  The last several days were a weird blur of driving and writing.  I’ve gotta say, work on this book has been one of the strangest experiences of my arguably strange life, and one I don’t care to repeat.  I normally prefer having at least a general idea of what the book is about before I start working on it.  I started writing this thing a full eight years before I knew what it was actually about.  It’s been very strange.  But it’s coming together nicely.  I think.

I must sleep.

N.P.: “Halloween” – Orbit Culture

Blessed are the peacemakers.

Hot damn, dear reader…though it’s not officially observed until tomorrow here in the States, today was the actual day Columbus discovered America for the Europeans and the world was truly born.

Let’s dispense with the hand-wringing and the insipid, anachronistic moralizing for just one goddamn minute, shall we?  Let’s talk about the moment the world stopped being a fragmented collection of provincial backwaters and became, for the first time, a singular, unified whole.  Of course I’m talking about 1492.  I’m talking about the day a stubborn, possibly half-crazy Genoese navigator dragged humanity, kicking and screaming, into its own future.

Picture it, man…a trio of glorified wooden tubs, the Niña, Pinta, and the flagship Santa Maria, bobbing on an endless, terrifyingly blue expanse of nothingness.  Weeks have turned into a month, then more, the crew a fetid stew of scurvy, desperation, and the kind of mutinous whispers that end with captains getting tossed to the sharks.  The men, a collection of Europe’s finest jail-scourings and debtors, are ready to string up their admiral from the highest yardarm.  They see only a watery grave.  Their admiral, Christopher Columbus, this lunatic with the glint in his eye, sees only destiny.  He has gambled everything – reputation, life, the backing of the Spanish crown – on a hunch so cosmically audacious it borders on psychosis: that he can reach the East by sailing west.

And then, land.  Not Cipango, not the gilded courts of the Great Khan, but something else entirely.  Something new.  A verdant smear on the horizon that resolves into an island he christens San Salvador.  Rather than an oppressive act of cruelty, this was an act of cosmic insemination.  The moment that salty, exhausted boot hit the sand was the Big Bang of the modern age.  It was the point-blank refutation of flat-earth timidity and the glorious, unapologetic affirmation of human will.

This single even, this one man’s refusal to accept the world as it was presented to him, lit the fuse on the Age of Exploration.  It was the gunshot that echoed across continents, waking Europe from its medieval slumber and yanking the Americas into the grand and chaotic narrative of global history.  It was the genesis of everything we now call “globalization” – the messy, brutal, and ultimately sublime collision of cultures, technologies, and ideas that would forge the world we inhabit.

To view this monumental juncture through the pathetic lens of 21-century guilt is to miss the point so profoundly as to be intellectually dishonest.  This was not a tea party.  It was the brutal, beautiful, and necessary birth of a new epoch.  It was the moment history drew a deep breath and roared.  Columbus didn’t simply stumble upon a new landmass; he shattered the old world’s cognitive map and, in doing so, created the very planet we recognize today.  It was, without reservation or apology, the single greatest thing to ever happen.  Period.

And now, for the absurd postscript of our age: the modern “land acknowledgment.”  Jesus.  Nothing says genuine solidarity like a fragile, self-congratulatory recital at the start of every TED-adjacent conference – a kind of liturgical guilt-venting for the overeducated, lightly organic white liberal, performed with the smugness of a yoga instructor who’s read one (1) book about colonialism.  Because why actually do anything when you can stare solemnly at your shoes and mumble how you “honor” the land you’re squatting on, right?  Here’s a radical idea: if you really believed in the cause, you’d sign over your mortgage to whatever tribe most recently claimed the land…hand the keys to your urban colonial compound, and take up residence in your Prius post-haste.  Try that at your next dinner party and watch the laughter – real, nervous, guilty laughter – ricochet around the kombucha bar.  Either give it all back or, for everyone’s sake, spare us the tragicomedy and just shut the fuck up.

N.P.: “I Really Wanna” – Mammoth