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 #964: JUROR # 2

 Have you seen Clint's new movie, Juror #2? WB really fucked him over on this. How much money has Clint made for them over the decades he's been making movies? How many awards do they have because of him? Yet because he's an old man, it's time to push him out the door. Instead of releasing a film by Clint Eastwood, one of the greatest living film directors we have, in theaters, it's been released to streaming instead. It's on Max if you wish to look it up. Yes, it did get, what, 50 theaters? But seriously, for a Clint movie? I don't even think that qualified him for Oscar season.

It's a great movie, and it shows that Clint is at the top of his game still. He might not even have a bottom to his game. The story is of a soon-to-be father getting sucked into jury duty only to discover the man accused of a murder might be innocent because the juror did something stupid when he was drunk many years ago. It starts out like 12 Angry Men, but before long it becomes obvious that it's 12 Angry Men From Hell. (12 From Hell? Like Rob Zombie's 3 From Hell?).

I don't want to go too much into the movie itself, because it's so much better if you go in knowing nothing more than this, but I was talking with my comics guys today, and I brought up this movie. As I talked about it I realized something interesting.

I like Nicholas Hoult. His performances are always top shelf, whether he's a young Beast from the X-Men or Renfield. Even when he's telling us stuff like, "Oh what a day! What a lovely day!" You can tell he's something special.

It occurred to me that, decades from now, Hoult is going to be an old man, possibly a director himself, talking to young film students. And one of them is going to ask about this film. More importantly, they're going to ask him, "What was Clint like?"

There will be a YouTube video. If you're alive at the time, check and see if I'm right.

Because Hoult does know Clint now, and he can tell these kids about what the old master was like. He can tell them about all the legends he worked with, and I know someone's going to ask him about Nic Cage. And that's the nature of history. The youngest one of the group usually tells the next generation (or even the next-next) what the rest of them were like. I'm thinking here of the Clint we remember from Rawhide, from the beginning of his artistic journey. He worked with just about everyone except John Wayne, and that wasn't for lack of trying. There's the famous story about . . . eh, not tonight.

I tried to think of what that would be like for Clint. Who would a film student ask him about now? I'd wager Sergio Leone, but it could very well be Don Siegel. He knew Lee Marvin and Richard Harris. Pat Hingle. John Vernon. Guys like that. As a nonagenarian he is an encyclopedia of Hollywood knowledge that will probably be lost when he dies. Has he done a Masterclass? If not, I hope he does one soon. I hate to think of that knowledge vanishing from the earth, never to be recovered. I feel the same way about another nonagenarian, Mel Brooks. I shudder to think of the world we will lose when they're both no longer among us.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #846: DREAM SCENARIO

 

When I first saw the trailer for Dream Scenario I expected batshit crazy Nic Cage doing all sorts of batshit crazy things. When I saw the movie I was surprised by how sedate it is considering the concept and the star. What threw me off, though, is that a lot of people involved said this film was about cancel culture. When people start bitching about cancel culture, I tune out. They are usually fools, but almost all of them are to the right, politically speaking, and the right is the king of canceling stuff. If you think that's unfair of me to say, ask a drag queen how they feel about it. Or someone who has written a book about their LGBTQ+ experiences. So I prepared myself to not like this movie because of that.

Nic Cage plays an ineffectual man who is more of an observer in his own life than a participant. Things get weird when people start talking about how they've seen him in their dreams. He does nothing. He just observes. At first it's a little odd, but as more and more people say it, the crazier it gets. Yet it never gets into batshit territory until the end, and even then the batshit crazy stuff is NOT coming from Nic Cage.

There's a scene in which a woman who saw Nic Cage in her dreams invites him over so he can reenact his role in her dream. It turns very sexual for him, and he creams his jeans. I think this is the turning point for him, because after this scene people start getting terrified of him. Apparently he's no longer doing nothing in people's dreams. Now he's doing unspeakable things to these people, and when they see him in real life they can't stand to be in the same room with him. It gets to the point where his job is on the line and his family wants nothing to do with him, all because of their dreams.

And that's what, at first, stuck in my craw about the cancel culture explanation. Because there is no such thing. There *is* suffering the consequences of your actions. That is definitely a thing. And it's because of this that the explanation didn't make sense to me. Those who complain about cancel culture always, every single time, miss a crucial detail: the key part of so-called cancel culture is someone *doing something* to get canceled. As far as I could tell in the film, Nic Cage didn't actually do anything. It's the equivalent of your partner getting mad at you for something you did in their dream.

And then comes the ending, and here there be spoilers. It turns out that the batshit crazy thing is that a company has built a device that allows you to go into other peoples' dreams. This is after Nic Cage's experience. They built these things because of him. He can go into other people's dreams naturally. He just wasn't aware of himself doing that. Which means, yes, he actually did do all of those things he was accused of doing in those dreams. Every person he tortured and raped? He really did do those things. He just didn't know he was doing it to people.

That's where the message makes more sense, but the morality of something like this is never explored, which seems like something the filmmakers should want to do. And I think perhaps that's why this movie was released and disappeared so quickly. The next logical step is ignored, so the rest of the movie doesn't really serve much of a purpose.

I don't know much about the director of the film. There's not a lot about him online, so I can only speculate that he made the movie to wallow in self-prescribed cancel culture. It's the only thing that makes sense. Why else did he not want to go any further into the story idea? Because it's a great analogy for someone who was "canceled" and doesn't understand why. People like that aren't typically introspective, so they probably wouldn't care to explore what they think of their own morality versus what their actions reveal about their actual morality. I enjoyed the movie up until that reveal in the end about the device. Now I'm just baffled.

Anyone else see Dream Scenario? Your thoughts?

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #742: EMOTIONAL SCENES IN MOVIES AND TV

 I'm a little short on time tonight. Today was a busy day at work, which means I talked to more people than usual. The more people I talk to, the higher my odds are of talking to difficult people. And I talked to a lot of difficult people today. I'd rather not think about it all that much.

Instead, I have a question. Why are actors in intense emotional scenes always out of breath? I've thought back over all the intense emotional moments in my life, and I was rarely, if ever, out of breath, even if I was in a shouting match with someone. Why do movies and TV shows do this? Are the words not enough? Or is it some kind of a Nic Cage-ish mega-acting thing?

I'll bet you've never noticed this before. No one seems to know what I'm talking about, and when I tried Googling such scenes, the internet was not very cooperative, so I don't have examples. It's probably too late tonight, but the next time you watch something, keep an eye out for these kinds of scenes. And check if the actors are out of breath. I'll bet they are.

This is just something I've been thinking about for a few months, and I can't think why people would do this. Have you ever been panting, out of breath, during such a moment in your life? When you're arguing with someone, do you need to catch your breath like you just ran a mile in five minutes? But you need to keep talking or you'll lose the argument or maybe not prove your point?

Just think about it. Take two morphine pills and call me in the morning.

NIC CAGE: 59

 It's been one year since you said, "Nic Cage can smooch!"

It's been nine years since you were Left Behind.

It's been twelve years since your last ghost ride.

It's been twelve years since you threatened to drink beer out of that dude's skull and then did it.

59, Big Daddy.

Remember, fourteen years ago, when you snorted heroin thinking it was cocaine?

Remember, sixteen years ago, when you graced the silver screen as Fu Manchu?

Remember, seventeen years ago, the horrible incident with the bees?

Remember, nineteen years ago, how you were our National Treasure?

59, Big Daddy.

Whether you're screaming about beating someone until they're pissing blood

or listening to Brian Cox tell you to avoid the deus ex machina

or sacrificing yourself for a Navajo windtalker

or simply bringing out the dead

it's 59, Big Daddy.

From snuff films

to angels

to Alcatraz

to being a Secret Service agent,

Whether you're leaving Las Vegas or honeymooning there,

or whether you're hanging in Red Rock West

or you're busy raising Arizona,

Please stay wild at heart.

It's been fifty-nine years since your debut on earth.

Happy birthday, Nic Cage!

NOW ANNOUCING SHIT POEMS NUMBER TWO!

 SHIT POEMS 

NUMBER 2 

 

 

BY JOHN BRUNI 

 

YES! It is finally upon us! I have just completed SHIT POEMS NUMBER TWO! And if you buy my new book, THE LIFE AND TIMES OF HIERONYMUS ALOYSIS ZIEGE, you will get a copy of this for free! If you've already bought the book, you can send me a copy of the receipt and your mailing address, and I'll send you a copy of this for free. Limited to 30 copies, so first come, first serve. All of these will be signed.

If you haven't bought the book yet, you can do so here. I expect to have a bunch of copies of it myself soon, so you can buy directly from me, and I'll sign them. And if you're in Chicago for Printers Row on Sept. 10-11, I'll have copies of ZIEGE and SHIT POEMS NUMBER TWO.

And yes, there is a bunch more Nic Cage poems in this one, including one for THE UNBEARABLE WEIGHT OF MASSIVE TALENT, which I think you'll like.

You can contact me in the comments below, or if you're on my Twitter or Facebook, you can get me there. Or, if all else fails, you can send an email to tabardinnedgewoodent@yahoo.com.