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

Dispatches from the Western Edge of the Republic: A Double Dose of Liberty Unleashed

Friends, countrymen,  and dear readers, let it be recorded that in the span of a single rotation of this weary planet – a mere twenty-four hours – the gears of history have ground forward with a ferocity that leaves one breathless, exhilarated, and not a little vindicated.

First, out of the fog-shrouded chambers of the Ninth Circuit, that erstwhile bastion of coastal restraint, comes a thunderclap: California’s long-standing prohibition on the open carry of arms in the populous counties – those teeming hives where ninety-five percent of the state’s souls reside = has been declared null, void, and contrary to the plain text and historical marrow of the Second Amendment.  A panel of judges, applying the Supreme Court’s unyielding Bruen standard, has affirmed what any honest reading of the Founders’ intent has always whispered: the right to bear arms in the open manner, visible and unapologetic, is no modern indulgence but a tradition woven into the very fabric of this nation’s birth.  The state’s attempt to confine this right to rural backwaters, while denying it to the urban millions, collapses under the weight of its own ahistorical pretense.  One can almost hear the collective sigh of relief from us law-abiding citizens who have chafed under this selective disarming, this bureaucratic emasculation of a core liberty.

And then – hot on the heels of this judicial reclamation – comes the second bolt, raw and audacious (just how we like ’em), from the south: the United States military, in a swift, overwhelming nocturnal operation, has seized Nicolás Maduro, the entrenched cartel leader and strongman of Venezuela, along with his consort, and extracted them from Caracas amid a barrage that lit the sky like a reckoning.  The dictator, long indicted for narco-terrorism and the systematic plunder of his people, now finds himself blindfolded in the back of a boat, en route to American soil, bound for the stern accounting of New York justice.  Explosions echoed through the capital; special forces descended; and by the dawn’s early light, the palace that sheltered tyranny stands breached.  Venezuela, that once-proud nation bled dry by socialist delusion and cartel collusion, now teeters on the precipice of deliverance – or at least the removal of its primary parasite.  The implications cascade: oil fields no longer siphoned for private jets and Swiss accounts, a people tasting the first unfiltered air of possibility in decades.

What a glorious, savage symmetry in these twin events.  On one hand, the restoration of an ancient American right to arm oneself openly against the caprices of power; on the other, the direct application of power to unseat a foreign despot who mocked sovereignty and flooded borders with poison.  Both strike at the heart of the eternal tension: the citizen’s defense against overreach, and the nation’s resolve against those who would export chaos.

We stand at a juncture where the republic flexes muscles long atrophied – judicial clarity slicing through regulatory overgrowth, and kinetic force reminding the world that certain lines, once crossed, invite swift and unsparing consequences.  Let the hand-wringers wring; let the apologists for socialism and tyranny howl from their ivory perches.  The last twenty-four hours were a reminder that the ground beneath us is never stable, that liberty is a vault you sometimes have to crack open with dynamite, and that tyrants – whether cloaked in bureaucracy or military fatigues – eventually face the reckoning.

And if you’re not celebrating, if you’re not at least a little electrified by the chaos, then maybe you’re already embalmed. Because this, dear reader, is what it looks like when history decides to stop whispering and start swinging.

N.P.: “Get Back” – We Three Kings

Already January 2nd.  Huh.  Not much going on around here today.  I mean, the usual book-work and a tragicomic wrestling match with a synthesizer, but that’s about it.

So let’s talk about 1979, specifically the slow-motion train wreck involving Simon John Ritchie, known to the spitting masses as Sid Vicious.  The Sex Pistols’ bassist – a job title that implies he actually played the instrument, which is generous – found himself on trial for the murder of Nancy Spungen.  Sid was out on bail, wandering through the New York winter like a terrifying puppy, only to OD on heroin before the gavel came down.

It’s like the punk rock equivalent of a Greek tragedy, if Oedipus had worn a padlock around his neck and couldn’t play three chords.

But then if we go back to January 2, 1939…this is where my headache really starts to throb behind the left eye.

TIME Magazine, that bastion of journalistic integrity and shiny paper, decided to name Adolf Hitler their “Man of the Year.”  Yeah, that actually happened.  Apparently, the editors looked at the burgeoning geopolitical nightmare in Europe, squinted really hard, and though, “You know who’s really crushing it right now?  The guy screaming at stadiums.”

I can picture the editorial meeting.  A room full of men in suspenders and fedoras, smoking cigarettes indoors, debating between the inventor of the toaster oven and the architect of the Third Reich.  “Well, Frank,” one of them says, puffing a cloud of blue smoke, “Adolf certainly has…presence.  He’s very dynamic.”  It took a special kind of myopia, a failure of imagination so profound it’s almost impressive.

So much for all that…time for round 9 with this goddamn synth.

N.P.: “Awake” – The Joke Jay

There comes a moment, dear reader – usually sometime between the third whiskey and the creeping suspicion that the universe is laughing at you rather than with you – when a person must plant a flag in the scorched earth of his own life and declare, loudly, profanely, and with the kind of reckless optimism that borders on a diagnosable condition, that next year will be different.

And by Christ, 2026 is going to be different.  This is the year I ascend.  This is the year I transcend the mundane filth of mediocrity and carve my name into the bedrock of history with a rusty spoon if I have to.
Resolutions are usually the lies we tell ourselves to stave off the crushing weight of our own inadequacy, little sticky notes of hope we slap onto the refrigerator of our souls.  “Eat more kale.”  “Call mom.”  “Stop arguing with strangers on X about the socio-economic implications of Freddy Got Fingered.”  Pathetic.  No, my resolutions for 2026 are not mere suggestions; they are commands issued from the burning bush of my own ego.  They are tripartite, a holy trinity of self-actualization that will either kill me or make me a god.

1. Sell the Goddamn Book
   The publishing industry is a shark tank filled with people who wear scarves indoors and use the word “synergy” unironically.  I hate them.  I need them.  My resolution is to sell this damn thing…to force some poor, unsuspecting editor at a major house (expect a phone call, Luke) to look at my genius and weep tears of joy and terror.  All the folks on X have been wondering why I’m going the traditional publishing route rather than self-publishing.  Their arguments are compelling.  And one never knows.  One thing is certain: Ima get paid!

2. Get My Black Belt
I’ve been training for years, and I now have a red belt – the one before black. I can disarm a knife- or gun-wielding lunatic before my morning coffee and fight my way out of an attempted bear hug from a Russian mobster built like a refrigerator, all while composing a pithy inner monologue.  Though the red belt is pretty sexy, I want the belt that says: this man has kicked enough metaphorical and literal ass to be dangerous in polite company.  The belt that requires sweat, blood, bruises, discipline, and the occasional moment of clarity while face-down on a dojo mat.  By the end of 2026, I want to tie that thing around my waist and feel the quiet, smug satisfaction of someone who has weaponized his body and his attitude.

3. Become Unbeatable at Chess
I’ve been locked in an all-out blitzkrieg campaign to drag my chess game out of the primordial ooze and up onto Grandmaster Beach all year, and honestly, the results are frightening – for my opponents, anyway.  Heh.  Gone are the days where I’d blunder a rook because I was too distracted plotting my next snack run.  This year was about openings, endgames, tactical drills that melted my corneas, and embarrassing a fair few cocky strangers (and at least one exceptionally smug AI that now twitches at the name Carlsen).

But 2026?  That’s the year I bring utter annihilation to the 64 squares. Frankly, I’m tired of losing to online avatars with names like “KnightDaddy420.”  I’m coming for your bishops, your pawns, your dignity.  I will turn trash talk into an art form, sprinkle humiliations like confetti at a Soviet New Year, and my Queen’s Gambit will haunt your dreams.  Prepare to be obliterated.
So, dear reader, wish me luck.  Or don’t.  I’ll do it anyway.
Here’s to 2026: the year I sell the book, earn the belt, conquer the board, and generally behave like a man who refuses to accept the small, quiet life the universe keeps trying to hand him.
Raise a glass.  Light a fuse.  Kick the damn door in.  We’re coming in loud.

N.P.: “Kiss This” – The Struts