GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #221: BACHELORS GROVE AND BEING ALONE

Remember when I used to write a bunch of reviews for my blog? When I first started up Tales of Unspeakable Taste I thought it would be funny to do cemetery reviews. Who the fuck does cemetery reviews? I did a few before I got bored with the idea. One of them was on Bachelors Grove. If you want to read it, here it is. It might help you understand where I'm going with this GF tonight.


I was thinking about Bachelors Grove because a friend mentioned it earlier today. I realized that there was one thing I left out of my review. Let's rewind 17 years.


In 1999 I won an honorable mention at a State of Illinois journalism competition sponsored by the Trib. It was for feature story. When I worked for the Elmhurst College Leader it was suggested to me, because I was the fuckin' weirdo on staff, that I should write a feature piece on local haunts. So I did. I'd heard about Bachelors Grove a few times over the years, but I'd never gone down there.


I decided to make the trip for the story. I was floored by how spooky that place is. If you read the review in the link above you'll see a double grave that someone had slightly dug up. Years after my first visit a friend of mine took a picture of that grave. When he developed the film he'd captured what looked like two ghosts. I've seen the picture. I'm an incredibly skeptical guy when it comes to things like this, but I'll be damned if it didn't look like two ghosts. It was hazy, but they had human form, and I could see their eyes. One was obviously male, the other female, which matches up because a man and woman are buried there. I don't know what to make of it. I'm just going to say it's something I don't understand.


And no, the picture no longer exists. My friend lives the life of a transient (he is currently in prison and will not have a home when he's released), and he lost the picture and the negatives. Sorry.


If there is any place that is truly haunted, it's Bachelors Grove. But that's not what I'm here to talk about. There is something I left out of my review, and I only remembered it this morning during the IM conversation with my friend.


On several graves someone had left identical copies of the same letter. I know I kept one, but I can't for the life of me find it now. The gist of it was that the writer was a very lonely woman in her late twenties, a Wiccan, and she was looking for fellow cemetery appreciators to talk with. It wasn't a sexual thing. She just wanted to find a friend because she didn't have any. It was one of the saddest things I'd ever read.


Back then I still had a shell around me. I was anti-social. I wanted to separate myself from the world. The only people I wanted to talk with were people I was already familiar with. I later discovered the joys of alcohol, which cured me of this horrible malady. I never wrote to her email address. Only two years later I would have, and that's a thing I regret to this day. Out of mere curiosity I would have contacted her. I'm sure she's an okay person, so there probably would have been a great friendship in that.


Being lonely and wanting to be lonely is one thing. That's what I wanted back then. But this person was lonely and didn't want to be lonely. That's something else entirely.


We didn't have social media back then. I wonder how she's doing now. I hope she's found friends online. Friends online almost always leads to real life friends. There are about two dozen people I was online friends with before I met them in person this year alone. Social media can be a terrible place (Reddit, I'm looking specifically at you; I've never seen a more merciless pit of vipers). But it can also be wonderful. A radio personality I used to listen to back in the early 2000's was fond of saying that he was a high touch guy, not high tech. He blamed the internet for distancing people from each other. I disagree. While there is an element to that, I find that it's brought me closer to humanity. I wouldn't know a majority of the people I know today without the internet.


I hope that lonely Bachelors Grove woman has discovered that truth, and I hope she has tons of friends. I hope she's no longer lonely.


Our solar system is a big place. Only this planet is inhabited. As far as we can see into the rest of the universe is unpopulated. But the math is against us being alone in existence. Still, that's a lot of space, and that's a lot of loneliness.


Tell your loved ones that you love them. In the end that is all we truly have.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #197: ROY ORBISON'S CRYING

Yeah. I love Roy Orbison. "Crying" is fantastic. You should all listen to it.


My mom and dad were never married. I am a literal bastard. I love mom despite her weaknesses. I love dad because of his weaknesses. I love my second step-mom Ann (she's a pervert like me, which I didn't get when I was a child but love as an adult). But I don't love my stepdad (the asshole my mom married before my half-bros were born).


My dad was laid back. He accepted things. My step-father was a dick. He was a biologist, which should have made him one of the good guys. Nope. He was a piece of shit. He beat the living daylights out of me when I was too young to fight back. He physically abused me for a good portion of my childhood. I used to go to sleep every night trying to think of ways I could murder him so he wouldn't beat me or my mom or my brothers (his sons) to death.


My biological dad would have been content to let me grow as I am. My step-father, on the other hand, wanted me to grow with a healthy fear of him at my fore front. He beat me mercilessly because he hated seeing me cry. If I shed a tear he would ruthlessly beat me until I had no more tears in me.


No matter how badly friends hurt me I never cried because I was trained not to. I was a cold bastard in my youth. A girlfriend fucked me over? Fuck her. She couldn't hurt me because the King Bastard already hurt me worse.


Sometimes I thought that was a blessing. I couldn't cry for a lot of my adulthood because of this lunatic. But he died. I feel bad for my brothers because he was their dad, and I never want to hurt anyone like that. But I was happy he died. That meant he couldn't hurt anyone else.


Brother Alex told me that my step-father died horribly. His organs were so loaded down with booze that the doctors tried to save him, but like the devil he came back and tried to strangle those Samaritans who tried to save him. Anyone who tried to kill someone trying to save them should fuck themselves,


Never mind that. For a lot of my life I couldn't cry because it was beaten out of me. Within the last five years I relearned. I could not have predicted it, but it feels really fucking good. It's cathartic. It gets the misery out of my system.


I love crying. It makes me feel terrible because I was beaten at a young age that crying makes you a pussy. Being a pussy gets you beaten up a lot. My step-father called me a fag because I cried as a child. I believed him for decades,


I'm glad he was wrong. It feels good to unleash my grief. Crying is horrible, but it feels really fucking good afterwards. We should cry more often.


Does anyone I know need to cry? If so, I'm here. Let me know how I can help. I love you all. If I can help, I'm here. Just ask.


Sometimes I fell like I'm all alone. A void surrounds me. I have great friends, but often I feel like I'm alone. When I was a kid I felt like an alien because no one else felt like I did. As an adult I know that others feel the same.I just wish we could all get along despite our differences.


I love you all. Even the assholes who disagree with me. Because we are all in this together.


There is no Heaven. There is no Hell. There is only here and now. We make that happen. Let's make it as nice as we can for as long as we're here. No one else will.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #147: IT'S REASSURING, I GUESS

Yeah, those of you who have been following me recently know I've been going through a fit of depression. I thought I had a handle on it, but a few things happened that threw me off course. I'm trying to figure my shit out, I really am. It helps that I got my new copies of STRIP today, the ones with the awesome Luke Spooner cover.


But then there's the problem of my next book, which just got fucked by the publisher going out of business.


I'm trying to keep a positive front up, but it's hard. It's hard to get attention for this book because it's a romantic crime novel, and there is almost a zero market for that. I wish I could explain more, but that would give away the important parts.


I've been rereading the book for the first time in about two years, getting it ready to be presented to a new publisher, and I dreaded doing this. I was afraid that this book would suck because it's soooooo different from the other shit I write. But as I'm going along, I'm impressed. I love the fuck out of this book, and I don't want it to be forgotten just because the publisher went out of business.


It's ultimately a book about love, and I just don't do that kind of thing. I've taken every relationship I've ever been in and thrown it into this thing. It's painful to reread some of this shit, because it's almost all true. Almost.


I have a plan. Hopefully it will succeed, because I really want you all to read this book. It might be the most honest thing I've ever written, mostly because it's based on my extrapolation of a true story. It's not necessarily a true story, but it's so close it burns like Icarus getting too close to the sun. I hope you get to read it someday.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #61: IDENTITY

A lot of people know me as a bizarro writer. I've written bizarro a few times, but I don't consider myself a bizarro writer. (Maybe this caused me to lose votes for the Wonderland final ballot in regards to TALES OF QUESTIONABLE TASTE. That would suck, but I'm not going to lose too much sleep over it. The fact that anyone read that book is balm in Gilead to me.)


A ton of people know me as a horror writer. I've written horror more times than anything else I've ever written, but I don't consider myself a horror writer.


A smattering of people know me as a crime writer. I've written crime a few times, but I don't consider myself a crime writer.


I consider myself a writer. Period. Anything that pops up in my head? I'll write it. Even if it's a gothic romance. (And believe you me, I have a gothic romance idea in my head. I've had it for at least twenty years. I just don't know how to write it yet.)


I've said it many times: Joe R. Lansdale is my favorite living writer. Notice I didn't clarify the term "writer." The guy has written in so many different genres, I couldn't modify the term if I had ten million years. I wouldn't want to, either. Since I was a kid, I wrote mysteries. Secondary to that were horror stories. After that, I wrote just about everything, including straight-up literary stories that might have caught the attention of the Paris Review, if I'd been more mature at the time.


This isn't to say I'm a snob. I'm far from it. I just don't get the need to classify everything. I get the desire to fit a story into a particular box, at least when it comes to marketing (for one), and finding an audience (for another). But to label the person who created that story? That's insane.


And honestly? Labeling a reader is kind of crazy, too.


I love horror stories. I also love bizarro. I love SF tales and on occasion, I get a kick out of those supposedly straight-up literary works, at least the ones that don't involve a parent dying of cancer just so the protagonist can learn something about him/herself. I would never call myself a horror reader. Or a bizarro reader. Etc. I'm a reader. Period.


It seems kind of silly, but a lot of writers and readers seem bent on making their various genres EXCLUSIVE instead of INCLUSIVE. This baffles me so much, I can't get my head around it. As a writer, I try to see things from EVERYONE's POV, but this one? It's too crazy for me to figure it out, aside from the fact that those who seek exclusivity are those who want to feel like they're in a club that no one else is allowed into. I get people wanting to feel special, but I don't get people wanting to push like-minded people away.


A bizarro writer recently said something reprehensible. I get why this person said it, because I understand a desire to not be pigeonholed. Yet at the same time, he said it in such a way that is inexcusable. It was poorly thought out. He caught a lot of heat, and he should have.


I generally like the guy. I've enjoyed his books. I can't speak for personal involvement, because I personally don't know him. I've never had a single exchange with him. But he went off on a particular genre, saying things that aren't true to make himself seem more important. Again, I get the desire to transcend, but to shit on something for self-important reasons is crazy.


I'm not a horror writer. I'm not a bizarro writer. I'm not a crime writer. But I love horror. I love bizarro. I love crime. And I love everyone who writes and reads in these genres because I want to spread word about the things I enjoy.


When I was in college, I started writing reviews for the local newspaper. Here's the thing, though: I only wrote reviews of things I enjoyed. Why? Because I wanted to spread word about a work of art that turned me on. I didn't want to be the lone voice shouting in the wilderness. I wanted someone to discuss these things with. It took a great deal of stupidity and/or evil to get me to write a bad review. In my two years of writing for a biweekly paper, I wrote only ONE bad review. (I don't have the numbers for after that, but I know that bad reviews from me were very rare in that time.)


I love a lot of things, and I want more people to love those things, so I have something to talk about with them. If a stranger comes up to me and professes a love for those things, I accept them immediately without question. It doesn't matter if they're a different color or GOD FORBID a different sex. I love talking about this shit with EVERYONE.


I guess what I'm trying to say is, I don't get the hate getting thrown about in particular genres. I get the egotistical need to be better than others, but I don't understand why anyone would apply it to readers and writers and other people who experience pop culture. To those who bitch about women "pretending" to be into comics? Fuck you. To those who hate a black Spider-Man? Fuck you. To those who dismiss an entire genre because you think its practitioners are focused on bullshit? Fuck you.


Try to think things through. Try to think about what "the more, the merrier" means. Try to decide if it's better to have a conversation with no one (hint: that sucks) or someone (hint: that's cool).


Let love in, fuckers. Stop being obstinate. You hated on popular authors for stepping up and helping unpopular genres, and for what? Are you so bent on your too-cool-for-the-room persona that you're OK with sacrificing genuine readers for people who will merely reaffirm your so-called independence?


If you really love the genre of your choice, be it horror, bizarro, SF or whatever, you would want to share it with others. When you get down to it, I think our various interests intersect quite nicely. Those of us who genuinely love these things are willing to share. Those of us who aren't? Those of us who think you have to earn love of certain things? Those of us who think you have to exhibit appreciation of certain things from an early age?


I think you're missing the point.