GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1036: A CORRECTION AND A QUANARY

 [Well fuck. I thought I was going to do three GFs this week. I gotta stop writing these while high. I wrote this last night and forgot to post it. So you're only getting two this week. Sorry.]

I got sick today. It freaked me out because it felt exactly like my mystery illness. I gagged for a while, hovering over the toilet, and I thought, oh fuck, please, not this again. It's been nearly a half a year. Don't bring this back into my life.

I then called off work, took a very large dose of my laudanum and went back to bed, hoping it was enough to prevent a trip to the ER. It was. I drowsed for a bit, and when I came back to myself, I no longer felt sick. It left me with a half a day of free time I didn't expect to have, so I figured why not make a correction to GF?

Recently I wrote about my awesome podiatrist and surgeon, the doctor who saved my bad foot. You can read about it here. I saw her again since then, and she was cleaning up the callus around the tiny slit in my foot when she sat back suddenly and looked at the area. "It's open just a sliver."

OK, good. She'd probably had a really long day before. All the same, she wasn--wait a minute. Does she read Goodnight, Fuckers? Probably not. What are the odds, right?

But what if she did? I casually made a few references to that particular GF, and I figured, if the McDonald's straw thing doesn't do it, then she really didn't read it. She laughed at it, but I sensed no recognition. Ah well.

She then went off to get some bandaging supplies for me. I sat there, putting my ankle brace back on. When she came back she asked me if I'd been tall all my life. I told her I'd been six feet at a very young age, and she said that I was lucky. She said that people regularly put the stuff she needed on the top shelves, maybe sometimes on purpose, so she had to climb up to get this stuff.

I found it very difficult to imagine my podiatrist, an exceptionally capable woman, feeling inadequate about anything. She saved my foot. I think the world of her.

I liked my previous podiatrist, too, but he took the better portion of two of my toes, so . . .

What's the quandary part of this? The whole thing made me wonder, who are all you lovely fuckers who read these columns? I know about a few of you, as you've discussed several of these with me, but what about the rest of you?

I know that about 20-ish of you read these things as intended, the night they're posted. Then, over the next few days, the numbers snowball up to 40-60. If it's an interesting topic, that number is closer to 80-90. And then it tapers off . . . until I check back in a month, where the business-as-usual ones are around 150, and the interesting ones are anywhere between 200-300. Every once in a while, there are more of you. On one grand occasion, there were 663 readers. So damned close! And no, I won't tell you which one. I don't want you all to flood it beyond that coveted number.

If you have reason to suspect I don't know that you read these, please take this opportunity to let me know in the comments.

Just kidding. You don't have to worry about that. No one ever comments. [IMPORTANT NOTE: Insert LOTR-keep-your-secrets meme here. Don't forget to delete this part in the brackets! These people look up to you, and you don't want to look like an idiot.]

But if you do feel moved to tell me about it, I'm interested to know.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1035: THIS LIFE HACK COULD SAVE YOUR LIFE!

 Whether you're here because you got excited over a possible way to enhance your life or because you can't wait to refute whatever the fuck I'm about to say, welcome. For the record I despise the phrase "life hack." 95% of all the so called life hacks I've seen or read about make whatever task you're doing more complicated, not less. By definition it should be a shortcut to make living easier. It shouldn't turn you into a mad scientist.

That's not what I'm going to tell you about today. I'm going to tell you about something that has recently made my life much more enjoyable and rewarding, so it might help you, too.

I used to handle to-do lists as a giant list of stuff that I could do that day if I got around to it, or if I found the time. But I discovered a certain level of satisfaction that comes with actually completing a to-do list. Holy shit, I checked every single thing off this list! That's amazing! When that happens, I view it as "winning" the day.

Incidentally, if you handle to-do lists like I used to, you find out pretty quickly what your priorities are. You should know your priorities. You may *think* you know them, but how often do you dedicate time to thinking about them?

But that's still no way to run your life. I learned that I wanted to feel that satisfaction at the end of *every* day. So I started making realistic lists. Stuff that's important to me that I actually have a chance at completing that day. And maybe an extra action item or two that would be nice if I did get it done, but I hold onto those for my days off from work.

The key, though, is the reward part of this process. The satisfaction is a great reward, but it's not enough. I want something tangible that I can point to. See that? I get a lot of shit done, and here's real life proof of that.

So if I check every item on my list off on any given day? I put a dollar into an envelope marked FUN FUND. I do not spend that on anything important. I spend that on things to reward myself and give myself pleasure.

I ran out of money lately, and I really wanted a vape cartridge. Payday was at the end of the week, so that wasn't going to happen. But then . . . THEN! I remembered my Fun Fund. I had $26 in there, which was just enough for a vape cartridge!

It was the first thing I bought with my Fun Fund, but I'm already looking forward to whatever I might get next, or if I gather enough money, perhaps I can give myself a real vacation for a change. Or I can afford a really good signed limited book. Or . . . you get the idea.

This practice has made me more efficient, and it has brought me more joy. I can't recommend it enough. If you're finding life to be particularly difficult these days, give it a shot. It might work for you, too.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1034: LIKE FATHER . . .

 I was trying to figure out what to do with a bunch of family stuff I managed to hold on to when I found the pile of yearbooks. Some were mine, some were Mom's, some were Dad's. I'd found a few notes to Mom from her friends when she was a kid, so I was looking for them in her yearbooks to put a face to the names. I didn't find any of them, but I looked through Dad's for . . .

You know how I say that the universe sends you messages all the time? I got a pretty big message once. Waaaaaaaaay back when, when I was drinking heavily and dating a woman I'd been with on and off for about 20 years at that point. She was always trying to get sober, always trying to drag me to AA. I was perfectly happy drinking like I was, but I agreed to go with her to meetings provided I could drink from my flask as soon as we were done.

So I went to AA with her this one time, and she said when they ask if it's anyone's first time, I should raise my hand so I could go through the welcome process. I would also get the Book for free, and I was to read from it whenever I got the chance. And I did read it. The stories are the best part. Everything else? Including the steps? Not so much.

I raised my hand, and these two guys took me upstairs to introduce me to the AA life. I had no intention of following through (and I never did; I'm a non-AA recovering alcoholic, 3 years and 194 days), but I heard them out as I'd promised, and I kept an open mind.

We started making small talk, and it came up that I lived in Elmhurst. One of the guys said he grew up there. I told him I'd graduated from York, and he said he had, as well. "Class of 1996," I said.

He made some self-deprecating comment meant as a joke about being much older, and then he gave me the message from the universe: "Class of '76."

The year Dad graduated from York. Holy shit, this guy went to school with Dad!

"Did you, by any chance, know Frank Bruni?" I said.

He got this grin on his face and nodded. "I knew him well."

I told him that was my dad, and he went crazy with laughter and exclamations before asking the inevitable: "How's he doing?"

I told him he'd just passed away. We talked about Dad for a while, and he said, "I once saw your dad out by the smoking area, and he had this tab of acid. We had to go take a test, so he just popped it in his mouth, and we went to class."

Which sounded like a very Dad thing to do. I asked him about Mom, but he didn't know her. "The name sounds familiar," he said. He also asked if Dad was an alcoholic. I think he expected me to say yes. Dad loved his booze, but he wasn't an alcoholic. There are some alcoholic problems on that side of my family, but I explained that it was my mom who was the alcoholic.

But what are the odds that my first real AA meeting would put me right next to someone who was friends with my dad in high school?

I wanted to look that guy up. I suspected he didn't know my mom because he didn't go to school with her. She'd graduated the year before Dad. Sure enough, I didn't find him in those yearbooks.

What I *did* find amused me to no end, and it brought back a memory from my own time at York.

Sophomore year. All my yearbooks are signed back and front except for that year. The reason is, it got printed late that year, and school was already out. I felt kind of bad about that because I'd wanted all my yearbooks to be signed. I'd told Dad about this, and I said, "I might sign it myself. Just so I have something in there."

He got this smile on his face. He had a great smile. I remember thinking back then, I wish I'd gotten that smile instead of the one I had. I'd find out decades later that I inherited my maternal grandma's teeth. I'd only known her when she had dentures. But that was my thought in that moment.

He told me I should do it. And now I know why:

I'm just noticing now, but it's also a little weird that I got someone else signing "DAD" in there, too.

If ever you wondered where I got my sense of humor, I LEARNED IT FROM YOU, DAD!

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1033: A HORROR BEYOND COMPREHENSION

[QUICK NOTE: We found the movie from last night's GF! Thank you, everyone, for your help! It's called Pledge Night, and I just watched it. My friend remembered it pretty well, at least the second half of it. I enjoyed it. I can see why it stuck in his head.] 

It's been a while since I gave you an update on my bad foot. It's been healing pretty well. There are still divots where the rods went through my leg, but they're closed up. Some of this bruising probably won't ever go away. The hole on the bottom of my foot is gone completely. The one on the side is still sorta there. It's mostly a dry patch of flaky skin, but recently it ballooned out before dribbling pus and flattening down again. I had an appointment with my podiatrist coming up, so I kept it clean and changed the bandage regularly, something I've become all too familiar with.

The x-rays looked good. The holes in my bone are still there, but they're finally closing up. They're more of a smudge on the x-ray instead of clearly defined holes. As for the discharge, the tests came back positive for an infection, so I'm back on antibiotics. But my podiatrist cleaned everything up and pronounced it to be a minor thing.

"It's just open a slither," she said.

I wondered if maybe I'd misheard her, but she said it again a few more times. I let it go because it was kind of cute. Adorable, actually. It also proved that she had a flaw, if not flaws. She gives off such a confident feeling that one sometimes gets the impression she might be invincible.

Once upon a time she'd told me I was her favorite patient. I'd suspected that for a while, but I was glad to have it confirmed. She's a very straightforward, professional person. "Exact" is the perfect word for her. I often got the feeling that she saw me as a challenge, and she was fully vested in whipping my bad foot back into shape. If anyone could do it, I knew it would be her. Proof positive that I was in good hands.

"But you make me nervous," she sometimes says. This time she adds, "I'm afraid that when you come in, I'm going to see the x-ray, and the bones in your foot will have collapsed, and you'll  have a bone sticking out of the bottom of your foot."

Yes, I silently agree. That terrifies me, too.

Recently she offered an option that would ensure my foot would completely heal, but it would involve putting a bigger rod into my leg, this time into the bottom of my foot and up. After being in the cage for so long? I said no thank you. I'll take my chances.

"There are so few of us who specialize in Charcot," she told me at this recent appointment, "and we all know each other."

Many fields are like that. Horror writers all know each other. Or if they don't, they at least *know of* each other.

She then told me about a horror beyond comprehension. A colleague of hers told her about one of his Charcot cases, and that guy got his bad foot put in a cage, too. But this podiatrist didn't get to see the case through to its conclusion. One day the patient stopped showing up for appointments.

10 years later (and keep this in mind, because holy shit) he sees his patient again. He's living on the streets. [Holds flashlight under my chin.] AND HE'S STILL GOT THE FUCKING CAGE ON HIS BAD FOOT!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[If you were reading a Brian Pulido Chaos comic, this is where someone would scream, "Oh the humanity!"]

I sat there stunned while I was putting my ankle brace back on. I thought back to when I was in the prep room waiting for the surgery to remove the cage. The most horrifying thing I could think of in that moment was that something was going to come up, and they weren't going to be able to take it off, after all. It's the thought that repeated itself like an alarm in my head, over and over again, because in that moment I couldn't imagine a worse fate. Some dude could have walked into my room and shot me in the heart (a very real possibility in my country), and that still would not have been a worse fate.

I tried to blank out as much of my cage time as possible, but I was in that fucker for months. I couldn't imagine being in that infernal contraption for a year, much less fucking ten of them.

She'd warned me way back when about something called Cage Rage, when people in my situation lose their shit and start kicking anything and everything with their caged foot. In the days leading up to the removal, she'd congratulated me on not suffering from it ever, not once.

"I was frustrated," I told her. "But I knew it wouldn't have made any difference, and it might have even made everything worse."

She brought it up again now, and I thought, no, if I'd had that goddammed thing on my foot for ten years, I wouldn't have just been full of Cage Rage. I would have Cage Supernovaed. I might even have gotten frustrated enough to saw my own fucking leg off. I could not have taken ten years of metal rods sliding through my leg like a straw through a cup at McDonald's. And if things had gotten so far gone that I was living an unhoused life? I would absolutely have drank my liver into a bad case of suicide. One hundred percent.

How the fuck does that guy stand it? And how the hell didn't his leg get infected? I kept mine as clean as possible and even had help from Home Health, and I still got an infected pin site. How didn't that leg rot off on its own?

I couldn't stop thinking about this for the rest of the day. I came to this conclusion: I'm a lot more fortunate than I think sometimes. My foot is nearly entirely healed. Not too long ago I thought for sure I was going to lose it, and then I was going to drink myself to death Nic Cage style, but I wasn't going to bother going to Vegas. The cage thing could have been a lot worse. Also: what are the odds that I'm afflicted with something like Charcot, and I just so happen to have one of the very few Charcot specialists in the country as my podiatrist? Not only that, but she's determined to succeed. Her success is my success.

(OH DEAR GOD NIC CAGE RAGE!)

I'm pretty optimistic that my foot is going to completely heal, and then I'll be able to ditch this ankle brace. Maybe stepping in that broken glass was a good thing. Before? I'd been getting around on a leg brace. When this is all done, I won't even need that.

Life is fucking weird. I wouldn't have it any other way.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1032: CALLING ALL HORROR MOVIE EXPERTS!!!

 Do *you* consider yourself a horror movie expert? Then I am in desperate need of your help! Rather, a friend of mine is. Many years ago he asked me if I could figure out this horror movie he saw when he was a kid. When I was in college, I'd gone through the literal entire horror movie section at EVERY video rental store in the area, from Blockbuster to Ken's World of Video and everything in between. But not even *I* could figure out the name of the movie.

So I searched around online. Nothing. I asked the one person I knew (at the time, at least) who knew more about horror movies than I did (you may remember the Drudgeon, one of my fellow reviewers at Forced Viewing, RIP)(the website, not my friend, who is still alive, I assure you), and he couldn't figure it out, either.

I forgot about it for a while, and then it came back to me a few years back. I tried again, hoping there would be more internet for Google to scour, but no dice. I was so desperate I asked ChatGPT about it. That fuckin' idiot couldn't figure it out, naturally, so I gave up again.

Last week I slapped my forehead. I'm such a silly goose. I have a metric shit-ton of author friends, and almost all of them write horror. Many of them are, indeed, horror movie experts. And I've accumulated a handful of horror movie reviewer friends, too, so what the hell? Why not give this a shot?

So thank you all for joining me tonight. I appreciate you all, and I hope you can help me out. Because if this fails, I only have one shot left. It's a real Hail Mary, so I'm hoping at least one of you knows this flick. I'm going to let my friend take over from here:

I'd say the year I watched it was probably about 1991-1994'ish so it at least wouldn't be anything newer than that.

There was a group of teenagers and they were in some kind of broken down beat up either big house or mansion (likely a house). It was a mix of guys and girls but the personalities didn't stand out to me so I can't identify any characteristics.

There was the main bad guy / entity / demon / ghost thing that had long black hair and a melted like face somewhat that looked like Lemmy. He kept asking everyone who they were / what their name was before he'd kill them. When he got to one of the kids and the kid said his name, Lemmy said something like "I only came back, to protect you my boy".

I remember one guy and girl found a room with an old bunk bed that they decided to have sex in. I think I remember the girl being apprehensive about it and the guy just being like whatever about it. Lemmy was shown underneath on the bottom bunk either standing (tall bed) or kneeling with a sword in his hand overhead sticking straight up that he was about to thrust through before the movie cut to black with him seemingly smiling.

It could have been an 80's movie or very early 90's movie.

Any ideas? Thoughts? Guesses? I'll take anything and everything you've got. Comment below or email me or message me on Facebook or let me know however you know me. I'll forward it all to him, and I hope we get lucky. Thank you in advance for your assistance.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1031: YOUR SECOND AND THIRD EXECUTIVE ORDERS

 Now that you've broken the backs of our corporate overlords, it's time to twist the knife. That is the purpose of these next two executive orders.

The second will be to prohibit corporations from capturing and selling their customers' personal data. "We value your privacy," says every automated system in the nation. Do you? Because it seems to me that what you do is, you coerce your customers into digitally signing a terms of service agreement so you can steal their data and sell it to the highest bidder. Or is the value you mention the gobs of money you get from selling our property? And no, I don't think Terms of Service is legally binding. In order to use the service, you have to agree to it. Then don't use the service, I hear you say. It is currently necessary to do business on the internet. You can't survive the modern world without it. So a company should be allowed to take advantage of us by making us sign this fucking thing?

You don't get to do that anymore. *We* own our own data, and if we wish to sell it, we can. But it should be strongly encouraged to not sell your data. Our corporate overlords have had "permission" to surveil us for a very long time. They should not be allowed to do that. They know everything about you. If you've ever wondered why you're talking about something with a friend, and then you see an advertisement for that thing, wonder no more. They know when payday is so they can change their prices on their app to extract as much money as possible out of you.

"We do this to enhance your customer experience." Fuck right the fuck off. Into the sun. Repeat as necessary.

The third executive order will be to outlaw the concept of "planned obsolescence." This economy exists to benefit actual living, breathing people, not to satisfy the greed of the uber-rich. When you buy a product, you can now expect it to last decades, not just a couple of years. Imagine what it would be like to never have to buy another lightbulb in your life. Or have you never heard of the Centennial Light Bulb?

Our government currently exists as a wealth extraction device for our corporate overlords. We must turn that around so that corporations must once again mewl and grovel for our business. In other words, we're bringing back competition to our economy, which it has sorely lacked these last 30 or so years.

If they're allowed to continue stealing our data and to deliberately make faulty products, then we can expect this to end much like the Soviet Union did. How long will it be before a loaf of bread costs a couple of hundred dollars?

These two EOs will prevent that from happening. And if the corporate overlords get caught violating these things, the punishment must be so incredible that they'd be terrified of even considering it. I think fining them $44B for each infraction would do the trick. Even Elon Musk would pause to think about breaking the law in such an instance. It would cost him, say, a Twitter for example.

More executive orders to come . . .

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1030: THE TWILIGHT SUPERNOVA

 I recently read Werner Herzog's The Twilight World, the real life tale of Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese soldier in WWII who was still fighting the war decades later in 1974. I reviewed it on Goodreads, which you can read here. Sometimes I feel like I'm having a conversation with the universe, and the one regarding Herzog's book was not over. Because I turned on Hardcore History for my commute the next day, and it was an episode called Supernova in the East Part 1. And as soon as Dan Carlin started describing a WWII soldier, I knew long before he said the person's name that it would be Hiroo Onoda.

And it was. In the review I make note of the attempts to reach Onoda to tell him the war was over, and he refused to believe it because orders are orders. I compared it to Maga now clinging to their concept of "fake news" rather than facing an unpleasant truth, a way to turn a blind eye to something that cannot possibly be accepted in that person's worldview. It puzzled me, and I felt a little disappointed, after reading about Onoda all these years, to see that this was the real reason why he kept fighting. I felt like the real Onoda, rather than the romantic character in my head, had let me down.

The universe reached out to let me know that no, I'm actually culturally insensitive. It gave me a lot to think about as Carlin describes the world in which Onoda grew up, quoting from Onoda's own memoir (which I need to find for myself, by the way). When he'd gone off to war, his mother had given him a dagger and told him to use it to kill himself if he should be captured. Carlin wondered about the other powers in that war. How many of their mothers would tell something like that to their sons? Just Japan's? Onoda himself talks about how, in the Japan he left when he went to that island, surrender would have been unthinkable. Every man, woman and child would fight to the very end, with bamboo sticks if necessary. The only conceivable way he would think that Japan surrendered was IF EVERYONE THERE WAS DEAD.

Holy fucking shit. No wonder he chose to keep fighting. The only alternative was that the world he'd known and loved had been wiped from the face of the earth forever.

I mentioned in my review how much the world had changed in the time Onoda fought on that island. Atom bombs and moonwalks. Could you imagine being the one to tell him about all of that? But Carlin goes further. He uses American vets as an example here. They came home from the war and watched how their world changed slowly but surely until it had become what they would think of as a perversion of everything they'd known their world to be, and that's why they reacted so poorly with the counter-cultural movement at the time. They were trying to maintain a world that no longer existed. But they got to witness the eventual . . . what they would consider a decline.

Onoda didn't witness that. When Suzuki brought him out of the jungle, he stepped out of one world--EVEN IF IT DIDN'T EXIST!!!!--and walked into a completely alien, brand new one.

And that got me to thinking. (Uh-oh, I hear you say.) The world I was born into, the one I think about often and fantasize about sometimes, that world? Is gone. Like you never step twice into the same river. That kind of gone. I ask myself, what would I do to save that world? What would I do to maintain it? What would I do to bring it back? Would I move goddam mountains to make that happen?

Probably. If I thought I had the ability, I'd probably do anything.

Which brings me back to Maga. Maybe I understand them a little more now. Obviously fuck their worldview, but now I finally understand why they're so determined to ruin the world for everyone else. If I were in their shoes, I might not do any differently.

But I do not now and never have coveted those shoes, because I understand the thing that they don't, that Carlin also points out. That world that we think about? The vanquished world? It never existed. That world can only be seen through the prism of memory, and how reliable is memory? Especially since YOU are your only reference point for that memory? Not very. Have you ever found a picture of a place you think about often? Something from your childhood? Some of the details are right, but a lot of them are wrong. That's because you (and I) have been building these memories up. It starts as: was it this way? And then it becomes: it was probably this way. And then it simply is: it was this way. It happens so fast we don't often notice it. But this world is more fancy than fact.

Nostalgia for an age that never existed.