GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1033: A HORROR BEYOND COMPREHENSION

[QUICK NOTE: We found the movie from last night's GF! Thank you, everyone, for your help! It's called Pledge Night, and I just watched it. My friend remembered it pretty well, at least the second half of it. I enjoyed it. I can see why it stuck in his head.] 

It's been a while since I gave you an update on my bad foot. It's been healing pretty well. There are still divots where the rods went through my leg, but they're closed up. Some of this bruising probably won't ever go away. The hole on the bottom of my foot is gone completely. The one on the side is still sorta there. It's mostly a dry patch of flaky skin, but recently it ballooned out before dribbling pus and flattening down again. I had an appointment with my podiatrist coming up, so I kept it clean and changed the bandage regularly, something I've become all too familiar with.

The x-rays looked good. The holes in my bone are still there, but they're finally closing up. They're more of a smudge on the x-ray instead of clearly defined holes. As for the discharge, the tests came back positive for an infection, so I'm back on antibiotics. But my podiatrist cleaned everything up and pronounced it to be a minor thing.

"It's just open a slither," she said.

I wondered if maybe I'd misheard her, but she said it again a few more times. I let it go because it was kind of cute. Adorable, actually. It also proved that she had a flaw, if not flaws. She gives off such a confident feeling that one sometimes gets the impression she might be invincible.

Once upon a time she'd told me I was her favorite patient. I'd suspected that for a while, but I was glad to have it confirmed. She's a very straightforward, professional person. "Exact" is the perfect word for her. I often got the feeling that she saw me as a challenge, and she was fully vested in whipping my bad foot back into shape. If anyone could do it, I knew it would be her. Proof positive that I was in good hands.

"But you make me nervous," she sometimes says. This time she adds, "I'm afraid that when you come in, I'm going to see the x-ray, and the bones in your foot will have collapsed, and you'll  have a bone sticking out of the bottom of your foot."

Yes, I silently agree. That terrifies me, too.

Recently she offered an option that would ensure my foot would completely heal, but it would involve putting a bigger rod into my leg, this time into the bottom of my foot and up. After being in the cage for so long? I said no thank you. I'll take my chances.

"There are so few of us who specialize in Charcot," she told me at this recent appointment, "and we all know each other."

Many fields are like that. Horror writers all know each other. Or if they don't, they at least *know of* each other.

She then told me about a horror beyond comprehension. A colleague of hers told her about one of his Charcot cases, and that guy got his bad foot put in a cage, too. But this podiatrist didn't get to see the case through to its conclusion. One day the patient stopped showing up for appointments.

10 years later (and keep this in mind, because holy shit) he sees his patient again. He's living on the streets. [Holds flashlight under my chin.] AND HE'S STILL GOT THE FUCKING CAGE ON HIS BAD FOOT!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[If you were reading a Brian Pulido Chaos comic, this is where someone would scream, "Oh the humanity!"]

I sat there stunned while I was putting my ankle brace back on. I thought back to when I was in the prep room waiting for the surgery to remove the cage. The most horrifying thing I could think of in that moment was that something was going to come up, and they weren't going to be able to take it off, after all. It's the thought that repeated itself like an alarm in my head, over and over again, because in that moment I couldn't imagine a worse fate. Some dude could have walked into my room and shot me in the heart (a very real possibility in my country), and that still would not have been a worse fate.

I tried to blank out as much of my cage time as possible, but I was in that fucker for months. I couldn't imagine being in that infernal contraption for a year, much less fucking ten of them.

She'd warned me way back when about something called Cage Rage, when people in my situation lose their shit and start kicking anything and everything with their caged foot. In the days leading up to the removal, she'd congratulated me on not suffering from it ever, not once.

"I was frustrated," I told her. "But I knew it wouldn't have made any difference, and it might have even made everything worse."

She brought it up again now, and I thought, no, if I'd had that goddammed thing on my foot for ten years, I wouldn't have just been full of Cage Rage. I would have Cage Supernovaed. I might even have gotten frustrated enough to saw my own fucking leg off. I could not have taken ten years of metal rods sliding through my leg like a straw through a cup at McDonald's. And if things had gotten so far gone that I was living an unhoused life? I would absolutely have drank my liver into a bad case of suicide. One hundred percent.

How the fuck does that guy stand it? And how the hell didn't his leg get infected? I kept mine as clean as possible and even had help from Home Health, and I still got an infected pin site. How didn't that leg rot off on its own?

I couldn't stop thinking about this for the rest of the day. I came to this conclusion: I'm a lot more fortunate than I think sometimes. My foot is nearly entirely healed. Not too long ago I thought for sure I was going to lose it, and then I was going to drink myself to death Nic Cage style, but I wasn't going to bother going to Vegas. The cage thing could have been a lot worse. Also: what are the odds that I'm afflicted with something like Charcot, and I just so happen to have one of the very few Charcot specialists in the country as my podiatrist? Not only that, but she's determined to succeed. Her success is my success.

(OH DEAR GOD NIC CAGE RAGE!)

I'm pretty optimistic that my foot is going to completely heal, and then I'll be able to ditch this ankle brace. Maybe stepping in that broken glass was a good thing. Before? I'd been getting around on a leg brace. When this is all done, I won't even need that.

Life is fucking weird. I wouldn't have it any other way.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1032: CALLING ALL HORROR MOVIE EXPERTS!!!

 Do *you* consider yourself a horror movie expert? Then I am in desperate need of your help! Rather, a friend of mine is. Many years ago he asked me if I could figure out this horror movie he saw when he was a kid. When I was in college, I'd gone through the literal entire horror movie section at EVERY video rental store in the area, from Blockbuster to Ken's World of Video and everything in between. But not even *I* could figure out the name of the movie.

So I searched around online. Nothing. I asked the one person I knew (at the time, at least) who knew more about horror movies than I did (you may remember the Drudgeon, one of my fellow reviewers at Forced Viewing, RIP)(the website, not my friend, who is still alive, I assure you), and he couldn't figure it out, either.

I forgot about it for a while, and then it came back to me a few years back. I tried again, hoping there would be more internet for Google to scour, but no dice. I was so desperate I asked ChatGPT about it. That fuckin' idiot couldn't figure it out, naturally, so I gave up again.

Last week I slapped my forehead. I'm such a silly goose. I have a metric shit-ton of author friends, and almost all of them write horror. Many of them are, indeed, horror movie experts. And I've accumulated a handful of horror movie reviewer friends, too, so what the hell? Why not give this a shot?

So thank you all for joining me tonight. I appreciate you all, and I hope you can help me out. Because if this fails, I only have one shot left. It's a real Hail Mary, so I'm hoping at least one of you knows this flick. I'm going to let my friend take over from here:

I'd say the year I watched it was probably about 1991-1994'ish so it at least wouldn't be anything newer than that.

There was a group of teenagers and they were in some kind of broken down beat up either big house or mansion (likely a house). It was a mix of guys and girls but the personalities didn't stand out to me so I can't identify any characteristics.

There was the main bad guy / entity / demon / ghost thing that had long black hair and a melted like face somewhat that looked like Lemmy. He kept asking everyone who they were / what their name was before he'd kill them. When he got to one of the kids and the kid said his name, Lemmy said something like "I only came back, to protect you my boy".

I remember one guy and girl found a room with an old bunk bed that they decided to have sex in. I think I remember the girl being apprehensive about it and the guy just being like whatever about it. Lemmy was shown underneath on the bottom bunk either standing (tall bed) or kneeling with a sword in his hand overhead sticking straight up that he was about to thrust through before the movie cut to black with him seemingly smiling.

It could have been an 80's movie or very early 90's movie.

Any ideas? Thoughts? Guesses? I'll take anything and everything you've got. Comment below or email me or message me on Facebook or let me know however you know me. I'll forward it all to him, and I hope we get lucky. Thank you in advance for your assistance.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1031: YOUR SECOND AND THIRD EXECUTIVE ORDERS

 Now that you've broken the backs of our corporate overlords, it's time to twist the knife. That is the purpose of these next two executive orders.

The second will be to prohibit corporations from capturing and selling their customers' personal data. "We value your privacy," says every automated system in the nation. Do you? Because it seems to me that what you do is, you coerce your customers into digitally signing a terms of service agreement so you can steal their data and sell it to the highest bidder. Or is the value you mention the gobs of money you get from selling our property? And no, I don't think Terms of Service is legally binding. In order to use the service, you have to agree to it. Then don't use the service, I hear you say. It is currently necessary to do business on the internet. You can't survive the modern world without it. So a company should be allowed to take advantage of us by making us sign this fucking thing?

You don't get to do that anymore. *We* own our own data, and if we wish to sell it, we can. But it should be strongly encouraged to not sell your data. Our corporate overlords have had "permission" to surveil us for a very long time. They should not be allowed to do that. They know everything about you. If you've ever wondered why you're talking about something with a friend, and then you see an advertisement for that thing, wonder no more. They know when payday is so they can change their prices on their app to extract as much money as possible out of you.

"We do this to enhance your customer experience." Fuck right the fuck off. Into the sun. Repeat as necessary.

The third executive order will be to outlaw the concept of "planned obsolescence." This economy exists to benefit actual living, breathing people, not to satisfy the greed of the uber-rich. When you buy a product, you can now expect it to last decades, not just a couple of years. Imagine what it would be like to never have to buy another lightbulb in your life. Or have you never heard of the Centennial Light Bulb?

Our government currently exists as a wealth extraction device for our corporate overlords. We must turn that around so that corporations must once again mewl and grovel for our business. In other words, we're bringing back competition to our economy, which it has sorely lacked these last 30 or so years.

If they're allowed to continue stealing our data and to deliberately make faulty products, then we can expect this to end much like the Soviet Union did. How long will it be before a loaf of bread costs a couple of hundred dollars?

These two EOs will prevent that from happening. And if the corporate overlords get caught violating these things, the punishment must be so incredible that they'd be terrified of even considering it. I think fining them $44B for each infraction would do the trick. Even Elon Musk would pause to think about breaking the law in such an instance. It would cost him, say, a Twitter for example.

More executive orders to come . . .

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1030: THE TWILIGHT SUPERNOVA

 I recently read Werner Herzog's The Twilight World, the real life tale of Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese soldier in WWII who was still fighting the war decades later in 1974. I reviewed it on Goodreads, which you can read here. Sometimes I feel like I'm having a conversation with the universe, and the one regarding Herzog's book was not over. Because I turned on Hardcore History for my commute the next day, and it was an episode called Supernova in the East Part 1. And as soon as Dan Carlin started describing a WWII soldier, I knew long before he said the person's name that it would be Hiroo Onoda.

And it was. In the review I make note of the attempts to reach Onoda to tell him the war was over, and he refused to believe it because orders are orders. I compared it to Maga now clinging to their concept of "fake news" rather than facing an unpleasant truth, a way to turn a blind eye to something that cannot possibly be accepted in that person's worldview. It puzzled me, and I felt a little disappointed, after reading about Onoda all these years, to see that this was the real reason why he kept fighting. I felt like the real Onoda, rather than the romantic character in my head, had let me down.

The universe reached out to let me know that no, I'm actually culturally insensitive. It gave me a lot to think about as Carlin describes the world in which Onoda grew up, quoting from Onoda's own memoir (which I need to find for myself, by the way). When he'd gone off to war, his mother had given him a dagger and told him to use it to kill himself if he should be captured. Carlin wondered about the other powers in that war. How many of their mothers would tell something like that to their sons? Just Japan's? Onoda himself talks about how, in the Japan he left when he went to that island, surrender would have been unthinkable. Every man, woman and child would fight to the very end, with bamboo sticks if necessary. The only conceivable way he would think that Japan surrendered was IF EVERYONE THERE WAS DEAD.

Holy fucking shit. No wonder he chose to keep fighting. The only alternative was that the world he'd known and loved had been wiped from the face of the earth forever.

I mentioned in my review how much the world had changed in the time Onoda fought on that island. Atom bombs and moonwalks. Could you imagine being the one to tell him about all of that? But Carlin goes further. He uses American vets as an example here. They came home from the war and watched how their world changed slowly but surely until it had become what they would think of as a perversion of everything they'd known their world to be, and that's why they reacted so poorly with the counter-cultural movement at the time. They were trying to maintain a world that no longer existed. But they got to witness the eventual . . . what they would consider a decline.

Onoda didn't witness that. When Suzuki brought him out of the jungle, he stepped out of one world--EVEN IF IT DIDN'T EXIST!!!!--and walked into a completely alien, brand new one.

And that got me to thinking. (Uh-oh, I hear you say.) The world I was born into, the one I think about often and fantasize about sometimes, that world? Is gone. Like you never step twice into the same river. That kind of gone. I ask myself, what would I do to save that world? What would I do to maintain it? What would I do to bring it back? Would I move goddam mountains to make that happen?

Probably. If I thought I had the ability, I'd probably do anything.

Which brings me back to Maga. Maybe I understand them a little more now. Obviously fuck their worldview, but now I finally understand why they're so determined to ruin the world for everyone else. If I were in their shoes, I might not do any differently.

But I do not now and never have coveted those shoes, because I understand the thing that they don't, that Carlin also points out. That world that we think about? The vanquished world? It never existed. That world can only be seen through the prism of memory, and how reliable is memory? Especially since YOU are your only reference point for that memory? Not very. Have you ever found a picture of a place you think about often? Something from your childhood? Some of the details are right, but a lot of them are wrong. That's because you (and I) have been building these memories up. It starts as: was it this way? And then it becomes: it was probably this way. And then it simply is: it was this way. It happens so fast we don't often notice it. But this world is more fancy than fact.

Nostalgia for an age that never existed.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1029: YOUR FIRST EXECUTIVE ORDER

 So you've been elected President of the United States as an independent, and now you've been sworn into office. It's time to break the backs of our corporate overlords so we can restore an America made for the people instead of the oligarchs. This will be more difficult than getting elected, as it will have to get past a lot of Congresspeople who do not, under any circumstances, want to help you break their masters. If they did, all that political money goes away, and what is Congress without corporate sponsorship? They might actually have to start thinking for themselves and about the people they're supposed to serve. Perhaps US politics will draw the best and the brightest for a change. Imagine a world where we have competent people making decisions for our country. That has not happened during my lifetime. Probably not yours, either.

Your first EO should be to eradicate Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. That sounds oddly specific. If you don't know what that is, you're not a Cory Doctorow fan, because I don't think he goes a single day without bringing it up. But you can see why he does. Here's an excerpt from one of his Pluralistic columns that explains it better than I can:

Under anticircumvention law, it's a crime to alter the functioning of a digital product or service, unless the manufacturer approves of your modification, and – crucially – this is true whether or not your modification violates any other law.

Anticircumvention law originates in the USA: Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 establishes a felony punishable by a five year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for a first offense for bypassing an "access control" for a copyrighted work.

So practically speaking, if you design a device or service with even the flimsiest of systems to prevent modification of its application code or firmware, it's a felony – a jailable felony – to modify that code or firmware. It's also a felony to disclose information about how to bypass that access control, which means that pen-testers who even describe how they access a device or system face criminal liability.

Under anticircumvention law any manufacturer can trivially turn their product into a no-go zone, criminalizing the act of investigating its defects, criminalizing the act of reporting on its defects, and criminalizing the act of remediating its defects.

This is a law that Jay Freeman rightly calls "Felony Contempt of Business Model." Anticircumvention became the law of the land in 1998 when Bill Clinton signed the DMCA. But before you start snickering at those stupid Americans, know this: every other country in the world has passed a law just like this in the years since. Here in the EU, it came in through Article 6 of the 2001 EU Copyright Directive.

Now, it makes a certain twisted sense for the US to enact a law like this, after all, they are the world's tech powerhouse, home to the biggest, most powerful tech companies in the world. By making it illegal to modify digital products without the manufacturer's permission, America enhances the rent-extracting power of the most valuable companies on US stock exchanges.

Let me describe what is the quintessential American scene. Picture a man who loves his car. He learns everything about his car so that he can maintain it in pristine condition, and so he can fix things that go wrong with it. Remember when you were a kid helping your dad with the flashlight while he worked under the hood? My dad wasn't around for stuff like that, but I experienced it with Gramps. Gramps was not good at that kind of thing and had to regularly throw in the towel and go to a mechanic.

But if the average American tried to fix their own car today, complete with all the digital programs that make your car run, that's a felony. Because of the DMCA. If your phone breaks, you can only go to an accepted vendor to get it fixed. It's also why you can't use any old ink in your printer. You have to use approved ink, which just so happens to be the most expensive fucking thing on the planet by volume. No shit. Do the math. Doctorow also points out that a Kentucky Derby champion's cum is less expensive than HP printer ink.

This is how corporations have come to control every single fucking aspect of our lives. And in case you skimmed that excerpt, who was the villain who did this to us? That's right, Bill Clinton.

Do you see, perhaps, why I don't trust Democrats, either?

If that wasn't enough, the corporate overlords forced our politicians to extor . . . er, I mean, convince the rest of the world to enact similar legislation protecting their "IP." I put that in quotation marks because there is nothing intellectual about this property. I dislike the phrase "intellectual property" under ordinary circumstances. Under these? It's fucking perverse. If you've also wondered where real innovation has gone, blame Clinton for outlawing the process of reverse engineering.

So yes, the rest of the world has similar laws, and that's how our corporate overlords became theirs, too. How did they threa--er, negotiate with them? If the other countries didn't pass that law, they'd have hefty tariffs levied against them.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!! Trump has no idea that he's planted the seeds to his masters' destruction. Doctorow is a big proponent of having those other countries repeal the law. That would be infinitely more rewarding than reciprocal tariffs, which only hurts their citizens, too.

But for some reason they're not doing that. So it'll have to be you. Make Reverse Engineering Great Again! Bring innovation back to the US! And more importantly, break the hold the corporations have over us.

And if you don't believe that the corporations have a hold over us, do you remember the Food Pyramid they taught you in school when you were a kid? It's bullshit. 100% bullshit. The corporations that sell us food made sure to push this thing on our teachers to ensure that we continue to buy, in great supplies, the specific foods they sell.

Do you drink orange juice in the morning? Why? Not that long ago (history is never that far behind us, remember), orange juice was NOT a breakfast beverage. But a propagandist started planting the idea in the media that American families drank orange juice for breakfast. Because his client had a surplus of oranges to sell that year.

That's just the shit we know about. How else have their slimy tendrils invaded our lives? Our thoughts? Our very beliefs? How much of you is really you, and how much is the runoff of a corporate scam to get you to buy something?

Break their hold on us. All of us.

____________________________________________________________

This is a bit I think I'll come back to every once in a while as more EOs occur to me. I already have another one, but that'll be for another time. This should get you started.

But maybe I've lost my mind. Haven't we all, these days? At least a little? I don't think I'm jumping at shadows. So . . .

Doctorow also brings up the fact that our military equipment breaks down all the time, which is a problem, especially if our military is in a warzone, for instance. Because our own soldiers aren't even allowed to repair that equipment. They have to ship it back to the corporation that made it so they can fix it and ship it back. It's like something out of Catch-22.

As always, don't take my word for it. Do some research. Look up "military right to repair." You may also see a recent news story about it. Because what the fuck else would you expect in these grim times?

The exterminator came in today like John Goodman in Arachnophobia. Guns blazing and one liners. He fought with Big Ed's brother in a boiler room. It was intense, but he finally dropped that fucker into a pool of molten lava. I saw the brass knuckles melt off the roach's legs.

I hope it worked.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1028: A PROPER AUTHORITARIAN REGIME

President Donald J. "Sergeant" Schultz, speaking with the press corps.

 Not too long ago I noted that we lucked out as far as being led by Nazis went. Instead of actual, scary Nazis, we got the Hogan's Heroes version. And let the record state, your honor, that my current favorite genre of videos is footage of ICE screwing the pooch over and over again. The ICE guy slipping on ice? I've got a little precum just thinking about it. He may be masked, but all his goon buddies know exactly who he is. He knows they laugh behind his back. Hell, for all I know, they laugh at his front, too.

And now ICE is just shooting people in the face. Is that scary? Yes. Very much so. But it's also still in the Hogan's Heroes mindframe.

These assholes can't even properly run an authoritarian regime. They just keep ratcheting shit up. It's not hot enough, fellas. It's gotta be hotter. No, HOTTER. NO! HOTTER!

I listen to a lot of political podcasts, so forgive me if I'm blanking on who said this, but it's a good point: Real authoritarian regimes know not to overdo it. They know when to release the pressure. They know how to ease up and let their people know peace if only for a little while. And if you look at long-lasting dictatorships, that's the secret sauce to their survival.

You may have noticed, but we used to be like that. Every once in a while we'd get a break from the constant assault on our senses, but ever since Sgt. Schultz was sworn into office we've never had a day--NOT SO MUCH AS A SINGLE SECOND--of relief. This is by design. They think this is breaking us. And it is. "Flood the zone with shit." -Steve Bannon, a Steaming Pile of Shit(TM).

But they're ignoring the natural consequence of this. Remember the last time we were under a constant assault of shit? Me neither, because I wasn't alive during the American Revolution.

"Where's King George III?"

"Am I my king's keeper?"

They want a civil war. Now that cities are threatening to arrest ICE agents, that civil war is closer to us than ever. How do you expect ICE to respond the moment one of them gets arrested? Now that they have pulled out their tiki torches and are no longer hiding their Nazi tendencies?

They're not exactly the paradigm of fuckin' restraint.

I feel it, too. I'm exhausted, angry, frustrated, aghast, stricken and so many other fucking things. You can probably sense from my tone how frayed I am. But we can't let them have that civil war. That's how we ALL lose.

But if they keep this shit up, they'll have a revolution instead.

All right, the apartment is fed up with us complaining about the roaches, so they're spraying the complex down tomorrow. I gotta warn them about Big Ed's brother. He's got a gun, I think, and he's been doing poppers all week. If I find the time, I'll finally get around to telling you how to kneecap our corporate overlords.

Jon Stewart turns solemnly toward the camera while loosening his collar. He clears his throat. "Hey France. It's been a while. Listen, I know we said some really bad things about you twenty years ago . . .and we're deeply sorry for the thing with the Freedom Fries. Please accept our sincerest apologies. Hey, we had some good times, didn't we? Like during the American Revolution! Say, speaking of those times, I have a favor to ask . . ."

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1027: HOW TO RUN FOR PRESIDENT AS AN INDEPENDENT AND WIN (or, A POX ON BOTH YOUR HOUSES)

So you want to run for US President as an independent . . .

 

Once upon a time I ran for US President. That year was 2016. You should have voted for me. Really. We wouldn't be going through all of this right now if you had. But I wasn't serious about the whole thing. I was doing it to promote a book. But I did look into the process.

What I learned is, all you have to do is say you're running for President. That's all. But there's a catch: if you want to be put on an actual ballot, you have to put in a lot of work. A lot. More than I was willing to go through for a book promotion.

But after you do that exceptionally difficult work, actually winning the office is pretty easy, but you have to follow these guidelines. You also have to be genuine. If you can't be genuine, this will not work for you. If you're merely seeking power, look elsewhere. Perhaps find a way to get yourself elected VP and then arrange for the big guy to have an accident. That might work for you. It's the passive version of what Vance seems to be going for, at any rate.

For the rest of you, though, this should be easy.

First and foremost, you should be qualified for the office. What does that mean? If you no longer remember your US Government class in high school: be a US-born citizen, the US must be your residence for the last 14 years and you must be at least 35 years old. And that's it.

But you don't want to do what I did. You want to actually win, so you'll need to get on ballots, and unfortunately you have to do that on a state by state basis. Each state has different requirements. You can learn more about that here. For the most part, you will be getting signatures from people in each state. A lot of signatures, and you'll probably have to go there yourself to get them or have someone do that on your behalf. So yes, you'll need funding or really, really good friends who would go out of their way to help you.

But let's say that you get all the signatures you need to be on the ballot of every state. How do you convince your fellow Americans to vote you into the highest office in the land?

Here's the easy part. Don't try to go after blue or red votes. It's a waste of time. That is not your focus. If you do this properly, those votes will siphon off to you naturally. You'll never win over the die hard left or right, but you can get the people the right and the left have let down.

Your focus will be two different kinds of people. In 2024, of the 174M people registered to vote, only 154M of them did. Even I can do that kind of math: that's 20M people who did not bother to vote. They are your first focus. The second? The unregistered citizens of legal age to vote. There are more than 72M of them. That's 92M+ people who loathe the system as it is now.

And it *is* loathing, not apathy. I've gone over this before. Their disgust with the system is such that they no longer want to participate in it.

All you have to do is give them a reason. Make them feel that they have a shot at having their voices be heard.

How do you reach them? Press releases are good, but you've got some pavement to pound and some flesh to press. You need a boots on the ground tactic, and your boots should be making contact on the ground around unemployment lines. At SNAP sites. Soup kitchens. Talk to the homeless, to sex workers, to addicts. You have to reach out a hand to all the people our political system has abandoned, and let them know that they have not been forgotten. You want to help. And don't just show up to put in an appearance. You have to listen to the people. Let them know that you're concerned about AI, the cost of living, the ability to own property, all that stuff. You're never going to own a home like your parents did. Well, I can help you with that.

I said it above, and I'll say it again. YOU MUST BE GENUINE. These people have been put through the fucking wringer, and their bullshit detectors are top of the line.

If you are honest and genuine, it will be easy to get elected. There's a reason that, every four years, Republicans and Democrats get hard-ons for the people who don't vote. They lust for those numbers to be added to their respective sides. And the numbers don't lie. If you can get that 92M (and you will undoubtedly get more, as there are Republicans sick of Trump and Democrats sick of whatever the fuck their side is doing; hence the siphoning comment above), then you'll wipe the walls with whoever those corporate sycophants put up against you. Trump got 77.3M votes, Harris got 75M.

The numbers don't lie.

There's something else to keep in mind. The Democrats and the Republicans all serve the same master: our corporate overlords. Those overlords do not like to be fucked with. They will first try to buy you ("It is better to buy than compete." --Mark Zuckerberg, corporate overlord), and make no mistake, they will spare no expense. You must not give in to them. Or, if you do take their money, give them nothing in return but a laugh. Fair warning: if you do this, you stand a good chance of being assassinated. My advice to you is to tell people in speeches, "I endanger their business, so it's only natural that they'd want to kill me. So if I ever get killed, please investigate them first." It may or may not keep you alive, but it gives you a better chance at survival.

But I urge you to proceed with caution because if corporate bribery doesn't work, and they're not ready to kill you yet, CIA "suggestion" could do the trick. For instance:

A guy approaches you, full of compliments, telling you how much he likes what you're doing, running as a third party candidate with a real shot at blowing the other guys out of the water. "But there's one thing I think you should really be aware of." He offers you a file folder.

And in that file folder is evidence of all the terrible things you've done that you thought you got away with. Video of you stolen from your laptop's camera, audio stolen from your laptop's mic. And if you think, haha, I don't use a laptop, do you also not use a smartphone?

There's a list of all the horrible things you've ever googled, all the porn videos you have ever watched. Every word you've sent via Facebook chat about people who thought you were their friend. EVERYTHING.

"I'd hate for this to get out," he tells you. "You'd be disappointing a lot of people."

So yeah. If they can't get you with that, then hire a great team of bodyguards.

OK, now that you know how to get voted into the White House as an independent, you now need to break the backs of our corporate overlords. But I've talked too long tonight. I have Friday off, so I may or may not write a GF tomorrow. I'm getting my eyes dilated, and I'm usually not in the mood to write after that happens. If I *do* write, tomorrow's topic will be what your first executive order should be and how that will utterly destroy the stranglehold the corporate overlords have over our lives.

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.]