GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #604: FUCK IT

Child of Rage by Jim Thompson

 

A while back--A LONG WHILE BACK--I wrote about how I was saving Child of Rage by Jim Thompson as the last book I will ever read. Now that I'm older (and possibly wiser) I think maybe I've made a terrible mistake. And according to that old GF column I knew exactly why it was a terrible mistake, and I decided to go ahead and make it anyway.

Well. Fuck it.

Considering all the shit I've been through, there is no way to guarantee that I would know when I was dying. I mean, I've been there before. I survived one death sentence, and I've survived a dozen brushes with death. I could have gone at any moment, and I would have not gotten to Child of Rage. I don't know how I'll die. Right now I'm not certain that I will die. Surviving all the crazy shit I have? It's a shocker that I still walk amongst you. Yet here I am. Maybe the world can't kill me? Although for a while I thought that I had died, and that I was living in the afterlife. 

(If you missed it, when I got out of the hospital in 2020 after going through king hell alcohol withdrawals, I thought I might have died in the hospital and that I was going through the motions of a very boring and annoying afterlife.)

I'm fairly certain that when my time comes, it will be a heart attack. It's the way I'd prefer to go. I don't want to linger for months on end. I don't want to be a burden to others. I don't want to suffer. A heart attack puts you down nice and quick, and you don't have to deal with long goodbyes. So if I'm right, I'll never read this book. What am I going to do, stop a heart attack so I can read a novel?

And remember, I wondered if it was possible that the book was bad. Thompson wrote a lot of great books, but there were a few stinkers in there. I'd feel like a dumbass if I saved this as my last book and it turned out to be shit.

So fuck it. I'm reading Child of Rage now. Watch, it turns out to be Thompson's best book and definitely worth saving it for last. Ah well. We'll find out soon.

I may have said this before, but I'll say it again. Once upon a time I drank a half a fifth of whiskey and wrote a story called "If I Drank as Much as Hemingway." It was a very funny and spot on parody. Then I finished the bottle and wrote "If I Drank as Much as Faulkner." It was funny, but it was also a mess. I told myself that one day I'd drink two fifths and write "If I Drank as Much as Jim Thompson." But I'm pretty sure that would have killed me even at the heights of my boozehound powers. Jim Thompson was a rare alcoholic. He made it to his seventies, boozing at full force. He literally died from drink. So yeah, maybe it was a good idea that I never did that one.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #440: HAVING A BAD LEG SUCKS BALLS, BUT IT COULD BE WORSE

 Today there was a fire alarm at work. Our office is on the third floor of the building, and you know what that means. Yeah, I had to go down three flights of stairs in order to comply with that alarm. In my experience, we don't do drills. There is too much money that we'd lose if we did. So I was fairly certain this was for real, and for a moment I almost hesitated, thinking, "Fuck it. I'm not going down. I guess I'll burn."

To our VP's credit, he joked at first. "Who wanted a break so bad?" he asked. But when people weren't going fast enough to suit him, he said, "I'm the last one out. Let's go!"

I struggled down the steps and told people to go around me. I know my leg's bad. I didn't want to back everyone up. At the bottom my leg felt like it was on fire. I went out to my car to collapse in the passenger seat for a while. The firetrucks showed up, and after a while, it was determined that nothing happened. Except someone pulled the alarm lever. I used my cane to get back upstairs and spent some time hyperventilating in the kitchen, waiting to see if I might have a heart attack.

I swear, if it was some jackass just being a dick . . .

And if I get my foot cut off because of this . . .

But it could have been worse. What if someone in a wheelchair worked in the office with us? What would that person have done? If that was me, I'd be fucking psychotic right now.

It reminded me of something from a few years back. This was when I'd first injured the foot, and I figured that it would heal and I'd be able to get back to my life as usual (silly me). I had to get around on crutches. And this is one of the things my old pharmacy fucked up that CVS does well. The old pharmacy had a handicapped space, but they didn't have a dip in the curb. I was fresh from the hospital, on crutches for the first time since I was in fifth grade, learning to use them all over again. I thought it would be a breeze. Like riding a bike. But it was a lot harder than I thought.

So I managed to get up on the walk, and that was when I noticed for the first time there isn't that dip I just mentioned. I wondered what it would be like to be in a wheelchair and need to get in here. I hoped I never had to find out.

I had to wait for my meds. That was fine. They were just prescribed. So I found a chair and waited, and wouldn't you know it? A guy in a wheelchair went past me to the counter. He needed to wait for his meds, too, and he saw me in a similar predicament. We talked for a while, and I mentioned the lack of a dip in the curb, asking him how he'd gotten up it.

"There is a dip," he said. "It's just all the way down that way." Pointing down the way toward a cafe and a dentist (who is actually now my dentist). The point being, it was so far away from the handicapped space it was barely worth the point of putting it there.

Not enough people think of this shit. I remember when America started making places handicapped accessible, and people started telling jokes about it. Kind of like when we decided to make seat belts mandatory. The resistance to change is strong, even if that change has got nothing to do with that.

That's an awful way to live, which is why I groan every time I hear some dipshit complaining about so-called "woke culture," which doesn't really exist.

I'm stopping now because I promised myself no tangents tonight. Last night got out of control. Believe it or not, I actually cut a tangent from last night. It--nope. I'm stopping.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #235: #VOTEBRUNIDANGER2016

For my entire life I have been unsettled by our government and the way it is run. Our system is fucked. It's unfair. It's garbage. Long time readers will remember this from years ago, when I complained about how rich white men make all the decisions in this country, and that's the way our system was designed from way back when, back when democracy meant practically nothing.


For the most part I still believe this. Our whole system, which is fucking ancient, needs to be retooled. This garbage makes no sense now. BUT! I've done a lot of thinking about this, and it sucks. I might have been wrong back then. Not about the rich white men doing shit. That's always been the case. No, I mean that maybe I was wrong about going with the popular vote.


In my youthful naivety I forgot about one thing: human beings are pieces of shit. The public should not be allowed to make important decisions. They are guided by one thing and one thing only: ME. Fuck everyone else. It's ME I'm concerned with. Fair enough. We all want to preserve our own way of life. But human beings, for the most part, can't be bothered with other ways of life. We're tribal. If something falls outside of our belief system we feel a moral obligation to fuck it to death with our mind dicks.


I feel more impotent than I've ever felt in my entire life. There's no sane way out of this. We can let America's id run rampant and get Trump into office, or we can let our superego let Clinton win the White House. But there's no way to make us all happy.


Fuck Trump. Fuck Clinton. Fuck all these other assholes who will never win but are still somehow on the ballot. Fuck this country. We need something new. Something different.


Do you realize how insane this year has been? This election? If it had happened 50 years ago, everyone would have been executed for the best of our nation. Trump and Clinton are sick dogs that need to be put down so we can actually do something creative with our country.


I'd say to vote for me and Danger Slater, but even that's a joke. I wouldn't know what to do with this shit show that 2016 is. But what the hell? If I was president I might sell more books. Same for Danger, who is an amazing writer. The dude is unstoppable.


Yeah, it would be funny. But it would be pointless. Fuck everybody.


What follows is a quote from the smartest person on Twitter, Neil deGrasse Tyson. I take a lot of comfort in this quote, and I probably shouldn't. I love life, and I love our potential, but a philosophy professor once told me that he hates the word "potential." He said, holding his empty hand aloft, "Right now I'm holding a potential sandwich."


True. Enjoy the following words from a great astrophysicist. And try not to lose too much sleep. What we do here is meaningless. Our only purpose is to make life easier for each other. Don't hate. Love. In the end we're all dead. Let's make this journey as pleasant as possible. Fuckers.


In 5-billion yrs the Sun will expand & engulf our orbit as the charred ember that was once Earth vaporizes. Have a nice day.