Category Archives: Lucubrations

September 6, 2025

 

Alright, strap in, dear reader, because we’re about to tear into the quivering, gelatinous underbelly of one very vaginal Malcolm Gladwell, the pop-sociology huckster who’s been peddling his slick, airport-bookstore pablum to the gullible masses for far too long.  This week, the man who made a career out of repackaging obvious truths as revelatory “tipping points” has finally shown his true colors, and they’re a repulsive hue of pusillanimity.  On a podcast – The Real Science of Sport, no less – Gladwell admitted he was “cowed” into supporting the absurd notion that men, by some perverse alchemy of ideology, can compete as women in sports.  Cowed.  Like a fucking farm animal.

Let that sink in.  Let the full, wretched, and frankly hilarious implications of that statement marinate in the primordial ooze of your consciousness.  This is a man who built a career on explaining the hidden mechanics of everything from ketchup to success, the guru who supposedly sees the intricate threads connecting outliers and dogwalkers and Jamaican sprinters.  Yet, when faced with a cultural blitzkrieg demanding he assent to a proposition as biologically sound as a flat earth, he tucked his pathetic tail so far between his legs it was tickling his famously frizzy chin.

He was bullied.  Intimidated.  Pressured into nodding along with a fantasy so complete, so utterly detached from observable reality, that a reasonably bright toddler could debunk it with a crayon and a rudimentary understanding of anatomy.  The alleged intellectual heavyweight, the celebrated thinker, apparently possesses a spine with the structural integrity of warm Jell-O.  He saw the mob, torches aflame and pronouns sharpened, and decided that the path of least resistance was to simply shut his mouth and pretend the emperor’s new genitalia, were, in fact, stunning and brave.  Now he’s backtracking, natch, whining that he’s “ashamed” of his silence at a 2022 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference where he played moderator to a panel stacked with trans activists.  Apparently, he sat there, nodding a long like a bobblehead, while some tranny athlete turned to panelist Ross Tucker and demanded, “You have to let us win.”  Imagine it, dear reader: a grown-ass man, a supposed intellectual, heard that bald-faced lunacy and didn’t say a fucking word.  Didn’t push back.  Didn’t call out the absurdity of a man demanding a free pass to dominate women’s sports.  Instead, he played the good little progressive, keeping his mouth shut because…why?  Fear of the Twitter mob?  Worried he’d lose his invite to the next Davos circle-jerk?  Whatever the reason, he admits he was “dishonest,” letting “howlers” pass without comment, all because he was too spineless to speak the truth he claims he believed along: that males have no place competing in female sports categories.

Boo-fucking-hoo, Malcolm.  This isn’t about tipping points or the 10,000-hour rule.  This is about a complete and utter abdication of the one thing a writer – a thinker – is supposed to have: courage.  The courage to look at a thing, a real thing, and describe it as it is, not as a screeching mob of idiots on social media demands it be described.
It occurs to me now that my dear reader may not know much, or anything at all, about our boy Malcolm.  So, for those of you who’ve been too busy actually reading something worth a shit to notice his rise to fame, Gladwell, a Canadian scribbler with a mop of hair that screams “I’m trying too hard to be quirky,” burst onto the scene with The Tipping Point (2000), a book that took the radical stance that – get this – ideas spread like viruses.  Wow.  How groundbreaking.  He followed it up with Blink (2005), where he told us trusting your gut is sometimes a thing, and Outliers (2008), where he “discovered” that success involves hard work and luck.  No shit.  The guy’s built an empire on stating the obvious with just enough jargon to make middle managers feel like they’re reading Foucault.  A staff writer for The New Yorker and a podcast darling, he’s been coasting on this faux-intellectual schtick for decades, wrapping commonsense observations in a veneer of statistical razzle-dazzle that collapses under scrutiny faster than a house of cards in a hurricane.  His work is the literary equivalent of a Ted Talk: flashy, shallow, and designed to make you feel smarter without actually challenging what you think.

This isn’t just a lapse in judgment; it’s a betrayal of reason itself.  We’re talking about a guy who’s made millions pontificating on human behavior, yet when push came to shove, he folded like a cheap lawn chair under the weight of ideological bullying.  Again, a five-year-old with a basic grasp of biology knows that boys are not and can never be girls, that men’s bodies – packed with testosterone, denser bones, and more muscle mass – give them a physical edge in sports that no amount of “identity” can erase.  This isn’t rocket science; it’s not even high school biology.  It’s the kind of truth so glaringly obvious it’s embarrassing to have to articulate it.  Yet Gladwell, this self-styled guru of insight, claims he was “cowed” into silence.  The man’s 62 years old, an alleged literary heavyweight with a platform bigger than most, and he’s whimpering about being bullied into silence?  Pathetic.

This confession doesn’t just torch his credibility; it proves he never had any to begin with.  A writer – a real writer – doesn’t just regurgitate trendy narratives or cower before the zeitgeist.  A real writer wields his pen like a machete, cutting through bullshit to get to the truth, no matter who’s screaming what.  Gladwell’s admission reveals him as a fraud, a man so desperate to stay in the good graces of the cultural elite and their luxury beliefs that he’d rather lie than stand up for what he claims to believe.  And now he’s “ashamed”?  Fuck you.  This isn’t shame; it’s damage control.  He’s seen the wind shifting – people like Riley Gaines and Amy Hamm calling him out on X for his flip-flopping – and he’s scrambling to save face.  Too late, jackass.  You’ve shown your hand, and it’s pitiful.

The kicker here is that he’s not even apologizing for the right reasons.  He’s not sorry for propping up a narrative that undermines fairness in women’s sports or for gaslighting female athletes who’ve been forced to compete against deluded males.  Nope.  He’s sorry he didn’t speak up, sorry he got caught looking like an absolute coward.  It’s the intellectual equivalent of a politician saying, “I regret if anyone was offended.”  Weak sauce, Malcolm.  If you’re going to take a stand now, at least have the balls to own the harm your silence caused.  Female athletes have been cheated out of opportunities, podiums, and scholarships because of this nonsense, and you sat there, complicit, while it happened.

What is the value of a mind that can be so easily herded?  What are we to make of his entire body of work now, knowing that the author’s primary operating principle isn’t intellectual curiosity, but a deep-seated fear of being yelled at?

His books now read like artifacts from a different, more chickenshit dimension.  Blink becomes the story of a man who makes a snap judgement to save his own skin.  Outliers seems less a study of success and more a roadmap for conforming to the prevailing groupthink to avoid ostracism.  This confession re-contextualizes everything.  It reveals the man behind the curtain is not a wizard, but just a very nervous publicist with a good haircut, frantically pulling levers to maintain an illusion.

So he feels bad about it now.  He’s seen the tide turn just enough that he can peek his head out of his Canadian foxhole and whisper, “Um, for the record, I was a scared little bitch.”  Fine.  Good for him.  But absolution is not on the menu.  You don’t get a cookie for admitting you abandoned your post when the shooting started.  You get contempt.  You get whatever is beneath contempt.  You get the acidic, burning realization that the people we were told were our intellectual navigators were just reading from a script handed to them by the most aggressive and least coherent people in the room.

So where does this leave Gladwell’s legacy?  In the fucking toilet, that’s where.  If he was ever a legitimate writer – and that’s a massive “if,” given his track record of repackaging platitudes as profundity – this episode proves he’s nothing more than a brainless weather vane, spinning whichever way the cultural winds blow.  A real writer doesn’t need to be bullied into believing bullshit; they call it out, loud and proud, even when it’s inconvenient.  Gladwell’s spent his career dodging hard truths in favor of palatable narratives, and this latest fiasco is just the cherry on top of a career built on intellectual cowardice.  He’s not a thinker; he’s a performer, a snake-oil salesman who’s finally be caught with his pants down.

To the readers still clutching their dog-eared copies of Blink: wake up.  Your boy Malcolm’s been exposed as a fraud who’d rather kowtow to ideologues than stand up for what’s right.  And to Gladwell himself: next time you’re tempted to play the objective observer, do us all a favor and keep your lying mouth shut.  Or better yet, try to retrieve your testicles out of whatever tranny’s purse you left them in and say what you mean.  Until then, you’re just another chickenshit hack, cowed by the mob and unworthy of the page.

The whole pathetic spectacle leaves a taste in your mouth like cheap gin and cowardice.  The man was never a danger, never a threat to the established order.  He was its court jester, its high-gloss flatterer.  And then the court demanded he believe that two plus two equals fish, he didn’t even have the balls to argue.  He just asked what kind of fish.

N.P.: “God’s Gonna Cut You Down (feat. Adoration Destroyed)” – Dead Animal Assembly Plant

September 3, 2025

 

Greetings from the Dissolute Desk, dear reader – this is your captain speaking, though, let’s be honest, the term “captain” implies a level of control over this particular vessel that would make Ahab weep with envy.  Today is Hump Day, that blessed Wednesday phenomenon that sits like a literary critic at a poetry slam – uncomfortable, slightly drunk, and desperately trying to find meaning in the chaos.

Just a brief update today – and my brief, I mean the literary equivalent of what pharmaceutical companies call “brief” side effects, which somehow manage to include everything from mild nausea to spontaneous combustion – since I’m currently submerged in the proverbial full-court press on this goddamn book.  And yes, to the one dear reader who thinks I should cuss less, I said “goddamn” because sometimes the English language requires the theological weight of profanity to adequately capture the Sisyphean absurdity of the creative process.

You know how, as an adult, everything becomes a Byzantine maze of bureaucratic torment designed by someone who clearly never had to navigate said maze while suffering from the literary equivalent of erectile dysfunction?  That’s to say: the persistent, maddening, inability to get your metaphors up when you need them most?  So that’s going on, but still – and here’s where my inherent optimism battles my well-documented pessimism like two drunk philosophers arguing about the meaning of existence at 3 AM – progress is being made.

Meeting my goals today is a pretty big deal when it comes to getting a draft done by September 8, which looms before me like a literary deadline should: with all the warm, welcoming energy of a proctological examination performed by someone with exceptionally large hands and a questionable understanding of personal space.

But let’s talk about this Wednesday celebration business, shall we?  Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my years of professional literary  debauchery – and by professional, I mean I occasionally get paid for this madness, though not nearly enough to justify the liver damage – it’s that midweek celebrations require a certain philosophical commitment to the absurd.

Think of it, man: it’s 2:17 PM Wednesday afternoon.  You’re three cups deep into what your local coffee shop optimistically calls their “house blend” but which tastes suspiciously like it was filtered through a gym sock that’s seen better decades.  Your manuscript stares back at you from the computer screen with all the judgement of a disappointed parent who just discovered your college transcript.  The cursor blinks.  Blinks again.  Taunts you with its rhythmic insistence that something should be happening here, some magical alchemy of words and ideas that transforms the mundane suffering of existence into something approaching art.

And then – miracle of miracles – the worse come.  They’re okay words.  Not the kind of luminous prose that makes readers weep and critics genuflect.  But words nonetheless.  Honest, slightly deranged words that capture something essential about what it means to be a human being stumbling through the cosmic joke of modern life with nothing but caffeine, stubbornness, and an inexplicable faith that somehow, against all evidence to the contrary, this particular arrangement of sentences might matter.

The adult world, you see, operates on the principle that nothing should ever be simple, straightforward, or remotely pleasant.  Need to renew your driver’s license?  That’s be a three-hour odyssey through a government office that apparently hasn’t been updated since the Carter administration.  Want to submit a manuscript?  Here’s a 17-page submission guide that contradicts itself no fewer than 43 times and requires you to format your work in a font that doesn’t exist on any computer manufactured after 1987.

But writing – actual writing, the kind that matters – operates on different principles entirely.  It demands that you show up, day after day, to face the blank page with nothing but your wits and whatever chemical assistance you can legally obtain.  It requires a kind of courage that’s simultaneously heroic and utterly ridiculous, like charging into battle armed only with a thesaurus and a profound sense of existential dread.

So yes, dear reader, progress is being made.  Slow, painful, occasionally hallucinogenic progress, but progress nonetheless.  Each sentence wrested from the void feels like a small victory against the forces of entropy and editorial bitching.  Each paragraph that doesn’t make me want to delete everything and take up accounting represents another step closer to that September 8 deadline, which approaches with all the subtlety of a methamphetaminic rhinoceros.

And if that’s not worth celebrating on a Wednesday afternoon, then I clearly don’t understand the fundamental principles of either celebration or Wednesday, both of which seem increasingly arbitrary the longer I contemplate them.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a book to finish and a hump day to properly honor.  The words won’t write themselves, though fuck knows I’ve asked them nicely.

Transmission ends.  Resume your regularly scheduled existential crisis. 

From the Dissolute Desk, where the coffee’s strong, the deadlines are stronger, and the metaphors occasionally achieve escape velocity. 

N.P.: “Pissed Off and Mad About It” – Texas Hippie Coalition

September 1, 2025

 

Happy September, dear reader.  Yo rent is due.

So picture this…September 1, 1952, and some editor at Life magazine is probably chain-smoking Lucky Strikes while wondering if they’ve just committed career suicide by dedicating an entire issue to what amounts to an extended fishing story.  I’m talking, of course, about Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, a novella so deceptively simple it makes you wonder if maybe, just maybe,  you’ve been overthinking this whole literature thing your entire booze-addled existence.  Or maybe that’s just me.  Anyway, the editor mentioned above need not have worried, because the story’s success was absurd: five million copies.  In two days.  Two!  As if the entire American reader public suddenly developed an inexplicable craving for tales of Cuban fisherman wrestling with marlins the size of small automobiles.  Which, when you think about it, is exactly what happened, and isn’t that just the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever heard?

Now, I know what you’re thinking – because I’m thinking it too – what kind of masochistic genius does it take to craft a story that’s essentially one old guy versus one big fish and somehow make it feel like the entire human condition is hanging in the balance?  The answer, it turns out, involves the kind of narrative compression that would make a neutron star jealous, each sentence so dense with meaning it threatens to collapse into a literary black hole.

Santiago – our weathered protagonist who’s gone eighty-four days without catching so much as a sardine (which, let’s be honest, is the kind of professional dry spell that would drive most of us to day-drinking and career reconsideration) – embodies this magnificent futility that defines the human experience.  Here’s a man who knows, knows with the certainty of sunrise and hangovers, that he’s probably going to lose this battle.  The marlin is bigger, stronger, operates in its natural element while Santiago is basically a land mammal with delusions of aquatic grandeur.  And yet – and this is where Hemingway’s genius reaches levels of almost pornographic intensity – he fights anyway.

Because what else is there to do?  Surrender to the inevitable mediocrity of a fisherman who can’t catch fish?  Accept that maybe the universe is just one giant cosmic joke and we’re all the punchline?  Hell no.  Santiago straps himself to that boat and engages in what amounts to a three-day death match with a creature that represents everything he’ll never be – young, powerful, at home in the vast indifference of the sea.

The beauty of this whole setup – and by beauty I mean the kind of terrible beauty that makes you want to simultaneously laugh and cry and pour another drink – is how Hemingway strips away every unnecessary word, every flowery metaphor, every literary flourish that might distract from the essential brutality of the confrontation.  This is prose as sharp and unforgiving as a gaff hook, sentences that cut straight to the bone of meaning without bothering with the courtesy of anesthesia.

And the kicker?  Santiago wins and loses simultaneously.  He catches the goddamn fish – this magnificent beast that represents everything noble and wild and free in the world – only to watch the sharks reduce it to a skeleton during the long journey home.  Which is, of course, exactly what life does to all our grand ambitions and noble struggles.  We fight the good fight, we occasionally triumph, and then reality shows up like a pack of hungry sharks to remind us that victory is always temporary and defeat is the only universal constant.

But here’s what those five million readers understood, consciously or not, when they devoured this story faster than Americans consume processed cheese: Santiago’s defeat isn’t really a defeat at all.  It’s defiance.  It’s the middle finger raised to a universe that seems designed to crush the human spirit.  It’s the refusal to go gentle into that good night, even when you’re 84 years old and your hands are cramping and the sharks are circling and every rational part of your brain is screaming that this is madness.

When the formerly prestigious Pulitzer committee awarded Hemingway the prize in 1954, they weren’t just recognizing technical mastery – though God knows the technical mastery is there, every sentence calibrated with the precision of a Swiss chronometer.  They were acknowledging something deeper, more essential: the recognition that great literature isn’t about happy endings or moral clarity or the comfortable illusion that virtue is rewarded and evil punished.  Great literature is about the futility of human effort in the face of cosmic indifference, and finding beauty in that futility.

So today let’s raise a glass to Santiago and his marlin, to Hemingway and his impossible brevity, to the five million readers who recognized greatness when it slapped them across the face like a salty wave.  In a world that increasingly rewards mediocrity and celebrates participation trophies, The Old Man and the Sea stands as a monument to the idea that sometimes the most heroic thing you can do is fight a battle you know you’re going to lose.

Because in the end, isn’t that what we’re all doing anyway?

N.P.: “Sunglasses On At The Dollar Store” – Shockwire

August 31, 2025

Had an opportunity to spend some time at a cemetery today.  We’re in the middle of a bit of a heat wave right now in the Creek, so it was far too hot out there for my comfort.  But heat aside, it was rather pleasant.  Not to get all goth about it, but I’ve always liked cemeteries.  I find them, as I’d imagine most do, very peaceful.  Even at night.  Especially at night.  It’s never “creepy” or even morbid.  Walking among the stones is calming in a way few other things are.  The place is quiet, obviously, but that’s not where the peace and calm come from.  Those, for me, come from the sense of absolute inevitability.  Whatever may be weighing you down in your life at the moment weighs a lot less when you are reminded that no matter what you do, no matter what choices you make, no matter how intelligent or passionate or intuitive or loved you may be, you are going to end up right here.  I recommend spending some time at a cemetery occasionally.  It’s good for you.  You need to remind yourself that The Clock Is Ticking.

Anyway, we have a few items of calendric business to attend to.  To wit:

First up, Happy Birthday to William Saroyan who was born in 1908.  In the event that dear reader is not an English major, allow me to ‘splain.  He was the guy who proved that you don’t need to kiss the ass of literary establishment to write something that’ll make grown-ass adults questions their life choices.  He was the sort of writer who looked at conventional narrative structure, laughed maniacally, and then proceeded to craft stories that hit you in the liver like a surprise audit from the IRS.

He won the Pulitzer back before the Pulitzer became a meaningless joke for The Time of Your Life – because apparently the universe has a sense of humor about timing – and then had the balls to initially reject it.  Fuck yes!  He basically told the (at the time) most prestigious literary award in America to sit on it and vigorously spin.  Also check out The Human Comedy.

Fast-forward (or rewind, depending on your relationship with linear time and sobriety) to 1837, when Ralph Waldo Emerson dropped the mic before mics were even invented, and  stood up at Harvard – again, back when Harvard was prestigious, and not a cesspool of anti-Americanism and antisemitism – and basically told American literature to grow a pair and stop copying its European homework.

“The American Scholar” was a literary declaration of independence wrapped with enough intellectual firepower to level a small philosophy department.  Emerson looked at American writers who were still desperately trying to sound British and said, essentially, “Why are you like this?”

The man had the audacity to suggest that American writers should – brace yourself, dear reader – write about America.  Revolutionary stuff, right?  Except it really was.  Before Emerson’s verbal smackdown, American literature was about as authentically American as a gas station sushi roll.

Up next…it’s We Love Memoirs Day.  I don’t usually appreciate the declaration of “Days,” to any particular cause or whatever, but since memoir is the genre I usually work in, why the hell not?  Memoirs are the literary equivalent of that friend who has absolutely no filter after three drinks: uncomfortable, brutally honest, and somehow exactly what you needed to hear.

The memoir is where we writers go to bleed on the page and somehow make it beautiful.  It’s the genre that says, “You think fiction is wild?  Hold my therapy bills.”  These are the books that make you realize your own problems aren’t so bad, or alternatively, make you question every life choice you’ve ever made.  Both outcomes are equally valid and equally entertaining.

There’s something pleasantly masochistic about diving into someone else’s trauma and calling it entertainment.  But hey, at least we’re honest about it now.  We’ve collectively decided that raw, unfiltered human experience is worth celebrating, which is either deeply profound or deeply disturbing, depending on your philosophical stance and B.A.C.

Finally, August 31, 1888 gives us the discovery of Mary Ann Nichol’s body in Whitechapel.  The first acknowledged victim of Jack the Ripper, a name that would launch a thousand terrible crime novels and enough conspiracy theories to keep internet forums busy until the heat death of the universe.

Here’s the thing about Jack the Ripper: he’s become literature’s favorite boogeyman, inspiring more truly terrible prose than a creative writing workshop after happy hour.  The man (presumably) committed horrific crimes and somehow became a cultural icon, which says something most people find deeply unsettling about our collective psyche that they don’t want to examine too closely.

The Ripper murders have spawned everything from scholarly dissertations to graphic novels to what can only be described as “fan fiction,” and honestly, that last category should probably worry you more than it does.  But there’s something about the combination of mystery, Victorian atmosphere, and genuine horror that keeps writers coming back like addicts.

What do these ridiculously disparate things have to do with each other, besides the date?  I don’t know.  Maybe nothing.  The birth of a literary rebel, a transcendentalist’s declaration of cultural independence, a celebration of oversharing as an art form, and the beginning of history’s most literary murder spree.  Yeah, nothing in common except occurring on August 31.

Which is today.  And if that’s not worth raising a glass (or six) to, then frankly, you’re taking this whole “literary appreciation” thing far too seriously.  Sometimes the best way to honor great writing is to acknowledge that it’s all beautifully, chaotically, magnificently insane – much like the people who create it and the people who consume it with the desperation of the chronically under-caffeinated.

Cheers.

N.P.: “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star – Minor Epic Version” – Rok Nardin

August 30, 2025

Whaddup, dear reader.  Today is Mary Shelley’s birthday.  She was born in 1797.  You should know about her because she wrote Frankenstein when she was 19 years old.  So happy birthday to her.  Read her book.

I’m being shamefully brief because today is also the birthday of someone very special (sorry, dear reader…this one is private), so I’ll be busy the rest of tonight.  I’ll catch up with you tomorrow.

N.P.: “I Love You” – Climax Blues Band

August 29, 2025

 

It’s Friday, dear reader. Last night, in those weird hours between 2-4 am, I decided I’d Had Enough and declared war on my own goddamn book.  Your favorite bourbon-soaked, deadline-dodging wordsmith has officially reached The Breaking Point – that sublime moment where the accumulated weight of procrastination, self-doubt, and the relentless ticking of the cosmic clock converges into a singularity of pure, unadulterated Fuck This Noise.  This book – this magnificent bastard of a manuscript that has been haunting the Dissolute Desk  like some literary poltergeist, it’s incomplete chapters mocking me with their half-formed sentences and their orphaned paragraphs that read like the fevered ramblings of a concussed psychology major who’s been drinking nothing but expresso and existential dread for six months straight.  And I’ve been dancing around it, tiptoeing through the metaphorical minefield of my own making, treating this project like it’s some precious, fragile butterfly that might disintegrate if I breathe on it too heard, when in reality what I’ve got here is more like a literary Frankenstein’s monster that needs a goddamn lightning bolt to bring it to life.  Damn right!

But here’s where things get interesting, dear reader – and by interesting, I mean the kind of desperate, last-stand-at-the-Alamo interesting that makes your pulse quicken and your liver quiver in anticipation – because I’ve officially declared war on this motherfucking manuscript.

September 8th.

Circle that date on your calendars with whatever writing implement causes you the most existential anxiety, because that’s when this whole circus of literary self-flagellation comes to an end.  That’s my drop-dead, no-bullshit, put-up-or-shut-up deadline to transform this sprawling, incoherent mess of caffeine-fueled stream-of-consciousness nonsense into something that resembles an actual book – coherent, cohesive, and presentable enough that I won’t want to set myself on fire every time someone asks me what I’m working on.

The other projects?  Those sweet little side hustles and creative dalliances that I’ve been juggling like some demented circus performer?  They’re gone.  Banished.  Exiled to the outer darkness of my “maybe later” folder, which, let’s be honest, is basically the creative equivalent of a mass grave.  The calendar has been cleared with the ruthless efficiency of a mob accountant, leaving nothing but blank space and the terrifying possibility of actually finishing something for once in this decade.

Is this madness?  Probably.  Is it the kind of beautiful, self-destructive madness that makes for great stories at dinner parties with rich people five years from now?  Oh God yes.  Because there’s something intoxicating about backing yourself into a corner so tight that the only way out is through – through all the bullshit.

But here’s the thing about corners: they clarify priorities with the brutal efficiency of a midnight deadline or an empty whiskey bottle.  When you’ve got nowhere left to run, nowhere left to hide behind your clever excuses and your perfectly reasonable rationalizations for why the work isn’t getting done, something primal kicks in – that same animal instinct that once helped our ancestors outrun saber-toothed tigers now gets channeled into the slightly less life-threatening task of stringing together coherent sentences.

So consider this your official notification, universe: the gloves are off, the safety net has been torched, and I’m going full kamikaze on this rotten project that has been torturing me for far too long.  September 8th or bust, motherfuckers.

And if I fail?  That’s not going to happen.  Because there’s nothing quite like the terror of a public declaration to turn a procrastinating writer into a deadline-slaying beast.

Watch this space, dear reader.  Things are about to get very interesting indeed.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a book to finish and some serious literary violence to commit.

N.P.: “Why?” – Jestofunk, CeCe Rogers

August 28, 2025

 

Apologies for my absence here yesterday, dear reader.  The whole day was nuts.

It began, as the best catastrophes do, with a mission of supposed sincerity and not nearly enough plausible deniability.  I was meeting Boochie for the express purpose of breaking the news – no Governor of California run, not for me, no way, not in this disastrous calamity of a state.

“Balls!” he said when I first told him.  “I thought that Kamala not running would be all the greenlight you’d need.”  I explained to him gently that what I really wanted to do was fight Governor Newsom, and since he’s not running in 2026, I wouldn’t even get a chance to debate him in a gubernatorial election.  Instead, I was throwing my questionable political capital behind Steve Hilton, because if you can’t be the candidate, at least endorse the guy who wears better shoes and probably doesn’t keep an emergency bottle of whiskey in his glove compartment.  So there’s that.

But you try explaining political strategy to a man three-quarters of the way through a bottle of something that tasted like the secretions of a vengeful forest spirit.  Boochie’s grin was all teeth and impending litigation, the rictus of either a prophet hallucinating the cosmos or a rat about to chew through a power line.

I delivered my little non-campaign speech, complete with what I though was sincere gravity, and Boochie blinked at me over the rim of a glass so dirty it may have predated refrigeration.

“So we’re not getting rich off graft and lobbyists.  What do we do now?  We should form a band.  Serious.  We need to make some real money.”

It’s a fact universally acknowledged – but rarely celebrated – that drunken logic breeds the great ventures of our age.  The scene: a particularly derelict dive in Fair Oaks where the paint flakes had both more character and less mold than most of the clientele.  The jukebox, naturally, seemed to be looping a twelve-minute opus that sounded suspiciously like a missile strike.

“The problem,” Boochie mused, ignoring that I had never asked, “is one of texture.  Of sonic grit.”  Modern music, he raged, had all the substance of a gluten-free communion wafer and all the bite of a neutered Yorkie.  His gesticulations nearly decapitated a man who may or may not have been part of the original construction crew of this shithole.

Meanwhile, I was deep in contemplation, deciphering an extremely crude cocktail menu that seemed equal parts alchemy and cry for help.  My notes from the evening, if you can call the napkin I later found fused to my wallet a journal, dwell in the realm of the tragicomic: “The existential dread of a dropped olive.”  If Kierkegaard had access to better olives, Danish philosophy would be very different.

There, amid the wreckage of my nascent political career and the sticky floor mosaic of spilled spirits, the fateful suggestion bloomed.  Boochie, drunk on somewhere between capitalism and literal gasoline, wanted a band.  A proper moneymaking operation.  Not just another yowling indie outfit doomed to obscurity, but something abrasive, unignorable, actively hostile to decency and taste – a sonic cleansing with a belt sander.  An industrial band.

“But the name,” Boochie slurred with entrepreneurial verve, “It’s gotta haunt people.  You want ’em to choke on their own curiosity.”

We plowed through suggestions like the local wild turkeys pecking at a landfill.  “Satan’s Power Drill.”  “Asbestos Nursery.”  “Cyborg Death Wish.”  All disqualified for either legal reasons or insufficient shock to the cardiovascular system.  I even through out “Bootie Juice,” which, if I ever started a funk band (which I’ve always wanted to do, real talk), but he vetoed it: “I do like ‘Boochie Juice, though…but not for this project.”  Alas.  And then, like a message from the universe’s deeply problematic uncle, it appeared: “We Want Children For Dinner”

The silence that followed could have been bottled and sold to Scandinavian nihilists.  Even the ancient crypt-keeper in the corner roused, possible from the afterlife.  The jukebox sputtered and died in shame.

It was the apex (or, more appropriately, the nadir) of bad taste – a perfect, monstrous idea.  It implied headline news, missing persons reports, a culinary theme better suited for litigation than lunch.  But it also sounded like money.  Or so Boochie insisted, and at that moment, with sobriety negotiating a surrender, I wasn’t equipped to disagree.

Handshakes.  Terrible vows.  An oath sworn over the ruins of a night that shouldn’t be immortalized but probably will be.  The post-midnight adventures unraveled predictably: a philosophical spat with a parking meter, the futile pursuit of tacos in a city hostile to dreams, a dissertation-level debate over whether squirrels can experience ennui.

Morning arrived like a SWAT team.  Skull pounding, tongue coated in oxidized pennies, I excavated from the disaster-area Safe House a napkin.  On it: “First album title: Lullabies for the Abattoir.”  Lordy.  We may not have a government to run, but apparently, we’ve got a band to start – or, more accurately, a creepy financial venture and a murder of hangovers to outlast.  Who knows?  In this world, only the deeply unserious have a fighting chance.

But never mind all that.  Today, August 28th, is a day of cosmic convergence, a chronological pile-up of such staggering, brain-melting significance that it makes you wonder if the universe is just a high-concept practical joke scripted by a committee of high-as-fuck philosophy majors.  On this day, two absolute titans were shot into this mortal coil, separated by a mere 168 years but spiritually joined at the hip like some kind of weird, metaphysical, world-building conjoined twin.

I’m talking, of course, about Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Jack “The King” Kirby.

Yes, you heard that right.  The German Übermensch of letters, the dude who gave us Faust and basically invented the modern goth concept of feeling all your feelings in a very dramatic, poetic way.  And the King of Comics, the human dynamo from the Lower East Side who drew gods and monsters with a pencil stub, birthing entire universes crackling with cosmic energy dots, a.k.a. Kirby Krackle.  It’s the literary equivalent of pairing a fine, aged Riesling with a fistful of Pop Rocks.  And it is glorious.

Let’s start with Goethe, born way back in 1749.  Dude was a one-man Enlightenment party.  He was a poet, a playwright, a novelist, a scientist who argued about the nature of light, and probably, if you checked his journals, a surprisingly good clog dancer.  He penned The Sorrows of Young Werther, a novel so emotionally potent it allegedly sparked a wave of copycat suicides across Europe, making him the original influencer of bespoke misery.  Then he drops Faust, a story about a guy who sells his soul to the devil for unlimited knowledge and, let’s be honest, a better social life.  It’s a sprawling, impossibly dense masterpiece that I, having failed to get to it earlier in the semester, once tried to read in a single weekend.  The attempt left me questioning my own sanity and the structural integrity of the English language itself.  Goethe was operating on a level of pure, uncut genius that most of us can only squint at from a safe distance.

Then, fast-forward to 1917.  The world is a different kind of chaotic, and out of this industrial grinder pops Jacob Kurtzberg, soon to be known as Jack Kirby.  While Goethe was wrestling with existential dread in iambic pentameter, Kirby was busy creating a new mythology with ink and pulp paper.  Captain America punching Hitler in the jaw?  That was jack.  The Fantastic Four, a dysfunctional family with superpowers bickering their way across the galaxy?  Jack.  Thor, the Silver Surfer, the New Gods, Darkseid – all modern archetypes, splashed onto the page with an explosive, kinetic force.  He art was much more than just “drawings” – they were detonations.  Every panel is a testament to raw, untethered imagination.  His figures are all barrel chests and impossible angles that lesser artists are still trying to rip off today.  He gave us a visual language for the sheer, pants-wetting awe of the cosmos, all while chain-smoking a cigar and meeting impossible deadlines.

So what, you might ask, dear reader, besides a shared birthday, connects the Weimar classicist with the King of comics?  Everything.  Both were architects of worlds.  Both stared into the abyss of the human condition – the struggle for knowledge, the temptation of power, the clash between gods and mortals – and wrestled it onto the page.  Goethe gave us Mephistopheles, the charming, urbane demon whispering deals in our ears.  Kirby gave us Galactus, the planet-eater, a force of nature so vast it rendered mortality irrelevant.  They were both dealing with the same big-ticket questions, just using different toolkits.

So tonight, let’s raise a glass.  To Goethe, for making existential despair so eloquent.  And to Kirby, for showing us that the universe is a weird, wonderful, and often violent place filled with gods who look suspiciously like they spend a lot of time at the gym.  Happy birthday to both of you.  Thanks for making reality a little more interesting.  The hangover will be worth it.  Probably.

N.P.: “Bob George” – JaGoFF

August 25, 2025

 

Well, hell, dear reader…it’s Monday again.  Today we’re faceplanting into the chaotic intersection where fate decided to play cosmic jukebox with two literary badasses.  August 25 – a date that should be etched in bourbon and typewriter ribbon – gave us both a literary assassin’s birth cry in 1938 and watched a literary butterfly’s final flutter in 1984.

Frederick Forsyth slithered into existence on this very day, though he probably emerged from the womb clutching a press pass and muttering something about covert operations in three languages.  Uncle Fred had the audacity to gift us The Day of the Jackal, which, and I’m not ashamed to admit this despite my well-documented pharmaceutical enthusiasm and questionable life choices – housed my second-favorite literary character during those formative years when I was still young enough to believe adults knew what they were doing.

The Jackal, that ice-cold professional with his meticulous attention to detail and his absolutely zero-fucks-given approach to geopolitics, captured something primal in my pre-adolescent imagination.  Here was a character who treated assassination like a particularly complex chess problem, complete with multiple identities, forged papers, and the kind of methodical precision that would make a Swiss watchmaker weep with envy.  The Count of Monte Cristo held the top spot, as you know – because what red-blooded vengeance-minded literary maniac doesn’t worship at the altar of Dumas’ revenge masterpiece – but The Jackal ran a damn close second.

This, oddly enough, came up in a talk I was having with my psychiatrist a couple of years back, when we were trying to untie the knot of some of my more unusual personality traits.  He wanted to know what it was about these characters [our discussion included a couple of other, similarly “dark” characters] that grabbed me by the intellectual throat.  After some thought, I told him it was their shared commitment to the long game, their willingness to subsume their entire existence into the service of a singular, magnificent obsession.  The Count had his decades-long revenge plot; The Jackal had his surgical approach to political elimination.  Both understood that true artistry requires patience, preparation, and an almost pathological attention to detail.  We’ll definitely be diving significantly deeper into all that in the book, so we’ll leave it there for now.  But if you haven’t, check out The Day of the Jackal, if you’re into dispassionate badassery.

While Forsyth was celebrating another year of breathing on this planet in 1984, Truman Capote – that brilliant, tortured, fabulous wreck of literary genius – was taking his final bow.  August 25th, 1984, marked the end of a man who had revolutionized non-fiction with In Cold Blood and scandalized high society with Answered Prayers.

Capote died at 59, which in literary years is basically infancy – especially considering the prodigious amounts of chemical enhancement many of us require just to function at baseline creativity levels.  The man who gave us Holly Golightly and redefined true crime narrative structure succumbed to what the medical establishment politely called “liver disease due to multiple drug intoxication,” which is basically doctor-speak for “he had Too Much Fun.”

The beautiful irony isn’t lost on me: on the same calendar date, we celebrate the birth of a master of cold, calculated fiction and mourn the death of a master of warm, devastating truth.  Forsyth gave us The Jackal – methodical, emotionally detached, professionally lethal.  Capote gave us characters who bled authentic human messiness all over the page, who made us feel things we weren’t entirely comfortable feeling.

Both men understood something fundamental about the writing life: sometimes you have to become someone else entirely to tell the truth.  Forsyth disappeared into his research, becoming a journalistic chameleon who could write about international intrigue with the authority of someone who’d actually lived it.  Capote disappeared into his subjects’ lives, becoming so intimately connected to Perry Smith and Dick Hickock that their story became indistinguishable from his own psychological journey.

And maybe that’s what drew me to The Jackal all those decades ago – not just the character’s professional competence, but the recognition that great art, requires a kind of controlled schizophrenia, a willingness to fragment yourself across multiple identities in service of the story.  Every writer worth their whiskey knows this feeling: the moment when you stop being yourself and start being the conduit for something larger, stranger, and infinitely more dangerous than your normal, everyday consciousness.

So here’s to August 25th, a collision of literary birth and death.  Here’s to Forsyth, who, unfortunately, passed on June 9th of this year.  And here’s to Capote, who burned out but never faded away.  And here’s to The Jackal, that cold-blooded professional who taught a young reader that sometimes the most compelling characters are the ones who’ve learned to disappear completely into their work.

After all, isn’t that what we’re all trying to do?  Disappear so completely into our craft that what emerges isn’t us anymore, but something infinitely more interesting?
[Raises glass of something appropriately destructive]
To the professionals, living and dead.  May their aim always be true.

N.P.: “Late Night Call” – Goblin, Alan Howarth, Retrofuture

August 24, 2025

 

Good goddamn afternoon, dear reader.  If I was a mere mortal left to my own devices, I would likely spend today bitching about how exhausting it is to constantly be fighting various forces of shittiness every day, whether it’s the government, the matrix, friends and family, the woke, the System, the general public.  And it is exhausting.  But I figured out a while ago, life is fighting every day.  You’re fighting a war every single day, and it never ends.  And the enemy won’t let up if you’re sick, or are in the middle of a nervous breakdown or whatever, no…they will only take advantage of your weakened condition.  So bitch today I shan’t.  I’ll just keep up The Fight, and keeping an eye out for new places to stack bodies.

So instead, today I want to blow the whistle on the most elaborate con game this side of a Vegas poker tournament – and trust me, I’ve been both the mark and the dealer in this particular house of marked cards.

Picture this if you can: a 17-year-old version of yrs. truly, wide-eyed and bushy-tailed, stumbling through the hallowed halls of community college like some kind of educational pilgrim seeking enlightenment, only to discover that the promised land was actually a strip-mall diploma mill staffed by adjunct professors living in their cars and full-time faculty who’d rather be anywhere else doing literally anything else for twice the pay.

But did I learn?  Hell no.  I doubled down like degenerate pervert gambler chasing a royal flush with pocket twos.

Four years of undergraduate purgatory later – during which I accumulated exactly zero student loan debt (because I always had a job in college, and this was obviously not something worth going in debt for), but did acquire a working knowledge of precisely how many ways one can deconstruct the inherent patriarchal implications of grocery store checkout lanes – I found myself clutching a bachelor’s degree that qualified me for exactly one thing: more school.

So naturally, being the kind of masochist who enjoys having his intellectual teeth pulled without anesthesia, I enrolled in graduate school, where I spent another year (yeah, I did grad school in a year.  At that point I could have probably gone on to get a doctorate in about 3 months) learning to speak in the kind of serpentine academic prose that would make one of Hakeem Jeffries’ dumb-ass filibusters sound like a haiku.

The punchline?  The only job this entire academic odyssey qualified me for was teaching other people how to navigate the same labyrinthine bureaucracy of intellectual masturbation that had just spent five years systematically destroying my will to live.

Here’s where it gets really beautiful in that special way that watching a plane crash in slow motion can be beautiful: when I actually tried to teach students how to think – not what to think, but the radical concept of independent critical analysis – I was about as welcome as a functioning fire alarm in a crack house.

See, the dirty not-so-little secret that most people are terrified to acknowledge is that higher education has become less about education and more about indoctrination, less about developing minds capable of independent thought and more about mass-producing ideologically compliant foot soldiers who can organize the shit out of protest march but couldn’t balance a checkbook or run a for-profit business if their lives depended on it.

The numbers don’t lie, even when the institutions do: college graduation rates hover around 60% for four-year institutions and an absolutely dismal 29% for community colleges.  Let that sink in for a sec – these places are failing to graduate even half their students, yet we continue to funnel young people into this academic meat grinder like some kind of educational Soylent Green factory.

But here’s the really insidious part: the students who do manage to survive this intellectual hazing ritual emerge not as critical thinkers or problem solvers, but a zealous activists armed with undergraduate degrees in Gender Studies and enough righteous indignation to power a small city, yet somehow lacking the basic skills necessary to function in any capacity that doesn’t involve organizing boycotts or composing strongly-worded tweets about microaggressions.

Meanwhile, the STEM fields – you know, the disciplines that actually require students to engage with objective reality rather than constructing elaborate theoretical frameworks to explain why mathematics is racist – continue to produce graduates who can build bridges that don’t collapse, develop medicines that actually work, and create technologies that improve human lives rather than simply providing new platforms for performative outrage.

The rest of higher education has become nothing more than a grotesquely overpriced finishing school for professional complainers, a four-to-six-year program in how to transform every conceivable human interaction into an opportunity for moral preening and victim status acquisition.

And the cost?  Oh sweet merciful Christ, the cost.  Students are graduating with debt loads that would have bought them comfortable middle-class lifestyles just a generation ago, all for the privilege of being certified unemployable in any field that requires actual productivity rather than simply the ability to identify and catalog various forms of systemic oppression.

The faculty – and I say this as someone who’s been on both sides of this particular con game – are either true believers in the cause, drunk on their own ideological Kool-Aid and genuinely convinced they’re saving the world one consciousness-raising session at a time, or cynical opportunists who’ve figured out the academia is the last refuge for people who want to get paid for having opinions while never having to actually test those opinions against the harsh realities of the marketplace.

The administration, meanwhile, consists entirely of bureaucrats whose primary qualification is their ability to speak fluent horseshit while extracting maximum tuition revenue from students who are too young and naïve to understand they’re being sold a bill of goods that makes shooting dice on the street look like a noble profession.

So here’s my advice to any young person currently contemplating higher education: if you want to be a doctor, and engineer, a scientific researcher, or anything else that requires actual technical knowledge and skills, by all means, go to college.  Learn calculus, organic chemistry, or hot to design a bridge that won’t fall down when someone sneezes on it.

But if you’re thinking about majoring in anything that ends with “Studies” or requires you to write papers about your feelings regarding the intersection of race, class, and gender in 19th-century flower arrangement, save yourself the time and money.  You’ll learn more about the world by working a series of minimum-wage jobs than you will by spending four years in an academic echo chamber being taught to see oppression in everything from breakfast cereal to traffic lights.

The great irony is that higher education – the institution supposedly dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge and the development of critical thinking skills – has become the very antithesis of both, a place where curiosity goes to die and independent thought is systematically beaten out of students like some kind of intellectual conversion therapy.

And the most delicious part of this whole sick joke?  The people running this scam have convinced society that questioning their methods makes you anti-intellectual, when in fact, the most intellectually honest thing anyone can do at this point is to call bullshit on the entire enterprise and start over from scratch.

Because that’s what this is, dear reader: a massive, institutionalized fraud that makes Bernie Madoff look like a small-time grifter, and it’s time someone had the balls to say it out loud.

The emperor isn’t just naked – he’s charging admission for people to come look at his invisible clothes.

Class dismissed.

N.P.: “Never Right” – SIERRA VEINS

August 23, 2025

 

Happy Saturday, my dearest reader.  Yesterday I was pulled away from the Dissolute Desk on urgent government business, and I regrettably missed an important day on the D.P.S. calendar.  Yesterday, August 22nd, was the day the cosmos decided to bless us with one Raymond Douglas Bradbury.  And I, due to the aforementioned government business resulting in a catastrophic failure of my moral obligations to the literary gods, completely and utterly whiffed it.  Blew past it like a bat out of some very strange and beautifully rendered hell.

One hundred and five years, or thereabouts, since the man first started inhaling oxygen.  And where was I?  Engaged in some deeply unimpressive, bureaucratic rescue mission.  How embarrassing.  The sheer, uncut, high-octane shame of it all is a heavy coat, dear reader.  I’ve missed deadlines, flights, and the occasional dental appointment, but missing the birth-date of the guy who basically invented the poignant sci-fi liver kick?  That feels like a special category of personal failing, a stain on my already questionable permanent record, governmental callings be damned.

To be clear, we’re talking about the architect of Fahrenheit 451, a book so prescient it feels less like fiction and more like a user manual for the last decade.  He’s the guy who took the simple, Rockwellian canvas of the American Midwest and splattered it with alien loneliness and the quiet terror of a passing carnival.  He saw the future, not as a chrome-plated utopia of flying cars, but as a place of profound human longing, where technology mostly just gave us newer, more efficient ways to be sad and isolated.  And he did it all with prose that could make a poet weep.

To have built entire worlds – worlds that are now permanently etched onto the collective cerebral cortex of anyone with a library card and a soul – and for some over-caffeinated scribe to neglect to raise a glass on the proper day…well, it’s a cosmic joke of the highest order.  A real something-wicked-this-way-comes level of disregard.

I picture Ray, somewhere out in the great, starry expanse he wrote about so lovingly, looking down and shaking his head.  Not in anger, but with that signature blend of knowing sadness and wry amusement.  He’d probably get it.  He understood human folly better than anyone.  He knew we were all just a bunch of flawed, forgetful apes running around, trying our best not to burn the books or miss the important things.

So here it is, 24 hours late and a dollar short: Happy Birthday, Ray.  Thanks for the Martians, the witches, and the firemen.  Thanks for making us look at the stars and feel a little less alone, and a little more terrified, all at once.  I’ll be over here, trying to recalibrate my entire existence and setting approximately 17 alarms for next year.  Forgive me.  Or don’t.  You’ve earned the right to be picky.

N.P.: “Let It All Go” – Beats Antique, Preservation Hall Jazz Band