Author Archives: Jayson Gallaway

September 14, 2025

What’s crackin’, dear reader.  As you ought to know by now, I’m an unapologetic patriot, just like you, and am looking forward enthusiastically to next year’s America 250 celebration.  But my style is being cramped in extremis by what seems to be a growing number of anti-American shitbags.
One recent egregious example – recent only to me, apparently, because I couldn’t care less about professional football and would rather have my intestines extracted with a dull spoon than sit through an entire football game – is that the NFL has allegedly been solemnly piping in some so-called “Black National Anthem” before kickoff.  That there hasn’t been a total boycott of the NFL until they knock that ridiculous shit off.  Half of the country seems to have collectively overdosed on anti-patriotism and cable-news outrage.  Spare me the racial separatism masquerading as “unifying gestures,” and you can stick your “two nations under God” horseshit all the way up your ass.

Today we’re going to talk about the actual, blood-and-black-powder origin story that stitched together the ragged, brawling entity we call the United States – a country a knows goddamn well there is only one national anthem that’s worth a shit, and that’s the one with rockets and bombs in it.  And that one was written on September 14, 1814.
So let’s descend, shall we, dear reader, into the muck and the mire of the Patapsco River, where the air is thick with the sulfurous stench of war and the taste of shitty rum.  It is here, dear reader, amidst the skull-rattling percussion of British naval cannons, that a lawyer named Francis Scott Key finds himself in what one might charitably call a jam.

Dig: a man, a lawyer no less – bobbing about on a sloop.  He’s technically a guest of the enemy, having just negotiated a prisoner release.  A gentleman’s errand, as we call it.  But the British, not being ones for letting a good surprise go to waste, decide to keep him for the night.  Why would those rotten British bastards do such a thing?  Because they’re about to unleash a fireworks display of apocalyptic grandeur upon Baltimore’s Fort McHenry.  Treacherous gits.

So there’s our guy, Frankie Key.  Trapped.  A spectator to the systematic, twenty-five-hour-long pulverization of his homeland.  It must have been sheer sensory overload.  The rockets – not the sexy, sleek, guided things of today, but fat, wobbly cones of incandescent rage – screaming across the sky.  The “bombs bursting in air,” which are actually hollow iron shells packed with enough black powder to disembowel a small building, arcing in beautiful, deadly parabolas before detonating with sound and fury.

The Shit is absolutely making sudden and brutal impact with the proverbial Fan.  The explosions are a relentless, psychedelic strobe.  The noise is physical, a pressure wave that vibrates throughout the ship and into his marrow.  And through it all, through this cacophony of imperial might, what is Key doing?  Cowering?  Praying?  Trying to bribe a royal marine for a belt of grog?  Probably.  But he is also watching.  His gaze is fixed, almost pathologically, on one thing: a magnificently oversized American flag fluttering over the fort.  It’s so big it requires a whole legion to hoist, a gigantic middle finger stitched from wool and cotton.  And as the night wears on, that flag becomes his focal point.  His North Star in a constellation of chaos.

When the dawn finally cracks, the bombardment ceases.  An eerie, ringing silence descends.  And Key, squinting through the smoke and the haze and probably a monster headache, sees it.  The flag.  Still fucking there.  A bit tattered and singed around the edges, but defiantly, miraculously, still there.

And in that moment of bleary-eyed, sleep-deprived, existentially pummeled relief, words begin to bubble up in the lawyer’s brain, fueled by adrenaline and whatever passes for patriotism when you’ve just watched your country take a 25-hour beating.  He scribbles them down on the back of a letter: the perilous fight, the ramparts, the rockets’ red glare.  Shit yes.

Your English professor, if they ever discussed this poem, which, let’s face it, likely will never happen, would probably call the poem, “Defence of Fort McHenry” a bit of a mess.  They’d say it’s wordy, the meter is clunky, and it’s set to the tune of a British drinking song, the irony of which is deliciously rich.  But you should tell your professor to get bent.  The poem is a genuine artifact, written in a moment of pure, unadulterated terror and awe.  It’s the sound of a man trying to make sense of the senseless, to find a sliver of meaning in the chaos of that night.  And for that, I propose we raise a glass to the old boy.  He saw the abyss, and all he could do was write a song about the light on the other side.

N.P.: “I Can’t Explain” – Scorpions

September 13, 2025

September 13th.  Just another date on the calendar for most, probably.  It’s Saturday, meaning most get a break from slogging through emails, pretending to care about spreadsheets.  Most get to spend the day with the fucking loved ones and wonder if it’s too early to pour a drink.  For me, it’s a day that calls for a certain type of reverence – the kind you can only really achieve with a glass of something dark and expensive in one hand and a dog-eared book in the other.  Because today, way back in 1916, a magnificent, complicated, and utterly brilliant bastard named Roald Dahl was spat into this world.

Of course, I use the term “bastard” with the utmost affection.  You see, the sanitized, candy-coated version of Dahl they fed us in elementary school – the jolly old grandpa figure with a twinkle in his eye – is a laughable fiction, a marketing ploy so grotesquely sweet it would give even Augustus Gloop a toothache.  The real Dahl was something else entirely.  A towering, cantankerous Welshman of Norwegian stock, a man who flew fighter planes, worked as a spy, survived a plane crash in the desert that basically rearranged his face, and then, only then, decided to write stories for children.  You have to respect that kind of life sequencing.  It’s like climbing Everest and then deciding to take up professional thumb-wrestling.

Think of it, man…the Great War’s churning Europe into a meat grinder, trenches belching mustard gas and madness, while over in this corner of the British Isles, a fishmonger’s son and his Norwegian wife, Sofie Magdalene Dahl, are hunkered down in a house that smells like salted cod and quiet immigrant grit, waiting for their third spawn to arrive.  Not with a whimper…nope – Dahl bursts forth like a prototype for every pint-sized tyrant he’d scribble into immortality, already plotting his escape from the ordinary, or at least that’s how it feels when you retro-engineer the myth from the man.

Because Dahl wasn’t born with a silver spoon; he got handed a goddamn harpoon, courtesy of that Viking heritage his folks dragged across the North Sea like contraband luggage.  Papa Harald, the elder Dahl, had fled Norway’s rigid hierarchies for the promise of Welsh rain and fish guts, only to drop dead when young Roald was barely out of diapers – some botched dental surgery gone septic, turning a routine tooth-pull into a full-on exit wound from life.  Just like that, the family’s reeling, Sofie’s left to wrangle the brood solo, and little Roald’s absorbing his first lesson in the universe’s gleeful sadism: death doesn’t knock, it drills right through your jaw.  You can almost hear the kid’s proto-writer brain whirring even then, filing away the absurdity for later deployment in tales where parents get squashed by rogue rhinoceroses or grandparents sprout wings from moonbeams.  It’s the sort of origin story that screams payback’s a peach, and Dahl would spend the next seven decades turning the screws on every adult who’d ever wielded authority like a blunt instrument.

Fast-forward through the Repton School gauntlet, where the headmaster’s wife (Mrs. Plum, no shit) tested her rancid gandy prototypes on the boys like they were lab rats in a chocolate-coated fever dream.  Dahl loathed the place and the vicious floggings doled out by masters who treated prepubescent hides like stress-relief punching bags.  “All through my school life I was appalled,” he wrote later in his memoir Boy, “by the fact that masters and senior boys were allowed literally to wound other boys, and sometimes quite severely.”  He not only survived it, but weaponized it.  Those beatings birthed the gleeful grotesquery of Matilda, where the monstrous Miss Trunchbull heaves the kids around like ragdolls, or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, with its parade of parental comeuppances doled out by a candymaker who’s equal parts benevolent god and capricious exterminator.

Cute to the 30s, and Dahl’s off gallivanting through Africa for the Shell Oil empire, playing expat tycoon in the Tanganyika sun until the Luftwaffe crashes his party in ’39.   A fighter pilot, he’s shot down over the desert, waking up in the hospital with a busted skull and a spine rearranged like a drunk dude’s Jenga tower.  From that chaos sprang his adult shorts, dark things like “Lamb to the Slaughter” where a frozen leg of lamb becomes the perfect murder weapon, or “The :Landlady” with its taxidermied guests and tea that’s just a tad too peachy.

But it’s the kids’ stuff that cements the legend, the books that sneak subversion past the parental radar: James and the Giant Peach rolling over authority figures like so many speed bumps, The BFG farting its way through linguistic lunacy, The Witches peeling back the hag masks on every snickering crone at the PTA bake sale.

I don’t mean to get too hagiographic here…Dahl was a prickly fucker, prone to barbs that drew real blood, the kind that still has folks clutching pearls a century on.  Antisemetic rants in print, casual bigotry slipped into early editions like contraband schnapps, stuff that got coins yanked from mints and apologies issued posthumously by his own family.  But ultimately, the guy was just a great story teller.  And he worked his ass off.  He wrote for two hours at dawn, two hours at dusk, churning out screenplays for Bond flicks and Bond girls, divorcing a Hollywood icon like Patricia Neal, then remarrying and plowing on till a blood disease claimed him in ’90 at 74.

So raise a glass of something fizzy and forbidden today to the birth of this Welsh-Norwegian badass who proved that the best revenge is a story served cold and crooked.  Sure, he wrote for kids, but Dahl rigged the game so they’d grow up questioning every adult edict, every saccharine lie, every caning disguised as character-building.  In a world still grinding boys into fodder and girls into footnotes, his pages remain explosive.  The real monsters are the ones who think they own the rules.
Now go read something that’ll scar your soul just right, and tell the headmasters to shove it.

N.P.: “Mind Like A Tree” – Scorpions

September 12, 2025

Hey…dear reader.  What a shitty week this was.  Glad it’s in the rearview.  There’s been too much on my mind.  Or as Wordsworth said…the world is too much with me.

But I’m here, not writing much these last couple days.
I’m just trying to sort out my thoughts, which are myriad and dark.

N.P.: “Burning” – Matteo Tura

September 9, 2025

 

Put your drinking cap on, dear reader, because today we’re raising a glass – or, more accurately, several glasses, straight from the bottle, no chaser needed – for the one, the only, Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy.  Born on this day in 1828, a man so monumentally, so titanically extra that his own life reads like a novel he’d have probably edited down for being too unbelievable.

Let’s be brutally, painfully honest for a moment.  Who amongst us hasn’t, in the throes of some ill-advised, 3 a.m. intellectual fugue state, picked up War and Peace with the genuine, albeit deeply misguided, intention of actually finishing it?  You see its heft, its sheer gravitational pull on your bookshelf, and you think, “Yes.  This is it.  This is the literary Everest I shall conquer.”  Then, 150 pages and approximately 4,729 character introductions later, you’re weeping into your lukewarm coffee, realizing you’ve made a terrible, terrible mistake.  And that, dear reader, is the genius of Tolstoy.  He makes you feel intellectually inadequate from beyond the grave, and you somehow thank him for it.

The man was a walking contradiction.  A bona fide aristocrat who wanted to be a peasant.  A soldier who became a pacifist.  A renowned sinner who spent the back half of his life penning moral treatises with the kind of high-minded sanctimony that would make a saint blush.  Imagine writing Anna Karenina – a sprawling, heartbreaking epic of adultery, societal ruin, and existential despair – and then turning around to become the world’s most famous, beard-stroking moralist.  It’s like a Michelin-starred chef opening a chain of kale-and-air smoothie stands.  The sheer, unadulterated audacity is something to behold.

He wrote with a scope that is, frankly, offensive to lesser mortals.  He wrote about everything: God, death, love, war, farming, family dysfunction, the subtle agony of a high-society dinner party – it’s all in there.  His sentences can be these long, winding , multi-clausal bastards that wrap around you like an anaconda, squeezing the air from your lungs until you finally reach the full stop, gasping, but somehow enlightened.  He’d spend twenty pages on a single battle, and you’d feel every cannonball, every terrified breath, every futile prayer.  Then he’d spend another ten on a girl’s conflicted feelings at her first ball, and you’d feel that, too, with surprising intensity.

So here’s to Leo.  Here’s to the man who gave us characters so real they feel like distant, dysfunctional relatives.  Here’s to the man whose magnum opus is both a literary masterpiece and the world’s most effective doorstop.  And here’s to the glorious, hypocritical, brilliant, maddening complexity of a writer who tried to renounce his own art because it was just too goddamn good.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m 73 pages into The Death of Ivan Ilyich and I’m already feeling the cold hand of existential dread on my shoulder.  Time to find some whiskey.  Tolstoy would have wanted it that way.  Probably.

N.P.: “Back in Black” – Doctorfunk

September 8, 2025

 

Well, well, well, dear reader, it’s Monday again, that cruel, coffee-sucking beast that lurches into our lives like a hungover, ‘roided out bouncer at a dive bar.  And here I am, your battle-scarred scribe, fresh off a nine-day bender of a writing marathon – call it a full-throttle, no-brakes assault on this sprawling, hydra-headed bastard of manuscript I’ve been wrestling like some demonic rodeo bull.

The mission was simple, or so I thought: take this shaggy, half-feral draft of a book – my latest attempt to claw some truth out of the chaotic void – and beat it into something resembling coherence.  Nine days of caffeine-fueled, sleep-deprived madness, hammering the keys until my fingers ached like the keys had been hammering back.  And the verdict?  Victory, of a sort.

There’s a draft now, a real, tangible beast, rough as a three-day bender and twice as messy, but it exists, goddamn it, in the digital ether.  An exceedingly rough draft, for my taste, with all the structural integrity of a sandcastle in a shitstorm.  But here’s the bright side, the one big, beautiful, undeniable fact I’m clinging to like a drunk to a lamppost: it’s good.  It’s not the polished diamond it needs to be before I put it out, but the fundamental shape of it, the raw architecture, is the best it has ever been.  So I’ll take it.  I will snatch that win from the jaws of chaos and hold it aloft, even as the to-do list stretches on into what feels like infinity.

One of the biggest successes of the week came from me experimenting with the chapter order.  This has been bugging me a long time.  I tried arranging them thematically, which, while common in memoirs, failed as badly as I thought it would here.  I tried arranging things purely chronologically, but that didn’t work either.  Ultimately, I had it arranged the way it’s supposed to be.  It jumps all over hell, timewise, but there’s no other way to tell it.

Of course, because the universe is a sadistic prick with a twisted sense of humor, nothing in this adult world of ours ever goes down smoothly.  The last week was a parade of distractions, obligations, and cosmic middle fingers – everything from Wi-Fi betrayals to existential crises that hit like a liver kick.  So, yeah, I didn’t check every box on my grandiose and erumpent to-do list.  The dream was to emerge from this nine-day gauntlet with a draft so tight it could swagger into a publisher’s office and demand a corner suite.  Reality, as always, has other plans.  But I’m not flogging myself too hard over it.  Perfection’s a myth, a siren song for suckers, and I’d rather have a flawed, fighting draft than a pristine fantasy that never leaves the page.

So here we are, Monday night, the world still spinning, the book still breathing.  I’m battered but unbowed, ready to dive back into the fray with a sharper blade and a meaner grin.  Stay tuned, sexy reader – you’re riding shotgun on this weird ride, and I promise you, it’s gonna be one hell of a show.

N.P.:  “Tron Ares – As Alive As You Need Me To Be – Metal Version” – Artificial Fear

Word of the Day: limerence

 

 

Today’s Word of the Day is limerence.  It’s a noun meaning a state of mind resulting from romantic or obsessive infatuation with someone, typically involving an intense emotional longing and a near-constant preoccupation with the object of one’s affection.  Think of it as love’s unhinged, over-caffeinated cousin who shows up uninvited and refuses to leave.

Coined in the 1970s by psychologist Dorothy Tennov, the word “limerence” has no clear linguistic ancestry, which feels appropriate for a term describing something so primal and chaotic.  It’s a Frankenstein of a word, stitched together to name the electric storm of dopamine and delusion that hijacks your brain when you’re smitten beyond reason.

Let me confess something, dear reader, because I believe in transparency, even when it’s messy and embarrassing: I am in full-blown, unapologetic hetero limerence with Taylor Sheridan.
This isn’t some casual admiration or polite nod of respect for a fellow creative.  No, this is the kind of obsessive, all-consuming fixation that makes you questions your own sanity.  It’s the kind of thing that has you Googling “Taylor Sheridan ranch photos” at 2 a.m. while your whiskey glass sweats on the nightstand.
It all started innocently enough, as these things often do.  I watched Sicario several years back, and it hit me like a tactical strike to the soul.  The tension, the moral ambiguity, the sheer audacity of the storytelling – it was like someone had cracked open my skull, scooped out my cinematic preferences, and weaponized them into a film.  I was hooked, but I didn’t yet know the name of my dealer.
Fast forward a few years, and I stumble across Hell or High Water.  Same reaction: instant love, like a shotgun blast to the chest.  But again, I didn’t connect the dots.  It wasn’t until earlier this year, after a rewatch of Sicario 2: Day of the Soldado (a sequel that, against all odds, doesn’t suck), that I finally decided to investigate.  Who was this mad genius behind these films?  Who was the puppet master pulling the strings on my cinematic emotions?
Enter Taylor Sheridan.
What I discovered sent me spiraling deeper into the rabbit hole.  This man isn’t just a screenwriter; he’s a goddamn force of nature.  A cowboy-poet with a $200 million deal at Paramount and a ranch the size of a small European country.  He’s not some Ivy League dilettante who lucked into Hollywood success.  Nope, he’s the real deal – a Fort Worth native who grew up wrangling cattle and probably knows how to castrate a bull without breaking a sweat.
It was his prolificity that rocked me.  The man churns out scripts and shows like he’s got a direct line to the Muses.  Yellowstone, 1883, 1923, Mayor of Kingstown, Tulsa King, Landman, Lioness – it’s like he’s single-handedly trying to keep the Western genre alive while the rest of Hollywood churns out shitty superhero sludge.
Here at the Safe House, we’ve been on a steady diet of Sheridan’s work all summer.  It’s become a ritual…after my day’s writing is done: whiskey, popcorn, and whatever new frontier of moral complexity he’s decided to explore.  And now, as we count the days to the second season of Landman, I find myself in a state of feverish anticipation.
Here’s the thing about limerence: it’s not rational.  It doesn’t care about logic or moderation.  It’s a wildfire, and Taylor Sheridan is the spark that has set my brain ablaze once again.  So here I am, a grown-ass adult, confessing my borderline-embarrassing obsession with a man I’ve never met but feel like I know well through his work.  For those of you who’ve been following me for a while, you know that a common complaint over the last several years has been that most of the artists I used to get inspiration and energy from are dead, and that things just aren’t the same now that, say Prince is gone.  I used to get a lot of energy from knowing that whatever I was doing, Prince was out there at the same moment creating brilliant art, and if he was staying up late working, then I needed to too.  The artists I’m referring to were like bright lights on the distant horizon, but gradually, those lights went out.  But now I’ve got Taylor.  We’re completely different writers, with completely different agendas and styles, but he is a welcome inspiration.  You may have noticed my output increasing significantly in the last six months or so, and this has a lot to do with that.  For the first time in a long time, there’s a writer I’ve never met who I’d love to go on a whiskey bender with, who’s badass enough to actually keep up.  And now I find out dude has his own brand: Four Sixes Whiskey!
It’s official…I want to be Taylor Sheridan when I grow up. 

N.P.: “Tide & Timber” – Edries Br

September 6, 2025

 

Alright, strap in, dear reader, because we’re about to tear into the quivering, gelatinous underbelly of one very vaginal Malcolm Gladwell, the pop-sociology huckster who’s been peddling his slick, airport-bookstore pablum to the gullible masses for far too long.  This week, the man who made a career out of repackaging obvious truths as revelatory “tipping points” has finally shown his true colors, and they’re a repulsive hue of pusillanimity.  On a podcast – The Real Science of Sport, no less – Gladwell admitted he was “cowed” into supporting the absurd notion that men, by some perverse alchemy of ideology, can compete as women in sports.  Cowed.  Like a fucking farm animal.

Let that sink in.  Let the full, wretched, and frankly hilarious implications of that statement marinate in the primordial ooze of your consciousness.  This is a man who built a career on explaining the hidden mechanics of everything from ketchup to success, the guru who supposedly sees the intricate threads connecting outliers and dogwalkers and Jamaican sprinters.  Yet, when faced with a cultural blitzkrieg demanding he assent to a proposition as biologically sound as a flat earth, he tucked his pathetic tail so far between his legs it was tickling his famously frizzy chin.

He was bullied.  Intimidated.  Pressured into nodding along with a fantasy so complete, so utterly detached from observable reality, that a reasonably bright toddler could debunk it with a crayon and a rudimentary understanding of anatomy.  The alleged intellectual heavyweight, the celebrated thinker, apparently possesses a spine with the structural integrity of warm Jell-O.  He saw the mob, torches aflame and pronouns sharpened, and decided that the path of least resistance was to simply shut his mouth and pretend the emperor’s new genitalia, were, in fact, stunning and brave.  Now he’s backtracking, natch, whining that he’s “ashamed” of his silence at a 2022 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference where he played moderator to a panel stacked with trans activists.  Apparently, he sat there, nodding a long like a bobblehead, while some tranny athlete turned to panelist Ross Tucker and demanded, “You have to let us win.”  Imagine it, dear reader: a grown-ass man, a supposed intellectual, heard that bald-faced lunacy and didn’t say a fucking word.  Didn’t push back.  Didn’t call out the absurdity of a man demanding a free pass to dominate women’s sports.  Instead, he played the good little progressive, keeping his mouth shut because…why?  Fear of the Twitter mob?  Worried he’d lose his invite to the next Davos circle-jerk?  Whatever the reason, he admits he was “dishonest,” letting “howlers” pass without comment, all because he was too spineless to speak the truth he claims he believed along: that males have no place competing in female sports categories.

Boo-fucking-hoo, Malcolm.  This isn’t about tipping points or the 10,000-hour rule.  This is about a complete and utter abdication of the one thing a writer – a thinker – is supposed to have: courage.  The courage to look at a thing, a real thing, and describe it as it is, not as a screeching mob of idiots on social media demands it be described.
It occurs to me now that my dear reader may not know much, or anything at all, about our boy Malcolm.  So, for those of you who’ve been too busy actually reading something worth a shit to notice his rise to fame, Gladwell, a Canadian scribbler with a mop of hair that screams “I’m trying too hard to be quirky,” burst onto the scene with The Tipping Point (2000), a book that took the radical stance that – get this – ideas spread like viruses.  Wow.  How groundbreaking.  He followed it up with Blink (2005), where he told us trusting your gut is sometimes a thing, and Outliers (2008), where he “discovered” that success involves hard work and luck.  No shit.  The guy’s built an empire on stating the obvious with just enough jargon to make middle managers feel like they’re reading Foucault.  A staff writer for The New Yorker and a podcast darling, he’s been coasting on this faux-intellectual schtick for decades, wrapping commonsense observations in a veneer of statistical razzle-dazzle that collapses under scrutiny faster than a house of cards in a hurricane.  His work is the literary equivalent of a Ted Talk: flashy, shallow, and designed to make you feel smarter without actually challenging what you think.

This isn’t just a lapse in judgment; it’s a betrayal of reason itself.  We’re talking about a guy who’s made millions pontificating on human behavior, yet when push came to shove, he folded like a cheap lawn chair under the weight of ideological bullying.  Again, a five-year-old with a basic grasp of biology knows that boys are not and can never be girls, that men’s bodies – packed with testosterone, denser bones, and more muscle mass – give them a physical edge in sports that no amount of “identity” can erase.  This isn’t rocket science; it’s not even high school biology.  It’s the kind of truth so glaringly obvious it’s embarrassing to have to articulate it.  Yet Gladwell, this self-styled guru of insight, claims he was “cowed” into silence.  The man’s 62 years old, an alleged literary heavyweight with a platform bigger than most, and he’s whimpering about being bullied into silence?  Pathetic.

This confession doesn’t just torch his credibility; it proves he never had any to begin with.  A writer – a real writer – doesn’t just regurgitate trendy narratives or cower before the zeitgeist.  A real writer wields his pen like a machete, cutting through bullshit to get to the truth, no matter who’s screaming what.  Gladwell’s admission reveals him as a fraud, a man so desperate to stay in the good graces of the cultural elite and their luxury beliefs that he’d rather lie than stand up for what he claims to believe.  And now he’s “ashamed”?  Fuck you.  This isn’t shame; it’s damage control.  He’s seen the wind shifting – people like Riley Gaines and Amy Hamm calling him out on X for his flip-flopping – and he’s scrambling to save face.  Too late, jackass.  You’ve shown your hand, and it’s pitiful.

The kicker here is that he’s not even apologizing for the right reasons.  He’s not sorry for propping up a narrative that undermines fairness in women’s sports or for gaslighting female athletes who’ve been forced to compete against deluded males.  Nope.  He’s sorry he didn’t speak up, sorry he got caught looking like an absolute coward.  It’s the intellectual equivalent of a politician saying, “I regret if anyone was offended.”  Weak sauce, Malcolm.  If you’re going to take a stand now, at least have the balls to own the harm your silence caused.  Female athletes have been cheated out of opportunities, podiums, and scholarships because of this nonsense, and you sat there, complicit, while it happened.

What is the value of a mind that can be so easily herded?  What are we to make of his entire body of work now, knowing that the author’s primary operating principle isn’t intellectual curiosity, but a deep-seated fear of being yelled at?

His books now read like artifacts from a different, more chickenshit dimension.  Blink becomes the story of a man who makes a snap judgement to save his own skin.  Outliers seems less a study of success and more a roadmap for conforming to the prevailing groupthink to avoid ostracism.  This confession re-contextualizes everything.  It reveals the man behind the curtain is not a wizard, but just a very nervous publicist with a good haircut, frantically pulling levers to maintain an illusion.

So he feels bad about it now.  He’s seen the tide turn just enough that he can peek his head out of his Canadian foxhole and whisper, “Um, for the record, I was a scared little bitch.”  Fine.  Good for him.  But absolution is not on the menu.  You don’t get a cookie for admitting you abandoned your post when the shooting started.  You get contempt.  You get whatever is beneath contempt.  You get the acidic, burning realization that the people we were told were our intellectual navigators were just reading from a script handed to them by the most aggressive and least coherent people in the room.

So where does this leave Gladwell’s legacy?  In the fucking toilet, that’s where.  If he was ever a legitimate writer – and that’s a massive “if,” given his track record of repackaging platitudes as profundity – this episode proves he’s nothing more than a brainless weather vane, spinning whichever way the cultural winds blow.  A real writer doesn’t need to be bullied into believing bullshit; they call it out, loud and proud, even when it’s inconvenient.  Gladwell’s spent his career dodging hard truths in favor of palatable narratives, and this latest fiasco is just the cherry on top of a career built on intellectual cowardice.  He’s not a thinker; he’s a performer, a snake-oil salesman who’s finally be caught with his pants down.

To the readers still clutching their dog-eared copies of Blink: wake up.  Your boy Malcolm’s been exposed as a fraud who’d rather kowtow to ideologues than stand up for what’s right.  And to Gladwell himself: next time you’re tempted to play the objective observer, do us all a favor and keep your lying mouth shut.  Or better yet, try to retrieve your testicles out of whatever tranny’s purse you left them in and say what you mean.  Until then, you’re just another chickenshit hack, cowed by the mob and unworthy of the page.

The whole pathetic spectacle leaves a taste in your mouth like cheap gin and cowardice.  The man was never a danger, never a threat to the established order.  He was its court jester, its high-gloss flatterer.  And then the court demanded he believe that two plus two equals fish, he didn’t even have the balls to argue.  He just asked what kind of fish.

N.P.: “God’s Gonna Cut You Down (feat. Adoration Destroyed)” – Dead Animal Assembly Plant

Word of the Day: Xanthippe

Today’s Word of the Day is Xanthippe.  It’s a noun meaning a shrewish, ill-tempered woman; a scold whose tongue cuts like my switchblade through butter.  Named after Socrates’ wife, reputedly a harpy of such mythic proportions she could make a philosopher question existence itself.

Derived from the Greek Xanthippe (Ξανθίππη), the name of Socrates’ spouse, whose alleged nagging became the stuff of ancient Athenian gossip.  First used in English around the 16th century to denote a woman whose vitriol could curdle wine.  From xanthos (yellow, fair-haired) and hippos (horse), though the etymological irony of “fair horse” for a termagant is a linguistic middle finger to decorum.  It’s either a weird flex or a sick burn, depending on how you look at it.

So there I am, three whiskeys deep into a Wednesday dusk, my typewriter humming like a junkyard Pontiac, when the air splits with the bellow of my neighbor, Brianna (we call her Big Brian), a “woman” built like a linebacker with the charm of a hungover wolverine.  She’s pounding on my door, her meaty fists rattling the hinges, hollering about a late-night drum circle that got going with some friends just back from Burning Man and the “goddamn jungle cacophony” of my half-feral parrots.  I fling open the door, shirt unbuttoned, a Camel dangling from my lip, ready to parry her outrage with my own.
“Brianna,” I snarl, “you miserable twat!  Your complaints are unwelcome.  Go back under your bridge and wait for your prandial goat to wander by, you troll.”
She looms, her face a topographic map of rage, eyes glinting like the business end of a chrome-plated shotgun.
“You degenerate goddamn scribbler,” she roars, “your noise is peeling the paint off my walls!”
The parrots, sensing blood, screech their approval from the living room, a feathered Greek chorus egging us on.  What ensues is a verbal cage match, a linguistic demolition derby.  She accuses me of harboring “a zoo for lunatics”; I counter that her nighty outdoor showers after swimming in her pool are traumatizing the local wildlife.  Her jowls quiver, her voice a foghorn of indignation, and I’m half-convinced she’s about to bench-press me into the next county.  But I’m no wilting poet – I lean in, whiskey breath and all, and lob a  barb about her grotesque yard décor, specifically her stupid fucking lawn gnomes, those “creepy ceramic bastards” staring into my soul.  She gasps, clutching her imaginary pearls, and I know I’ve hit the mark.
Then, in a moment of pure, unscripted glory, she unleashes her inner Xanthippe.  “You think you’re clever, you booze-soaked word-monger?” she thunders, her voice a sonic boom that sends the parrots into a flapping panic.  I’ll have your lease revoked faster than you can misquote Kerouac!”  It’s magnificent, her fury a force of nature, like a hurricane with a perm and a grudge.
“Lease?  I own this bitch!”  I cackle, salute her with my glass, and retreat to my typewriter, making a mental note to shit in their pool again the next time they leave town. 

N.P.: “One Way Or Anther” – Broken Peach

September 3, 2025

 

Greetings from the Dissolute Desk, dear reader – this is your captain speaking, though, let’s be honest, the term “captain” implies a level of control over this particular vessel that would make Ahab weep with envy.  Today is Hump Day, that blessed Wednesday phenomenon that sits like a literary critic at a poetry slam – uncomfortable, slightly drunk, and desperately trying to find meaning in the chaos.

Just a brief update today – and my brief, I mean the literary equivalent of what pharmaceutical companies call “brief” side effects, which somehow manage to include everything from mild nausea to spontaneous combustion – since I’m currently submerged in the proverbial full-court press on this goddamn book.  And yes, to the one dear reader who thinks I should cuss less, I said “goddamn” because sometimes the English language requires the theological weight of profanity to adequately capture the Sisyphean absurdity of the creative process.

You know how, as an adult, everything becomes a Byzantine maze of bureaucratic torment designed by someone who clearly never had to navigate said maze while suffering from the literary equivalent of erectile dysfunction?  That’s to say: the persistent, maddening, inability to get your metaphors up when you need them most?  So that’s going on, but still – and here’s where my inherent optimism battles my well-documented pessimism like two drunk philosophers arguing about the meaning of existence at 3 AM – progress is being made.

Meeting my goals today is a pretty big deal when it comes to getting a draft done by September 8, which looms before me like a literary deadline should: with all the warm, welcoming energy of a proctological examination performed by someone with exceptionally large hands and a questionable understanding of personal space.

But let’s talk about this Wednesday celebration business, shall we?  Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my years of professional literary  debauchery – and by professional, I mean I occasionally get paid for this madness, though not nearly enough to justify the liver damage – it’s that midweek celebrations require a certain philosophical commitment to the absurd.

Think of it, man: it’s 2:17 PM Wednesday afternoon.  You’re three cups deep into what your local coffee shop optimistically calls their “house blend” but which tastes suspiciously like it was filtered through a gym sock that’s seen better decades.  Your manuscript stares back at you from the computer screen with all the judgement of a disappointed parent who just discovered your college transcript.  The cursor blinks.  Blinks again.  Taunts you with its rhythmic insistence that something should be happening here, some magical alchemy of words and ideas that transforms the mundane suffering of existence into something approaching art.

And then – miracle of miracles – the worse come.  They’re okay words.  Not the kind of luminous prose that makes readers weep and critics genuflect.  But words nonetheless.  Honest, slightly deranged words that capture something essential about what it means to be a human being stumbling through the cosmic joke of modern life with nothing but caffeine, stubbornness, and an inexplicable faith that somehow, against all evidence to the contrary, this particular arrangement of sentences might matter.

The adult world, you see, operates on the principle that nothing should ever be simple, straightforward, or remotely pleasant.  Need to renew your driver’s license?  That’s be a three-hour odyssey through a government office that apparently hasn’t been updated since the Carter administration.  Want to submit a manuscript?  Here’s a 17-page submission guide that contradicts itself no fewer than 43 times and requires you to format your work in a font that doesn’t exist on any computer manufactured after 1987.

But writing – actual writing, the kind that matters – operates on different principles entirely.  It demands that you show up, day after day, to face the blank page with nothing but your wits and whatever chemical assistance you can legally obtain.  It requires a kind of courage that’s simultaneously heroic and utterly ridiculous, like charging into battle armed only with a thesaurus and a profound sense of existential dread.

So yes, dear reader, progress is being made.  Slow, painful, occasionally hallucinogenic progress, but progress nonetheless.  Each sentence wrested from the void feels like a small victory against the forces of entropy and editorial bitching.  Each paragraph that doesn’t make me want to delete everything and take up accounting represents another step closer to that September 8 deadline, which approaches with all the subtlety of a methamphetaminic rhinoceros.

And if that’s not worth celebrating on a Wednesday afternoon, then I clearly don’t understand the fundamental principles of either celebration or Wednesday, both of which seem increasingly arbitrary the longer I contemplate them.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a book to finish and a hump day to properly honor.  The words won’t write themselves, though fuck knows I’ve asked them nicely.

Transmission ends.  Resume your regularly scheduled existential crisis. 

From the Dissolute Desk, where the coffee’s strong, the deadlines are stronger, and the metaphors occasionally achieve escape velocity. 

N.P.: “Pissed Off and Mad About It” – Texas Hippie Coalition