GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #791: REVELATION

 I realized this before today. Not sure when, specifically. If I had to guess it was between bouts of extraordinarily painful vomiting. I've been out of action since Saturday morning, and it wasn't until last night that it all stopped.

But I do recall hovering over the bathroom sink, washing my mouth out, looking into my reflection. Red-faced, sweating, exhausted, I realized something that I couldn't put into words until now, today.

I'm still weak. Shaky. My vision blacks out if I stand up too quickly. But I'm alive.

I know this post is going to make me seem crazy. I understand that, but the clues were always there. For a while in 2020 I could have sworn I died, but no one else noticed, not even me. Then, when my grandma died and I lost another toe, I thought I'd accidentally slipped into a parallel universe. The feeling was stronger when I got out of detox.

But I was wrong about that. I think I'm on the right track now. Because I do believe in parallel universes. Don't worry, my cheese isn't sliding that far off the cracker. "Believe" is little-b, not BIG-B. But if I believe in parallel universes, I have to wonder why.

I believe that there is One Perfect Universe where everything goes right, and no one ever loses. Everyone lives their perfect life.

And the revelation I felt while sopping puke from my chapped and bleeding lips, was that I was not living in that universe. We all try to live the perfect life, but we don't all succeed. Does anyone? Except in that One Universe? All these other universes? Those are us trying. Every decision ever made births a new universe, and that's how we got all those others.

We all start out in the One Perfect Universe, and we make terrible decisions that make us stray from the path. I can think of so many times I screwed the pooch not just for myself but for others. How many people have I let down over the course of the years? I'm not a greedy man, for example, but the impulse is there. It's my job to make sure that impulse never wins.

But it did win on a few occasions. Because I'm not perfect, and I fucked up my timeline pretty horribly. Not as badly as it could have been, but still. I haven't had a drink in seemingly ages, and yet I'm still having these stomach problems that I was told would cease if I ever quit drinking. Guess that didn't happen. My rotten raw vicious streak of shit luck continues into the setting fucking sun.

It's a soul destroyer of a revelation, and I stopped functioning for a little bit. I had to put my head down and think about the fucking horrors of my life and all the dangerous situations I've been in that are shockingly stupid and 100% avoidable if I'd just made the right decisions. Things I could have done to be a better person. A better son. A better brother. Yeah, I have a lot to make up to my brothers. I was not the best big brother they could have had.

Paralyzed, I asked God for a favor. I know a lot of good people who would do me a favor, but none of them are equipped for one of this magnitude. And you know me, I'm an atheist, so talking to God is not something I do. But I was desperate.

Like I said, I'm not a greedy man, but the impulse is there. And I begged for a very greedy favor. I wasn't in that One Perfect Universe at the time, but I think I really strayed from the path during that first year of college. I begged God to send me back to that time right here, right now, with all the knowledge I possess now so I can do better next time.

Then I realized the consequences of asking something like that. What if doing so kills this timeline off? What if all the good things I've done and all the great people I've met cease to exist because I asked for this carelessly greedy thing? Could I sacrifice everything that happened between 1996 and now just for a second chance?

Then I thought, what if I don't do this out of greed? And the more I thought about it, the more I realized I could save people. I could warn friends from doing things that would end badly for them. I could warn them about when they would die so they could stop it from happening. I could save my mom. Warn my dad. I started thinking, eh, fuck my stepdad, but without him I wouldn't have three of my brothers. And then I started getting grandiose. Did nearly 3,000 people need to die on 9/11/01? What if I could find a way to prevent Covid and the 2016 election? What if I could find a way to prevent corporations from being declared as people with First Amendment rights to buy up residential property and bump up the rents beyond all imagination?

I would do those things, or try, but let's not get a big head. What went beforeth the fall? But there were people near and dear to me that I couldn't save if I merely went back to 1996. They were already damaged goods. I would have to go back farther and save them from the get-go. Shit, I didn't want to live through high school and most of my childhood again, and I certainly didn't want to relive my fucking stepfather, but if something like this were to happen, I couldn't just use it to help myself. I have way too much to make up to the world. I've done a lot of awful things. I try to be the best person I can be at all times. I strive for excellence every day. But I still fall short of the mark.

But there's that greedy impulse. I thought of living without any of these fucking illnesses that have plagued me for more than a decade. Diabetes? Next time out, I'll listen to Grandma. Caffeine Free Diet Coke really isn't that bad. I'd still be in shape. I'd have a better head on my shoulders. I'd make better plans. That early in college? I could still study a few classes that would bore the shit out of me but would give me better opportunities. Holy shit, I even thought I saw myself getting married and having kids and the whole American Dream rolled up into a neat red-white-and-blue hobo bindle.

Yeah, it's crazy talk, and I'm almost certain I'm wrong. But for about two hours today it felt so right, like nothing I'd ever felt before. But there is no God, and there (probably) aren't parallel universes. It's my imagination running away with me.

But with just a little hope I amended my heavenly request: "When I die, please send me back. I know I can get it right this time."

That's all folderol. The real revelation is that I'm a loser in this existence. This is a fight I've already lost, and there's no way to go back and fix it. What does that mean going forward? The struggle continues. Sure, I'm going to lose this go at life, but goddammit, I'm going to make this the most successful fucking failure that I can. The deck is stacked against me, but I've come pretty far for a loser, and I'm not going to quit until the world rakes the back of my throat for my final breath.

Because the poet was right. "I've been down so goddam long that it looks like up to me."

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #731: IN EVENT OF MOON DISASTER

 In an alternate universe, probably the one where Mickey Dolenz was the Fonz on Happy Days and Eric Stoltz was Marty McFly in Back to the Future (and, oddly enough, the Dude in The Big Lebowski), the Apollo 11 astronauts didn't make it home.

In politics it pays to prepare for any and all contingencies. For all his faults Nixon was a beast when it came to politics, so it doesn't surprise me that he had a separate speech prepared just in case the first humans to walk on the moon didn't make it back. And like all good political speeches, he didn't write it. Someone else did. Regardless, that's quite a level of preparation.

It's a poetic dirge to the potential loss of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. I like the part about "mankind's most noble goal." It is, by the way. Our other goals are usually backwards and fucked seven ways to Sunday, but "the search for truth and understanding" is a pretty noble one. I find it odd that they didn't include Michael Collins in that speech, but he didn't go to the moon. He just sat in the module, so I guess they figured they could get him back home. It must have been odd for him. Just by not doing the thing he had a better chance of survival, but by not doing that thing he didn't get to join the others in making history. Hell, if I didn't mention his name, would you have known it? Everyone knows Armstrong and Aldrin, but who thinks about Collins? Google his name, and one of the questions that comes up is, like some depraved Jeopardy question, "Who was the forgotten astronaut of 1969?"

I wonder if he ever read this speech, and if so, what he thought of it. Quantum physics is a weird fucking thing, and it seems to support the idea of a multiverse. I wonder if he thought about the possibility that an alternate version of himself had to say goodbye to his friends and colleagues, leaving their corpses on the moon in a fashion very much like Tommy Lee Jones at the end of Space Cowboys. I'll bet it's the same universe where Robert Englund played Luke Skywalker and Col. Kilgore . . .

OK, yeah. I fucking referenced Space Cowboys. What of it? I enjoy that one. I recognize I'm in the minority on that, but I usually am. Nothing new there.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #662: ALTERNATE UNIVERSE

 Remember how, back when I lost my second toe, when I got out of the hospital I had this weird feeling that I'd accidentally been sent to an alternate universe? That feeling came back last week when it was my grandfather's death anniversary.

When I got out of the hospital I saw a lot of new stuff had been built since I'd gone into the hospital. Is it possible to put up an entire building in a couple of weeks? It might be. And where did all these gyms come from? They weren't there before, but here they were. And it made me think that everything was so similar to what I remembered, but it was just different enough, that I might be in the alternate universe next door.

I could have sworn Gramps died in 2016. I have a memory of sitting at his gravestone before Grandma died and looking at the 2016 engraving and thinking, holy shit, Gramps missed a lot of crazy shit. He was around for the beginning, but he had no idea how fucked up things would get.

So my aunt told me she was coming to visit for Grandma's death day, which is Friday, and we discussed Gramps being gone for six years. Six? No, it was seven. He'd been gone since 2016. No, she said, he died in 2017. I was so certain she was wrong that I prepared myself to take a picture of the grave and send it to her.

When I got there, the stone said 2017. How could that be?

Unless I'm in a universe I wasn't born in. Perhaps the one next door. That period of my life was pretty fucked up, after all. I was in the last months of being an alcoholic, and a heavily self-medicated one at that. I'd just lost my second toe. Grandma had just passed. Homelessness loomed in my near future. I also had some painkillers that I washed down with booze on a regular basis. Was it possible that this shit just piled up on top of me and phased me into an alternate universe?

It sounds stupid, but I feel that deep down inside I actually am in another universe right now. It would explain a lot. Then again, for a long time I thought I'd died in January 2020 while going through alcohol withdrawals, and that this world was just a living hell, and I was wrong about that. I mean, I was wrong, right? Right?