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.

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 #436: NICK CAVE BIOPIC

 OK, this is going to be a short one. Because I'm higher than usual, and it's taking me longer to type this. Just look at the title of this one. Got it?

This is a picture of Nick Cave, in case you don't know who he is. Got it? Good. Now look at the next picture, and I think you'll get a complete understanding of this GF column.

'Nuff said!

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #435: EXISTENCE IS A FUCKIN' WEIRD PLACE

 I mean, when you stop and think about it. Just about everything is an illusion, but that would make sense, wouldn't it? When a camera sees stuff, it translates data into an image, and that's kind of what our eyes do, anyway. We just do it with more meat. Think you're looking at something green? Sucker! It's all the colors EXCEPT for green! That's just the color the object reflects back to you. And you never really get to touch something. All you can feel is the sensation of trying to touch something. Your atoms won't let you actually touch something.

And fucking electric fucking eels! A living creature that can deliver a serious voltage to whatever it touches. Something that can hurt us and kill smaller creatures.

And the platypus! Did God sneeze when making that fucker?

I mean, look at this fuckin' thing!

There are some people who think mushrooms are extraterrestrial because they're unlike anything else from our tree of life. Maybe. I mean, it sounds kinda stupid, but it's possible, right? God's an astronaut. Oz is over the rainbow, and Midian is where the monsters live.

I keep thinking about how most people reacted to learning that humans evolved from monkeys. They were so furious. No, we couldn't come from monkeys. We're creatures of God, shithead. Actually, that's not what I keep thinking about. What I really keep thinking about is what if they made the next logical step? What if they were told that monkeys evolved from bacteria? Ergo . . .

Hey, all this planet needed was a handful of single cell organisms and a few million years, and now we have 9-5 jobs, mortgages and a bunch of other shit not even nature could have come up with.

I'm going to stop talking about this now before I start pondering how magnets work, but I gotta say, I love writing these things while hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh as fuck. I almost forgot what writing them while drunk felt like. Maybe the next time I decide to drink. We'll see.

It should come as a surprise to no one that this guy was my favorite Midianite.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #434: APOLLO 13

 

So I watched Apollo 13 again recently. I didn't mean to. I was cleaning up a bunch of shit in my bedroom, and I wanted something on in the background. I'd forgotten how much I liked this one, so I got sucked back in. I like movies like this. Humanity trapped beyond the known needing to use science to survive and get home? Count me in. You know, like The Martian.

But near the end, after the astronauts get home (spoiler alert), I noticed something, and I had to wonder about it. So they come down in the ocean and are rescued and brought back to America, where their first public appearance shows them wearing hats with the mission details for Apollo 13. That implies that the hats were made before the mission and were waiting for its completion.

But what if they didn't get home? What if they died out there? Or burned up in the atmosphere? What happens to those hats?

Here's the thing. There is someone, possibly a few someones, who knows the answer to that. Space missions are fucking dangerous, and NASA has an unfortunate history of getting astronauts killed. So I can only assume that there are Challenger hats somewhere out there, just as an example. What happened to them? Were they buried or destroyed out of honor for the astronauts who lost their lives? Are they mothballed somewhere? In a museum?

Before I started getting drunk (and now high), this was the kind of thought that would keep me awake at night.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #433: THE PLOT AGAINST ME

 There is a horrible plot against me. I don't know who or what started this, but it's been plaguing me for years, and I know it will continue for the rest of my life. There is no way to stop it. There is no way to even fight back. I'm doomed, and I know it is all because of this nefarious plot.

Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, it strikes the hardest. I wake up two minutes before my first alarm goes off, but I don't check the time. I don't have to. I already know the Sword of Damocles is hanging and ready to run me through.

The alarm goes off, and I hit snooze. I grumble to myself because I'm tired as fuck. I can't get out of bed yet, and I tell myself that I'm not going to fall back asleep because then the pain would be worse. I tell myself I'm going to stare at the ceiling until the second alarm goes off. But then I close my eyes. And I start to dream five minutes before the second alarm goes off and ruins the rest of my day. Because I will never be fully awake, and I'll feel miserable at least until I get out of work, and I'll probably not feel much better even then. And then I go to bed so it will all start over again.

Thursdays and Sundays I don't set an alarm because I plan to sleep in. Not that it matters. I wake up at about the time my alarm would have gone off. You'd think that the same thing would happen as on the other days but without the misery. Yeah, I'll close my eyes and go back to sleep and wake up whenever. That sounds glorious.

But that's not what happens. I could tape my eyes shut, and I'd never go back to sleep. Because now I'm awake, and there is nothing I can do about it.

When? When, O Lord, will I get my own Stargate so I can murder the gods that did this to me?

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #432: DEATH THROES

 Its finally happening. Years after planned obsolescence, my phone is in its death throes. It's been dying a slow death, but its built in life span has reached the very end. I'm going to need to get a new one, and that sucks.

Whenever I get technology, I get the top of the line because I know I'm going to use it until I literally can't anymore. Most of my writing is done on a desktop computer more than 15 years old. It glitches sometimes, but it still works. The phone, on the other hand, is losing most of its capabilities. Asking it to access Twitter is an exercise in futility. Facebook still works, more or less, for what that's worth. Texting is not reliable, especially if it's a group text. Sometimes I can get a text but can't respond to it. Going online with a browser? Ha! Don't even ask.

The only things that work are actual phone calls and my alarm clock. And the alarm only works under a specific set of circumstances which I've perfected. At least for now.

The problem is, I can't afford a new phone. Well, this upcoming payday I can afford either my car insurance or a phone. Considering my bad luck with the car, I'm paying the fucking insurance. Hopefully the payday after that I will be able to get a new phone.

In the meantime, if you have my number and need to contact me, don't bother. I will probably not even know you tried to text me. If you're on my social media, the best shot is to get my attention there. I may not respond right away, but I will respond.

I've been on a decade plus of bad fucking luck right now, and I'll probably never pull out of it at this point. Did you hear that?!

RIP Mr. Lahey, sorry the shithawks got ya, bud.