GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #866: I'M STILL HERE?

 When I was a child I thought I would live forever. And then my best friend died, and Mom explained death to me in a way that perhaps no parent should. "When you die, you go in the ground and get eaten by the worms."

And look at me now.

After that I've never felt very long for the world. During high school I got it into my head that I was going to die at 48. I changed my mind and lowered it to 46. And there it remained for a few years. Around the time I started drinking and exploring a more social side of my life I realized that if I continued in the same fashion I would live to 40, and that's it. People would ask me what I would do if I somehow lived to 41. I advised them glibly that I would kill myself at 1:59 am on July 25, 2018. My reasoning? I was born at 2 am on the dot. I didn't mean it, but I said it as seriously as I could so whoever asked me *had* to wonder if I was telling the truth.

It was a different world.

And suddenly, magically, I turned 41. As of this writing I have less than a month before my 46th birthday. That will put me within seven years of the age Mom was when she died. I felt that I could beat that score. I believe I said that during the GF I wrote last Monday.

So when I found myself in the ER, waiting for my room in the hospital to be ready, thinking I might have a tumor in my small intestine, things got a little grim for me. I felt like it really was the end, and I wasn't going to beat Mom's record. And yes, I did come up with a story idea, but that's not all I did as I rested in the darkness, morphine calming the screaming bastard in my lower back.

I thought about all the people who needed me to be around, and I thought about ways to tell them that I wouldn't be there. I felt especially bad for the brother who lives with me. He can't afford to keep living here without me. I thought about things I wanted to tell my loved ones before the end.

But it wasn't all doom and gloom in that room (ah jeez, someone call Dr. Seuss). I wondered, what if it's nothing? Or what if it's something that can be easily dealt with? What if this isn't the end?

I couldn't just keep doing business as usual, that's for sure. I don't know how the rest of you view me, but my life is fairly pathetic. It's pretty much work, then tasks around the house, then hang out watching movies and shows while getting high and waiting for bedtime. Get reading and writing in whenever I can. I used to have a rich social life. It's dried up for a variety of reasons, but one of them is that people think that since I'm no longer drinking, I no longer want to hang out. It's wrong, but here's the thought process: "Hey, all we do is drink at bars. He probably doesn't even want to see a liquor bottle. Let's not invite him for his own good." I can and have spent time in bars without drinking. Without even being tempted to drink. It's actually kind of fun because I was usually the drunkest person in the room. It's fun to see other people get fucked up.

But that's not what I wanted to talk about tonight. Because once you've had a brush with death you can't let the status quo take over again. So I thought about ways to improve my life.

I want to quit caffeine again, but more to the point, I have to stop drinking energy drinks. One positive side effect of not drinking booze is a nearly endless reservoir of energy. I'm bursting with it throughout the day. I used to be able to sit quietly and still. Now I fidget. I try to burn it off by rocking out to music whenever I drive, but it's not enough. The only time I'm tired is when I wake up in the morning. That's when I feel I need the energy drinks, so that's when I drink them. I have to stop that.

I also want to quit Caffeine Free Diet Coke. I'm only down to one or two cans a day, but that might still be too much. It's the most healthy of the soft drinks, but it's still pretty unhealthy. My idea is to spend my days drinking nothing but water. The problem is, when I do that my heartburn returns for some reason. I'll just have to battle it with Tums, I guess. I'm not getting rid of soft drinks all together. I think I'll let myself have them if I'm at a restaurant or at a friend's place for dinner, etc.

But the biggest thing I want to do is get back to working out. I can't work out my entire body. I'll have to cut anything having to do with my legs. Maybe my back, too, although from what I understand there are a few moves I can do with my back that won't impact where I have constant pain. And that pain shouldn't be a problem after Friday, when I'm getting another spinal injection. At least for a while.

Now that I don't have a bed I have the room to work out again. Oh yeah, my bed. After 30 years of service it finally fell apart on me. I flipped and rotated the mattress a lot. Hell, I rotated the box springs, too. Until finally it had to be tossed. I sleep on an air mattress that's honestly more comfortable than that bed was near the end. That bed had lumps and divots. There was only one comfortable place to sleep on it, and that was pretty sweet while it lasted.

Shit. I'll bet my bad back is because of that fucking bed.

The only drawback is, the air mattress runs low around 4 am, which wakes me up. If I'm lucky I can keep my eyes closed and reinflate it and then go back to sleep. I can also do it if I keep only one eye shut. But if both eyes open? The chances drop significantly.

My aunt says she'll buy me a bed for my birthday. I'm going to talk with her about it this week. Heh. I remember when I was trying to get out of the hospital, I sat on the couch looking at the bed. I was begging to get out of here, where I had an actual bed, to go back to my air mattress at home? I guess so.

I also plan to walk more at the forest preserves I frequent. See? I have such wonderful ideas to improve the quality of my life, but whenever I do that? Something horrible happens to me.

Naturally, with my head full of these ideas, I got a call from my GI doctor's office today. He wants to see me ASAP. So much so that he's coming in on a day he usually doesn't. That can't possibly be good news. When I talked to the hospital GI doc she said that she hadn't watched the whole video the camera pill recorded. She said she glanced through key parts of it. Maybe my GI doctor took a closer look? Maybe he found something?

So maybe I should hold off on this stuff for now, at least until after I see him. I've said before, technically this cancer scare isn't over. There's still some stuff to investigate. They scanned my whole body except my head, so maybe that's where the tumor is?

I know it's kind of pointless worrying about it now. Think of this as me whistling past the graveyard. I'll keep you updated on everything.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #865: THE WORLD IS MOVING ON, BUT STILL!

 

I've been feeling a lot better, so I thought I'd spend some time at my favorite forest preserve, Fullersburg. I usually hang out at the Graue Mill end these days. I like to read there, but I can no longer wander the land to my heart's content because I'm supposed to stay off my feet as much as possible per my podiatrist. So yes, I have seen the fences from where they're restructuring Salt Creek's flow. The mill is closed up as far as I can tell. And as I drove down the back road to the entrance to the other side of Fullersburg, I saw just how different the creek looked. I can't tell for sure, but I think the waterfall is gone.

I remember when I was a kid I walked the narrow ledge just so I could perch on the overhang above the waterfall. I can't do that anymore. My bad leg would never let me get that far. Even if it did, the unfortunate side effect of two decades of hard-as-fuck drinking is that I no longer have balance, and I still get the shakes. As best as I can tell, those things are never going to go away.

But on that day I looked down and saw a giant fish broken on the rocks below, flapping as hard as it could. At first I thought it was a salmon, but there are no salmon in Salt Creek. There are pike, but they're pretty rare. As it turned out, when its struggles slowed, I could tell it was a pike. Saw the little teeth in its opening and closing mouth.

(There's some bass in there and bluegill. Supposedly there's catfish in there, too, but I've never seen one nor evidence of one's existence.)

The waterfall was fucking beautiful. I hope it's still there, and I just can't see it because of the angle of my view.

But today was a fucking gorgeous day, so I said fuck the foot. I'm going to walk around a bit. More than usual, at least. The sun felt good on me. I felt the Mediterranean in me calling. When I was young I hated it, but in my elder years I can see myself all too easily doing something I thought Gramps was crazy for: sitting outside wearing nothing but shorts, soaking in the sun. He did it so much they had to cut melanomas from his head. But it felt amazing today. Like the world finally had a place for me, and I fit into a me-shaped hole there perfectly.

I never feel like I fit in with the world. I always feel like I'm just a tad out of whack with the rest of it, like I raised my arms at the wrong part of the roller coaster. I'm looking at that sentence, and I'm not sure it makes sense. More like a puzzle that lost a piece, and the owner cut a new piece out of cardboard, and that new piece is me. That feels better. Yes.

This is behind the visitor center, where you can see the partial skeleton of a wooly mammoth, if that's your thing. It's mine, so don't be shy. But where you see all that grass? It used to be all creek.

The water used to come up to this wall. It was never deep, but the wildlife used to come up to the wall, too. Frogs, turtles, ducks and an occasional fish. Once upon a time a friend of mine and I wound up in the newspaper because we decided to venture beyond the wall. The creek had dried up at the time, and the ground *looked* sturdy. The creek was just a streamlet, and she wanted to get a close up picture of a duck that was floating there. She sank in the mud, and when I cockily went to rescue her I sank, too. She lost her shoes (wait, not her shoes, she had "borrowed" them from someone), and I wound up giving her a piggyback ride almost the whole mile back to the parking lot. A journalist was doing a softball piece on the place at the time, and we wound up in her article for the Trib. Granted, she made up a pack of lies about us, but it was nice regardless.

Forgive an old man if he's forgotten whether or not he's told that story before. I'll bet I have. And I'll bet my tone was a lot more annoyed by it. But as I said, this man is old, and he is softening at the edges. Possibly feeling a little more mortal than usual due to a health scare that kinda-sorta isn't over. Forgive me the moment of nostalgia.

After enjoying a bit of natural solitude I decided to walk down to the big bridge, and from the middle of it I saw with glee that I could see through the water again. When I was a kid it was a toxic green sludge, almost. When I was in college the water got cleaned up so much I could see clearly to the bottom. Then it got bad again. Not as bad as before. The green had not gone neon yet. Now that they're doing the renovation I can see to the bottom again. Not clearly, not yet, but I take it as a good sign.

But what I really wanted to see was the short bridge that leads to the island in the middle of Salt Creek. I'd hoped that they finally opened it back up, because I wanted to walk the path that goes around the island, maybe hang out at the rest stop a little bit.

Motherfucker. The bridge is gone, and with it any chance I will have of exploring that island ever again. I looked around, and if I had two good legs I could probably get over there. The creek dried up on this end of the island. All that's there now is a tiny little swamp.

If I didn't need this leg brace to get around, I think I could cross the rough ground and the tiny bit of swamp to get there, but I really don't want to say fuck my foot on that one. The odds of breaking it further here are just too high. If it breaks any more than it already has, I'll become Pegleg Johnny. Because yes, if I do lose the foot, I do want a pegleg. I probably wouldn't be able to balance well on it, but it would be cool for maybe five minutes. Maybe a little longer if I'm going to roar along to "The Curse of Captain Morgan" by Alestorm.

It seems that every time I walk around Fullersburg, there is something vastly different. But as I sat on a bench looking up at the cathedral the trees made above me, I couldn't help but think, No matter how badly they try to change this place, they can never take away its beauty. And it is still fucking beautiful. The world is moving on, but there is still beauty to behold.

THOMAS H. "BOSTON" CORBETT

 You can easily be forgiven for not knowing who Thomas H. "Boston" Corbett was. He did one super important thing in history, and you all know what that deed is. You just don't know the man behind the deed.

Don't look him up yet. Just go with the flow on this.

He was born in England before going to New York City with his parents as a child. They wound up in Troy, NY, and he started working as a milliner. Back in the 19th Century that involved working with a lot with mercury nitrate, ie. the reason the Mad Hatter is mad. When you take this into consideration, his later life makes a lot of sense. He did many crazy things, and chemical psychosis explains that away pretty neatly.

He married and became an American citizen, but he found it hard to keep a job in Virginia because he was very much against slavery. There are abolitionists, and there is this guy. He chomped at the bit whenever the subject came up. His wife grew sick and died, and he took up the bottle and drank heavily until he fell under the sway of the Methodist Church. They sobered him up, and now that his head was clear, he devoted his life to God. So much to the point that whenever someone cursed in his presence, he stopped to sing and pray for the lost soul doing the cursing. He regularly stopped doing his job to do this, so he made a lot of bosses angry.

And Corbett didn't fuck around. He took the teachings of the Bible literally, especially when it comes to what happens when one's eye offends thee. He desperately wanted to be celibate, but his sexual thoughts kept getting in his way. So he did the Biblical thing to do: he castrated himself. With scissors. He didn't rush to get to a hospital, either. He had enough time to grab a bite to eat and to go to church and pray first.

And he was happy about it. Without sexual thoughts he was able to preach more. At around this point he picked up the nickname "Boston." It was the city in which he'd converted. He spent a lot of his time rounding up drunks and feeding them, getting them sober and hopefully converting them to Jesus.

And then the Civil War began. As anti-slavery as he was, he couldn't wait to join the Union Army even though he had to cut his Jesus-long hair to do so. He carried a Bible with him always and read to his fellow soldiers whether they liked it or not. He routinely got into trouble with his superiors and eventually was sentenced to death by firing squad for taking one to task over cursing and using the Lord's name in vain. They decided not to shoot him and discharged him instead. He quickly joined up with the Cavalry where he was demoted from sergeant to private over something that history has forgotten.

Late in the war he found his unit surrounded by Confederates. His fellow soldiers were captured, and he was left in a ditch with a repeating rifle. They didn't stop him until he ran out of ammo. One of the Confederates put a gun to his head but was stopped because "[h]e has a right to defend himself to the last!" And so he was sent to the horrorshow that is Andersonville. After months of torment and torture he was released. For his heroics he was promoted back to sergeant.

And then came April 14, 1865. You know that date. And now you may suspect why Corbett is important to history.

When Abraham Lincoln was shot, Corbett was part of his funeral parade. Not long after that he was given orders to follow up a lead on John Wilkes Booth's location. They had him cornered at a Virginia farmhouse. Corbett had his men surround the house, at which point David Herrold, one of Booth's co-conspirators, surrendered, leaving Booth inside on his own. Corbett asked his CO for permission to go in alone to get Booth. He reasoned that if Booth shot him, then the other soldiers can get Booth. He was denied and positioned at the perimeter around the farmhouse. They set it on fire to burn out Booth, but Corbett found himself near a large crack in the wall, where he could see into the house and to Booth.

Corbett said that he saw Booth aim his carbine, forcing him to shoot Booth before he could pull the trigger. The minie ball struck Booth in the exact same place that he'd earlier shot Lincoln. Pure coincidence. Corbett might have called it divine intervention. In fact when asked about it, he said, "Providence guided my hand."

They dragged a screaming, mortally wounded John Wilkes Booth out into the open like a vampire. He begged for water, but when he got some he couldn't drink it. Lincoln had been lucky. He'd been unconscious until he succumbed to the assassin's bullet. Booth was not so lucky. He remained conscious as he died inch by inch. It took him so long to die that he literally begged the Union soldiers to kill him. Then, finally, hours after being shot he died. In case you were wondering, his last words were, as he looked at his hands, "Useless . . . useless."

Here's the thing: by shooting Booth, Corbett had gone against orders according to some historians, and it was a bit of a scandal. Corbett insisted that he thought Booth was going to shoot his way out, so shooting him dead was self-defense. "Booth would have killed me if I had not shot first. I think I did right." He then said that he hadn't intended to kill Booth, but at the same time he didn't have any problems with the result. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton famously said of Booth and Corbett, "The rebel is dead. The patriot lives. He has spared the country expense, continued excitement and trouble. Discharge the patriot."

Corbett became a celebrity. People wanted his autograph. They wanted to hear him tell the story of killing John Wilkes Booth. They wanted to buy the gun that killed the rebel, which he wouldn't sell "at any price" because the gun belonged to the government. But this is how he usually told the tale:

I aimed at his body. I did not want to kill him....I think he stooped to pick up something just as I fired. That may probably account for his receiving the ball in the head. [W]hen the assassin lay at my feet, a wounded man, and I saw the bullet had taken effect about an inch back of the ear, and I remembered that Mr. Lincoln was wounded about the same part of the head, I said: "What a God we have...God avenged Abraham Lincoln.

The public didn't agree with that last part. Corbett picked up another nickname: Lincoln's Avenger.

The fame had a double edge to it. Southerners routinely sent him death threats, so he made sure to be armed at all times. When discharged he went back to being a hatter but kept getting fired for stopping work to pray. When he could no longer find work as a milliner he capitalized on his fame and gave lectures and such, almost like the Coward Robert Ford did after killing Jesse James. But due to his fame and the threats to his life and the constant stream of being fired, he became paranoid, and his speeches became more incoherent as he ranted and raved at anyone who would listen.

In 1875, while attending a soldiers' reunion, one of the men expressed his doubt that Booth had even been killed. This enraged Corbett to the point of him pulling his gun on the accuser. The others rushed him out of there. Like when someone told Buzz Aldrin that the moon landing was faked. Aldrin and Corbett didn't respond well to such accusations.

In a last ditch effort at a normal life Corbett was given a job as the doorkeeper of the Kansas House of Representatives, but his paranoia got the better of him. He thought the Representative officers were after him, so he brandished his gun and chased after them. He didn't hurt anyone, but that was enough for a judge to sentence him to a mental institute in Topkea.

In 1888, around the time Billy the Kid was fighting a war in Lincoln County, AZ, Corbett escaped from the asylum on horseback. He was last seen in Neodesha, KS, where he stayed with a farmer before moving on to Mexico, or so the farmer said. People speculated that he'd actually gone to Minnesota where he died in the Great Hinckley Fire. Why speculated? Because if the story about Mexico is true, he did exactly what Ambrose Bierce did decades later: he went to Mexico and was never seen again.

Bizarrely there were two people who later claimed to be Corbett, one of them as late as 1905, but both were dismissed as fakes and were imprisoned.

So what really happened to the man who shot John Wilkes Booth? No one knows. But it's a strange way to end the strange tale of Thomas H. "Boston" Corbett.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #864: OUR AMERICA

 

Happy Fourth to all who celebrate. For all the shit I say in these columns, I am one of those people. I love America, but that's not an unconditional love. Because as much as I love my country, it constantly aggravates me by not living up to its dream, its promise.

A lot of my frustration can be explained by this video in which Weird Al is begging America to stop being weird. Read that sentence again for the full effect.

I'm going to read off a Bill Hicks quote for the billionth time in my life. And it's not just because Garth Ennis quotes it in Preacher, my favorite comic book of all time. This really resonates with me. Every time you read me taking my country to task over something or battling with corporations or tech bros and such, the impetus for that all comes from this quote. I do my best to live by it. I don't always succeed because I'm not perfect, far from it, but if you were to rip my chest open and pull my beating heart from my ribcage, you would see these words etched onto my pump:

I was told when I grew up I could be anything I wanted: a fireman, a policeman, a doctor--even president, it seemed. And for the first time in the history of mankind, something new, called an astronaut. But like so many kids brought up on a steady diet of Westerns, I always wanted to be the avenging cowboy hero--that lone voice in the wilderness, fighting corruption and evil wherever I found it, and standing for freedom, truth and justice. And in my heart of hearts I still track the remnants of that dream wherever I go, in my endless ride into the setting sun.

This country stands for freedom, but every day our politicians take freedom from us and put it in the hands of corporations, and corporations are loyal to one concept and one concept only: shareholder value. Everything else can die in a fire. And it's not just politicians and CEOs, it's fellow Americans, too. The last time we were this divided we literally killed each other over it. I think the second Civil War has already begun. It's only being fought on social media right now, but with tensions ratcheted up this high? It's almost a guarantee that the physical fighting will begin when this next election is called.

Americans should not be fighting Americans. We're on the same fucking team, for fuck's sake! But we're at each others' throats, some thinking that they're fighting a good vs. evil situation, others thinking that they're fighting a right vs. wrong situation. It sounds the same, but it's not. The first has religious connotations, the second has morality connotations. You can be a moral person and not have a god. Those people, I think, are the most moral people on the planet. They're doing it because they want to, not because there's some scary threat of Hell behind it.

Ever see Mars Attacks? I realize I sound like Jack Nicholson's "Why can't we all just get along" speech with the same disastrous results. But we really can work together. We really can put aside our differences and go after our true enemy: the corporations that are ruining our lives.

Because we have to live together. And neither side is willing to make any sacrifices on their part because neither side thinks they're wrong or even allows the possibility that they *might* be wrong. And I think that's why America might be over. Irreconcilable differences.

Rome didn't end when the Romans decided to crown Julius Caesar as emperor, nor did it end with the triumvirate that followed his assassination. Depending on which historian you ask, the Roman Empire toddled on for hundreds of years to a thousand years. So whatever we'll have will still be called America, but it wouldn't really be America. The same people who will argue the Second Amendment to death in favor of owning assault rifles to defend against the government want to install Trump as an emperor. And something tells me he wouldn't deny the crown three times, like Caesar. He'll snatch that crown like a beast from the filthy commoner who would hand it to him.

America promises big, but it doesn't deliver. Our system is easily manipulated by criminals and psychopaths, and I hate that that's possible. I hate it when powerful people take advantage of those with little to no power. I hate that the corporations flaunt their power when we have regulations on the books against that but not enough regulators to enforce them. I hate that millionaires and billionaires are considered self-made heroes of the people when all they do is take advantage of the same people who call them heroes, and those people are never the wiser. I hate that Americans hate other Americans for who they are. Racism, sexism, all the -isms continually tear this country apart, and I hate that, too. Most of all, I hate that a thousand years from now the dominant society on earth will point back to the fall of America, comparing it to their own problems, talking about the danger to their own way of life. As Rome is a canary in a mine for us, we will be the same for whoever is the biggest power on earth in the future.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: All I want is for my beloved country to live up to its promise. The ideas are noble and lofty and good. The execution leaves a lot to be desired.

I know this column will have very little effect on the world, but it's all I can do. I have words, and I know how to use them. I can only hope someone who knows how to make America live up to itself reads this and knows how to implement a plan to fulfill this desire. I'm not holding my breath, but at the same time, I don't want to live to see my country turn into the monster that many of us want it to be. I don't want to live long enough to see such a noble idea die a violent and bloody death. And before you object, yes, I know that other countries already view us as monsters. We are pretty bad, but we're not nearly as bad as the worst of us want us to be.

OK, it's cheesy, but fuck it. Why can't we all just get along?

One more thing. The more cynical among you might say something like, "Of course America is unfair. Life is unfair." I agree, America (and life) is unfair, but unlike you, I think we should do our absolute best to change that instead of mindlessly accepting that as a natural state of reality. Human beings are animals with a lot of base desires, but that doesn't stop us from trying to be civilized.

OK, one more thing. For real this time. As always, Charles M. Schulz was possibly the wisest of us all:

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #863: PORNO METAL

 

I don't know how it happened, but I suddenly found myself obsessed with the band, Electric Callboy. Actually, I know how it happened, but I'm not sure why.

I first heard them on Octane on SXM. When I heard "We Got the Moves" I thought to myself, are these guys metalheads doing rave music? Sure enough, that's exactly what it is. It was a relief when I looked them up on YouTube and confirmed that yes, while their music is more or less serious, they don't take themselves very seriously. But watch that video. It's a song, like many of their others, that you wouldn't think I'd be interested in . . . and then the metal kicks in.

(Why Eskimo Callboy? That was their old name. Someone must have told them that it was insulting to the Inuit, because as far as I can tell, they just changed the offensive name on their own. No one told them to do that. They seem like really nice guys.)

So I dug deeper and found "Pump It," which makes me laugh every time I hear it. They take the joy of working out to a whole new level. I couldn't stop myself. I moved on to "Hypa Hypa." Goddam, these guys make catchy music, and they look like they're having a lot of fun making it. That's the way it should be.

I looked up the lyrics to these songs and discovered that, much like Andrew WK insisted that we all party, Electric Callboy wants us to rave. And they make a compelling argument. I'm not a rave kind of guy, but I feel this music flowing through me like crazy.

Then I saw, fresh off the press, that they worked with Babymetal. I'm not the biggest Babymetal fan, but I like their work. "Ratatata" is a near magical collaboration. By now I have added these songs to my Spotify, and nothing wakes me up and gets me moving faster than Electric Callboy. I wonder if they can defeat a hangover, like Korpiklaani can.

And then I found "Spaceman." This is possibly the catchiest of their songs. That spaceship with the mustache is fucking glorious. So is the idea of a big bang bass guitar, whatever that is.

"Tekkno Train" is a delightful take on Snowpiercer, but my absolute favorite part of this song is when they start chanting "choo-choo-choo-choo-choo," which is absolutely ridiculous, and I love it. Oh yeah, and when the one dude grabs the piece of cake and squishes it in his hand before violently throwing it on the floor. You'll notice in some of these videos that they are a force of fun destruction.

"Everytime We Touch" starts off as a love song and then takes a sudden left turn that never ceases to crack me up. And the complicated handshake at the end . . . Jesus.

"HURRIKAN" is a bit of a weirdo. I'm not sure I'd listen to this while driving, but that video is fucking great. I'm 100% into it. It was at that moment I thought, Oh shit. These guys are German. They sing really good in English.

"Fuckboi" is a change in direction. It's a bit of a throwback. It reminds me of the mid-Nineties. It's a more or less serious song but enjoyable.

They do write some serious music, like "Hate/Love" and "Mindreader" and "Parasite." You may notice something about two of these songs: they sound influenced by Linkin Park. They are. The lead singer lists Chester Bennington as a major influence to him. For example. I felt chills listening to that. "Love/Hate" sounds so much like Linkin Park I had to check to make sure it's not a cover. It's not.

I had you listen to a lot of music tonight (if you followed the links), but I saved my favorite for last. "Arrow of Love" is the most aggressively positive song I've ever heard.

All of these songs are fairly new, from their last two albums. It turns out that their lead singer is actually new to the band, that they've been around a lot longer than I thought. So I looked up some of their older music, and it's vastly different. They used to be straightforward metal. Take "Transilvanian Cunthugger" for instance. That's pretty hardcore. If I were younger, I'd be into their older songs more. As I am now old and softening at the edges, I prefer their newer music. I wonder how their older fans feel about that change. I probably would have felt betrayed at a younger age. Now I'm a lot more laid back. I would be totally cool with it now.

Oh yeah. Why did I call this one "Porno Metal"? I looked them up on Wikipedia, and people describe their music in so many different ways. However, they self-identify as porno metal. I hate labels, but something tells me they had their tongues planted firmly in cheek when they came up with that, kind of like Alestorm with Scottish pirate metal. Or me saying Eye Cutter is splatter SF. All I can say is, I'm very much into it. I hope you are now, too.

And for the record, my musical taste is rock in general, metal and punk specifically. I guess I should list alternative, too, particularly grunge. But in my opinion, Nirvana is punk and Alice in Chains is metal. You get the idea. So my interest in Electric Callboy is unusual but not totally alien.

[EDIT: So it turns out that I actually *have* heard these guys before, but I just didn't know it was them. You've heard of them, too. I heard this song everywhere back when it first came out. Holy shit, right? Also, did you know their drummer won Europe's version of The Bachelor?!?!?!?!?!]

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #862: GOOGLE IS FUCKING WITH ME

 Remember when Google was a good search engine? And then they started to enshittify their product so that if you look something up, it will purposely give you bad results so you try again and get exposed to more ads. And now they've started putting AI results at the top of the page despite the fact that almost every time I've seen it AI spun a web of lies and more often than not quotes directly from the Onion.

Frustrated, I sent them a feedback form telling them to stop doing this shit. The next thing I know I'm seeing ads on Chrome. Weird. I have an ad blocker for that. Why is it not working?

I checked my extensions, and sure enough the ad blocker was turned off. Let me repeat that: AFTER I SENT GOOGLE NEGATIVE FEEDBACK, CHROME TURNED OFF MY AD BLOCKER. Not only that, but Chrome has a message saying that the ad blocker is dangerous and needs to be removed.

Not fucking likely. Nice try, dickhead. I turned it back on.

The next day, lo! and behold! I saw ads again. Chrome turned the ad blocker off AGAIN. Like Captain America, I can do this all day. I turned the ad blocker back on, and Chrome has yet to turn it off again. All the same, on two websites I routinely visit, I somehow see ads. Bleeding Cool and Flashbak, for some reason, won't let me block their ads. It used to work but not anymore. So I'm starting to think maybe visiting those sites is a bad idea. Can I live without them? Yes. But they are pretty entertaining.

I go to Bing when Google fails to give me my result the first time, but Bing is just as bad. A lot of search engines are bullshit, but there is a good one. Kagi doesn't spy on you, and it doesn't use advertising. You have to pay for it, but it might be money well spent. Come to think of it, if social media did the same thing, ie. ditching ads and surveillance in favor of being paid for the service, perhaps that would be healthy for society as a whole. Granted, most people are on social media because it's "free" and probably wouldn't want to pay for anything. But not being surveilled? Not being advertised to? Like I said, it could be money well spent. Something to think about.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #861: BACK TO THE HOSPITAL

 I recently had another bout of my usual mystery illness, so once more I am on short term disability. Every time I'm in the ER for this a doctor asks if I have bloody stools, and every time I've said no. But when my illness concluded this time I *did* notice blood in my stools. My shit looked like used coffee grounds. So when I went to my usual doctor and told him this, he asked me when my next appointment is with the GI doctor. It was at the end of July. He said to call the office and to mention the bloody stools to guarantee that GI would see me ASAP. Because I'd also lost a lot of weight. More than usual.

I got in to see the GI doc that same day, and he said that he wanted me to swallow a camera pill so he can look in my small intestine for either a blood leak or a tumor. He left the decision to me, but he said he strongly suggested that I be admitted to the hospital for the test, and that it had to be done that day. Time, he said, was of the essence, especially if it turned out to be a tumor.

So I went to the ER and got a room in the hospital. I was not technically admitted, as this is more for observation than anything else.

Before I went to the ER, I stopped off for food, and it was a good thing I did. By the time I got my room the kitchen was closed, and they wanted me on a clear liquid diet. They also wanted me to swallow some bowel prep so the camera could see clearly. It brought back horrible memories of my colonoscopy.

The camera was about as big as the first joint on my index finger, and it flashed a light, presumably for taking pictures inside of me. I swallowed it, and they had me wear a vest that would collect the data as the camera worked its way through me. After 2 hours I could drink water again. After 4 they let me have a light snack. After 8 I could remove the vest. Finally, the next day they let me have a full meal.

The camera found nothing. It's a relief because, hey, no tumor. It's worrisome because there is still something wrong with me. I lost ten pounds during my hospital stay. I no longer have bloody stools (thank fuck), so I'm hoping whatever this is isn't too bad. But my next step is a hematologist to see if they can figure out where my missing blood went. I was down to 7.1 hemoglobin in the hospital, but it was up to 7.5 when I left. A good sign.

My health horrors aren't over, but at least we know more now. I'll keep you updated as I learn more. For a while there I was pissed off because I figured a tumor would kill me within months, and I'd never get to fulfill one of my goals: to beat my mom's high score. She died at 53. I thought I could beat that for sure. Dad's high score, 59, will be more difficult, but I thought I at least had Mom in the bag. So yeah, one of my goals is to live to 60. After that, no promises.