Today has been ridiculous, dear reader.  Started with coffee and a McRib.  Things only went downhill from there.  Still managed to work on the book a bit.  I have to go fight a bunch of guys in a bit (training, of course), but after that, I’ll be glad to see this day in the rearview mirror.

But before I can put this day to bed, we have a bit of D.P.S. business.  For you see, dear reader, on this day in 1865, Mark Twain – that literary, whiskey-soaked middle finger to Victorian decorum – published “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” in the New York Saturday Press.  It was a story about a frog.  A frog that jumps.  Or doesn’t.  Depending on whether someone has secretly filled it with buckshot.  And it is, in every sense that matters, the moment American literature stopped pretending to be British and started chain-smoking behind the barn.

The plot, such that it is, is a barroom anecdote nested inside a shaggy-dog story wrapped in some thick dialect.  A man named Smiley, who bets on everything from horse races to the lifespan of parsons, trains a frog named Dan’l Webster to jump farther than any other frog in Calaveras County (which county is about 70 miles from where yrs. truly is presently parked behind the Dissolute Desk).  Enter the stranger, the con, the existential cheap-shot: Dan’l gets sabotaged, stuffed with lead, and loses the bet.  Smiley is swindled.  The frog is betrayed.  The reader is left somewhere between hysterical laughter and a creeping suspicion that the whole damn country runs on this kind of absurdity.

This story is a blueprint for the American psyche: the pathological gambler, the weaponized anecdote, the amphibian as metaphor for hope and humiliation.  Twain’s genius here isn’t just the humor – it’s the architecture of the joke, the way he builds a cathedral out of frontier horseshit and then sets fire to it with a single punchline.  This was a bit of a tectonic shift: our literature stopped being about noble suffering and starts being about the guy who loses his ass because someone cheated at frog-jumping.

This was Twain’s breakout.  The moment the literary establishment looked up from its tea and said, “Wait, what the hell was that?”  It was the sound of the West elbowing its way into the stodgy parlor, with muddy boots, crooked sneer, frog in hand.

So raise a glass to Dan’l Webster, the frog who couldn’t jump because he was full of lead.  He is us.  He is America.  And Twain the guy in the corner, watching it all, scribbling furiously, and laughing like hell because he knows the joke is always on us.

N.P.: “Ain’t No Man Alive Can Handle Me” – Dumpster Grooves, Bertha Mae Lightning

Connectivity.
The internet’s an asshole.
Cloud cover too thick?

Hot damn, dear reader…there is light at the end of this long, circuitous, Byzantine, labyrinthine, and ludicrous writing process for the goddamn book.  I’ll officially begin shopping it around for a deal in early ’26.  Because 20 years between books is totally normal, right?  My hopes are high, but I’m trying to manage my expectations.  As always, I’ll be looking for Fuck You money for this thing, but what I’m really looking forward to, believe it or not, is finally being able just to talk about it.  Having to maintain this Masonic air of secrecy around the whole project for all these years hasn’t necessarily been difficult, but it has been a pain in the ass.

Speaking of pains in the ass, today’s date – November 16th – appears to be a sort of nodal point in the chaotic, often self-immolating timeline of literary insurrection.  Five seismic events, five big fuck-yous to the status quo, five reasons to believe that writing – real writing – is still the most dangerous thing you can do with your clothes on.

Exhibit A: We jump back to 1860, where a certain Fyodor Dostoevsky, fresh off a four-year sabbatical in the Czar’s least hospitable Siberian resorts and a mock execution…does my dear young reader even know what that is?  Imagine this: you’re blindfolded, standing in front of a firing squad, heart jackhammering like a meth-addicted woodpecker, and just as the rifles rise – a reprieve.  Not mercy, but bureaucratic sadism.  That’s the crucible Dostoevsky crawled out of before he wrote The House of the Dead, serialized today in 1860 in Vremya magazine.  Did you ever see HBO’s Oz?  Well, this makes that look like Sesame Street.  Russia banned it for “undermining authority,” which is apparatchik-speak for “telling a truth with a scalpel.”

Fast forward to Copenhagen, 1885.  This guy August Strindberg stages Miss Julie.  Class warfare, sexual humiliation, psychological evisceration – all in a goddamn kitchen.  Strindberg directed it himself, then tore ass out of Sweden when he knew the pitchforks were coming.  Critics called it “obscene,” which is rich coming from a country that invented IKEA.  The Swedes banned it until 1906.  But the damage was done: realism was dead, and theater would never be safe again.

Then 1938.  The world is going dark, goose-stepping toward oblivion.  Bertolt Brecht was holed up in exile in Denmark, fleeing the Gestapo with the ink still wet on his passport.  Fear and Misery of the Third Reich dropped today in 1938 – 24 scenes of quotidian Nazi terror disguised as cabaret.  It was agitprop performed in basements.  The Nazis, in a stunning lack of self-awareness, burned the book in Berlin, providing the most ringing endorsement a writer could ever hope for.

Jump to 1952.  Ernest Hemingway, holed up in Cuba and dodging the FBI between mojitos, publishes The Old Man and the Sea in a single issue of Life magazine.  It was 72 pages of ruthlessly stripped-down, sunburned prose.  He took a simple goddamn fishing trip and hammered it into a crucifixion myth.  Five million copies sold in 48 hours.  It was a cultural event, a literary knockout that won Papa the Pulitzer and, eventually, the Nobel.  The man mailed the manuscript from a bar, probably bleeding from a marlin gaff and muttering about grace under pressure.  Literature’s heavyweight champ, still swinging.

And finally, the cherry on this chaotic sundae: 1967.  Our favorite Kentucky-born degenerate, Hunter S. Thompson publishes Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga.  HST embedded with the Angels for a year, rode with them, drank with them,  until the inevitable, teeth-shattering climax where they stomped him into the dirt.    He lived the story, then wrote it while still bleeding, blurring the line between observer and participant until it ceased to exist.  The book got banned for “glorifying violence,” which, like all the others on this list, meant it was simply too honest for the delicate sensibilities of the people in charge.

So here’s to November 16 – a date that reads like a rap sheet for the literary criminally insane.  These were saboteurs, prophets, and beautifully deranged motherfuckers who made art dangerous again.  If you’re not pissing someone off, you’re probably just typing.

Stay tuned.  The book’s coming.  And when it drops, I want it to be quite a fucking thing.
Light your cigarettes.  Stockpile ammo.  The storm’s coming.

N.P.: “Listen To My Voice” – Gary Numan

Today is a great day, dear reader.  Not in the saccharine, Instagrammable, “live laugh love” horseshitty sense of the phrase, but in a way a thunderclap is great, or a freight train derailing into a fireworks factory is great – loud, messy, and absolutely unignorable.  Today is a great day because the sky over Anhedonia County has finally cracked open like a long-suffering ulcer, hemorrhaging a steady, blessed rain onto the parched bones of The Creek.  The gutters are gurgling like drunks in a confession booth, the air smells like wet asphalt and ozone, and the squirrels are losing their tiny minds.  It’s glorious.

Second, and this is not a drill, today is November 13th, the birthday of Robert Louis Stevenson – patron saint of duality, chronicler of pirates, and the man who taught us that every respectable gentleman has a snarling, libidinal monster just beneath the waistcoat.  Raise a glass of laudanum-laced absinthe in his honor, or at least mutter a curse at the mirror and see who blinks first.

But the third reason is the real meat of the matter, both literal and metaphysical.  The McRib is back.  Yes.  That unholy slab of reconstituted pork slurry, shaped like a rack of ribs by someone who’s only ever seen ribs in a dream, slathered in a sauce so sweet it could double as embalming fluid.  It’s back.  And I, for one, have already eaten two.  Possibly three.  I blacked out somewhere between the second and the third and woke up with barbecue sauce on my collar and a vague sense of spiritual renewal.

There’s something about the McRib’s seasonal resurrection that feels like a pagan rite – like Persephone clawing her way out of the underworld, except she’s made of pork and corn syrup and corporate nostalgia.  It’s a culinary Brigadoon, a meat mirage that appears just long enough to remind us that joy is fleeting, and then vanishes again into the marketing ether.  You don’t eat a McRib because it’s good.  You eat it because it’s back.  You eat it because you’re alive, dammit, and because the rain is falling, and because Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote about a man who turned into a beast and you, too, feel the beast stirring when you smell that tangy, smoky perfume wafting from the Golden Arches.

So yes, today is a great day.  The sky is weeping, the dead are remembered, and the McRib is back.  It that’s not enough to make you howl at the clouds and dance barefoot in the mud, then brother, I don’t know what the hell you’re doing here.

Now go forth.  Eat recklessly.  Write dangerously.  And if you see me in The Creek, sauce-stained and grinning like a pervert, just nod and keep walking.  Some days are too good to explain.

N.P.: “Simple Life” – Elton John

So you think you know what it takes to be a writer.  You’ve got your little Moleskine, your artisanal coffee, your carefully curated suffering that looks great on an author bio.  That’s cute.  Let’s talk about November 9th, a date that serves as a goddamn benchmark for the kind of beautiful, high-octane derangement that actually forges words into weapons.  Writing, dear reader, isn’t about tweed jackets; it’s about the howling chaos at the core of the human machine.

First, we rewind the tape to London, 1938.  The air is thick with fascist foreplay and impending war as the city holds its breath before the Luftwaffe turns the sky into fire.  Dylan Thomas (whose birthday we just celebrated here on October 27), 24, the Welsh wunderkind with a voice like God gargling gravel, incandescently drunk on love and existential rage, decides to get hitched.  He makes a quick, unceremonious trip to the registry office with Caitlin Macnamara.  A lesser man night have called it a day, maybe had a nice dinner, and worried about the existential dread of both matrimony and aerial bombardment.

Not Dylan…fuck no, thank you very much.  This is Dylan Thomas.  He drags his new bride to a pub, fueled by a cocktail of love, booze, and pure defiance, and proceeds to hammer out the final lines of “And death shall have no dominion,” a poem so defiant it might was well have  been written in whiskey and gunpowder.  That’s how it’s done.  While the world is gearing up for mass slaughter, Thomas is scribbling a poem that gives the concept of death The Finger.

“Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again” – a line that got read over BBC airwaves while London burned, carved into war memorials, tattooed on soldiers, screamed at protests, and became a mantra for a people staring into the abyss.

Fast forward to 1965, New York City.  The scene shifts from Blitz-era balls to a different type of explosion: the psychic detonation of Norman Mailer.  After a party saturated with that special 60s blend of intellectual preening and pharmaceutical excess, Mailer, high on coke and ego and profoundly misguided artistic rage, stabs his wife Adele Morales with a penknife.  I fear the young and temporally myopic dear reader may not know what a penknife is: it’s a small, folding knife originally designed for sharpening quill pens, hence the name.  Over time, it evolved into a compact, pocket-sized blade used for general utility tasks like cutting string, opening packages, pretty much a contemporary pocket-knife.

She survives, miraculously.  He pleads guilty to assault.  So what does this literary lion, the heavyweight champion of American letters, do next?  He writes An American Dream.  It’s a novel about a man who – and you can’t make this up – murders his wife and gets away with it. This book is not safe.  It’s certainly not sane.  It’s a literary psych ward with no exit signs.  Critics screamed and called it monstrous.  Feminists demanded his head on a platter.  Mailer, with a shrug that could curdle milk, called it “the most honest thing I’ve ever written,” which is like Charles Manson saying he finally found his truth in finger painting.  It immediately sold 800,000 copies.  Because America loves its monsters, especially when they write well.  Literature rarely gets more dangerous than this, unless you could the times when Burroughs shot his wife in the face or when Hemingway tried to wrestle a shark for his manuscript.  Forget your “edgy” campus novels.  This was a man wrestling his own demons on the page for all the world to see, and daring you to look away.

Which brings us, dear reader, twitching and grinding our teeth, to today.  November 9, 2025.  Right here, right now.  Your humble narrator, Jayson Gallaway – yes, the literary berserker with the limo-tinted eyes (“he can see out, but no one can see in”) and a keyboard soaked in venom and heartbreak, is engaged in a similar, if less publicly felonious, form of literary combat, slaving over a manuscript so unhinged it makes American Psycho look like a coloring book.  The masterpiece is taking shape, a psycho-symphony of words pried from the clammy darkness   The day’s schedule is a testament to the modern writer’s balanced life: a hyper-caffeinated morning spent wrestling sentences into submission, a brief pause for a sandwich that tastes like ash, and then the obligatory trip to the local asylum to visit a loved one whose grip on reality makes my own seem downright respectable.

And then, the real work.  An unscheduled detour into pest control.  Last night, a raccoon – a fat, insolent little fucker with the eyes of a tiny, furry gangster – had the sheer temerity, the stupid audacity, the unmitigated gall to sass me while I was defending the family trash can.  There are lines, you see.  An unspoken contract between man and beast that this particular creature violated with gusto.  As always, I choose violence.  So tonight, under the cold glare of a November moon, justice will be served.  I’m going to murder that little motherfucker.  Not metaphorically.  Not poetically.  Just good old-fashioned trashcan vengeance.  It’s a small, violent, and frankly necessary act of reclaiming order in a universe that constantly threatens to spin out of control.  Granted, it’s not stabbing your wife, and it’s not defying the Third Reich, but it’s the same goddamn impulse.  It’s the primal scream against the chaos, whether that chaos comes from a bomber, a marriage, or a chittering idiot thief in the night.

Today is a hallowed day of for the beautifully deranged, the dangerously honest, and the creatively unhinged.  If you’re not writing something that could get you arrested, excommunicated, or canonized, then what the hell are you doing?  On this day of literary madness, raise a glass to the lunatics: to Thomas, Mailer, and all the other maniacs who understood that writing isn’t about telling a story.  It’s about grabbing life by the throat, staring into its wild, bloodshot eyes, and refusing to be the first one to blink.

N.P.: “Edie (Ciao Baby) – The Cult

Well, thank Christ that’s over.  What a fucking flop!  Last night’s so-called “celebration” was less a perverted bacchanal of costumed chaos and more a pathetic exercise in suburban futility.  Two kids.  Two!  As in, one pair.  As in, not even enough to form a quorum for a haunted game of Duck Duck Goose.  Last year, the Safe House was a sugar-slick war zone – doorbell ringing like a fire alarm, candy flying like ticker tape, tiny goblins and superheroes swarming like locusts.  So naturally, this year, I prepared.  I went full Costco.  Bought enough candy to induce a diabetic coma in a mid-sized village.  And what did I get?  A couple of half assed Elsa knockoffs and a lingering sense of betrayal.

Why the ghost-town turnout?  Maybe the neighborhood kids unionized and declared our porch “too spooky.”  I’d suspect the local HOA banned fun or something, but they were all executed by firing squad in 2023.  Maybe there was a TikTok trend warning that the Safe House was haunted by the ghost of last year’s dentist.  Or maybe the children of Fecal Creek have evolved beyond candy, now subsisting entirely on influencer merch and weed.  Whatever the reason, I’m left with a mountain of uneaten sugar and a soul full of rage.  But never mind all that.

Today, November 1st, is National Author’s Day – a Hallmarkian nod to the ink-slingers, the word-jockeys, the caffeine-addled typists who dare to make meaning out of the chaos.  It’s a day for celebrating literary contributions, which is a polite euphemism for “thank you for bleeding onto the page so we don’t have to.”  And while the usual suspects will be trotted out – your novelists, your poets, your memoirists (those pains in the ass) with their trauma-for-breakfast – today we raise a glass (or a Hustler-branded flask full of rotgut bourbon) to one of the most subversive authors this country ever produced: Larry Claxton Flynt, Jr.

Born in Lakeville, Kentucky, in 1942, Flynt emerged from the American South like a libidinous banshee with a printing press.  He didn’t write novels.  He didn’t write essays.  He wrote Hustler.  And Hustler was a glossy, sticky dirty bomb unleashed directly on the sanctimonious façade of American decency.

Flynt understood something most authors only flirt with in the MFA programs before retreating to the safety of metaphor: that the First Amendment is not a polite suggestion.  It’s a weapon, and in 1988, he proved it.  Hustler Magazine v. Falwell was more like constitutional poetry than a court case.  The Supreme Court ruled that parody – even the kind that makes televangelists cry into their gold-plated bathtubs – is protected speech.

And let’s not forget, dear reader: the man took a bullet in 1978.  A literal bullet.  Not a metaphorical one.  Not a bad review or a mean tweet.  A real, spinal-cord-shattering, life-altering slug from a maniac.  But that didn’t even slow Uncle Larry down.  He kept publishing.  Fram a wheelchair.  With a golden gun and a mouth full of legal venom.  He became the wheelchair-bound warlord of the First Amendment, rolling through courtrooms and editorial meetings like a tank made of smut and jurisprudence.

So on this National Author’s Day, while your sipping your pumpkin spice latte and posting quotes from dead poets on Instagram, take a moment to honor the man who reminded us that literature isn’t always pretty.  Sometimes its profane.  Sometimes its naked.  Sometimes its waving your middle finger while quoting the Constitution.  Larry Flynt bulldozed boundaries, lit them on fire, and published the photos.

Happy birthday, Larry, you old pervert.

N.P.: “Get Em Up” – Paul Oakenfold, Ice Cube

It’s October, the weather is cool and cloudy with rain in the forecast, the book is coming together sexily, and I’m happier than a pig in shit.  I don’t think I need to remind my dear reader that this is the beginning of the half of the year when my mood elevates, the writing gets better, and everything is just generally, nebulously better (the other half of the year, is, of course, during those hot and rotten months between April and September, during which months I become quite cranky and tend to by prone to long fits of bitching).  The night are getting longer and cooler, and the overall spookiness level is increasing.

Speaking of spooky, guess who kicked the bucket on October 7, 1849?  You guessed it.  The curtain dropped with a fucking thud on the epic, booze-soaked opera of Edgar Allan Poe.  It’s a tad ironic: despite being the man who pretty much invented the modern detective story, his own final act remains the most unsolved, messy whodunit of them all.  No neat and tidy conclusion here…no.  Poe’s exit from this mortal coil was a masterclass in gothic squalor, a final poem written in gutter water and cheap whiskey.

In case you’re fuzzy on the details, let’s rewind the tape.  Four days prior, our man Poe – the architect of premature burials and talking ravens, the illustrious potentate of existential dread (fuck yeah!) – is discovered face-down in the Baltimore muck.  He’s not in his own clothes, of course, but some poor bastard’s ill-fitting hand-me-downs, looking like a scarecrow that lost a fistfight with a hurricane.  He’s delirious, babbling incoherently, and repeatedly calling out for a ghost named “Reynolds.”  It’s exactly the kind of scene you’d expect to find in one of his stories…a perfect, sordid tableau of a live lived on the jagged edge of brilliance and ruin.

And that man knew how to live.  He wasn’t a typical, delicate flower of the literary scene.  Fuck no…this was Poe.  He dueled with critics, swam against the current of public opinion, and funded his own genius out-of-pocket while dodging creditors like a man who couldn’t pay his bills.  He mainlined his opium-laced nightmares directly onto the page, creating worlds of horror that would later inspire whole generations of writers from Lovecraft to King.  He gave us C. Auguste Dupin, the original armchair detective, and laid the foundation for every Sherlock to follow.  He was a literary machine, churning out stories of such psychological depth that they make most modern thrillers look like kids’ bedtime stories.

So what was it that finally punched his ticket?  The official record is a blank stare…the bureaucratic shrug.  So, of course, there are theories: was it rabies?  A brain tumor?  Or was is something far more fittingly sordid?  Keep in mind, Baltimore in the 19th century was a snake pit of political corruption, and election days were notorious for “cooping”  – a practice where unwilling citizens were drugged, beaten, and forced to vote multiple times.  The image of Poe, the ultimate anti-authoritarian, being dragged from polling station to polling station by a gang of political thugs is almost too darkly poetic not to be true.

He died in a hospital bed, still ranting, still lost in the labyrinth of his own mind.  His final words were reportedly, “Lord, help my poor soul.”  A fitting, desperate plea from a man who spent his entire career mapping the darkest corners of the human spirit.  He was only 40.

Fortunately for us, death didn’t silence Poe.  It immortalized him.  It transformed his obituary into the ultimate noir thriller, an eternal riddle wrapped in a mystery inside a bottle of shitty gin.  His end wasn’t a tragedy; it was his final literary contribution.  A perfectly crafted, perpetually maddening, and profoundly badass disappearing act.  Quoth the Raven, nevermore?  Horse feathers.  The bird is still flying.

N.P.: “7th Symphony – Second Movement – Lofi Version” – ClassicFi, Ludwig van Beethoven

Happy Saturday, dear reader.  And what a glorious Saturday morning it is.  I slept my ass off last night.  I’ve been missing a lot of sleep the last few weeks, staying up late or waking up early to work on the book.  And it’s absolutely been worth it, but it’s been not without its drawbacks, the main one being I’m tired all the goddamn time.  So last night was much needed.  Woke up fresh as a fucking daisy.

Speaking of using the night for things other than sleep, the Badass Literary Calendar tells us that on this day in 1941, in the sultry, jazz-soaked, and decadently decaying heart of New Orleans, Anne Rice was born…the woman who would go on to redefine vampires, gothic fiction, and, really, the entire concept of brooding immortality.

Anne Rice conjured her worlds with a floridity that many found to be a bit much, but given her subject matter, I think her rococo style, going on for pages about the décor of a room, worked.  She gave us worlds where the night was always young, the wine was always red (and occasionally hemoglobin-rich), and the existential crises were as thick as the fog rolling off the Mississippi.  She gave us Lestat, the rockstar vampire with a God complex and a penchant for melodrama that made Hamlet look like a well-adjusted life coach.  She gave us Louis, the original sad boy, who could out-emo any eyeliner-wearing, Cure-listening teenager in the 80s.  And she gave us a New Orleans that was equal parts haunted mansion and hallucination, a place where the line between the living and the dead was as thin as one of her overly-described lace curtains.

But Anne didn’t limit herself to vampires.  She tackled witches, mummies, and even Jesus Christ himself with the same fearless, no-holds-barred approach.  She was a literary badass who didn’t give a damn about genre conventions or what the critics thought.  She wrote what she wanted, how she wanted, and in doing so, she inspired generations of writers, readers, and goth kids who finally felt seen.

So today, we raise a glass (or a goblet, if you’re feeling fancy and really want to get into the spirit of things) to Anne Rice.  Her genius, her audacity, and her ability to make the macabre feel downright sexy.  Happy Birthday, Anne.  The world is a darker, more deliciously twisted place because of you.

And to the aspiring writers out there: take a page from Anne’s book.  Write fearlessly.  Write passionately.  And for the love of all that is unholy, don’t be afraid to get a little weird.
Cheers to the Queen of the Damned.  May her legacy live forever – just like her vampires.

N.P.: “A Funeral Of A Provincial Vampire” – Jelonek