Category Archives: Dead Poets Society

February 8, 2026

 

You know what today is, dear reader: The Big Day!  So let’s get to it.  Let us raise a glass – preferably something volatile, possibly hallucinogenic, and definitely poured from a copper decanter with unnecessary gauges – to the undisputed godfather of speculative badassery.  Today marks the 1828 genesis event in Nantes, France, of one Jules Goddammit Verne.  [Author’s note: his middle name wasn’t really Goddammit – it was Gabriel – profanity added for enthusiasm.]  And frankly, if you don’t think this man deserves a twenty-one-gun salute fired from the deck of a submarine that doesn’t exist yet, maybe you’re better off watching professional sport or some such.

Because this man essentially reverse‑engineered the future using nothing but ink, obsessive research, and a brain wired like a Victorian supercomputer running at unsafe voltages while everyone else was still trying to figure out how to keep their pantaloons from catching fire near a candle.

Verne was doing the heavy lifting before “science fiction” was eve a glint in a publisher’s eye.  He looked at the world – a world obsessed with steam engines and top hats – and said, “That’s cute, but what if we shot three guys out of a cannon and landed them on the moon?”  And he did it with such meticulous, neurotic research that you almost feel bad for the lesser mortals trying to write adventure stories today.  It’s the literary equivalent of building a functioning internal combustion engine out of paper clips and cider-driven hubris.

The man didn’t predict the future so much as he bullied it into existence.  Every submarine hatch that ever hissed open in the real world owes something to Captain Nemo’s brooding Nautilus, that gothic iron leviathan gliding through abyssal darkness like a floating cathedral of revenge.  Every rocket that punched through the atmosphere carries the echo of Verne’s lunar shell, that audacious brass-and-gunpowder dream.  He mapped the thrill of the unknown onto the grid of known fact, and made speculation feel like engineering homework.  Verne predicted the electric submarine at a time when electricity was basically just magic that killed you if you touched it wrong.  He saw the deep-sea exploration, the crushing pressure, the isolation – he saw it all through a haze of cigar smoke and French ennui.

Consider, sexy reader, From the Earth to the Moon.  The man basically calculated escape velocity on the back of a napkin while sipping absinthe.  He predicted the launch site (Florida, obviously) and the splashdown method.  It’s almost annoying how right he was.  It’s the kind of prescience that makes you wonder if he had a time machine stashed in his basement next to the wine rack.

Then there is Around the World in Eighty Days.  Phileas Fogg is the patron saint of punctuality and anxiety.  The idea of global connectivity, of shrinking the world until it fits in your pocket watch – Verne saw the internet coming.  He didn’t call it that, of course.  He called it steamships and railways and pure bloody-minded determination, but the spirit is the same.  He understood that the world was getting smaller, faster, and infinitely more dangerous.

So here’s to Jules Verne, the man who taught us that exploration is 10% science, 40% madness, and 50% just refusing to admit that going to the center of the Earth is a terrible idea.  He is the reason we look at the stars and think, “Hell, I bet I could build a ship and go up there,” instead of just, “Pretty lights.”

Now go build something impossible. Or at least read something that makes you feel like you could.

N.P.: “The King’s Court” – Kristofer Maddigan

February 5, 2026 – Letter to Control

 

REPORT TO CONTROL -ANNEXIA FIELD NODE
FROM: GALLAWAY, JAYSON (WILD BOY CLASS-C OPERATIVE)
SUBJECT: BURROUGHS – THE ORIGINAL VIRUS ENGINEER – BORN THIS DAY, 1914

Control –
I transmit this communiqué from the rust-eaten balcony of the Annexia Safehouse, where the air tastes like burnt typewriter ribbon and the boys are sharpening their bones for the night’s operations.  The Interzone static is thick today – something in the grid humming like a junk-sick wasp – and I know why.  The date.  The birth signal.  The old man’s frequency rising from the sewer of time like a coded cough.
William Seward Burroughs – born February 5, 1914, St. Louis, Missouri – patron saint of the deranged, the dispossessed, the chemically re-engineered.
A man who wrote like a virus thinks.
A man who saw the Control Machine before the rest of us even knew we were plugged into it.
I file this report in the proper Annexia format: unreliable, unstable, and unfit for bureaucratic digestion.  Just how he’d want it.

I.     ORIGIN OF THE SPECIMEN
Burroughs arrived on this planet in the respectable husk of a Midwestern boy, but the larval stage didn’t last.  Something in him cracked early – maybe the St. Louis humidity, maybe the ancestral cash, maybe the simple fact he could see the invisible strings jerking the meat-puppets around him.  He drifted toward the outlaw circuits like a moth toward a neon “NO VACANCY” sign.
By the time he hit Tangiers – our beloved Annexia – he was already a walking cut-up, a man spliced from junk, queer desire, and cold surgical detachment.  A field agent of the forbidden.

II.     THE INCIDENT (CONTROL FILES SEALED, BUT WE KNOW)
You know the story, Control.  Everyone does, though they whisper it like a curse.
The William Tell routine.
The drunken angle.
The bullet that didn’t respect the myth.
Joan Vollmer – shot through the skull in a Mexico City apartment.
She lived long enough to haunt him.
He lived long enough to weaponize the guilt.
Burroughs always said that killing Joan forced him to write.
If that’s true, then literature owes its most radioactive prophet to a single catastrophic misfire.

III.     NAKED LUNCH – THE VIRUS TEST
When Naked Lunch hit in 1959, the censors screamed like bureaucrats discovering a cockroach in their coffee.  They banned it in Boston, the UK, Australia – anywhere the Control Machine still believed it could keep the human psyche tidy.
But the book wasn’t meant to be read.
It was meant to infect.
A non-linear fever-script of addiction, talking assholes, mugwumps, liquified morality, and the eternal struggle between the Body and the State.  A manual for escaping the soft police of the mind.
Cronenberg tried to film it decades later and wisely didn’t even attempt a straight adaptation.  He made a hallucination about a hallucination.  Burroughs would’ve approved.

IV.     THE AFTERMATH – PUNK, CYBERPUNK, AND THE WILD BOYS
Burroughs didn’t simply influence other writers – he rewired entire subcultures.
– Punk kids scrawled his name on bathroom walls like a sigil.
– Cyberpunks treated him as the proto-hacker of consciousness.
– Kurt Cobain recorded with him, like a disciple seeking benediction from a skeletal oracle.
– Every outlaw writer since has stolen at least one trick from his kit.
And the Wild Boys – my cadre, my brothers in the dust, trace our lineage straight to him.
He taught us that language is a weapon.
That Control is a parasite.
That the only sane response to a world of invisible masters is to laugh, cut the tape, and run.

V.  CLOSING TRANSMISSION
So here’s my official report, Control:
On this day, February 5, we mark the birth of the man who cracked the code of the human condition and found nothing inside but wires, needles, and a cosmic joke.
Burroughs stared into the void and didn’t flinch.
He wrote like man carving escape routes into the walls of a prison he knew was infinite.
He remains the most dangerous kind of visionary:
the one who tells the truth about the machinery running the world.
Control, the signal is fading.
The mugwumps are restless, and the black meat is calling.

I send this dispatch with full Wild Boy authorization.
Interzone trembles.
The old man’s ghost is on the line.

N.P.: “Bug Powder Dust” – Bomb the Bass

February 2, 2026

 

It is, perhaps, a testament to the sheer entropic force of the universe that John Simon Ritchie – better known to the constabulary and the terrified mothers of Great Britain as Sid Vicious – managed to survive on this spinning rock of sadness for as long as twenty-one years.  When he finally shuffled off this mortal coil on February 2, 1979, having ingested enough heroin to sedate a mid-sized rhinoceros with emotional baggage, the collective sigh of the establishment was audible from London to New York.  It wasn’t a tragedy in the classical, Aristotelian sense, because tragedy implies a fall from grace, and Sid never really had any grace to begin with.  He had a bass guitar he barely knew how to play and a sneer that could wilt flowers at fifty paces.

To understand the death, one must first attempt to parse the life, which was less a biographical narrative and more a series of violent spasms interrupted by periods of unconsciousness.  Sid was the id of punk rock made flesh – a walking, spitting, safety-pinned monument to the idea that if you can’t be good, you should at least be loud and possibly infectious.  He was the poster boy for a movement that didn’t just want to watch the world burn but wanted to be the one holding the match while flipping off the fire brigade.

The scene in the Greenwich Village apartment where he checked out was grim, but also possessed of a certain dark inevitability.  He had been out on bail for the alleged murder of Nancy Spungen, a relationship that makes Romeo and Juliet look like a sensible e-harmony match.  Their love was a chemical fire, fueled by codependency and substances of questionable purity..  When he woke up that morning – or rather, failed to wake up – it was the final punctuation mark on a sentence that had been screaming itself hoarse since 1977.

One might argue, whilst adjusting one’s spectacles and attempting to sound profound, that Vicious was a victim of the very machine he raged against.  That he was a lost boy looking for a father figure and finding instead a manager who treated him like a circus bear with a drug habit.  And there’s probably a kernel of truth in that sociological analysis, assuming the dear reader cares for that sort of thing.  But to reduce him to a victim is to strip him of his agency, however self-destructive that agency was.  Sid chose chaos.  He embraced the void with the enthusiasm of a golden retriever jumping into a mud puddle.

His death wasn’t just the end of a man; it was the symbolic closing of the casket on the first wave of punk.  The anger had turned inward, the nihilism had become literal, and the “No Future” slogan had transformed from a rebel yell into a bleak prophesy.  He left behind a legacy that is equal parts embarrassment and inspiration – a reminder that you don’t need talent to change the world, just an unshakeable belief in your own refusal to conform and a leather jacket that smells like stale beer and resentment.

So here we are, dear reader, decades later, still talking about a kid who couldn’t play bass, couldn’t sing, and couldn’t stay alive, but who somehow managed to become an icon.  It’s funny, really, in a way that makes you want to laugh until you start coughing us something suspicious.  Sid Vicious didn’t die for our sins; he died because he lived life with the safety catch off and the throttle stuck wide open.  And in a world that increasingly demands we color inside the lines, there is something undeniably, terrifyingly respectable about that level of commitment to making a mess.

N.P.: “Pretty Vacant – Remastered 2007” – Sex Pistols

January 31, 2026

Hot damn, dear reader…today we raise a whole goddamn bottle to Norman Kingsley Mailer, the literary titan who swaggered into the world on this day in 1923 (the same year my father was born) and spent the next 84 years punching, writing, and philosophizing his way into the annals of American letters. There are certain figures in the literary cosmos – cosmos here meaning that sprawling, barely governable constellation of egos, neuroses, and typewriter shrapnel – whose birthdays feel less like commemorations and more like controlled detonations.  Mailer was a force of nature, a human hurricane of ego, intellect, and testosterone who made it his business to provoke, challenge, and occasionally terrify anyone who dared stand in his way.

Mailer was an absolute badass.  Not the Instagram-filtered, hashtagged kind, but the real fucking deal – the kind who wrote like his typewriter was on fire and lived like he had a personal vendetta against boredom.  This is the man who gave us The Naked and the Dead, a WWII novel so raw it smells like gunpowder and sweat.  He followed that up with The Executioner’s Song, a Pulitzer-winning masterpiece that turned the grim, true-crime story of Gary Gilmore into a sprawling, novelistic epic.

Mailer dissected the human condition with the precision of a surgeon and the brutality of a barroom brawler.

Mailer wasn’t just about the words.  He was a walking, talking, headline-generating spectacle.  He ran for the mayor of New York City (on a platform that included seceding the city from the state), headbutted his way through literary feuds, and once famously decked a critic at a  party.  He was the kind of guy who could charm you with a perfectly turned phrase one minute and make you want to throw a drink in his face the next.

Mailer’s genius (and his madness) lay in his refusal to play it safe.  He bulldozed boundaries, set them on fire, and then wrote a 10,000-word essay about the ashes.  He was a pioneer of New Journalism, blending fact and fiction in a way that made journalistic purists clutch their pearls and readers care more deeply about the stories.  He was a messy, complicated, infuriating pain in the ass, but he was never boring.

So here’s to the man who turned literature into a compact sport, who made us think, argue, and occasionally cringe, and who reminded us that great writing isn’t about being polite – it’s about being alive.

Happy birthday, Mr. Mailer

N.P.: “Smack My Bitch Up” – Aytkact

January 27, 2026

 

Welp, here we are again, dear reader, another Tuesday spinning around the sun on this mud-ball of consequence and cheap wine, and the calendar, that merciless tick-tocking ledger of our own slow decay, informs us that it is January 27th.  A day that would, if I were in charge of things, be a global holiday of mandatory, state-sponsored debauchery.  Why? Because on this day, back in 1756, the heavens smiled (maybe smirked) down at humanity, and out popped – fully formed, one assumes, with a tiny powdered wig and a head full of symphonies that would make angels weep into their celestial cognacs – one Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart.  [Preemptive response to any snarky freshman insisting Mozart’s middle name was Amadeus…you’re not wrong: it’s in there.  “Theophilus” translates to “lover of God” or “beloved of God,” which he often rendered as “Amadeus” in Latin.  Now quit whining and pay attention.]

Wolfie.  The Kid from Salzburg, that smug little Archbishopric town, a baroque snow-globe of a city that probably didn’t deserve the cosmic anomaly it was hosting.  This was the starting block of a thirty-five-year rampage of such concentrated, supernova-grade talent that it still scorches the ears and baffles the mind.  Almost instantly beyond merely composing music, he mainlined the divine, scribbling down dispatches from a dimension the rest of us can only glimpse in our most profound moments of chemical or emotional excess.  He committed a kind of ecstatic arson on the very idea of what music was supposed to be, torching the rulebook while humming counterpoint so perfect it bishops shit and aristocrats rethink their live choices.  Dude was basically a human high-pressure hose of melody, spraying the 18th century with a recursive, self-referential brilliance that, frankly, most dear readers are too intellectually malnourished to even process.  He spat out concertos like sunflower seeds.  He tossed off operas that contained more human truth in a single aria than most novels manage in 400 pages of tortured prose.  All this while navigating the powdered, perfumed, and profoundly perilous viper pit of Viennese court society.  It’s been 270 years of the little bastards ghost still owning the room, still making every  subsequent composer sound like they’re trying to hot-wire a harpsichord in the back of a stolen carriage while Mozart’s already three towns ahead, laughing in perfect sonata form.  You listen to the Jupiter Symphony or the Requiem and you realize the rest of us are just dicking around with tuning forks while he was out there rewriting the laws of emotional physics.

And then, the flameout.  The big, ugly stop.  Thirty-five.  An age when most of us are just starting to figure out how to properly file our taxes, Mozart was already a legend being shoveled into a pauper’s grave.  The official story is as thin as cheap soup, some horseshit about a fever.  But we know better, don’t we, dear reader?  The darkness that always nibbled at the edges of his brightest compositions finally came to collect.

Was it Salieri, the patron saint of mediocrity, finally succumbing to a fit of murderous envy?  A plausible, almost operatic, narrative.  Or was it something more sordid, more human?  A bad plate of pork, a dose of trichinosis turning his guts into a warzone?  A grimly ironic end for a man who lived his life at forte fortissimo. Or maybe it was mercury, the fashionable cure-all of the day, a slow-acting poison administered by a jealous husband or a quack doctor.  Regardless, we know it was no grand operatic exit, no dramatic farewell aria – just a genius reduced to a shivering, swollen husk in a rented room while the city outside kept right on waltzing without him.

But here we are, centuries later, still blasting his stuff in concert halls and headphones and car stereos at 3 a.m. when the world feels too stupid to live in.  The music doesn’t age, doesn’t date, doesn’t give a flying fuck about your theories or your playlists or your fragile ego; it just sits there, eternal and smug, daring you to keep up.

So today, raise a toast to the Wolf…not of some polite Riesling, but of something with a kick: whiskey, cheap red, black coffee laced with spite.  Happy birthday, Wolfie.  He burned twice as bright, and if he only lasted half as long, well, maybe that was the point.  He crammed a hundred lifetimes of pure, uncut genius into three and a half decades, leaving behind a body of work so perfect, so impossible, that it serves as a permanent middle finger to the quiet desperation of an ordinary life.  (And if you’re reading this while some string quartet is sawing through Eine Kleine Nachtmusik in the background, crank it louder.  Let the uncultured heathens next door know the dead genius is still winning).

N.P.: “Mozart” – Trans Siberian Orchestra

January 25, 2026 – Burns Night

 

Hot diggity damn, dear reader…tonight is Burns Night!  Since you are not already drinking whisky and jumping off the furniture, I can only assume you are unfamiliar with Burns Night. Fair enough…it is my depressing belief that very few Americans read much anymore.  I’m not confident that many of them can read. But that’s another topic for another day.  Today is Burns Night, dammit.

Today we celebrate the birthday of the OG wordsmith of Scotland, Robert Burns!  Born January 25, 1759, this literary legend penned verses that Rolling Stone said, “flowed as smoothly as a fine Scotch whisky and as sharply as the Highland wind.”  Fact check: true.  This founding member of the D.P.S. was not only a rebel with a quill…he was the man who made haggis a legitimate subject of lyrical devotion.

Speaking of haggis, have you read his “Address to a Haggis?”  Only Burns could turn a sheep’s stomach stuffed with oats into an ode of unparalleled grandeur.  Any Burns Night celebration worth its salt (certainly any I’ve ever attended) features a massive haggis, held aloft by a group of dudes in kilts, making a lap around the entire room so all in attendance can get a close-up look at what they’re about to eat.  There are whoops and cheers (especially by those of us who’ve been drinking Snakebites for the previous few hours).  When the haggis has finished its tour around the room, it is eventually placed on a table in the center of the room, and someone then reads the “Address to a Haggis,” as significant amounts of whisky is poured over the haggis, and then it is cut with a sword and plates of the rotten stuff is passed around to whomever is daring enough to eat it.  At least that’s what how I remember it going down…I was always completely shit-housed by the time the haggis showed up.  As it should be.  As it must be.  Haggis is food for drunk people who are hungry, freezing, and out of options.  Sober people cannot eat haggis.  I mean it’s physically impossible.  The sober mind will not let its physical self willingly consume something so fetid and foul.  I have personally verified this theory many times: cold nights in San Francisco when the fridge was a little barren at home, a warm, whisky covered haggis is goddamn delicious.  Sober with a full stomach, and that same haggis is repugnant.

And let’s not forget Burns’ saucier side.  He also gifted us with “The Fornicator,” a tribute to all of us unapologetic fornicators, including himself.

And fornicate he did!  Burns fathered 12 children, nine of them out of wedlock.  He was prolific in many ways.  He worked as a farmer, a customs officer, and was allegedly the smoothest talker north of the border.  Burns was into the Enlightenment philosophers and could talk about Rousseau and Voltaire while slamming shots.

Like so many greats, Burns’ spark was snuffed out too soon.  He died on July 21, 1796, at the age of 37, likely due to rheumatic fever exacerbated by his hard-living ways.  Remarkably, the day he was laid to rest, his son Maxwell was born.

Today I recommend you crack your Burns anthology and check out “Tam o’ Shanter” or “A Red, Red Rose.”  Or, better yet, you could gut a pig, make some haggis, and recite the “Address” as you wash it down with whisky.

Slàinte, Robby!

N.P.: “Shy Boy” – JD McPherson

January 19, 2026

It is January 19th, dear reader, which, as I’m sure you know by this point in our relationship, means that somewhere in the vast, spiraling ether of the literary afterlife – a place I imagine looks suspiciously like a Baltimore gutter circa 1849 and smells faintly of amontillado and laudanum – Edgar Allan Poe is turning 217.  Or he would be, had he not shuffled off this mortal coil in a weird delirium tremens fugue state at the ripe old age of 40.  But we are not here to mourn the brevity of the fuse; we are here to celebrate the explosive, terrifying bang.

To be clear from the start: without Poe, modern literature is basically just a series of polite tea parties where nothing bleeds.

Before Poe, “scary” stories were mostly just moralistic claptrap about why you shouldn’t wander into the woods or stiff peers in castles rattling chains.  Poe took those chains and strangled his reader with them while whispering sweet nothings about the inevitability of premature burial.  He was the original architect of the American Nightmare who looked at the burgeoning optimism of the 19th century and said, “Yes, but what if a bird flew into your room and screamed at you about your dead girlfriend until you went insane?”

Consider the sheer, unadulterated audacity of the man.  He invented the detective story – invented it, wholesale, out of thin air – with “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.”  He gave us C. Auguste Dupin, the ur-Holmes prototype for every socially maladjusted genius sleuth from Baker Street to whatever Scandi-noir police procedural you’re currently binging on Netflix.  And he did it not because he loved the law, but because he was obsessed with the puzzle, with the friction between the rational mind and the irrational universe.

And honestly, if you haven’t tried to read “The Fall of the House of Usher” while nursing a hangover that feels like a nine-inch nail through the frontal lobe, have you even really read it?  The sensory hypersensitivity of Roderick Usher is not just a gothic trope: it is the definitive literary depiction of the Sunday Morning Fear.

We celebrate him today not because he was a saint – by all accounts, he was a disaster of a human being, a walking catastrophe of bad debts, worse decisions, and a liver that was essentially waving a white flag for two decades – but because he had the balls to stare into the abyss and take meticulous notes.  He understood that the monster isn’t under the bed: the monster is in your head, and it is probably significantly smarter than you are.

So here’s to you, Edgar, you gloomy, brilliant wretch.  I hope wherever you are, the bells are ringing, the raven has shut its beak for five minutes, and the cask is tapped.

Cheers.

N.P.: “Death Waltz” – Adam Hurst

December 22, 2025

 

On This Day in Doom

Let’s be honest, dear reader: history is a malfunctioning carnival ride operated by a meth-addled gibbon, and December 22 stands as a particularly glitchy gear in the machine.  It’s a day that grabs you by the lapels, shakes the loose change out of your pockets, and whispers, “Hey kid, wanna see something really fucked up?”
Because on this specific calendar square – separated by roughly 130 years and several thousand miles of icy/suburban wasteland – we have two distinct flavors of nightmare fuel.  One involves the near-death of literature’s gloomiest heavyweight, and the other involves a clown who wasn’t joking.
Strap in.  The brakes were cut miles ago.

The Great Siberian Psych-Out (1849)
First up, we have Fyodor Dostoevsky, the guy who made existential dread fashionable before French people ruined it with cigarettes and turtlenecks.
Imagine this: you’re 28, a literary upstart with a naïve taste for utopian socialism who’s been arrested for reading banned books and talking too much about justice.  The Tsar doesn’t like that.  So you’re sentenced to death, natch.
It is cold.  Not “put on a sweater” cold, but “your soul is freezing into a jagged little icicle” cold.  You’re dragged out to Semyonov Square.  You and your Petrashevsky Circle buddies are lined up.  You are read your death sentences.  You are given the white shirts of the condemned, which is a fashion statement no one wants to make.  You’re blindfolded.  You hear the click of rifles being raised.  The drums roll.  The priest does his mumbling bit with the cross.  You feel the cold breath of eternity on your neck.  You stand there, probably thinking, “Well, this is going to severely impact my ability to write 800-page novels about guilt.”  This is it.  The Big Sleep.  The dirt nap.  And then a messenger gallops in – presumably in slow motion, possibly while an eagle screeches overhead – waving a piece of paper.  “Psych!” screams the Tsar (paraphrasing).  “Just kidding!  You aren’t dying today!  You’re going to Siberia for four years of hard labor.  Four years of frostbite, dysentery, and theological whiplash.  Enjoy!”
It was a mock execution.  A prank.  A piece of psychological theater designed to break his sprit so thoroughly that he’d be sweeping up the shards of his own psyche for decades.  And it worked, sort of.  He walked away from the firing squad with a rewired brain.  Dostoevsky went to the klink, got epileptic, found Jesus, and came back to write Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov and other breakup letters to God.
Essentially, the Tsar’s twisted sense of humor gave us the entire canon of Russian existentialism.  If the command to “Fire!” had been given three seconds earlier, your college lit syllabus would look drastically different, and we’d have fewer metaphors for suffering.  The Tsar played Russian roulette with a writer’s soul and lost.

The Clown in the Crawl Space (1978)
Fast forward to 1978.  We trade the frozen wasteland of Russia for the frozen wasteland of Des Plaines, Illinois.  Different continent.  Different kind of horror.
Enter John Wayne Gacy.  A contractor.  A precinct captain for the Democrats.  A guy who dressed up as “Pogo the Clown” to entertain sick kids, which in retrospect is the darkest irony in the history of polyester costumes.
By December 22, the cops had been buzzing around Gacy like flies on roadkill.  He’d been playing this cat-and-mouse game, strutting around with an arrogance that suggested he thought he was smarter than the collective moral universe.  He wasn’t.  He was just a contractor with a really bad smell coming from his heating ducts.
On this day, the dam broke.  Gacy, likely realizing the jig was up or perhaps getting tired of the charade, started talking.  And once he started, he didn’t stop.  He admitted to killing 33 young men and boys.  He drew a map.  He pointed to the crawl space beneath his house – a ranch-style suburban home that looked exactly like every other ranch-style suburban home – and essentially said, “Yeah, they’re down there.”
It’s hard to process the logistical horror of it.  Twenty-nine bodies buried under the floorboards while he ate dinner and watched TV about them.  It’s the ultimate suburban gothic nightmare: the monster isn’t in the closet; the monster is the guy checking your permits, and he’s literally built a life on top of his victims.

N.P.: “Scarecrow” – Meg Lee Chin

December 14, 2025

 

Sobriety, dear reader, has been a trip.  Not the fun, kaleidoscopic kind where you’re riding a wave of serotonin and questionable decisions, but the kind where your brain decided to chuck a I.E.D into your circadian rhythm just for the fuck of it.  In the early days, I became what I can only describe as “insomniatic.”  [Yes, I know it wasn’t (previous to today) a recognized English word, but I found the English language to be lacking in this specific instance, so I created this neologism.  You’re welcome.]  Sixty-two hours.  That’s how long I was awake.  Sixty-two hours of raw, unfiltered consciousness.   It was like being trapped in a David Lynch film, minus the jazz and creepy dwarves.  Fascinating, sure, but also the kind of fascinating that has you questioning the nature of reality itself.

Then came the dreams.  Those annoyances had been gone for decades, and they weren’t missed.  But they’ve come back now, in 4K resolution, Dolby surround sound, and full fucking Technicolor.  And they sucked.  Not in a “wake-up screaming” kind of way – I don’t do nightmares, thank you very much – but in a “why is my subconscious so goddamn annoying?” kind of way.  They were petty, irritating little vignettes that stuck to my brain like gum on a hot sidewalk.  But last night?  Last night, my dreams finally got their act together.  They started with a delightful little scene of vengeance – me, absolutely eviscerating a certain pitiful bitch who had the stupid audacity to approach me in a restaurant.  It was glorious.  Then, a hard cut to something far more wholesome: a dream about the release of my next book, the one I’m about to hurl into the publishing void.  No spoilers, of course, but let’s just say I woke up feeling like a goddamn superhero.

That feeling didn’t last.  Because, as is the way of the world, reality came knocking with its usual bag of horrors.  The news of the antisemitic terrorist attack in Australia hit like a liver kick.  Utterly vile.  My hat’s off to the badass who wrestled one of the attacker’s guns away – and act of courage that deserves more than a passing mention.  Would that he had finished the job, though.  My thoughts are with the victims, their families, and my Jewish friends around the world on this first day of Hanukkah.  It’s a bitter reminder that the world is still full of monsters, and not the fun, fictional kind.

On a brighter note, let’s talk about Shirley Jackson.  Today marks the birth of one of the most ferocious minds to ever put pen to paper.  If you didn’t read The Lottery in school, stop what you’re doing and fix that.  It’s a short story that will slap you across the face and leave you questioning everything you thought you knew about human nature.  And then there’s The Haunting of Hill House, a gothic masterpiece that opens with one of the most chilling paragraphs in all of literature:

No living organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.  Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more.  Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone. 

Chills. Every damn time.  That opening is a masterclass in atmosphere, a slow, deliberate tightening of the noose before you even realize it’s around your neck.  Jackson dissected the human condition with the precision of a surgeon and the malice of a cat toying with its prey.  Suburban conformity, psychological terror, the uncanny – she turned these into her playground, and the results were nothing short of devastating.  She was, in every sense of the word, a literary badass.

I aspire to write something even a fraction as haunting, as sharp, as utterly unforgettable as her opening paragraph to Hill House.  Until then, I’ll keep hammering away at these keys, dreaming in 4K, and occasionally indulging in a little dream-world vengeance.

Here’s to Shirley Jackson, to the courage of those who stand against Islamic-extremist hate, and to the strange, maddening, beautiful journey of sobriety.  Stay weird, stay wild, and for the love of all things holy, stay awake for less than 62 hours at a time.

Happy Sunday, Merry Christmas, and Happy Hanukkah.

N.P.: “I Stay Away” – Alice In Chains

December 13, 2025

 

Okay, confession time, dear reader: if you’re reading this on December 13th, congratulations – you’re three days late to the party, just like me (and frankly, just like Faulkner would’ve preferred).  But hey, what’s a Nobel speech anniversary without a little tardiness and existential disarray?  Time is a flat circle, calendars are a social construct, and whiskey tastes the same on any day ending in Y.
So, let’s rewind to December 10th, 1949, and picture it: in the icy, buttoned-up heart of Stockholm, a gaggle of Nordic royalty and tuxedoed stiff-shirts are waiting.  Waiting for a small, mustachioed man from the humid, gothic morass of Mississippi to stumble up to a podium, likely completely shit-housed, and accept the shiniest of all literary hood ornaments: the Nobel Prize.  The man is William Faulkner, author of The Sound and the Fury and cartographer of the broken human soul, and he very nearly told them to all to shove it.
This whole affair, this trans-Atlantic flight into the glacial maw of European high culture, was, for Faulkner, the type of bullshitty literary root canal he had zero intention of undergoing.  The man hated speeches.  Hated them with a passion usually reserved for tax collectors and people who dog-ear pages.  His initial, and let’s be honest, deeply admirable plan was to dispatch a two-sentence telegram.  Something along the lines of, “Fuck off.  I’m busy.” and then get back to the serious business of drinking whiskey and wrestling sentences into submission.
But pressure, for some  people, can be a hell of a thing.  Family, friends, maybe the ghost of Conrad himself, they all conspired.  So Bill gets on the goddamn plane, a tweed-clad ghost haunting the fuselage, probably already marinating his liver for the ordeal ahead.  He arrives in Stockholm, a place as alien to his Rowan Oak porch as a Marian landscape, and proceeds to do what any sane man would do when faced with a week of stilted small talk and ceremonial pomp: he gets absolutely, unequivocally hammered.
And then comes the moment.  The culmination of a year-long delay and a lifetime of torturing typewriters.  He’s shuffled to the dais, looking less like a literary titan and more like a man searching for the nearest exit and a stiff drink.  The world holds its breath, expecting a mumbled thank you, a polite nod, and a quick escape.
What they get instead is five minutes of pure, uncut, lightning-in-a-bottle prophecy.  This titan of tragedy, this man who writes novels so dense with despair you could drown in them, stands up there, swaying, and delivers the single most potent dose of secular scripture in modern history.  He talks about the atom bomb, the fear, the universal dread hanging over everyone like a shroud.  Here’s the core:
“I feel that this award is not made to me as a man, but to my work…Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it.  There are no longer problems of the spirit.  There is only the question: When will I be blown up?  Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart…
I decline to accept the end of man…I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail.  He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.”
It’s a speech so powerful, so fundamentally at odds with the bleakness of his own work, that it feels like a cosmic joke and a profound truth all at once.  Faulkner, in that moment, becomes the reluctant prophet of postwar literature.  He tells the world that the writer’s duty is to remind humanity of its courage, its honor, its hope, and its capacity for compassion.  He says this while still metabolizing a truly heroic amount of whiskey.
He drops the mic, pockets the prize money, fucks off back to Mississippi , and goes right back to writing labyrinthine masterpieces that most of America wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole.  Back to the porch and the typewriter and the dogs and the ghosts.
He keeps writing.
Books that no one buys.
Books that confuse people.
Books that bleed.
So today, we raise a glass (cheap bourbon preferred, neat, no ice) to the man who took the Nobel, told the world to get its shit together, and then went back to the swamp to keep doing the work.
He didn’t endure.
He prevailed.
And he did it broke, drunk, and brilliant.

N.P.: “Bellum Terrae Mediae” – Dogukan Ozturk