GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #765: THIS NIGHT ONLY

 

Imagine getting tickets to go to a play. The tickets say THIS NIGHT ONLY on them. You find out that the president of the United States is going to be there, watching the play with you. Sounds pretty interesting, no? And then some fucker (not one of you reading these columns, I mean an actual bad fucker) shoots the president.

This night only takes on a different meaning.

The play in question was Our American Cousin. The theater, Ford's. The president was none other than Abraham Lincoln. And the picture you see above is of two used tickets to the show. They went up for auction a few weeks ago and sold for $262,500.

It's kind of weird to sell historical artifacts like that, but this is the world we live in. It's not even the weirdest historical artifact to be sold. Rasputin's penis, for example, was sold to a museum in Russia. A lot of people doubt its authenticity, but it was sold to the museum by Rasputin's daughter, Maria. If anyone was to sell it, I'm pretty sure it would be someone who knew him personally. I still have questions, as I'm sure you all do, but I lean toward it being legit.

If GF can be said to have a slogan, it's, "History is never far behind us." That these tickets to Ford's Theater on that tragic night have resurfaced is proof of that. And there's more. The bullet that killed Lincoln is still out there. I think the White House Historical Society has it. And the historical museum where Ford's used to be has the gun that fired it.

Hell, there are life and death masks of Lincoln out there, too, just in case we ever doubt what he actually looked like. We have paintings and photos and such, but there is no substitute for a 3D image to give a dead historical figure life.

When I was a kid the Fullersburg Forest Preserve had a walkthrough exhibit where you could see bones of a wooly mammoth that had been found there. They recently put it together, and now it towers in the exhibit they currently have there, but back then I'd reach over the ropes and put my hand on the mammoth's bones. It seems kind of silly, but it transported me back. I felt a thrill, like I was actually touching history.

There's plenty of history out there, and one person just paid a shit-ton of money to touch (and own) one grim piece of it. If I had the money, I might have done the same.

And then I think of centuries from now, whatever civilization that takes over from us might find my old bones. I wonder if one of their children might pick up, say, my femur and wonder who I was.