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 #894: THE APPLE TREE

 I went for a walk today, which is a big no-no for me. I've been told that I have to stay off my feet because of a hole in the sole of my bad foot. I didn't walk for long. I can only do a block, anyway. But that block is one I've walked around my entire life, starting when I was a little kid with Mom.

We used to go for walks all the time. I don't think I was even in school yet, I was that young. We'd head out from where we lived at the time, which is two blocks from where I am now, and we'd head toward Jefferson Elementary because there was a park there I could play at.

The neighborhood has changed a great deal. Almost none of the houses are the same. But there was a house that had a beautiful garden that we liked to look at all the time. It lasted quite a while until the old couple who lived there moved out. That was maybe 20 years ago. One of the first things the new owner did was wall in the garden. Although I'm pretty sure they also ripped it up, and that there's nothing to look at even without the fence. It's a shame. It was very beautiful.

But there was another spot we used to stop at, and I thought about it today as I walked past. There was an old man who lived in a cottage that had an apple tree in the backyard. If he was there, he'd give me an apple, freshly picked. And I'd eat it on the way to the school park.

Wait, li'l John Bruni eating fruit? Yes. To this day I can tolerate apples. I can also stomach corn (and not just as liquor!). While in the psych ward I learned that I can stand pears, too. So me eating an apple at that age isn't that far afield.

I was attending that elementary school when the old man moved away. I remember asking Mom if the new owner will keep giving me apples. She said she hoped so.

But the new owner didn't. One of the first things he did was uproot the tree. There is a piece of sidewalk now where that tree used to be, a stone path through his backyard. At first I thought, with a child's simplicity, that the new owner just didn't like me, but that guy probably had no idea of all the walks Mom and I took through that neighborhood, and he certainly had no idea of the enjoyment a simple apple could give a small boy like the one I'd once been.

I miss that tree. I even had a taste for apples today. As Vonnegut used to say, "So it goes."

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #661: NIPPLE PAIN

Here's a thing that sucks about being me. Every morning I sit on the edge of my bed to put my pants on, and then I have to put my leg brace on. And then I have to put my shoes on. Putting the right one on is always easy, but the left one comes with some risks.

Because I have to reach down and pick up my left shoe before putting it on. At this point my legs are in my pants, but my pants aren't up yet. I have to stand for that, and I don't want to put on pants, then stand up, then sit down and do the brace and shoes. It makes more sense, especially since standing up at any time sucks for me, to sit, put on my pants, put on my brace, put on my shoes, then stand and pull up my pants, buckle the belt, etc.

So when I reach down, I'm leaning over my knees, which puts my nipple pretty close to the zipper of my pants, and all too often I wind up scraping my precious nipple across that zipper. It never draws blood, but it hurts like a motherfucker.

I could put on a shirt first, but the zipper will still find my nipple, and besides, I don't want to stand up and hold my shirt back so I can close my pants. The older I get, the more movement economy becomes important.

So I guess I'll have to live with scraping my nipple almost every morning. So it goes.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #355: A CONFESSION I'M COMFORTABLE WITH MAKING NOW

 I have denied an ability for most of my life because I was afraid that if I said I could do it, people might want to do it with me, and I couldn't stand the very thought. Because this is a skill I learned very selfishly and with an exact purpose. Granted, I was never able to complete this vision, but that doesn't matter because now it is impossible for me to do this.

Don't get me wrong. Most dances I just can't do, but I learned how to tango very, very well. I kept that under lock and key, but now that I don't have the full use of my legs, I can safely and comfortably admit that I possessed this skill.

I was OK at waltzing. I could foxtrot a bit if you didn't mind me trampling your feet. But I was really good at the tango.

Knowing I could do that is kind of weird, right? I'm the last person you would expect this of. But I had one reason and one reason only for learning how to do this. I'm sure you'll understand in a moment.

I wanted to dance to "The Masochism Tango" by Tom Lehrer.

I never got to, sadly. I didn't know anyone sick in the head enough to do it. Ah well. To quote a great man, "So it goes."

I never got around to it, but I thought at the time that the only other dance worth learning was the Mamushka!