1. Benjamin Goddamit Franklin, may God rest his sweet, patriotic soul, invented daylight saving time just like he invented electricity and he was obviously a genius and how dare you or any other non-genius fuck with Uncle Ben’s ideas.   They didn’t put your ugly ass on the hundred dollar bill now, did they?  Alright, look…you need to remember a couple of things.  Absolutely, Ben Franklin was a genius.  A great many of his inventions propelled America and mankind into the future that we enjoy today.  However, Ben Franklin lived in a world without electric light and climate control.  His nights were lit solely by candles and oil lamps, and even though his idea of shifting the clock around was pretty clearly meant as a joke, and he had likely been into his cups when he wrote this letter, it did make some bit of sense then to suggest that opening business an hour earlier during certain months of the year would reduce candle usage. American businesses haven’t relied on candlelight or oil lamps in more than a century.  Even candle shops now use electric light and computers.  The position of the sun no longer has anything to do with when we can and cannot work, play, cook, read, et cetera.   If B.F. were alive today, I suspect he would want to pimp-slap all those who have mindlessly remained allegiant to daylight saving time.  He invented his stove to more efficiently heat houses: he would certainly acknowledge that central heating and air is a vastly more safe and effective method of climate control, and would likely insist on having it in his house.
2. It will save energy and money.  Poppycock.  Patently untrue.  In fact, the exact opposite holds true: hundreds of millions of dollars are lost every year due to employees arriving late for work, conference calls and meeting missed, and overall productivity lost.  Doctors tell us that dicking around with the clock and one’s sleep schedule increases the chances of heart attack significantly, leading to hundreds of millions of more dollars lost in medical expenses.  Sleep loss, the disruption of the Circadian rhythm, greater susceptibility to illness…all of things lead to lost productivity, lost money, and ultimately increased energy resources. And having citizens in the work force arrive home at the hottest part of the day ends up using significantly more energy than would be used otherwise.  Just ask Arizona.  They ignore DST (as does Hawaii) and they do just fine.  In fact, neither of those states have nearly the same number of rolling blackouts during the summer as California does.  We have them regularly throughout the summer, during DSL.  There has never been a rolling blackout during Standard Time.
3. The farmers need daylight saving time to order to harvest their crops and get all their work done during the summer.  I can’t even begin to understand this one.  And I think that’s because this one falls in to the very strange category of many of the other lines of rationale I’ve heard to justify the menace of DST: people seem to actually think that DST adds an hour of time to the day.  Like we ACTUALLY get an extra hour of daylight or the days are ACTUALLY an hour longer than they would be during Standard Time.  To these poor souls I can say only that I will include you in my nightly prayers and hope that you aren’t a registered voter.  Farmers go to work when the sun comes up, and they don’t spend the day watching the clock, waiting for 5 o’clock so they can knock off.  Hell no.  They quit work when it’s so dark they can’t see what they’re doing.  They don’t give the slightest of damns if you insist it’s 5:00pm or midnight: just stay out of their way.

Got a massive flashing greenlight on the proposal I’m putting together this week, which greenlight was more sorely needed than I had originally thought.  Let’s just say my thinking about this whole project over the summer was about 50/50: it had equal chances of being massive and falling absolutely flat.  As of today, I’m thinking more 75/25.  It will all come down to the writing, of course.  Everything always does.
This means a full-court press for the rest of ’24…total focus.

N.P.: “Feel Like Making Love” – The Hunger

Happy Halloween, dear reader!  That’s it…I just decided…Halloween is now the official start of the New Year on the Gallaway calendar.  Now I must come up with an official traditional celebration of this holiday.  The reasons for this are myriad but make total sense to me.

And by making my New Year on the last day of the month, we can dedicate an entire day and night to celebrating with reckless abandon, then wake up on the first of the new month, ready to get to work on This Year’s Project(s).  Brilliant.

Our traditional celebration will have nothing to do with trick-or-treating.  Sure, I was into it as a kid, but now trick-or-treaters just annoy me.  I could do without that particular tradition.  But I’m into costumes one day/night a year, so costumes will likely be part of it.  And liquor, of course.  I don’t know…I’m going to have to flesh this out.  I’ll get back to you as developments warrant.

Did you ever decide what you’re going as?  I might have mentioned mine was a toss-up between Art the Clown and The Mad Hatter.  Yesterday I decided I’d just be Garbage.  It was just the easiest option.   I thought I was being original, but everybody that’s come to the door so far has also been Garbage.  Weird.

Anyway, something for you better than candy: 10 of my favorite books/stories to read around this time of year (in no particular order):

1. “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” by Washington Irving
2. “Dracula” by Bram Stoker
3. “Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley
4. “The Haunting of Hill House” by Shirley Jackson
5. “Something Wicked This Way Comes” – Ray Bradbury
6. “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe
7. “The Shining” by Stephen King
8. “Ghost Story” by Peter Straub
9. “The Witches” by Roald Dahl
10. “MacBeth” by William Shakespeare

N.P.: “Grim, Grinning Ghosts” – Ghosts

It’s Halloween Eve, dear reader!  Which fills my heart with joy.  Had to kick on the heater last night, there’s rain in the forecast, and the nights are getting significantly longer than the days.  Tomorrow we get to get juiced and dress like dicks and menace the gentry for candy.  Then Sunday night we again abandon the foolish absurdity of Daylight Saving Time and return to Actual Time.  And I’ll have plenty to say about that when it happens.  I’m just glad it’s happening.  All of this to say that for a Halloween Eve, today was a fine day.

But it was a tad dull.  It lacked excitement.  It was certainly no 1938.

On Halloween Eve (October 30), 1938, Orson Welles scared the living shit out of the American public with his infamous radio broadcast.  Picture the scene: a nation teetering on the brink of war and uncertainty, suddenly pummeled into hysteria by Welles as he unleashed Martians upon the unsuspecting masses.

This was no ordinary Halloween prank, dear reader.  This was a full-scale assault on the fragile psyche of the American public, plunging them into the delicious pit of paranoia.  Broadcasting from the Mercury Theater on the Air, Welles and his band of mischief-makers adapted H. G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds” into a radio play that would transcend entertainment and catapult itself into the realm of mass psychological experiment.

Seriously, picture it: families gathered around their radios, the dim glow of the tubes casting eerie shadows on the walls, when suddenly: news bulletins of Martian invasions!  Alien machines!  Death rays incinerating helpless New Jersey residents!  The more gullible folk sprinted for the hills, convinced that the apocalypse was happening.  Listeners fled their homes, the highways clogged with panic-stricken masses, and the telephone lines blew up with people calling each other, trying to figure out what was happening.

This was the birth of modern-media sensationalism, a flashpoint where fiction blurred into perceived reality.  Welles, ever the anarchist, shattered the comfortable cocoon of pre-war America, and it was amazing.

So tonight we drink to Orson Welles, the man who turned a lazy Sunday afternoon into a nightmarish ride through the cosmos.  His broadcast remains a testament to the power of storytelling, and a cautionary tale of the media’s impact on a gullible and uncritical public.  Perhaps the latter lesson is the one that contemporary Americans would do well to heed.

N.P.: “Thunder Cash ’69” – Cody Parks and the Dirty South

Travel day.  On the go since 06:00.  Didn’t write shit.
Eight days until Halloween.

N.P.: “Down to the Bottom” – Dorothy

Well, shit, dear reader…9 days until Halloween and I haven’t done a damn thing to prepare.  Not sure what I need to prepare for…I don’t do anything on Halloween anymore.  I just like Halloween.  I’ve never thrown a party, but if I was going to, I kind of assume it would be a Halloween party.  With my almost perverse affinity to the cold and the dark, Halloween is more like my New Years.

My schedule for the rest of this fetid year has no room for parties.  Alas.  But I do love Halloween.

N.P.: “Double Lucifer” – TVAM

Tonight, dear reader, we pour some out for Kerouac.  October 21 marks the anniversary of the passing of one Jack Kerouac, a literary rebel whose words still almost pulsate with the restless energy of the Beat generation.  I spent a lot of the early 90s reading Kerouac while drinking port.  I think I was trying to channel him.  He struck me more as a force of nature than a writer, which was what I was looking to become.  The port did nothing to advance that cause.  It killed Kerouac, and did me no favors.  I even tried to get into jazz.  I took pride that Jack Kerouac and I were both alive on the same planet for a few months. It was a weird time.

Kerouac’s journey began with what would become his manifesto: “On the Road.”  For those of you in the “it’s not about the destination, it’s about the chaotic, poetic journey, this is your jam.  On the road was (as far as I know) the first American road trip novel, and was the third such novel that I encountered, and the one that cemented the genre as one of my favorites.

Kerouac wrote the draft of “On the Road” on one continuous long scroll of teletype paper so as not to disturb his flow.  The other day I was imagining Jack being alive now and having literally endless digital paper at his disposal, leaving no reason (except for a power outage) to ever stop typing.

He once said, “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved…”  This was Kerouac’s ethos – a torrid love affair wild, the untamed, and the beautifully chaotic.

I’m not sure if the new generation is even capable of appreciating Kerouac.  They seem completely detached from The Past and seem remarkably inept at perspective taking.  And so much for them.

Here’s to Kerouac, a true literary badass.

N.P.: “Desolation Angels” – Jack Kerouac

This time of year is always weird and somewhat confusing for the landed gentry of Fecal Creek: the nights are appropriately Fall-like…with a bit of a chill in the air, but the days are still cruelly summer-like, with highs in the 80s and 90s.  People don’t know what the hell to do: it’s clearly too hot during the day to have the heater on or bust out fall clothes, but then they freeze their balls at night.  These people haven’t yet figured out California’s climate confusion: while the entire rest of the country enjoys four distinct seasons, California sports only two: Summer, and Not Summer.  Which is more like one season with a privation.  But never mind that.  Summer here is preposterous: this last July, the temperature soared to well over 110F every day, with the nighttime lows only dropping to maybe 85.  It’s so brutally hot, people die.  Usually the old and infirm, but you never know.  Most species of insects have died from the heat and lack of water by August 1.  Birds explode mid-flight, making a light “poof” sound, and leaving nothing but a chaotic spray of feathers gently floating down.  It’s awful.  The only things that seem to thrive in this climate are the lizards and snakes.  Fortunately we don’t have scorpions or tarantulas this far north, but give it time: they will be here soon enough.

From Cinco de Mayo until Halloween, yrs. truly generally doesn’t leave the house, preferring instead to spend my waking hours sitting naked on the cool tile floor in front of my open deep-freezer, sipping whiskey and loudly cursing whomever’s stupid idea it was to originally settle in this egregiously inhospitable place.  I’ve always assumed that everybody that lives here pretty much operated the same way.  But I’m starting to think I’m alone in my suffering.

Fecal Creek, CA is a banal suburbia where the grass is always green on the other side of the septic tank. Sundays here are like Groundhog Day on acid, but instead of a lovable rodent predicting the end of winter, we have gangs of vicious turkeys that roam the neighborhoods like terrorists, menacing anything that isn’t part of their flock.  Until, of course, they start high-tailing it for their lives from the local animal control officer who seems perpetually tanked on Sterno.

I’ve never been a big fan of Sundays.  But Sundays in Fecal Creek defy logic and sanity, when time seems to dilate, and the absurd becomes the norm. The sun rises reluctantly, casting a jaundiced glow over the town as if even it is too hungover to shine properly. It’s the kind of place where the turkeys’ godawful gobbling is replaced by the tubercular cough and mucous-spitting of Mr. Shitbag (I know that that’s not his real name…but that’s what I call him), the street’s unofficial alarm clock, bellowing from his porch as he sips a questionable brew from a thermos labeled “NOT COFFEE.”

Today happens to be the Fecal Creek Pancake Derby, a chaotic spectacle of culinary and vehicular misadventure. Picture this: a gaggle of local eccentrics armed with spatulas and a suicidal lack of fear, racing on modified lawnmowers while flipping pancakes into the mouths of unsuspecting spectators. The rules are simple—there are none. It’s a syrupy, flour-dusted free-for-all that ends when the last pancake hits the pavement or when someone finally breaks a hip.

By noon, the town shifts gears. The Fecal Creek Farmers’ Market opens its gates, offering an array of goods no sane person would ever need or want.  Some hippy chick seems to be selling artisanal mud pies.  She sits proudly next to some dude’s collection of slightly sinister garden gnomes. The air is thick with the aroma of deep-fried everything and the faint whiff of existential dread as cash exchanges hands for items destined to clutter garages and provoke marital disputes.  I generally try to avoid the Farmers’ Market.

As do most of the folks on my street: Sunday’s are evidently for lawn care.

I awakened this fine (or not so fine, as it were) Sunday morning to the cacophony of church bells and lawnmowers, my head throbbing in time with the frequencies of a thousand dying angels. I stumble to my window, naked as Diogenes but with less philosophical intent, and witness the terrifying tableau below: the air is thick with the aroma of overcooked potatoes and regret as families emerge from their cookie-cutter homes, still dressed in their Walmart-bought pajamas.

I gag and retreat indoors, desperate for solace from this Dantean landscape.

Inside, my sanctuary is no better.  The television offers nothing but golf, football re-runs, and “inspirational” biopics starring those Hallmark channel actors who sleep with the light on to avoid their own mediocrity. My so-called “smart” phone, which I might add has a Ph.D. in Failure Studies, only offers me “fun day” suggestions: brunches with saccharine mimosas, hiking trails to nowhere, and worse, fucking arts and crafts!

I try to escape this madness by venturing out into the world, hoping to find safety in numbers. Alas, the streets are littered with the slack-jawed zombies I feared most: families ambling along sidewalks four abreast, oblivious to the anguished honking of cars behind them. Dogs in humiliating costumes trotting obediently behind their mindless masters, their eyes begging for a swift end to this likely feline-conspired nightmare. And the children—oh, the fucking children! Hordes of them, stained with the remnants of their Easy Mac Last Supper, wailing for attention like some horrific game of “Pin the Screaming Brat on the Impatient Uncle.”

As the day already seems to be dragging on like a sloth with a broken metronome, I return to my lair, defeated and demoralized. Trudging back, I see driveways filled with the lifeless husks of automobiles, their owners hypnotized by the alien hum of their infernal lawn implements. The air is thick with the acrid stench of burnt gasoline and freshly mown grass clippings.  Back in the house, I check on some marijuana I left in the garage, then go to my window again.

Lunch!  The men don their “World’s Greatest Dad” aprons, which last saw use on Father’s Day ’98, and fire up their charcoal grills to prove their manhood to an audience of one: the neighbor’s cat, Dildo. I doubt that that’s the cats actual assigned moniker, but that’s what I call it.  Because it fits.  That’s a story for another time.  Burgers sizzle and beer cans hiss, and soon enough, the smell of charred meat and sweat permeates the air.  They desperately cling to the dying vestiges of Summer, before Not Summer starts.

The ladies of the street gather ’round someone’s plastic kiddie pool, discussing the latest gossip about nonsense. Their kids run amok, their shrill laughter competing with the sounds of Blink-182 from one of their idiot kids’ bedroom.  As their neighbors peek through their weed-covered blinds, sipping on their cheap Chardonnay and adjusting their polyester drawers, Fecal Creek braces itself for another week of the same old shit – literally, figuratively, and metaphorically.

I have concluded simply that Sundays suck. And like an ageless vampire, they will rise again next week to feast upon our sanity and grace us with their idiotic influence.

Until then, I leave you with this bittersweet advice: stock up on booze and ammo, barricade your doors, and pray for the End Times. For while the sun may rise on another Sunday, at least there’s a 50/50 shot it’s the end of the world as we know it. And I, for one, won’t be mowing my goddamn lawn.

N.P.: “Skin City” – Robert Rodriguez, Rebecca Rodriguez, Rick Del Castillo, Steven Tyler

Happy Saturday, dear reader.  On my new ridiculous schedule with the audacious goals, Saturday is just the sixth Monday of the week.  And I’m still behind schedule!  But I’ve got a good feeling about catching up reasonably soon.

An unfortunate side-effect of this pre-dawn-til-after sunset schedule is the losing track of time and days.  It was just over 100 degrees and September, next thing I know, it’s the last half of October, and Halloween is suddenly right around the corner.  It seems like a couple weeks ago I was cursing the fireworks stands that had popped up like patriotic acne all over the parking lots of local strip malls, and suddenly, there are pop-up Halloween costume stores in the same strip malls.  I’m not sure how this temporal chaos happened, but it is obviously high time to get into the Halloween spirit.

Here, then, is the first of what I suspect will be a steady stream of bad Halloween poems and maybe short stories between now and Halloween:

In the shadowed woods where whispers creep,
A forgotten path the night fog keeps.
Beneath a sky of ink and lace,
The moon’s frail glow hides its face.

Branches twist like gnarled claws,
Scratching secrets, breaking laws.
The air is thick with ancient dread,
Where once the lost and lonesome fled.

A rustle, a sigh, a chilling breath,
A dance with shadows, a waltz with death.
Eyes unseen watch the wayward stray,
Luring souls to eternal gray.

Footsteps echo, then fall to hush,
In this realm where nightmares rush.
Dare you wander, dare you stay,
In the haunted where phantoms play?

N.P.: “Rigor Mortis” – The Hunger

Today is a fine day.  Yahya is in hell.  #FAFO

N.P.: “Adir Adirim (feat. Victoria Hanna)” – Balkan Beat Box