GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1028: A PROPER AUTHORITARIAN REGIME

President Donald J. "Sergeant" Schultz, speaking with the press corps.

 Not too long ago I noted that we lucked out as far as being led by Nazis went. Instead of actual, scary Nazis, we got the Hogan's Heroes version. And let the record state, your honor, that my current favorite genre of videos is footage of ICE screwing the pooch over and over again. The ICE guy slipping on ice? I've got a little precum just thinking about it. He may be masked, but all his goon buddies know exactly who he is. He knows they laugh behind his back. Hell, for all I know, they laugh at his front, too.

And now ICE is just shooting people in the face. Is that scary? Yes. Very much so. But it's also still in the Hogan's Heroes mindframe.

These assholes can't even properly run an authoritarian regime. They just keep ratcheting shit up. It's not hot enough, fellas. It's gotta be hotter. No, HOTTER. NO! HOTTER!

I listen to a lot of political podcasts, so forgive me if I'm blanking on who said this, but it's a good point: Real authoritarian regimes know not to overdo it. They know when to release the pressure. They know how to ease up and let their people know peace if only for a little while. And if you look at long-lasting dictatorships, that's the secret sauce to their survival.

You may have noticed, but we used to be like that. Every once in a while we'd get a break from the constant assault on our senses, but ever since Sgt. Schultz was sworn into office we've never had a day--NOT SO MUCH AS A SINGLE SECOND--of relief. This is by design. They think this is breaking us. And it is. "Flood the zone with shit." -Steve Bannon, a Steaming Pile of Shit(TM).

But they're ignoring the natural consequence of this. Remember the last time we were under a constant assault of shit? Me neither, because I wasn't alive during the American Revolution.

"Where's King George III?"

"Am I my king's keeper?"

They want a civil war. Now that cities are threatening to arrest ICE agents, that civil war is closer to us than ever. How do you expect ICE to respond the moment one of them gets arrested? Now that they have pulled out their tiki torches and are no longer hiding their Nazi tendencies?

They're not exactly the paradigm of fuckin' restraint.

I feel it, too. I'm exhausted, angry, frustrated, aghast, stricken and so many other fucking things. You can probably sense from my tone how frayed I am. But we can't let them have that civil war. That's how we ALL lose.

But if they keep this shit up, they'll have a revolution instead.

All right, the apartment is fed up with us complaining about the roaches, so they're spraying the complex down tomorrow. I gotta warn them about Big Ed's brother. He's got a gun, I think, and he's been doing poppers all week. If I find the time, I'll finally get around to telling you how to kneecap our corporate overlords.

Jon Stewart turns solemnly toward the camera while loosening his collar. He clears his throat. "Hey France. It's been a while. Listen, I know we said some really bad things about you twenty years ago . . .and we're deeply sorry for the thing with the Freedom Fries. Please accept our sincerest apologies. Hey, we had some good times, didn't we? Like during the American Revolution! Say, speaking of those times, I have a favor to ask . . ."

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1027: HOW TO RUN FOR PRESIDENT AS AN INDEPENDENT AND WIN (or, A POX ON BOTH YOUR HOUSES)

So you want to run for US President as an independent . . .

 

Once upon a time I ran for US President. That year was 2016. You should have voted for me. Really. We wouldn't be going through all of this right now if you had. But I wasn't serious about the whole thing. I was doing it to promote a book. But I did look into the process.

What I learned is, all you have to do is say you're running for President. That's all. But there's a catch: if you want to be put on an actual ballot, you have to put in a lot of work. A lot. More than I was willing to go through for a book promotion.

But after you do that exceptionally difficult work, actually winning the office is pretty easy, but you have to follow these guidelines. You also have to be genuine. If you can't be genuine, this will not work for you. If you're merely seeking power, look elsewhere. Perhaps find a way to get yourself elected VP and then arrange for the big guy to have an accident. That might work for you. It's the passive version of what Vance seems to be going for, at any rate.

For the rest of you, though, this should be easy.

First and foremost, you should be qualified for the office. What does that mean? If you no longer remember your US Government class in high school: be a US-born citizen, the US must be your residence for the last 14 years and you must be at least 35 years old. And that's it.

But you don't want to do what I did. You want to actually win, so you'll need to get on ballots, and unfortunately you have to do that on a state by state basis. Each state has different requirements. You can learn more about that here. For the most part, you will be getting signatures from people in each state. A lot of signatures, and you'll probably have to go there yourself to get them or have someone do that on your behalf. So yes, you'll need funding or really, really good friends who would go out of their way to help you.

But let's say that you get all the signatures you need to be on the ballot of every state. How do you convince your fellow Americans to vote you into the highest office in the land?

Here's the easy part. Don't try to go after blue or red votes. It's a waste of time. That is not your focus. If you do this properly, those votes will siphon off to you naturally. You'll never win over the die hard left or right, but you can get the people the right and the left have let down.

Your focus will be two different kinds of people. In 2024, of the 174M people registered to vote, only 154M of them did. Even I can do that kind of math: that's 20M people who did not bother to vote. They are your first focus. The second? The unregistered citizens of legal age to vote. There are more than 72M of them. That's 92M+ people who loathe the system as it is now.

And it *is* loathing, not apathy. I've gone over this before. Their disgust with the system is such that they no longer want to participate in it.

All you have to do is give them a reason. Make them feel that they have a shot at having their voices be heard.

How do you reach them? Press releases are good, but you've got some pavement to pound and some flesh to press. You need a boots on the ground tactic, and your boots should be making contact on the ground around unemployment lines. At SNAP sites. Soup kitchens. Talk to the homeless, to sex workers, to addicts. You have to reach out a hand to all the people our political system has abandoned, and let them know that they have not been forgotten. You want to help. And don't just show up to put in an appearance. You have to listen to the people. Let them know that you're concerned about AI, the cost of living, the ability to own property, all that stuff. You're never going to own a home like your parents did. Well, I can help you with that.

I said it above, and I'll say it again. YOU MUST BE GENUINE. These people have been put through the fucking wringer, and their bullshit detectors are top of the line.

If you are honest and genuine, it will be easy to get elected. There's a reason that, every four years, Republicans and Democrats get hard-ons for the people who don't vote. They lust for those numbers to be added to their respective sides. And the numbers don't lie. If you can get that 92M (and you will undoubtedly get more, as there are Republicans sick of Trump and Democrats sick of whatever the fuck their side is doing; hence the siphoning comment above), then you'll wipe the walls with whoever those corporate sycophants put up against you. Trump got 77.3M votes, Harris got 75M.

The numbers don't lie.

There's something else to keep in mind. The Democrats and the Republicans all serve the same master: our corporate overlords. Those overlords do not like to be fucked with. They will first try to buy you ("It is better to buy than compete." --Mark Zuckerberg, corporate overlord), and make no mistake, they will spare no expense. You must not give in to them. Or, if you do take their money, give them nothing in return but a laugh. Fair warning: if you do this, you stand a good chance of being assassinated. My advice to you is to tell people in speeches, "I endanger their business, so it's only natural that they'd want to kill me. So if I ever get killed, please investigate them first." It may or may not keep you alive, but it gives you a better chance at survival.

But I urge you to proceed with caution because if corporate bribery doesn't work, and they're not ready to kill you yet, CIA "suggestion" could do the trick. For instance:

A guy approaches you, full of compliments, telling you how much he likes what you're doing, running as a third party candidate with a real shot at blowing the other guys out of the water. "But there's one thing I think you should really be aware of." He offers you a file folder.

And in that file folder is evidence of all the terrible things you've done that you thought you got away with. Video of you stolen from your laptop's camera, audio stolen from your laptop's mic. And if you think, haha, I don't use a laptop, do you also not use a smartphone?

There's a list of all the horrible things you've ever googled, all the porn videos you have ever watched. Every word you've sent via Facebook chat about people who thought you were their friend. EVERYTHING.

"I'd hate for this to get out," he tells you. "You'd be disappointing a lot of people."

So yeah. If they can't get you with that, then hire a great team of bodyguards.

OK, now that you know how to get voted into the White House as an independent, you now need to break the backs of our corporate overlords. But I've talked too long tonight. I have Friday off, so I may or may not write a GF tomorrow. I'm getting my eyes dilated, and I'm usually not in the mood to write after that happens. If I *do* write, tomorrow's topic will be what your first executive order should be and how that will utterly destroy the stranglehold the corporate overlords have over our lives.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1026: HE'S BACK . . .

  . . . The devil is here!
Smoke crack!
And drink a lot of beer!

To quote an old song I wrote. *ahem* Anyway.

Yeah, I'm back. Surprise! To no one except myself, apparently. I figured I'd miss GF after a few years and then say, the hell with it, and go right back to it.

But I missed you all. And I missed writing these things. Even though some were a real bitch to write (and many of them I don't even remember writing, as I used to do these while heavily inebriated.

I've been up to quite a bit since last we met up here. I'm pretty sure I'm not even the same guy who wrote #1025, there has been so much afoot in my life. And if that's true? I'm lightyears away from the guy who wrote GF #1.

Before I begin this next part, I'm going to quote Nixon. "I want to make one thing perfectly clear." I understand that the tools of literary critique are not meant to apply to real life. I have not gone insane. (I'm pretty sure I'm not.) I am not so far gone to think that a method of examining a fictional character should ever be used to examine an actual person, much less myself.

That said, remember Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey?

When I was a much younger man I wrote in my journal about a rare moment of jealousy for me. I was jealous of one of my friends who had traveled through and lived in Europe for having such great adventures and meeting wonderfully different kinds of people, and I wanted that for me. Not, like, I wanted to wear his skin and walk a mile in his literal shoes. I wanted my own version of it. I'd lived a lot of my life up to that point holding back on everything because I didn't want to take chances. I liked being comfortable. And yet my inner Walter Mitty always went journeying off.

I can count on my fingers the number of times I've been jealous in my life, so these moments tend to stick out. Except in that moment in particular I realized there wasn't a single fucking thing standing in the way of me living the adventurous life that I desired at that moment. Why am I sitting here bitching into my journal about something I have 100% control over? It was a moment of my revelation.

It was my call to adventure.

I have, indeed, lived an adventurous life. Some of the things I've seen and lived and experienced are wonderful, even if they were grim and awful in the moment I was living them. At the age of 47, I have lived what I consider a full life, and if I dropped dead of a heart attack tomorrow (a possibility, considering how my dad passed) I would die satisfied. I got my fuckin' money's worth.

But I did die. Kind of. Remember Doomsday? As in, how I used to reference the day I had to move out of my childhood home? That was the day I think I died. I dragged what was left of my wretched soul to the River Styx and climbed aboard the boat with Charon. That was the hotel I lived in for a month in Addison. It really was a nightmare of a place. A waking nightmare. I numbly watched the madness of humanity all around me, never realizing that I wasn't just a tourist. I was living there, too. I was trapped with the horrors, just like them.

And then I wound up in the underworld, aka Joliet. It was the most miserable time of my life, possibly because I wasn't alive. I was in some weird version of Purgatory, where I had to figure out my next, possibly final, destination.

I took the advice I used to sell on a bumper sticker. I chose death. Things were so rough I felt doomed. DOOMED. No hope at all. It was time, stricken, to face the true horrors of it all. Cue the ending of Angel Heart.

I somehow survived. Well, I know how I survived. I don't think I'll ever tell that story, but suffice it to say, I found hope again. Hope brought back my fighting spirit. I fought harder than I ever fought in my life for something, and I came out on top.

I was talking about this with a friend, and I likened it to the ending of The Chronicles of Riddick. I'd found myself suddenly sitting on the throne, stunned in victory. How the hell did this happen?

And the world bloomed before me, Samwise the Strong!!!

And then I told myself, dude, tone it down a little.

I am alive. And I intend to stay that way, at least for the next 13 years. I have to beat my dad's high score of 59. After that, if death comes a knockin', I'll be a-rockin'.

And now the return.

Welcome back to Goodnight, Fuckers. It won't be the same as last time. Oh, don't worry, these will all still be my memories and thoughts, history lessons and political rants. Plain weird shit. But we'll see where this takes us.

Tune in tomorrow for my tips on how to run for President of the United States as an independent and win. It'll probably be a long one.

[Warning: This Goodnight, Fuckers contains spoilers for the ending of The Chronicles of Riddick. You should have watched the movie first. Also, by reading this you agree to buy at least one of my books. If you already have bought one of my books, you must now buy an additional one or more. This document is legally binding. Sorry.]

IT RISES by John Bruni

 The ball slowly descends on the scene as drunken revelers count down the seconds, 2025 finally--mercifully--coming to an end. Hopes are high in this crowd. After all the lunacy they survived, how could 2026 possibly be worse? Utter nuclear annihilation? Because that's what it would take, most think to themselves.

The crowd shouts themselves hoarse as the ball comes down. "FIVE!" they scream. "FOUR! THREE! TWO! ONE!"

A light show erupts, bathing the party in flashes and sparks, and confetti flies. Triumphant music blares. It's finally over. "HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!!!" they cry out.

Drinks are quaffed. People gather and kiss and hug and take selfies. The fever pitch rises in a way only a fresh start can generate.

The lights go suddenly out. The music stops without so much as a screech or a needle drop. Dead silence reigns supreme. Then quiet mutterings begin. What happened? Is someone going to fix this? Dammit, this is no way to ring in the new year.

And then fireworks unexplode. Music plays backwards. Confetti zips itself back into its cannons. Humanity watches in horror, mouths agape, as the ball rises back up the pole. 2026 retreats, replaced by its predecessor, and the people scream and gnash their teeth and rend their hair, and the horror resumes.

Forever and ever, amen.

"OLD SCHOOL" IN ILLUSTRATED WORLDS MAGAZINE

 

I have a story in the new issue of Illustrated Worlds Magazine. It's called "Old School," the story of a telecom field tech dispatched to fix a POTS line at a retirement home, but the people living there seem off. So do the staff, come to think of it. Something's not right here . . . Find out what by getting your own copy here.

BLACK WEDNESDAY (BELATED)

[NOTE: I wrote this last night and thought I'd posted it. However, I was also high when I wrote this, and by the time I realized I hadn't posted it, I was in bed with my ankle brace off. I wasn't going to put it back on to go out to my laptop in the living room. Hence the "belated" part of the title.]

 It's been three years and one hundred and thirty-four days since my last drink. Black Wednesday is traditionally the drunkest day of the year in America, but even at the deepest depths of my alcoholic depravity, I never went out for Black Wednesday. I got shitfaced at home. Leave the DUIs to the social drinkers who over-imbibed that night. It's like vampires on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. They stay home on Halloween night.

This used to be my favorite weekend of the year because at all my office jobs I usually got a four day weekend, which I always dedicated to drunken debauchery of all sorts. Then I'd have a handle of Wild Turkey 101 (it was Thanksgiving, after all) the next day, and I'd have a collection of booze for when that was gone. I usually had Jameson as back up, and then a couple of handles of really cheap shit for when that ran out. I'd return to work the following Monday hung the fuck over (or possibly still a little drunk).

I really do miss those days, but even if I was still drinking now, I'd no longer get to celebrate like I used to. My current job is closed on Thanksgiving, which is always on a Thursday, a day I usually have off. No, I don't get a different day off. We're open on Black Friday (and for the first time ever, we have a Black Friday sale, so . . . yay . . .), and I work on Saturdays, so my four day weekend would be impossible now.

This will also be my first Thanksgiving completely alone. Now that my brother and I have gone our separate ways, and I'm all the way out in the middle of nowhere, there's no likelihood of seeing anyone else. I'm pretty happy to spend time on my own. I like my own company very much. But on a holiday? And it's likely to be the same for Christmas and New Year's. I guess we'll put my resistance to loneliness to the test.

I still have a tiny bottle of WT101. Empty, of course. I suppose I'll give it a sniff tomorrow to remind me of the good ol' days.

Happy Thanksgiving. Don't get any DUIs tonight. And if you love your mental health, stay home on Black Friday. Don't worship at the feet of unrestrained corporate greed. Unless you have to work, in which case you have my condolences.

Almost said goodnight, fuckers. But really, why would I say something so silly and rude?

STORIES FROM THE MOTEL SICK NOW AVAILABLE!

STORIES FROM TJHE MOTEL SICK edited by Michael Allen Rose is now available! I have a story in this one called "Family Tradition." Get your copy here!