Dear Skutch, you festering carbuncle on the ass-end of civic leadership,

I’m writing to you from the greasy edge of despair, mainlining black coffee, whiskey, and rage, because your little Podunk hellhole—Fecal Creek, CA, a name so on-the-nose it might as well be a metaphor for your administration—has become a labyrinthine death trap of traffic circles that would make Dante himself weep into his beard. I’m talking about the roundabouts, Skutch, those asphalt whirlpools of doom that have popped up like zits on a teenager’s face over the last five years, turning every drive through this town into a white-knuckled, zig-zag gauntlet of despair. It’s outrageous, man, a cosmic-level fuck-up that reeks of your special brand of ineptitude.  It’s depressing the shit out of me, Skutch.  We were good friends…I thought we had a relationship.  But this ridiculousness has made me question everything I thought I knew about you.

Let’s break this down, you bureaucratic bottom-feeder. Five years ago, Fecal Creek had one traffic circle—a quaint little novelty, a roundabout with delusions of grandeur that the locals could handle with a shrug and a prayer. But now? Now you’ve got them everywhere, Skutch, metastasizing across the town like some kind of malignant urban cancer. I drove through seven—seven!—of those godforsaken loops just to get from the the Safe House to the Burger King last Tuesday, each one a fresh circle of hell where the rules of physics and human decency go to die. The drivers here, Skutch, they’re old and scared and absolutely not equipped for this. They’re simple folk, raised on straight lines and stop signs, not this European nonsense you’ve foisted upon them. They weave and zag like drunks at last call, their eyes wide with terror, their hands trembling on the wheel, and I’m one of them, man, screaming into the void as I dodge a Prius driven by a soccer mom who’s clearly on her third Xanax of the morning.

And here’s the kicker, you soulless suit: the good people at the Fecal Creek Police Department (FCPD) are clueless. For the last two years, every single driver they’ve pulled over for DUI has been sober—sober, Skutch! These poor bastards aren’t drunk; they’re just trying to navigate your dystopian hellscape of roundabouts without losing their minds. But the FCPD, in their infinite wisdom, assumes every erratic turn is a sign of bourbon-fueled rebellion, so they slam these innocent souls down Main Street, cuffing them in broad daylight while the real crime—your urban planning disaster—goes unpunished. It’s a travesty, a grotesque miscarriage of justice, and it’s all on you.

I can see you now, Skutch, over there in your Mayoral Loft, sitting in your faux-leather mayor’s chair, ignoring the phone, probably sipping a lukewarm Coors Light while you dream up new ways to torment your constituents. You thought, “Hey, roundabouts are trendy! They’ll make Fecal Creek look cosmopolitan!” But you didn’t stop to think about the human cost, did you? You didn’t consider the existential dread of a 77-year-old retiree named Doris who just wants to get to her bridge club without being sucked into a vortex of perpetual left turns. You didn’t think about the kids on their bikes, the delivery drivers, the stray dogs who now live in the median of Circle Number Four because they’re too scared to cross. You’ve turned this town into a Kafkaesque nightmare, a place where the very act of driving feels like a punishment for sins we didn’t even know we committed.

And don’t even get me started on the special needs of Fecal Creek drivers, Skutch. These folks were barely managing the old grid system, and now you’ve thrown them into a geometric Thunderdome where the only winners are the tow truck companies and the shrinks treating everyone for roundabout-induced PTSD. Back when the traffic circles started sprouting, they seemed like they might need a little extra TLC—maybe a few more signs, a driving class or two—but now? Now they don’t stand a chance. You’ve abandoned them, Skutch, left them to fend for themselves in a world where “yield” is a foreign concept and “merge” is a declaration of war.

So what’s your endgame, huh? Are you trying to drive us all insane so you can sell the town to some Silicon Valley tech bro who wants to turn it into a drone delivery hub? Or are you just so drunk on your own power that you get off on watching us suffer? Either way, I’m calling you out, you miserable son of a bitch. Fix this. Tear down the roundabouts. Give us back our straight roads, our stoplights, our sanity. Or I swear to God, I’ll rally every last one of these shell-shocked drivers, and we’ll march on your office with pitchforks and tire irons, demanding your resignation in the key of pure, unadulterated rage.

This is what it feels like to live in your Fecal Creek, Skutch—a recursive loop of frustration and futility, where the infrastructure itself becomes a metaphor for the failure of late-stage capitalism to address the basic human need for a straight fucking line.¹

Do better, or we’re coming for you.

With all the love of a howler monkey in estrus,
The Writer Formerly Known As Jayson

¹ And if you think I’m exaggerating, Skutch, try driving through Circle Number Six at rush hour with a toddler in the backseat screaming about goddamn Paw Patrol while a semi-truck driven by face-tattooed illegals con riflés cuts you off and a gang of wild turkeys decides it’s the perfect time to cross the road. Then tell me I’m wrong.

N.P.: “Think Twice (Version X)” – Jackie Wilson & LaVern Baker

Gather round, younger readers, because grampa’s about to wax nostalgic for a time when danger was the spice of life, when we played hard and lived harder, before the world got overrun by a bunch of sniveling, bubble-wrapped snowflakes who can’t handle a little risk without clutching their emotional support water bottles. I’m talking about Lawn Darts—those glorious, foot-long harbingers of chaos, with their weighted metal spikes and plastic fins, designed to be lobbed underhand at a plastic ring on the grass, sticking into the earth with a satisfying thunk that said, “Yeah, I’m alive, and I’m not afraid to prove it.” They were the backyard gladiator’s weapon of choice, a game that separated the reckless from the timid, and I miss them with the kind of aching, bone-deep longing that makes me want to scream into the void until the universe gives me back my damn Jarts®.

Picture this: it’s the 1970s, and you’re a kid in the suburbs, the sun beating down on your un-sunscreened shoulders because nobody gave a rat’s ass about UV rays back then. You’ve got a set of Lawn Darts—12 inches of pure, unadulterated potential, a metal tip that’s not sharp enough to look dangerous but heavy enough to do some real damage if you’re careless, which, let’s be honest, we all were. You’d stand 35 feet from the target, or closer if you were feeling particularly unhinged, and you’d toss those bad boys with a flick of the wrist, watching them arc through the air like a Roman plumbata—yeah, those ancient war weapons from 500 BCE that inspired this whole beautiful mess—hoping to land a ringer and score three points, or at least get closer than your opponent’s throw to snag a measly one point. It was a game of skill, sure, but also a game of guts, because you had to stand there while your buddy chucked a metal spear in your general direction, and if you flinched, you were the loser in more ways than one.

But here’s the rub, the dark little footnote that makes the safety police clutch their pearls: Lawn Darts were dangerous as hell, and they racked up a body count that would make a slasher flick blush. From 1978 to 1986, the Consumer Product Safety Commission tallied 6,100 emergency room visits—81% of the victims were under 15, half under 10, with most injuries to the head, face, eyes, or ears, leaving kids with permanent scars, blindness, brain damage, the works. Three kids didn’t make it out alive—a 4-year-old, a 7-year-old, and a 13-year-old, their lives snuffed out by a game that was supposed to be fun but turned into a tragedy when a dart went astray, piercing a skull with the force of 23,000 pounds per square inch, according to one researcher’s estimate. The tipping point came in 1987, when David Snow’s 7-year-old daughter, Michelle, took a dart to the brain in her own front yard, thrown by a neighbor kid who didn’t know any better. Snow went on a one-man crusade, hounding the CPSC until they banned the sale of Lawn Darts outright on December 19, 1988, urging parents to destroy their sets and keep them away from kids. Canada followed in 1989, and just like that, the Jarts® were gone, relegated to the black market of flea markets and yard sales, where they still lurk like forbidden fruit, tempting the brave and the stupid.

Now, I’m not saying those injuries and deaths weren’t heartbreaking—because they were, and I’m not a complete monster—but let’s talk about why it’s time to lift the ban and bring back Lawn Darts in all their perilous glory. We’re 37 years past that 1988 ban (which is personally unbelievable…seems like just yesterday), and in that time, we’ve raised generations of the softest, most coddled kids this planet has ever seen, kids who’ve never known a world without safety nets, both literal and metaphorical, who’ve been swaddled in so much bubble wrap they can’t even handle a scraped knee without a therapy session and a participation trophy. These snowflakes have grown into adults who are terrified of their own shadows, who’d rather sip oat milk lattes and whine about microaggressions than face the raw, unfiltered reality of life. They’re clogging up society with their weakness, their endless need for validation, their inability to take a risk and survive the consequences, and frankly, there are too damn many of them. We need to thin the herd, and I don’t mean that in some dystopian, eugenics-fueled fever dream—I mean it in the primal, Darwinian sense that says if you’re too dumb to dodge a Lawn Dart, maybe you’re not cut out for the long haul.

Bringing back Lawn Darts isn’t just about nostalgia; it’s about restoring a sense of toughness, of resilience, of living life on the edge and not crying to the government to save you when things go south. We’ve got trampolines killing 11 people between 2000 and 2009, skateboards claiming 40 lives a year, swimming pools drowning 390 kids annually, and hot dogs choking far more children under 14 than Lawn Darts ever did—yet we don’t ban those, because we understand that life comes with risks, and mitigating them is on us, not some faceless bureaucrat. The CPSC’s ban was a knee-jerk reaction, a capitulation to a culture that’s forgotten how to let kids be kids, to let adults be adults, to let us all take responsibility for our own goddamn choices. Lawn Darts taught us that—taught us to be careful, to be aware, to respect the danger and still have a blast, because what’s the point of living if you’re not willing to tempt fate every once in a while?

So here’s my demand, you pencil-pushing cowards at the CPSC: lift the ban on Lawn Darts, effective immediately, and let us badasses reclaim our birthright. Let us toss those metal-tipped beauties across the lawn again, let us feel the adrenaline of a near miss, let us laugh in the face of danger and teach the next generation what it means to be alive. The snowflakes can stay inside with their iPads and their safe spaces—we’ll be out back, playing a real game, thinning the herd one ill-aimed throw at a time. Because if we don’t toughen up this society, if we don’t reintroduce a little chaos into the mix, we’re doomed to a future of mediocrity, and I, for one, would rather go down swinging with a Lawn Dart in my hand than live in a world that boring.

N.P.: “Girl U Want” – Robert Palmer

Dearest readers, friends, miscreants, and assorted malcontents, I regret to inform you that we’ve reached a new nadir in the never-ending corporate hijacking of art, rebellion, and everything holy that once made rock’n’roll a weapon, not a beige commodity slathered in nostalgic platitudes and sold back to us like overpriced junk at a yard sale.  What I am referring to, nay railing against with every ounce of venom my synapses can muster, is insult of cataclysmic proportions masquerading as a “Sex Pistols” tour.  Newsflash, you clueless cash-drunk husks clinging desperately to your fading youth like it’s an oxygen mask on crashing plane: without Johnny Rotten (John Lydon), it is NOT the Sex Pistols.  It’s a farce.  A sideshow.  A garishly bad cosplay act smeared together with the sticky residue of corporate nostalgia and aged opportunism.

I’ve been up most of the night having a goddamn fit about this, dear reader.  I mean, really, who are we kidding here?  Two original members.  Two.  That’s what we’re left with.  A skeletal, emaciated version of one of the most incendiary bands whose sheer existence once sent puritanical tabloid hacks scurrying to their typewriters in terror.  Nobody would have ever even heard of Steve Jones and Paul Cook if not for the raw, uncontainable vitriol that spewed out of Johnny Rotten like a Hellfire missile shot at the vinyl-soft underbelly of 1970s British society.  But here they are, zombifying the entire concept of the Pistols, dragging its bloated, lifeless corpse onto a stage to jiggle it around as if that crude facsimile could even begin to conjure the anarchic genius that defined the real deal.

And for what, exactly?  Spare change?  Relevance?  Some morbid desire to prove to themselves that they weren’t just side characters in Rotten’s caustic, venomous opera?  Because whatever it is, one thing is abundantly clear: it’s not integrity.  It’s not art.  It’s not even rebellion.  It’s the opposite of rebellion.  It’s compliance.  And worse, it’s embarrassing.

The Sex Pistols I remember would never have done this.  My first memory of them was when I was about 8.  My mom was driving us to church, and we’d listen to a Top 40 radio countdown show.  One week, Dick Clark or whoever it was came on and announced there was no #1 song on the British charts that week because the #1 song that week was, in fact, God Save the Queen by the Sex Pistols, which song had been banned in England.  The BBC and many independent radio stations refused to play it, and major retailers declined to stock it, Dick said, due to its controversial lyrics and timing, coinciding with Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee.  As an 8-year-old in suburban America, I did not have enough of an understanding of England’s politics or culture at that time to truly appreciate the lyrics, but the song itself was unmistakenly assaultive.  It made me want to sneer, which was new to me at 8.  Fast forward a couple of years…I was still a kid living in Suburbia and I remember hearing about Sid Vicious dying in New York City.  That one made me want to both sneer and change my name to something as awesome as Sid Vicious.  The next time the Pistols showed up on my radar was just after I graduated from high school with the release of Sid & Nancy, the biopic released in 1986, directed by the execrable Alex Cox and starring Gary Oldman as Sid and Chloe Webb as Nancy.  Though Johnny Rotten said the movie had a “duff script,” and its historical accuracy has been oft-debated, the film quickly became a cult classic, and I was very much a member of that cult.

Big jump to August 23, 1996…I was in my mid-20s and living in San Francisco when I saw the original Sex Pistols line up (with bassist Paul Cook resuming his role) when they brought their Filthy Lucre Tour to the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View.  That reunion tour marked the first time the band had performed together since their initial breakup in 1978, and it was amazing.  And I would be remiss in not mentioning my trip to Manhattan in 2000, when I first visited the Chelsea Hotel, where Sid and Nancy had been living in Room 100 when Sid allegedly stabbed Nancy to death in October, 1978 (Sid was charged with her murder but died of a heroin overdose before the case could go to trial).  The room numbers had been changed, but sneaking up the stairway to the first floor, I felt some very heavy vibes in that place (not just from the Sid debacle, but the many other personally influential artists who had lived there).  I decided it would probably be interesting to spend a year living in the Chelsea, but that never came to fruition as I started having a lot of success as a freelance writer in San Francsico.  Whilst living in San Francisco, I was a frequent patron of the Beni Hana in Japantown, which Beni Hana was located in the same mall as the Miyako Hotel (now the Hotel Kabuki), where Sid famously walked through a glass door during the Pistols’ infamous 1978 U.S. tour.  That chaotic incident occurred on January 14, the same day as the band’s final show at the Winterland Ballroom.  Sid, in a drug-fueled haze, smashed through the glass door, injuring himself in the process.  When I’d come stumbling out of Beni Hana, toweringly drunk on sake bombs and Sapporo, I’d often threaten to go around the corner and go ploughing through the glass doors as a sort of moronic tribute to Sid.  Fortunately my people never allowed that to happen.  I say all this just to show that for good or ill, the Pistols have oddly informed many instances in my life as I was growing up.  But I do digress.  Returning to the travesty at hand…which was the shameful bastardization of the greatest punk band in history.

Because, believe it or not, dear reader, this fever dream somehow gets worse.  What got me really worked up about all this nonsense was hearing that this contraband knockoff of the Sex Pistols has been invited to open for Guns N’ Roses?  G’n’F’nR?!  Far be it for me to throw shade at Axl Rose, who, for all his faults, has at least managed to preserve the rough-edged lunacy of his legacy (even if he has done so while occasionally resembling a sleep-deprived Willy Wonka whose chocolate factory has long since closed).  But endorsing this sacrilege?  Giving this shameful cover band some shred of legitimacy by lending them a prime spot on your globally adored, pyrotechnic-heavy circus tour?  C’mon, Axl.  Is there no sense of responsibility anymore among the elders of this subculture we once dared call “countercultural”?  How much more abuse can the spirit of punk endure before it just curls up and dies, exhausted, in the corner of some overpriced arena hosting another “nostalgia night”?

This absurd Karaoke Kabuki is insulting, not just to the legacy of punk or the Sex Pistols themselves, but to anyone who once believed in the raw, pugilistic necessity of rock as an art form.  Anyone who screamed along to “God Save the Queen” or shredded their vocal cords to “Anarchy in the U.K.” because for once, someone out there seemed real.  Rotten wasn’t just a front man…he was the face of punk’s refusal to be nice, digestible, or safe.  He was the shard of glass tucked under the rug, the sputtering voice that declared with full, unrestrained fury that everything the establishment told you to believe was a bowl of beige horseshit.  He was the heart.  The lungs.  The fire.  And without him?  Without him, the Sex Pistols are just a hollowed-out carcass, trotted out in front of audiences who don’t seem to care that their rebellion has been taxidermized and sold back to them at $120 a ticket.

This isn’t punk, this is pantomime.  A travesty wrapped in a tragedy, shaved down into a palatable consumer “experience.”  And I, for one, refuse to clap politely as legends deface their own mythology for another damn payday.  Rotten may be absent from the stage, but his spirit cries foul from the shadows, mocking this grotesque imitation for what it is.  A scam.  A theft.  And a reminder that no matter how loud their amps, Jones and Cook have proven that the sound of desperation is deafening.

N.P.: “L F C L” – Public Image Ltd.

Top o’ the morning, dear reader.  Another overheated day in the Creek.  I shan’t bitch too much yet: it’s only supposed to be 95°F today, which, though misery-inducing enough, is a big pink titty compared to the triple digits that are coming.  So bitch I shan’t.  Besides, this year I have a secret weapon.  During the last few years, I’ve made some much-needed upgrades to The Safe House, the most recent being a new air-conditioning unit.  But this is not just any air-conditioning unit, dear reader.  This is the Chill-Mageddon X, and it is a total game-changer.  Built in Las Vegas, with the tagline “Colder Than Your Ex’s Black Heart,” these things are illegal in California.  But since I’m drinking buddies with the Mayor of Fecal Creek, and he owes me several favors, I was able to convince him to get the local regulators and code-enforcers to turn a blind eye to my particular installation, which was good, because the operation to get this big bastard into the backyard involved a freight helicopter and a crane.
I first heard about this thing when I was in Vegas two summers ago.  This was the ad:
Are you tired of sweating through your couch cushions? Does your ceiling fan feel more like a gentle sigh of disappointment? Enter the Chill-Mageddon X, the air-conditioning unit so powerful it makes glaciers jealous.
This beast doesn’t just cool your home; it over-delivers like your friend Karen who brings a four-tier cake to the potluck. The Chill-Mageddon X works overtime to annihilate heat. We’re talking arctic, penguin-friendly temperatures ON DEMAND. Hot summer? Horseshit! What summer? This bad boy can turn your living room into a perfectly chilled meat locker faster than you can say, “I’m melting.”
Features so ridiculous, you’ll think we’re kidding (we’re not):

• Nuclear-Level Chill Mode: Takes your space from “sweaty jungle” to “ski resort after-hours” in minutes.
• Frost Thrower Technology™: Ever wanted to see the cold? Watch frosty gusts blast out like a blizzard in a box.
• Smug Over-Achiever Thermostat: Keeps the temperature at a precise 61° because it can.
• Emergency Blizzard Mode: Heatwave? What heatwave? Your neighbors might be roasting, but you’ll be scraping ice off your TV.

With Chill-Mageddon X, gone are the days of opening your fridge just to feel alive. It’s time to stop negotiating with summer and declare all-out war on heat.
Warning: Side effects may include spontaneous snowball fights, confused houseplants, and never wanting to leave your home again.
Chill-Mageddon X: Bring on the snowpants, baby, because things are about to get COLD.

Needless to say, I was interested.  The ad encouraged anyone who was interest to visit the company’s website, which I did.  Holy monkey:

Introducing the Chill-Mageddon X, the air-conditioning unit that doesn’t cool so much as it declares an all-out Arctic invasion on your home. If you’re tired of living in a sauna where even your ice cubes won’t hold their shape, this beast of a machine is here to save the day—and your sweaty dignity.
Why Settle for Cool When You Can Have Sub-Zero?
The Chill-Mageddon X isn’t your run-of-the-mill AC unit. Oh no. This powerhouse transforms your living space into a sub-zero paradise faster than you can say, “Where’s my parka?” With its absurdly powerful Nuclear-Level Chill Mode, you’ll go from heatwave to Antarctica at midnight in mere minutes. Your houseplants might need counseling, but hey, sacrifices must be made.
Ridiculously Over-the-Top Features Include:

• Frost Thrower Technology™: Ever wondered what the Arctic wind feels like indoors? You’re about to find out. Watch as frosty gusts blast out like Mother Nature’s personal A/C revenge.
• Smug Over-Achiever Thermostat: Why settle for general comfort when you can nail down the perfect 61°? It’s precise, it’s smug, and it’s cooler than your cousin who lived in Iceland for a semester.
• Emergency Blizzard Mode: Because sometimes summer just refuses to chill. Prepare to out-freeze your entire neighborhood. Warning: may cause spontaneous snowdrifts in the hallway.
• Arctic Quiet Operation: It’s powerful enough to freeze time (almost), but somehow it’s quieter than your fridge. That’s right. Chill and Netflix without interruption.

Unbeatable Performance, Unreal Coolness
No fan? No problem. The Chill-Mageddon X laughs in the face of heatwaves, humidity, and whatever cruel jokes July throws at you. This is the unit that just gets you. It doesn’t believe in “good enough” cooling; it believes in “Why does my breath look frosty indoors?”
Live in Comfort. Or a Meat Locker. Your Choice.
Whether you’re in the middle of a heatwave or just want every day to feel like Polar Bear Appreciation Day, Chill-Mageddon X has your back. No more sweaty T-shirts, swamp ass, sleepless nights, or bargaining with an old box fan. You deserve better. You deserve Chill-Mageddon X.
Turn up the cold, turn down the drama. Summer never stood a chance.

Hot damn.  How could I turn that down?  Of course, with every glorious ad extolling the frigid virtues of the Chill-Mageddon X came the legal notice: Not available in California.  Ha, I said.  They said the same thing about Dragon’s Breath shotgun ammo, but I managed to get a few cases of those bad boys into Cali without much effort at all.  I visited the FAQ page of the website looking for info on the exact number of BTUs this bad boy spits out.  Their answer did not disappoint: The Chill-Mageddon X is so over-the-top, it spits out an infinite number of BTUs—enough to turn your living room into the North Pole! But if you need an exact number for legal reasons, it’s packing a whopping 50,000 BTUs.

That’ll work.  Unfortunately, however, this magnificent number of BTUs is also the reason the units are banned in California: the wattage drain caused by actually running the Chill-Mageddon X might be enough to bring the already fragile and antiquated California power grid crashing down.  Even if we go with the website’s likely conservative estimate of 50K BTUs, The CMX would likely require a massive amount of energy.  For context, a typical high-powered residential AC unit (around 24,000 BTUs) uses about 2000 watts per hour.  So the CMX might guzzle somewhere in the neighborhood of 5,000 watts per hour – basically, it’s the air-conditioning equivalent of a small space ship.  If, as I assume, the local grid isn’t prepared for this frosty juggernaut, the neighbors’ lights will certainly flicker when I hit “Blizzard Mode.”  Since the state is already on an electrical austerity plan (the last three summers have featured regular brownouts, rolling blackouts, and actual pleas and begging from the Governor to set all thermostats (business as well as residential) to 85°F and to please only charge your electric cars between the hours of 7a.m. and 8a.m.), this thing could potentially cause the entire West Coast grid to collapse.  If the CMX wasn’t banned, I would have given Fecal Creek Electric and Light a friendly heads-up before installation.  But as it is, I’ll likely have to purchase 7 or 8 back-up industrial generators.  I’m trying to brace myself for the electric bills that shall ensue: running this thing during peak summer months will likely make my electricity bill look like a phone number.  According to recent bills, we’re billed an average cost of $0.30 per kWh, running this beast for 8 hours a day could add $500 a month to our already confiscatory monthly bill.  But honestly, can you really put a price on living in a personal ice palace?  I may have to consider pairing the Chill-Mageddon X with solar panels or a wind-turbine.  Or I might charge the neighbors admission into my frosty oasis.  We’ll see.  I’ll keep you posted.

N.P.: “Spirit in the Sky” – Evol Walks

Tuesday morning, during my usual morning ablutions, I composed a haiku:

I am resenting
The demands of Mgmt
Task-master sadists

Certainly not great verse, but it hit the mark.  To wit:
These limey gits put me on a clearly impossible schedule eight weeks ago.  I agree to it because, badass that I am, I typically view people trying to do the impossible with a great deal of respect, and usually reframe the “impossible” as “audacious.”  Fine.

Then, they suddenly, without valid reason, shaved a month off that same schedule, changing its status from audacious to ludicrous.  On top of that, they then demanded I dramatically increase my social media presence.  Since my social media presence was basically zero, I didn’t think this would be particularly challenging.  And it in and of itself isn’t particularly challenging, but keeping up with the various messages that come with any social media presence is a time-consuming pain in the ass.

I had decided I’d had enough, so after the ablutions mentioned supra, I arranged for a meeting with Mgmt.  The meeting was fairly hilarious (I’d love to post a transcript here, but was reminded of the ruthlessly confiscatory N.D.A. I had signed) and pleasantly productive.  Sure, there were a few expletives and some potentially rude and/or threatening remarks, but in the end, we agreed to return to status quo ante: tossing the ludicrous schedule in favor of returning to the audacious one.  On my end, I agreed to post at least one current photo of me by the end of the summer.  You likely don’t understand what a big deal this is to me.  I hate having my picture taken.  I was that way even before I went underground.  Pretty much every picture taken of me in the last several decades ends up just being a close-up of my palm as I aggressively block the picture.  But, I suppose a picture or two isn’t a totally outrageous request in this weird world of ours, so fuck it: I agreed.  So I need to get back to the book, but first [puts on English Instructor outfit), This Day In Badass Literary History.

Today, May 9th, we’re forced to acknowledge a literary genesis that ought to be sacred – J.M. Barrie’s arrival into this wretched, time-obsessed world in 1860, a Scottish scribbler who’d eventually birth Peter Pan, that jagged, unruly testament to freedom’s cost, a story which, in its original 1904 play and 1911 novel forms, stands as a snarling repudiation of adulthood’s suffocating grip, only to be gutted, neutered, and bedazzled by the saccharine, capitalistic meat-grinder of Disney® – a cultural crime so grotesque it demands we pause, seethe, and reconsider what we’ve let happen to art in the name of “family-friendly” pablum.

Barrie, born in the bleak nowhere of Kirriemuir, wasn’t some twee sentimentalist doodling fairy tales for the nursery set – he was a man carved up by grief’s dull blade, his brother’s early death a specter that haunted his family and left him, forever, the boy trying to fill an unfillable void, a void that metastasized into Peter Pan’s feral howl against the adult world’s obsession with control, its ticking clocks, its soul-deadening norms.  Peter, you’ll recall, isn’t a mere child playing dress-up in Neverland; he’s a goddamn revolutionary, a pint-sized anarchist who says fuck you to growing up, who gathers his ragtag Lost Boys – those castoffs of a society that’d rather see them broken than free – and wages war on pirates, on Hook, that sneering embodiment of “The System” with his crocodile-shadowed dread of time’s passage.  There’s a raw, almost Nietzschean will-to-power in Peter’s refusal to conform, a rejection of the social contract that’s less “whimsical” than it is a throat-slitting act of defiance, and Barrie, with his own quiet wounds, pours every ounce of his disillusionment into this kid who’d rather die than let the world domesticate him.

But then, goddammit – enter Disney®, that glittering behemoth of sanitized mediocrity, which in 1953 took Barrie’s jagged blade of a story and sanded it down into a toothless, pastel-colored singalong, a cultural lobotomy so thorough it’s a wonder we can still find the original text beneath the wreckage.  Where Barrie gave us a Peter who’s as much tragic antihero as he is liberator – a boy who pays for his freedom with a chilling inability to love, to remember, to connect, leaving Wendy and the Darlings as mere ghosts in his eternal childhood – Disney® gives us a smirking, green-tights-wearing imp, all wide-eyed innocence and catchy tunes, as if Neverland were just a theme park ride and not a lawless refuge for the broken.  The Mouse House, in its infinite, profit driven cowardice, couldn’t stomach the story’s darker currents: the haunting loneliness of Peter’s rebellion, the way his refusal to grow up makes him both free and damned, the way Barrie dares to ask what it costs to spit in the face of time and society and everything that demands we bend.  Disney® scrubs all that away, leaving us with a Peter who’s little more than a mascot, a sanitized avatar of “youthful spirit” that erases the blood and grit and existential dread Barrie wove into the tale’s very marrow.

And don’t even get me started on Hook, dear reader – Barrie’s Hook, that is, a figure of Shakespearean chaos, reduced by Disney® to a bumbling cartoon villain, all mustache-twirling and pratfalls, as if the whole point of his character weren’t the way he embodies the adult world’s desperate need to control what it can’t understand.  Disney’s® version is a betrayal, a cultural felony, a reduction of Barrie’s work to the intellectual equivalent of a Happy Meal™ toy – shiny, cheap, and utterly devoid of the original’s searing, subversive soul.

So here we are, on this May 9th, marking Barrie’s birth with a bitter nod to what he created and what’s been done to it.  Peter Pan, in its undiluted form, is a homemade grenade of a story, a reminder that freedom isn’t free, that rebellion cuts deep, that the world’s rules are made to be broken but not without consequence.  Barrie knew this; he lived it.  Disney®, in its contemptible, focus-grouped cowardice, did not.  And we’re poorer for it – left with a shadow of a tale that once dared to show us the cost of staying young forever, now just another cog in the machine of mass-marketed nostalgia.  If you want the real Peter Pan, the one who’d sneer at Disney’s® glittering lies, go back to Barrie’s text.  Read it.  Feel its teeth.  And then ask yourself what else we’ve let the House of Mouse™ ruin in the name of “magic.”

N.P.: “When You Fall” – Gary Numan

Today we hurl ourselves headlong into the glorious, guacamole-smeared chaos of Cinco de Mayo!  As I’m sure I don’t have to tell you, this isn’t another Hallmark holiday for sipping appletinis and nibbling kale.  No!  Or as they say en español: ¡No!  This is a full-throttle, tequila-fueled riot – a day to celebrate a batshit underdog victory with enough swagger to make El Diablo jealous.  So ditch your inhibitions, grab a bottle of something that burns, and let’s dip our beaks into the history, the lunacy, and the downright profane ways to make this fifth of May a legend for the ages.

First off, Cinco de Mayo is not Mexican Independence Day, you philistines.  That’s September 16, when Mexico told Spain to suck it in 1810.  Cinco de Mayo commemorates the Battle of Puebla, an 1862 ass-kicking where a ragtag Mexican army, let by the gloriously named General Ignacio Zaragoza, curb-stomped Napoleon III’s fancy-pants French army.  We’re talking 4,000 scrappy campesinos with rusty machetes and bad attitudes against 6,000 of Europe’s finest, all decked out in their prissy uniforms.  The French had better guns, better horses, and an emperor who likely bathed in cologne.  The Mexicans had guts, grit, and a serious case of “fuck it.”  It’s the ultimate David-and-Goliath tale, except David’s got a machete and a bottle of mezcal.  Spoiler: Mexico won.  It’s like if a bar fight ended with the drunk guy in flip-flops knocking out a Navy SEAL.  In Mexico, it’s mostly a Puebla thing, like a hometown parade for kicking ass.  In the U.S., it’s a Chicano pride bash, a corporate cash gran, and an excuse to get so catastrophically plastered you wake up with a sombrero glued to your face.  And that, dear reader, is the kind of cultural dumpster fire we can all salute.

The Battle of Puebla was a fluke, a one-off in a war Mexico ultimately lost.  Picture 1862: Mexico’s broke, the U.S. is busy slaughtering itself in the Civil War, and France, led by Napoleon III (a twerp with a mustache that screamed “I collect rare cheeses”), decides to turn Mexico into its personal piñata to fund his Eurotrash empire.  Mexico, barely holding it together, said, “Nah, bro.”  Enter Zaragoza, a Texas-born badass who looked at the French army and thought, “I’ve seen worse odds at a cockfight.”  On May 5, 1862, his men – farmers, vaqueros, and guys who probably smelled like goats – fortified Puebla and turned the French advance into a blood-soaked fiasco.  It wasn’t a war-ender (France took over later), but it was a middle finger to colonialism that still gets us buzzed.  By the ’60s, Chicano activists grabbed Cinco de Mayo as a “screw the man” symbol, celebrating resistance and identity.  Then Budweiser and Taco Bell smelled money, and now it’s a full-blown American bacchanal where even your accountant’s doing body shots off a mariachi.  It’s less about history and more about defiance, excess, and the sheer joy of being alive in a world that keeps trying to screw you over.  And I’m here for it.

Here’s where we get to the meat, the marrow, the tequila-soaked soul of the thing.  Celebrating Cinco de Mayo isn’t about sipping daintily from a Corona; it demands you go full feral, embracing the kind of excess that’d make Caligula blush.  It’s about diving into the abyss and coming up grinning, with cactus spines in your hair and a story that no one will believe.  Here’s how to do it right – or so wrong its right:

1. Drink Like You’re Burning Down an Empire
   Tequila is non-negotiable.  Not that watered-down piss you find in a dive bar.  Get the real shit – 100% agave, the kind that tastes like cactus and poor life choices.  Some argue that Mezcal’s even better; it’s tequila’s feral cousin, smoky and unapologetic.  Shoot it, sip it, or pour it into a hollowed-out pineapple for maximum chaos.  Margaritas?  Fine, but make ’em strong enough to strip paint.  Garnish with a jalapeño, a lit sparkler, or a live scorpion if you’re already unhinged.
2. Eat Like a Revolutionary
   Tacos are the obvious play, but don’t settle for some limp fast-food travesty.  Find a taqueria where the cook’s cussing in two languages and the salsa makes you see God.  Go for barbacoa, suadero, lengua if you’re feeling brave, or tripe if you’ve got the stones.  Enchiladas with enough chili to melt your face, tamales that taste like your abuelita’s love – eat until you’re a human piñata, until you’re weeping from joy or capsaicin.  For the blasphemous, order a burger and slather it in queso and hot sauce, calling it “postmodern Mexican.”  Watch the room riot.  That’s your cue to run, gringo.
3. Dance Like Your Dodging Bullets
   Blast mariachi, cumbia, or straight-up narcocorridos (those ballads about drug lords – pure outlaw poetry).  Dance badly, with abandon…spins, twirls, and at least one ill-advised backflip.  No rhythm?  Thrash like you’re being electrocuted.  For maximum chaos, stage a Battle of Puebla interpretive dance reenactment with squirt guns and leftover burritos.  Apologize to no one.
4. Read Something That Punches Back
   What sort of badass literary presence would we be if we didn’t recommend you continue your celebration by cracking open something with teeth?  Try The Underdogs by Mariano Azuela, a kidney-punch of a novel about the Mexican Revolution.  House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende brings the magical realist heat.  Want poetry?  Dig into Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the 17th-century nun who roasted the patriarchy with quill and kink.  Read it loud, preferably while standing on a table and waving a bottle of mezcal, until the neighbors complain and the cops show up.
5. Get Political (or at Least Pretend To)
   Cinco de Mayo’s roots are in resistance, so channel that.  Rant about whatever’s pissing you off – colonialism, cultural appropriation, or the price of avocados.  Post a typo-riddled screed on X about how the holiday’s been co-opted by corporate greed, then immediately contradict yourself by buying a six-pack of Modelo.  The hypocrisy’s part of the charm.  If you’re feeling extra, stage a mock protest outside a chain restaurant serving “Mexican-inspired” nachos.  Bring signs.  Bring flair.  Or crash a suburban block party with a megaphone and demand “reparations in tacos.”  Bonus points if you’re white.  You’ll be a legend or a felon.  Worth it.
6. Smash Shit (Figuratively or, Uh, Maybe Literally)
   Obliterate a piñata filled with candy, hot sauce packets, and those mini tequila bottles from gas stations.  Or shatter your own pretensions – write a poem so raw it scares you, scream it into the night, then burn the evidence.  Kiss someone you shouldn’t.  Steal a lawn gnome and name it Zaragoza.  The goal is to feel alive, not sane.

If you’re my kind of overachiever, and you want to really take it too far, here’s how to make Cinco de Mayo a legend whispered in horrified tones:

• Karaoke “La Bamba” in a Viking Helmet.  Because it’s wrong, and wrong is beautiful.
• Challenge a Bartender to a Tequila Duel: Loser pukes first.  Winner’s still screwed.
• Wear a Poncho Made of Chipotle Bags: It’s eco-friendly and unhinged.
• Declare Yourself “Supreme Comandante of the Fiesta”: Demand loyalty oaths in Spanish.  Get chased out by 9 p.m.

Cinco de Mayo is a war cry for the underdog, a reminder that a bunch of nobodies can humiliate a king.  It’s about laughing in the face of empires, borders, and hangovers.  It’s Chicano pride, Mexican defiance, and the universal thrill of telling the universe, “You ain’t shit.”  So this May 5, raise a shot to Puebla, to Zaragoza, to every lunatic who ever swung at the impossible.  Then chug it, dance like an idiot, and write something so wild it makes the moon flinch.

Now go make some epically stupid choices.  I’ll be over here, ensconced in the Safe House, cackling into my tequila and toasting your inevitable arrest.  ¡Viva Cinco de Mayo!

N.P.: “Danza Kuduro” – Don Omar, Lucenzo

Fecal Creek, California, May 4, 2025—It’s 12:30 PM PDT, and I’m standing in the middle of a goddamn war zone, a swirling maelstrom of bureaucratic insanity and primal rage at the Fecal Creek Department of Motor Vehicles. The air reeks of tear gas and desperation, a noxious cocktail that burns the lungs and stings the eyes. The Real ID mandate, that federally mandated beast of post-9/11 paranoia, has finally sunk its teeth into the Golden State’s underbelly, and the good people of Fecal Creek have clearly had enough. They’re rioting, man, rioting like it’s the end of the world, and maybe it is—for them, for me, for all of us suckers caught in this dystopian DMV nightmare.

The Real ID deadline is three days away, May 7, 2025, and the California DMV has been scrambling like a junkie on a bender to process the stragglers. They’ve extended hours, opened early, even cracked the whip on Saturdays—Saturdays, for Christ’s sake!—but it’s too little, too late. The Los Angeles Times reported that over 35 million Californians still need their Real ID, and Fecal Creek, a nowhere town with a name that sounds like a bad joke, is ground zero for the rebellion. The DMV here, a squat, soul-crushing concrete bunker, has become a battleground, a place where the American Dream, at least the part of it that expects that an American citizen can travel freely between states without having to carry special permits, goes to die in a haze of pepper spray and shattered glass.

I got here at dawn, fueled only by Benzedrine and grappa, hoping to beat the rush. But there was no beating this rush. The line stretched around the block, a writhing serpent of pissed-off citizens clutching birth certificates and utility bills, their eyes wild with the kind of fear that comes from knowing the feds are about to screw you six ways to Sunday, sans lube. The Real ID, they say, is your ticket to the skies—without it, you can’t board a domestic flight or step foot in a federal building after May 7. But the process is a Kafkaesque nightmare: proof of identity, proof of residency, proof you’re not a goddamn terrorist. And in Fecal Creek, where half the population looks like they’ve been living off the grid since the Clinton administration, that’s a tall order.

By 10 AM, the tension was palpable, a live wire sparking in the crowd. Some poor bastard in a faded Kamala T-shirt started shouting about the Tenth Amendment, claiming the Real ID Act is unconstitutional, a federal overreach that turns state DMVs into immigration enforcers. He wasn’t wrong. But nobody in Fecal Creek gives a rat’s ass about legal theory when they’re facing down a deadline that could ground them for good.

The first bottle flew at 11:15, a Molotov cocktail of cheap vodka and rage, shattering against the DMV’s front window. The crowd roared, a guttural, animal sound, and then all hell broke loose. A woman with a face like a leather satchel started swinging a tire iron at a “Real ID Now!” sign, screaming about how the DMV lost her paperwork—twice. A pack of tattooed bikers, their Harleys parked crookedly on the sidewalk, began hurling rocks at the riot cops who’d just rolled up in armored vans. The cops fired back with rubber bullets and tear gas, but the crowd didn’t budge. They were too far gone, too fed up with the DMV’s incompetence, with years of long lines and broken promises.

I saw a kid—no more than 16—clutching a skateboard and a crumpled passport, get clocked in the face by a baton. He certainly had it coming, and went down hard, blood streaming from his nose, but he was back on his feet in seconds, screaming, “I just want to fly to my grandma’s funeral in Reno, you fascist pigs!” The kid quickly disappeared into the melee, a crimson streak in a sea of chaos.

By noon, the Fecal Creek DMV was a full-on insurrection. A group of soccer moms—those minivan warriors of suburbia—had flipped a news van, its antenna snapping like a twig as they chanted, “No ID, no peace!” The bikers were now looting the DMV’s pathetic little kiosk, grabbing fistfuls of learner’s permit applications and lighting them on fire, a pyre of bureaucratic bullshit blazing in the parking lot. Somewhere in the haze, a guy in a tattered flannel was waving a “Don’t Tread on Me” flag, screaming about the deep state while a tear gas canister bounced off his skull. He didn’t even flinch—just kept yelling, a mad prophet in a world gone feral.

I ducked behind a dumpster, my notebook soaked with sweat and rotten grappa, trying to make sense of the madness. The Real ID Act, that 2005 brainchild of Homeland Security paranoia, was supposed to make us safer, but all it’s done is turn a backwater DMV into a crucible of rage. The feds say it’s about keeping terrorists off planes, but in Fecal Creek, the only terror is the DMV itself—understaffed, overwhelmed, a labyrinth of incompetence that’s been screwing people over since the Carter administration. The Sacramento Bee reported last week that California DMVs are processing Real IDs at a snail’s pace, with wait times stretching into months. But the deadline doesn’t care about your backlog, and neither does the TSA.

At 12:45, the National Guard rolled in, their Humvees growling like beasts from some dystopian fever dream. They started zip-tying anyone who didn’t scatter, dragging them off to paddy wagons while the crowd hurled insults and the occasional brick. I saw the Kamala guy get tackled, his arms pinned as he shouted, “This is tyranny! You can’t take my freedom!” But they did—freedom’s a hard sell when you’re face-down on asphalt with a knee in your back.

As the tear gas thickened, I bolted, my heart pounding like a jackhammer, my lungs screaming for air that wasn’t laced with chemical warfare. I made it to my car and peeled out of the DMV parking lot with the sounds of sirens and shattering glass fading in the rearview. The Real ID mandate had turned a sleepy DMV into a battlefield, a microcosm of America’s fractured soul—angry, alienated, and ready to burn it all down over a piece of plastic.

Personally, I had two hopes keeping me afloat in this chaos: 1) I’ve been getting hyperventilating pressure from friends and acquaintances for literally decades six-months before whichever of the 47 different deadlines that have been in place at various times since 2005 when the Real ID was first mandated.  Each time I’ve ignored everybody.  And each time the deadline was nixed at the last minute. I’ve got to say, three days before the present deadline, it looks like this time it’s going to be forced through.  2) I had hoped that whichever government branch was ultimately in charge of this nonsense was going to be DOGE’d out of existence before the deadline arrived, but there too, it’s doubtful that’s going to happen in the next 48 hours.  It occurs to me that I’ve neither been on a commercial flight nor darkened the door of any airport in about 15 years.  So my plan is to stay put, stay drunk, keep writing the book, and let the jet-setting class figure it out for themselves.

Meanwhile, in D.P.S. news, on May 4, 1953, Ernest Hemingway, that grizzled colossus of American letters, seized the Pulitzer Prize for his lean, lacerating masterpiece The Old Man and the Sea. It was a moment of apotheotic vindication—a jagged, salt-crusted testament to his genius, forged in the crucible of his own relentless psyche. Hemingway himself called it his finest work, and who are we to argue with the man who wrestled prose into submission with the ferocity of a spider monkey in a bear trap? Written in a mere eight weeks, the novel is a stark, elemental dirge—a paean to man’s inexorable struggle against the indifferent maw of nature. Its literary merit is beyond cemented; it’s ossified, a fossil of resilience and defiance, capturing the human spirit’s refusal to buckle under the weight of cosmic odds. Hemingway carved a myth into the bedrock of modernity, a narrative so raw it bleeds.

But let’s not linger in the sanitized glow of literary accolades. Hemingway’s life was no genteel stroll through the groves of academe; it was a odyssey, a careening, death-defying sprint through the jagged teeth of fate. Just months after that Pulitzer win, in 1954, Hemingway found himself in the Belgian Congo, chasing the kind of primal, adrenaline-soaked experience that fueled his art. What happened next reads like a fever dream, but it’s all too real—a double-barreled assault on mortality that would’ve broken lesser men.

Dig: Hemingway, the bearded bard of badassery, boards a small bush plane, the kind of rickety deathtrap that looks like it’s held together with spit and prayers. The plane takes off, and then—bam!—it slams into the jungle like a meteor, a fiery wreck that should’ve been his curtain call. But this is Hemingway we’re talking about, a man who laughed in the face of oblivion. He staggers out of the wreckage, bloodied, battered, his body a map of contusions, and wanders through the jungle, a modern-day Lazarus too stubborn to die. He emerges, somehow, from that green inferno, a specter of survival, only to—get this—climb aboard another plane. You’d think the gods would’ve had their fill of tormenting him, but no. That second plane crashes too, a catastrophic encore that leaves Hemingway with a fractured skull, a ruptured spleen, and burns that sear his legend deeper into the annals of literary lore.

This was a middle finger flown to the universe, a snarling, visceral refusal to be snuffed out. Hemingway’s life was a high-octane, no-holds-barred brawl with destiny, and The Old Man and the Sea—with its stark, stoic Santiago battling the merciless deep—feels like a prophecy of his own unyielding grit. The Pulitzer was a coronation for a man who lived as ferociously as he wrote, whose every sentence was a detonation, whose every breath was a dare. Hemingway lived literature, bled it, and damn near died for it, emerging from the wreckage to remind us all what it means to be defiantly, gloriously human.

N.P.: “White Rabbit” – Emilíana Torrini

Too many people in this gutless world have come under the impression that writers are a race of finks, queers, and candy asses to be bilked, cheated, and mocked as a form of commercial sport.  It should be noted, therefore, in the public interest, that some writers possess .44 Magnums and can puncture beer cans with 240-grain slugs from that weapon at a distance of 150 yards.  Other writers, it is said, tend to enjoy violence for its own sake, and feel that a good fight, with the inevitable destruction of all nearby equipment and furniture, is nearly as fine for the nerves as a quart of John Powers Irish Whiskey.  ~ HST

I promised myself that I’d quit bitching about the weather, dear reader…after all, you and I both know neither my bitching nor anyone else’s will have the slightest effect on the local meteorology.  And yet I find myself on the cusp of yet another vicious, nauseating, soul-killing, literally hotter-than-hell summer, after an inappropriately warm and dry winter, and thus, I find myself feeling the need to bitch once again, resolutions and self-promises be damned.  It could very well be the whiskey talking, but I presently feel that a solid round of bitching is more than called for at this point.  You see, dear reader, most of the rest of the country gets four clearly delineated seasons. Their years are divided quite nicely between four (4) three (3)-month periods, each significantly different than the last or the one to come.  So, for the rest of the American world, summer is hot and humid and sometimes intolerably so, but those good people are only forced to endure such inhospitable conditions for 90 days.  Then on the 91st day, like clockwork: the cooling relief of fall.  The heat and excruciating humidity alleviates, the leaves all turn gold and orange, the trees begin their slow and sexy three-month striptease, the birds start looking for warmer climes to the south, and the gentry brace for what is to come: winter.  For three months, the entire rest of the county freezes their balls and has contend with all manner of arctic horrors: ice storms, blizzards, thundersnow…the whole bone-chilling nightmare.  I personally seem to thrive in that sort of environment, but I get why most people don’t.  But just when it gets to be Too Much and people have Had Enough of the frigid misery, bam!  Spring springs and the flowers come out and it’s suddenly mating season for the mammals.  Then, exactly 90 days after that vernal Bacchanalia begins, the solar-blasted summer begins, and the whole damn cycle starts over.  The point is for the rest of the world, right as your reaching your breaking point for whatever season you’re three months into, it’s over.  And you are thus thrilled with the arrival of the new season.  You’ve had a chance to miss it, with the heart growing fonder with absence and all that.

Not so in Allergy Valley, CA, dear reader.  Oh no.  Here, it is constantly summer…it only slowly waxes and wanes.  While the rest of the continent is freezing their balls, we’re over here basking in clear, 55°F days.  It gets below freezing for a few hours during two, maybe three nights out of the year, and even then just barely.  That’s about as bad as it gets.  Ever.  Springtime is just more dryness and highs in the 60s-70s.  Pollen explodes.  Then June shows up and everything goes to hell.  High soar into the 110s and everybody gets pissed off.  Aircraft aren’t able to land here because their tires melt the instant they come into contact with the landing strip.  Birds explode in midair.  The whole thing is disgusting.  The number of elderly who fall asleep while lying in the morning sun reading a book or whatever and then just bake to death skyrockets.

Today was pretty inarguably great…a few clouds, a light breeze, high in the mid-70s.  It was a fucking lovely day.  But that’s going to be the last one for a while.  All too soon there will be no more clouds, no more breezes, no more temperatures under 90°.  Just melting tires and exploding birds.

Summer is Coming.  And I’d really rather it not.

N.P.: “What’s Coming To Me” – Dorothy

Greetings, dear reader, you beautiful, chaotic individualist, you renegade of the soul, you glorious misfit who’d rather chew glass than salute a hammer and sickle – May Day is upon us, and it’s time to rip the mask off this festering boil of a holiday.  May 1st, that annual orgy of red flags and clenched fists, has become a psychic assault, a collectivist con job dressed up as liberation, and I’m here to torch it.

Let’s start with the raw, unfiltered gestalt of May Day.  It’s a holiday born in the blood-slicked gutters of 19th-century labor struggles, sure, but don’t let the sob stories fool you.  The Haymarket riots, the eight-hour workday fight – noble in isolation, maybe, but hijacked faster than a narc’s stash at a Hell’s Angels rally.  By the time the Second International got its claws in, May Day was less about workers’ rights and more about the slow, suffocating creep of Marxist dogma, that intellectual tapeworm that promises utopia then delivers gulags.  It’s a bait-and-switch so blatant it’s make a used-car salesman blush.  The proletariat’s big day?  Please.  It’s an altar to the State, where individuality gets fed into the woodchipper of “the common good.”  And if you’re not outraged by that, you’re either comatose or waving a red flag yourself.

Now, let’s get semiotic for a second, because symbols matter, and May Day’s got a visual vocabulary that screams oppression louder that a CCP propaganda reel.  The red banners, the raised fists, the earnest chants of “solidarity” – it’s a pageant of conformity, a chromatic middle finger to anyone who dares think for themselves.  Red, that arterial hue, is a warning…the shade of blood spilled by every regime that ever promised equality and delivered body counts.  Mao’s Cultural Revolution?  Stalin’s purges?  Pol  Pot’s killing fields?  Add ’em up, and you’ve got a century-long abattoir, all sanctified under the same crimson banner that flaps on May Day.  And don’t give me that “but socialism’s different” dodge – same church, different pew.  The math doesn’t lie: collectivism’s body count dwarf’s anything the capitalists ever dreamed about, and May Day’s the anniversary party.

But oh shit, the irony, the skull-cracking, Kafkaesque absurdity of it all!  May Day’s supposed to celebrate the worker, right?  The noble laborer, toiling for dignity?  Except under every communist regime, the worker’s the first to get screwed.  Look at the Soviet Union, where “equality” meant bread lines for the masses and dachas for the apparatchiks.  Or China, where the proletariat’s “liberation” looks like sweatshops and censorship so tight you can’t sneeze without a permit.  The worker’s not the hero of May Day; they’re the sacrificial lamb, duped into worshipping the very ideology that chains them.  It’s like throwing a parade for the cow on its way to the slaughterhouse.  And yet, every May 1st, you’ve got earnest undergrads and tenured radicals marching in lockstep, waving manifestos they haven’t read, chanting slogans they don’t understand, all while congratulating themselves for “resisting.”  Resisting what?  Freedom?  Prosperity ?  The right to not have your soul nationalized?

I want to grab their own megaphone and scream: Wake the hell up!  May Day isn’t liberation; it’s a leash.  It’s the siren song of a system that hates everything that makes you human – your quirks, your ambitions, your right to tell the State to fuck itself.  Communism doesn’t just fail economically (though, sweet Jesus, does it ever – cf. Venezuela’s dumpster-fire GDP or Cuba’s time-capsule cars).  It fails morally.  It’s a philosophy that sees you as a cog, a statistic, a faceless drone in the hive.  And May Day?  It’s the day they try to sell you on that prison, wrapping it in the language of justice like a turd dipped in glitter.

So what do we do, you ask, you magnificent bastard who’d rather die than trade your freedom for a ration card?  We reclaim May 1st.  We turn it into grenade to every collectivist fantasy that ever tried to smother the human spirit.  Here’s my proposal: call it Individual Day.  Wake up, crank some Billy Idol (because “Rebel Yell” is the opposite of a five-year plan), and do something gloriously, defiantly you.  Paint a mural.  Start a business.  Tell a bureaucrat to eat shit.  Hell, just sit on your porch with a whiskey and revel in the fact that you’re not saluting a politburo.  And if you see a May Day parade, don’t just ignore it – mock it in whichever way you deem best.  Because the only “collective” worth a damn is the one you choose, not the one that drafts you.

In closing, let’s be clear:  May Day’s a scam, a red-washed relic of a failed experiment that keeps limping along because people love the aesthetics of rebellion without the brainpower to question it.  It’s not about workers; it’s about control.  It’s not about justice; it’s about erasure.  So this May 1st, spit on the red flags, laugh at the manifestos, and live like the untamed, unapologetic individual you were born to be.  Because in the end, the only revolution worth fight for is the one that keeps you free.

Postscriptum: If you’re still clutching your copy of Das Kapital and muttering about “late-stage capitalism,” I invite you to spend a week in North Korea.  Then we’ll talk.  Until then, keep your dogma out of my liberty.

N.P.: “Dancing in the Street” – The Struts