Some days are for quiet reflection, dear reader.  This is not one of them.  This is a day for the guys who bet the whole goddamn farm, the ones who drew the maps, and the one who chronicled the beautiful, roaring decay of it all.  So pour a glass of whatever vintage your desk whiskey is this month, and let’s get to it.

First up: 1493.  Christopher Columbus, not a year after stumbling upon what he insisted was the scenic route to India, decides to double down.  Forget one rickety voyage; this time he’s back with a goddamn armada.  Seventeen ships and 1,200 men, all chomping at the proverbial bit to colonize the New World.  It was a high-seas hostile takeover bid, funded by royals who were probably just tired of hearing him talk.  This second trip was about planting flags and laying claim, a sort of primordial manifest destiny with more scurvy.

Fast forward to 1789.  The smoke from the revolution has barely cleared, and the ink on the Constitution is still wet.  So, being on a bit of a roll, the founding fathers created the Judiciary Act.  They conjure the Supreme Court and the Attorney General out of thin air.  With these, the founders created a legal framework meant to put a leash of the very power they’d just fought to seize.  It’s the moment the wild, screaming spirit of rebellion put on a robe and picked up a gavel.

And then, the main event for our kind of degenerate: 1896.  F. Scott Fitzgerald is born in St. Paul, Minnesota.  This is the origin story of the man who would document the glittering rot at the core of the American Dream.  Mainlining the Jazz Age, Scott and Zelda burned through life with the kind of glorious, self-destructive velocity that lesser souls can only read about.  His prose was sharper than a broken champagne glass.  And his life was a cautionary tale wrapped in glamour.  He partied with Hemmingway, wrestled with his own demons in public, and wrote it all down in sentences so perfect they make you want to drink and cry.  He was an amazing failure, and the patron saint of anyone who’s ever believed that a little excess is the only way to live.  Amen.

So here’s to September 24.  A day that reminds us that neither history nor great art are made by the timid.

N.P.: “Back in Black (Soul)” – FAKE MUSIC