Fecal Creek, California, May 4, 2025—It’s 12:30 PM PDT, and I’m standing in the middle of a goddamn war zone, a swirling maelstrom of bureaucratic insanity and primal rage at the Fecal Creek Department of Motor Vehicles. The air reeks of tear gas and desperation, a noxious cocktail that burns the lungs and stings the eyes. The Real ID mandate, that federally mandated beast of post-9/11 paranoia, has finally sunk its teeth into the Golden State’s underbelly, and the good people of Fecal Creek have clearly had enough. They’re rioting, man, rioting like it’s the end of the world, and maybe it is—for them, for me, for all of us suckers caught in this dystopian DMV nightmare.

The Real ID deadline is three days away, May 7, 2025, and the California DMV has been scrambling like a junkie on a bender to process the stragglers. They’ve extended hours, opened early, even cracked the whip on Saturdays—Saturdays, for Christ’s sake!—but it’s too little, too late. The Los Angeles Times reported that over 35 million Californians still need their Real ID, and Fecal Creek, a nowhere town with a name that sounds like a bad joke, is ground zero for the rebellion. The DMV here, a squat, soul-crushing concrete bunker, has become a battleground, a place where the American Dream, at least the part of it that expects that an American citizen can travel freely between states without having to carry special permits, goes to die in a haze of pepper spray and shattered glass.

I got here at dawn, fueled only by Benzedrine and grappa, hoping to beat the rush. But there was no beating this rush. The line stretched around the block, a writhing serpent of pissed-off citizens clutching birth certificates and utility bills, their eyes wild with the kind of fear that comes from knowing the feds are about to screw you six ways to Sunday, sans lube. The Real ID, they say, is your ticket to the skies—without it, you can’t board a domestic flight or step foot in a federal building after May 7. But the process is a Kafkaesque nightmare: proof of identity, proof of residency, proof you’re not a goddamn terrorist. And in Fecal Creek, where half the population looks like they’ve been living off the grid since the Clinton administration, that’s a tall order.

By 10 AM, the tension was palpable, a live wire sparking in the crowd. Some poor bastard in a faded Kamala T-shirt started shouting about the Tenth Amendment, claiming the Real ID Act is unconstitutional, a federal overreach that turns state DMVs into immigration enforcers. He wasn’t wrong. But nobody in Fecal Creek gives a rat’s ass about legal theory when they’re facing down a deadline that could ground them for good.

The first bottle flew at 11:15, a Molotov cocktail of cheap vodka and rage, shattering against the DMV’s front window. The crowd roared, a guttural, animal sound, and then all hell broke loose. A woman with a face like a leather satchel started swinging a tire iron at a “Real ID Now!” sign, screaming about how the DMV lost her paperwork—twice. A pack of tattooed bikers, their Harleys parked crookedly on the sidewalk, began hurling rocks at the riot cops who’d just rolled up in armored vans. The cops fired back with rubber bullets and tear gas, but the crowd didn’t budge. They were too far gone, too fed up with the DMV’s incompetence, with years of long lines and broken promises.

I saw a kid—no more than 16—clutching a skateboard and a crumpled passport, get clocked in the face by a baton. He certainly had it coming, and went down hard, blood streaming from his nose, but he was back on his feet in seconds, screaming, “I just want to fly to my grandma’s funeral in Reno, you fascist pigs!” The kid quickly disappeared into the melee, a crimson streak in a sea of chaos.

By noon, the Fecal Creek DMV was a full-on insurrection. A group of soccer moms—those minivan warriors of suburbia—had flipped a news van, its antenna snapping like a twig as they chanted, “No ID, no peace!” The bikers were now looting the DMV’s pathetic little kiosk, grabbing fistfuls of learner’s permit applications and lighting them on fire, a pyre of bureaucratic bullshit blazing in the parking lot. Somewhere in the haze, a guy in a tattered flannel was waving a “Don’t Tread on Me” flag, screaming about the deep state while a tear gas canister bounced off his skull. He didn’t even flinch—just kept yelling, a mad prophet in a world gone feral.

I ducked behind a dumpster, my notebook soaked with sweat and rotten grappa, trying to make sense of the madness. The Real ID Act, that 2005 brainchild of Homeland Security paranoia, was supposed to make us safer, but all it’s done is turn a backwater DMV into a crucible of rage. The feds say it’s about keeping terrorists off planes, but in Fecal Creek, the only terror is the DMV itself—understaffed, overwhelmed, a labyrinth of incompetence that’s been screwing people over since the Carter administration. The Sacramento Bee reported last week that California DMVs are processing Real IDs at a snail’s pace, with wait times stretching into months. But the deadline doesn’t care about your backlog, and neither does the TSA.

At 12:45, the National Guard rolled in, their Humvees growling like beasts from some dystopian fever dream. They started zip-tying anyone who didn’t scatter, dragging them off to paddy wagons while the crowd hurled insults and the occasional brick. I saw the Kamala guy get tackled, his arms pinned as he shouted, “This is tyranny! You can’t take my freedom!” But they did—freedom’s a hard sell when you’re face-down on asphalt with a knee in your back.

As the tear gas thickened, I bolted, my heart pounding like a jackhammer, my lungs screaming for air that wasn’t laced with chemical warfare. I made it to my car and peeled out of the DMV parking lot with the sounds of sirens and shattering glass fading in the rearview. The Real ID mandate had turned a sleepy DMV into a battlefield, a microcosm of America’s fractured soul—angry, alienated, and ready to burn it all down over a piece of plastic.

Personally, I had two hopes keeping me afloat in this chaos: 1) I’ve been getting hyperventilating pressure from friends and acquaintances for literally decades six-months before whichever of the 47 different deadlines that have been in place at various times since 2005 when the Real ID was first mandated.  Each time I’ve ignored everybody.  And each time the deadline was nixed at the last minute. I’ve got to say, three days before the present deadline, it looks like this time it’s going to be forced through.  2) I had hoped that whichever government branch was ultimately in charge of this nonsense was going to be DOGE’d out of existence before the deadline arrived, but there too, it’s doubtful that’s going to happen in the next 48 hours.  It occurs to me that I’ve neither been on a commercial flight nor darkened the door of any airport in about 15 years.  So my plan is to stay put, stay drunk, keep writing the book, and let the jet-setting class figure it out for themselves.

Meanwhile, in D.P.S. news, on May 4, 1953, Ernest Hemingway, that grizzled colossus of American letters, seized the Pulitzer Prize for his lean, lacerating masterpiece The Old Man and the Sea. It was a moment of apotheotic vindication—a jagged, salt-crusted testament to his genius, forged in the crucible of his own relentless psyche. Hemingway himself called it his finest work, and who are we to argue with the man who wrestled prose into submission with the ferocity of a spider monkey in a bear trap? Written in a mere eight weeks, the novel is a stark, elemental dirge—a paean to man’s inexorable struggle against the indifferent maw of nature. Its literary merit is beyond cemented; it’s ossified, a fossil of resilience and defiance, capturing the human spirit’s refusal to buckle under the weight of cosmic odds. Hemingway carved a myth into the bedrock of modernity, a narrative so raw it bleeds.

But let’s not linger in the sanitized glow of literary accolades. Hemingway’s life was no genteel stroll through the groves of academe; it was a odyssey, a careening, death-defying sprint through the jagged teeth of fate. Just months after that Pulitzer win, in 1954, Hemingway found himself in the Belgian Congo, chasing the kind of primal, adrenaline-soaked experience that fueled his art. What happened next reads like a fever dream, but it’s all too real—a double-barreled assault on mortality that would’ve broken lesser men.

Dig: Hemingway, the bearded bard of badassery, boards a small bush plane, the kind of rickety deathtrap that looks like it’s held together with spit and prayers. The plane takes off, and then—bam!—it slams into the jungle like a meteor, a fiery wreck that should’ve been his curtain call. But this is Hemingway we’re talking about, a man who laughed in the face of oblivion. He staggers out of the wreckage, bloodied, battered, his body a map of contusions, and wanders through the jungle, a modern-day Lazarus too stubborn to die. He emerges, somehow, from that green inferno, a specter of survival, only to—get this—climb aboard another plane. You’d think the gods would’ve had their fill of tormenting him, but no. That second plane crashes too, a catastrophic encore that leaves Hemingway with a fractured skull, a ruptured spleen, and burns that sear his legend deeper into the annals of literary lore.

This was a middle finger flown to the universe, a snarling, visceral refusal to be snuffed out. Hemingway’s life was a high-octane, no-holds-barred brawl with destiny, and The Old Man and the Sea—with its stark, stoic Santiago battling the merciless deep—feels like a prophecy of his own unyielding grit. The Pulitzer was a coronation for a man who lived as ferociously as he wrote, whose every sentence was a detonation, whose every breath was a dare. Hemingway lived literature, bled it, and damn near died for it, emerging from the wreckage to remind us all what it means to be defiantly, gloriously human.

N.P.: “White Rabbit” – Emilíana Torrini