GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1041: RASPUTIN

 This song recently came on after one of my Spotify playlists ended, and it's been stuck in my head ever since. It's so deep in there that when I wake up every day, it's already roaring through my synapses. I wondered, what would Mom think of this song? She liked some of my heavier music, so she might have enjoyed this, especially if she knew the subject matter. It hit me then.

I often say that my love of history goes back to when my grandmother on my dad's side got me a book called Don't Know Much About History by Kenneth C. Davis, and I learned about all the American propaganda I'd been taught at school. I wanted to know what really happened (ah, sweet naivete!), and I have never been bored by it. But my interest went back beyond even that.

(In a perverse twist of fate, it was also school that taught me to distrust that American propaganda. Mr. Torney's US History class at York introduced me to George Orwell and gave me most of the tools I'd need to ferret out bullshit wherever it reigned supreme.)

Because Mom was big into history, and I got an earful of it when I was a li'l kid. Her favorite topic was JFK and Jackie, but her second favorite was Nicholas and Alexandra. Which is why "Rasputin" reminded me of this. It was like opening a secret portal into the past for a very brief memory. Sitting in my mom's Mustang, driving along with the radio on, the wind whipping through the windows, a McDonald's drink in the cupholder clipped to the rubber in the window. She told me the story of Rasputin. She always knew my interests went dark, and she correctly guessed that was the part of the story I'd be interested in.

She did not, by the way, tell me about the alleged story about Rasputin's cock (which is a great name for a rock band, as Dave Barry might say). I found that out when I was researching the black market for famous body parts. That story turned into "A Market for All Things," which was originally published in Strange Sex 3 but is currently available in Dong of Frankenstein and Other Pornos You Can't Jerk It To, should you decide to give it a shot. In case you were wondering, Napoleon's dick suffered much the same fate.*

You can take that one to bed with you. Goodnight, fuckers.

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*Fine, fine. Allegedly. For Pete's sake. But, ah, check it out.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #608: ALL IT TAKES IS A GOOD TEACHER

 Up until high school I was a pretty straight forward young lad. I trusted (more or less) in authority and thought that the police had our best interests at heart even though I'd already had a pretty rough run in with them in junior high. And then I took Mr. Torney's social studies class in high school.

Mr. Torney had a bad rap around the school because if you fell asleep in his class he would shoot you with a Super Soaker. I never fell asleep in any class, so that was never an issue for me. I wound up in his classroom for the first time and saw that he was probably insane due to the decor. Most teachers went to various other classrooms to teach, but his classroom was clearly HIS. Hanging above his desk was a mannequin head wearing a Nixon mask with a bird perched on its forehead. And that was just the beginning. He had a lot of crazy stuff on the walls, but the one that drew my attention was a poster of an authority figure that said BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING.

I soon learned that this was a reference to 1984 by George Orwell, which I read for his class as well as Animal Farm. The more I learned in his class, the more I realized that authority figures might not be authority figures. The older I get? The more I am certain that they're no real authority.

I learned not to trust politicians from Mr. Torney. I learned not to trust the government from him. And I learned not to trust the police from him.

It was an eye-opening experience, taking that class. It taught me that not everything is what it seems, and if you dig deep enough you'll find people's true motives. Sometimes the government is right. A lot of times they're not. It's on a case by case basis, really.

But I think about the police mostly. For a while I even believed that bad apples theory, that when you hear about a cop stepping out of his (almost always his) lane, he's an exception, not the rule. But nope, when you realize that they're all of a brotherhood, that they watch each others backs, that even the so-called good apples will keep their mouths shut to protect the bad apples, you realize that they're all corrupt. And when Uvalde happened, I discovered that they're all cowards, too. Not a single one of them has any kind of courage. Their loyalty belongs only to themselves. No exceptions.

So yeah. I'm all in favor of disbanding the motherfuckers. Replace them with people who are courageous. Who have a loyalty to preserving the peace instead of to themselves. Who don't panic when confronted with a difficult situation. Who, instead of callously murdering people, they try to find peaceful solutions when possible. I get it if a guy is waving a machine gun that he's not supposed to have at the cops. They can shoot that guy. But a bunch of cops piling up on one person who isn't even armed? To the point where they actually KILL that person? I don't care if they thought that person was Satan himself, they don't get to kill unarmed people, no matter how much it will get their dicks hard. And killing people gets a lot of cops' dicks hard.

Wow. That got a little out of hand. I just wanted to talk about learning to distrust authority. But I stand by everything I said here.