Category Archives: Lucubrations

Yesterday was the summer solstice in this shitty hemisphere, which made it the longest day/shortest night of the year, which, as you can probably imagine, was disgusting to me.  Given my contempt of the sun, the summer solstice is traditionally the shittiest day on the Gallaway Calendar.  The only good news is that now that we’re on the other side of the Stupid Solstice, the days will now get slightly shorter every day until we get to December 21…the longest night of the year, when I traditionally perform an incredibly lewd goat dance celebrating the Cold and the Dark.  Tick tock.

N.P.: “The Bible is Bullshit” – Corporate Avenger

Another good day, another great word count.  I’m working on something else, for here, and it’s taking longer than expected.  I’m not sure when it will be done, but I’m going to push for tomorrow or the next day.  No promises, but I’m trying.  It’s nothing that’s new to you, dear reader, but it is something that needs to be read.  Unfortunately, the people who really need to read it have been proving themselves illiterate dolts lately, but, you know…still gotta try.
Okay…back to work.

N.P.: “Oh, Pretty Woman” – Palast

Taking the day off due to societal disgust, or, for you, dear reader, since I know you’re up on your Latin: contemptus mundi.  If you didn’t happen to make Latin class for those four miserable high school years, then I’ll refer you to Wordsworth (or at least a paraphrase): the world is too much with me.
This calls for a drug-induced coma…just for 8 hours or so.  And then, tomorrow, we rise, and drain our pens of bitter ink.  Unless, of course, everything is still overwhelmingly shitty and stupid tomorrow, in which case I might take another day off and just roll the coma over.

N.P.: “Black Hop на районе” – Uratsakidogi

When the police talk with you politely for 25 minutes, administer a sobriety test (also politely), and you fail, they are going to arrest you.  Had you passed the test, they would not arrest you.  But you didn’t pass the test.  So when they go to cuff you, you decide to resist and start fighting with the police.  You knock two of them to the ground, and steal the weapon of the police officer, and then turn to use that weapon against the police, you are going to be shot and likely killed.  The races and genders of anybody involved in such an incident are irrelevant.

N.P.: “Cheat on the Church” – Graveyard BBQ

The goddamn Guinea Worm is back!  After having been essentially eradicated in Africa where they had plagued the continent since Biblical times, this nasty parasitic sonovabitch has suddenly resurfaced…but not in Africa.  Nope.  Thousands of miles away, way the hell over in Vietnam!  Impossible, you say?  So do I!  But according to some Vietnamese doctors, that’s exactly what’s going on.
Have I ever told you about the Guinea Worm, dear reader?  This pernicious parasite infects humans through contaminated drinking water as larvae, make their ways into the abdomen, grow into adults, and mate.  Then, when she She-Beast is ready to deliver, she makes her way rather aggressively south, down toward the legs and feet.  Keep in mind that an adult female Guinea Worm is 2.5 -3 feet long.  Yeah.  And but so anyway when this evil awful thing gets ready to deliver, she very aggressively heads toward the nearest surface (out the side of the thigh or calf, sometimes out of the bottom of the foot), and comes bursting through the skin, pissed off, jaws snapping…imagine it, reader….fucking horrible.
Anyway, this whole bursting-through-the-skin thing apparently causes the owner of the leg skin to feel an intolerable, searing burn at the worm exit hole, and the burning pain sends most mortals running/limping for the nearest body of water (and in Africa, there was maybe a pond for a village to use for everything, including drinking water).  So whomever jumps into the village water supply and at that very moment, the Worm squirts it’s larvae into the water, so now anybody who drinks from that pond will be infected with worms.  Which they were.  It was not uncommon for entire villages to have myriad of these hateful things hanging out of their legs, causing excruciating pain, and all they can do is drag themselves, limping, crawling, or being carried, to whatever sort of doctor is around.  All the doctor can do is go to each worm, wrap it around a pencil, and pull the worm out without killing it, usually no more than an inch a day.  And the pulling of the worm somehow causes the already excruciating pain to get even worse.
It’s the absolute worst.  But somehow, through the miracles of modern western medical science, the Guinea Worm was thought to have been eradicated and made extinct.  But now, here comes Vietnam wanted to get in on the action.  Apparently investigations are ongoing to determine if what they have there is actually a Guinea Worm, some sort of new Asian parasite worm, or maybe something else entirely.

N.P.: “Hoochie Koochie Lady” – Elf

Here’s why I don’t like “protests” in America: they are the easy way out.  And they are also pointless, ineffectual, and chickenshit.  They are “doing something“ without having to bother with coming up with an actual solution or do much of anything at all, really. This all stems from yeah idea really came about in the 60s, that America is composed of “us“ and “them“. There are politicians and then there are people. There are the police and then there is the public. It’s as if there were separate classes that you had to be born into, otherwise you were not and would never be part of the other group. “We” would never be “Them.”  And this leads to all manner of fallacious reasoning and erroneous conclusions. And it leads to a feeling of helplessness.  Of hopeless defeatism.  Hence, protests.

Is there is no us and them. It’s all Us. They are Us.  If you really want to change something, then go change it. If you feel that passionately about a situation, maybe rather than walking in circles in the streets, protesting, bitching, and complaining, without offering a single solution to the issue, you can just go in and fix the issue. Rather than pointlessly stopping traffic to protest police violence, why not become a police officer? The chief of the Dallas Police Dept has said that if you can pass their selection and get through the academy, he will put you in your own neighborhood to patrol.  In other words, “if you have a problem with the way your neighborhood is policed, and you think you could do a better job, then be our guest.”  If you don”t like what’s going on politically, and think you could do better, then run for office.

“But I can’t do that…I’ve got a degree and a career and that’s my calling and I’ve got a family and…”  blah blah blah.  So you’re not that upset about what you’re protesting.  Not really.  Just enough to go join the other lemmings so you can get your virtue-signaling in, let all your weak-minded friends see you protesting, and then you’re done.  Which is why it is all absolute bullshit.  And everybody who is not duped by whatever false narrative is controlling you idiots at the moment see right through it.  Go become a cop you want patrolling your neighborhood.   Run for office and become the politician you want governing your people.  Or shut the fuck up.

N.P.: “Stossgebet” – Eisbrecher

So, I’m 95% sure that I’m changing the name of the book.  You know, The Book…the big one.  The non-fiction one.  The title I’ve had for it is amazing from a literary perspective, and it will still get used, maybe as a chapter title or something, but it was not at all representative of the book, and just going by that title, no one would know what the hell the book was about.  But there’s this other title that’s been floating around for a while, but I was so enamored with the first one that I just kind of ignored it.  And it’s good…it sounds good, looks good on the page, and it pretty much spells out exactly what the book is about.  So from a commercial standpoint, changing the title is absolutely the thing to do.
Unfortunately, now I really can’t reveal the title until it’s sold with a hard publishing date.
I can tell you the book was almost called “Titties.”  That came from a drunken night with my editor, when I was hollering about the experience I’d had with my first book, when I put “Viagra” in the title.  In addition to hollering, I remember occasionally pounding on the table to accentuate the general state of things. The bulk of the book had nothing to do with Viagra, but I spent not an insignificant amount of time various national TV shows being interviewed about recreational Viagra use.   I declared back then that if I’m going to become the poster boy for whatever I put in the title, regardless of the content or subject matter of the book, then the title of my next book is definitely going to be “Titties.”
Alas, ’twas not to be.  At least not this book.
So now, hopefully, things will start coming together kind of quickly with this book.  It’s been an amorphous mess up to this point…the new title will serve nicely to refine and limit the focus of things.

N.P.: “Christian Woman” – Type O Negative