GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #925: THE HORRORS PERSIST

 Printers Row: Please don't make me get sick before I go. Authorcon IV: Please don't make me get sick before I go (or even while I'm there). Last Wednesday: Shit, I think I picked up a cold from the con. Friday: OH FUCK IT'S MY SICKNESS NOOOOOOOO!!!!!!

After about seven hours of puking my guts out every 15 minutes and constant pain, I decided to admit defeat and finally go to the ER, where they went through the usual rounds. They haven't hospitalized me for this illness for a while, so I didn't expect them to keep me overnight. But after they sent me for a CT scan (the first of two) the ER doc came back and said, rather cheerfully, "Your scan looks great! Except you tore a hole in your esophagus from puking too hard!"

Well shit. Thanks for that. They thought air was getting through the hole, but no water. They decided to admit me. No food. No water. I can't even let water get close to my mouth. I was hungry, and my tongue scratched like sandpaper across the roof of my mouth. My throat ached, begging for anything. I'd have taken a hot load from John Holmes himself if that was all that was available. My only comfort was morphine, and they were not stingy with it.

(They took mercy on me and got me a cup of water with a sponge to swab my mouth. I couldn't drink it, though.)

But as they were asking the usual questions, and the nurses were fretting about me as they always do, they asked about my leg brace. I then found myself explaining that I have a hole in my foot from stepping on broken glass a couple of months ago. I got it all out, and my podiatrist x-rayed me to confirm that. But now they were worried about it again. They sent me for an MRI, and wouldn't you know it? There wasn't any broken glass, but there *was* a lot wrong with my foot. They didn't scan the heel or ankle, so I still have to do that to learn the final verdict, but they told me about how I've been walking on bone shards for who knows how long? Also, one of my toes died. The bone near the base is just about detached, and I know when that happened. I started working out again, but while doing leg exercises, I heard a pop in that foot. I can't feel anything there, so I took it very seriously and quit working my legs. Now it would seem that lifting weights is also out. I must keep as much pressure off my foot as possible for the rest of my life. I shouldn't even be walking on it, apparently.

The hole itself is doing all right, though. Not great, but not as bad as the rest of my foot. My podiatrist made it sound like I might be losing my foot this week. He's already taken two of my toes (on my other foot, so if I lose the bad one I'll be down to three toes). I know he's hungry for the rest of them. (I wrote a story about the first amputation. I have yet to collect "Welcome to Middle-Age NOW GIVE ME YOUR TOE!", but you can read it here if you wish.)

He had a vacation coming up, so he left me in the hands of his colleague. She looked at the MRI and then at my bad foot and determined that nothing could be determined at this time. But she said it looked stable, and that the other MRI would be needed, but this isn't an emergency situation. It will be somewhere down the line (hopefully three days after the time of my death; wish in one hand . . .), but for now she saw no reason to keep me for the foot. That made me optimistic for the first time in this whole ordeal.

This morning they had me swallow a bunch of barium and took x-rays of it moving through my body. There is no air leak anymore, thank fuck, but I can't have anything solid to eat until next Monday. Clear liquids only in all that time. That sucks, as I am still very hungry, but that first clear liquid "meal" was fucking great. Drinking water again felt great, and I've been instructed to drink a lot of it so the barium doesn't come back and haunt me.

They let me go earlier tonight with a list of doctors to set up appointments with and all of my meds changed from pills to liquids. Shockingly enough I've been given LIQUID FUCKING OPIOIDS. That is what I'll be taking shortly.

The cause of the illness was alcohol. After ignoring medical advice for a decade, I finally quit drinking. I went a year without suffering from this sickness, but it started again in January this year. The docs think it's something called cannabis hyperemesis syndrome. Cannabis builds up in your body and must be purged or I'll get sick. It's a little convenient that they're trying to take another drug away from me, but I've been assured I don't have to quit. I just can't ingest weed in any form, flower, edible or even the excellent infused ginger ale I had with me in St. Louis, every day. They've recommended once a week.

For a while there I was pretty sure that my streak was about to end. It's been two years and ninety-two days since my last drink. That was probably my best streak ever, even when I was on the Sobriety Clock during the Tabard Inn days. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I'm certain I'll drink again. My job is to make sure that day gets put so far off into the future that I might die before it comes. In the hospital I knew that whatever they advised about my foot, I'd ignore it for as long as I possibly could. Then, the day before the amputation, I'd load up on a month's work of whiskey for when I got home after. I'm sure my tolerance has gone remarkably down, and my liver and pancreas are probably in the best shape of my life since I was in college.

We'll have to see how everything goes. For the record, when this year started out I weighed 265. Not my heaviest. That was 306 (and I still managed to get lucky, so not altogether bad). The lowest I've weighed as an adult was in college at 205. My weight is now at 206.

For now I've suffered enough. I'm going to try out this opioid because despite what I told the docs before I left tonight, I still *do* have pain. I lied because I wanted to get the hell out of there. On the pain scale, I'd say I'm at a seven right now. Technically you need to be eight before they give you opioids. All the same, it will be great to get a good night's sleep tonight. This has gone on long enough, so I won't repeat myself on the horrors of trying to sleep in a hospital. For now, goodnight ye kind fuckers, ye.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #924: FAMILY VACATION

 When I was a kid, Gramps would take me and Grandma and my cousin, Erik, on a family vacation. We usually drove down to Springfield, IL, because it was easy. Once we went to Washington, DC, and I remember not being very impressed with our nation's capital. We were going to the White House for a tour, but it was locked down for some reason I no longer recall.

But one year Gramps decided that he would take us to St. Louis to see the Arch. Grandma didn't want to go up because she had many fears, and heights was one of them. Gramps, Erik and I got into the most annoying elevator in the world (you can probably guess as to why). We got to the top, and Erik and I leaned out so we could look out the windows. Gramps didn't have many fears, but every once in a while he got nervous. He was afraid we would fall through I don't know how many feet of steel to our deaths below, so he grabbed the backs of our belts.

That same year he decided to take us to Hannibal, MO, home of Mark Twain because he knew I loved Mark Twain. For the time it was still a little boy's love of adventure. I had yet to get to some of the more interesting of his works. I recently read that after the US slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Filipinos just because we could that Mark Twain said we should replace the stars and stripes with a skull and crossbones. Perhaps you see the appeal to me.

Fast forward a few decades, and I'm driving to St. Louis as an adult. I first knew we were getting close because the Arch is so big it's impossible to miss. It's so much bigger than I remembered it to be. Aren't childhood memories the other way around? Things are supposed to be smaller than you remember.

Like the Mississippi River. I remember it being a lot wider, but we drove over the bridge pretty quickly. It seemed reminiscent of the Des Plaines River when you're heading south down 83. The Mississippi didn't seem all that impressive. Maybe when I was a kid we crossed it elsewhere. I don't know.

I thought briefly about going to Hannibal as an adult, but there was no way I had enough time. Not if I wanted to get back home before midnight. I also thought about maybe visiting one of my publishers. Don Noble lives in that area, and it's been ages since I've seen him. Again, I didn't have enough time.

Which is weird because the drive felt a lot shorter than I expected. The trip didn't feel long at all. I picked up my road partner about an hour from home, but after that it didn't feel like three hours. It felt like two, tops. The drive home felt more or less the same. We stopped at Bob Evans, something I haven't done since I was a kid. It was pretty good.

I haven't made up my mind about doing more shows yet. For more on that, tune in to this week's newsletter. But looking at the map I've decided that the farthest I can go in any direction is probably St. Louis, Indianapolis, Madison and Davenport. My aunt lives across the Mississippi from Davenport, so I might even have a place to stay if I go that way. I won't have to rely on a hotel.

We'll see.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #923: CAFFEINE FREE DIET COKE

 Last week, in preparation for St. Louis, I decided to allow myself to drink Caffeine Free Diet Coke again. I've been eating dinner with water instead, so going back to cola was interesting for me. The problem is, when I started doing that again, I started waking up in the middle of the night again.

For the longest time I've been sleeping nearly through the night. I tend to wake up maybe fifteen minutes before my alarm goes off. But when I went back to the cola, I would wake up at two. Or three. Or four. And I'd try to go back to sleep, but I couldn't.

I got back home, so I'm back to drinking water at night. Somehow I have yet to sleep through the night. That irritates me. Getting a good night's sleep was doing wonders for me. It maybe even saved my sickness from coming back. It's possible that's why it's been a while since an attack.

I'm sick today, so we're keeping this one short. It's a cold, which I rarely get. I wonder if that's the trade off when it comes to my recurrent stomach problems. I get stuck with those, but I rarely get a cold. I think I'd rather get the colds.

Maybe it's a sign that the usual sickness is going away for a while. That would be nice. If I can make it to the end of the year without puking my guts out, I'll trust myself with more conventions next year.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #922: COOKIES

 The wicked get no rest, and neither do the depraved, so when I had last week off *from* Goodnight, Fuckers, I still did research *for* Goodnight, Fuckers. I shan't tell you the topic yet, as I will be using it possibly this week, but something interesting happened while I was looking something up. I found a link, and it took me to a website where I was confronted with the usual cookies ultimatum.

Except . . . it *wasn't* an ultimatum. It requested that I accept all cookies, and it explained what the cookies were meant to do, and it gave me the option to continue without accepting the cookies. Wait, that can't be right. If I come across a cookies statement, I back out of the website. I do *not* want their surveillance on my computer. Which is funny, because I accept that the NSA is spying on us, but I don't really care about that. If they found something interesting about me, they wouldn't just use it. They'd sock it away in case I someday become a terrorist or some such nonsense. But I very much care about corporations, our country's true owners, spying on us. Corporations . . . wait, I'm going to put this in all caps so there's no misunderstanding. CORPORATIONS HAVE NO RIGHT TO SPY ON US.

But this one website said I could skip the cookies? I could continue anyway?

Then it hit me. I'm not on an American website, am I? Nope! I'm not! Because the EU has much better privacy laws than we, the supposedly greatest country in the universe, do. The last privacy law we got was in 1988 when a pack of Congressassholes passed the law to prevent video store clerks from ratting them out to the press. That was pre-internet, and everything has changed. We don't just need a new privacy law. We're OWED IT.

I chose to skip the cookies, and I enjoyed reading a website that didn't try to fuck me over. I shit you not, it was euphoric.

But we're going to have to scare the shit out of these Congressassholes again. That means we're going to have to find out, say, which porn sites they use and publish them. That is an illegal act because the Congressassholes aren't stupid. But we need to incentivize them.

Which reminds me, since I have you all here, I have a solution to the AI problem. It will be very illegal, but it will also be very effective. If someone were to create a deepfake of Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham fucking each others' brains out, I'm pretty sure we'll get those anti-AI laws.

If I may borrow a line from one of my characters, it's "something to consider."

GOODNIGHT,FUCKERS #921: HOME AGAIN

 As much as I loved doing Authorcon IV in St. Louis this weekend, it was good to get home and sleep in my own bed last night. It was also good to brazenly smoke weed in my bedroom instead of finding someplace to do that around the hotel. It was a stressful weekend, so I was glad I had today off from work. I had plenty of time to not only put my life back in order but to also relax and let my heart rate get back to normal. Or, at least, normal for me.

I'll probably talk about the show more for my newsletter. I try to put all writing stuff in that instead of here. For tonight I'm just happy that I'm no longer turned up to 11, which pretty much started Friday morning when I took the last of my shit to the car until last night when I finally got home. I'll get into something more substantial tomorrow night. In the meantime, if you missed the news earlier, I have my post convention sale going on. Prices will revert back to usual on Sunday night, so if you want to take advantage, now's the time. I'm also going to try to not be so angry in these. My frustrations kept getting the better of me lately, and these are supposed to be at least funny-ish, not these harrowing grim doom and gloom explorations that I'm starting to get used to.

So let's meet back here tomorrow night and talk about something . . . interesting. Interesting in the Chinese proverb type of way, probably, but who knows? We'll see.

POST CONVENTION SALE

 OK, now that I'm done going to shows for the year, it's time for my post convention sale! I'm going to let the convention sale prices go for the week, so if you're interested in trying something of mine, now is the time. This sale is good for until October 13th at midnight central. Each book is $12 each or 3 for $30. The only exception is listed at the bottom. I'm low in stock on some of these. Those titles are marked with an asterisk. If I can physically put these books in your hand, that's the final price. If I have to ship it, please add $5 to the price. US only. Sorry, rest of the world. I can make it up to you. If you want something of mine, I'll find something digital for you for free. For America, I take PayPal, Chime and CashApp. Or you can send me a check. Or, God help me, I have a Square I can physically enter credit card info into, but that's only if you trust me enough with that info. I personally would not trust someone else in such a fashion, but if you're OK with it, I'm OK with it. I promise I'm not a scumbag. Contact me for details on social media or here or my website, etc.

AND JESUS CAME BACK

BEERS WITH HANK (a tribute anthology for Charles Bukowski)*

BLOOD

THE DOCTOR . . . IS IN (a tribute anthology for Hunter S. Thompson)*

EYE CUTTER

GONZO RISING (a follow up to that tribute to HST)*

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF HIERONYMOUS ALOYSIS ZIEGE

POOR BASTARDS AND RICH FUCKS

STRIP*

TALES OF QUESTIONABLE TASTE

TALES OF UNSPEAKABLE TASTE

TRAIL OF BLOOD

THESE BEAMS DON'T MELT: This is the exception. It's $5, toss in $1 for shipping. I didn't write this one. My friend, Rosie Kant, did. It's the last signed copy I have, and I'm not likely to get anymore of them anytime soon.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS BREAK

 I'm taking another break from Goodnight, Fuckers for next week, as I am preparing to go to St. Louis for Authorcon IV. I should return to it the following Monday.