Tuesday morning, during my usual morning ablutions, I composed a haiku:

I am resenting
The demands of Mgmt
Task-master sadists

Certainly not great verse, but it hit the mark.  To wit:
These limey gits put me on a clearly impossible schedule eight weeks ago.  I agree to it because, badass that I am, I typically view people trying to do the impossible with a great deal of respect, and usually reframe the “impossible” as “audacious.”  Fine.

Then, they suddenly, without valid reason, shaved a month off that same schedule, changing its status from audacious to ludicrous.  On top of that, they then demanded I dramatically increase my social media presence.  Since my social media presence was basically zero, I didn’t think this would be particularly challenging.  And it in and of itself isn’t particularly challenging, but keeping up with the various messages that come with any social media presence is a time-consuming pain in the ass.

I had decided I’d had enough, so after the ablutions mentioned supra, I arranged for a meeting with Mgmt.  The meeting was fairly hilarious (I’d love to post a transcript here, but was reminded of the ruthlessly confiscatory N.D.A. I had signed) and pleasantly productive.  Sure, there were a few expletives and some potentially rude and/or threatening remarks, but in the end, we agreed to return to status quo ante: tossing the ludicrous schedule in favor of returning to the audacious one.  On my end, I agreed to post at least one current photo of me by the end of the summer.  You likely don’t understand what a big deal this is to me.  I hate having my picture taken.  I was that way even before I went underground.  Pretty much every picture taken of me in the last several decades ends up just being a close-up of my palm as I aggressively block the picture.  But, I suppose a picture or two isn’t a totally outrageous request in this weird world of ours, so fuck it: I agreed.  So I need to get back to the book, but first [puts on English Instructor outfit), This Day In Badass Literary History.

Today, May 9th, we’re forced to acknowledge a literary genesis that ought to be sacred – J.M. Barrie’s arrival into this wretched, time-obsessed world in 1860, a Scottish scribbler who’d eventually birth Peter Pan, that jagged, unruly testament to freedom’s cost, a story which, in its original 1904 play and 1911 novel forms, stands as a snarling repudiation of adulthood’s suffocating grip, only to be gutted, neutered, and bedazzled by the saccharine, capitalistic meat-grinder of Disney® – a cultural crime so grotesque it demands we pause, seethe, and reconsider what we’ve let happen to art in the name of “family-friendly” pablum.

Barrie, born in the bleak nowhere of Kirriemuir, wasn’t some twee sentimentalist doodling fairy tales for the nursery set – he was a man carved up by grief’s dull blade, his brother’s early death a specter that haunted his family and left him, forever, the boy trying to fill an unfillable void, a void that metastasized into Peter Pan’s feral howl against the adult world’s obsession with control, its ticking clocks, its soul-deadening norms.  Peter, you’ll recall, isn’t a mere child playing dress-up in Neverland; he’s a goddamn revolutionary, a pint-sized anarchist who says fuck you to growing up, who gathers his ragtag Lost Boys – those castoffs of a society that’d rather see them broken than free – and wages war on pirates, on Hook, that sneering embodiment of “The System” with his crocodile-shadowed dread of time’s passage.  There’s a raw, almost Nietzschean will-to-power in Peter’s refusal to conform, a rejection of the social contract that’s less “whimsical” than it is a throat-slitting act of defiance, and Barrie, with his own quiet wounds, pours every ounce of his disillusionment into this kid who’d rather die than let the world domesticate him.

But then, goddammit – enter Disney®, that glittering behemoth of sanitized mediocrity, which in 1953 took Barrie’s jagged blade of a story and sanded it down into a toothless, pastel-colored singalong, a cultural lobotomy so thorough it’s a wonder we can still find the original text beneath the wreckage.  Where Barrie gave us a Peter who’s as much tragic antihero as he is liberator – a boy who pays for his freedom with a chilling inability to love, to remember, to connect, leaving Wendy and the Darlings as mere ghosts in his eternal childhood – Disney® gives us a smirking, green-tights-wearing imp, all wide-eyed innocence and catchy tunes, as if Neverland were just a theme park ride and not a lawless refuge for the broken.  The Mouse House, in its infinite, profit driven cowardice, couldn’t stomach the story’s darker currents: the haunting loneliness of Peter’s rebellion, the way his refusal to grow up makes him both free and damned, the way Barrie dares to ask what it costs to spit in the face of time and society and everything that demands we bend.  Disney® scrubs all that away, leaving us with a Peter who’s little more than a mascot, a sanitized avatar of “youthful spirit” that erases the blood and grit and existential dread Barrie wove into the tale’s very marrow.

And don’t even get me started on Hook, dear reader – Barrie’s Hook, that is, a figure of Shakespearean chaos, reduced by Disney® to a bumbling cartoon villain, all mustache-twirling and pratfalls, as if the whole point of his character weren’t the way he embodies the adult world’s desperate need to control what it can’t understand.  Disney’s® version is a betrayal, a cultural felony, a reduction of Barrie’s work to the intellectual equivalent of a Happy Meal™ toy – shiny, cheap, and utterly devoid of the original’s searing, subversive soul.

So here we are, on this May 9th, marking Barrie’s birth with a bitter nod to what he created and what’s been done to it.  Peter Pan, in its undiluted form, is a homemade grenade of a story, a reminder that freedom isn’t free, that rebellion cuts deep, that the world’s rules are made to be broken but not without consequence.  Barrie knew this; he lived it.  Disney®, in its contemptible, focus-grouped cowardice, did not.  And we’re poorer for it – left with a shadow of a tale that once dared to show us the cost of staying young forever, now just another cog in the machine of mass-marketed nostalgia.  If you want the real Peter Pan, the one who’d sneer at Disney’s® glittering lies, go back to Barrie’s text.  Read it.  Feel its teeth.  And then ask yourself what else we’ve let the House of Mouse™ ruin in the name of “magic.”

N.P.: “When You Fall” – Gary Numan

Today we hurl ourselves headlong into the glorious, guacamole-smeared chaos of Cinco de Mayo!  As I’m sure I don’t have to tell you, this isn’t another Hallmark holiday for sipping appletinis and nibbling kale.  No!  Or as they say en español: ¡No!  This is a full-throttle, tequila-fueled riot – a day to celebrate a batshit underdog victory with enough swagger to make El Diablo jealous.  So ditch your inhibitions, grab a bottle of something that burns, and let’s dip our beaks into the history, the lunacy, and the downright profane ways to make this fifth of May a legend for the ages.

First off, Cinco de Mayo is not Mexican Independence Day, you philistines.  That’s September 16, when Mexico told Spain to suck it in 1810.  Cinco de Mayo commemorates the Battle of Puebla, an 1862 ass-kicking where a ragtag Mexican army, let by the gloriously named General Ignacio Zaragoza, curb-stomped Napoleon III’s fancy-pants French army.  We’re talking 4,000 scrappy campesinos with rusty machetes and bad attitudes against 6,000 of Europe’s finest, all decked out in their prissy uniforms.  The French had better guns, better horses, and an emperor who likely bathed in cologne.  The Mexicans had guts, grit, and a serious case of “fuck it.”  It’s the ultimate David-and-Goliath tale, except David’s got a machete and a bottle of mezcal.  Spoiler: Mexico won.  It’s like if a bar fight ended with the drunk guy in flip-flops knocking out a Navy SEAL.  In Mexico, it’s mostly a Puebla thing, like a hometown parade for kicking ass.  In the U.S., it’s a Chicano pride bash, a corporate cash gran, and an excuse to get so catastrophically plastered you wake up with a sombrero glued to your face.  And that, dear reader, is the kind of cultural dumpster fire we can all salute.

The Battle of Puebla was a fluke, a one-off in a war Mexico ultimately lost.  Picture 1862: Mexico’s broke, the U.S. is busy slaughtering itself in the Civil War, and France, led by Napoleon III (a twerp with a mustache that screamed “I collect rare cheeses”), decides to turn Mexico into its personal piñata to fund his Eurotrash empire.  Mexico, barely holding it together, said, “Nah, bro.”  Enter Zaragoza, a Texas-born badass who looked at the French army and thought, “I’ve seen worse odds at a cockfight.”  On May 5, 1862, his men – farmers, vaqueros, and guys who probably smelled like goats – fortified Puebla and turned the French advance into a blood-soaked fiasco.  It wasn’t a war-ender (France took over later), but it was a middle finger to colonialism that still gets us buzzed.  By the ’60s, Chicano activists grabbed Cinco de Mayo as a “screw the man” symbol, celebrating resistance and identity.  Then Budweiser and Taco Bell smelled money, and now it’s a full-blown American bacchanal where even your accountant’s doing body shots off a mariachi.  It’s less about history and more about defiance, excess, and the sheer joy of being alive in a world that keeps trying to screw you over.  And I’m here for it.

Here’s where we get to the meat, the marrow, the tequila-soaked soul of the thing.  Celebrating Cinco de Mayo isn’t about sipping daintily from a Corona; it demands you go full feral, embracing the kind of excess that’d make Caligula blush.  It’s about diving into the abyss and coming up grinning, with cactus spines in your hair and a story that no one will believe.  Here’s how to do it right – or so wrong its right:

1. Drink Like You’re Burning Down an Empire
   Tequila is non-negotiable.  Not that watered-down piss you find in a dive bar.  Get the real shit – 100% agave, the kind that tastes like cactus and poor life choices.  Some argue that Mezcal’s even better; it’s tequila’s feral cousin, smoky and unapologetic.  Shoot it, sip it, or pour it into a hollowed-out pineapple for maximum chaos.  Margaritas?  Fine, but make ’em strong enough to strip paint.  Garnish with a jalapeño, a lit sparkler, or a live scorpion if you’re already unhinged.
2. Eat Like a Revolutionary
   Tacos are the obvious play, but don’t settle for some limp fast-food travesty.  Find a taqueria where the cook’s cussing in two languages and the salsa makes you see God.  Go for barbacoa, suadero, lengua if you’re feeling brave, or tripe if you’ve got the stones.  Enchiladas with enough chili to melt your face, tamales that taste like your abuelita’s love – eat until you’re a human piñata, until you’re weeping from joy or capsaicin.  For the blasphemous, order a burger and slather it in queso and hot sauce, calling it “postmodern Mexican.”  Watch the room riot.  That’s your cue to run, gringo.
3. Dance Like Your Dodging Bullets
   Blast mariachi, cumbia, or straight-up narcocorridos (those ballads about drug lords – pure outlaw poetry).  Dance badly, with abandon…spins, twirls, and at least one ill-advised backflip.  No rhythm?  Thrash like you’re being electrocuted.  For maximum chaos, stage a Battle of Puebla interpretive dance reenactment with squirt guns and leftover burritos.  Apologize to no one.
4. Read Something That Punches Back
   What sort of badass literary presence would we be if we didn’t recommend you continue your celebration by cracking open something with teeth?  Try The Underdogs by Mariano Azuela, a kidney-punch of a novel about the Mexican Revolution.  House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende brings the magical realist heat.  Want poetry?  Dig into Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the 17th-century nun who roasted the patriarchy with quill and kink.  Read it loud, preferably while standing on a table and waving a bottle of mezcal, until the neighbors complain and the cops show up.
5. Get Political (or at Least Pretend To)
   Cinco de Mayo’s roots are in resistance, so channel that.  Rant about whatever’s pissing you off – colonialism, cultural appropriation, or the price of avocados.  Post a typo-riddled screed on X about how the holiday’s been co-opted by corporate greed, then immediately contradict yourself by buying a six-pack of Modelo.  The hypocrisy’s part of the charm.  If you’re feeling extra, stage a mock protest outside a chain restaurant serving “Mexican-inspired” nachos.  Bring signs.  Bring flair.  Or crash a suburban block party with a megaphone and demand “reparations in tacos.”  Bonus points if you’re white.  You’ll be a legend or a felon.  Worth it.
6. Smash Shit (Figuratively or, Uh, Maybe Literally)
   Obliterate a piñata filled with candy, hot sauce packets, and those mini tequila bottles from gas stations.  Or shatter your own pretensions – write a poem so raw it scares you, scream it into the night, then burn the evidence.  Kiss someone you shouldn’t.  Steal a lawn gnome and name it Zaragoza.  The goal is to feel alive, not sane.

If you’re my kind of overachiever, and you want to really take it too far, here’s how to make Cinco de Mayo a legend whispered in horrified tones:

• Karaoke “La Bamba” in a Viking Helmet.  Because it’s wrong, and wrong is beautiful.
• Challenge a Bartender to a Tequila Duel: Loser pukes first.  Winner’s still screwed.
• Wear a Poncho Made of Chipotle Bags: It’s eco-friendly and unhinged.
• Declare Yourself “Supreme Comandante of the Fiesta”: Demand loyalty oaths in Spanish.  Get chased out by 9 p.m.

Cinco de Mayo is a war cry for the underdog, a reminder that a bunch of nobodies can humiliate a king.  It’s about laughing in the face of empires, borders, and hangovers.  It’s Chicano pride, Mexican defiance, and the universal thrill of telling the universe, “You ain’t shit.”  So this May 5, raise a shot to Puebla, to Zaragoza, to every lunatic who ever swung at the impossible.  Then chug it, dance like an idiot, and write something so wild it makes the moon flinch.

Now go make some epically stupid choices.  I’ll be over here, ensconced in the Safe House, cackling into my tequila and toasting your inevitable arrest.  ¡Viva Cinco de Mayo!

N.P.: “Danza Kuduro” – Don Omar, Lucenzo

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

Too many people in this gutless world have come under the impression that writers are a race of finks, queers, and candy asses to be bilked, cheated, and mocked as a form of commercial sport.  It should be noted, therefore, in the public interest, that some writers possess .44 Magnums and can puncture beer cans with 240-grain slugs from that weapon at a distance of 150 yards.  Other writers, it is said, tend to enjoy violence for its own sake, and feel that a good fight, with the inevitable destruction of all nearby equipment and furniture, is nearly as fine for the nerves as a quart of John Powers Irish Whiskey.  ~ HST

I promised myself that I’d quit bitching about the weather, dear reader…after all, you and I both know neither my bitching nor anyone else’s will have the slightest effect on the local meteorology.  And yet I find myself on the cusp of yet another vicious, nauseating, soul-killing, literally hotter-than-hell summer, after an inappropriately warm and dry winter, and thus, I find myself feeling the need to bitch once again, resolutions and self-promises be damned.  It could very well be the whiskey talking, but I presently feel that a solid round of bitching is more than called for at this point.  You see, dear reader, most of the rest of the country gets four clearly delineated seasons. Their years are divided quite nicely between four (4) three (3)-month periods, each significantly different than the last or the one to come.  So, for the rest of the American world, summer is hot and humid and sometimes intolerably so, but those good people are only forced to endure such inhospitable conditions for 90 days.  Then on the 91st day, like clockwork: the cooling relief of fall.  The heat and excruciating humidity alleviates, the leaves all turn gold and orange, the trees begin their slow and sexy three-month striptease, the birds start looking for warmer climes to the south, and the gentry brace for what is to come: winter.  For three months, the entire rest of the county freezes their balls and has contend with all manner of arctic horrors: ice storms, blizzards, thundersnow…the whole bone-chilling nightmare.  I personally seem to thrive in that sort of environment, but I get why most people don’t.  But just when it gets to be Too Much and people have Had Enough of the frigid misery, bam!  Spring springs and the flowers come out and it’s suddenly mating season for the mammals.  Then, exactly 90 days after that vernal Bacchanalia begins, the solar-blasted summer begins, and the whole damn cycle starts over.  The point is for the rest of the world, right as your reaching your breaking point for whatever season you’re three months into, it’s over.  And you are thus thrilled with the arrival of the new season.  You’ve had a chance to miss it, with the heart growing fonder with absence and all that.

Not so in Allergy Valley, CA, dear reader.  Oh no.  Here, it is constantly summer…it only slowly waxes and wanes.  While the rest of the continent is freezing their balls, we’re over here basking in clear, 55°F days.  It gets below freezing for a few hours during two, maybe three nights out of the year, and even then just barely.  That’s about as bad as it gets.  Ever.  Springtime is just more dryness and highs in the 60s-70s.  Pollen explodes.  Then June shows up and everything goes to hell.  High soar into the 110s and everybody gets pissed off.  Aircraft aren’t able to land here because their tires melt the instant they come into contact with the landing strip.  Birds explode in midair.  The whole thing is disgusting.  The number of elderly who fall asleep while lying in the morning sun reading a book or whatever and then just bake to death skyrockets.

Today was pretty inarguably great…a few clouds, a light breeze, high in the mid-70s.  It was a fucking lovely day.  But that’s going to be the last one for a while.  All too soon there will be no more clouds, no more breezes, no more temperatures under 90°.  Just melting tires and exploding birds.

Summer is Coming.  And I’d really rather it not.

N.P.: “What’s Coming To Me” – Dorothy

Greetings, dear reader, you beautiful, chaotic individualist, you renegade of the soul, you glorious misfit who’d rather chew glass than salute a hammer and sickle – May Day is upon us, and it’s time to rip the mask off this festering boil of a holiday.  May 1st, that annual orgy of red flags and clenched fists, has become a psychic assault, a collectivist con job dressed up as liberation, and I’m here to torch it.

Let’s start with the raw, unfiltered gestalt of May Day.  It’s a holiday born in the blood-slicked gutters of 19th-century labor struggles, sure, but don’t let the sob stories fool you.  The Haymarket riots, the eight-hour workday fight – noble in isolation, maybe, but hijacked faster than a narc’s stash at a Hell’s Angels rally.  By the time the Second International got its claws in, May Day was less about workers’ rights and more about the slow, suffocating creep of Marxist dogma, that intellectual tapeworm that promises utopia then delivers gulags.  It’s a bait-and-switch so blatant it’s make a used-car salesman blush.  The proletariat’s big day?  Please.  It’s an altar to the State, where individuality gets fed into the woodchipper of “the common good.”  And if you’re not outraged by that, you’re either comatose or waving a red flag yourself.

Now, let’s get semiotic for a second, because symbols matter, and May Day’s got a visual vocabulary that screams oppression louder that a CCP propaganda reel.  The red banners, the raised fists, the earnest chants of “solidarity” – it’s a pageant of conformity, a chromatic middle finger to anyone who dares think for themselves.  Red, that arterial hue, is a warning…the shade of blood spilled by every regime that ever promised equality and delivered body counts.  Mao’s Cultural Revolution?  Stalin’s purges?  Pol  Pot’s killing fields?  Add ’em up, and you’ve got a century-long abattoir, all sanctified under the same crimson banner that flaps on May Day.  And don’t give me that “but socialism’s different” dodge – same church, different pew.  The math doesn’t lie: collectivism’s body count dwarf’s anything the capitalists ever dreamed about, and May Day’s the anniversary party.

But oh shit, the irony, the skull-cracking, Kafkaesque absurdity of it all!  May Day’s supposed to celebrate the worker, right?  The noble laborer, toiling for dignity?  Except under every communist regime, the worker’s the first to get screwed.  Look at the Soviet Union, where “equality” meant bread lines for the masses and dachas for the apparatchiks.  Or China, where the proletariat’s “liberation” looks like sweatshops and censorship so tight you can’t sneeze without a permit.  The worker’s not the hero of May Day; they’re the sacrificial lamb, duped into worshipping the very ideology that chains them.  It’s like throwing a parade for the cow on its way to the slaughterhouse.  And yet, every May 1st, you’ve got earnest undergrads and tenured radicals marching in lockstep, waving manifestos they haven’t read, chanting slogans they don’t understand, all while congratulating themselves for “resisting.”  Resisting what?  Freedom?  Prosperity ?  The right to not have your soul nationalized?

I want to grab their own megaphone and scream: Wake the hell up!  May Day isn’t liberation; it’s a leash.  It’s the siren song of a system that hates everything that makes you human – your quirks, your ambitions, your right to tell the State to fuck itself.  Communism doesn’t just fail economically (though, sweet Jesus, does it ever – cf. Venezuela’s dumpster-fire GDP or Cuba’s time-capsule cars).  It fails morally.  It’s a philosophy that sees you as a cog, a statistic, a faceless drone in the hive.  And May Day?  It’s the day they try to sell you on that prison, wrapping it in the language of justice like a turd dipped in glitter.

So what do we do, you ask, you magnificent bastard who’d rather die than trade your freedom for a ration card?  We reclaim May 1st.  We turn it into grenade to every collectivist fantasy that ever tried to smother the human spirit.  Here’s my proposal: call it Individual Day.  Wake up, crank some Billy Idol (because “Rebel Yell” is the opposite of a five-year plan), and do something gloriously, defiantly you.  Paint a mural.  Start a business.  Tell a bureaucrat to eat shit.  Hell, just sit on your porch with a whiskey and revel in the fact that you’re not saluting a politburo.  And if you see a May Day parade, don’t just ignore it – mock it in whichever way you deem best.  Because the only “collective” worth a damn is the one you choose, not the one that drafts you.

In closing, let’s be clear:  May Day’s a scam, a red-washed relic of a failed experiment that keeps limping along because people love the aesthetics of rebellion without the brainpower to question it.  It’s not about workers; it’s about control.  It’s not about justice; it’s about erasure.  So this May 1st, spit on the red flags, laugh at the manifestos, and live like the untamed, unapologetic individual you were born to be.  Because in the end, the only revolution worth fight for is the one that keeps you free.

Postscriptum: If you’re still clutching your copy of Das Kapital and muttering about “late-stage capitalism,” I invite you to spend a week in North Korea.  Then we’ll talk.  Until then, keep your dogma out of my liberty.

N.P.: “Dancing in the Street” – The Struts

Oh, dear reader…your boy has stepped in it now.  In fecus profundis, if you will.  Dig: me, a guy who cackles at Saw traps, quasi-admires Art the Clown for his creativity, and reads American Psycho over breakfast tacos and finds it funnier each time I read it, thinking I’m untouchable.  Then, today, I lose a lunchtime bet (don’t ask…it involved rather a lot of tequila and a dog-eared copy of Naked Lunch) and now my punishment is a single-sitting marathon of all three Human Centipede movies.  Yeah, those movies.  I think I’ve finally recovered from seeing the first one back in ’09, when Tom Six’s ass-to-mouth nightmare left me, Mr. “Nothing Fazes Me,” genuinely rattled.  That creepy-ass doctor, those silent screams, that feeding scene?  It was like Kafka and Cronenberg had a perversely deformed love child.  The content of the movie was bad enough, but I remember being more disturbed by the mind could conceive of this atrocity.  Now I’m staring down three of these cinematic war crimes, and I’m sweating like a vampire in a tanning booth.  I’ve gotta make a plan – maybe this weekend, maybe with bucket of whiskey and a priest on speed dial.  Send thoughts, prayers, or a time machine so I can un-lose this bet.

In other news, there were an annoying amount of uncalled-for setbacks today.  These days I usually get bad news of things like setbacks and just smirk and say, “Good,” because ultimately the outcome will be good, even though that outcome may take years to happen.  Such is life.  But then, out of the blue, Mgmt calls and cuts a month off our previous established deadline.  In fact, they want this proposal as soon as possible.  I thought I had months, now I have weeks.  Today was not my favorite Monday ever.

N.P.: “Are Friends Electric? (Grey Mix) – Gary Numan

Today, dear reader, let us celebrate the anniversary of the publication of Kafka’s The Trial.  Let’s set the stage: it’s 1924, Berlin’s a cauldron of post-war malaise, and Franz Kafka’s The Trial hits the world, published posthumously thanks to his friend Max Brod, who – bless his defiant heart – ignored Kafka’s dying wish to torch his manuscripts.  If my best friend did that, I might be inclined to haunt his ass ruthlessly for the rest of miserable life.  Be that as it may, I’m quite glad old Max did what he did…this book is amazing.  Josef K., a regular bank clerk, wakes up one morning to find himself arrested for a crime he doesn’t know, by authorities he can’t comprehend, in a world that refuses to explain itself.  Kafka constructs a suffocating machine of bureaucratic dread and existential terror, slicing through the veneer of order with surgical precision.  This sort of raw, unfiltered work became a cornerstone of modernist literature, its influence being seen over everyone from Orwell’s 1984 to Camus’ The Stranger.

Kafka is able to turn the mundane into the macabre, to take the everyday – courtrooms, paperwork, faceless officials – and render it as a Kafkaesque (yes, he birthed the term) descent into absurdity.  Josef K. isn’t battling dragons or gods; he’s battling a system so opaque, so indifferent, that it might as well be a deity of apathy.  Kafka strips away any comforting illusions of justice or reason.  K.’s arrest isn’t dramatic – it’s banal, a couple of low-level bureaucrats eating his breakfast while they detain him.  From there, the story spirals into a fever dream of endless corridors, stifling attics, and cryptic conversations with characters who seem to know more than they’ll ever say.  Kafka’s prose forces you to feel K.’s mounting paranoia as he’s ground down by a machine he can’t fight because he can’t even see it.  It’s the psychological vivisection of the terror of being alive in a world that doesn’t care if you understand it.

That’s all I have time for today, dear reader…the book is calling, and so, regrettably, is Mgmt wanting a progress report and to see today’s work.

N.P.: “X the Eyes” – Mr. Strange

Happy Friday, dear reader.  There was a weird amount of helicopter traffic in the skies over Fecal Creek this morning…first a Blackhawk, followed by a Little Bird, followed shortly thereafter by a big-ass Chinook, all heading southwest.  I saw these while I was waiting with saint-like patience in the drive-thru line of Dunkin for my Triple Mocha Frozen Coffee which, I crushingly found out later, was somehow ill-prepared.  Not enough chocolate.  It tasted more like a Single-and-a-Half Mocha Frozen Coffee.  I still drank it…shit yes, dear reader…I drank the hell out of it.  But it didn’t provide me with the usual joy.  My blood sugar level was only raised to maybe semi-dangerous levels, rather than the usual and expected “my heart feels like a great white shark that is about to explode” levels that I have grown to know and love.  Alas.  The world continues to turn.  And so much for that.  Now down to business.

On this day in 1719, Daniel Defoe dropped Robinson Crusoe, a novel that’s pure survivalist grit.  Dig: a man, shipwrecked on a desolate island, staring down the abyss of nature’s indifference, cannibals circling like vultures, and his own teetering sanity threatening to jump ship.  Crusoe not only endures his 28-year exile; he wrestles it into submission, building shelters, taming goats, and even converting a local he dubs Friday to Christianity.  This is not some twee castaway tale like Alexander Selkirk’s, the real-life marooned sailor who inspired Defoe.  No.  Defoe cranks the stakes all the way to 11, weaving a narrative so raw and immediate that 18th-century readers swore it was nonfiction, cementing him as a progenitor of the novel form.  What makes Crusoe such a badass isn’t just that he survives – it’s him telling despair to fuck right off as he carves out a life from nothingness.

Defoe’s genius lies in his ability to make the mundane feel mythic.  Crusoe’s daily grind – salvaging shipwreck scraps, planting crops, crafting tools – becomes a Homeric odyssey of self-reliance.  But beneath the surface, there’s a simmering tension: the psychological toll of isolation and the existential dread of a man who’s both god and prisoner of his own domain, a feeling that I’ve been uncomfortably familiar with in the past.  Defoe doesn’t flinch from the ugly bits, and that’s what makes Robinson Crusoe a timeless beast – it’s not just about surviving the wilderness; it’s about surviving yourself.  The book’s realism was so potent it birthed a genre, but its real legacy is in showing us that heroism isn’t capes and swords; it’s the quiet, ferocious will to keep going when the world’s gone to hell.  Damn right.

Now let’s pivot, and fast-forward exactly 306 years to this very day, dear reader, and the cause of much celebration and head-banging around the Safe House today: Ghost’s new album Skeleta, which dropped today and has my aorta all atingle after a single listen.  The Swedish group, helmed by the preternaturally talented Tobias Forge, has delivered a record that’s both a banger and a revelation – no filler to be found here, but also no interstitial musical interludes (a departure from their previous album’s penchant for atmospheric detours), just 10 songs of pretty much unadulterated brilliance.  My standout after one spin is Cenotaph.  It’s just a brilliant pop song.

One of the things that fascinates me about Ghost – and Skeleta in particular – is how their image has a death metal band, complete with corpse paint and Satanic theatrics, probably scares off listeners who’d otherwise be dare I say enraptured by their sound.  Whatever references to headbanging I made supra…forget it. There’s no actual headbanging going on here (though I will confess to brief air-guitar this afternoon when Majesty came on). Forge isn’t channeling the guttural nihilism of death metal: he’s closer to Andrew Lloyd Webber, crafting operatic, melody-drenched compositions that wouldn’t feel out of place in a West End musical.  Fans of Phantom of the Opera or Jesus Christ Superstar would likely lose their minds over Ghost’s entire catalog, from Opus Eponymous to this latest gem.  On the one hand, it’s a damn shame the metal label might alienate the theater-kid demographic that’d eat this up with a spoon.  On the other hand, fuck ’em…the timid and weak don’t deserve good music.  They deserve Taylor Swift.  Uncultured heathens.

The writing continues apace, or at least as apace as can be realistically expected.  Of course, what reality expects and what Mgmt expects are completely different things.  That “difficult” chapter I mentioned the other day?  I’m not going to be able to write that straight through…I’m going to have to work on other chapters and then come back to this as ideas occur or I’m more “ready.”  So I’m shifting the schedule around to a much more non-linear arrangement, which gives Mgmt the Angst.  For which I deeply apologize but feel compelled to say also tough titty.  This whole process is like giving birth: I don’t have a whole lot of control over how long things take or when certain things happen.  Thou Shalt Deal With It.
#UnculturedHeathens

N.P.: “Bible” – Ghost