Forgive my absence here yesterday, dear reader, but it was simply too goddamn hot to write.  It was 107°F in The Creek yesterday, which is really too hot to do much of anything that requires any sort of mental clarity.  But never mind all that.  Today is a new day, and what a day it is.

July 12th should be a national holiday for anyone tired of sucking on the exhaust pipe of a world powered by conformity and crushing mediocrity.  This is the birthday of Henry David Thoreau – poet, philosopher, professional recluse, and mad prophet of the woods.  Born in 1817 in Concord, Massachusetts, Thoreau did more than carve his name onto the bark of American letters.  He set the whole goddamn tree on fire.

This is the man who walked away from the mechanical insanity of the 19th century to shack up in the woods near a pond, chopping his own firewood and minding his own business, only to emerge with Walden, a book so sharp and provocative it’s still noosed around the neck of English majors over a century later.  It’s not a polite book.  It doesn’t coddle you or ask for permission to be heard.  No, Walden is a defiant roar against the drivel of materialism, a full-frontal challenge to the hamster wheel of ambition and blind conformity.  Thoreau grabs us by the collar and demands we live simply and insists that we shed all the junk cluttering our lives and figure out what the hell it even means to live.

And if that wasn’t enough to piss off polite society, he doubled down with Civil Disobedience.  Written after Thoreau himself spent a night in jail for refusing to pay taxes to a government he deemed morally bankrupt (yes, the night in jail is an essential flex), this essay is nothing less than a flamethrower aimed at unjust authority.  Governments, he argued, exist to serve justice – not to prop up the petty tyrannies of the many or the corrupt whims of the few.  And when they fail?  Dissent isn’t just a right, it’s an obligation.

This is where Thoreau’s buckshot really hit the mark.  The ripples of his defiance carried far.

Gandhi mined Civil Disobedience to mount a nonviolent rebellion and kick the British Empire out of India, an achievement that still reverberates in history books and imperial nightmares.  Martin Luther King Jr. marched into the Civil Rights Movement with Thoreau’s words tucked into his back pocket, turning quiet disobedience into a wrecking ball against systemic oppression.  Think about that for a second – one guy, dollar-store journal in hand, wielding an influence so massive it could topple empires and rewrite history.

Thoreau didn’t write for fame – honestly, he would’ve rather burned most of us with a caustic one-liner than shake hands and schmooze at some literary soirée.  He wrote because the words were searing in his guy and demanded to be spit out, pure and undiluted.  His legacy?  It’s a challenge, flashing like a neon sign for misfits, the world-shakers, the ones who grind their teeth at the idea of “business as usual.”

Sure, the man got misunderstood.  Some called him misanthropic, others accused him of hypocrisy.  But Thoreau never pretended to be a saint.  He was furious, flawed, and human.  He philosophized about freedom, sure, but he also lived it, inhaled it, and scribbled it into permanence.

So today, on his birthday, throw up a toast to Thoreau.  Better yet, unplug for a couple minutes.  Forget the relentless scrolling, the email pings, the fluorescent-lit conveyor belt of modern living.  Step outside, breathe, touch grass, think, be.  Raise your middle finger to all the bullshit masquerading as progress.  That’s your present to man who lived deliberately, resisted relentlessly, and died unapologetically.

Happy Birthday, Uncle Hank…the rebel spirit lives on.

N.P.: “Smoke On The Water” – Calling All Astronauts

This Wednesday is for the more dark and twisted dear readers, for today is July 9, a date that seems to have been plucked from the blackened pages of some cosmic ledger, a day when the literary gods decided to birth their most deliciously deranged and shadow-dwelling progeny.  If you’re the sort of person who finds comfort in the flicker of a guttering candle and the whisper of something unspeakable just beyond the edge of the firelight, then this day is your holy feast.  Let’s raise a glass – hell, let’s raise the whole goddamn bottle – to three architects of the macabre who share this date as their entry point into the mortal coil.

First up, Ann Radcliffe, born in 1764, the original queen of Gothic fiction.  Before her, novels were polite little things, like tea parties with too much sugar and not enough gin.  But Radcliffe?  She dragged the genre into the shadows, draped it in cobwebs, and gave it a pulse that throbbed with dread.  The Mysteries of Udolpho was a blueprint for how to make readers sweat through their corsets.  She is The Voice for the whole haunted castles and moonlit moors crowd, of which I am proudly a member.  Without her, there’s no Poe, no Austen parodying her in Northanger Abbey, and certainly no modern horror as we know it.  She’s the reason you can’t walk past a crumbling mansion without imagining a ghostly figure in the window.  Cheers to you, Ann, you magnificent purveyor of dread.

Then there’s Matthew “Monk” Lewis, born in 1775, who took Radcliffe’s Gothic playbook, soaked it in absinthe, and set it on fire.  At 19 – an age when most of us were still figuring out how to fake our way through adulthood – he wrote The Monk, a book so scandalous it made Victorian prudes clutch their pearls and faint dead away.  Erotic, violent, blasphemous – it was the literary equivalent of a mosh pit in a cathedral.  Lewis obliterated boundaries with a sledgehammer.  He gave us depraved monks, demonic pacts, and enough moral ambiguity to make your head spin.  If Radcliffe was the architect of Gothic romance, Lewis was the punk rock anarchist who spray-painted obscenities on it’s walls.  Here’s to you, Matt – you magnificent, twisted bastard.

And finally, we land in 1945, the year Dean Koontz entered the scene.  Now Koontz might not be Gothic in the traditional sense, but let’s not split hairs while we’re three drinks deep.  The man has churned out more novels than most of us have had coherent thoughts, and his knack for blending suspense, horror, and a touch of the supernatural has made him a household name.  Odd Thomas, False Memory, and Phantoms are like rollercoasters in the dark: thrilling, disorienting, and just scary enough to make you question your life choices.  Koontz is the guy who reminds us that the monsters under the bed are real, but they’re probably just misunderstood.  Dean, you’re a machine, and we’re all just trying to keep up.

So here’s to July 9, a day that gave us three titans of the dark and the strange.  Radcliffe, Lewis, Koontz – each one a master of their own brand of literary mayhem.  If you’re not raising a glass to them today, you’re doing it wrong.  And if you’re not reading their work, you might as well be dead already.

N.P.: “KOOKSEVERYWHERE!!!” – AWOLNATION

Happy Tuesday, dear reader.  Today, we celebrate Hemingway’s baptism by shrapnel and the birth of a literary demi-god.

Picture this: it’s July 8, 1918, and an eighteen-year-old kid – not some grizzled veteran, not some stoic Roman statue carved by hardship, but a pimply, wet-behind-the-ears, not-yet-bearded version of Ernest Hemingway – is bumbling around Italy, driving ambulances for the Red Cross like some overeager Small Town Hero.  And then, boom!  Cue the Austrian mortar, a nasty piece of work that comes screaming in from afar like the wrath of God, raining shrapnel down on Hemingway’s youthful, squishy human form with all the subtlety of a freight train colliding with a fruit cart.  Over 200 fragments of metal embed themselves in his leg – not one, not a dozen, but 200, like some gratuitously overblown war souvenir he didn’t ask for.

But wait, it gets worse (or better, depending on whether you’re Hemingway or a future literary voyeur eager to psychoanalyze the trauma stew that would become his writing).  While he’s lying there, freshly perforated, our boy still has the nerve to drag an injured Italian soldier to safety because, apparently, even with half your leg turned into modern art, you can’t turn off the hero complex.  For this, he earns an Italian Silver Medal of Military Valor and a permanent VIP membership to the Survivors of Insane Shit Club.

Fast-forward to the aftermath, where Hemingway is convalescing in a Milan hospital, which is, in many ways, the haunting prologue to a novel you’ve already read.  Because it’s here, amidst the gauze and blood stains, he collides headfirst into actual romance – and by romance, I mean Agnes von Kurowsky, a no-nonsense nurse with enough poise to inspire Catherine Barkley, Hemingway’s star-crossed muse in A Farewell to Arms.  There’s something almost too well-scripted about it, like God’s editor handed Hemingway the perfect character arc for his fledgling authorial ambitions.

But here’s the kicker – it’s this exact sequence of war-monster violence and gooey human connection that calcifies into Hemingway’s whole literary thing.  If you’ve wondered why his prose reads like a direct line to the soul of struggle, the battle scars are the handwritten footnotes.  His stories don’t coddle or cajole; they slap you across the face with raw, unvarnished truth – that life is brutal and short, and yet, somehow, worth chasing even when despair has you by the throat.  The bleak endurance of The Old Man and the Sea, the grit-covered tenderness of For Whom the Bell Tolls – you don’t pull that kind of emotional theory out of thin air.  You write that because you’ve crawled through the mud and the blood and came out alive but not unscathed.

It’s almost poetic, really, that Hemingway would limp away from Italy with wounds that would heal wrong in all the right ways.  Those 200 fragments were more than just metal in his leg; they were ideas welded into the marrow of his bones.  By the time he scooped up the Nobel Prize in 1954, it was less a victory lap than an expectation fulfilled.  We knew, deep down, that no one could write about the weight of human suffering with such stark, battered honesty unless they’d once been shattered themselves.

And so, we’re left with the immense irony that Hemingway, the legendary tough guy of 20th-century literature, probably wouldn’t have become Hemingway without that mortar blast derailing his teenage innocence.  Funny how the universe hands you trauma like a baton and says, “Run with it.”

N.P.: “Venus” – Royal Republic

Today we pour some out for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the legendary detective Sherlock Holmes, who passed away on July 7, 1930 at the age of 71.  His death marked the end of a prolific career that not only gave us one of the most iconic literary characters but also contributed significantly to the detective fiction genre.  Doyle’s last words, spoken to his wife, were reportedly, “You are wonderful.”

There’s something unreasonably grand about the way Sir Arthur Conan Doyle shuffled off this mortal coil.  Those final words – “You are wonderful,” whispered to his wife – are hardly the stuff of mundane, fading-out inertia.  They leave you imagining some kind of Victorian fireworks display framing his departure, ornate letters spelling out his bow in curling smoke.  It’s almost too perfect.  Too wrapped in velvet and dipped in sepia-toned drama to feel real.  But what could be more fitting for the man who, through some strange alchemy of character engineering and narrative bravado, birthed Sherlock Holmes, a figure so steadfast in the collective imagination he might as well be carved into Mount Rushmore next to the guy with the top hat?

As mentioned above, the man died on July 7, 1930, at the age of 71, presumably exhausted from a career spent revolutionizing detective while moonlighting as history’s most confounding paradox.  Here’s a guy who gave the world Sherlock Holmes – deductive reasoning incarnate – only to spend a solid chunk of his later years chasing ghosts, spouting spiritualist woo-woo, and attempting, with alarming sincerity, to convince the public that fairies were real.  Real fairies.  With wings and everything.  It’s the kind of creative dissonance that makes you wonder if genius simply always comes with a side order of lunacy.  A complex combo meal for the mind.

But Doyle’s death was like turning off a spotlight, leaving the stage dark while the velvet curtains swayed and creaked in some unseen draft.  No encore, no standing ovation.  Except, of course, that we’re still clapping.  We’re clapping every time someone reaches for The Hound of the Baskervilles on a crowded airport bookshelf or binge-watches the latest adaptation of a Holmes story that Doyle himself probably would’ve rolled his eyes at.  And for what it’s worth, the adaptations do keep coming.  Hundreds of them.  The character has been dissected, reset, gender-swapped, modernized, de-modernized, and even turned into a vaguely anthropomorphic mouse detective – none of which has diminished his relevance.  Even when Holmes appears as a snarky sociopath who plays the violin like he’s trying to strangle Mozart’s ghost, he remains weirdly eternal.

It’s a hell of a legacy for a guy who, by all accounts, got bored of the character halfway through writing him.  There’s an irony there, dear reader, is there not?  Doyle’s genius wasn’t in his ability to adore Holmes, but in his ability to construct him so well that the rest of us can’t stop adoring him for him.  It’s like building a ship you hate, only to realize it’s the sturdiest thing afloat, indestructible even when it’s battered around by the gales of pop culture.  Doyle himself tried to sink it – drowning Holmes in the icy chasm of Reichenbach Falls.  But good luck holding down something that millions of readers are collectively begging to resurrect.  Like Lazarus in a deerstalker hat, Holmes returned, and, to Doyle’s resigned irritation, never left.

But Doyle’s contributions didn’t stop there.  At a time when the detective story was still flailing about in its infancy like a drunk looking for their keys, he took it by the scruff of its neck and told it to shape up.  The genre had existed before Doyle – Poe’s Dupin waddled so Holmes could strike with brisk efficiency – but Doyle sharpened it down to a fine point.  He gave detective fiction its rigor, its bit, and, most importantly, its enduring sense of clever possibility.  He’s the reason we can believe – against all evidence to the contrary – that any puzzle, no matter how tangled, can be solved with enough brainpower and an alarming tolerance for pipe smoke.

And yet, Doyle somehow managed to life his life as if entirely unconcerned by what he was doing to the literary world.  He wrote feverishly, yes, but his focus was broader, more scattered, like a flashlight with a weak battery.  He dabbled in just about everything -writing historical novels, dabbling in politics, obsessing over paranormal nonsense.  It’s almost as though he didn’t quite realize he was in the middle of creating a cultural giant.  Or maybe, in true contrarian fashion, he simply didn’t give a shit.

Now here we are, nearly a century after his death, still tangled in the web of his imagination, still arguing about which Sherlock actor captured the “true” Holmes, still swearing that we’d totally outwit Moriarty if given the chance.  Doyle may have stepped away from the stage, but the play – thank God for it – goes on, loud and puzzling and impossible to put down.  His legacy is a testament to the peculiar power of storytelling – something that can outlast even the stories’ creator.  If that’s not a kind of immortality, then I don’t know what is.

N.P.: “The Lunatics Have Taken Over the Asylum – Signals MIX” – Collide