GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1026: HE'S BACK . . .

  . . . The devil is here!
Smoke crack!
And drink a lot of beer!

To quote an old song I wrote. *ahem* Anyway.

Yeah, I'm back. Surprise! To no one except myself, apparently. I figured I'd miss GF after a few years and then say, the hell with it, and go right back to it.

But I missed you all. And I missed writing these things. Even though some were a real bitch to write (and many of them I don't even remember writing, as I used to do these while heavily inebriated.

I've been up to quite a bit since last we met up here. I'm pretty sure I'm not even the same guy who wrote #1025, there has been so much afoot in my life. And if that's true? I'm lightyears away from the guy who wrote GF #1.

Before I begin this next part, I'm going to quote Nixon. "I want to make one thing perfectly clear." I understand that the tools of literary critique are not meant to apply to real life. I have not gone insane. (I'm pretty sure I'm not.) I am not so far gone to think that a method of examining a fictional character should ever be used to examine an actual person, much less myself.

That said, remember Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey?

When I was a much younger man I wrote in my journal about a rare moment of jealousy for me. I was jealous of one of my friends who had traveled through and lived in Europe for having such great adventures and meeting wonderfully different kinds of people, and I wanted that for me. Not, like, I wanted to wear his skin and walk a mile in his literal shoes. I wanted my own version of it. I'd lived a lot of my life up to that point holding back on everything because I didn't want to take chances. I liked being comfortable. And yet my inner Walter Mitty always went journeying off.

I can count on my fingers the number of times I've been jealous in my life, so these moments tend to stick out. Except in that moment in particular I realized there wasn't a single fucking thing standing in the way of me living the adventurous life that I desired at that moment. Why am I sitting here bitching into my journal about something I have 100% control over? It was a moment of my revelation.

It was my call to adventure.

I have, indeed, lived an adventurous life. Some of the things I've seen and lived and experienced are wonderful, even if they were grim and awful in the moment I was living them. At the age of 47, I have lived what I consider a full life, and if I dropped dead of a heart attack tomorrow (a possibility, considering how my dad passed) I would die satisfied. I got my fuckin' money's worth.

But I did die. Kind of. Remember Doomsday? As in, how I used to reference the day I had to move out of my childhood home? That was the day I think I died. I dragged what was left of my wretched soul to the River Styx and climbed aboard the boat with Charon. That was the hotel I lived in for a month in Addison. It really was a nightmare of a place. A waking nightmare. I numbly watched the madness of humanity all around me, never realizing that I wasn't just a tourist. I was living there, too. I was trapped with the horrors, just like them.

And then I wound up in the underworld, aka Joliet. It was the most miserable time of my life, possibly because I wasn't alive. I was in some weird version of Purgatory, where I had to figure out my next, possibly final, destination.

I took the advice I used to sell on a bumper sticker. I chose death. Things were so rough I felt doomed. DOOMED. No hope at all. It was time, stricken, to face the true horrors of it all. Cue the ending of Angel Heart.

I somehow survived. Well, I know how I survived. I don't think I'll ever tell that story, but suffice it to say, I found hope again. Hope brought back my fighting spirit. I fought harder than I ever fought in my life for something, and I came out on top.

I was talking about this with a friend, and I likened it to the ending of The Chronicles of Riddick. I'd found myself suddenly sitting on the throne, stunned in victory. How the hell did this happen?

And the world bloomed before me, Samwise the Strong!!!

And then I told myself, dude, tone it down a little.

I am alive. And I intend to stay that way, at least for the next 13 years. I have to beat my dad's high score of 59. After that, if death comes a knockin', I'll be a-rockin'.

And now the return.

Welcome back to Goodnight, Fuckers. It won't be the same as last time. Oh, don't worry, these will all still be my memories and thoughts, history lessons and political rants. Plain weird shit. But we'll see where this takes us.

Tune in tomorrow for my tips on how to run for President of the United States as an independent and win. It'll probably be a long one.

[Warning: This Goodnight, Fuckers contains spoilers for the ending of The Chronicles of Riddick. You should have watched the movie first. Also, by reading this you agree to buy at least one of my books. If you already have bought one of my books, you must now buy an additional one or more. This document is legally binding. Sorry.]

IT RISES by John Bruni

 The ball slowly descends on the scene as drunken revelers count down the seconds, 2025 finally--mercifully--coming to an end. Hopes are high in this crowd. After all the lunacy they survived, how could 2026 possibly be worse? Utter nuclear annihilation? Because that's what it would take, most think to themselves.

The crowd shouts themselves hoarse as the ball comes down. "FIVE!" they scream. "FOUR! THREE! TWO! ONE!"

A light show erupts, bathing the party in flashes and sparks, and confetti flies. Triumphant music blares. It's finally over. "HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!!!" they cry out.

Drinks are quaffed. People gather and kiss and hug and take selfies. The fever pitch rises in a way only a fresh start can generate.

The lights go suddenly out. The music stops without so much as a screech or a needle drop. Dead silence reigns supreme. Then quiet mutterings begin. What happened? Is someone going to fix this? Dammit, this is no way to ring in the new year.

And then fireworks unexplode. Music plays backwards. Confetti zips itself back into its cannons. Humanity watches in horror, mouths agape, as the ball rises back up the pole. 2026 retreats, replaced by its predecessor, and the people scream and gnash their teeth and rend their hair, and the horror resumes.

Forever and ever, amen.

"OLD SCHOOL" IN ILLUSTRATED WORLDS MAGAZINE

 

I have a story in the new issue of Illustrated Worlds Magazine. It's called "Old School," the story of a telecom field tech dispatched to fix a POTS line at a retirement home, but the people living there seem off. So do the staff, come to think of it. Something's not right here . . . Find out what by getting your own copy here.

BLACK WEDNESDAY (BELATED)

[NOTE: I wrote this last night and thought I'd posted it. However, I was also high when I wrote this, and by the time I realized I hadn't posted it, I was in bed with my ankle brace off. I wasn't going to put it back on to go out to my laptop in the living room. Hence the "belated" part of the title.]

 It's been three years and one hundred and thirty-four days since my last drink. Black Wednesday is traditionally the drunkest day of the year in America, but even at the deepest depths of my alcoholic depravity, I never went out for Black Wednesday. I got shitfaced at home. Leave the DUIs to the social drinkers who over-imbibed that night. It's like vampires on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. They stay home on Halloween night.

This used to be my favorite weekend of the year because at all my office jobs I usually got a four day weekend, which I always dedicated to drunken debauchery of all sorts. Then I'd have a handle of Wild Turkey 101 (it was Thanksgiving, after all) the next day, and I'd have a collection of booze for when that was gone. I usually had Jameson as back up, and then a couple of handles of really cheap shit for when that ran out. I'd return to work the following Monday hung the fuck over (or possibly still a little drunk).

I really do miss those days, but even if I was still drinking now, I'd no longer get to celebrate like I used to. My current job is closed on Thanksgiving, which is always on a Thursday, a day I usually have off. No, I don't get a different day off. We're open on Black Friday (and for the first time ever, we have a Black Friday sale, so . . . yay . . .), and I work on Saturdays, so my four day weekend would be impossible now.

This will also be my first Thanksgiving completely alone. Now that my brother and I have gone our separate ways, and I'm all the way out in the middle of nowhere, there's no likelihood of seeing anyone else. I'm pretty happy to spend time on my own. I like my own company very much. But on a holiday? And it's likely to be the same for Christmas and New Year's. I guess we'll put my resistance to loneliness to the test.

I still have a tiny bottle of WT101. Empty, of course. I suppose I'll give it a sniff tomorrow to remind me of the good ol' days.

Happy Thanksgiving. Don't get any DUIs tonight. And if you love your mental health, stay home on Black Friday. Don't worship at the feet of unrestrained corporate greed. Unless you have to work, in which case you have my condolences.

Almost said goodnight, fuckers. But really, why would I say something so silly and rude?

STORIES FROM THE MOTEL SICK NOW AVAILABLE!

STORIES FROM TJHE MOTEL SICK edited by Michael Allen Rose is now available! I have a story in this one called "Family Tradition." Get your copy here!

MY TWENTY YEAR PROJECT

 Earlier this year I finished a project I began 20 years ago. I was a huge western fan when I was a kid. I watched reruns of Gunsmoke and Rawhide most back then, but I also loved Have Gun Will Travel and Wanted: Dead or Alive. I didn't get into Maverick until the Mel Gibson movie came out, but I fell in love with that series, too.

I noticed one thing about all these shows, though: the characters killed an excessive number of people, and they also got shot a lot. Some of these guys should be more scar tissue than person, in fact. So I decided to keep a tally of this while I watched every single episode of these five shows on the 50th anniversary of each one airing.

Here are those results.

I learned that the more cast members you have, the more these numbers get spread out among them. On Rawhide they weren't quite the prolific killers that shows with a more limited cast would be. Plus there was some turnover for this show, as there were so many cast members. Here are the tallies starting with the minor characters and moving my way up.

Jed never got shot, but he killed five people. Ian similarly never got shot, but he killed two. Simon didn't get shot, either, and he only killed one person. Forester, Haysoos and Teddy never got shot, and they never killed anyone. Joe Scarlet never got shot, but he killed two people. Mushy (!) got shot once and killed two people. It's hard to picture him killing anyone, but he did it twice.

Quince has been shot four times, and he killed seven. Only seven, considering he was the biggest troublemaker in the lot. Pete Nolan got shot three times and killed fifteen people. Wishbone got shot once (and was dragged by a horse once), but he only killed five people. Not bad for a cantankerous old coot.

And now for the two leads. Rowdy Yates was shot 10 times (once with an arrow), and he killed thirty-nine people over the years. That's a low kill count for Clint, who once killed more Nazis than anyone else in the movie, Where Eagles Dare. I'm certain the scene in Preacher where the Saint of Killers shoots a bunch of Herr Starr's men was based on Clint's deeds in that one.

And Gil Favor was shot seven times, once with an arrow, and he was whipped once. He killed a whopping fifty people. If Rawhide happened in modern times, he'd be considered a serial killer.

Maverick has had the longest life of any of the westerns not named Gunsmoke. Not only was there the original show, but there were also three (!) other Maverick shows (The New Maverick, Young Maverick and Bret Maverick) and the Maverick movie I previously mentioned. Even that movie is canon, as James Garner still plays that same Bret Maverick, and Gibson is Bret Jr. So these tallies count all of that.

Bret Jr. didn't get shot once, but he killed a couple of people. Not bad for Gibson. Usually he plays kill-crazy bastards.

Brent Maverick got shot once and killed one person.

Ben Maverick didn't shoot anyone and never got shot. Pappy would be proud.

Beau Maverick (Roger Moore!) never got shot, but he did kill ten people.

Brother Bart got shot five times, and he killed fifty-two people! But he was the darker, more violent of the brothers.

Bret Maverick only got shot three times, but he was stabbed twice, and he killed a mere twenty-two people.

Josh Randall got shot twelve times, which is kind of amazing, but he killed seventy-seven people. Even a bounty hunter today would be hard pressed to explain that to the courts.

Paladin got around quite a bit. When he wasn't enjoying the San Francisco opera or a good book in the lobby of the Carlton, he got shot sixteen times (once with an arrow). Despite doing his level best to never kill someone unless he absolutely had to, he killed 198 motherfuckers. Holy fucking shit. That's . . . that's insane even by a western's standards. Unless the standard is set by . . .

Wanted: Dead or Alive did have a movie made out of it in the 'Eighties, but it doesn't really count. It was modernized with Rutger Hauer and Gene Simmons. So yeah, no. Gunsmoke, however, started in 1955 and ended in 1975. There were five made-for-TV movies made after, thus making it *the* western TV show of all time. This is another ensemble cast with some turnover, so let's start with the minor characters.

Newly O'Brien got shot five times. He also killed five people. Thad got shot six times and didn't kill anyone (poor Thad). Quint (Burt Reynolds!) got shot twice, stabbed once and whipped once, but he killed six people.

Then there were the assistants. Chester Goode was shot ten times, dragged by a horse once, stabbed once, and he killed eighteen people. Hard to believe Chester was capable of that. Festus Hagen, on the other hand, doesn't surprise anyone with his abilities. He got shot fifteen goddam times, bitten by a dog once, and he killed thirty five* people. WOW.

Miss Kitty got shot twice, and she killed five people. Doc got shot twice (over 20 years, that ain't bad), stabbed twice, and killed seven* people.

And then there's Matt Dillon, US Marshal. He got shot with an arrow once and stabbed twice, but he got shot an awe-inspiring sixty-two fucking times. And not counting the opening credits, he's killed 438* motherfuckers.

That's an astounding number by ANYONE's estimation. The hero that so many people back then looked up to had killed literally hundreds of people. HUNDREDS.

Not even I expected him to be that prolific a killer. Also, could you imagine being shot 62 times? He was a big dude (six-seven), but how the fuck was there anything left of him after that? He should look like Deadpool after all that shit.

*These three numbers are estimates because of one episode in the final season. That deserves some discussion because, for the first 19 years of the show, Matt Dillon loved nothing more than the law and upholding it, and he only killed people if he had no other choice. Festus had more or less the same view, although he was a little quicker to kill than Matthew. Doc loathed killing of any kind EXCEPT for this one episode.

What happened was, these three characters found themselves in a town of criminals, and instead of escaping and siccing the US government on them (as the Matt Dillon of the first 19 years would have done), they decide instead to blow this town up and kill every single man living there. This is an act of wanton violence none of these characters would have ordinarily wanted. The asterisk is because so many people died I couldn't count them all. So 438 is the lowest possible estimation. I only counted the ones I saw die. At least a hundred people lived there, but I can't say for sure.

The real reason I was doing this was so I could compare to the kills of horror movie slashers. I'll bet if you combined Freddy, Jason, Myers, Chucky, Leprechaun, Pinhead and the Cenobites (a great name for a rock band, to quote Dave Barry), and hell, let's throw Pumpkinhead in there, too, you still wouldn't have as many deaths as those caused by Matt Dillon. Which is funny to me. The parents back in the 'Eighties horrified by these monsters killing people while Matt Dillon, the hero of *their* childhood, killed more than all of them combined.

For some reason Matt Dillon stopped caring about the law during that last season and the five movies after. I suspected it was because Clint Eastwood was the western hero of the time, and he was an anti-hero, so maybe the writers wanted one of their own instead of the John Wayne inspired Dillon. And that might even be the real reason his character did a complete one-eighty during that time. But I have another theory, and if there are any Gunsmoke fans reading this, I'd like to hear your thoughts.

What's the one thing that's different about that final season of Gunsmoke? That's right, Miss Kitty left. There was no longer a feminine touch on the show. That last season was a sausage fest. But think about it a bit more. I think Matt Dillon's love for Miss Kitty was the real thing that kept him in check, and when she left, he lost any desire to uphold the law. He felt the world had punished him, so he decided to punish the world back. That last season of Gunsmoke shows us a good man who was broken by the absence of love, and that's why he really blew up that town of criminals with Festus and Doc's help. The next thing you know, he's no longer the marshal, and he's living out in the wilderness, where we find him in Return to Dodge.

Gunsmoke wasn't known for character development, at least not in the main characters, more like in the guest stars. But if I'm right, that's one hell of a swing to take.

NOTHING NEW TO AMERICA

 A short note tonight, perhaps an optimistic one, for our American society. I just finished the first volume of Hay and Nicolay's biography of Abraham Lincoln. They were secretaries to him during his time in the White House, and Hay later came back as the Secretary of State for McKinley, so these two men actually knew and worked with Lincoln, as opposed to how many biographers on the subject? I read it to learn more about Lincoln, but it had the side effect of teaching me about the events leading up to the Civil War.

What I want to bring to your attention, though, is the part of this volume that deals with how Kansas got its start. I really, really recommend reading at least this part to any American reading this. I understand that it's not going to be pleasant for most. History books rarely are. But I think it offers us a little bit of sunshine on a rainy, say, four years.

All the political chaos we're going through right now? It doesn't hold a candle to what we went through in the 1850s. At the very least we don't have slavery in play right now. I mean, that could change at any moment, and I'm almost certain that the endgame for our corporate overlords is to bring slavery back, but this time to let it be colorblind. That's a story for another day, though.

We're supremely lucky that the federal government is terrible at being Nazis. They're more like the Hogan's Heroes version. Because if they were good at it, we'd be living in the days when people were literally murdering people on the opposite political aisle from them. Wholesale murder. Enough to make the practitioners serial killers.

Read this. It's mostly the last few chapters, but it will give you an idea of how horrendous things got before the Civil War, and it might give us some insight into avoiding the Civil War 2: War Harder. It will also tell you what they didn't teach you in elementary school: that slavery wasn't just a thing the South wanted to continue doing. They envisioned a slavery empire. Let the North have their dinky free states. The South wasn't going to stop at stealing Texas from the Mexicans. They wanted to steal Mexico from the Mexicans. And Central America. They wanted their slavery paradise to stretch all the way down to Tierra del Fuego in the cruelest example of Manifest Destiny imaginable.

And that's why evil has always been baked into our country. Sadism and inhumanity have always been lurking under our polite veneer of freedom. Freedom for me, not for thee.

Hell, if they'd taught us about Kansas in school, we might not even be in this fucking situation right now.

I beseech you to click that link. Read the whole thing. It's enlightening. But at the very least read about Kansas.

If this entices you, they write about how Lincoln, when he was a young man, despised people who spoke crudely in front of women. In one instance, he beat the daylights out of one such guy . . . and then rubbed dogshit in his eyes. They never told us about that on Presidents Day.