GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #404: NOT FOUND

 

Yeah, technically this isn't a real Goodnight, Fuckers. I write and post these before I go to bed, but I'm not going to bed after I post this one. I had an excellent idea for a pleasantly thoughtful column tonight, but that has been superseded by bullshit.

I can't talk about said bullshit. Even if I could, it would be of interest only to those in the same industry as me, auto glass. And even then, they probably wouldn't want to hear it, either.

Something pissed me off today, and it's been a long time since something got through to me this badly. Usually when I leave the office, I don't think about it until I have to be up the next morning. But this bad, demoralizing experience continues to haunt me. I couldn't enjoy listening to music on the way home. I couldn't concentrate enough to read or do any of the things I usually do when I get home.

So instead of reading my musings on a particular episode of Lucifer, tonight you're reading this (unless you saw the image above on the link and decided not to click on it, which would be funny). As for me, I'm unplugging from the world to scrape this horror from my memory.

The sad thing is, when I get into the office tomorrow, I'm sure I'll have to relive the whole fucking thing. The day was actually a good day, but it was that last call of the shift. The one where I figured I could get through the next five minutes so I could get out of there. The one that made me stay almost 45 minutes late. It was so grim that I'm still pissed off right now.

So yeah. Radio silence for the rest of the night. Goodnight and . . .

If you recognize this, then you know the rest of the line.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #403: A WRITER OR AN AUTHOR

 Relax. Don't worry. I'm not going to say some stupid bullshit about what it takes to be an author versus a writer. Anyone who does that is full of shit. Whatever works for you is the real answer. The difference between feeling like an author or a writer is something that applies to me alone.

It's easy to feel like a writer. You sit down and write (or edit, or fucking hell, put together a synopsis), and that's it. I've felt like a writer for as long as I can remember. During the plague it was pretty easy to feel that. But I missed feeling like an author.

I got to experience that again for the first time in, what? Two years? Going to Printers Row this year was a lot of fun. I missed that kind of thing. Selling books. Signing books. Meeting readers. That's the shit that makes me feel like an author, and these were hard things to come by during these Covid Years. More importantly, I missed doing live readings.

Feeling like an author is difficult. I can't rely on just myself for that. I need the participation of others in order to get into that head space. And goddam! That felt good.

I really want to do more shows in 2022. I hope that we can put this plague behind us and have fun in public spaces full of people again. That would be nice. I'd like to do Days of the Dead again, for example. I'm still not back on board with comic book conventions. That would take a lot. But horror cons? I miss the hell out of those. And one day I'd like to table at Scares That Care. I'm pretty sure that won't happen next year, but maybe 2023? Who knows?

That would be pretty fucking cool.

Oh yeah, and sorry for almost creating a cult during and after the live reading of my story, "Butt Club," from Tales of Unspeakable Taste.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #402: MY DESCENT INTO DECREPITUDE CONTINUES

So I got even more bad news yesterday with a tiny sprinkling of good news. Because that's what happens every time I see a doctor. Any doctor.

But this wasn't just any doctor. He was the last person to see the big toe on my right foot attached to the rest of me. Because he was holding the scalpel that would remove said big toe. So I knew the news would be bad.

My bad foot is collapsing. The more it collapses, the closer it comes to being amputated, and they would be cutting just below my left knee. He looked at the bottom of my foot with a great deal of concern, and I started wondering if I'd be able to leave his office with both feet still attached. That would suck, especially since the hole in that foot healed so nicely.

"I'm going to look at the x-rays," he said. When he came back, he had that sprinkle of good news. "It's not too bad. Yet. If your foot gets hot and turns red, go to the ER."

Well. Okay then.

Then he wanted to admire his work on my right foot. "I don't know who performed that amputation, but he did a great job," he said.

I tried to smile. Not that it would have showed under my mask, anyway.

But he was very concerned with the toe next to my stump. I'd been having problems with it, but for a while it was covered on the tip by a shell of dead skin. It seemed to have healed, and it was giving me no problems.

"That's bad," he said. "Let me trim that up for you."

It's a good thing I have very little feeling in my toes because he took a scalpel and some surgical scissors to that toe, carving away the dead skin. "Ah. There's an open sore here. It's small, but it's not too bad. If you hadn't come in, it might have gotten to the bone. Then you'd have eight toes."

Fucking great.

"Oop. You're bleeding a little bit." He used gauze to wipe it up, and then he bandaged it up and advised me to keep an eye on it. Keep changing the bandage. Use the leftover antibiotic ointment from the incident with the hole in my foot.

"And hey. Bleeding is good news. If it bleeds, it can heal."

I'm pretty sure that's not the lesson I learned from Predator.

Then he lowered me down from the elevated chair, and I saw that I'd bled so much there was a puddle on the floor that a nurse had to sanitize. It reminded me of when a surgeon had to "open you up a little" when I had an abscess. When I looked at that guy's work, he'd unzipped the inside of my thigh. I could have fit all of my fingers in the slit he made there.

So I've been watching that toe. Every time I finally get it to stop bleeding, a couple of hours later I discover it's started bleeding again. But hey. If it bleeds, we can kill it. No, wait. I got that wrong.

Anyway, I'm sure if I live long enough (and that's never a guarantee), I'll be Johnny Eight Toes. Or hell. Maybe I'll get the other foot cut off and I'll be Johnny Three Toes. It has a certain ring to it, but I don't think I'd like going through life like that.

FUCK.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #401: VILLA PARK'S SLEAZE STRIP

So if you head west down North Ave. from Rt. 83, you'll reach a block that is probably ground zero of all crime in the suburbs, and it's about to get grimier.

You'll see Strat's, which looks like a very nice place, and it is. They have a decent burger, and the decor is straight out of the 'Fifties. But they have these car shows where macho bullshit reigns supreme. Every youth with a hotrod thinks he's James Dean on PCP, so they get a lot of fights there. They sometimes got so bad that Strat's stopped serving beer, hoping to cut down on the violence. It worked. A little. I remember being there for one of them, and when all the cops showed up, it made me very nervous about having a flask on me. Luckily for me my driver's license was suspended at the time because I didn't blow when arrested for DUI (and years after I got my license back, I was found not guilty). As such, I'd taken a taxi, so I got the fuck out of Dodge while the gettin' was good.

Then you'll see the OTB bar. Because gambling and alcohol go so well together, as anyone who has been to Vegas will attest. I haven't gone in there often, but when I have been there, there has been violence.

And then my favorite place on this sleaze strip: the best no-tell in the area, the Brer Rabbit Motel. I cannot tell you how many sordid nights I spent in this place, usually drunk and covered in the stink of sex. If you're looking for drugs or prostitutes, this is the place for you. If you get to your room after registering without someone asking if you want crack or meth, you probably look like a cop.

And you know what? I'll up the ante on this place. I'm sure many people have died there, through their own excesses or someone else's taste for death, but I know for sure that at least one murder happened there. It was a while back, and I'm too lazy and high to look up names right now, but there were a couple of guys who used to live there. They liked to dig up corpses and fuck them and leave them dismembered somewhere. Then they moved on to the living. They kidnapped a young woman and brought her to this motel, where they raped and tortured and killed her. If memory serves correctly, they dumped the body out behind the place. One grim detail remains prominent in my mind, though. They cut off one of her breasts and played Soggy Biscuit with it. If you don't know what that game is, it's when a bunch of dudes get together and jerk off onto a biscuit (UK) or cookie (US) or some kind of food. Whoever cums on it last has to eat it.

How's that for a fuckin' image? I hope you weren't eating anything while reading this one tonight. Reader discretion is advised . . .

But now there's a new addition to this sleaze strip. I just noticed it today. It's not open yet, and I think it is a tremendously horrible idea to open this place at that specific location.

The new business? A gun range. I'm not sure if they sell guns, too, but I'll bet they do.

Yeah, things have always been weird on that block between Villa and Ardmore, and I suspect it's going to get a lot weirder soon.

"I don't know how many years on this earth I have left, but I'm gonna get real weird with it."

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #400: THE TIME I LIVED WORLD WAR II

 Wow. 400 fucking columns. That's outstanding. How the hell did that happen? It feels like I just celebrated doing 300 of these things.

All right. Let's get into it, then.

One more quick word. I wrote this last night, but as I was rereading it before posting, I saw that it's unusually angry for me. It's weird because I was high at the time, and it's supposed to be impossible to be furious when high. Well, that's how bad it was. I decided I would cut most of it out, and if we're all supremely lucky, we'll never have to read that version. So here's the better (I hope) version. By the time you're done, I suspect you might know why I got so fucking pissed off, but it's better to just cut that shit out.

We're going back in time. Not to the 1940's, but to the early 1990's. I think I was in seventh grade, although I might be wrong on that. What I know for sure was that I was at Sandburg Junior High, and a school-wide project was launched. We were going to pretend we were living WWII. It was to teach the importance of civic duty, I believe, and it actually worked in my case. Not right away, naturally. But during these plague years, I think often on this exercise.

First and foremost, all of us boys were relegated to the draft. Sadly, we weren't going to pretend to fight a war. That might have actually been cool. Instead we were just going to Boot Camp. Fuck that shit. I worked very quickly to get myself designated as 4F right away. This is something I would have done in real life, anyway. I've never been a fan of physical exertion, and I certainly had no intentions of being a leg-breaker for the Uncle Sam. I know that wasn't actually at stake, but again, I would have done the same thing in real life. While everyone else was forced to run laps and do push ups and sit ups (this was before the idea of the crunch was introduced into Physical Education), I dined on snacks of the age and got to watch Dumbo.

This is kinda funny, considering I actually am 4F now. If, for some reason, the draft was reinstated and they wanted middle-aged men to kill some motherfuckers, they would still turn me down due to the bad leg.

But it wasn't all fun and games being stuck at home while the boys went off to battle the Hun. (And yeah, that's more WWI than WWII, but they still used the term in the 'Forties.) As in real life, we also had our ration stamps. We had to sacrifice at home so our soldiers could do the best they could. Sacrifice was an important part of the war effort in those days. The government dictated how much of a certain food you could buy. For example. Did anyone argue the point?

Not at school. And for the most part, not in real life, either.

Could you imagine Americans having to go through that shit today? How many people would complain? If I had a Venn Diagram of those who would complain about having to use ration stamps and those who complain about Covid restrictions? I'm pretty sure I'd be looking at a perfect circle.

I guess people just don't give a shit about the common good anymore. Sacrifice is for the cucks, right? And there's another word I just can't stand. And this is the part I'm rewriting per the notes at the beginning. There are about 2,000 words that follow this sentence that I'm about to cut for my personal greater good. I'm getting heated up again, and I'm high yet again, so I'm just stopping right now.

There were also some funny comments about spellcheck, but it's connected too deeply to the anger. I was tempted to leave them in, but fuck it. Sorry..

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #399: DID I DIE?

 There are sometimes that I think I died, and I'm in the afterlife. And what a shitty afterlife that is. For example, I occasionally wonder if I died when I was in the hospital in January 2020 after I lost my job and went on the drinking binge to end all drinking binges, the one when I went in for pancreatitis and wound up getting stuck there for two weeks going through severe alcohol withdrawals. When 2020 kept getting worse and worse, I figured yeah, I'd died in the hospital. This is just some fever dream of the brain. I just have to wait for the electric impulses to end, and I'll be gone for good.

Not too long ago, I was fucked up on pills in an attempt to get some sleep. I hadn't gotten any the previous night, so I needed to make sure I zonked out in the morning. I was in the twilight between high as fuck and actual sleep, and I looked up at the ceiling. There was a golden door there, and I thought, holy shit, I really did die. Now it's time to get out of here.

After I thought about it I realized it was actually something reflected up at my ceiling from the backyard. It looked like a door, but there was no knob or anything. I giggled to myself and sleep finally took me.

It reminded me of when I was in the hospital before the worst of the DT's hit. Whenever I'm in the hospital, for whatever reason, the bed is positioned directly under a reflective light so if I want to look up and see how pathetic I appear, it's nice and easy to do that. I was a lumpen form in a hospital bed, bloated and ugly like how the scandal sheets get pictures of celebrities when they're not looking their best.

But this time I saw an Old West street with horses and tumbleweeds and gunslingers and everything. And there was a very pretty woman who beckoned to me, holding out her hand like she could pull me through the light and into her world. Intellectually, I knew it was a hallucination. But goddam, it was a good one. I wouldn't have minded then and there lifting up a hand to leave this fucking place.

Instead I called for the nurse so I could get my next morphine shot.

How's that for a fuckin' dark GF column. I'm not even in a bad mood right now. It's just something I thought about while eating lunch today. Gotta watch out for those ceiling doors into other worlds . . .

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #398: ARE YOU SIRIUS?

 I got my car back today. Looks prettier than ever. I know it's common to name a car after a woman, but this one's name is the Dude. There's a lot of years on him, and he likes to take it real easy. He's also a hybrid, so he's thinking environmentally. But that's just, like, my opinion, man. The Dude looks better than ever now.

I've been driving a rental for the past week or so. It was a nice vehicle, but it just wasn't the same. The one thing that I really enjoyed about it, though, was the Sirius/XM radio. I missed listening to Sirius/XM. It's usually where I get the newest music, and for the past few months I've been driving a vehicle where my only options are terrestrial radio (and that's just a bummer) or CDs. So I've been wearing my CDs down on all my trips until the front of my car fell off.

I really enjoyed getting back to satellite radio. I usually listen to Octane, Lithium, Liquid Metal, Ozzy's Boneyard and a few others. It was nice to check in once again. I found it very enjoyable, even the bands that I don't particularly care for.

So if this horrible nightmare was worth something, it was that. I'll miss satellite again for a while.

My plan is to get a new car probably next year. Hopefully next year. I'm saving up for a giant down payment because I'm bankrupt, so no one is going to want to set me up with a car loan. That's one of the reasons I had to buy the Dude in the first place. I had $8K as my budget at the time, payment from my insurance for my totaled car, and I came in under at the used car dealership.

I know I'm not going to get a top of the line new car when I have the money. But I'm going to get a new car, not used. I'm shooting for a model that's been on the lot for a couple of years and the dealer wants to get rid of it to make room for newer vehicles. When I get that car, which will probably be a Honda Civic, I hope that it has a Sirius/XM radio in there.

I'm not going to retire the CDs, but it'll be nice to let them have a rest.