Category Archives: Lucubrations

July 3, 2025

 

Gather ’round, dear readers and existential thrill-seekers, because today we light the candles on a metaphorical cake that will never be eaten, in honor of a man who gave us nightmares we didn’t know we needed.  On July 3, 1883, Franz Kafka was born – screaming, presumably – into a world that he would later pick apart with surgical precision and reassemble into some of the most mind-meltingly bizarre narratives human civilization has had the gall to produce.  Kafka was a wiry stream of dread and genius poured into a human-shaped container.  He was the literary badass who saw modern life for what it really is – bureaucratic purgatory with a side of existential horror.

Yes, Franz Kafka, the grim architect of worlds where people turn into cockroaches and face endless surreal trials without any clear crime or resolution.  He’s the guy who somehow managed to make even paperwork feel like a metaphysical death spiral.  In “The Metamorphosis,” a dude wakes up as a repulsive insect and everyone he loves despises him – tell me that scene doesn’t feel eerily like the Monday morning commute in emotional metaphor form.  Or take The Trial…a paranoid fever dream where the protagonist gets dragged through the legal ringer without so much as a checklist for survival.  Kafka captured exactly what it feels like to exist inside a system designed to crush you for unclear reasons – on this, the man was, to borrow a modern term, criminally underrated in his time.

But we’re not here to wallow in existential despair (or are we, dear reader?).  No, today we’re popping existentialist champagne – whatever that might look like – and celebrating the incredible influence Kafka has had on literature, philosophy, and probably your last five anxiety spirals.  His writing did something so rare and so raw that most of us puny humans spend entire lifetimes running away from it.  He took the gnawing absurdity of life, the suffocating anxiety of being, and the shallow, ridiculous theater of societal norms and slathered it onto the page with the precision who works for Nightmares, Inc.

This kind of writing lasts for a reason.  Maybe it’s because Kafka was one of us.  He was a guy trapped in the meat grinder of reality (though, in his case, it was working a suffocating insurance job in the shadow of his overbearing father).  Everything was set up to squash him like Gregor Samsa under a boot heal.  But instead, he wrote.  He wrote like there was no tomorrow, because he knew there probably wasn’t, and he filled every paragraph with the nervous, raw quality of someone staring directly into the abyss just long enough for the abyss to nervously shift its gaze elsewhere.

And while the world was busy sleeping on him or dismissing his work as the deranged ramblings of a man who probably just needed a stiff drink and a vacation, Kafka was redefining what fiction could be.  He was one of very few in his time who didn’t tell stories to entertain you in the Saturday matinee sense – he dragged you into a psychological whirlpool and dared you to find your way back.  His influence on modern literature is seared into the DNA of anyone who’s ever tried to capture this mess we call existence into words.  Guys like Borges, Camus, and Pynchon…the whole brood of postmodern and existential heavy-hitters owe him a stack of royalties and an apology note scrawled in shaky handwriting.

Did Kafka mean to be this towering figure of angst-riddled brilliance?  Hardly.  The man didn’t even want most of his stuff published.  He told his buddy Max Brod to burn the manuscripts after his death.  Thank God Max ignored the instructions like a responsible literary saboteur.  Because what’s life without Kafka?  Cleaner, maybe.  Simpler, definitely.  But infinitely less true.

And so, as we raise a glass – probably of something unreasonably dark and bitter, because what else would Kafka himself toast with? – we thank him for putting the absurdity of life into a terrifyingly honest mirror.  Happy Birthday, Uncle Franz.  You taught us all that the world is laughing at us, sure…but sometimes, it’s okay to laugh back.

Now go read The Metamorphosis again.  It’s a party.

N.P.: “Going to the Party” – The Allergies, Lyrics Born

July 2, 2025

 

Today, dear reader, we pour some out for Ernest Hemingway.  For a name that thunders with such literary gravitas, it’s paradoxical how much of him has been sliced, boiled, and reduced into a series of cliches fed to college freshmen in Intro to Lit.  Hemmingway, the masculine deity of the English sentence, I’m told, lived as though his life were a dare he accepted solely to spite death.  And how did it end?  Death, of course.  Death, in all its clinical indifference, finally called his bluff.  On July 2, 1961, Hemingway shoved two rounds of buckshot into himself in Ketchum, Idaho.  Cue the symphony of gasps, tributes, and reductive eulogies, all neatly packaged for obligatory reverence.  Yet the man, much like the sentences he crafted, wasn’t so easily punctuated.

To get into the meat of Hemingway’s life – this messy, blood-soaked symphony of adventure, genius, and catastrophe – you first have to understand the gravitational force he exerted not just on American literature, but on our entire mythology of what it means to live wildly and write well.  You can’t talk about courage in prose without tipping your hat to the guy who turned language into a knife.  Hemingway wrote as if words had weight – every sentence carved lean, shorn of excess, held up by something primal.  The Old Man and the Sea was a proving ground of grit.  A Farewell to Arms was love set against the erosion of humanity.  He forced readers into the ring with life’s hard knocks, and somehow, we loved him for it.  But there’s an odd hypocrisy in the Hemingway myth.  For all his talk of stoic restraint and quiet courage, his life was a chaos of loud, brazen excess.  This was a guy who chased bulls in Spain, downed daiquiris on the daily in Cuba, and hunted big game as if extinction lists didn’t exist.  Hemingway didn’t just live…he swaggered.  He tore through the trenches of World War I, bled out Hemoglobin’s worth of whiskey, and somehow still had the energy to swear loudly at the inadequacies of hotel service.  It was as if he lived on the belief that to stare death in the face was not enough – you had to step closer until you felt it’s breath.

And yet, the end loomed.  Because genius burns fast, and gods of excess always leave behind a smoldering wreckage.  By the late 1950s, Hemingway’s life turned into its own tragic third act.  Wracked by injuries from plane crashes, riddled with lingering effects of old wounds, and plagued by the ghosts of too many memories – his resilience began to crack.  Depression crept in, and paranoia turned the world into a series of looming shadows.  There’s a particularly cruel irony in knowing how a man who prided himself on the clarity of language underwent electroshock therapy – treatment that dulled not only his memories, but his creative fire.  He who gave the world such piercing prose began to lose his edge, stumbling toward a haze of confusion and pain.

And so when that July morning arrived, it didn’t exactly whisper.  Hemingway closed the book on his own narrative in the way he had always seemed destined to – not quietly, not cutely, but violently definitive.

The lesson I’ve taken from his work, mostly, is something like this: courage is not the absence of fear but the grit to stand firm within its shadow.

He was not a saint.  He was flawed, and sometimes brutal.  But that’s also the point.  Hemingway didn’t live or write to be worshiped.  He did it because he couldn’t do otherwise, and from that compulsiveness sprang something rare, magnetic, and alive.
I think Hemingway would laugh at all the efforts to tidy the loose ends of his story and life.  Because he, of all people, knew there was no clean narrative.  Just the raw beauty of life lived, fought for, and sometimes lost.

N.P.: “Sunroof Diesel Blues” – MY BABY

June 29, 2025

 

On June 29, 1613, the hallowed ground of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London transformed into a chaotic pyre during a rowdy performance of Henry VIII.  Picture this: a cannon, misfired in all its reckless glory, spitting fire like some drunken god’s tantrum, igniting the thatched roof in a blaze that roared with apocalyptic fervor.  No one was killed – miraculous, given the mayhem – but the event was a seismic liver-kick to the literary and theatrical cosmos, as the Globe stood as a pulsing hub for the bard’s immortal plays.  The flames licked away history itself, a dramatic loss that left the world gasping.

But here’s the kicker: this wasn’t the end.  From the ashes, like some phoenix with a quill, the Globe rose again, rebuilt in 1614, it’s spirit unbroken.

The original rebuilt Globe Theatre remained in use until it was closed in 1642.  This closure was due to the English Civil War and the Puritan government’s ban on theatrical performances, which lasted until the Restoration in 1660.  The building itself was eventually demolished in 1644 to make way for housing.  This modern replica, known as Shakespeare’s Globe, was constructed between 1993 and 1997, when it opened to the public.  This replica was built about 230 meters (that’s 750 feet to us Americans) from the original location, based on historical evidence, to revive the experience of Elizabethan theater, honoring Shakespeare’s legacy and to serve as a cultural and educational hub for performances and studies of his works.

I visited the replica in 2001.  It was impressive, but I wasn’t aware it was a recently constructed replica until mid-visit.  Thinking it was the original structure rebuilt in 1614, I was impressed to the point of being shocked at how well maintained the thing was.  So upon finding out it was a four-year-old replica, I couldn’t help but be disappointed.  But that was my own fault, and I’ve since come to appreciate this replica as a damn fine thing for England and its culture.

N.P.: “Found Atlas” – AWOLNATION

June 26, 2025

What’s crackin’, dear reader.  Yrs. truly is crazy busy with multifarious projects, looming deadlines, and a puppy that absolutely refuses to let me concentrate on anything other than her.  So let’s get to today’s business.

On this day in 1997, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was unleashed upon the UK by Bloomsbury, kicking off a cultural juggernaut that redefined modern storytelling.  Despite rejections from multiple publishers who thought the 90,000-word manuscript was too long for a children’s book, Bloomsbury’s Barry Cunningham took a chance after his eight-year-old daughter raved about it.  The book’s blend of wit, magic, and moral depth – pitting an orphaned underdog against cosmic evil – captured imaginations worldwide, selling over 120 million copies and spawning a franchise that’s still a benchmark for badass literary impact.  This book was a phenomenon, a literary bunker-buster that blew the walls out of traditional publishing and set the world ablaze with wizarding wonder.

The first time I heard about this book, I was sitting in my apartment in San Francisco one evening, reading some news, and I saw an item about a bunch of midwestern moms all up in arms because their kids were going ga-ga over a book that “promoted witchcraft.”  I didn’t think much of it, but about an hour later, I walked over the Green Apple Books on Clement Street and saw this massive display for Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and did a double-take since this was the book I’d just read about.  Normally, I pay exactly zero attention to children’s books, but this time I stopped, cracked open one of the hardbacks, and read a few pages.  It was great!  What I instantly liked about it was that it was very obviously appropriate for and directed at children, but it wasn’t insultingly watered down, so I actually wanted to read the rest of the book.  And I obviously wasn’t alone.

So let’s talk about the staying power of this beast.  What started out as a single volume has morphed into a sprawling empire – films, theme parks, video games, and a fanbase that rivals most religions.  The prose, sharp and unapologetic, pulls you in, while the world-building – gritty yet enchanting – feels like a middle finger to the sanitized dreck that typically dominates kids’ shelves.  It’s a testament to the raw, unfiltered genius of a tale that dared to mix humor with heartbreak, proving that good writing can punch you in the liver and leave you begging for more.

But fast forward to the present, and the creator of this literary titan finds herself in the crosshairs of a cultural firing squad.  J.K. Rowling’s recent acknowledgment of biological reality – that men cannot become women – has sparked a dim-witted yet ferocious attempt to cancel her, a move as absurd as trying to banish Voldemort  with a strongly worded letter.  The backlash, fueled by a vocal minority wielding social media like wands of righteous fury, seeks to erase her legacy over a stance grounded in elementary science and common-ass sense.  Yet, this controversy only underscores the book’s original spirit: a refusal to bow to dogma.  Rowling’s defiance mirrors Harry’s own battles against oppressive forces, turning her into a lightning rod for free thought in an age where cowardly conformity is king.  The irony?  A story about standing up to tyranny is now being used to silence its creator.  The storm of stupidity is finally breaking, and her resoluteness will only burnish her legend further.  Regardless, one thing is clear: the magic of Harry Potter endures, cancellation attempts be damned.

N.P.: “Paint It Black” – Deadsy

June 25, 2025

 

Today we celebrate the birthday of Eric Blair – better known to us as George Orwell – who was born on this day in 1903, into the sweltering chaos of Motihari, British-occupied India.  A literary titan emerged from that colonial crucible, and damn, did he deliver!  His works, 1984 and Animal Farm, hit like intellectual shithammers, tackling totalitarianism with a razor-sharp insight that cuts deeper than my switchblade through silk.  These books are fearless, incisive grenades of storytelling that explode power structures and leave you reeling.  Orwell’s prose, drenched in a gritty, enduring impact, resonates across generations like a rebel yell that may very well echo forever.

1984, penned by George Orwell and unleashed in 1949, was a stark cautionary tale, a dystopian scream against the perils of totalitarianism, surveillance, and the erosion of truth.  Orwell crafted a world where Big Brother’s omnipresent gaze and the Ministry of Truth’s reality-warping lies served as a warning: look what happens when power crushes individuality and language itself.  The novel’s bleak vision was meant to jolt readers into vigilance, a fuck-you to authoritarian creep.

Yet, some interpret it quite differently today.  The leftist Woke Supremacists seem to have flipped the proverbial script, treating Orwell’s nightmare as some sort of perverse political playbook rather than a dire caution.  Where he depicted the manipulation of language and history as oppressive tools – think “doublethink” (more on that in a minute) and rewritten records – they’ve embraced similar tactics, wielding cancel culture and narrative control to enforce ideological conformity.  The irony’s thick: Orwell’s warning about though police morphs into a justification for policing thought, with social media acting as the new telescreen.  It’s less about resisting power and more about redirecting it, turning a cautionary talk into a how-to guide for their own dark version of utopia.  Orwell might’ve rolled in his grave – or grabbed a pen to rewrite the ending.

Doublethink, a cornerstone of Orwell’s 1984, is the mind-bending art of holding two contradictory beliefs simultaneously, accepting both as true, and purging any flicker of cognitive dissonance.  Born from the novel’s oppressive regime, it’s the psychological grease that keeps totalitarianism humming – where “war is peace, “freedom is slavery,” and “ignorance is strength” aren’t just slogans but lived realities.  Orwell, with his 1903-born genius, designed it as a warning, a glimpse into how language and thought can be twisted to enslave rather than liberate.

It works by training the mind to suppress doubt, embracing the Party’s ever-shifting truths with zeal.  Take the daily rewriting of history in the Ministry of Truth – yesterday’s ally becomes today’s enemy, and records adjust seamlessly.  The individual doesn’t just accept it; they believe it, untroubled by the contradiction.  It’s a mental acrobatics act, requiring constant self-deception and a willful amnesia of the past.

In 2025, real-world doublethink echoes Orwell’s 1984 with eerie precision, manifesting in ways that blur the line between caution and complicity.  Take social media platforms where users decry censorship while flagging posts they deem offensive, embracing “free speech” only when it aligns with their views.  This cognitive juggling act lets them champion open dialogue while silencing dissent, a contradiction swallowed whole.  Politically, it’s rampant: public health offers such a case – during debates in recent years, I witnessed myriad such slaves who, in a single conversation, screamed about bodily autonomy and  “my body, my choice,” and in the same breath fascistically pushed untested vaccine mandates, holding both as unassailable truths.  Even consumerism shows it: people whine about climate change but immediately buy into fast fashion’s disposability, rationalizing personal impact as negligible.  “Ugliness is beauty” double-think is easily seen in the body positivity movement, to such an extent that even television commercials, which used to use beauty to sell their products, are now a nauseating parade of aggressively unattractive, overweight dullards touting victimhood.  These instances reveal a society that has become pathetically adept at doublethink – accepting opposing ideas, rewriting narratives, and silencing inner conflict, just as Orwell warned.

Disgusted as he’d be if he could see western society now, I still raise a glass and toast the birthday of a scribe whose legacy remains a badass benchmark for truth-tellers everywhere.  Doubleplusgood birthday, George…your ink still burns bright!

N.P.: “Sexcrime (Nineteen Eighty-Four)” – Eurythmics

June 24, 2025

Okay…I have to say something because I can’t take it anymore and something needs to be said about these massive fucking pickup trucks, and, regrettably, the people who, for the most part, it seems, drive them.

You, my fellow denizens of the asphalt jungle, have no doubt seen the grotesquely engorged pick-up trucks that lumber through our streets like some hypertrophic nightmare, their dimensions ballooning into a preposterous caricature of utility! In the span of a scant few years, these vehicular behemoths have metastasized to such an absurd scale that the humble California garage—once a sanctuary of suburban pragmatism—now stands impotent, its confines laughably inadequate to cradle these monstrous steel leviathans. And lo, the consequence: every driveway from San Diego to Sacramento is now a grotesque tableau, dominated by at least one oversized truck, its hulking mass obliterating any vestige of street-side charm, a garish monument to excess that screams louder than a foghorn in a library.  And fuck it…it’s a free country and you can buy whatever kind of vehicle you want.  And it’s your house…if you want to totally eclipse the view of that pile of stucco you paid $750K for, cool.  Most of my neighbors at the Safe House have fallen into this truck trap.  If you are a big-league contractor, or you find yourself hauling semi-trailers or towing busted bulldozers or some such, cool…you need all the truck you can get.  But they two or three guys I know with things clearly do not need this much truck.  One dude’s an attorney who works for Anhedonia County.  Why does he need a two-ton truck as a daily driver?  It’s the digital age…not like he has to haul entire file cabinets of briefs to and fro.  All he has to take with him to work is his phone, and maybe a small briefcase.  And his office is maybe a mile from here…not like he needs to go offroad and ford a river or anything.  And the other dude is retired.  He only uses his truck to get to the local Indian casino.  I see him out my window every evening as he prepares to go gamble this month’s pension money…he can barely climb into that big bastard that’s parked in his driveway.  But whatever…they can do whatever they want.  Hell, I don’t need a tank, but if I had Fuck-You money, I wouldn’t put it past myself to arrive home one day in a shiny new Abrams whip, and I wouldn’t want any guff about it (though I really doubt anybody would give me any guff at all if I was sitting in the cockpit of an actual Abrams tank).  But if you’re going to go through all the attendant hassle of having one of these big-ass trucks, I would think your driving would reflect your vehicular choice.  If you’re going to shell out…how much are these things?  Jesus!  A Ford F-150 Raptor (which is what one of the aforementioned neighbors is sporting this year) is over $100K.  If one is will to shell out over $100K for one of these Mega Trucks, would one not want to drive it like a Boss?

Yet, oh the irony!  The swaggering titans who pilot these colossi reveal themselves as quivering milquetoasts the moment the road demands a modicum of mettle!  Observe them, these self-anointed lords of the highway, as they approach a speedbump with the tremulous hesitance of a dowager clutching her pearls, their behemoths inching forward with a delicacy that would shame a geriatric snail.  Each crest is navigated with a painstaking crawl, a ritual of cowardice that belies the brash bravado their tonnage implies – truly, a spectacle of spinelessness wrapped in chrome.  It just happened again to yrs. truly…I’m in a relatively miniscule car, with itty bitty shitty tires, trying to get across a grocery store parking lot to park.  There are some old school speedbumps in said parking lot, not the newer, kissy-face “undulations,” but the more brutal speedbumps.  And this guy in a massive, black Chevy Silverado, is actually slowing to a vaginal crawl whenever he gets to one of the things.  Huge off-road tires…I think this thing is even lifted.  He could take speedbumps twice this size at speed and not feel a thing.  It’s inexplicable.

And then…oh, shit, dear reader, and then, the piece de resistance of this absurdity: the seemingly ritualistic backing into parking spaces, a maneuver executed with the precision of a paranoid squirrel hoarding nuts.  Why, one might ask (I sure as hell do), this fetishistic reverse choreography?  Is it some primal urge to assert dominance, to ensure their retreat is as ostentatious as their arrival?  Or perhaps a tacit admission that these unwieldly beasts are better suited to flee than to face the world head-on?  Whatever the rationale, it’s a dance of dithering insecurity, a final flourish of folly atop their already towering pike of automotive hubris.  And it pisses me off to no end.

N.P.: “Poverty Blues” – Appalachian White Lightning

June 23, 2025

Behold, dearest reader, another Monday is upon us.  But this isn’t “just another Monday.”  No.  June 23, 2025 is a day of ink-soaked rebellion and typewriter fury.  Around this time in 1971 (try as I might, I couldn’t pin down an exact date), Charles Bukowski’s raw, booze-soaked novel Post Office was published.  It’s a throbbing middle-finger to The Grind, chronicling his years as a postal worker with unfiltered grit – drinking, screwing, and surviving the soul-crushing monotony.  Bukowski’s voice is pure badass: no polish, just truth.  This book cemented his rep as the poet of the down-and-out, and its release was a liver-lick to the literary establishment.  If you’re looking for something that screams defiance, this isit.  The prose hits like a shot of Jack – rough, unapologetic, and leaving you reeling.  Bukowski showed writers like yrs. truly How Its Done, turning a dead-end job into a manifesto of survival.  Pick it up, crack it open, and let the pages drag you into the chaos of a man who refused to bow to the suits.  This book was a grenade tossed into the ivory tower.

June 23 is also National Typewriter Day, marking the 1868 patent of the typewriter by Christopher Latham Sholes.  This machine was the weapon of choice for literary rebels like Hemingway, Kerouac, and other wild scribes who hammered out their works with mechanical fury.  The typewriter’s clack is the sound of creation under pressure.  It’s a nod to the tools that let writers fight their own apocalypses on the page.  Back in the day, this beast of a device was the heartbeat of the craft, a clattering symphony of keys that turned thoughts into tangible rebellion.  Sholes’ invention birthed a revolution, giving voice to the outcasts and dreamers who pounded out epics on its iron frame.  Today, it’s a relic, sure, but its legacy lives up to every keystroke – a reminder that the fight for words is as old as the machine itself.

I have a truly old, totally analog typewriter…no electricity needed.  If the world goes up, or the electrical grid collapses, dissemination will certainly be affected, but I’ll still be here, banging on the keys.  Due to my father’s ludditic obstinance when it came to technology, I was forced to use a typewriter until I had already started college.  It was a real pain in the ass, especially since literally everyone I knew had been rocking word processors for years at that point.  But there is a certain satisfaction the comes from typewriting.  I think it’s the combination of several different elements: the various noises from the contraption itself…the aforementioned clanking of the keys, the end-of-the-line ding, the subsequent smacking of the carriage-return lever.  It also has something to do with the fact that you are dealing with a physical page, which pages stacking up next to the machine is far more gratifying to those of us who like tangible, visible results of our efforts than any screen could ever be.

N.P.: “Bauhaus Staircase” – Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark

June 22, 2025

 

You know, dear reader, I do my best to extoll the virtues and pleasantries of living in Fecal Creek, CA.  And I know I’ve spilled a lot of virtual and analog ink over the years bemoaning the literary uninhabitable heat that happens here from Cinco de Mayo through Halloween.  But as I’ve recently discussed here, I may finally be getting acclimated to this unreasonable heat.  Maybe I’m just getting old.  You know how old people are always cold, and they always talk about going to warmer climates for their health or bones or whatever?  Maybe that’s going on.  I hope not.  Regardless, I am trying to lean into the heat this year.  Not just to accept it, but to embrace it for some reason I have yet to figure out.  Surviving multiple summers here does suggest a durability, a hardiness, even a ruggedness you possess that other humans and species do not possess.  But there’s a darker side to that arrangement: you’re stuck living here with those hardy, rugged creatures, and the warmer the temperatures get, the more some of these little monsters thrive and breed.  Which is what brings me to the topic of today’s sermon.

Behold, dear readers, the unmitigated chaos that descends upon our beleaguered hamlet of Fecal Creek each summer, a season wherein the very basic fabric of our domestic tranquility is besieged by an army of cockroaches so multitudinous, so audaciously omnipresent, that one might be forgiven for imagining a dystopian epic penned by a madman with a typewriter and a vendetta.  These six-legged marauders, glistening with the unholy sheen of resilience, emerge from the dank crevices of our collective subconscious – or, more likely, the sewer grates – transforming our sunlit days into a grotesque ballet of evasion and existential dread.

Let us consider, with a trembling yet irreverent chuckle, the sheer audacity of their numbers.  By mid-June, as the thermometer breaches the infernal threshold of ninety degrees, the cockroach population swells to a figure so staggering – let’s hazard a wildly speculative estimate of eleventy-billion – that one cannot so much as open a cupboard without encountering a symposium of antennae and skittering legs, debating philosophy or plotting their next assault on the sanctity of my artisanal sourdough stash.  The kitchen counter, once a bastion of culinary ambition, becomes a roach-filled agora, where these critters hold court with the insouciant swagger of uninvited guests at a black-tie gala.

And oh, the indignities they inflict!  Last Tuesday, as I endeavored to brew a pot of coffee – black as my mood and twice as bitter – one such brazen interloper executed a kamikaze dive into the carafe, necessitating a ritualistic exorcism involving scalding water and a string of expletives that would make a sailor blush.  The sheer affrontery!  To infiltrate the sacred rite of caffeine consumption is to declare war on the very soul of Fecal Creek, and yet, these pests persist with a tenacity that borders on the absurdly heroic.

What recourse, then, for the beleaguered citizenry?  Traps abound – sticky, insidious contraptions that promise salvation but deliver only a tableau of wriggling captives, a macabre art installation titled the Agony of the Arthropod.  Pesticides, those chemical knights in shining aerosol cans, offer a fleeting reprieve, only to be met with the roaches’ evolutionary middle finger: resistance so robust it could withstand a nuclear winter.  We are left, dear reader, to wage this battle with brooms, bravado, and a grim determination to reclaim our dominion, one squashed invader at a time.

So here we stand, on the precipice of July, in Fecal Creek’s cockroach apocalypse, armed with humor as our shield and a reckless disregard for the conventional.  Let us laugh in the face of this scuttling tyranny, for to do otherwise would be to cede victory to the six-legged horde.  Until the autumn chill restores order, I bid your fortify your pantries, steel your nerves, and join me in this absurd, ongoing crusade – because if we can’t beat them, we’ll at least mock them with the ferocity of a thousand suns.  Onward, brave souls, to the Roachpocalypse 2025!

N.P.: “Bug Powder Dust” – Bomb The Bass, Justin Warfield

June 19, 2025

 

Behold, dear reader: June 19, 1947, the birthday of a true literary badass, Salman Rushdie, whose audacious prose – most electrifyingly The Satanic Verses – ignites global tempests and even a fatwa with its unapologetic defiance and razor-sharp storytelling.  Today we raise a glass to a titan who dances on the edge of controversy, weaving narratives that slash through the mundane with fearless brilliance.

Let’s take a minute to dive into the firestorm: that 1989 fatwa (I remember it well), a death sentence from Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, branded Rushdie a heretic for daring to blend sacred myth with profane imagination.  This was not long after the Pope had forbidden Catholics from seeing “The Last Temptation of Christ,” and as a fledgling writer, the notion that one could potentially write something so potent that it would be labeled verboten, even worthy of a death sentence by heads of state and religious leaders made the whole thing that much more appealing.  The fatwa was a global hunt, a shadow over his every step, yet this badass refused to cower.  Decades of exile, guarded existence, and relentless threats couldn’t muzzle him – he kept writing, kept provoking, kept living loud.

They almost got him on August 12, 2022: a knife attack in New York that stole his right eye, a brutal scar on his unyielding spirit.  Doctors fought to save him, and though the blade took his sight, it didn’t touch his badass soul.  With one eye and infinite grit, he rose again, pen in hand, declaring in his memoir Knife that silence is the enemy’s victory.  Fuck yes.  This man, now 78, stands unbroken, a testament to resilience.  Cheers to you, Salman, the unbreakable.

N.P.: “The God That Failed” – Imelda May

June 18, 2025

Partial Transcript of Emergency Strategy Meeting, Tuesday, 17 June 2025, In The Law Office of Finger & Diddle, Fecal Creek, CA.  Participants: Jayson Gallaway, Author and Presumptive Gubernatorial Candidate, Boochie Collins, Drug Dealer and Political Analyst/Advisor, James “Jimmy” Finger, Attorney At Law, and Shazam, Paralegal of Rather Dubious Visa Status.

Jayson: …the hell it ain’t a step down, Finger…this is a trailer!  You live here?  What happened to the loft?
Finger: Fuckin’ divorce.
Jayson: Ouch.  Weren’t you a divorce attorney?
Finger: Best in town.
Jayson: Did you represent yourself?
Finger:  What, in the divorce?  Hell no.  Diddle did it.
Jayson:  Diddle didn’t do a very good job, did he, if you lost the loft.
Finger: Lost the ‘Vette, too.
Jayson: Son of a bitch.
Finger: Indeed.  But never mind all that.  You want to run for mayor?
Jayson: Nope.  I wanna run for governor.
Finger: Governor of what?
Jayson: California, dumbass.
Finger:  Well, you can never be too sure with you.  Cool.  California.  Governor.  Love it.  Let’s do it.
Jayson:  Great.  I went over qualifications last night with Boochie…ah…Boochie Collins, meet Jimmy Finger.  Finger…Boochie.
Finger:  Nice fronts, Boochie.
Boochie: Nice trailer, douchebag.  What’s that smell?
Finger: What smell?
Jayson: Yeah…that is pretty loud, isn’t it?
Finger:  What smell?
Boochie: Smells like a bouncer in a Persian nightclub.
Finger:  Ah…that’s Shazam.
Jayson: ..the fuck is Shazam, your new cologne?  It’s rancid.
Finger: Shazam’s my paralegal.  Shazam!  Come say hello to our new clients!
Shazam: ….
Jayson: You’re making shit up.
Finger:  Goddammit…Shazam!
Shazam [coming in from other room, taking earbuds out of his ears]: Sorry, boss…had my earbuds in.
Finger: Shazam this is Jayson Gallaway, the next governor of California, and his, what, sidekick?  Gucci.
Boochie: Boochie.
Shazam: Salam.
Jayson: What it is.
Finger: Okay, let’s get down to business.
Jayson: Let’s.
Finger: Okay…hold on.
Jayson: …
Boochie: …
Finger: …just give me a minute.  Google’s been slow all day.  Shazam, can you please reboot the router!
Shazam: …
Finger: Ah!  Here we go.  Okay.  First thing you’re gonna wanna do is, it says, is, “to officially become a candidate, you must complete the following steps with the California Secretary of State and county elections offices…”
Jayson: Give it to me.
Finger: Jesus.
Jayson: What’s up?
Finger: This is a lot of steps.   This is going to be…yeah.  Okay.  Today we need to submit a Statement of Intention with the Secretary of State.
Jayson: So far, so good.  Boochie, write up a Statement of Intention.
Boochie:  What…right here?  Now?
Jayson:   Why not.  Here, use this.
Boochie: A cocktail napkin?
Jayson:  Yeah, it’ll be fine.  Keep it simple: Dear Secretary of State…shit…who’s the Secretary of State?
Finger: No idea.
Boochie:  Who cares.
Shazam: What’s the question?
Finger: Who’s the Secretary of State?
Shazam:  How the fuck would I know?
Finger: Dammit…you asked.  Never mind.  I Google it.
Jayson: Am I just paying you to do Google searches?  I could have done that.
Finger: Thus far, you haven’t paid me shit, and no, you could not have done that.  You could have, you would have, but evidently you didn’t, so shut up and let me type.
Jayson:  Ass.
Finger:  …
Finger: Fucking internet!  Shazam!  Reboot!
Jayson: Fuck it.  Just put “Dear Secretary of State.”  They know who they are.  Then, “I, Jayson Gallaway, hereby state my intention to run for Governor of this massive pile of shit by the Pacific.”
Finger:  No.  Don’t do that.  And don’t write it on a goddamn cocktail napkin.  I’ll write the thing.  Come back tomorrow and will get ‘er signed and sealed.
Boochie: Dude…this just feels right.  You’re going to win this thing.
Jayson:  That’s the spirit, Booch.  Damn right.  We are going to Kick Ass!  Finger, be ready…we’ll be back tomorrow.

N.P.: “Magic Carpet Ride (Steir’s Mix)” – Steppenwolf