CONSIDERING JOHN BRUNI

 I recently talked with my longtime friend and fellow author, Kent Hill, about Something to Consider, Trancers and a bunch of other cool stuff. Check it out here.

NEW SOCIAL MEDIA

 I got it into my head that I should leave Squitter and pull back significantly on Facebook to limit social media, but now I've done the opposite. I have MORE of a social media presence now. You can find me on Mastodon at @johnbruni and on Bluesky at @tusitalabruni. What the hell is wrong with me?

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #950: FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE

 A while back my stepmom sent me a note from my dad. He'd been thoughtful enough to leave messages to all his loved ones in the event of his death. I thought it would be a good idea to do the same, so I spent some time a couple of weeks ago doing just that.

Have you ever written something meant to be read after you're dead? Mark Twain demanded that his autobiography go unpublished until a hundred years after his death to ensure that everyone he wrote about would be dead. It's not quite the same thing, though, when you're writing something for a specific person to read.

The first thing I noticed was the list of regrets I'd built up without ever realizing it. I have more regrets than I ever thought I would, and I'm not a regretful guy. Not usually. But it was odd how quickly they came pouring out of me when I started writing them down. I was surprised to find I was tearing up while writing some of these. I certainly didn't expect that.

Actually, I *have* written something before meant to be read after my death. I wrote a final GF for you all to be posted as a last message. It didn't feel quite the same, though, as writing to specific people. I hope I've made it easy for my survivors to find everyone I wrote to. These are, after all, physical letters in actual envelopes.

Nature turns to wrapping up another cycle of its life. The leaves fall dead, and the trees are lined with snow. The earth curls inward. The creatures sleep. The end of the year approaches, and we wrap up everything we can. Everything we can't? That's next year's problem.

And yes, I'm wrapping up Goodnight, Fuckers for the year. Next week is Thanksgiving, so my writing vacation officially begins once I post this. (Kind of. I still have GMF on Sunday.) I'll see you all in 2025. I fucking hope. And it's got to be better than 2024. It can't possibly be worse.

Can it?

(Cue the apocalypse . . .)

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #949: THANK THE SPARTANS

 For my birthday I gifted myself the complete collection of Dan Carlin's Hardcore History. I hadn't heard the first 35 shows, so I thought it would be a good investment. As I was listening to one of the early episodes I heard him talking about how Thermopylae was more important than a lot of people realize. Sure, it's a great story, but if it had gone differently it might have changed the course of world history.

I found this a little difficult to believe. If you don't know the story, you know the story. It's the 300 Spartans holding off the Persian Army. The significance of their sacrifice was to buy the Greek city-states time to gather an army to head off Xerxes at the pass. They were able to do this and turn the Persians away.

But what if they didn't succeed? The idea is, Persia conquers Greece and then prevents Greek culture and ideas from spreading out across the world. And which modern country based a lot of their government on Greek culture and ideas? Is it possible that America would never have been founded? Or, at least not in the way that we think of as America. In this alternate reality there might even be a different name for it.

In all likelihood it probably wouldn't have happened that way. The Persians tended toward big picture things, not little picture things. They required a tribute of taxes and able-bodied men in the event of war, and that was it. They left everyone else to live and think and worship as they pleased. As "culture" doesn't really fall under the purview of the ruling empire, I'm pretty sure Greek ideas would have still gotten out there.

But it's kind of fun to think about.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #948: CORPORATIONS AND SMALL BUSINESS OWNERS

You know how I hate advertising. If I'm stuck with commercials, I will not so much as look at the TV. I will not listen. I will not pay attention until my show comes back on. The truly unfortunate side effect of getting high is that I often forget to look away and constantly watch commercials by accident.

I saw this meme earlier, sent by my hetero lifemate Rob Tannahill, and I actually thought, no. Corporations are actually *not* trying to shut down small businesses. I mean, not usually. It happens from time to time, but it's not the standard SOP.

Bill Hicks used to say that commercials used sex appeal to sell things. Now they use nostalgia, which seems to be oddly working better than the sex. But a lot of commercials on the air right now are about corporations ready and willing to help small business owners get their business off the ground. That seems a little . . . different, right?

Why would corporations, who are notoriously in it for themselves (and whatever tax breaks they can get for tricking their customers into donating for causes by "rounding up" instead of donating, themselves), help small business owners? It is a little baffling if you're unfamiliar with corporate tactics.

Why do you think the farmer feeds his pigs so much slop? Why does he smile as they get fatter and fatter? Why do such pigs go for so much money at the county fair?

What do corporations do when they're in trouble? Money's running low, and they're running out of options. They start to look around for another corporation in a similar situation to merge with, sure, but then they would be equal partners in something, and that is unacceptable. Even Donald J. Trump hisowngoddamself knows that in every transaction there is a winner and a loser, and there isn't a CEO in the US who hasn't read The Art of the Deal. Par for the course for any CEO: raid the assets of small businesses. They don't have the crippling debt the corporations have, so the corporations can seize those assets, borrow even more money against them, and leave the small business a hollowed out carcass suitable for making footballs.

They'll come to you hat in hand, first, offering you the world if you'd only just sell for an obscenely low, insulting figure. Naturally you decline. So now it's a hostile takeover, and your lawyer will never be good enough to fight their army of lawyers. Before you know it, you no longer have a business, big or small. And no crime has been committed. No one is going to prison for this unless you flip out and murder some executive who probably has it coming. Not that such an argument would hold up in court.

All of these corporations are running on the fumes of consuming smaller businesses, never realizing for an instant that they will one day hit critical mass. There will be just one business that owns everything. Odd that they're angling for a Communist world through Capitalism. But all the same, when there are no more businesses to conquer, Alexander the CEO won't just weep. He'll eat himself starting at the feet.

It suddenly occurred to me that I don't really know if footballs are made of pigskins. Turns out, in the early days of football they were made out of, not pigskin, but pig bladder. Which is definitely not a skin, but it's a whole lot better to say "let's throw around the pigskin" than "let's throw around the pigsbladder."

Although it comes down to the same thing in the end. The corporations *are* killing small businesses. That's some free market we have, there. Kinda like putting mobsters in charge of enforcing the law.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #947: GWAR

 

I've been listening to GWAR since high school. I've been with them even through Carnival of Chaos, but I dropped off after Battle Maximus. For reasons. Not too long ago I decided to put together a GWAR playlist. Fuck it. Let's throw the new shit on there, see if it's any good. I was not hopeful, but what the hell?

I try not to bail on a band when they get a new singer. I stuck with Alice in Chains, and they're still putting out good songs, more or less. Not the same as with Layne Staley, but Jerry Cantrell is still there rocking out. But sometimes it's a dealbreaker. If your singer, Bon Scott, died on you, and you thought to hire Brian Johnson, that was a good call. That worked. Now Brian Johnson left and you got an aged Axl Rose to replace him, that's a different story. Were Stone Temple Pilots better with Scott Weiland or without? A more appropriate question: who do you remember more fondly, Stone Temple Pilots or Talk Show? Come to think of it, they had two singers die on them, the other being Chester Bennington for that brief period where he was touring with them. Is Dave Coutts still alive?

So. How does the new GWAR measure up?

It doesn't. Not by a longshot.

It still sounds like GWAR except when the singer is singing. He has one thing he does really well, so he never strays from it. There is no nuance to him. No playfulness. Jokes tend to fall flat. There is no creativity in their profanity and descriptions of bloody violence and sex. The band I remember was a real person, but now they're a pod person. They seem the same, but something is off.

And it's very obvious what is off.

Dave Brockie used to say that he imagined GWAR as a band that could go on forever like KISS. It doesn't matter who is under the masks/paint. He seems to have been right about every member of GWAR . . . except for himself.

By the way, if you didn't know he wrote a book, you should check out Whargoul. It's the most aggressively passive book I've ever read. It's great.

Also, GWAR has been on Fox News a lot. What's up with that? Not sure I want to actually watch the videos to find out. Can anyone summarize?

One last thing. I didn't often listen to This Toilet Earth. It wasn't as good as the others. But I'd completely forgotten about this gem.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #946: THIS! VERY! DAY!

 Today has been a very unusual day for me. I've felt off in everything I did except, oddly, my job. That went pretty well. It almost always does on a Monday, and I kicked ass on that front. But my brain, which runs super fast despite my desire for it to go much, much slower, kept hitting speed bumps today. I'm kind of surprised it didn't derail my day.

And almost all of this stuff is speech. I have a script in my head for every occasion. Except I kept getting hung up on words that I knew backwards, forwards, maybe not inside out but what the hell why not? I lost confidence in the things I was saying, which is a huge mistake if you're in sales.

And then there was this nearly overwhelming sensation that I'm going deaf. You know how when it gets dead silent you can actually hear how deafeningly loud silence is? I've been getting that today. I ran a finger through each ear, and there's no blockage. I just did a deep cleaning not too long ago (a necessary thing, as my body produces an insane amount of ear wax). My ears *do* feel kind of numb, though.

Or maybe I'm finally cracking. I've had a crack up in the works, anyway. Might as well get it over with, preferably without the psych ward this time. Would it be better to pretend to lose my mind for a little while than to wait for it to happen naturally? It would probably be waaaaaaay worse the latter way.

It would be nice to wake up without any fucking pain or problems. Just once.

All right, Tuesday. The golfball is in your garden hose. Let's get to work on the best possible results . . .

Oh! Also, today is the 39th anniversary of me writing my first story. Mom made me sign and date it so I'd always know. I thought that was weird at the time, but I'm now glad I did. Although I'm not sure why she told me to do that. Did she somehow know even back then? Or is this something all moms do, and if their kid turns out to be a writer, hey, that's a gamble that pays off? Holy shit, is that why I liked dinosaurs so much? She was trying to push me into paleontology?!?!?!?!!?! What other seeds did she plant?!?!?!?! Dark Shadows?!?!?!?! SHE PUT THAT THERE, T . . . well, actually, I really enjoyed Dark Shadows. I've seen all things Dark Shadows EXCEPT for the Tim Burton movie, which I shall never see.

Wow. Look at this mess. This is kinda what Goodnight, Fuckers looked like back when I was writing these things in a blacked out drunken state. I swear I didn't drink any booze! Why? Do you got some?

Ahhhhhhhhh. I swear I meant to write about something here tonight. I think I'm finally bored with my own misery. Has that finally happened? Have I lived long enough to witness this day? This? Very? Day?

That's heavy, Doc.