California on the Brink: A Symphony of Self-Inflicted Wounds

It’s a strange and beautiful kind of damnation out here, dear reader, watching an empire of golden dreams and sun-bleached asphalt methodically, almost artistically, disembowel itself.  California, the great shimmering mirage on the western edge of the continent, is not so much collapsing as it is performing a spectacular act of public suicide, funded, it seems, by an infinite supply of pilfered cash and weaponized apathy.  And the best part, the truly chef’s-kiss-perfect part, is that nobody seems to give a flying fuck.

Let’s just, for a moment, peel back the veneer of organic kale markets and performative outrage to gaze upon the writhing, maggot-infested carcass of the state’s finances.  It’s a real Bosch painting of bureaucratic depravity.  Take Los Angeles County, a place where the sun shines bright on a truly breathtaking hospice care fraud scheme.  We’re talking billions – with a ‘B’ – siphoned off by ghouls who bill the state for comforting the terminally ill, who, upon closer inspection, are not only not dying but are often blissfully unaware they’ve been enrolled in their own final act.  It’s a perfect, closed-loop system of grift: exploit the dying, bill the taxpayer, and cash the check before the Reaper can even sharpen his scythe.

But why stop at the nearly-dead when you can monetize the illegals?  The sheer scale of the Medi-Cal fraud is a thing of grotesque beauty.  Billions more vanish into the gaping maw of healthcare for those who shouldn’t even be in the fucking system.  It’s a humanitarian shell game where the only sure bet is that the house – a shadowy network of phantom clinics and complicit paper-pushers – always wins.  This state bleeds money, and anyone who dares to point it out gets branded with some scarlet letter of xenophobia.

Oh, but we’re barely scratching the surface, dear reader.  Let’s talk about the goddamn homeless, the state’s official mascot of compassion.  Billions upon billions have been shoveled into a black hole of nonprofits and initiatives with all the accountability of a three-card monte dealer in a back alley.  The number of  people living on the streets only goes up, yet the river of money flows unabated.  Where does it go?  Does it evaporate into the smog?  Is it used to build tiny homes out of pure, uncut virtue?  Who the fuck knows?  The people in charge sure as hell don’t know, or, more accurately, don’t want you to know.

And then there’s the high-speed rail.  This stupid, non-existent train.  A pharaonic monument to ineptitude.  A multi-billion dollar fever dream of connecting L.A. to San Francisco in a futuristic blur, which has so far produced exactly zero miles…hell, zero feet of functional track between those two points.  It’s the ultimate metaphor for the modern Californian condition: a promise of sleek, efficient progress that is, in reality, a colossal, money-burning hold in the ground in the middle of nowhere.  It’s a project so profoundly stupid, so audaciously wasteful, that you almost have to admire the sheer balls it took even to propose it.

And let us not forget, fed-up reader, the pièce de résisitance, the unemployment fraud during the unemployment fraud during the “pandemic.”  A cool thirty-plus billion dollars – a sum that could fund a small nation – casually handed out to international crime syndicates and prison inmates.  The state’s Employment Development Department, a name so Orwellian it’s almost poetic, basically left the vault door open with a “help yourself” sign taped to it.

The cumulative effect is a state budget that resembles the aftermath of a cartel war.  A fiscal bloodbath.  And the citizens?  The tanned, smiling, idiotic, Prius-driving masses?  They wander through the wreckage like placid livestock, their faces illuminated by the glow of their phones, their brows furrowed not by the wholesale looting of their future, but by the existential dread that the Bad Orange Man or some other far-off boogeyman in D.C. might cute the federal allowance that props up this whole pathetic charade.

It is my sincere hope that this entire beshitted state gets DOGEd out of existence and immediately forgotten about.

You can almost hear the collective whine: “But who will pay for our subsidized incompetence if Washington turns off the spigot?”  It’s a level of cognitive dissonance so profound, so complete, that it ceases to be merely pathetic and ascends to the level of high art.  They stand in the burning ruins of their own house, complaining about the price of fire extinguishers.  It’s a glorious, moronic spectacle, and from this vantage point, all you can do is pour another whiskey, light a cigarette, and watch the whole corrupt, fucked-up experiment burn.

N.P.: “Destroyer” – The Birthday Massacre

I am in a foul mood this morning, dear reader…foul!  I woke up this morning in the kind of mood that makes small children cry and grown mean cross to the other side of the street – an existentially foul, sleep-deprived snarl of a mood – because I made the catastrophic tactical error of letting the puppy sleep in the bed.  A choice that, in the moment, felt like benevolent paternal bonding but in practice became a kind of canine waterboarding session conducted in hourly installments.  Starting at 01:00, the little beat launched a precision-engineered campaign of nocturnal harassment: toenail scritching, repositioning with the subtlety of a bowling ball, and the occasional full-body flop that suggested she believed gravity was optional.  The coup de grace arrived at 04:45, when a warm, unapologetic tongue made direct contact with my inner ear canal, a sensation so profoundly violating it should be classified as at least a misdemeanor in California.  Everything else is illegal here, might as well add this to the pile.

And but so anyway, in this state of bleary, half-feral irritability, I remember that today marks the death of Mary Shelley – who, unlike me, managed to produce world-altering literature while presumably getting more than ninety consecutive minutes of sleep.  She died in 1851 at the age of 53, taken out by a brain tumor, which feels cosmically unfair given that she’d already gifted the world Frankenstein, the primordial ooze from which all modern science fiction crawled.  She was eighteen – eighteen – when she conjured the monster during that infamous ghost-story challenge at Lord Byron’s villa, while the rest of us at eighteen were barely capable of coherent thought, let alone inventing a genre.  Shelly was a literary titan disguised as a human, a woman who understood ambition and monstrosity and the terrible of loneliness of creation long before the rest of us caught up.

I have a brain tumor, too.  It’s external, weighs about 6 lbs., is shaped uncannily like a chihuahua and is attached to my hip with the clingy devotion of a barnacle that’s read too much self-help literature.  It’s not fatal, but it can be loud, and it is responsible for the fact that I am typing this with the emotional stability of a Victorian ghost.

I hate this goddamn dog right now.

The calendar, in its infinite appetite for chaos, also reminds us that February 1 marks the first proven murder committed by Ted Bundy in 1974.  Proven being the operative word, since Bundy’s whole biography is basically a Choose Your Own Nightmare of unconfirmed horrors.  On this night, he broke into the basement apartment of Lynda Ann Healy in Seattle, bludgeoned her unconscious, and abducted her.  Her remains wouldn’t be found for a year, a grim punctuation mark on a story that was already too bleak to bear.  Bundy is the kind of guy who forces you to confront the abyss with no guarantee the abyss won’t wink back.

And honestly – given my current state of sleep deprivation – I’m starting to suspect that Bundy’s entire homicidal career might have been catalyzed by a dog that wouldn’t let him sleep either.  I’m not saying it excuses anything (it does not), but I am saying that after being woken up every hour on the hour by a creature who weighs less than a Thanksgiving turkey, I understand how a person’s grip on sanity can begin to fray like a Temu extension cord.

I just burned my tongue on the tea.  Fucking dog.

Which brings us back to the present moment, for good or ill: me, the puppy, the lingering psychic residue of Mary Shelley’s genius, and the grim anniversary of Bundy’s first confirmed atrocity.  All braided together in the strange, sleepless braid of February 1.  Honestly, after the night I’ve just endured, I’m starting to understand the primal murderous rage that can brew in the heart of a man denied the sweet oblivion of unconsciousness.  Just saying, if I see one more dog-shaped shadow, or hear one more soft, wet sound, somebody’s gonna pay.  And it won’t be me.  Or Mary Shelley.  Or, probably, Bundy.  But someone.  Someone will pay.

Okay, fuck it: the puppy is snoring again.  I’m wide awake.  The monster in my head is probably just caffeine withdrawal and sleep debt, probably.  But if it starts whispering in German about galvanism and reanimation, I’m calling it quits and moving to Geneva.  Or at least to the couch.  Maybe I’ll sleep, maybe I won’t.  The hour hand keeps moving either way.

N.P.: “Sellf Help” – Offbeat, Greg Blackman

What a night, dear reader.  It’s tough being me some nights.  Legitimately difficult.  And last night was one such night.
Unlike the previous decade, which saw me getting 2-4 hours of sleep a night at the most, my sleep hygiene in the ’20s has been immaculate.  My Apple Watch regularly kisses my ass over meeting my 7-hour/night sleep goal.  But sometimes, every couple of weeks or so, things don’t go as planned.  There’s no secret to it: it’s all very obviously the fault of my overactive mind.

Last night, I very responsibly turned off the show I was watching at the appropriate time, and headed to bed.  I should have been asleep no more than an hour later, but an hour and fifteen later, I was still quite awake.  It was around that exact time that I decided I really needed a Dodge Challenger.  But a quick bit of research left me heartbroken…Dodge quit manufacturing new Challengers in 2023.  “Son of a bitch!” I said, out loud, upsetting everybody else in the bed, who were already asleep.  I was upset, so, not wanting to further disturb anyone else’s slumber, I got out of bed, went to the other room, and looked out the window at the fog.  That made me feel better, and made me think of Lovecraft and Poe.  It also reminded me that the new Dracula movie comes out in the States on February 6.  This, too, improved my mood.  But it did nothing to slow down my mind.  Which mind then jumped suddenly to W.H. Auden, most likely because I’ve been reading some of his poetry recently.  I thought about some stories of eccentricities one of my professors in college had told me about when Auden had stayed at his house for a couple of days.  It then occurred to me that there had been no feature film or biopic yet made based on Mr. Auden, and that a) it was high time one was, b) I was the person to write the script, and c) the time to do that was right this very sleepless second.  So I went into the studio and got to work.

I’d recently finished reading Carpenter’s biography of Auden, so things moved quickly.  It would be called “The Necessary Angel.”  It would be Tár meets The Imitation Game, and would have lots of smoky rooms, cigarette ash, opera rehearsals, and political arguments, and it would center around this poet who lived like a storm cloud with a library card.  Brilliant!  Smoky, cerebral, and emotionally jagged.  Great…time to outline:

Act I – The Making of a Monster
1.     Prologue: The Old Lion
Opening in 1972, Auden in his final years: disheveled, brilliant, chain-smoking, lecturing in a Vienna classroom.  He begins reading a poem – then stops, pissed off, muttering that he “no longer believes a word of it”  Cut to black.

2.      Childhood in Birmingham
Auden as a pretty weird kid, obsessed with mining equipment and reciting Icelandic sagas.

3.      Oxford: The Young Genius
Auden arrives at Oxford and immediately becomes the weirdest, smartest, most magnetic student in the room.  He meets Christopher Isherwood, who becomes his mentor, lover, and co-conspirator.

4.     The Auden Group
Auden, Isherwood, Spender, and MacNeice form a literary group that feels like a punk band of the 1930s.  The write, argue, drink, and reinvent modern poetry.  Auden becomes the reluctant leader, which he both hates and secretly loves.

5.     Spain and Disillusionment
Auden goes to Spain to check out the Civil War and hopefully get some moral clarity.  Instead he finds chaos, propaganda, and his own political ignorance.

This was going just swimmingly.  If the next two acts went as smoothly and quickly as this opener, I’d have a saleable treatment by dawn.  But there was a problem…when I originally got out of bed to go look at the fog, I popped a lightweight muscle relaxer, which was suddenly kicking in.  Shit…I may not have until dawn.  Whatever…a couple of notes about casting this fucker.
W.H. Auden will be played by Andrew Scott.  Not because he looks like Auden (he doesn’t), but because he does razor-sharp intellect, emotional volatility and dry, surgical wit better than anyone.  He also has a strange mix of shyness and arrogance that I appreciate, that Auden seemed to radiate.  Especially in his work in Sherlock, he has the uncanny ability to make genius feel truly dangerous.  All that, and I just think Andrew Scott should be in everything.
Ben Wishaw would be great as Christopher Isherwood.  And Cate Blanchett would have to be Erika Mann.  That’s it for casting…for now.  Back to the outline:

Act II – The Exile and the Angel
1.     A Marriage of Convenience
Auden marries Erika Mann to help her escape Nazi Germany.  Political, absurd, and deeply moving.

2.     Flight to America
Auden and Isherwood leave England for the U.S.  The British press calls them cowards.  Auden shrugs it off, but is actually deeply wounded.

3.     New York: Reinvention
Auden meets Chester Kallman, the love of his life.  Opera, poetry, cigarettes, and late-night arguments.  Auden feels reborn.

Christ.  It’s now 03:17, and I am starting to nod off.  Finally. I save this to a file with 27 other started screenplay projects, none finished, all started in the  pre-dawn hours of some sleepless night and almost immediately abandoned when the muscle relaxers or whatever was on the menu to help me sleep when nature failed kicked in that evening.

N.P.: “Why Do I Do” – Plaine

California has collapsed  and my presence here is no longer tenable.  It will obvious take time to implement my exit…such things are very much like turning aircraft carriers around…but there is a plan and the beginning steps have already been implemented.

The cause of the collapse of this once-great state lies squarely at the feet of Gavin Newsom and the Democratic supermajority that has allowed to fester in this State for far too long.

Last week, Gavin Newsom delivered his pathetic State of the State address.  I have to give him credit…at least this year he actually gave the speech.  In the past few years, he was too embarrassed to even show up to give the speech.  But there he stood, looking like the asshole he is, claiming without any actual evidence that California “leads the nation.”   And for once, he was right.  California has led the nation during his tenure in homelessness, unemployment, poverty, illiteracy, gas prices, electricity costs, debt, and outmigration.
California also, of course, leads the nation in fraud.  It’s been 5 years since the State Auditor found Newsom allowed $32 billion in unemployment fraud after ignoring “repeated warnings.”  But the Auditor just found that billions in EDD fraud continues to this day, unabated.

Minnesota’s fraud scandals have just ended Tim Walz’s miserable political career.  California should likewise end Gavin Newsom’s.  The fraud in California, one it is all dragged into the light, will far surpass anything in Minnesota.  Again, a federal audit is presently underway which will expose the full extent of it.

Finally, a proposed “wealth tax” is already causing the most predictable exodus from California.  It turns out people would rather not have the government seize their assets simply to create a bigger pot of money for fraud, waste, and corruption.  The billionaires are now fleeing the state by the dozens, and once that happens, you can bet the next lower tax bracket will be targeted.

N.P.: “Fuck This Shit I’m Out (feat. Youngblaze)” – The Theme Song

The grotesque spectacle unfolding in Minnesota, courtesy of the craven Democrat duo Tim Walz and Jacob Frey, is an affront to the very concept of governance.  These spineless apparatchiks, more suited to leading a chorus of kittens than the helm of a state, have reduced leadership to a farcical pantomime and turned the Twin Cities into a tragi-comic open-air joke where the only law enforced is the one that lets the herd of fat, white, liberal sheep commit felonies while the shepherds bleat about “compassion” and “resistance.”  Their ineptitude is matched only by their audacity, as they openly flout federal law and incite their brainwashed minions to impede enforcement.

Look at them: Walz with his folksy aw-shucks grin that hides the spineless calculation of a man who thinks he knows exactly how far he can push before someone notices the bodies piling up in the ditches of his sanctuary policies; Frey, that chinless wonder, standing at podiums like a defeated altar boy reciting catechism while the city burns around him, telling federal agents to “get the fuck out” as if profanity substitutes for policy, as if rage-tweets and virtue-signaling pressers can rewrite Title 8 of the U.S. Code.  These are not leaders; they are enablers in suits, men who have so thoroughly internalized the lie that borders are racist constructs that they now treat federal law itself as an optional suggestion, a quaint relic from a less enlightened era.

They swallow every delusion fed to them by the party of cowardice – the notion that refusing ICE detainers somehow makes the Somalian streets safer, that releasing criminal aliens back into neighborhoods is an act of moral courage rather than criminal negligence, that the chaos erupting in Minneapolis (protests turning into assaults on agents, vehicles being used as deadly ramming weapons, the whole grotesque theater of impeding federal officers) is somehow the fault of the people trying to enforce the actual goddamn law.  They nod along, eyes glazed, jaws slack, because the alternative – admitting the experiment has failed, that their pieties have real human costs – would require a spine they long ago traded for donor checks and primary endorsements.

The liberal white women of Minnesota, tragically misled and woefully ignorant, march in lockstep behind these pathetic leaders, blindly accepting the lies they’re fed.  Their delusional attempts at relevance are an embarrassment, a tragicomic display of naivety and weakness.  But the two “leaders” seem to blindly trail after the flock like shepherds who have decided to hate their dogs, convinced that the sheep will protect them when the wolves finally show up.  They believe the lies because believing anything else would mean confronting the wreckage: the victims ignored while vigils are held only for the “right” kind of dead, the streets where criminal aliens roam because local jails have become revolving doors courtesy of sanctuary edicts, the slow bleed of public safety replaced by performative outrage.

The only solution that remains when elected officials openly abet felony obstructions and turn their jurisdictions into no-go zones for federal law enforcement: invoke the Insurrection Act, immediately and without apology.  These aren’t merely policy disagreements; this is active interference, conspiracy to impede officers in the performance of their duties, felonies stacked like cordwood while Walz and Frey issue statements about “authoritarian tactics” and “intimidation.”  Crush them in the streets, if necessary – not with glee, but with the cold necessity of restoring order when the civil authorities have abdicated.  Let the noise of boots and badges drown out the bleating; let the broken noses and busted jaws of the enablers serve as the final punctuation on their tragic, self-inflicted delusion.

Because nothing else works.  Personal experience has shown it: these loudmouthed lemmings will crumble at the first sign of real resistance, their feigned bravado giving way to pitiful sobs of defeat.  These “men” only understand force when their own hides are at stake, when the abstract principles they’ve weaponized suddenly become very concrete handcuffs.  Until then, they will keep propagating and swallowing the lies, keep leading the herd toward the cliff, convinced the fall is someone else’s fault.

The time for diplomacy is over.  The subs of the weak and defeated have had their day.  Time to end the farce.

N.P.: “Paint It, Green” – Denis Pauna

It is Tuesday, dear reader, a day traditionally reserved for tacos and hangovers, but down in the swampy bowel of D.C., something far more hallucinogenic is taking place.  The Supreme Fucking Court of the United States – that marble mausoleum on First Street where nine block-robed eminences sit in a row like constipated owls – today undertook the solemn business of hearing whether a man can, by pure declarative force of his own mouth, transmute himself into a woman for all legal and rational purposes, simply by announcing the fact with sufficient sincerity.  Not surgery, not hormones, not even the full bureaucratic regalia of a changed passport or birth certificate; just words.  Sincerely uttered words.  “I am a woman,” spoken aloud, preferably with feeling, and lo, biology folds like a cheap suit.

The occasion was oral arguments in the twin cases out of Idaho and West Virginia, where states have had the audacity to insist that girls’ and women’s sports teams remain delimited by the crude old metric of biological sex at birth.  Lawyers for the challengers – tranny women (a.k.a. men) – faced a relentless barrage from the conservative bloc, most memorably Justice Alito, who kept returning, with the patient cruelty of a man peeling an onion layer by layer, to the hypothetical: Here is a person born male, unaltered by any medical intervention, possessed of undiminished testosterone and the full architectural complement of male secondary characteristics, who nonetheless steps forward and declares, “I sincerely believe I am a woman.  I am, in fact, a woman.”  Is this person now, for constitutional purposes under equal protection or Title IX, a woman?  Not “treated as,” not “recognized in certain limited contexts as,” but is.  The attorney for the challengers, to her credit, did not quite vaporize into a mist of horseshit on the spot, but the exchange hung in the air like smoke from a tire fire.

And here we arrive at the great, foaming, incandescent, absurd idiocy that has become the progressive position on sex itself.  Because if the answer is yes – if mere self-declaration suffices to override the material reality that has ordered human reproduction, athletics, prisons, medical care, and basic mammalian taxonomy for several hundred million years – then we have entered a realm where language is no longer descriptive but performative magic.  Say the spell correctly, believe it hard enough, and the body obeys.  Reality is optional.  The Left, in its current fever-dream configuration, has decided that the highest form of compassion, the purest moral heroism, consists in pretending that words can repeal chromosomes.

This is not thinking.  This is anti-thinking.  It is the intellectual equivalent of covering your eyes and shouting “Not real!” at an onrushing freight train.  The same moronic cohort that once prided itself on ruthless materialism – class analysis, historical dialectics, the implacable grind of economic base determining ideological superstructure – has now traded all that for a metaphysics so idealist it would make Hegel blush and Berkeley look like a blunt empiricist.  Sex is not a fact; it is a felt essence.  Biology is bigotry.  The body is a suggestion.  And those of us who point out that penises and testosterone confer certain ineradicable athletic advantages, or that women’s prisons perhaps ought not to house rapists who have recently discovered an inner femininity, are excommunicated as a TERF, a bigot, a collaborator with the carceral state, et cetera, et cetera, ad infinitum, ad absurdum, ad nauseum.

What we are witnessing is not progress but a species of religious hysteria dressed in secular drag.  The catechism demands affirmation, the sacraments are social transition and pronoun policing, the heretics are those who notice patterns in crime statistics or bone density or simple mammalian dimorphism.  Dissent is violence; skepticism is hate.  The high priests – academics, NGOs, blue-check journalists, certain appellate judges – enforce orthodoxy with the zeal of inquisitors convinced they are saving souls.  Meanwhile the material world keeps refusing to cooperate: women lose scholarships and podiums, girls sustain injuries, female inmates face predation, and everyone is required to smile and applaud the new doctrine that a sufficiently earnest declaration overrides every measurable datum.

This whole stupid spectacle would be darkly comic if it were not so destructive.  A man can no more become a woman by saying so than he can become a giraffe by eating leaves off the top shelf or a helicopter by spinning really fast.  Yet here we are, dear reader, watching the highest court in the land earnestly debate whether the incantation “I am a woman” should enjoy the full force of constitutional recognition.  The Left has not merely abandoned reason, it has declared war on it, and demanded we all enlist.

I almost hope the Court rules the obvious – that sex is binary, immutable, and not subject to unilateral verbal fiat – simply so the idiot fever can break, the patients can be led gently back to observable reality, and we can stop pretending that the most radical act of solidarity is agreeing to hallucinate together.  But even then, the damage is done.  This insipidly imbecilic ideology will slink off to lick its wounds, rebrand, and return under a new, nonsensical slogan.  Because the true believers never really wanted to win an argument.  They wanted to win reality itself.

And that, ladies and gentlemen of the invisible jury, is where we stand on this fine January day in 2026: listening to solemn men and women in robes decide whether self-deluded sincerity is stronger than sperm.

I can’t believe I’m forced to live in a society this fucking stupid.  Christ almighty.  Pass the Jack Daniels.

N.P.: “Here comes the rain again” – Pure Obsessions & Red Nights

There’s a particular species of well-meaning interpersonal pablum – a kind of linguistic airbag – that has been growing increasingly common since the Covidiots started demanding everybody wear masks all the time.  It’s a verbal plague – a contagion of concern-trolling that has somehow become the default sign-off for every human interaction – that really descends upon you the moment the calendar even thinks about flipping to a new year.  It arrives in texts, in emails, in the brittle small talk of relatives who haven’t had an unsupervised thought since the Obama administration.  “Stay safe,” they chirp, from the checkout clerk to your own mother, their faces arranged in masks of earnest, suffocating care.  “Have a safe New Year.”  “Be safe out there.”

And I find myself, with a frequency that is becoming frankly alarming, wanting to grab them by their responsibly-sourced lapels and scream, “No.  Absolutely not.”  My goal is not safety.  My primary directive is not the careful preservation of this mortal coil in a hermetically sealed container until its warranty expires.  What, precisely, is the grand prize for accumulating the most days lived without a single scratch, a solitary misstep, a glorious and ill-advised leap into the unknown?  A slightly longer stay in a little room, waiting for the Jell-O cup?

Because here’s the thing nobody seems to want to admit in polite society: safety is boring.  Safety is the beige carpeting of human aspiration.  Safety is the spiritual equivalent of lukewarm tap water.  Safety is the bureaucratic memo stapled to the front of your soul reminding you to please refrain from doing anything interesting, alarming, or remotely alive.

This relentless, wallpaper-thin mantra of safety is a uniquely modern sickness and demonstrative of the wristslittingly depressing pussification of the entire culture.  It’s a linguistic anesthetic designed to numb us to the glorious, terrifying, and fundamentally unsafe business of being alive.  Every jagged edge of existence must be sanded down.  Every exhilarating risk must be mitigated into a spreadsheet of predictable outcomes.  We are encouraged, no, commanded, to wrap ourselves in bubble wrap and float gently down the river of life, avoiding all the sharp rocks and thrilling rapids where the actual living happens.

And yet, this holiday season, I was bludgeoned – rhetorically, repeatedly, and with the kind of  passive-aggressive cheer that should be classified as a misdemeanor – by people insisting I have a safe New Year.  As if the highest imaginable human achievement is to tiptoe through the next twelve months like a Victorian governess afraid of scuffing the parquet.

Well, fuck that.

I don’t want a safe New Year.  I don’t even want a safe Tuesday.  I don’t want a safe anything.  I want a year with teeth.  A year that lunges.  A year that leaves claw marks on the drywall.

The entire reason I do the so-called “unsafe” things I do –  the impulsive road trips to failed narco-states, the all-night creative benders, the questionable home-improvement experiments, the general refusal to live like a laminated instruction manual – is precisely because they’re unsafe.  Because they remind me that I’m not a domesticated appliance humming obediently in the corner.  Because they jolt the nervous system awake in a world that keeps trying to sedate it with ergonomic chairs and HR-approved slogans.  The entire point of doing anything worthwhile involves a calculated, and sometime not-so-calculated, dance with disaster.  The best stories don’t begin with “So, I conducted a thorough risk assessment.”  They begin with a bad idea, a shot of questionable liquor, and a magnificent disregard for the probable consequences.  They are forged in the fires of imprudence.  I don’t know about you, dear reader, but the memorable moments – the ones that flash behind your eyes when you’re horizontal with a tube in your nose at The End – are not the times you successfully followed the safety instructions.  They are the moments you threw the manual into the fire and Went For It.

The very concept of a “safe New Year” is an oxymoron of the rankest vintage.  A new year should be a wild, untamed frontier, a 365-day stretch of pure, chaotic potential.  It should be a minefield of opportunity and beautiful mistakes.  It should be dangerous.  It should be something you survive, not something you merely endure.

I think 2026 is going to be amazing – but only for the people who understand that “amazing” and “safe” rarely occupy the same sentence without one of them choking the other to death.

So here’s my counter-blessing, my anti-benediction, my heretical toast to the coming year:
May your 2026 be dangerous.
May it be unruly, ungovernable, and uninsurable.
May it terrify the people who think “safety” is the apex of human ambition.
May it leave you breathless, scraped, exhilarated, and unmistakably alive.
May it violently reject the soft, padded prison of a life lived in perpetual caution.
And if someone tries to tell you to stay safe, smile politely, nod once, and then go do something that would make them clutch their pearls so hard they leave dents.
Because safety is for appliances.
Danger is for humans.
And I intend to live like one.
I’ll take being alive.

N.P.: “In the Hall of the Mountain King” – Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross