It’s not easy working on a book that you believe no publisher will ever touch.  There are morale issues with such an endeavor.  It can get tough to summon the energy and dedication to create something that may never see the light of day due to societal pusillanimity.  We live in the age of cowards, dear reader, which is wrist-slittingly depressing for some of us.  American society needs this book, but they are too afraid to even crack it.   Of course, if it does get published, it will be pretty revolutionary, if I may say so myself.

Here’s the thing about literary revolutions – they usually happen on Tuesday afternoons when  nobody’s paying attention, involving men with bad lungs and worse attitudes toward authority.  Which brings us, in that meandering way that all good stories eventually stumble toward their point (assuming they have one, which this one does, I think), to August 15th, 1945, when a certain skinny Brit named Eric Blair – though you probably know him by his pen name, the infinitely more ominous George Orwell – unleashed what might be the most savage takedown of totalitarian bullshit ever disguised as a children’s book about barnyard animals.  Animal Farm.  Two words that would make commissars shit themselves for decades to come.  Now, you might be thinking (and who am I to stop you from thinking, though the habit has become dangerous since this shitty decade began): “What’s so revolutionary about talking pigs?”  First you need to understand that this isn’t your average Charlotte’s Web situation.  This is literary napalm wrapped in the deceptively simple packaging of a fairy tale, which is exactly what makes it so goddamn brilliant.

Dig, if you will, this picture: It’s the middle of World War II, and here’s Orwell – already establishing himself as the kind of writer who looked at power structures the way an entomologist looks at particularly disgusting insects – crafting this razor-sharp allegory while the world burns around him.  The man had seen the writing on the wall (literally, considering his later work), and that writing spelled out the uncomfortable truth that maybe, just maybe, our glorious Soviet allies weren’t the freedom-loving champions of the proletariat they claimed to be.

But here’s where it gets interesting (and by interesting, I mean the kind of publishing nightmare that would make modern literary agents reach for the bourbon): Nobody wanted to touch this thing.  Publishers circled it like it was radioactive – which, in a sense, it was.  Political sensitivities were running higher than a meth-addled bat, and here comes Orwell with his talking pigs basically calling out Stalin as just another power-drunk pig in a different trough.

The rejection letters must have been poetry in their own right.  “Dear Mr. Blair, while we admire your allegorical approach to critiquing totalitarian regimes through the lens of barnyard democracy, we feel that now might not be the optimal time to publish what amounts to a literary assassination attempt on our wartime ally’s political system.  Also, talking animals are weird.  Sincerely, Cowardly Publishing House.”

But Orwell, bless his stubborn soul, kept pushing.  Because that’s what real writers do when they’ve got something to say: they say it, consequences be fucked.  The man had already taken a bullet fighting fascists in Spain (literally, through the throat), so a few nervous publishers weren’t about to stop him from exposing the porcine nature of power.

And then, finally, August 15th, 1945.  Secker and Warburg – publishers with enough testicular fortitude to recognize genius when it came wrapped in barnyard satire – released this literary dirty bomb into the world.  The timing was almost poetic: Japan had just surrendered, the war was ending, and suddenly everyone was free to start asking uncomfortable questions about what exactly they’d been fighting for.

The beauty of Animal Farm…the sheer, devastating brilliance of it…is how it works on multiple levels simultaneously.  Kids can read it as a simple story about farm animals.  Adults can appreciate it as a scathing indictment of Soviet totalitarianism.  Political scientists can analyze it as a meditation on the corruption of revolutionary ideals.  And cynics (like yrs. truly) can admire it as proof that sometimes the best way to tell the truth is to dress it up as a lie.

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”  If that line doesn’t make you simultaneously laugh and want to burn down the nearest government building, you might want to check your pulse.

The book’s impact was immediate and massive.  Here was someone finally saying what a lot of people had been thinking but were too polite (or terrified) to articulate: that power corrupts absolutely, regardless of the ideology used to justify it.  That revolutionary leaders have an unfortunate tendency to become the very thing they overthrew.  That the pigs, quite literally, end up indistinguishable from the humans.

What makes this whole story even more tasty is the context: while Orwell was writing this devastating critique of Soviet communism, the Western world was still largely enchanted with Stalin and company.  The man was essentially committing literary treason against the prevailing narrative, and he did it with such style and wit that by the time people realized what he was doing, it was too late to stop him.

The book became a phenomenon – banned in Soviet countries (natch), embraced by Western readers hungry for someone to finally call bullshit on the whole utopian communist experiment, and studied in schools worldwide as an example of how literature can be both entertaining and subversive as hell.

So raise a glass (or 12) to George Orwell, literary badass and professional pain-in-the-ass to tyrants everywhere.  The man who proved that sometimes the most revolutionary act is simply telling the truth, even when – especially when – nobody wants to hear it.  He gave us talking pigs that tell us more about human nature than most humans ever will.

And that, dear reader, is how you stage a literary revolution.

Because in the end, we’re all just animals in someone else’s farm.  The question is: are we going to be the sheep, or are we going to be the ones exposing the pigs?

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need another drink.  All this talk of revolution and talking pigs has left me thirsty for desk bourbon and suspicious of barnyard animals.

N.P.: “My Angel” – Binary Park

I don’t even know why I try to do any serious writing in the summer…I have never been able to artfully express myself in this ridiculous and oppressive heat.  The higher the temperature, the lower the (good) word count.  That said, I shall continue to press, continue trying.  What the hell else am I going to do.

Today is a Triple Death Day on the D.P.S. calendar, so pour some out and throw some back for three literary badasses who have gone on to their Great Reward.  Unfortunately, I’ll have to be shamefully brief for each one, as this goddamn book is demanding attention, and I’m in no position to deny it.

Up (or perhaps down) first is William Blake.  This visionary poet and artist passed away on August 12, 1827.  If you’re not familiar, I highly recommend checking out Songs of Innocence and of Experience and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, both being absolutely revolutionary, blending mysticism, some pretty radical politics, and raw creativity.  Blake’s defiance of conventional norms along with his unapologetic exploration of human nature and spirituality make his legacy patently badass in its fearless originality.  His death marked the end of a fascinating life spent challenging the status quo through art and words.

Next we have Thomas Mann, the German novelist and Nobel Prize winner who died on August 12, 1955.  If the dear reader is not familiar with him, check out Death in Venice and The Magic Mountain.  These both tackle some pretty big ideas – desire, morality, and the human condition – unflinchingly.  Mann showed a lot of courage in critiquing his society, especially during the rise of actual Nazism.  He has earned his place here for myriad reasons, with one of the biggest being impressive intellectual bravery.

Lastly is Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, who died on August 12, 1964.  The Bond novels, starting with Casino Royale, redefined spy fiction with their suave, gritty, and unapologetically adventurous style.  Fleming used his own experiences as a naval intelligence officer to fuel his stories with a raw, larger-than-life energy – think fast cars, high stakes, and a hero who’s cool under pressure.  His death marked a pivotal moment for a franchise that still dominates pop culture, though now more for controversy than solid storytelling…recent efforts to make James Bond female have been met with bitter and brutal backlash from those of us who understand that you can’t swap the gender of a beloved character without profoundly changing that characters in ways that would make the original creator reach for a weapon in his grave.

Alright, dear reader…back to it.

N.P.: “Skeletal Parade” – Santa Hates You

Ugh, dear reader.  Your boy was laid low by a particularly pernicious case of The Crud.  Not just your common corner-store head cold, either – no, this was full-on pestilence, like consumption but with fewer dramatic gasps and more snot.  I’ve been sweating through my sheets like…I dunno, something that sweats inordinate amounts in the night, throat raw enough to be legally declared sushi, and my voice was just shot to hell.  Imagine Tom Waits gargling gravel in a hurricane.  It’s be a goddamn opera of misery with yrs. truly singing lead.

Alas, life, of course, refuses to press “pause” just because I’m horizontal and leaking from the face.  Which brings us to more pleasant things, a couple of things that made me smile whilst suffering the sickness.  To wit:

1. The days, dear reader, are getting noticeably shorter, while the nights are stretching their long, velvety fingers further and further into our lives.  This is the ever-shortening runway to autumn, the season that smells like woodsmoke and tastes like apple cider donuts.  And
2. Halloween is just 91 days away.  Just enough time to make panic decisions about costumes, pretend you’re thrilled when someone inevitably starts barking about pumpkin spice season, and stockpile a metric shit-ton of candy you have no intention of sharing with children.

As you know, dear reader, I love Halloween.  Think it’s great.  And I can’t wait for it to get here.  That said, however, a week ago…ya know, back in July…as I was driving skillfully through a college marching band, my eye was caught by something orange, black, and familiar: a sign for a Spirit Halloween Store.  In fucking July!  Then, the next night, I walked into the Fecal Creek Costco and couldn’t help but notice a 20-foot skeleton standing in the middle of a huge Halloween section.  Also in fucking July!  Again, I’m all about Halloween, but god damn!

Here’s the thing: Halloween is great in its own right, but a big part of why I love it has to do with all the other decidedly fall/winter things the holiday brings: Fall, and cooler weather, longer nights, the smell of rain on dead leaves.  And it’s the kick of “the holiday season.”  Time to watch horror movies and make beef stew.  It’s the same reason seeing pro football on tv makes me so happy.  I don’t give a shit about football, and fuck the NFL anyway.  No…football on TV means fall and winter are upon us.  Doing anything Halloweeny while it’s 100°F outside is grotesque.

Anyway, so much for all that.  We have a bit of D.P.S. business: today is Herman Melville’s birthday.  Uncle Herm was a master of deep-sea metaphors, perverse literary masochism, and radically labyrinthine sentences.  He took a whale, shock it so hard it became an existential crises, and then made everyone read 800 pages about it.

For the non-English majors joining us this evening, Melville is the mad bastard responsible for Moby-Dick, a painfully massive tome about a Captain obsessive war with a big-ass whale (it’s a bit more complicated and layered than that, but we’re not going down that rabbit hole tonight, dear reader).

Cheers to you, Herman.

N.P.: “Love & Happiness (Ghetto Filth Remix)” – Wiccatron

I’m gonna let you in on a bit of a secret, dear reader: my favorite book, my favorite story, ever, the one that has captured my psyche and imagination since the first time I heard it, at the age of six, is The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas.  The movie was going to be on TV back then, and my father seemed very interested in watching it (back then, nothing was on-demand: the three networks showed what they showed when they showed it, and if that didn’t work out with your schedule, tough shit – you didn’t get to see it.  My father, as I recall, had done a bit of schedule adjusting and planning to watch this movie).  Before it started, I asked him what it was about, and he told me: a young man is betrayed by his friends and acquaintances, even the woman he loves.  His friends conspire and lie and have the young man thrown in a gothic abomination of a prison for life for a crime he didn’t commit.  While he’s in prison, his father suffers greatly due to his son’s imprisonment and eventually dies from grief and poverty.  But then the young man escapes, finds a massive treasure, gets a new identity, and sets about taking his revenge on all those who betrayed him.  And that clicked so strongly in my head that I suspect my father actually heard the click.  I couldn’t imagine a more righteous fight: escaping from wrongful punishment and destroying those who were behind its infliction.

So then we watched the movie.  Back then, I thought most of what my father watched on TV (i.e., not cartoons) was boring.  Not that night.  That night I watched the entirety of the movie absolutely rapt.  I learned the young man’s name was Edmond Dantès, and he was my kindred spirit…or at least the first time I related to anyone, fictional or otherwise, in that way.  I also learned the best revenge is played in the long game.  It requires patience and unwavering will power to endure suffering and neglect.  I learned a lot of things that night…a surprising amount.  I didn’t know it at the time, but the experience of that story would be formative.  From that moment until right now as I’m sitting here typing this, revenge was, is,  and likely always will be my biggest motivator.  Seriously.  Fear not, dear reader…I’m aware of how problematic this is, and I have spent a great deal of time on various mental health professionals’ couches “dealing” with it.  For a while, on the advice and under the care of one such professional, I attempt to “let it go.”  All of it.  Quit viewing life as time to take out those on The List and spend my time in my head doing something else…feeling gratitude or some such hippie hooey.  I spent a couple years trying (I mean really trying) and failing (I mean really failing) to meditate.  Hell, I went to hypnotherapist about it.  Which was interesting, and those closest to me at the time noted that I was “a lot nicer,” but alas, it didn’t really take.  After a couple of awkward years, I said “fuck it” and went back to my vengeful ways.  It felt like coming home.  During a very uncomfortable time in my life, I was suddenly comforted.

Okay…gotta stop…all of this belongs in the book.  Besides, this isn’t supposed to be about me.  This is supposed to be about the birthday boy…the author of my favorite book.

Alexandre Dumas was born on this day in 1802, and if there’s any justice in the afterworld, the man is somewhere today picking sword fights with angels and uncorking bottles of celestial champagne.  He was larger than this messy, meat-grinding life – an unapologetic tornado of appetite, ambition, and literary brilliance.  This was the guy who gave us not only The Count of Monte Cristo, but also the more popular The Three Musketeers, which is, while I was diving into the story of the Count, what the other kids in my class were into.  He wrote about six jillion other tales of intrigue, betrayal, and swagger-dripping heroism.

But here’s the thing.  Among all his triumphs – and there are many – it’s The Count that sits at the top of the mountain, an exquisite cocktail of vengeance service ice-cold and spiked with the kind of high-stakes drama most writers can only fantasize about.  Reading it (for me) is like stepping onto a battlefield armed with rage, cunning, and a self-righteous thirst that could flatten nations.  And yet, my one complaint – with zero apology – is that Edmond Dantès, the Count himself, wimps out at the finish line.  Forgiveness?  Redemption?  Goddammit, no!  No, no, no.  Not in this house.

I am, as usual, almost completely alone in my opinion, here.  The Count of Monte Cristo is a supposed to be a redemption story, the redemption happening when Edmond/The Count realizes that his quest for revenge, which is a thing of absolutely beauty in my book, has consumed him and caused suffering to others (well, yeah!  Why else embark on a quest for revenge?) including “innocent” people (in my world this is known as “collateral damage”).  If you want to make an omelet, you’ve got to break some eggs.  But the Count suddenly seems to misplace his balls somewhere and decides to forgive his enemies and let go of his hatred.  Apparently the Count is capable of this, and good for him, I guess.  But this part of the story, when he just goes soft and starts listening to Taylor Swift and watching Disney content, is always a crushing disappointment for yrs. truly.

Here…allow me to elaborate a tad.  Imagine being Dantès.  Twenty-something, engaged to a beautiful woman, on the verge of your life’s dream, and then BAM!  A Machiavellian screwjob of the highest order.  Then you’re framed for treason, locked away in some wretched dungeon while your enemies profit from your ruin.  One guy marries your fiancée, for chrissakes!  Another climbs the career ladder using your blood as rungs.  But then, you escape!  Against all odds, you claw your way back into the land of the living, armed with a new name, a pile of Fuck You money and Titanic-level resources, and one singular purpose: make everyone who destroyed you pay.

For most of the book, Dantès embodies vengeance in its purest, most operatic form.  A chess master orchestrating ruin with surgical precision.  Poisonings, psychological warfare, financial annihilation – his betrayers are crushed one by one beneath the weight of their own sins, which he amplifies like some vengeful, God-tier conductor.  It’s satisfying in that primal, blood-thirsty way that it seems humanity doesn’t really like to admit.  This is revenge as art.

But then.  Then.  After something like 1400 glorious pages of well-earned savagery, Dantès does the unthinkable – he gets soft.  He fucking forgives.  He decides vengeance has consumed too much of his soul or whatever philosophical drivel we’re meant to accept as closure.  Sure, maybe that makes him a “better person,” but some of us don’t read The Count of Monte Cristo for moral improvement.  Some of us want to see these backstabbing weasels buried six feet under with nothing but ruinous regret to keep them company.  Redemption is Disneyesque, kindergarten nonsense.  I want scorched earth.  Blood.  I want heads on spikes.

Which isn’t to say that the book is anything less than one of the greatest novels ever written.  I just rewrite the last chapters in my head every time I finish it – and in my version, no one crawls out unscathed.  Danglars doesn’t get to slink off after losing his fortune.  Fernand doesn’t bite his own bullet just because he happens to feel bad at the end.  No.  They all go down.  Every.  Single.  One.  That’s the ending I celebrate.

Still, Dumas, even at his softest, deserves nothing but awe.  The man was a magician, telling timeless stories while also bedding half of Europe and shaking hands with history itself.  (The guy once fought a duel once over a nasty theater review.)

So here’s to you, Monsieur Dumas.  Your words have outlived you by centuries, and your spirit will linger long after we’re all dust.  Raising a glass in your honor, and maybe, just maybe, plotting a hypothetical alternate Dantès ending where nobody gets forgiven and every wrong is avenged tenfold.  Cheers to a legend.

N.P.: “That Death Cannot Touch” – The Black Queen

Seems like the last week or so has been a busy week or big-name literary births and deaths and such, does it not, dear reader?  Maybe it’s just me.  But the proverbial hits, as they say, just keep on coming.  Today, July 21, we hoist our glasses, sloshing with the good stuff (with the good stuff today being defined as a big fuck-off bottle of Dark Hedges Irish Whiskey…I’m about to find out how good it is), to the indomitable, beard-shadowed colossus of America letters, Ernest Hemingway, born this day in 1899.  The man carved his stories from the raw meat of existence, bloodied his knuckles on the world, and left us prose so lean it could cut glass.

I felt that paragraph deserve a snort of Whiskey…first impressions: burns a bit…a little raspy going down.  But it will clearly get the job done.  So now please join me, dear reader: pour one out, preferably something that burns going down, and let’s get to it.

Hemingway was a one-man war zone, a walking manifesto of grit and gusto.  Born in Oak Park, Illinois, he didn’t waste time sipping tea with the bourgeoisie.  By 17, he was banging out copy for the Kansas City Star, learning to strip sentences to their bones – short, sharp, true.  That style, that relentless economy of words, became his machete, hacking through the jungle of horseshit that passes for literature.  To wit:

• The Sun Also Rises – More of a bullfight than a book, all blood and dust and broken hearts in Pamplona.  This 1926 novel follows Jake Barnes, a war-wounded expat journalist nursing a literal and figurative impotence, as he drifts through the booze-soaked cafés of Paris and the sun-scorched fiestas of Spain.  He’s tangled up with Lady Brett Ashley, a magnetic, reckless beauty who loves him but can’t stay faithful, and a crew of disillusioned drifters – lost souls of the Lost Generation.  They drink, they bitch at each other, they chase bullfights and heartbreak, all while grappling with the emptiness of a world that’s been shot to hell.  It’s a story about longing you can’t satisfy, purpose you can’t find, and the cruel grace of just keeping on.  Hemingway’s sparse prose makes every glance, every drink, every bull’s charge feel like a wound you didn’t see coming.  [A second slug of the Dark Hedges…burns less than the first one, which is usually how these things go.  Less of a shock to the system.]
• A Farewell to Arms – A love story that kicks you in the teeth and leaves you gasping.  Set against the chaotic Italian front of World War I, it’s the tale of Frederic Henry, an American ambulance driver who falls hard for Catherine Barkley, a British nurse with a past as haunted as the war-torn landscape.  Their romance is desperate, all-in, a fleeting sanctuary amid the mud, blood, and betrayal of war.  Of course, Hemingway doesn’t do bullshitty fairy tales – love gets battered by shellfire, bureaucracy, and fate’s cold indifference.  When the couple flees to Switzerland, the story’s liver-kick of an ending reminds you that life doesn’t owe you a happy ending, just the strength to face the wreckage.
• For Whom the Bell Tolls – Robert Jordan, a Montana dynamiter, joins a gang of Spanish guerrillas fighting Franco’s fascists in the Civil War.  His mission is to blow a bridge to stop the enemy’s advance.  Over four days, he grapples with love (enter Maria, a survivor with fire in her eyes), loyalty, and the ticking clock of mortality.  The title, cribbed from John Donne, says it all: no man’s an island, and every death chips away at us all.

But let us not, as you might in some other lit classes, get lost in the canon.  Hemingway’s life was the real novel – louder, messier, and more alive than any page could hold.  The man drove ambulances in World War I, got himself blown up and still crawled back for more.  He hunted big game in Africa, fished marlin that could swallow your ego whole, and boxed like he was settling scores with God.  He drank like a pirate, caroused in Parisian cafés, and turned Key West into his personal fiefdom of whiskey and words.  He did time in Cuba, slinging daiquiris and stories with equal swagger.  He jumped into Spain’s Civil War, dodging bullets and scribbling almost surreal dispatches.  And yeah, the man had flaws – big, jagged ones.  He could be a prick, a chauvinist, a violent storm of ego and insecurity.  But what writer isn’t at some (or most) points?  Four wives, countless feuds, and a temper that could torch a room.  But so what?  Who wants a saint?  Saints don’t stare into the abyss and come back with The Old Man and the Sea.  That book, that lone fisherman battling the ocean’s wrath, is Hemingway distilled – stubborn, solitary, and unyielding, even when the sharks come circling.

Gen Zers tend not to get it.  They tend to stare with stunning jadedness and mumble something about how “the world has changed.”  We’re drowning in tweets and memes, and Papa’s iceberg theory, where seven-eighths of the story lurks beneath the surface, feels like a relic.  But fuck them.  Hemingway’s still relevant, still dangerous.  In a world fat and bloated with hot takes and clickbait, his clarity is a switchblade.  And his life is a reminder to live hard, love fiercely, and write like your heart’s on fire, even if it leaves you scarred.

So here’s to you, Ernest…on your 126th birthday, we’re raising a glass of Dark Hedges, no ice, no apologies.  Happy birthday, Papa.  Keep swinging in the great barroom brawl of eternity.

Now, dear reader – go read A Moveable Feast, chase it with a shot of absinthe, and write something that’d make Hemingway nod from the great beyond.  Or at least spill some booze in his honor.  Cheers.

N.P.: “Bottle With Your Name On It” – Thomas Rhett

Well, hell, dear reader…it’s July 20, and the ghost of Cormac McCarthy’s birthday is rattling its chains, demanding a toast.  Cormac was, for my money, one of the two greatest novelists of my time (the other is Don DeLillo, who is still, thankfully, very much alive).  But today is for the late Mr. McCarthy.
Born in 1933, the old bastard would’ve been 92 today, probably still squinting into the void, penning sentences sharp enough to flay your soul.  He’s gone now – kicked the bucket on June 13, 2023, leaving us poorer for it – but his words still very much burn like cheap whiskey on a busted lip.  So here I am, half-cocked on desk whiskey and deep reverence, to sling some ink about the three McCarthy novels that have and shall always claw at my guts in the best way: No Country for Old Men, Child of God, and The Road.  If you haven’t read them, stop what you’re doing, light a cigarette (even if you don’t smoke), and prepare to have your soul dragged through the dirt.  Reading any of these three books is basically a bar fight with the abyss.  For you Gen Z creatures of comfort who can’t be bothered to crack an actual book, all three of these books were made into very respectable movies, so have at it.

First up, No Country for Old Men.  This is McCarthy at his most nihilistic, which is saying something.  It’s a story about a big bag of money, a psychopathic hitman, and the kind of moral decay that makes you want to shower in bleach.  This thing is philosophical meat grinder, a West Texas bloodbath where fate’s got a coin toss and a cattle gun.  Llewelyn Moss stumbles on a drug deal gone sour, snags a satchel of cash, and sets off a chase that’s less cat-and-mouse and more buzzard-and-corpse.  Anton Chigurh (that name alone is a blade in the dark) stalks the pages like death’s own CPA, balancing the books with a silencer. Javier Bardem’s portrayal of Anton in the movie version of the story has been called, correctly, the most accurate and realistic portrayal of a psychopath on the big screen.  The movie is one of my favorites, but the book is where it’s really at.  McCarthy’s prose is leaner than a starved coyote, every sentence a bullet.  The dialogue crackles, sparse but heavy, like men muttering over a campfire before the world ends.  It’s about chance and fate, sure, but also about how the old codes – honor, grit, whatever – get chewed up by a new kind of evil that doesn’t negotiate.  Reading it makes one want to punch a wall, then cry into one’s drink.  It’s that kind of book.

Then there’s Child of God, which is basically McCarthy saying, “Oh, you thought No Country was dark?  Hold my beer.”  Lester Ballard is a character so twisted, so utterly devoid of redemption, that you almost feel bad for him – until you remember he’s a necrophiliac living in a cave.  Yes, our boy Lester is a depraved little gremlin, a Tennessee hillbilly gone feral, humping corpses and scuttling through caves like some reject from God’s assembly line.  You shouldn’t like him, but McCarthy makes you stare, makes you see the humanity in a monster – because, hell, most of us are just one bad day from digging graves for company.  The prose here is raw, almost biblical, painting a world so bleak you can smell the rot.  It’s short, too, like a shot of rotgut that burns going down and leaves you queasy.  I love it for its nerve, for how it dares you to look away and knows you won’t.  McCarthy doesn’t flinch, and neither should you.

And finally, The Road.  Sweet, merciless Road.  This is the book that makes you want to hug your kids, stockpile canned goods, and never, ever take a sunny day for granted.  This one’s a sledgehammer to the heart.  A father and son trudging through a world scorched to ash, where hope’s a memory and cannibals are the neighbors.  It’s apocalypse stripped to the bone – no zombies, no sci-fi bullshit, just survival and love in a place that doesn’t give a shit.  The father’s cough, the boy’s questions, the way they carry “the fire” – it’s all so fragile you want to scream.  McCarthy’s style here is stark, almost poetic.  I read it when I’m feeling too cocky, when I start to mistakenly think the world’s got my back.  It humbles you, makes you want to hug your kids or your dog or hell, even a stranger, just to feel something warm.  It’s a love letter to what’s left after everything’s gone.

McCarthy’s dead now, and the world feels thinner without him.  He wrote like he was carving epitaphs, each one daring you to face the dark and keep walking.  So today, I’m pouring some out for Cormac, that grim old poet of blood and dust.  Happy birthday, you magnificent bastard.  May your shade find a barstool in whatever dive serves the afterlife’s best whiskey.  Here’s to No Country, Child of God, and The Road – three shots of truth that hit far harder than a hangover.  Cheers, and rest in chaos.

N.P.: “Up Jumped the Devil” – David & the Devil

Alright, dear reader, if you don’t know what day it is, you should.  Somewhere, in the halls of bourbon-soaked eternity, sits a man who once pistol-whipped conventional journalism, shoved it down a sandpaper slide, and baptized it in a pool of acid-laced self-awareness.  That man, born on July 18, 1937, amid the southern gothic sprawl of Louisville, Kentucky, would erupt into existence nothing less than a human bunker buster for the literary world – Hunter Stockton Thompson.  Today, we light a ceremonial joint, shotgun a tallboy, and salute the King of Gonzo in all his unhinged chaos.

To properly talk about Thompson (and honestly, to even try to keep your adjectives in place while doing so), is to ride shotgun in a careening Cadillac speeding toward the sharp cliff edge of meaning itself.  His invention of gonzo journalism was less a writing style and more a manifest scrawled in blood-red Sharpie on the back of society’s Ikea instruction manual.  Objectivity be damned; Thompson wasn’t about observing the story – he was the story.  He waded into the filthy trenches with his subjects, mainlined their madness, and stitched his fractured psyche across every page he produced.  Subtle? Hell no.  Effective?  Absolutely.

Take Hell’s Angels, for example.  He didn’t just “write about” those smoke-belching, bar-brawling apostles of chaos.  Nope…Thompson got in the saddle, ate their dust, drank their beer, and got his face caved in for the privilege.  He emerged – bloody, patched up, and somehow syllabically sharper – with one of the most brutally honest dissections of America’s outlaw soul.  But did he stop there?  Shee-it.  HST didn’t dabble in rebellion – he deep-throated the shotgun of conformity and loaded both barrels himself.

And then, of course, there is Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.  If the American Dream was an actual physical object, that book would’ve taken a staple gun to it and lit it on fire.  It’s a masterpiece of gonzo depravity – a demolition derby held inside the fragile collective skull of a nation limping out of the 1960s, hungover and disillusioned.  Riding high on mescaline, ether, and enough high-proof liquor to get entire third-world nations drunk, Thompson peeled back the tacky, neon-lit veneer of Vegas and revealed…well, ourselves.  Ugly.  Greedy.  High as hell.  And blaming it all on everyone else.  And I found it all very relatable.

I was an undergrad trying to figure out whether to major in music or English, and was dividing most of my class time between subjects.  I was taking a couple of creative writing classes, and in those classes, people kept asking me after class if I’d heard of Hunter Thompson and/or Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.  Eventually I went to Tower Books and picked up a copy.  It was a Friday afternoon.  I went home to my apartment, got comfortable on the couch, and started reading.  And I read the entire thing straight through (which was something I’d never done before), howling and cackling throughout the entire thing.  But more importantly, aside from being the funniest thing I’d ever read to that point, Vegas kicked me in the mind.  The next night I was on a dinner date, and I drank Chivas with my meal.  When Monday morning rolled around, I went to the Registrar’s Office and changed my major from Music to English.  Dr. Thompson had just blown open the possibilities of writing in my head…I didn’t know you could do that with writing.

But it wasn’t just what he wrote that mattered.  It was how he burned himself, raw and live, into the fabric of the narrative.  He shredded the wall between the observer and participant, reporter and drug-fueled maniac, proving that some truths are so ugly you have to punch them straight in the throat to make them talk.  And right there, bleeding in the dirt, is where he lived.  Where most authors tiptoed around controversy or built polite little fences to sit on, Thompson set the whole field on fire and rode through it naked on a motorbike.

Thompson ultimately left the world the same way he moved through it, with a thunderclap and zero regard for everyone’s fragile sensibilities.  But even in his absence, his spirit lingers in some of us, in every defiant middle finger flipped at the bastards trying to quash originality and every word typed by a writer who refuses to “play nice.”

Today, we remember not just Thompson’s birth but the explosion that came with it.  A reminder that the best way to honor a literary outlaw who lived without brakes is to live: messy, loud, and unapologetic.  Because fear is boring, conformity is worse, and the truth, no matter how grotesque, always tastes better when served raw with a fifth of Jack.

Happy birthday, Hunter.  Wherever the hell you are, I hope they’re letting you smoke.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a bottle of bourbon and a typewriter calling my name.  It’s what the good doctor would have wanted.

N.P.: “Lawyers, Guns & Money” – Warren Zevon

Seventy-eight years ago, a 25-year-old kid with a notebook and a bad case of existential itch packed himself into a car headed straight for the raw, writhing guts of America.  That kid was Jack Kerouac, and what he did that summer wasn’t just a road trip.  It was an existential tantrum dressed up as adventure – a booze-drenched fever dream of freedom with jazz riffs for punctuation and a reckless sprint toward something like divinity.  Or maybe the whole thing was just a desperate stab at drowning out the noise in his own head.  Either way, what came out the other end was On the Road, a book more combustible than a jerrycan of gas in a bonfire.

Picture it, dear reader.  July heat, just like the kind baking wherever you are right now in the northern hemisphere.  The kind of heat that makes the pavement shimmer, as if the road isn’t  just something to be traveled but something alive and pissed off, daring you to drive faster.  Kerouac had the windows rolled all the way down, likely because the car was either without A/C or it was simply harder to breathe in when the windows were shut.  And there he was, pinballing across the country with the verve – and perhaps hygiene – of a man who needed this drive not just to live but to avoid imploding.  There’s probably a word for the energy he was chasing, but it’s not in English.  It’s a headspace between euphoria and collapse, where everything burns brighter and breaks harder.

And the kid?  He scribbled through it.  Through the truck stops and motel ashtrays, through the miles of asphalt stretching out ahead like some cosmic dare.  Jazz on the radio, junkie poets for company, and God knows what in the flask riding shotgun.  Kerouac wrote like a man possessed – not by demons, but by something much scarier: hope.  Not the easy Hallmark variety, but the bone-deep, terrifying kind that makes you wonder if somewhere, out there, there’s a way to fill whatever black hope keeps chewing through your insides.

When On the Road his shelves in 1957, it was a lit match in a room full of dynamite.  Suddenly, every Poor Bastard in America who’d been staring down the barrel of nine-to-five mediocrity had permission to trash the manual.  This wasn’t about winning; it was about searching.  About saying “fuck it” to the scripts we’re handed and chasing the kind of truth that burns like whiskey going down.

Many made the mistake of calling it romantic.  But the road isn’t about romance – it’s about friction.  [The same could be said about sex, of course.]  The kind of friction that leaves you scorched and skinned and shaking but alive in a way you forgot you could be.  Kerouac wasn’t glorifying anything.  He was giving us the messy, bloody glory of coming undone – and maybe finding God in the process.  Although, spoiler alert, it probably wasn’t the God you’re thinking of.

Fast forward to right now.  July 17, 2025.  Do the math, dear reader.  You’re not too old, too broke, or too goddamn civilized to take your own swing at this.  You won’t be Kerouac – good.  He already did it, and you wouldn’t survive on the kind of coffee and amphetamines that fueled him anyway.  But was you can do is crack open a notebook, climb into whatever vehicle you’ve got, and chase something that’ll look different from freedom but feel just as dangerous.

And maybe when you’re out there burning rubber through the sticky American night, you’ll catch a little of the jazzed-up chaos Kerouac found.  And I’ll be out there with you, chasing the same thing.  Just make sure when you catch it, write it down.

N.P.: “I Gotcha” – Eleven Triple Two, Ghostwriter

Forgive my absence here yesterday, dear reader, but it was simply too goddamn hot to write.  It was 107°F in The Creek yesterday, which is really too hot to do much of anything that requires any sort of mental clarity.  But never mind all that.  Today is a new day, and what a day it is.

July 12th should be a national holiday for anyone tired of sucking on the exhaust pipe of a world powered by conformity and crushing mediocrity.  This is the birthday of Henry David Thoreau – poet, philosopher, professional recluse, and mad prophet of the woods.  Born in 1817 in Concord, Massachusetts, Thoreau did more than carve his name onto the bark of American letters.  He set the whole goddamn tree on fire.

This is the man who walked away from the mechanical insanity of the 19th century to shack up in the woods near a pond, chopping his own firewood and minding his own business, only to emerge with Walden, a book so sharp and provocative it’s still noosed around the neck of English majors over a century later.  It’s not a polite book.  It doesn’t coddle you or ask for permission to be heard.  No, Walden is a defiant roar against the drivel of materialism, a full-frontal challenge to the hamster wheel of ambition and blind conformity.  Thoreau grabs us by the collar and demands we live simply and insists that we shed all the junk cluttering our lives and figure out what the hell it even means to live.

And if that wasn’t enough to piss off polite society, he doubled down with Civil Disobedience.  Written after Thoreau himself spent a night in jail for refusing to pay taxes to a government he deemed morally bankrupt (yes, the night in jail is an essential flex), this essay is nothing less than a flamethrower aimed at unjust authority.  Governments, he argued, exist to serve justice – not to prop up the petty tyrannies of the many or the corrupt whims of the few.  And when they fail?  Dissent isn’t just a right, it’s an obligation.

This is where Thoreau’s buckshot really hit the mark.  The ripples of his defiance carried far.

Gandhi mined Civil Disobedience to mount a nonviolent rebellion and kick the British Empire out of India, an achievement that still reverberates in history books and imperial nightmares.  Martin Luther King Jr. marched into the Civil Rights Movement with Thoreau’s words tucked into his back pocket, turning quiet disobedience into a wrecking ball against systemic oppression.  Think about that for a second – one guy, dollar-store journal in hand, wielding an influence so massive it could topple empires and rewrite history.

Thoreau didn’t write for fame – honestly, he would’ve rather burned most of us with a caustic one-liner than shake hands and schmooze at some literary soirée.  He wrote because the words were searing in his guy and demanded to be spit out, pure and undiluted.  His legacy?  It’s a challenge, flashing like a neon sign for misfits, the world-shakers, the ones who grind their teeth at the idea of “business as usual.”

Sure, the man got misunderstood.  Some called him misanthropic, others accused him of hypocrisy.  But Thoreau never pretended to be a saint.  He was furious, flawed, and human.  He philosophized about freedom, sure, but he also lived it, inhaled it, and scribbled it into permanence.

So today, on his birthday, throw up a toast to Thoreau.  Better yet, unplug for a couple minutes.  Forget the relentless scrolling, the email pings, the fluorescent-lit conveyor belt of modern living.  Step outside, breathe, touch grass, think, be.  Raise your middle finger to all the bullshit masquerading as progress.  That’s your present to man who lived deliberately, resisted relentlessly, and died unapologetically.

Happy Birthday, Uncle Hank…the rebel spirit lives on.

N.P.: “Smoke On The Water” – Calling All Astronauts