And so it arrives.  The Main Event.  Halloween proper, the zero hour of the Gallaway Calendar, which, if you’ve been paying attention (and I know most of you haven’t, because you were busy duct-taping fake intestines to your front porch or mainlining candy corn like it’s Adderall), marks not the end but the beginning.  The Big Bang of the weird.  The first tick of the cosmic clock that runs of mischief, masks, and the sacred art of pretending.  You want to be a sexy vampire?  A depressed cowboy?  A sentient bag of Doritos?  Today, the universe says: “Yes.”

Like any good New Year, today demands a resolution.  Not the gym membership kind.  Not the “I’ll stop doomscrolling after midnight” kind.  I’m talking about the real stuff.  The marrow-deep vow to live louder, weirder, and with more intentional chaos.  To reject the tyranny of the beige.  To embrace the sacred disorder of the human soul.

Because Halloween is the only day the world agrees to play by Gallaway rules: that masks reveal more than they hide, that fear is a form of worship, and that the line between comedy and horror is not a line at all, but a Mobius strip make out of rubber bats and existential dread.

So tonight, when you’re out there – whether you’re chaperoning sugar-addled goblins or dancing in a warehouse dressed as a haunted spreadsheet – remember this: you are not celebrating death.  You are celebrating the refusal to be dead.  You are ringing in the new year of the beautifully deranged, the spiritually feral, the unapologetically strange.

Happy Halloween, dear reader.  May your candy be spiked, your costumes be cursed, and your soul be just a little more unhinged than it was yesterday.

Now go howl at something.

N.P.: “This Is Halloween” – Marilyn Manson

Hot damn, dear reader!  Tomorrow is Halloween, the New Year’s Day of the damned, the divine, and the deliriously decorated.   The annual ritualistic disembowelment of the pumpkins is complete, carved with surgical precision and a touch of psychosis.  Their malignant grins, a series of jagged and frankly unsettling triangles that leer like they know something about you that you don’t (and they do…they absolutely do), now illuminate the porch of the Safe House, casting a light that feels less like a welcome and more like a warning.  Which is, of course, the point.  Out here, where the treeline get thick and the ambient weirdness is a constant, low-grade hum, the 30th of October serves as the true demarcation.  Forget that champagne-and-confetti horseshit at the end of December; tonight is New Year’s Eve on the Gallaway Calendar.

This is the precipice, the final, deep breath before the glorious plunge.  Tomorrow, the veil gets so thin you could poke a finger through it and touch something cold and long-dead on the other side.  Not that the vibe here at the command center every deviates far from this particular frequency.  We exist in a state of perpetual autumn, a kind of year-long Samhain simmer.  Which is to say: cobwebs are not seasonal, they’re structural.  Skeletons aren’t props, they’re roommates.  The Safe House doesn’t do transitions – it marinates in perpetual October.  The aesthetic is year-round: a curated chaos of thrift-store taxidermy, flickering orange lights, and the faint scent of cinnamon and brimstone.  If Martha Stewart and Aleister Crowley had a baby and raised it in a haunted bowling alley, that baby would call the Safe House “home.”  The difference now is the rest of the world, for one fleeting, candy-coated night, finally gets the memo.  They catch up.

And then, as if the cosmos itself decided to sweeten the deal with a temporal cherry on top, we get the Fall Back.  This weekend, we reclaim that stolen hour.  We bend time back to its proper, non-daylight-saving configuration – what can only be described as Real Time.  An allegedly “extra” hour to exist within the perfect, chaotic apex of the year.  An extra sixty minutes of darkness and possibility.  Could things possibly ascend to a higher plane of perfection?

Fuck yes, they could.  The forecast, that meteorological oracle of institutionalized guesswork, whispers of a potential deluge later this week.  A solid gray sky-opening wash of rain to cleanse the psychic palate and settle the dust.

So here we stand, on the threshold of our New Year, with carved gourds bearing witness and the promise of temporal normalcy and a biblical drenching on the horizon.  The air is electric with the correct kind of wrongness.  Let the saccharine charade of the straight world have its day.  We know what time it really is.

So light your candles.  Lace up your boots.  Put on something that makes you look like you escaped from a Victorian asylum or a failed goth band.  This is the night before the night.  The last gasp of the old year.  The first breath of the new.  And if you’re lucky,  you’ll wake up Sunday soaked, slightly hungover, and reborn.  Happy Halloween Eve.  Let’s get weird.

N.P.: “Night of the Wolf” – Nox Arcana

We don’t need to possess everyone. We don’t have to. We have useful idiots who do more damage than we ever could. They carry out our agenda without ever knowing it. They think they’re doing good. They think they’re enlightened. But they’re just pawns. Tools. And when they’re no longer useful… we discard them.  ~ Lord Nefarious

N.P.: “Coexist With My Fist” – Hard Archive

Good day, dear reader, literary degenerates, and word perverts of various species.  And what a day it is…a cool fall day in the Creek, all cloudy and drizzly.  And only six days until Halloween, the New Years Day of the Gallaway Calendar.  I like it.

For absolutely no reason at all, I’ve decided today’s Word of the Day is a lexical artifact, dredged up from the Mariana Trench of the English language, found in the sedimentary layers of Latin, polished with the spit of linguistic masochists, and flung into the modern lexicon like a grenade of nonsense and confusion.  [That was quite an introduction…all apologies, dear reader…yrs. truly had a big breakfast, and a bigger lunch.  Never mind.]  Ladies and gentlemen, I give you nudiustertian –  adjective – pertaining to the day before yesterday.  Yes, a whole word for a concept we’ve clumsily handled in three.  And it’s so perfectly useless it’s beautiful.
Etymologically, it’s a smash-and-grab from Latin: nudius = “now is the day” and tertius = “third.”  So nudiustertian means “the third day from now,” which, in the twisted logic of time travel and English grammar, lands you squarely in the day before yesterday.  You can almost hear some toga-clad senator slurring it after too much wine, trying to remember which day he misplaced his chariot keys.  It’s the kind of word that makes even seasoned lexicographers reach for the desk whiskey.

So there I was, sitting in a booth at the Pink Iguana, where the air was thick with the ghosts of myriad bad decision’s – a miasma of stale cigarette smoke, cheap whiskey, and Glitter Bomb body spray.  My present companion – stage name: Tropicana, real name: Bethany – is straddling a barstool like it owes her child support, wearing nothing but glitter and the kind of confidence that makes Wall Street brokers cry in the shower.
I tell her, “You remember what happened nudiustertian?”
She blinks.  “Is that a sex position?”
“No, it’s a word.  It means the day before yesterday.”
She squinted at me. It was the same look she gave a guy who tried to pay for a lap dance with a coupon.  “Why not just say ‘the day before yesterday’?”
“Because language is a weapon, Bethany.  And sometimes you need a sniper rifle instead of a butter knife.”
She started at me, a long, unnerving silence stretching between us, punctuated only by the frantic clatter of my own self-satisfaction echoing in my skull.  I felt brilliant.  A poet.  A warrior of words bringing light to the darkened corners of her vocabulary.
Finally, a slow, dangerous smile spread across her face.
“You know,” she said, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper.  “There’s a word for people who use words like that.”
I leaned in, genuinely curious.  “Oh yeah?  What is it?”
She leaned closer, her lips almost touching my ear.
“Unfuckable,” she breathed.
Then she took the bottle I had just paid for, winked, and sashayed away, leaving me alone with the sudden, crushing weight of my own magnificent vocabulary. 

So there it is, dear reader…nudiustertian.  Use it if you want to sound like a time-traveling Victorian ghost with a thesaurus addiction.
Use it to confuse your friends, alienate your enemies, and seduce someone who thinks etymology is foreplay.
Use it because words are weapons, and this one’s a dagger dipped in irony.

N.P.: “Rivers Laughing” – promptgenix

Woke up this morning and I got myself a beer,
The future’s uncertain and the end is always near. 
~ James Douglas Morrison

I’m not afraid of death, and I’m not afraid of dying, but the idea of not existing is kind of a weird one that I have some trouble getting my mental arms around some nights.  The whole issue of mortality has been very much on my mind, especially the last several years when various things have tried to kill me and I’ve had to ‘rassle them into submission.  Each time, I’ve had the advantage of knowing that whatever I was dealing with at the time was simply not cool or interesting enough to be the actual Thing That Takes Me Out.  Cancer?  Nah.  Heart attack?  Hell no.  Gunfight with federales at the Tijuana/San Ysidro border?  Fuck yes.  Losing a fight with a rattlesnake?  I’ll take it.

But let’s talk about a real goddamn exit.  Not the slow fade into nursing-home tapioca, but a final act that achieves the level of myth or legend.  October 24, 1926, in Detroit, a city of steel and fury, where Houdini took his last bow.  And what a bow it was.  The man was burning up, a furnace of a fever scorching him from the inside out, his own appendix having staged a rather nasty and decidedly unmagical rebellion.  A lesser mortal – say, you or I – would be curled up, mewling pitifully for a nurse.  Not Uncle Harry.

Houdini, the ur-escapologist, the man who treated chains and straitjackets like they were merely inconvenient suggestions, dragged his fever-racked carcass onto the stage of the Garrick Theatre because the show must go on, goddammit.  The contract was signed.  The audience was there.  And Harry Houdini, a man whose entire existence was a fuck you to limitations, wasn’t about to be undone by something as pedestrian as a ruptured internal organ.  He stumbled, he sweated, he nearly collapsed, but he finished the show.  A week later, the curtain came down for good.  Peritonitis.  A messy, biological trap even he couldn’t pick the lock on.

But the death seems almost incidental.  A footnote.  The legend is what matters.  Much more than just a magician, Houdini was a walking, breathing, fist-swinging piece of American folklore.  You can draw a straight, jagged line from Houdini’s on-stage battles to the very heart of certain narrative traditions.  He engaged in a public, ink-soaked war with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the world’s most logical mind, over the fuzzy, ectoplasmic nonsense of Spiritualism.  Houdini, the ultimate illusionist, dedicated his life to exposing the fraudulent tricks of others, a crusade that was equal parts public service and some pretty amazing, high-minded flexing.  He even put his money where his mouth was and wrote, peeling back the curtain with a surprising authorial flair.  His book, The Unmasking of Robert-Houdin, is a meticulously constructed argument, a writerly vivisection of the very art form he perfected.

Then you have the fictional echoes, with his shadow falling across the pages of guys like E.L. Doctorow.  In Ragtime, Houdini is a symbol of human defiance against the locked doors of class, race, and fate.

That final, agonizing performance in Detroit was the apotheosis of it all.  Battered, poisoned from within, but utterly unbowed.  He took the stage knowing, I’m sure, on some primal level, that this was the end of the road.  He faced the abyss not with a whimper, but with a card trick.  And that is rather badass.  He didn’t just escape handcuffs and water torture chambers.  On that last night, he made a damn good attempt at escaping mortality itself, turning his own death into the one story that, nearly a century late, still refuses to be buried.

N.P.: “Circle of Samhain” – Slaev

Good evening, dear reader.  The last several days were a weird blur of driving and writing.  I’ve gotta say, work on this book has been one of the strangest experiences of my arguably strange life, and one I don’t care to repeat.  I normally prefer having at least a general idea of what the book is about before I start working on it.  I started writing this thing a full eight years before I knew what it was actually about.  It’s been very strange.  But it’s coming together nicely.  I think.

I must sleep.

N.P.: “Halloween” – Orbit Culture

Blessed are the peacemakers.

Hot damn, dear reader…though it’s not officially observed until tomorrow here in the States, today was the actual day Columbus discovered America for the Europeans and the world was truly born.

Let’s dispense with the hand-wringing and the insipid, anachronistic moralizing for just one goddamn minute, shall we?  Let’s talk about the moment the world stopped being a fragmented collection of provincial backwaters and became, for the first time, a singular, unified whole.  Of course I’m talking about 1492.  I’m talking about the day a stubborn, possibly half-crazy Genoese navigator dragged humanity, kicking and screaming, into its own future.

Picture it, man…a trio of glorified wooden tubs, the Niña, Pinta, and the flagship Santa Maria, bobbing on an endless, terrifyingly blue expanse of nothingness.  Weeks have turned into a month, then more, the crew a fetid stew of scurvy, desperation, and the kind of mutinous whispers that end with captains getting tossed to the sharks.  The men, a collection of Europe’s finest jail-scourings and debtors, are ready to string up their admiral from the highest yardarm.  They see only a watery grave.  Their admiral, Christopher Columbus, this lunatic with the glint in his eye, sees only destiny.  He has gambled everything – reputation, life, the backing of the Spanish crown – on a hunch so cosmically audacious it borders on psychosis: that he can reach the East by sailing west.

And then, land.  Not Cipango, not the gilded courts of the Great Khan, but something else entirely.  Something new.  A verdant smear on the horizon that resolves into an island he christens San Salvador.  Rather than an oppressive act of cruelty, this was an act of cosmic insemination.  The moment that salty, exhausted boot hit the sand was the Big Bang of the modern age.  It was the point-blank refutation of flat-earth timidity and the glorious, unapologetic affirmation of human will.

This single even, this one man’s refusal to accept the world as it was presented to him, lit the fuse on the Age of Exploration.  It was the gunshot that echoed across continents, waking Europe from its medieval slumber and yanking the Americas into the grand and chaotic narrative of global history.  It was the genesis of everything we now call “globalization” – the messy, brutal, and ultimately sublime collision of cultures, technologies, and ideas that would forge the world we inhabit.

To view this monumental juncture through the pathetic lens of 21-century guilt is to miss the point so profoundly as to be intellectually dishonest.  This was not a tea party.  It was the brutal, beautiful, and necessary birth of a new epoch.  It was the moment history drew a deep breath and roared.  Columbus didn’t simply stumble upon a new landmass; he shattered the old world’s cognitive map and, in doing so, created the very planet we recognize today.  It was, without reservation or apology, the single greatest thing to ever happen.  Period.

And now, for the absurd postscript of our age: the modern “land acknowledgment.”  Jesus.  Nothing says genuine solidarity like a fragile, self-congratulatory recital at the start of every TED-adjacent conference – a kind of liturgical guilt-venting for the overeducated, lightly organic white liberal, performed with the smugness of a yoga instructor who’s read one (1) book about colonialism.  Because why actually do anything when you can stare solemnly at your shoes and mumble how you “honor” the land you’re squatting on, right?  Here’s a radical idea: if you really believed in the cause, you’d sign over your mortgage to whatever tribe most recently claimed the land…hand the keys to your urban colonial compound, and take up residence in your Prius post-haste.  Try that at your next dinner party and watch the laughter – real, nervous, guilty laughter – ricochet around the kombucha bar.  Either give it all back or, for everyone’s sake, spare us the tragicomedy and just shut the fuck up.

N.P.: “I Really Wanna” – Mammoth

PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT OF THERAPY SESSION, SATURDAY, 11 OCTOBER 2025, IN THE OFFICE OF DR. KEVIN PEPPER, PH.D.  PARTICIPANTS: DR. KEVIN PEPPER AND MR. JAYSON GALLAWAY, FILE NUMBER 788-2945

KEVIN PEPPER: So what I hear you saying is that you want to go back to not dreaming.
JAYSON GALLAWAY: Goddamn right.
KEVIN: I don’t know of a way to do that.
JAYSON: Well, you better figure it out, because it’s your fault I started dreaming again.
KEVIN: How the hell is it my fault?
JAYSON: Because I didn’t dream for about a decade, then I started seeing you, and I started dreaming again.
KEVIN: Purely coincidence.  You were having a nervous breakdown, and while that was happening, your mind sort of took your capability to dream offline, basically.  As you recovered, you started dreaming again.  This is actually a really good sign.
JAYSON: It’s a pain in the ass.  I hate it.
KEVIN: Why?  Are you having nightmares?
JAYSON: Not at all.  At least that would be interesting.  At least I think it would.  I don’t think I’ve ever had an actual nightmare.
KEVIN: You reported that once your breakdown started, you had the same dream every night for…
JAYSON: A year and a half.
KEVIN: The same dream?  Remarkable.  And that wasn’t a nightmare?
JAYSON: Nope.  Exactly the opposite.  In that dream, everything was right again.  She was still alive…it was all just a misunderstanding, but everything was okay again.  Then I’d wake up and realize it was just a dream.  What I woke up to was the nightmare.
KEVIN: Jesus.
JAYSON: Indeed.
KEVIN: So what’s pissing you off about your dreams now, if it’s not nightmares?
JAYSON: They’re just irritating.  I keep having the same mundane dream night after night, and it’s just a waste of time.  It stressed me out while I’m sleeping.  And it’s just unnecessary.
KEVIN:  Well, in a sense, you’re right…dreams are just your mind trying to process things that you may not be attending to consciously.  In that sense, they can be fascinating windows into our subconscious…lets you deal with emotions and feelings in a symbolic way, rather than confronting things head on.
JAYSON: I don’t think this is that.  As you know, I have some pretty…complicate feelings, and this doesn’t seem to be addressing those at all.
KEVIN: Maybe I can help make the connection for you.  Tell me about your recurring dream.
JAYSON: This time I’ve had the dream the last two or three nights.  The first night, I arrived in a new city that I wasn’t familiar with.  It was kind of like San Francisco (with which I am very familiar) but not.  It was very labyrinthine, parking on the street, a couple of blocks away from wherever I’m going.  Lots of street lights and light from neon signs and that sort of thing (it’s always nighttime in my dreams), and people everywhere, but they were all strangers and couldn’t help me.  There were a couple of casinos, but it’s definitely not Vegas.  I had (apparently) rented a small apartment, but once I left the apartment, I had trouble finding it again.  That went on for a night or two.  Then, in last night’s dream, I was hanging around with an old friend of mine, a female, but nobody specific, and we got into some arbitrary fight, about which I remember nothing, but I didn’t understand why she was so upset with me and thought the whole thing was an overreaction.  I guess I left, but when I couldn’t find the apartment again, I decided it was time to get the hell out of this weird city and go back home.  But then I couldn’t remember where I parked my car.  I was wandering around the city, looking for anything that looked familiar, but found nothing.  I decided to call my friend for help…
KEVIN: Was this the same friend you got into the fight with?
JAYSON: Yes, so she wouldn’t pick up.  I decided the best thing to do would be to return to the apartment, or at least the area it was located in, and do a block-by-block search for my car, but since I couldn’t find the apartment, I didn’t really know where to look.  So I decided to just walk around and try to find it, but no luck, and I quickly got frustrated and quit.
KEVIN: As you tend to do.
JAYSON: Fuck you.  What do you mean?
KEVIN: Do you not think you get frustrated with things a lot?
JAYSON: Constantly.
KEVIN: And you’re typical reaction seems to be to quit.
JAYSON: Well, I don’t know about that.  I’m pretty frustrated right now, but I’m still sitting here.
KEVIN: We’ll see how long that lasts.
JAYSON: You’re a terrible therapist.
KEVIN: Do you think you’re a good patient?
JAYSON: No idea.  I think I’m the most interesting patient you’ve got.
KEVIN: Based on what?
JAYSON: The dolts I see coming into and leaving your waiting room.
KEVIN: Dolts?  I take umbrage.
JAYSON: Come on…every one of them…suburban housewives trying to figure out why they’re sad.
KEVIN: You don’t know that.
JAYSON: The hell I don’t.  I can hear everything they say…this stupid white noise machine does not compensate for the thinness of these walls.
KEVIN: Really…you can hear in the lobby.
JAYSON: Yes, dumbass…sometime I show up to these appointments early just to hear if maybe anything interesting is being discussed.  It never is.
KEVIN:  [scribbling furiously in his notebook]
JAYSON: Anyway, my dream…where was I?  Oh yeah…so I can’t find the car, I can’t find the apartment…then I realize that I’ve been there for several days, and since this is a big city, the car might have been towed at this point, which would mean that I could look for days and never find it.  Then I decide to use my smartphone to see if it could tell me where I parked, but the phone has strange apps on it, none of which work.  Then I wake up.
KEVIN: [scribbling furiously in his notebook]
JAYSON: ….
KEVIN: Okay…so it sounds like this dream is addressing your feelings around change, uncertainty, and connection.  I think we should focus on what the city, getting separated from the apartment, and the car might symbolize.
JAYSON: Sure, why not.
KEVIN: First, the city.  The city that feels like San Francisco but isn’t could symbolize a situation in your life that feels familiar yet disorienting.  You used the world “labyrinthine” to describe the layout, which is interesting. San Francisco, with its hills, lights, and sort of vibrant energy, might represent a place of creativity, or past experiences.  The fact that it’s “not quite” San Francisco could indicate a sense of being close to something meaningful but unable to fully connect with it.
JAYSON: Go on.
KEVIN: The apartment probably represents your personal space, identity, or sense of security.  It’s a sense of stability, comfort, or “home” within yourself.  The increasingly difficulty in finding it could reflect a fear of losing something important, like stability or control.
JAYSON: This is boring.  Why can’t I find the fucking car?
KEVIN: Cars in dreams often symbolize your ability to move forward in life, your drive, or your sense of autonomy .  Losing your car and being unable to find it might indicate feeling stuck, directionless, or powerless in some area of your life.  The fear of it being towed adds a layer of external forces, outside  your control) potentially taking away your means of progress, which could point to anxieties about circumstances or people undermining your goals.
JAYSON: Hmmm.  Slightly more interesting.
KEVIN: I wouldn’t worry about it always being night in your dreams, or the strangeness of the apps on the phone…dreams are sort of low-budget movies that your mind creates.  Details are left sort of out of focus…they take too much brain power…the purpose of the dream is more symbolic broad strokes, rather than details.  The lighting is dim in most people’s dreams because it’s an easy way to avoid having to come up with details.  Same thing with the apps on your phone…that too much detail for your mind to process while it’s busy creating the other aspects of the dream.
JAYSON: That’s probably true about the darkness of everything, but the cellphone not being able to help me find my car seems more relevant than that.
KEVIN: It could be.  What does the cellphone symbolize?
JAYSON: Don’t start with your cheap Socratic banter with me.  I’m paying you, like, $300 an hour…you tell me what the fucking thing symbolizes.
KEVIN: It quite obviously represents communication.  Resources.  In this case, a problem-solving tool.  It’s strange apps and failure to work could symbolize frustration with your usual methods of navigating challenges, e.g., your tendency to get frustrated and quit.
JAYSON: Your mother.
KEVIN: It might suggest that the tools and strategies you employ in real life aren’t working in a current situation.  They aren’t working as expected.
JAYSON: I appreciate your efforts here, but there isn’t a whole lot that is revelatory.
KEVIN: I’m just working with what you give me.  If you want more interesting analyses, have more interesting dreams.
JAYSON: You clown.  I obviously don’t control these things…they are clearly a waste of time and are just irritating.  Isn’t our time about up?
KEVIN: It is…might I suggest journaling about your dreams and your life?
JAYSON: You might, but I will do no such thing.  Isn’t it lunchtime?  I will instead drink whiskey and ruminate darkly on whether or not I’m getting my money’s worth in these sessions.
KEVIN: Fair enough.  See you next week, at the regular time.
JAYSON: Yeah, I’ll be here.
KEVIN: Have a good week.
JAYSON: Blow it out your ass.

N.P.: “JUST LIKE JOHNNY CASH” – Texas Hippie Coalition