GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1040: BROICISM

 I'm sure you've heard me blather on about my double major back when I was at Elmhurst College (now, to justify the exceptionally high price per semester, a "capital U" University), but for those who are newer to these, I majored primarily in English. That was the plan when I got there. I took a few philosophy classes and realized, holy shit, just a handful more of these and I can call myself a double major, so I took on Philosophy, too. I gleefully informed the world, for the next rest-of-my-life, that I majored in these two things, guaranteed to get me nowhere in the world.

I took an interest in the Stoics, in particular Marcus Aurelius. His Meditations. It stuck so hard that I leaned heavily on him for my recent SF novel, Eye Cutter. It truly is a great guide to how to live your life. (Meditations, not Eye Cutter. Oh dear God, not Eye Cutter.)

I can hear some of you groan. I know, I know. I didn't learn about this until last week, when I was looking through YouTube for something to listen to while I did mindless work around my apartment. I found this video, which got my attention because of the title. A Daily Show guy talking to someone about stoicism? That's right up my alley. All the same, were techbros really obsessed with this shit?

Turns out they're not the only ones. I am now all too familiar with "broicism." Aurelius is making the rounds among insecure males who constantly worry that people don't think they're manly enough. I wondered, who the fuck is selling Aurelius to men who want to be manly? There's nothing in this book about how to man up. Not a goddam thing. It's about how to live a good life, and how to treat others.

(Including your slaves. Which, by the way, is a secondary storyline in the next novel in the Eye Cutter series. How does this group of crewmates who used to be slaves also take to heart the lessons of a slave master?)

Here's another awful thing I learned about: the "manosphere." And I'm glad spellcheck still underlines that word (and broicism!) in red. Online influencers have done nothing but make the human race even more miserable than it already is, but manosphere influencers are the fucking worst. They profit off the weakness of all these guys out there who are going through the loneliness epidemic. It's like priests going after alcoholics and junkies. Get 'em when they're at their lowest, and you can make them believe anything. It also helps if your victim is young and impressionable.

I don't blame many of the guys who fall under their spell. They're desperate, and these assholes are taking advantage of that. Sure, it's made them richer, but I think what they really get off on is the power. Once you have people who hang on your every word, you can make them do whatever you want them to do.

If I could send out a message to the poor guys falling for this line of bullshit, it's this: never depend on someone else's opinion of you when determining your self worth.* Your value should come from yourself.

Meditations *is* a good book. Actually read it, but not through the filter you've been given. Don't seek the lessons you've been told are there. Take in the lessons that are *actually* there.+

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* Unless you're Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, Scrooge McDuck, etc.

+When I was a kid, this went without saying, but in this day and age, ah, slavery's bad, okay? So don't take any of those lessons to heart.

This could be the darkest SF novel you'll ever read. If you like your science fiction gory, violent and fucked up, then you should give it a shot.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1039: HANGOVER

 To be read to this song.

Here's something you won't hear many alcoholics reminisce about when they talk about the things they miss about drinking. I miss hangovers.

Not all of them. The hangovers I got in the last three or four years of my nearly lifelong bender were rough. Nothing good about them, and they didn't often signal the thing I always tried to experience when suffering the morning after. I was proud of my hangovers before then. They meant I'd done something meaningful the previous night. I'd gone to battle and emerged victorious. I had stories to tell. I still do. But those hangovers were glorious. They were so great I named some of them and gave them personalities. Some came back to visit like old friends. Maybe a cousin. Never a sibling, not that close.

But in those last years, they were just vile. By then I was mostly drinking at home, doing nothing more glorious than watching movies. I didn't give hangovers much time to get going, anyway, because I kept a bottle between my bed, my night table and a garbage can. If the morning felt rough, I took a couple of swallows. Hair of the dog wasn't a cure, but it helped me function. And what the hell? A couple of drinks'll do me good, so why not have a few more drinkypoos? Start doing fuckin' GREAT! So yeah, those hangovers were a bunch of losers.

The above song came on while I was driving to work the other day, and I thought about the liquor store about three blocks from where I live. I could really live the romantic life of the struggling writer in a place like this. Hell, if I was going to do that, I needed to get to work on my first relapse. The cliche demanded it, and I wanted to oblige. I didn't just think it; I said it out loud: "I'd bet those hangovers would be awesome."

I could probably find out.

But I won't. Hangovers exist for a reason. Back then? I thought they were the price to pay for greatness. Now? They're an early warning system that should be heeded, not celebrated. Perhaps that was one of the reasons I drank so much. I have a bunch of 'em, but that might be one of the bigger ones. There are a few that are reeeeeeeeeeeeeeally out there. Like, batshit insane reasons. Maybe I'll talk about some of them eventually. It's been three years and 214 days since my last drink. I intend to keep making that number go up.

In the middle of writing this I remembered the greatest hangover music video of all time. It's not from Alestorm but Korpiklaani. It's a cover of Anthrax's "Got the Time," sort of. Korpiklaani wrote their own lyrics, but otherwise, it's the same. Behold!

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1038: AN ADJUSTMENT

 OK, so back in the day, I occasionally got so wasted while writing these things that I would sometimes forget to post them. Or I'd pass out in the middle of writing them. These days? I'm starting to notice that if I'm very high while writing these, I have a tendency to save it and think that I've posted it. Even if I don't go through the process of posting the link on my social media, in my head it's been posted. I might remember about it when I'm in bed about to turn the lamp off, but by then I'm not going to put my ankle brace back on to go back to my living room, to my laptop, and go through the process.

Last night's GF was written last week because I got high and fucking forgot to post it, which is kind of funny because the one I'd posted the night before had been another forgotten post. So I gotta find a new way of doing this.

GF is supposed to be a gathering of my thoughts before going to bed (more or less), but I'm thinking about writing them earlier and then posting them just before I go to bed. The problem is, I'm even more likely to forget about it this way.

What I'm going to try is writing these before I get high, then leaving my laptop up so I don't forget to post it when I'm high as fuck. Wait, no, I got it. I'll just write it and post it before I get high entirely. Then stay the fuck off social media the rest of the night. I should be doing that, anyway.

I'll give that a try. Who knows? Maybe more people will read these fresh off the press, if I'm going to be posting these earlier moving forward.

You'd think I'd start with this one. Wouldn't it be funny if I got high and forgot to post this, too?

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1037: "FIRST THEY CAME"

 As we currently live in a fascist state, it's pretty common to see people posting the poem, "First They Came," on their social media. It's very apropos, all things considered, but I'm a little surprised that MTG isn't the one relentlessly posting it.

It was written by Martin Niemoller, a WWI U-boat commander and priest who viewed Hitler as "an instrument sent by God." That's right, the guy who wrote that poem was a Nazi. And no, the reason he split with Hitler wasn't the Final Solution. Hitler tried to take over the church, and that was a big no-no for Niemoller. They got tired of arresting him for his resistance, so they threw him into a concentration camp. He spent most of the war in Dachau.

As you can imagine, that did wonders for his perspective on the persecution of others. When he was liberated, he had this to say about his country:

We must openly declare that we are not innocent of the Nazi murders, of the murder of German communists, Poles, Jews, and the people in German-occupied countries… And this guilt lies heavily upon the German people and the German name, even upon Christendom. For in our world and in our name have these things been done.

I imagine a lot of Magas are going to be able to identify with Niemoller in the years to come. They're *really* going to take that poem to heart. They'll carry that with them for the rest of their lives. They might even get it tattooed on their bodies. "Never again," they'll say. And why does that sound familiar?

The world will remember it, at least until the next empire takes up the crown of evil and does it all over again.

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!