GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #953: A NIGHT LIKE TONIGHT

 The appointment I had with my podiatrist ran a lot later than expected today, so by the time I got home I wasn't really in the mood for anything, especially considering how I'd just spent the last money I'm likely to see in a while.

I slumped down on my bed and glanced out the window to see the sky painted perfectly. It always, by the way, is painted perfectly. But tonight made me think of nights like tonight of old. The sky was dark and gray, compacted like a snow that has lasted overnight, and at the edges it went light, fresh, and I watched as the white turned darker until only a scrim of white remained. It would be blown away like a snow dusting, or it would freeze and become one with the snow by morning.

On a night like tonight I would be getting ready to go out drinking with friends. Depending on which group, I might just toss a shot of whiskey down before heading to the local bar, or I'd have a couple of drinks under my belt before driving out to whatever town we'd be drinking in.

The sky darkened until it all looked compacted and ready to turn to ice for the hungover shuffle the next morning. But as the light vanished entirely, I drew in a breath of that sinus-clearing cold freshness of a winter night, and it was that last breath of fresh air before going into a bar and drinking everything in sight.

There was a freedom in nights like tonight (and mischief) because it was the weekend, and I didn't have to work the next day. I didn't even need to wake up my own bed. And if I had my breakfast whiskey waiting for me? What of it? I had another day to fuck off, too.

Fuck me, I miss weekends.

If I was lucky I'd have a warm hand in mine, the light perfume of a girlfriend on the chill of the night.

I thought back to those nights--O Discordia! gone forever!--because I feel nostalgic when I'm hopeful. I am almost never hopeful, so I never give up the chance to feel a nostalgia honestly found, not the cheap crap they try to sell you in commercials.

My new podiatrist seems very surprised that my foot looks so well. She says I'm healing pretty quickly. There were two drains for the discharge, and one of them is almost completely healed. She said if the other does the same, and everything looks good when the stitches come out, then we can reconstruct my bad foot.

When this year started, I was pretty sure my bad foot was infected. I tried to stay in denial, but the signs built up to the point of no return, so I had to go to the ER. I thought I was taking my last steps as I went from my car to the hospital. I thought my foot would be gone, and I'd be drinking myself to death soon. By now, in fact. I had a good run. Fuck. So it goes. It was so real I saw myself in a vision drinking the cheapest shit I could find directly from the plastic handle, watching as blood seeped through my stump bandages.

What I did *not* expect was to not only still have my foot but also have the possibility of rebuilding it so I wouldn't need a brace anymore and would be able to walk like normal again. My God! I would be able to go for my night walks again! I'd be able to go hiking at forest preserves again! I could even go down that one path in Fullersburg where you eventually see the other path on a cliff above you, where the tree root goes all the way up. I could climb that fucker again! Just like I used to. And I'd get up to the top, push myself to my feet with no problem and brush my hands off. I could go to the second waterfall and the island where no one has been in decades. I wonder if that's still true, but I'd be able to go find out for myself.

I have hope again, and that's something I never expected to feel again. No, I'm never going to go back in time to nights just like tonight. I wouldn't be able to drink in those places or anywhere, anyway. But instead of sitting inside like tonight, I could go out for a long walk, maybe all the way down to Spring, see how the bars are hopping, but maybe staying outside. And then I could walk back, the fresh crisp cold night air in my lungs, and I could feel like I used to in those old days. Not the old days. *Like* the old days.

And that's maybe the best I can get for the rest of my life.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #934: A DAY SOAKED IN YOUTH

 Today was the perfect type of day. A sunny day, but also a cool day. You can feel the chill against you, but you can also feel the heat of sunshine on your face, vanquishing it in an instant. Your body feels flush, luxuriant. It's a day soaked in youth.

It brings me back to the end of high school and the beginning of college. I was in shape and attractive enough that gay dudes would hit on me. I had the world ahead of me. I just had to get through the drudgery of school, and then the real world could begin. Get that backup job, but put everything I've got into writing. If I keep getting rejects, well, then, uh, fuck. I'm just not trying hard enough. So I tried harder. Always harder.

It's the kind of day that I would spend in the wilderness. I walked everywhere back in those days, never taking a ginger step because I had two perfectly good and healthy legs, all ten toes present and accounted for. I walked difficult trails at forest preserves for fun. If I was lucky I had a lady friend with me. It didn't happen often, but it did happen more frequently than my high school self would have thought. A cool and sunny day was a lot more fun when you had a warm hand in yours. Or even better if you found a particularly abandoned stretch of forest . . .

The leaves finally changed color and sacrificed their lives for my aesthetic enjoyment. There was a crunch in my step today as I made my way through the parking lot to get my last haircut until spring. As I walked back to the car I felt the cold breath of our mother on my freshly exposed neck, and I traveled in time once again to those days when the crunch of the leaves beneath your feet was fresh and new. Even though at the ripe old age of nineteen you're an old hand. A very old hand, indeed. I already knew the secrets of the world. What else could I possibly need to know?

Never aware that while innocence might be the winged cherub in midflight, experience is a Neanderthal with a big club. It always lurks in the shadows, waiting for the moment to beat some dark and terrible knowledge into you, something that eradicates some previously cherished piece of piece of you.

I came back home, and just as I was about to go back inside I turned back to the world and felt the warmth, the chill. The stuffy house behind me waited, old and decrepit while the sprightly new day danced in the glow of forgotten ecstasy newly discovered.

To quote a great man, "The world has moved on. O Discordia!"

Nostalgia twists the knife, and you feel an ugly disgust with your past self. That motherfucker'd better appreciate what he has. He has a lot more than he thinks. Knowing, having lived it, that the motherfucker in question did not appreciate what he had. He didn't until he started to lose those things. The second rule of Thermodynamics.

The grief for a world lost to time sinks its fangs in, and you suddenly hate the world around you. You want it to perish because goddammit, this can't be the way things are supposed to be. Nothing works, and everything is getting worse. My sacred world was destroyed to pave the way for this ghastly monstrosity?!?!?!?! And then the manifesto starts writing itself. What I would do if they put me in charge . . .

You can't let that happen. You just have to remember that this is the way of the universe. The kids living today will mourn these days when they are adults. And their kids will do the same, as will their kids and so on. The wheel turns. The pendulum swings. What goes around, comes around. We have so many clichés for this, I think, because we have ALL noticed this trend whether we admit to it or not, and we're trying to make a square peg fit in a round hole in our attempt to make sense of it all.

I went back inside, into the stuffy house and away from the youthful vigor of the day. I wanted to go out for a walk and cursed my bad foot, knowing that my days of even going around the block are over. To quote another great man, "So it goes."

There is one thing I'm truly grateful for: humanity's ability to remember so powerfully. It wasn't a thought or an image or a sound that sent me back in time. It was a *feeling* so perfect it can't ever be replicated by the machines we're desperately training for . . . what, exactly? But I could feel the world so strongly in myself that it overwhelmed me. For a moment while I was crossing the parking lot I saw an old Cadillac, and there was no one around looking at their phones. No other cars. No sounds from the present that would seem alien in the past, and I was there. 1999. A world far from perfect, but a world I at least found acceptable. I didn't feel torn apart by everything like I do today. My mind has never been a peaceful place, but there were times when it was a lot less of a storm. The waters were manageable.

But we have those memories, and we have ways to be teleported to them. And that is one of my favorite parts about being alive.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #807: STOLEN

 Its been unseasonably warm lately, but last week there was one night in particular when the temperature was perfect.

It's hard to describe. That night had a certain quality to the air, and it reminded me of when I was young and getting ready to leave home for the evening. There would be adventures, and you really wouldn't know what you'd get up to, just that it was going to be awesome.

A chill to the night air. Nothing excessive. Just slight. It's a spring night stolen from winter. You might not even need a jacket. There are friends waiting at a house party or a bar, or we're just chilling somewhere. Whatever it may be, adventure is in the air.

But I'm 45 now. Adventure still has its allure, but I just don't have the energy to take it on. I felt sad when I realized that I wasn't going out last week, that I was just going to go home and relax and wait for the next day. Because it feels like a missed opportunity. To be young again, to go on said adventures. When those times end, that's when you know you're getting old.

The world has moved on. So have I. O Discordia!

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #700: WALTER BISHOP IN CHINATOWN

 There's an episode of Fringe in which Walter Bishop gets lost in Chinatown. Remember, when we first met him, he was on a psych ward and had been for almost two decades. Now he's been out for a while, but people have to keep a close watch on him because, well, he's an old man with the sensibilities of a child. He yearns for more freedom, but he just can't have it. So in this episode he defiantly goes to Chinatown on his own, and sure enough, he gets lost. He's stranded without any hopes of contacting his son Peter or the rest of his Fringe Division team. He's a brilliant scientist who figured out how to go to a parallel universe, but when it comes to more mundane things? He doesn't have a good grip on things. He's practically helpless.

It reminded me of Gramps from a long time ago. Back then he worked at Dulles Cleaners in Elmhurst. The store he used to work at is no longer there. I think the flagship still is, but I'm too lazy to look it up now. Regardless, from my house to Dulles is a five minute drive, and that's allowing for a lot to go wrong. It's about a mile and would take me--in my prime--about 30-45 minutes to get there by foot.

Gramps needed a ride to work, and I told him I would give it to him when I got back from running errands. He expressed some concern that I would not be back in time, and I told him that would be no problem. I'm usually very punctual. When I'm hanging out with friends, I usually arrive to the minute I say I'm going to be there. When it's something else, like work or a signing or some kind of event, I'm almost always early (except for Printers Row, but that's a story for another day).

I ran my errands, but I did run a little later than I expected. I told Gramps I would be there at 4:50 pm, and he had to be at work by 5. I said this expecting to be done with everything by 4:30, but like I said, I ran a little late. I still made it back at 4:49. I honked the horn. Gramps didn't come out. The clock switched to 4:51, and I went inside to find out what's going on.

Gramps wasn't there. I searched around until I found Grandma in the basement with the laundry. She said that Gramps left a half an hour ago ON FOOT to go to work. That stubborn old man guessed I wouldn't be there on time. I asked her why she didn't stop him, but I needn't have.

Angry, I got back in my car and sped down the road, keeping an eye out. I found Gramps about three-quarters of the way, and he was looking rough. By that point in life he was already bowlegged, and he struggled to keep moving forward. It was more of a hobble than a walk. There was no way he would have made it.

I pulled over and unlocked the door, pushing it open and shouted to get his attention. When he saw it was me, he got in the car, and I drove him the rest of the way. I was so fucking angry with him that I let him have it with both barrels. Not a second went by without me yelling at him, not even when I pulled into the lot by the side of Dulles. I sat there for a little while longer, because I had another couple of minutes to rant at him. I forget how much time has passed, but he was probably in his early eighties at the time. How could he think that he could have walked all that distance when he had difficulty going up and down stairs? He could have been hurt. What if I didn't see him? What if he fell down and had to be brought to a hospital? What if . . . and so on. I can still feel the heat of my anger right now as I type this out.

And he sat there and took it without a single fucking word. Finally, when I ran out of steam and it was 4:58, he said, "I'm sorry, Dodge. I am. But I have to go into work now."

And so he went. I was his ride home that night, and I spent a lot of my time thinking about other angry things to say to him, but when I picked him up we didn't say anything.

And now here I am, a few weeks from turning 45, and I understand why he did it. No one ever wants to admit that their best days are behind them. Someone who used to walk miles and miles all the time doesn't want to get used to the fact that they can't do that anymore. No one wants to admit to themselves that age is getting the better of them. That they can't do the things they used to. That youth is gone and all that remains is the time you have left with your own ever-increasing decrepitude and how long that takes to wear you down to the pencil nub they'll put in the ground at the end of your life.

Because I feel that now, and I'm only half the age Gramps was when he went out for his walk. I, too, used to walk a lot. At least a mile a night. Just for the fun of it. I can't do that anymore because of my bad foot. My joints are going bad on me. Not too long ago I thought I had rheumatoid arthritis, but it turned out to be trigger finger instead. Still, it's pretty debilitating. I'm going under the knife for one of my hands soon, and I've been advised that it will be out of commission for a while so it can heal. My right hand. The one I write with. One of the hands I need to type with. I thought about just ignoring the doctor's warning, but then I thought of Gramps on his way to Dulles. Walter Bishop lost in Chinatown.

And I thought about the years ahead of me. What happens if my bad foot needs to be amputated? What if I lose the other one, too? What if my hands go so bad on me that I can't just charge forward, doing whatever I want to do anyway? Who is going to do these things for me?

I don't want to admit that one day, if I live long enough, I'm going to need someone to take care of me because this getting old thing doesn't show any signs of stopping. And I don't want to give up and sit in bed and wait for the end to come. I want to walk to fucking Dulles, for Christ's sake!

But I can't. The world has moved on and will always move on. I, too, have moved on.

O Discordia!

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #490: THE SINS OF OUR FATHERS

 

I forgot to tell you all that while I was still recovering from my amputation, I read the final piece of fiction in the Expanse series. Everything that follows (including the link I'm about to post) contains spoilers. If you are interested in reading the series, skip tonight's GF.

Remember when I wrote this? I only knew there was one novella left to tell for The Expanse, and I speculated that it would tell us the ending of Filip's story. Surprise! I was right. I kinda hoped that it would reunite him with his mother so she would know that she didn't actually kill him when she killed his father. That was a bit optimistic for me and the series, anyway.

When the ring space was sealed off from humanity, Filip was working in a different solar system and got stranded there, living under his mother's last name instead of his father's. Being the son of a crazed fascist (maybe an oxymoron there) is a pretty fucked up thing to live through, especially when you realize that your father is a lunatic. He works at surviving with his team on this distant planet so far from the Belt that the Enterprise would probably take a long time getting him back even at warp nine.

So now he's helping build a new civilization because everyone has (rightfully) decided that they will never go home again. This is home now. And everything seems to be going as well as it could given the circumstances until a strong charismatic man starts taking power little by little until it's starting to look like a lot. Filip, being his father's son, is very familiar with what is about to happen if he doesn't step in and handle it. And he handles it in a big fuckin' way.

He becomes the colony's first murderer.

Had he still been in the frame of mind he'd been in when murdering thousands in the name of the Free Navy, he probably would have stepped in to fill the sudden power vacuum. He doesn't. The others don't know quite what to do with him. Should they kill him? Did they have the resources to imprison him for life? One way or the other, he doesn't care. He knows what he did and what he deserves, and he's willing to take his punishment. But he really, really had to kill that guy. That guy definitely had it coming.

They choose to exile him, and the end of The Expanse shows us Naomi Nagata's son heading out on his own in a strange new world with only the fact that he has easy access to water to comfort him. Well, that and the fact that gravity here is almost like home, so his Belter body won't go into convulsions and kill him.

Wow. There's only one thing I can say to that.

O Discordia!

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #437: THE EXPANSE AND THE DARK TOWER

 

There is a sensation that goes beyond melancholy and doom and the feeling of a world that has moved on. The perfect phrase comes from the final book of The Dark Tower: "O Discordia!" You've seen me use that one before, but I'm going to explore it a bit deeper now, especially how it relates to The Expanse book series.

There will be spoilers for that one ahead, so if you just started the first book or are planning to, or you're at book six, maybe skip this one.

I was reluctant to check out The Expanse TV show for one reason and one reason alone: everyone kept saying it was the Game of Thrones of space. I hate it when people describe something as "the Game of Thrones of (whatever)." It's never a good description, and nothing ever lives up to it. I usually skip everything people describe as that. But! In this case, a lot of people I respected said that it was one of the best SF TV shows ever. For the first three seasons, I agreed that it was the best SF TV series not called Stargate SG-1. By season four? I decided that they were right. It really is the best. And it is pretty much the Game of Thrones of space. There are just fewer people calling each other a cunt. (It probably helps that the authors are friends with GRRM.)

So I got into the books, and as with most shows and movies, the books are better. My favorite of them was Cibola Burn, which was season 4 of the show. It made me very happy. A space western that feels like it could actually happen. And there's no rescue from guys like Murtry and his RCE because what can you do? Report them to earth? How long will that take? The message first has to travel through the Ilus ring gate, then through the Sol ring gate, then through all the space between Uranus to earth. Then the UN has to figure out what to do about the situation before they send help. To Uranus and the Sol gate. To the Ilus gate. Yeah, we're talking months, maybe even a year. Maybe more. If you thought police arriving late for a 911 call was bad, you're not even close to the reality of the Ilus situation. So yeah, I fucking loved it.

And then came Tiamat's Wrath, which is hands down the best so far. I'm almost done with Leviathan Falls, so I can't say for sure, but Tiamat's Wrath is an absolute heartbreaker of a book, and it's the pinnacle of the feeling of O Discordia for me.

Just think. The first thing it greets us with is Avasarala's death and Laconia's hijacking of her funeral. Does her beloved earth get to host it? To even bury her body? Nope. Laconia fucks that all up, and it's hosted on Laconia, the heart of the tyrannical Laconian Empire.

James Holden, now a lot older than when we met him, has been Laconia's prisoner for years since the end of book seven. He's more or less treated like a dancing bear, like the Russians used to have bears in their court with their teeth and claws removed. Because why not hang out with a fucking bear? When I first read the back of the book, it mentions him as "Mephistophelian" which I truly didn't understand until his conversation with Elvi and Fayez. I didn't get it because I never thought Holden was capable of it. The morals he used to have before his captivity apparently changed. Not entirely, but still. Considering what he's been throughout the series, he's so moral he was reckless with it. Remember the Cant?

Meanwhile, Naomi Nagata has to survive without her beloved for years. Imagine the person you love the most in the world. Now imagine that this person was taken away from you for years. So many years that you figure that you'll never see that person again. She's given up on ever seeing Holden again, and she's grieving his loss.

Alex Kamal is bittersweet. He's now a father, and that makes him so happy that not even divorcing that kid's mom can make him feel bad. But he's just lost his best friend. Bobbie Draper died the way she probably would have preferred: a violent and victorious explosion. But she's still gone.

And then there's my favorite character, Amos Burton. When he was growing up as a criminal and child prostitute in the worst parts of Baltimore, back when he was still Timothy, I'll bet he never thought he'd wind up being a part of the biggest conflict humanity has ever faced. He certainly didn't expect to be undercover on Laconia for years, sitting on a pocket nuke, waiting for the chance to blow up the bad guys after trying to rescue Holden. He probably didn't expect to befriend the daughter of Laconia's god-emperor and her dog. And there's no way he would have expected his life to end at the hands of an authoritarian military on a planet so far from home that it hadn't even been known to the world he'd come from, and that he would be calling himself Timothy again would have blown his mind.

And even if he could have guessed any of those things, it's impossible to believe that he would have known what the "strange dogs" would do to him after his death.

It is a stark book. All you can feel is hopelessness. Despair. O Discordia!

And it's good to feel a lot of that in Leviathan Falls. I've reached a turning point where the feeling has shifted, but until that it still feels stark, especially when Tanaka faces off against Holden, Duarte's daughter and her dog and the thing that used to be Amos and might actually still be him. He has the same attitude as Amos. The same speech patterns. The same way of looking at life. But then there are his pitch black eyes, his off color skin and the way he sometimes pauses before saying something. But it's probably still him, right? Even after he's killed again by Tanaka, right?

I'm going to be sad when I read the last sentence of this one. There's going to be another novella after it, but when the main story is done? I'll miss it. It's been one of the greatest joys of the last few years for me.

And goddammit! How do Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham manage that feeling? If I could write what I call "O Discordia," I'd be a much happier writer. I feel so jealous right now. Do you know how rare that is for me?

(And yes. I took a break from the cannabis in favor of drink tonight. That's probably why this is so long, and it makes more sense than my high GF columns.)

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #363: THE DOOM THAT CAME TO MY GARAGE

 Yeah, my garage has been crumbling for quite some time. It sucks, because I loved hanging out back there when I was a kid. Sometimes I'd jump into one of the cars and pretend we were on a cop chase. It was a kinda-sorta clubhouse back then. It's the last original garage on my block. I loved fiddling around with the tools back there, in particular the shovel and the pitchfork and the axe.

(He said ominously.)

But the gutters have fallen off. The roof has a bunch of holes in it. Birds have nested in the mechanical garage opener, making it useless. The concrete floor is crumbling. One of the windows is broken out. Many animals have been hiding out in the junk back there. It's falling down on its own, but the City of Elmhurst, ever eager to get rid of an eyesore in the neighborhood, is tearing it down for free tomorrow. I'm really going to miss it. Sometimes I thought maybe we could convert it to a guest house like some rich people have on their property. It would be more like a cabin in the sense of the frontier world, but what the hell.

So I've been going through the garage in the hopes of finding stuff that I could salvage. I can't do that kind of thing very well anymore. I have one bad leg, the other isn't much better and because of my current tennis elbow I'm stuck with one good limb.

As you can imagine, I had to take a lot of breaks just to relax and get my strength up. As I cast my gaze about the backyard I realized that I hadn't been back here much of late. It's really a nice place to relax. The people who owned the place before used it as a garden, so it's pretty wild back there. I don't tend to it, so it grows everywhere. There are also a few atavistic things that grow back there, like the occasional corn stalk or a small tree. It's beautiful.

I sat and luxuriated in it, and I don't care if my garage is an eyesore, it looks perfect back there. It should be in a horror movie, it's that grim and beautiful.

And tomorrow I get to watch as it gets torn down. Nothing will go up in its place. It will just be a parking spot, nothing more.

And that saddens me.

UPDATE: For those who don't know, I was going to post this last night, but I discovered I'd written one of these the night previous and got too high to post that one. 

I woke up this morning, thinking it would be the last time I would look out my bedroom window at the garage. I was sorta right. The workers were about five hours late, so they quit halfway through the job today. They emptied the garage out on the inside and ripped off the roof. There are three walls remaining, so it looks more like a ghost of its former self. Perhaps a bombed out European building in the waning days of WWII. I walked in there, shocked by how much light shone down on me. I stood at the broken out window directly into my garden of surprises for the first time since I was a kid.

And the last time ever.

The workers will return tomorrow while I'm at work. I will come home to an empty stone slab where my garage used to be.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #241: THE GHOSTS OF CHRISTMAS PAST

When I was a kid, and I mean a teeny-tiny kid, my family was fairly well off. Upper middle class in the early 'Eighties. I'd place us somewhere in the upper lower class now. I have a roof over my head, but it's slowly falling apart (every time it rains, I get nervous because my ceiling has a bunch of soft spots which I have covered with duct tape). My electrical system is breaking down. I can't afford to repair the broken garage door. I can't even fix the plumbing. But back then times were different. Back then we could actually have those awesome Christmas parties like you see only in movies these days. We would not have looked out of place at Kevin McCallister's house.


One of our traditions was for my grandfather to break out the projector and play films of Christmases past, when it was just him, Grandma, my mom and my aunt. Some of these 8 mm films were shot in Arizona, where they all lived for a while, but quite a few were shot around Chicago and then in Elmhurst, at the home we inhabited at the time. It was a grand place. Two stories, an attic, a basement and a backyard big enough to play baseball in. It was weird seeing my mom as a kid and teenager. Parents never grew up. They were born fully grown, and they had full dominion over their kids. The very idea that my grandfather wanted to keep track of these memories was kind of odd, too. He only ever kept track of Christmas. Never any other moments. That was left up to Grandma and a Kodiak camera. Or sometimes a Polaroid. Back then she smoked Golden Lights. She had a leather pouch for her cigarettes and her lighter. She hasn't smoked in decades, which makes this fact even crazier.


Christmas belonged to Gramps, though. He relished recording every moment with his video camera. This tradition continued with my arrival on the scene, as well as my cousin's birth. When Gramps showed those on this roll-down screen, it always fascinated us. That's footage of us when we didn't even know who we were! There was a kind of magic to that.


After that, Gramps, wearing his rainbow colored shirt that said, over and over, WORLD'S GREATEST GRANDPA, would screen a few other short films. We had PUSS-N-BOOTS and a couple of Three Stooges shorts. It was great. I remember laughing at each reel as if it was the first time I'd ever seen it.


About a decade or so ago, I was scrounging around in the basement when I uncovered not just the old reels of film, but also the projector. The screen was nowhere to be found, unfortunately, but we had a white wall and plenty of space to watch. First the ones of my mom and aunt in their childhood, whether under the hot Arizona sun or in the frosty wasteland of Chicago. Then out to the suburbs. To them growing up. To me and my cousin as children. Building snowmen. Unwrapping presents. It was a window in time.


And then the projector melted down the film, rendering the machine unusable. It was nice to get that one last look into a past that will be forgotten when I'm no longer here. When my cousin is no longer here.


I spent Christmas today with the few remaining. My cousin lives off in Colorado now, so it was Gramps, Grandma, my aunt and another cousin. No one recorded anything. But I remember talking with my grandfather, and I have a sneaking suspicion this is his last Christmas. He can't walk anymore. He's confined to the living room, where he spends his time watching TV and doing not much else. He no longer shaves or cuts his hair. And he's been like that so long that he no longer knows the layout of his own home. He's forgotten quite a lot. He still knows my name, but he's uncertain about a lot of other stuff.


Maybe someday I can figure out a way to clean out that burnt film, maybe replace the bulb, if they make 'em anymore. Maybe just put the old reels on DVD, or something. In my youth I was convinced that I was going to die at the age of 40. That's an article for another day. I've recently decided that I hope I can squeeze out at least another decade. Maybe two. But no more than that. Getting old sucks. I've seen it first hand. My grandfather will be 90 in a few weeks. I don't ever want to reach that age.


But I keep thinking back to the time of those 8 mm reels, and I miss it. That was before I had any brothers, meaning that was before my mom met the creature who--eh, forget it. I've gone on about that before. Suffice it to say, the John Bruni in those films was someone who had yet to get the shit kicked out of him by the world, and everyone around him was young and alive and full of hope.


To quote a great series of books, "O, Discordia!"