Happy Saturday, degenerate reader.  Today, September 20th, delivers a one-two punch to the  glass jaw of the status quo, birthing two titans who picked up the pen and decided to use it as a weapon: a sledgehammer and a goddamn Valyrian steel sword.  We’re talking about Upton Sinclair and George R.R. Martin – two men from significantly different eras, working in different genres, but share the same raucous, fire-breathing, tiger-blood DNA of the American Badass.  Shall we?

First up, we have Upton Sinclair, born on this day in 1878 in Baltimore, Maryland.  Perhaps the original MAHA author, Sinclair had zero interest in entertaining the gentlefolk; he wrote to kick over the tables and set the whole casino on fire.  His masterpiece, The Jungle, was a visceral, stomach-churning dive into the meatpacking industry’s disgusting underbelly.

Sinclair’s book was so brutally honest and potent that it literally changed the law.  The Pure Food and Drug Act and the creation of the FDA were both direct results.  You can thank this guy for making sure your hot dog isn’t (entirely) made of sawdust and rat parts.  To be honest, dear reader, I (like I’m assuming you were) was exposed to The Jungle on a high school reading list.  I kinda thought Uncle Upton was a one-hit wonder, but it turns out the man was a literary machine, pumping out over 90 books, each one a take-down of corruption, greed, and injustice.  He proved that a writer does a lot more than just tell stories…a writer can literally change society.  So here’s to Upton Sinclair, from back when activists could wage war with words and win.

Now, we fast forward to 1948, Bayonne, New Jersey.  George Raymond Richard Martin, a man who would look at the fairy-tale castles of fantasy, snicker and sneer, and then proceed to blow them up with dragonfire and political intrigue.  Before GRRM, fantasy had become, in far too many cases, a predictable waltz of shining heroes, cackling villains, and tidy endings.  Martin shredded off of that sort of stuff and replaced it with moral ambiguity which lead directly to your favorite character’s unexpected and brutal demise.

With A Song of Ice and Fire, starting with A Game of Thrones, he built a world so complex, and so viciously real, that it felt less like fantasy and more like a historical account from a place you’re glad you don’t live in.  Antiheroes to root for, noble men who lose their heads, and a universe where nothing can be reasonably expected.

In more local news, late last night I suddenly decided that I could not write another word in this office until I rewired part of the room and drastically improved both the number and location of speakers and Get The Music Right.  Dear reader will be forgiven if they do not understand or appreciate the importance of music in my processes.  Whatever I’m doing – writing, driving, training – I mean, I can do those things without music, sure…but they go a whole hell of a lot better when The Music Is Right.

So, to the fist-shaking and snarky-remarking chagrin of all occupants of the Safe House, I got out some tools and the inordinately noisy vacuum, and got to work.  Wires were pulled, tangled, and untangled.  Weird, only vaguely identifiable shit that had been living rent-free behind the Dissolute Desk for what I can only assume was a decade were evicted with extreme prejudice.  The vacuum roared like a jet engine, and I thought I heard bitching and protestations coming from other parts of the house, but I didn’t give a shit.  But I couldn’t be stopped by whining.  I was on a mission.  A mission to create the perfect sonic environment.

The first step was figuring out the proper speaker placement.  Now, I’m no sound engineers, but I know a bunch of them, and I used to work in a recording studio, and I’ve watched enough YouTube tutorials to know that speaker positioning is an exacting and unforgiving art.  Too close to the wall and the bass gets muddy like a swamp.  Too far apart and you lose the stereo effect.  After a lot of trial and error and bad noise (and a few near-death experiencing precariously balanced bookshelves), I finally found the sweet spot for all 17 of these things.

Next came the wiring.  In hindsight, I recognize that getting higher than an SR-71 to figure out the sweet spot mentioned slightly supra might not have been the best idea when about to attempt an unlicensed, unpermitted wiring project after midnight.  Yet there I was, crawling under the Desk at 1 a.m., flashlight in mouth, trying to figure out which cable goes where.  It’s like a high-stakes game of Twister, but with the added thrill of possibly electrocuting yourself.  Heh.  But eventually, the chaos of the cables started to make sense.  The speakers were all connected, the power strips were organized, and I even managed to label a few cords for future me.

And then, the moment of truth: the first test track.  I hit play, and the room filled with the opening notes of Boston’s The Launch.  It was glorious.  The sound was crisp, the bass was punchy and made your guts pucker, and for the first time in ages, the office felt like a place where I could finish a book.

Of course, by this point, the rest of the house was in a dark state of piss-off, audibly wishing me ill, uttering disturbing promises of retribution and vengeance for my late-night DIY project.  But as I sat there, basking in the glow of my newly optimized sound system, I knew it had all been worth it.  Now I can finish the book.

Because here’s the thing: when The Music Is Right, everything else falls into place, somehow.  Words flow more easily, ideas come faster, and even the most mundane tasks get significantly more interesting if they’re being done with a soundtrack.   Speaking of which, I need to get back to work.  And seeing how loud these speakers can actually get.

N.P.: “Innuendo” – Queen

Good evening, dear reader.  I’ve been in a not-great mood about generally everything for a week now, so I’ve been avoiding spending much time online, but I thought I’d take a break from the darkness for a bit and say hello.  Besides, today is a date of some not-inconsiderable import, a day of historical gravitas.  On this day, some 238 years prior to this present moment of typing, a clutch of bewigged and justifiably sweaty men in Philadelphia signed their names to a document of such audacious, world-reconfiguring ambition that it still causes spasms in the global body politic.  The United States Constitution.  It was a radical blueprint, a schematic for a republic scribbled down in the face of monarchical certainty, a glorious albeit flawed attempt to bottle lightning.

And yet.

On this same day, in 1935, another kind of American lightning was born out in La Junta, Colorado.  A different sort of founding father.  Ken Kesey.  The Chief.  The man who hotwired the novel and drove it straight into the psychedelic heart of the 20th century.  While those dudes in Philly were arguing about bicameral legislatures, Kesey was busy mapping the far-flung territories of the human mind, first with the cuckoo’s nest and then with the sprawling, rain-soaked, timber-striking saga of the Stamper clan.  He mainlined the American experience and spat it back out as high-voltage prose.

I had the profound and frankly reality-bending good fortune to see the man himself, live and in the flesh on a Friday the 13th in ’96, in San Francisco.  He was on stage with the Pranksters, or what was left of them.  They had a movie they had shot, and Kesey wanted to record crowd reactions…cheers, boos, the usual.  He was there with a Bay Area band called Jambay (if memory serves).  It was a chaotic explosion of light and noise and rambling, prophetic poetry.  Kesey, even then, was a titan.  He had this physical presence, a charisma that felt less like charm and more like electrical current.  Years later, not long before the final curtain fell for him, I managed a brief, halting email correspondence.  A note or three, a quick response.  At the time, for me, it was like getting a postcard from God, if God wore a funny hat and had a permanent twinkle in his eye that suggested he knew the punchline to the whole cosmic joke.

Which brings us, via a particularly noxious detour of logic, to the third and arguably most spiritually cleansing event of this day: the reported, blessed, and long-overdue demise of Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night shit show.  A true cause for national rejoicing.  Absolutely fuck Jimmy Kimmel.  I was supposed to be on his shitty show in 2005, but he cancelled.  I’m glad to have never been associated with that shitbag.  To witness the end of that suffocating pageant of obsequious celebrity interviews and steady, completely unfunny Trump Derangement Syndrome propaganda that felt more insulting than honest – it feels like a cultural fever is finally beginning to break.  Thank Christ.

So let’s raise a glass.  To the bewigged radicals in Philly who dared to dream up a nation.  To Ken Kesey, the wild-eyed Chief who showed us what it meant to be truly, anarchically free.  And to the sweet, sweet silence replacing one more smarmy, woke-infected voice in the night.  Happy Birthday, Ken.  The asylum is still running itself, but we’re still listening for your laugh in the static.

N.P.: “Electric Head, Pt 2 – Sexational After Dark Mix (Explicit)” – White Zombie

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 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

Happy September, dear reader.  Yo rent is due.

So picture this…September 1, 1952, and some editor at Life magazine is probably chain-smoking Lucky Strikes while wondering if they’ve just committed career suicide by dedicating an entire issue to what amounts to an extended fishing story.  I’m talking, of course, about Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, a novella so deceptively simple it makes you wonder if maybe, just maybe,  you’ve been overthinking this whole literature thing your entire booze-addled existence.  Or maybe that’s just me.  Anyway, the editor mentioned above need not have worried, because the story’s success was absurd: five million copies.  In two days.  Two!  As if the entire American reader public suddenly developed an inexplicable craving for tales of Cuban fisherman wrestling with marlins the size of small automobiles.  Which, when you think about it, is exactly what happened, and isn’t that just the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever heard?

Now, I know what you’re thinking – because I’m thinking it too – what kind of masochistic genius does it take to craft a story that’s essentially one old guy versus one big fish and somehow make it feel like the entire human condition is hanging in the balance?  The answer, it turns out, involves the kind of narrative compression that would make a neutron star jealous, each sentence so dense with meaning it threatens to collapse into a literary black hole.

Santiago – our weathered protagonist who’s gone eighty-four days without catching so much as a sardine (which, let’s be honest, is the kind of professional dry spell that would drive most of us to day-drinking and career reconsideration) – embodies this magnificent futility that defines the human experience.  Here’s a man who knows, knows with the certainty of sunrise and hangovers, that he’s probably going to lose this battle.  The marlin is bigger, stronger, operates in its natural element while Santiago is basically a land mammal with delusions of aquatic grandeur.  And yet – and this is where Hemingway’s genius reaches levels of almost pornographic intensity – he fights anyway.

Because what else is there to do?  Surrender to the inevitable mediocrity of a fisherman who can’t catch fish?  Accept that maybe the universe is just one giant cosmic joke and we’re all the punchline?  Hell no.  Santiago straps himself to that boat and engages in what amounts to a three-day death match with a creature that represents everything he’ll never be – young, powerful, at home in the vast indifference of the sea.

The beauty of this whole setup – and by beauty I mean the kind of terrible beauty that makes you want to simultaneously laugh and cry and pour another drink – is how Hemingway strips away every unnecessary word, every flowery metaphor, every literary flourish that might distract from the essential brutality of the confrontation.  This is prose as sharp and unforgiving as a gaff hook, sentences that cut straight to the bone of meaning without bothering with the courtesy of anesthesia.

And the kicker?  Santiago wins and loses simultaneously.  He catches the goddamn fish – this magnificent beast that represents everything noble and wild and free in the world – only to watch the sharks reduce it to a skeleton during the long journey home.  Which is, of course, exactly what life does to all our grand ambitions and noble struggles.  We fight the good fight, we occasionally triumph, and then reality shows up like a pack of hungry sharks to remind us that victory is always temporary and defeat is the only universal constant.

But here’s what those five million readers understood, consciously or not, when they devoured this story faster than Americans consume processed cheese: Santiago’s defeat isn’t really a defeat at all.  It’s defiance.  It’s the middle finger raised to a universe that seems designed to crush the human spirit.  It’s the refusal to go gentle into that good night, even when you’re 84 years old and your hands are cramping and the sharks are circling and every rational part of your brain is screaming that this is madness.

When the formerly prestigious Pulitzer committee awarded Hemingway the prize in 1954, they weren’t just recognizing technical mastery – though God knows the technical mastery is there, every sentence calibrated with the precision of a Swiss chronometer.  They were acknowledging something deeper, more essential: the recognition that great literature isn’t about happy endings or moral clarity or the comfortable illusion that virtue is rewarded and evil punished.  Great literature is about the futility of human effort in the face of cosmic indifference, and finding beauty in that futility.

So today let’s raise a glass to Santiago and his marlin, to Hemingway and his impossible brevity, to the five million readers who recognized greatness when it slapped them across the face like a salty wave.  In a world that increasingly rewards mediocrity and celebrates participation trophies, The Old Man and the Sea stands as a monument to the idea that sometimes the most heroic thing you can do is fight a battle you know you’re going to lose.

Because in the end, isn’t that what we’re all doing anyway?

N.P.: “Sunglasses On At The Dollar Store” – Shockwire

Had an opportunity to spend some time at a cemetery today.  We’re in the middle of a bit of a heat wave right now in the Creek, so it was far too hot out there for my comfort.  But heat aside, it was rather pleasant.  Not to get all goth about it, but I’ve always liked cemeteries.  I find them, as I’d imagine most do, very peaceful.  Even at night.  Especially at night.  It’s never “creepy” or even morbid.  Walking among the stones is calming in a way few other things are.  The place is quiet, obviously, but that’s not where the peace and calm come from.  Those, for me, come from the sense of absolute inevitability.  Whatever may be weighing you down in your life at the moment weighs a lot less when you are reminded that no matter what you do, no matter what choices you make, no matter how intelligent or passionate or intuitive or loved you may be, you are going to end up right here.  I recommend spending some time at a cemetery occasionally.  It’s good for you.  You need to remind yourself that The Clock Is Ticking.

Anyway, we have a few items of calendric business to attend to.  To wit:

First up, Happy Birthday to William Saroyan who was born in 1908.  In the event that dear reader is not an English major, allow me to ‘splain.  He was the guy who proved that you don’t need to kiss the ass of literary establishment to write something that’ll make grown-ass adults questions their life choices.  He was the sort of writer who looked at conventional narrative structure, laughed maniacally, and then proceeded to craft stories that hit you in the liver like a surprise audit from the IRS.

He won the Pulitzer back before the Pulitzer became a meaningless joke for The Time of Your Life – because apparently the universe has a sense of humor about timing – and then had the balls to initially reject it.  Fuck yes!  He basically told the (at the time) most prestigious literary award in America to sit on it and vigorously spin.  Also check out The Human Comedy.

Fast-forward (or rewind, depending on your relationship with linear time and sobriety) to 1837, when Ralph Waldo Emerson dropped the mic before mics were even invented, and  stood up at Harvard – again, back when Harvard was prestigious, and not a cesspool of anti-Americanism and antisemitism – and basically told American literature to grow a pair and stop copying its European homework.

“The American Scholar” was a literary declaration of independence wrapped with enough intellectual firepower to level a small philosophy department.  Emerson looked at American writers who were still desperately trying to sound British and said, essentially, “Why are you like this?”

The man had the audacity to suggest that American writers should – brace yourself, dear reader – write about America.  Revolutionary stuff, right?  Except it really was.  Before Emerson’s verbal smackdown, American literature was about as authentically American as a gas station sushi roll.

Up next…it’s We Love Memoirs Day.  I don’t usually appreciate the declaration of “Days,” to any particular cause or whatever, but since memoir is the genre I usually work in, why the hell not?  Memoirs are the literary equivalent of that friend who has absolutely no filter after three drinks: uncomfortable, brutally honest, and somehow exactly what you needed to hear.

The memoir is where we writers go to bleed on the page and somehow make it beautiful.  It’s the genre that says, “You think fiction is wild?  Hold my therapy bills.”  These are the books that make you realize your own problems aren’t so bad, or alternatively, make you question every life choice you’ve ever made.  Both outcomes are equally valid and equally entertaining.

There’s something pleasantly masochistic about diving into someone else’s trauma and calling it entertainment.  But hey, at least we’re honest about it now.  We’ve collectively decided that raw, unfiltered human experience is worth celebrating, which is either deeply profound or deeply disturbing, depending on your philosophical stance and B.A.C.

Finally, August 31, 1888 gives us the discovery of Mary Ann Nichol’s body in Whitechapel.  The first acknowledged victim of Jack the Ripper, a name that would launch a thousand terrible crime novels and enough conspiracy theories to keep internet forums busy until the heat death of the universe.

Here’s the thing about Jack the Ripper: he’s become literature’s favorite boogeyman, inspiring more truly terrible prose than a creative writing workshop after happy hour.  The man (presumably) committed horrific crimes and somehow became a cultural icon, which says something most people find deeply unsettling about our collective psyche that they don’t want to examine too closely.

The Ripper murders have spawned everything from scholarly dissertations to graphic novels to what can only be described as “fan fiction,” and honestly, that last category should probably worry you more than it does.  But there’s something about the combination of mystery, Victorian atmosphere, and genuine horror that keeps writers coming back like addicts.

What do these ridiculously disparate things have to do with each other, besides the date?  I don’t know.  Maybe nothing.  The birth of a literary rebel, a transcendentalist’s declaration of cultural independence, a celebration of oversharing as an art form, and the beginning of history’s most literary murder spree.  Yeah, nothing in common except occurring on August 31.

Which is today.  And if that’s not worth raising a glass (or six) to, then frankly, you’re taking this whole “literary appreciation” thing far too seriously.  Sometimes the best way to honor great writing is to acknowledge that it’s all beautifully, chaotically, magnificently insane – much like the people who create it and the people who consume it with the desperation of the chronically under-caffeinated.

Cheers.

N.P.: “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star – Minor Epic Version” – Rok Nardin

Apologies for my absence here yesterday, dear reader.  The whole day was nuts.

It began, as the best catastrophes do, with a mission of supposed sincerity and not nearly enough plausible deniability.  I was meeting Boochie for the express purpose of breaking the news – no Governor of California run, not for me, no way, not in this disastrous calamity of a state.

“Balls!” he said when I first told him.  “I thought that Kamala not running would be all the greenlight you’d need.”  I explained to him gently that what I really wanted to do was fight Governor Newsom, and since he’s not running in 2026, I wouldn’t even get a chance to debate him in a gubernatorial election.  Instead, I was throwing my questionable political capital behind Steve Hilton, because if you can’t be the candidate, at least endorse the guy who wears better shoes and probably doesn’t keep an emergency bottle of whiskey in his glove compartment.  So there’s that.

But you try explaining political strategy to a man three-quarters of the way through a bottle of something that tasted like the secretions of a vengeful forest spirit.  Boochie’s grin was all teeth and impending litigation, the rictus of either a prophet hallucinating the cosmos or a rat about to chew through a power line.

I delivered my little non-campaign speech, complete with what I though was sincere gravity, and Boochie blinked at me over the rim of a glass so dirty it may have predated refrigeration.

“So we’re not getting rich off graft and lobbyists.  What do we do now?  We should form a band.  Serious.  We need to make some real money.”

It’s a fact universally acknowledged – but rarely celebrated – that drunken logic breeds the great ventures of our age.  The scene: a particularly derelict dive in Fair Oaks where the paint flakes had both more character and less mold than most of the clientele.  The jukebox, naturally, seemed to be looping a twelve-minute opus that sounded suspiciously like a missile strike.

“The problem,” Boochie mused, ignoring that I had never asked, “is one of texture.  Of sonic grit.”  Modern music, he raged, had all the substance of a gluten-free communion wafer and all the bite of a neutered Yorkie.  His gesticulations nearly decapitated a man who may or may not have been part of the original construction crew of this shithole.

Meanwhile, I was deep in contemplation, deciphering an extremely crude cocktail menu that seemed equal parts alchemy and cry for help.  My notes from the evening, if you can call the napkin I later found fused to my wallet a journal, dwell in the realm of the tragicomic: “The existential dread of a dropped olive.”  If Kierkegaard had access to better olives, Danish philosophy would be very different.

There, amid the wreckage of my nascent political career and the sticky floor mosaic of spilled spirits, the fateful suggestion bloomed.  Boochie, drunk on somewhere between capitalism and literal gasoline, wanted a band.  A proper moneymaking operation.  Not just another yowling indie outfit doomed to obscurity, but something abrasive, unignorable, actively hostile to decency and taste – a sonic cleansing with a belt sander.  An industrial band.

“But the name,” Boochie slurred with entrepreneurial verve, “It’s gotta haunt people.  You want ’em to choke on their own curiosity.”

We plowed through suggestions like the local wild turkeys pecking at a landfill.  “Satan’s Power Drill.”  “Asbestos Nursery.”  “Cyborg Death Wish.”  All disqualified for either legal reasons or insufficient shock to the cardiovascular system.  I even through out “Bootie Juice,” which, if I ever started a funk band (which I’ve always wanted to do, real talk), but he vetoed it: “I do like ‘Boochie Juice, though…but not for this project.”  Alas.  And then, like a message from the universe’s deeply problematic uncle, it appeared: “We Want Children For Dinner”

The silence that followed could have been bottled and sold to Scandinavian nihilists.  Even the ancient crypt-keeper in the corner roused, possible from the afterlife.  The jukebox sputtered and died in shame.

It was the apex (or, more appropriately, the nadir) of bad taste – a perfect, monstrous idea.  It implied headline news, missing persons reports, a culinary theme better suited for litigation than lunch.  But it also sounded like money.  Or so Boochie insisted, and at that moment, with sobriety negotiating a surrender, I wasn’t equipped to disagree.

Handshakes.  Terrible vows.  An oath sworn over the ruins of a night that shouldn’t be immortalized but probably will be.  The post-midnight adventures unraveled predictably: a philosophical spat with a parking meter, the futile pursuit of tacos in a city hostile to dreams, a dissertation-level debate over whether squirrels can experience ennui.

Morning arrived like a SWAT team.  Skull pounding, tongue coated in oxidized pennies, I excavated from the disaster-area Safe House a napkin.  On it: “First album title: Lullabies for the Abattoir.”  Lordy.  We may not have a government to run, but apparently, we’ve got a band to start – or, more accurately, a creepy financial venture and a murder of hangovers to outlast.  Who knows?  In this world, only the deeply unserious have a fighting chance.

But never mind all that.  Today, August 28th, is a day of cosmic convergence, a chronological pile-up of such staggering, brain-melting significance that it makes you wonder if the universe is just a high-concept practical joke scripted by a committee of high-as-fuck philosophy majors.  On this day, two absolute titans were shot into this mortal coil, separated by a mere 168 years but spiritually joined at the hip like some kind of weird, metaphysical, world-building conjoined twin.

I’m talking, of course, about Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Jack “The King” Kirby.

Yes, you heard that right.  The German Übermensch of letters, the dude who gave us Faust and basically invented the modern goth concept of feeling all your feelings in a very dramatic, poetic way.  And the King of Comics, the human dynamo from the Lower East Side who drew gods and monsters with a pencil stub, birthing entire universes crackling with cosmic energy dots, a.k.a. Kirby Krackle.  It’s the literary equivalent of pairing a fine, aged Riesling with a fistful of Pop Rocks.  And it is glorious.

Let’s start with Goethe, born way back in 1749.  Dude was a one-man Enlightenment party.  He was a poet, a playwright, a novelist, a scientist who argued about the nature of light, and probably, if you checked his journals, a surprisingly good clog dancer.  He penned The Sorrows of Young Werther, a novel so emotionally potent it allegedly sparked a wave of copycat suicides across Europe, making him the original influencer of bespoke misery.  Then he drops Faust, a story about a guy who sells his soul to the devil for unlimited knowledge and, let’s be honest, a better social life.  It’s a sprawling, impossibly dense masterpiece that I, having failed to get to it earlier in the semester, once tried to read in a single weekend.  The attempt left me questioning my own sanity and the structural integrity of the English language itself.  Goethe was operating on a level of pure, uncut genius that most of us can only squint at from a safe distance.

Then, fast-forward to 1917.  The world is a different kind of chaotic, and out of this industrial grinder pops Jacob Kurtzberg, soon to be known as Jack Kirby.  While Goethe was wrestling with existential dread in iambic pentameter, Kirby was busy creating a new mythology with ink and pulp paper.  Captain America punching Hitler in the jaw?  That was jack.  The Fantastic Four, a dysfunctional family with superpowers bickering their way across the galaxy?  Jack.  Thor, the Silver Surfer, the New Gods, Darkseid – all modern archetypes, splashed onto the page with an explosive, kinetic force.  He art was much more than just “drawings” – they were detonations.  Every panel is a testament to raw, untethered imagination.  His figures are all barrel chests and impossible angles that lesser artists are still trying to rip off today.  He gave us a visual language for the sheer, pants-wetting awe of the cosmos, all while chain-smoking a cigar and meeting impossible deadlines.

So what, you might ask, dear reader, besides a shared birthday, connects the Weimar classicist with the King of comics?  Everything.  Both were architects of worlds.  Both stared into the abyss of the human condition – the struggle for knowledge, the temptation of power, the clash between gods and mortals – and wrestled it onto the page.  Goethe gave us Mephistopheles, the charming, urbane demon whispering deals in our ears.  Kirby gave us Galactus, the planet-eater, a force of nature so vast it rendered mortality irrelevant.  They were both dealing with the same big-ticket questions, just using different toolkits.

So tonight, let’s raise a glass.  To Goethe, for making existential despair so eloquent.  And to Kirby, for showing us that the universe is a weird, wonderful, and often violent place filled with gods who look suspiciously like they spend a lot of time at the gym.  Happy birthday to both of you.  Thanks for making reality a little more interesting.  The hangover will be worth it.  Probably.

N.P.: “Bob George” – JaGoFF