GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #713: MY SHAME

 Remember at the beginning of this year, when I tallied up all the books I read in 2022, how horrified and ashamed I was at that low number? It really stuck in my craw because I just hit that number for 2023, and we still have a lot of year left.

Admittedly, I was going through some shit last year. My grandma died. I lost another toe. I had to go to detox. I was in and out of the hospital a ridiculous amount of time. And then there was the constant fear of homelessness. I'm still kind of surprised we haven't gotten our notice to leave the house.

But 2020 might have been worse. I went through a lot of fucked up shit then, and I still didn't have such a low number of books read that year. What the fuck?

(Well, now that I think on it, I didn't have a job that year, so I did have more time than usual on my hands, and I didn't use it *all* for drinking. Just *most* of it.)

Never again. That's my promise now, and I've made good on it this year.

How many books is that? A few people asked me that in January, and I didn't want to answer them because I was ashamed of that low number, but I guess I'll state it now for the record.

That number of books is . . .

Whoo-boy. This is tough. Maybe I should have a Wild Turkey 101 straight up for enough courage to say this.

Okay, here we go. I only read . . .

*blows out air* Is this really that hard? I guess so. Fuck. Let's rush through it.

I ONLY READ FORTY-FUCKING-FOUR BOOKS LAST YEAR.

There, I said it. Now you know why I could barely look myself in the mirror a few months back. I have never in my entire life read less than 100 books in any given year (discounting, of course, the three years I could not read or read well).

So I'm still a little behind. If the trend continues, I expect to hit 98 books by December 31. So I have to pick up the pace.

Wish me luck.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #438: MY READING LIST

 So I'm perpetually ten years behind on my reading list, and I'm slipping even further back. Books that had just been released when I added them were published in 2009 now. It's irritating, but there's nothing I can do about, and like the fucking idiot that I am, I keep buying more and more books. I know for a fact that I'm not going to live long enough to get to them all, and it's probably just going to be a hassle for my relatives when I die.

But I can't help myself.

Not too long ago I found myself looking at that reading list. When I finish a book, I put a dot next to it. I have three notebooks filled with a book on each line. The first notebook is done. I'm halfway through the second. And then I thought that once upon a time this list was only one notebook long. In fact, once upon a time that list was one page long.

And that led me to another strange thought. Once upon a time I didn't have a reading list. I just let chaos guide me. I'd go to the library and pick whatever I wanted to read next. Thinking about the lack of a plan back then shocks me. It's very unlike me. But at the same time, I kinda miss the freedom of something like that. Back when I first started putting this reading list together I fantasized about finishing it and then going back to what I did before: going to the library and letting chaos guide my hand.

That's never going to happen again. Probably. The odds are staggeringly against me on this one. Then again, I figured I'd be dead by now. Death has come for me a few times now, and he always goes away without me. Sometimes he takes pieces of me, like my gall bladder and my toe, but he hasn't gotten the whole package yet. His John Bruni collection is incomplete. It's gotten to the point where sometimes I have this irrational thought that I might not actually die. That I might live until the heat death of the sun. I know that's stupid, but when you've beaten death like I have, it makes you kinda cocky, and we all know what Han Solo said about that.

But what if I do finish the list? What if I got my book habit under control and stopped buying books whenever I felt like it? Just stick to the new releases of a handful of authors. What then?

Just kidding. That's never going to happen. The only reason I didn't buy a book yesterday was because I'm broke. And I spent some time with a friend getting drunk and seeing Ghostbusters: Afterlife. By the time I got home, I was pretty out of it, hence the lack of a GF column last night. I just wanted to watch TV and pass out, which is exactly what I did.

And I'm going to bed now. Goodnight, fuckers.

HEY FUCKERS #15: SURREPTITIOUS READING

From Lamebook

I love Lamebook, but at the same time, I'm glad no one I know has been posted there. I think that shows I have great taste in friends. Anyway, I was hanging around Lamebook when I found this post of a guy who just couldn't wait to get home to watch some porn. He thought he was being clever by turning his device away from everyone, not realizing that the window would show the reflection of what he's watching. I thought, "What a stupid thing to do. Just wait until you're in the privacy of your own home before you watch people fucking." And then I realized that I was kinda-sorta guilty of the same thing back in November.


I'd gone out to Vegas to visit my father, step-mom, sister and brother, and since it's a long flight, I brought plenty of reading material to keep me sane. The perfect reading material for a flight? Bizarro fiction. The books tend to be short, and they always tend to be interesting, so I can usually knock out a couple of them on the way out and a few more on the way back.


This time, I had brought Carlton Mellick III's THE BABY JESUS BUTT PLUG. I have no problem with reading nasty, crazy books in public. I proudly read RICO SLADE WILL FUCKING KILL YOU by Bradley Sands with the cover facing the entire world, so I figured tBJBP wouldn't be a problem. And then I discovered that there were illustrations in the book. Very questionable illustrations. I have no problem with them, of course, but the people who had to sit next to me? I kind of worried about them. The thought of being jailed for public indecency got to me, and while I read the book, I covered the illustrations with my hand if they were on the right side of the page (I was at the window seat on the left side of the plane). If they were on the left side, I turned the book slightly, so they wouldn't be able to see. (And I closed the blind to the window to avoid any reflection.)


I loved the book, and I discovered something odd about the people sitting next to me: THEY DIDN'T GIVE A SHIT ABOUT ME. They never even glanced in my direction because they were too involved in their own boredom-killing attempts. I was paranoid for nothing. Even now, as I write this months later, I don't even remember their faces, and I'm sure they haven't given me a second thought since getting off the plane.


So fuck it. Next time I'm on a plane, I'm going to watch A SERBIAN FILM.

EVERYONE'S GOT ONE #23: HOW I'VE CHANGED

Most of the people who know me personally are probably laughing at this title right now.  Everyone knows I don’t really change all that much.  I dress the same way I did when I was in elementary school, I get the same haircut, I eat the same shit, and I try to avoid new technology.  (For example, I didn’t have a cell phone until maybe four years ago, and I just got internet in my house last year.)

But contrary to popular belief, I do change, if only a little bit at a time.  Look at it this way:  take two people who know a guy, and then send one of them away for ten years.  Bring them back together, and the one who’d disappeared for a while will be surprised to see how much that person changed.  The guy who stayed, though, won’t think much of it because he’s seen the subject every day of those ten years.  It’s like that.

There are four things that I’ve noticed about the ways I’ve changed of late, and I find two of them mildly disturbing, and the other two disgustingly shocking.

--I don’t remember anyone’s phone numbers anymore.  Even when I was a kid, I didn’t have a mind for numbers, but I still retained maybe ten phone numbers in my head that were absolutely essential to me, among them my home, my grandparents’, the library’s, my best friend’s, my cousin’s, and a few others.  Now, I can’t even remember my own cell phone number.  It’s crazy.  The only thing I can think of, aside from early senility, is that since I can just save phone numbers on my cell phone, my brain has decided it no longer needs to waste space on this remembering them.  This is mildly disturbing.

--I can’t remember directions anymore.  I used to be a parts driver for the City of Elmhurst, so I had to have a map of every place in my head.  I knew the suburbs and a lot of the city like the back of my hand.  Now?  I remember very little of it.  Again, senility comes to mind, but a more likely suspect is the GPS I have in my car.  Who the fuck needs to remember directions anymore?  Hell, when was the last time you gave directions to someone?  This is mildly disturbing.  (It should also be noted that this seems to go for cab drivers, too.  When I was a kid, cab drivers knew where everything was.  Now, as an adult, whenever I get into a cab, I have to give the fucker directions.  And that’s even WITH the GPS they usually have.  How the fuck is it possible that cabbies don’t know how to get to Midway?!)

--I’m losing my ability to spell.  Shit that I should know is no longer in my head.  I’ve always been an excellent speller.  Straight A’s on that one throughout my entire life.  This one I lay squarely at the feet of spell check and auto correct.  This is disgustingly shocking because I’m a writer, and I should know these things.  I’m supposed to be smarter than this machine when it comes to this kind of thing.

--This is the most disgustingly shocking thing of all.  I’ve always been a fan of bookstores.  Once upon a time, I would take my weekly paycheck and go to a bookstore and peruse their wares.  I would inevitably spend too much, but it would always be worth it, considering my prizes.  Even though it was more convenient and cost-effective to shop on Amazon, I resisted for a long time.  But then the mom and pop bookstores disappeared from my area.  And then Borders disappeared.  And I refuse to shop at Barnes & Noble because they were the ones who started the remaindering process.  Where the fuck else did I have to go?

I gave in.  I haven’t bought a book from an actual store in maybe three years.  Yeah, I know.  But the thing is, during that time, I forgot the bookstore experience.  I’d gotten caught up in the cold, antiseptic (but ever so convenient) practice of buying from Amazon.  And this is not to knock them, because Amazon is a fabulous thing.  I’ve probably spent thousands of dollars with them, and I’ll probably spend even more before my death.

But there is beauty in an actual bookstore, and I’d forgotten that until I’d gone to see Weird Al Yankovic at Anderson’s in Naperville.  (It could have happened a month previous, when I’d gone to Joe Hill’s signing there, but since he had an actual show to put on, I paid attention to that and not my surroundings.)  I sat down in the stacks to read while waiting for my turn to meet Weird Al, and directly in front of me was a bookshelf loaded down with glorious, wonderful books.

It’s hard to say how I felt in that moment, letting my eyes drift over spines and covers.  My heart quickened, thinking about how much I would enjoy having each and every one of those books in my own collection.  My head opened like a rose in the morning sun, and I found myself glancing up over whatever I was reading to admire the view before me.  I felt like I was 20 again.  I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten this sensation.  I started calculating how much money I had in my pocket, and I felt the almost overwhelming urge to grab a handful of books to take home with me.

I resisted, since I’m trying to battle my way out of debt right now, but I know that the 20-year-old version of me would have lost that struggle.

So how about it?  In what ways have you changed over the years?  And are you disgusted with yourselves or proud?  Let me know in the comments below.