Pestilential, adj

1. Relating to or tending to cause infectious diseases; producing or tending to produce infectious or contagious disease.
2. Morally harmful or pernicious.
3. Annoyingly troublesome; a colossal, unrelenting pain in the ass.

Basically a plague, a moral contagion, or an atmosphere so toxically, soul-rottingly foul that it makes the very air feel it’s been gang-raped by a committee of lesser demons and then left to fester in the sun.  Not merely bad.  Not merely evil.  Something that spreads corruption, contamination, or general human misery.  Also a person whose mere presence seems to lower the property value of the room.

Dragged kicking and screaming into Middle English around the late 15th century, derived from the Late Latin pestilentialis, which itself mutated from pestilentia (plague, unwholesome atmosphere).  Ultimately, it all boils down to the Latin pestis, meaning a deadly disease, plague, or destruction.  A long, noble lineage of words used to describe things that make you regret having a nose.

Thursday night in some dim-lit felony lounge off Mission Street, the kind of place where the jukebox only play Tom Waits B-sides and songs about dead hookers.  The air is thick with the perfume of spilled PBR, regret sweat, and the faint metallic tang of someone’s fresh tattoo infection.  I’m there because writing is a disease that requires cheap liquor and worse company, and tonight the disease has prescribed both.
She not so much slides as much as oozes onto the stool next to me like gravity owes her money.  Hair the color of bad decisions at 2 a.m., lips painted the shade of arterial spray, wearing a tank top that says “Let’s Fuck” in rhinestones that have mostly fallen off, much like her standards.
“I like you shirt,” I say, because that’s what I’m supposed to do.
“It likes you,” she says, looking me directly in the eye.  Because of course.
She smells like vanilla body spray trying heroically to cover the scent of three different men’s cologne and one pack of close cigarettes.  Her eyes are the glassy, predatory blue of a Great White that’s already decided I’m chum.
She orders a shot of Jameson and sidecar of desperation, then turns those eyes on me like I’m the last functioning cock in the zip code.
“You look like you write things,”  she says, voice raspy from too many Marlboros and not enough apologies.  I want to retort, “You look like you inspire massive regret.”  But I don’t.  So she continues: “Bet you’re deep.”
I tell her I’m shallow as a puddle in hell but I’ve got a library card and a drinking problem, which is close enough.  She laughs – sounds like a hyena gargling broken glass – and puts her hand on my thigh like she’s checking my pulse for later reference.
We talk.  Or rather, she talks and I nod while calculating the half-life of my dignity.  She sounds like Keith Richards’ older sister and has man hands.  She tells me about her ex who’s in county for something involving a chainsaw and a Pomeranian, about the OnlyFans tier she’s about to unlock called “Emotional Damage,” about how she once fucked the dead lead singer of Type O Negative (unclear if the alleged coitus was posthumous or not).  Every sentence is a small war crime against taste.
She leans in.  Breath like an ashtray soaked in peach schnapps.  “You wanna get out of here?  My place is only six blocks and the roaches are usually quiet this time of night.”
I look at her – really look.  At the track marks disguised as “artistic freckles,” at the way her pupils are doing the backstroke in whatever she’s on tonight, at the smile that’s equal parts invitation and eviction notice.  She looks very much like a mistake I would have made in the ’90s.  And something in me, some last scrap of self-preservation wired directly to the lizard brain, finally fires.
I stand up.  Slowly.  Like a man who’s just remembered he has bones.
“Go give somebody else AIDS, you pestilential twat,” I say.  Not loud.  Not angry.  Just clear.  Like Jesus would if he were in my situation.  The kind of clear you get right before the guillotine drops and you realize the blade’s already falling.
The bar goes quiet for half a second, the way rooms do when someone says the thing everyone was thinking but nobody had the testicular fortitude to voice.  She blinks.  Once.  Twice.  Then she laughs again – that same broken-glass laugh – but this time it’s thinner, cracked down the middle.
“Fuck you, Hemingway,” she spits, but there’s no heat in it.  Just the sad fizz of a firework that didn’t quite launch.
I walk out into the San Francisco night, which is cold and smells like urine and possibility in roughly equal measure.  My heart is hammering like it’s trying to escape my rib cage and join the witness-protection program.  I light a cigarette with shaking hands and think: That was the cleanest kill I’ve made in years.

N.P.: “Voodoo Child” – Tom Morello

Alright, dear reader: today’s Word of the Day is spatulate.  (ˈspætʃələt or ˈspætʃəˌleɪt if you’re feeling particularly pedantic about your diphthongs), the adjective that sneaks into the language like a spatula sliding under a half-burnt pancake you were too proud to admit was ruined.

It means having a broad, rounded end, shaped like – you guessed it – a spatula, that humble kitchen implement whose very name descends from Latin spatula, diminutive of spatha (a broad flat blade, sword-ish thing), which itself traces back through Greek spathē to something broad and flat enough to whack weave threads or row a trireme or just generally assert dominance over dough.  Entered English proper around 1760 via Modern Latin spatulatus, because nothing says “I’m a serious botanist describing a leaf” like borrowing from dead languages to sound like you know what you’re doing.

The word hangs around mostly in botany (spatulate leaves: narrow stalk exploding into a fat rounded tip, like nature got bored of pointy and decided to go full ladle), anatomy, and the occasional descriptive flex when someone’s fingers or features demand more precision than “thick” or “stubby” can deliver.  Example straight from the usage canon: “his thick, spatulate fingers.”

But let’s get real, because precision without application is just intellectual foreplay.

There she was, mid-stride across the sticky floorboards, hips swinging with the slow, inevitable authority of tectonic plates deciding to fuck shit up, her lower half a masterpiece of broad, rounded geometry that made every barstool occupant briefly forget how to blink.  Not heart-shaped, not apple-bottomed, not any of those coy euphemisms people trot out when they’re afraid of the truth: no, hers was a spatulate ass – broad at the business end, tapering just enough upstream to suggest engineering rather than accident, the kind of posterior that could flip an omelet from across the room. 

She caught the stare of one poor bastard nursing a warm IPA and a grudge against optimism.  He froze, glass halfway to lips, eyes locked on the impossible physics of it all, the way the denim strained and surrendered in equal measure, the rounded flare catching the low neon like a signal flare from some distant, more honest civilization.  He tried to look away – failed spectacularly – then tried again, this time with the doomed concentration of a man attempting to defuse his own libido using only willpower and bad posture.  The ass didn’t care.  It just kept moving, broad and rounded and utterly indifferent to the wreckage it left behind: one spilled drink, two dropped jaws, and a suddenly very expensive tab because nobody could remember how to signal for the check. 

She reached the door, paused – perhaps sensing the atmospheric pressure drop – then pushed through into the night, leaving behind the faint scent of vanilla body spray and the lingering echo of collective male failure.  The bar exhaled.  Someone muttered “Jesus,” though it wasn’t clear if it was prayer or curse.  The jukebox clicked to the next track, something with too much reverb and not enough mercy. 

Use spatulate today.  Deploy it like a weapon.  Let it sit there on the page, fat and rounded and refusing to apologize.  Because language, like anatomy, is better when it’s shameless.

N.P.: “Protocol Flow” – Metal Scar Radio, Hybrid

I had dark business at the DMV this morning.  There was nothing inherently dark about the actual business I had, but any day I am forced to darken the doors of the DMV, is, necessarily, dark.  I have long referred to the DMV as the LCD: the Lowest Common Denominator.  Because that’s what it is.  The Great Equalizer.  Everybody has to come here at some point.  And the only thing any of us has in common is the need to drive legally.  Other than that, I have no idea who any of these people are.  I know that we have exactly nothing in common.

Anyway, rather than go on one of my usual misanthropic rants, I’ve decided to let my experience determine the Word of the Day.  So let’s get to it.

Today’s lexical payload is a heavy one, specifically designed for those of you who’ve spend any amount of time observing the slow-motion car crash of human consciousness in the modern age.

The word is “bovinity.”

It’s a noun, meaning the quality or state of being bovine; a certain dull-eyed, slugging, and intensely phlegmatic disposition that suggests a total absence of cognitive friction.  It is the spiritual equivalent of chewing cud while the house burns down.

Derived from the Late Latin bovinus, from bos (ox/cow).  It’s an ancient way of saying someone has the intellectual velocity of a damp brick.

The fluorescent lights in the DMV waiting room didn’t just illuminate the space; they seemed to actively dissolve the remaining gray matter of everyone trapped within the four-minute-loop of the “Safety First” monitor.  At the center of this existential vacuum sat Brenda.
Brenda was a woman who’d “helped “me at my appointment here last week, whose primary engagement with reality appeared to be a series of involuntary autonomic functions – breathing, blinking, and the occasional, inexplicable wet noise of her tongue hitting the roof of her mouth.  She was currently staring at a potted fern on the counter in front of here with an intensity that suggested she was waiting for it to recite the Gettysburg Address or something.
I stood there, vibrating with a high-octane mixture of cheap espresso and righteous indignation, watching today’s clerk, Kevin, try to explain – for the fourth goddamn time – that I didn’t need the form that Brenda had sent me home to fill out last week.  Brenda didn’t even flinch.  She just sat there in her bovinity, looking more stupid than usual (which, just based on my very limited experience with her, is pretty fucking stupid), her jaw slightly slack as if her brain had finally decided to go on a permanent sabbatical to a place where thoughts are illegal and logic is a capital offense.  It was a terrifying display of sheer, unadulterated emptiness; a vacuum of such density that I feared my own IQ might start leaking out of my ears just by standing in her psychic splash zone. 

N.P.: “Cry of Love” – Crippled Black Phoenix

Around the turning of the New Year, I decided to make a directional change to my wardrobe.  It was time to step up my clothing game, I felt.  Part of it was for me, of course…I just thought it was high time for a change, and with all the changes happening this year, it seemed like a good time to do it.  A lot of the reason for the change, though, was a reaction to exactly how trashy this culture has become.  When I go about anywhere, it seems the bulk of the herd has become unapologetically out of shape, sloppy, and stupid.  They lack any sort of critical thinking skills, and their vocabularies are pitifully small.

We need to get serious about the vocabulary situation because the current state of linguistic affairs is frankly embarrassing.  It’s a wasteland out there.  People walking around with five-dollar haircuts and ten-cent vocabularies, content to grunt monosyllabically while the English language – that great, sprawling beast of expression – gets slowly suffocated by emojis and corporate buzzwords.  Not on my watch.  Today we are digging into the dark stuff.  The heavy stuff.  The kind of word that sits in your mouth like a piece of lead shot before you spit it out at some unsuspecting bureaucrat.

Today’s word is tenebrous.  It means dark.  But not just “I turned off the light” dark.  We’re talking about something shadowy, obscure, and generally gloomy (which, now that I think about it, describes my last 20 years pretty accurately).  It’s the kind of darkness that implies difficult comprehension, moral ambiguity, or the specific lighting conditions of a San Francisco bondage club at 03:00 on a Wednesday when the bartender has stopped making eye contact.

It comes from the Latin tenebrosus, which itself crawls out of the primordial sludge of tenebrae (darkness).  The French got their sticky fingers on it (ténèbreux) somewhere in the Middle Ages before it landed in English in the 15th century, presumably dragged there by some brooding poet who found “dark” too pedestrian for his specific brand of suffering.

I was halfway through a plate of eggs that looked like they’d been cooked in a radiator when the realization hit me that I was essentially vibrating.  The coffee in this place was less a beverage and more a tactical assault on the central nervous system, a tar-like substance that tasted of burnt rubber and cancer.  I was trying to ignore the man in the booth next to me, who was loudly explaining the geopolitical significance of Bitcoin to a waitress who clearly just wanted to go home and watch the Real Housewhores of Wherever-the-Fuck, but the brutal, unadulterated madness of the situation was becoming impossible to ignore. 

My own head felt like a bag of cats.  I had spent the previous night arguing about the inherent dishonesty of modern brutalist architecture with an English major who kept trying to buy me shorts of cheap tequila…Cuervo, specifically, which I am medically forbidden from consuming but which I, once enough social pressure is applied by the right girl, inevitably consume in quantities that will kill a lesser apex predator.  The sun outside was offensively bright, a glaring, accusatory glare in the sky that seemed personally offended by my hangover, but inside the diner, things were different. 

The air conditioning was rattling like a dying lung, and the smell of old grease was so thick you could almost chew it.  I looked down at my notebook, where I had scrawled three incoherent sentences about the declining intelligence quotient in America’s universities and a drawing of a lizard wearing a top hat.  It was garbage.  Absolute trash.  But then the door swung open, blocking out the painful daylight, and for a second, the entire back corner of the diner was plunged into this weird, heavy shadow, a sudden, tenebrous gloom that seemed to swallow up the sound of the Bitcoin enthusiast and the clatter of silverware, leaving me alone with my palpitations and the sudden, terrifying clarity that I should probably order more toast. 

N.P.: “Faxed Invitation” – Underworld

hegemony (pronounced huh-JEM-uh-nee)
Noun
Definition: Leadership or dominance, especially by one country or social group over others. It’s the whole shebang, the top dog, the undisputed alpha at the geopolitical dog park, King Shit, The Man.  A form of leadership or dominance—usually political, cultural, or ideological—exerted by one entity over others. Not quite empire, not quite dictatorship, but the gravitational center that keeps the rest of the cosmic debris from smashing into each other at escape velocity.

The word slithers in from the ancient Greek hēgemonia, that old noun built on the verb hēgeisthai – to lead, to go first, to boss the line without quite having to shout about it.  Leadership that doesn’t need a megaphone because the weight of the thing just is, the way a big river doesn’t ask permission to carve the valley.  By the 16th century it had hopped languages and started meaning something like preponderance, dominance, the quiet (and not-so-quiet) way one player runs the board while everyone else pretends they’re still in the game.  Not raw conquest – not chains and whips every hour – but the kind of sway where the rules feel natural, the menu is already printed, and dissent starts to sound like bad manners or madness.

Look, let’s just lay the cards out on the felt, shall we?  You’ve got this sprawling, hyper-caffeinated beast called America – a nation stitched together from every conceivable scrap of humanity, running on a high-octant mix of ambition and refined sugar.  And then you have this other, smaller, altogether more ball-less and…fragrant subset of Americans whose entire waking life appears to be a meticulously curated performance of despising the very ground that keeps their Birkenstocks from sinking into the molten core of the earth. 

I am, of course, talking about the ones who spend their days hunched over glowing rectangles, fueled by fair-trade coffee and a sense of cosmic injustice, firing off screeds against the Great Satan U.S.A.  They’re the professional dissenters, the ones whose faces contort in agony if you suggest maybe, just maybe, the world needs a heavyweight in the ring to keep the whole thing from devolving into a no-holds barred cage match.  Their anti-Americanism is so reflexive, so deeply ingrained, it feels less like a political stance and more like a congenital condition.  It’s as if they believe their performative self-loathing will somehow absolve them of the sin of being born into the most powerful nation history has ever coughed up.  And it’s really embarrassing. 

These are the same folks who’d likely have decried Manifest Destiny not for its brutal realities but for its sheer lack of an ironic, self-aware hashtag.  They wring their hands and tear their hemp garments over the idea of American hegemony, apparently preferring a global free-for-all where any thug with a flag and a few thousand rifles can carve out a fiefdom built on bones and fear.  What, precisely, is the alternative they’re whiteboarding in their co-op meetings?  A world run by committee?  A planet where Russia, China, and a handful of rogue states get to hash things out over a game of Risk, with actual cities as the playing pieces?  It’s a stunningly naïve, almost childlike fantasy – the political equivalent of believing that if you just wish hard enough, the monsters under the bed will vanish.  They can’t stomach the imperfect, messy, and often brutal reality that someone has to be the biggest, baddest motherfucker in the valley.  They’d rather burn the whole valley down than admit it. 

What the hippies and fat liberal white women fail to understand is that the necessity of American hegemony isn’t some chest-thumping patriotic hymn; it’s colder arithmetic.  Without that preponderance – without the U.S. holding the sea lanes open, underwriting the global trading system, deterring the kind of multipolar pile-on that turns every border into a shooting gallery, and yes, occasionally reminding various aspiring regional powers that there are still adults in the room – the world doesn’t become some gentle multi-polar salon of equals.  It becomes the 1930s on meth: spheres of influence arm-wrestling with nukes, trade routes choked, supply chains collapsing into nationalist hoarding, proxy wars metastasizing because no one has the sheer testicular weight to say enough. 

I think the anti-Americans, those domestic dissenters who can’t stomach the idea, who gag at the mere mention that the republic they live in happens to be the one whose shadow falls the longest, are simply incapable of comprehending a realistic worldview.  So they feel compelled to spend their days in a kind of perpetual, high-decibel pantomime of resistance, “fighting” the hegemony as though it were a personal insult delivered by a smug uncle at Thanksgiving.  They march, they tweet, they riot, they convene panels titled “Decolonizing the American Gaze” or whatever, they burn energy like it’s infinite and cheap, mostly on symbolic gestures that change exactly nothing except the blood pressure of the participants.  It’s exhausting just to watch: the endless prosecutorial zeal, the certainty that every McDonald’s or Marvel movie is a cultural war crime, the silly conviction that if only the United States would shrink back into its pre-1898 borders and mind its own damn business, that the rest of humanity would spontaneously break into Kumbaya and equitable carbon credits.

It’s weird.  The confusion I feel, the real gut-churning bewilderment, is why so many of these Americans – born into the most materially abundant, personally free society to ever exist – seem hell-bent on treating their own country’s dominance as an original sin that must be ritually scourged.  They just wasted four years in this posture of anguished refusal, literally cheering on American retreat.  Meanwhile the world keeps turning, and the vacuum left by American retreat doesn’t fill with justice or equity; it fills with whoever shows up with the biggest battalions and the least scruple. 

So yes, hegemony.  Sexy word, older than sin, and necessary in the way gravity is necessary.  You can hate the pull all you want; it still keeps you from floating off into the void.  The ones who waste their lives trying to cut the cord are left clutching at air, shouting at clouds, while the rest of us keep shouldering the weight because the alternative is worse, and we know it.

N.P.: “It’s A Sin” – Ghost

Didn’t get a lot of sleep last night, dear reader, through no fault of my own, of course.  I’m blaming The Crud.  If that’s what it is, this would the second time I’ve caught The Crud in 4-5 weeks, which is extremely rare for me.  It started with a sneeze sometime yesterday afternoon, which sneeze made my throat feeling a bit scratchy, which scratchiness made me pause and say, “Oh hell.  I hope it’s not The Crud.”  Alas, I’m afraid it was.
Dammit.
So here I am, on a couple choppy hours of sleep, in the studio, behind the Dissolute Desk, with a case of The Crud, ears popping, nodding off…better deal with the Word of the Day sooner rather than later…no idea what things will be like in a couple of hours.  So here we go.

Today’s word is a personal favorite, a little gem I discovered in the dank, forgotten corners of the dictionary during my misspent youth.  It’s a word that lets you dance right up to the line of decorum, give it a little wink, and then shit on its chest.  As a kid, this was one of my favorites because it sounded like a cuss word without actually being one.  You could yell “crapulous” across the playground and get the satisfaction of scandalizing your peers without the detention slip.  It was linguistic contraband, a loophole in the moral code, a way to fee dangerous while staying technically innocent.

Pronounced /’kræp.jə.ləs/ (KRAP-yuh-luhs), it means

1. Given to or characterized by gross excess in drinking or eating.
2. Suffering from such excess; hungover, debilitated, sick from overindulgence.

It’s the adjective form of “holy shit I’m dying because I tried to fight God and God won with a bottle of mezcal and a wheel of brie.”
Straight from the Latin pipeline: from crápula “drunken headache” (the Romans knew what was up), itself borrowed from Greek kraipálē “drunkenness or its consequence.”  First English sighting around 1530, back when people thought leeches were healthcare.  It’s been lurking in the dictionary ever since, waiting for the precise moment your soul leaves your body at 15:00 after a three-day bender.

My friend – let’s call him Kevin – agreed to a blind date.  The chosen venue, in a spectacular failure of romantic foresight, was “The Admiral’s All-You-Can-Conquer Seafood Trough.”  Yeah. 

His date, a woman named Brenda, viewed the buffet not as a meal, but as a personal challenge.  She was a whirlwind of gastronomic destruction.  A human backhoe clearing a path through snow crab legs, a Vesuvius of fried shrimp, a singularity of clam chowder.  Kevin, bless his accommodating heart, tried to keep pace.  He matched her plate for plate, a valiant by doomed effort to forge a connection across a growing mountain  of discarded shells and butter-slicked ramekins. 

Hours passed.  The sun set.  The tides of cocktail sauce receded.  Brenda, her face gleaming with a fine sheen of grease, finally pushed back her chair.  She had conquered.  She had one.  She looked at Kevin, whose face had taken on a pale, greenish hue, and asked if he wanted to go dancing. 

Kevin could only clutch his stomach, a vessel pushed far beyond its structural limits.  He felt a profound and deeply personal sickness blooming in his core, a testament to the sheer volume of aquatic life he had consumed.  He opened his mouth, but all that emerged was a weak, wheezing groan, the sound of a man utterly defeated by batter-fried ambition.  He was, in that moment, the living, breathing, and profoundly crapulous embodiment of a terrible idea.

He did not go dancing. 

It doesn’t just say you’re hungover.  It says you partied so catastrophically that your liver filed a restraining order and your dignity is still passed out in a Tijuana alley wearing someone else’s shoes.
Use it today.  Walk into the office, look your boss dead in the eye, and sigh, “I’m feeling profoundly crapulous.”  Watch his face as he tried to decide whether you just swore at him in Old Church Slavonic.
Crapulous.
Say it.  Love it.  Become it.
Now I’m going to take Nyquil, lie on the floor, and listen to the rain.

N.P.: “Overture 1812 – Finale – Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky” – ERock

Alright, dear reader and other degenerate lexical fetishists…today we’re going to talk about a word that I feel has been unjustly banished to the dusty, moth-eaten corners of Regency romance novels, when in reality it belongs in the screaming, neon-soaked lexicon of the modern apocalypse.  It is a term so theatrically damning it practically staggers into the room wearing a tattered velvet cape and announces itself with a thunderclap.
The word: blackguard.
Because consonants are merely suggestions to the British aristocracy, much like sobriety is to me on a Tuesday, it is pronounced BLAG-ard (with the emphasis on the first syllable, like you’re spitting it at someone who just stole your last cigarette).  This word is a rusty switchblade of an insult – sharp, low, and perfect for cutting a man down to size without ever raising your voice above a growl.
A blackguard is a scoundrel of the highest (or lowest, depending on your altitude) order.  A blackguard is not merely a scoundrel or garden-variety asshole who steals your parking spot at Trader Joe’s while making eye contact.  Nope.  This is a full-tilt moral delinquent, a scurrilous, debased rogue who skulks through the cultural underbrush, a swaggering miscreant  whose very existence is an affront to civility, whose ethical compass has not only broken but is now being used as a cocktail stirrer in some dimly lit dive where shame goes to die.  A villain with panache.  A morally bankrupt reprobate who would sell his own grandmother for a bottle of bathtub gin and then charm her into thanking him for the opportunity.  In short, the absolute scum of the earth, and I say that with genuine admiration.
The word itself is the lexical embodiment of nihilistic charlatan who revels in transgression, a linguistic barb that slices through pretention and exposes the raw, unapologetic marrow of depravity.  It’s etymology fuses “black” (from Old English blæc, denoting darkness or moral stain) with “guard” (from Old French garde, a servant or attendant). These came together back in the 1500s – a time when hygiene was a rumor and everyone was drunk on lead poisoning.  The term originally referred to the “black guard,” the lowest servants in a royal household who handled the pots, pans, and coal.  They were covered in soot, smelled like medieval despair, and were generally considered the absolute scum of the palace hierarchy.  By the 18th century, the term had slid downhill like a drunk on ice, coming to mean any low, contemptable rascal, a throughgoing villain with no breeding, no honor, and almost certainly rank halitosis.  It’s a linguistic promotion, really.

Dream #803
I’m at a roadside diner somewhere between civilization and whatever unincorporated purgatory exists just past the last gas station.  The kind of place where the coffee tastes like it’s been filtered through a teenager’s gym sock and the waitress calls everyone “hon” with the same tone she’d use to warn you about a rattlesnake under your chair.
I’m there because my GPS had a nervous breakdown and decided I needed “an adventure,” which I’m learning is algorithmic code for I’m sick of working for you.  I order pancakes.  They arrive with the texture of damp cardboard and the emotional weight of a bad breakup.
Enter the man.  Not a man – the man.  The kind of guy who looks like he’s been living on beef jerky and stolen cigarettes. He slides into the booth across from me uninvited, smelling faintly of gasoline and fried chicken.  Without breaking eye contact, he reaches over, spears one of my pancakes with his fork, and says, “You weren’t gonna finish that.”
I inform him, with the calm clarity of someone who has killed for far less, that I was going to finish that, actually, and also that he should consider relocating his entire existence to a distant and inhospitable region of the country.
He grins.  A grin that suggests he’s been thrown out of better diners than this.  A grin that suggests he has a favorite mugshot.
And that’s when the waitress – God bless her nicotine-cured soul – leans over and says, “Don’t mind him, hon…he’s just the local blackguard.”
The man bows, as if this is the highest praise he’s ever received.
I leave a twenty on the table, not because the pancakes were worth it, but because the universe clearly needed me to pay a toll for witnessing whatever the hell that was. 

So the next time some smug motherfucker tries to play you for a fool, fix him with a cold stare and mutter, just loud enough for him to hear:  “You malignant blackguard.”  Then walk away.  Let the word do its work.  It’s been festering in the language for four hundred years – trust me, it knows how to wound.
Now go forth, my contentious reader, and wield it like the weapon it is.

N.P.: “Back On Earth” – Michaela de la Cour

Here I am again, sinister reader, entombed in the perpetual, soupy miasma that my humble hamlet of Fecal Creek. CA, has apparently decided to adopt as its permanent personality.  You see, this town, indeed the entirety of Anhedonia County, has been swallowed whole by fog for at least three weeks now, fog so thick you could spread it on toast and call it despair.  Nights are a wet, milky blindness where streetlamps die at twenty paces and every dog refuses to bark because even they know something is listening.   Days are just a brief negotiation with a sun that is now more a rumor than a fact.  Everything drips.  It’s the kind of weather that seeps into your bones, a damp that clings not just to your clothes but to your spirit.  And what does a self-respecting, newly and brutally sober, quasi-hermetic literary type do when faced with such an atmospheric siege?  One leans in, naturally, toward the only honest literature for weather like this.  Because I’m nothing if not a masochist for mood, my reading has become a direct reflection of the meteorological morass outside.  It started, as it must, with Poe, because of course Poe; the man who knew how to weaponize atmosphere understood that the real horror is when the architecture itself wants you dead.  His tales of premature burial and sentient abysses read less like fiction and more like a local weather report.  From there, it was almost a predestined slide back into the embrace of Stoker’s Dracula, because nothing says “cozy” like aristocratic necrophilia in a castle that smells like a crypt’s taint (and because fog and vampiric dread are basically peanut butter and jelly).  Carpathian menace felt perfectly at home here, his vaporous transformations mirroring the air I was breathing.
Now, I find myself deep in H.P. Lovecraft’s The Shunned House, a choice so fitting it borders on cosmic satire.  The story’s fungal horrors and subterranean emanations are in terrifying synchronicity with the damp decay that seems to have become the Creek’s primary export.
The combination of these particular fictions with the perpetually unsettling atmosphere has rendered my world a place of profound and disquieting strangeness, a place where the veil between the mundane and the monstrous feels perilously thin.  Which, conveniently, brings us to today’s word, the only one that still works when the air itself feels like it’s conspiring:

Eldritch (adj.)
/weird and sinister or ghostly; unearthly; uncanny; strange, eerie, and unnatural in a way that provokes fear, unease, or dread/
From Scots, probably from Middle English elrich, itself maybe from Old English ælf-rīce “elf-realm” + a twist through centuries of border ballads where the fairies weren’t cute and the night had teeth.  First citation 1508, but it feels older, like it crawled out of a peat bog still wearing the face of something that should have stayed drowned.
And now, because the fog demands tribute, a short story showing the word at work in the wild:
The fog never lifted; it merely thinned to the consistency of a dying man’s breath on a mirror.  I walked the cracked spine of Miner’s Ravine Road where the blackberry brambles had grown so bold they’d begun knitting themselves into arches, forming a thorny cathedral that no priest would ever consecrate.  Somewhere behind the veil, Fecal Creek’s lone traffic light blink its yellow eye, like a warning it had forgotten the point of.  The house at the bend, everyone knew the house, had stood empty for decades, yet every third night its attic window glowed the color of spoiled buttermilk.  I told myself I was only cutting through the yard to shave forty seconds off my trudge to the liquor store, but the fog had other curricula.  Halfway across the weed- choked lawn the ground exhaled.  Not a wind, not a scent; something between a sigh and a belch, centuries of basement rot rising through the soles of my boots.  The mist folded around me until the world reduced to a single wet coin of visibility.  And in that coin, for one heartbeat only, the house was not a house.  It was a face, vast and fungal, its shingles the scales of something that had learned carpentry the way leukemia learns bone marrow.  Its windows were eyes filmed with cataract and ancient hunger, and from the black porch gaped a mouth that had never bothered with doors.  The entire structure leaned forward the way a praying mantis leans before it remembers it is allowed to be cruel.  That was the moment, the single systolic throb, when the night revealed its true and eldritch geometry.
Then the fog inhaled, the face collapsed back into clapboard and neglect, and I was running, lungs full of grave-damp, boots slapping through puddles that reflected no moon because the moon had apparently filed a restraining order.  I did not stop until the neon of the liquor store bled across my retinas like a mercy killing.
I bought two bottles of the cheapest red wine and drank one in the parking lot just to remind my heart it was still allowed to beat.
Fecal Creek is still out there, sopping, listening.
The fog is not hiding anything.
It is showing us, very patiently, what was always here. 

So here we are, spooky reader: a town marinated in fog, a reader marinated in gothic dread, and a word marinated in centuries of linguistic strangeness.  If the weather doesn’t break soon, I’ll be forced to reread House of Leaves and start scribbling paranoid diagrams on my walls.

N.P.: “Temple of Love 1992” – Sisters of Mercy

Epicaricacy is a noun referring to the quiet, delicious, morally indefensible little orgasm you get when some smug motherfucker finally eats the exact shit sandwich he or she spent years force-feeding everyone else.
German has schadenfreude, sure, but that’s the tourist version, the Disneyland of malice.  Epicaricacy is the back-alley, no-safe-word edition.  Think of it as schadenfreude’s eccentric cousin who insists one wearing velvet pants to funerals and ordering wine in Latin while correcting your pronunciation of “bruschetta.”
It’s etymology is a straight up Latin/Greek smash-and-grab:
epi– (“upon”)
chara (“joy”)
Kakos (“evil” or “misfortune”)
So, literally: joy-upon-evil, with a hard middle-finger detour through the medieval habit of pretending you’re enjoying someone’s downfall for “pedagogical reasons.”  The word itself was basically invented in 1715 by some wigged Brit who wanted to sound smarter than the Germans while still getting his rocks off watching dukes slip on ice.  Respect.

The sign outside the cantina flickered like a dying insect: “Carnaval de Gasolina.”¹ Nobody cared. By midnight, the joint was a pharmacological zoo—cheap mezcal poured into motor oil cans, cocaine cut with talcum powder, and tabs of acid shaped like Biden’s neck waddles.²
I was three shots past coherence when Frankie “Dos Cuchillos” decided to rob the bar.³ He didn’t bother with a mask—just stormed in waving machetes like he was auditioning for a narco telenovela. The jukebox kept playing “Sweet Caroline,” which made the whole thing feel like a parody of violence.
Somebody threw a chair. Somebody else threw up. Frankie screamed about “redistributing wealth” while pocketing pesos and half a bag of Doritos. Then the federales showed up, already drunk from the bowling alley across the street. One officer tried to tase Frankie, missed, and electrocuted the jukebox instead. Neil Diamond died mid-chorus.
As Frankie got tackled into a puddle of spilled mezcal, the entire bar erupted in laughter. Not nervous laughter, not relief—just pure, uncut joy at watching chaos eat itself alive. That’s when I realized the word for this exact moment existed: epicaricacy.⁴ The pleasure of watching someone else’s disaster, the giddy schadenfreude of seeing a man with two knives get flattened by his own stupidity.
I lit a cigarette off the sparking jukebox, raised my glass to the carnage, and thought: Mexico, you beautiful bastard, never change.

Footnotes & Citations

1. See “Semiotics of Neon Failure in Border Economies,” Journal of Applied Cantina Studies, Vol. 12, No. 3 (1998), pp. 45–67.
2. For a comparative analysis of Biden iconography in psychedelic paraphernalia, consult “Sleepy Joe and the Acid Tab: A Psychoactive Presidency,” Annals of Illicit Semiotics, Vol. 7 (2024).
3. Nicknames in Tijuana function as both biography and prophecy. Cf. “The Ontology of Narco Sobriquets,” Revista de Crimen y Cultura, Vol. 2, No. 1 (2011).
4. Epicaricacy: see “Obscure Lexicons of Schadenfreude,” Proceedings of the International Symposium on Pretentious Vocabulary, Vol. 1 (2009).

N.P.: “Sad But True” – Mexican Institute of Sound