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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

N.P.: “Innuendo” – Queen

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

And yet.

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

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

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

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

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

What’s crackin’, dear reader.  As you ought to know by now, I’m an unapologetic patriot, just like you, and am looking forward enthusiastically to next year’s America 250 celebration.  But my style is being cramped in extremis by what seems to be a growing number of anti-American shitbags.
One recent egregious example – recent only to me, apparently, because I couldn’t care less about professional football and would rather have my intestines extracted with a dull spoon than sit through an entire football game – is that the NFL has allegedly been solemnly piping in some so-called “Black National Anthem” before kickoff.  That there hasn’t been a total boycott of the NFL until they knock that ridiculous shit off.  Half of the country seems to have collectively overdosed on anti-patriotism and cable-news outrage.  Spare me the racial separatism masquerading as “unifying gestures,” and you can stick your “two nations under God” horseshit all the way up your ass.

Today we’re going to talk about the actual, blood-and-black-powder origin story that stitched together the ragged, brawling entity we call the United States – a country a knows goddamn well there is only one national anthem that’s worth a shit, and that’s the one with rockets and bombs in it.  And that one was written on September 14, 1814.
So let’s descend, shall we, dear reader, into the muck and the mire of the Patapsco River, where the air is thick with the sulfurous stench of war and the taste of shitty rum.  It is here, dear reader, amidst the skull-rattling percussion of British naval cannons, that a lawyer named Francis Scott Key finds himself in what one might charitably call a jam.

Dig: a man, a lawyer no less – bobbing about on a sloop.  He’s technically a guest of the enemy, having just negotiated a prisoner release.  A gentleman’s errand, as we call it.  But the British, not being ones for letting a good surprise go to waste, decide to keep him for the night.  Why would those rotten British bastards do such a thing?  Because they’re about to unleash a fireworks display of apocalyptic grandeur upon Baltimore’s Fort McHenry.  Treacherous gits.

So there’s our guy, Frankie Key.  Trapped.  A spectator to the systematic, twenty-five-hour-long pulverization of his homeland.  It must have been sheer sensory overload.  The rockets – not the sexy, sleek, guided things of today, but fat, wobbly cones of incandescent rage – screaming across the sky.  The “bombs bursting in air,” which are actually hollow iron shells packed with enough black powder to disembowel a small building, arcing in beautiful, deadly parabolas before detonating with sound and fury.

The Shit is absolutely making sudden and brutal impact with the proverbial Fan.  The explosions are a relentless, psychedelic strobe.  The noise is physical, a pressure wave that vibrates throughout the ship and into his marrow.  And through it all, through this cacophony of imperial might, what is Key doing?  Cowering?  Praying?  Trying to bribe a royal marine for a belt of grog?  Probably.  But he is also watching.  His gaze is fixed, almost pathologically, on one thing: a magnificently oversized American flag fluttering over the fort.  It’s so big it requires a whole legion to hoist, a gigantic middle finger stitched from wool and cotton.  And as the night wears on, that flag becomes his focal point.  His North Star in a constellation of chaos.

When the dawn finally cracks, the bombardment ceases.  An eerie, ringing silence descends.  And Key, squinting through the smoke and the haze and probably a monster headache, sees it.  The flag.  Still fucking there.  A bit tattered and singed around the edges, but defiantly, miraculously, still there.

And in that moment of bleary-eyed, sleep-deprived, existentially pummeled relief, words begin to bubble up in the lawyer’s brain, fueled by adrenaline and whatever passes for patriotism when you’ve just watched your country take a 25-hour beating.  He scribbles them down on the back of a letter: the perilous fight, the ramparts, the rockets’ red glare.  Shit yes.

Your English professor, if they ever discussed this poem, which, let’s face it, likely will never happen, would probably call the poem, “Defence of Fort McHenry” a bit of a mess.  They’d say it’s wordy, the meter is clunky, and it’s set to the tune of a British drinking song, the irony of which is deliciously rich.  But you should tell your professor to get bent.  The poem is a genuine artifact, written in a moment of pure, unadulterated terror and awe.  It’s the sound of a man trying to make sense of the senseless, to find a sliver of meaning in the chaos of that night.  And for that, I propose we raise a glass to the old boy.  He saw the abyss, and all he could do was write a song about the light on the other side.

N.P.: “I Can’t Explain” – Scorpions

September 13th.  Just another date on the calendar for most, probably.  It’s Saturday, meaning most get a break from slogging through emails, pretending to care about spreadsheets.  Most get to spend the day with the fucking loved ones and wonder if it’s too early to pour a drink.  For me, it’s a day that calls for a certain type of reverence – the kind you can only really achieve with a glass of something dark and expensive in one hand and a dog-eared book in the other.  Because today, way back in 1916, a magnificent, complicated, and utterly brilliant bastard named Roald Dahl was spat into this world.

Of course, I use the term “bastard” with the utmost affection.  You see, the sanitized, candy-coated version of Dahl they fed us in elementary school – the jolly old grandpa figure with a twinkle in his eye – is a laughable fiction, a marketing ploy so grotesquely sweet it would give even Augustus Gloop a toothache.  The real Dahl was something else entirely.  A towering, cantankerous Welshman of Norwegian stock, a man who flew fighter planes, worked as a spy, survived a plane crash in the desert that basically rearranged his face, and then, only then, decided to write stories for children.  You have to respect that kind of life sequencing.  It’s like climbing Everest and then deciding to take up professional thumb-wrestling.

Think of it, man…the Great War’s churning Europe into a meat grinder, trenches belching mustard gas and madness, while over in this corner of the British Isles, a fishmonger’s son and his Norwegian wife, Sofie Magdalene Dahl, are hunkered down in a house that smells like salted cod and quiet immigrant grit, waiting for their third spawn to arrive.  Not with a whimper…nope – Dahl bursts forth like a prototype for every pint-sized tyrant he’d scribble into immortality, already plotting his escape from the ordinary, or at least that’s how it feels when you retro-engineer the myth from the man.

Because Dahl wasn’t born with a silver spoon; he got handed a goddamn harpoon, courtesy of that Viking heritage his folks dragged across the North Sea like contraband luggage.  Papa Harald, the elder Dahl, had fled Norway’s rigid hierarchies for the promise of Welsh rain and fish guts, only to drop dead when young Roald was barely out of diapers – some botched dental surgery gone septic, turning a routine tooth-pull into a full-on exit wound from life.  Just like that, the family’s reeling, Sofie’s left to wrangle the brood solo, and little Roald’s absorbing his first lesson in the universe’s gleeful sadism: death doesn’t knock, it drills right through your jaw.  You can almost hear the kid’s proto-writer brain whirring even then, filing away the absurdity for later deployment in tales where parents get squashed by rogue rhinoceroses or grandparents sprout wings from moonbeams.  It’s the sort of origin story that screams payback’s a peach, and Dahl would spend the next seven decades turning the screws on every adult who’d ever wielded authority like a blunt instrument.

Fast-forward through the Repton School gauntlet, where the headmaster’s wife (Mrs. Plum, no shit) tested her rancid gandy prototypes on the boys like they were lab rats in a chocolate-coated fever dream.  Dahl loathed the place and the vicious floggings doled out by masters who treated prepubescent hides like stress-relief punching bags.  “All through my school life I was appalled,” he wrote later in his memoir Boy, “by the fact that masters and senior boys were allowed literally to wound other boys, and sometimes quite severely.”  He not only survived it, but weaponized it.  Those beatings birthed the gleeful grotesquery of Matilda, where the monstrous Miss Trunchbull heaves the kids around like ragdolls, or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, with its parade of parental comeuppances doled out by a candymaker who’s equal parts benevolent god and capricious exterminator.

Cute to the 30s, and Dahl’s off gallivanting through Africa for the Shell Oil empire, playing expat tycoon in the Tanganyika sun until the Luftwaffe crashes his party in ’39.   A fighter pilot, he’s shot down over the desert, waking up in the hospital with a busted skull and a spine rearranged like a drunk dude’s Jenga tower.  From that chaos sprang his adult shorts, dark things like “Lamb to the Slaughter” where a frozen leg of lamb becomes the perfect murder weapon, or “The :Landlady” with its taxidermied guests and tea that’s just a tad too peachy.

But it’s the kids’ stuff that cements the legend, the books that sneak subversion past the parental radar: James and the Giant Peach rolling over authority figures like so many speed bumps, The BFG farting its way through linguistic lunacy, The Witches peeling back the hag masks on every snickering crone at the PTA bake sale.

I don’t mean to get too hagiographic here…Dahl was a prickly fucker, prone to barbs that drew real blood, the kind that still has folks clutching pearls a century on.  Antisemetic rants in print, casual bigotry slipped into early editions like contraband schnapps, stuff that got coins yanked from mints and apologies issued posthumously by his own family.  But ultimately, the guy was just a great story teller.  And he worked his ass off.  He wrote for two hours at dawn, two hours at dusk, churning out screenplays for Bond flicks and Bond girls, divorcing a Hollywood icon like Patricia Neal, then remarrying and plowing on till a blood disease claimed him in ’90 at 74.

So raise a glass of something fizzy and forbidden today to the birth of this Welsh-Norwegian badass who proved that the best revenge is a story served cold and crooked.  Sure, he wrote for kids, but Dahl rigged the game so they’d grow up questioning every adult edict, every saccharine lie, every caning disguised as character-building.  In a world still grinding boys into fodder and girls into footnotes, his pages remain explosive.  The real monsters are the ones who think they own the rules.
Now go read something that’ll scar your soul just right, and tell the headmasters to shove it.

N.P.: “Mind Like A Tree” – Scorpions