GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1043: PHYSICAL THERAPY

 Earlier this year I got another spinal injection. It was a great relief, not having back pain . . . for a couple of weeks. It wore off much too soon. So I guess it's not going to be worth it getting another. The next step is surgery, and no thanks. I'm not that desperate yet.

So I've been sent to physical therapy. Today was my third appointment, and I think it's been going pretty well so far. It helps that my therapist is easygoing and funny. She's also very informative. I learned, for example, that my posture is completely and totally fucked. I suspected that. I've been tall since I was a kid, so yeah, I hunch over a lot. And my body tends to curl in on itself when I sit down. I'm just not carrying myself like I should be. That's what's causing my discs to bulge, so we'll have to correct it to get them to squish back into place.

She ran my legs through the motions and found them to be very tight. She tested my butt and determined that it had withered because I don't use it like I should when I'm walking. It might explain the terrible disease I suffer from, Nobutatol. She's teaching me to activate that part of my butt, so who knows? Maybe when this is done I'll have a juicier ass.

(That, I believe, is a medical term, but I could be wrong.)

My favorite part of this adventure is what happened on the second day, when she brought up the term "enshittification." I gleefully told her that not only was I familiar with the topic, I had also met the man who coined the term, Cory Doctorow. I didn't know if I should, while we were standing in the hospital, go into his crusade against private equity firms who buy up hospitals and raid them for assets before leaving them reduced to a worthless husk (sometimes with bats living in them). It didn't seem like the right time.

I really hope this works. Now that I no longer have metal rods going through my leg, and the trigger finger pain on both hands has gone down, my back is the biggest point of agony on my body. It would also be kind of nice to not drink so much laudanum. I've been on it so long that I've forgotten what it's like to take a shit without struggling. I'm sure that's an image you want to take with you on your way to bed.

Goodnight, fuckers.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1042: DEATH OF A PHONE

 Looks like my good luck streak is coming to an ignoble end. Nothing has gone right for me since Thursday of last week. Monday and yesterday were the flat-our worst, and it all came to a head when my phone had a mental breakdown and died.

I use technology for a very long time. I use cellphones until they literally can't function anymore. But I've only had this one since, what, 2021? That's not long at all, which suggests to me that planned obsolescence is even worse than it was previously.

I was at work when my phone turned itself off, then on again. Off and on again. Off and on. And it wouldn't stop cycling. I tried to get it to stop, and I even looked up ways to troubleshoot it online. All those methods failed. It sucked extra because the software I use to answer phones at work stopped working, and I had to reboot my computer.

I'm sure you can figure out how well that went.

Thankfully there was a way to backdoor my way in without using my phone, but all the same, it was rough. Because I reacted very poorly to it. I actually panicked. I didn't just need my phone to work, I fucking needed it to work. My mind raced, and later, on my 76 minute drive home from the Verizon store, listening to terrestrial radio because I forgot my Spotify login, I realized that I was very familiar with this feeling.

It felt exactly like it did when I underestimated the amount of booze I'd need to knock me out for the night. How could I have finished that bottle? What the fuck? Do I have another here somewhere? One I've forgotten? Wait, there's an airplane bottle around here. There's gotta be. WHERE THE FUCK IS IT?!

That oftentimes happened at three in the morning. Corner Cottage stayed open later than the other liquor stores in town, but even they were closed at that time.

I didn't like that realization about myself. Not just that it reminded me of what it was like back in those  days, but also because it showed me that despite all the precautions I'd taken with my phone, I'm addicted to it.

At the Verizon store I was advised that the motherboard was fried. It would cost more to fix it than it was worth, and I'd lose everything. "But I can get you a deal for $300 off a new phone." I think it was three hundred. My brain was kind of fried, too.

One of the reasons Monday was so miserable was because I'd forgotten about my annual bill for my website, and it just about wiped out my bank account. All the money I'd put in my savings since I got to my new apartment? Gone except for about twenty-ish bucks.

So when the clerk told me that, I thought about all the things I do with this phone. And I realized exactly how free I'd be if I gave up all of them in one go, like a man who, instead of having one last drink of booze before quitting, pours out the rest of the bottle instead. It would hurt. I knew it would. I force myself to not check my phone constantly, and I thought I was beating it by doing that. Surprise! I should have listened to the recent study. I can't find it now, but it stated that a cellphone doesn't have to be used to cause a decline in productivity. It's very presence next to you is enough to do that. I read about it in Arnold's Pump Club. I'll have to go through the archives.

At any rate, I told the clerk, "I'm not going to get a new phone." I explained that I'd get by with a TracFone for emergencies only. I didn't need the other stuff. "I think I'm addicted to this thing. I'm going to let this set me free."

Three cheers for me, yes?

Eh . . . no.

She said that they actually had a trade in promotion, that I'd get a new phone for free. There was just a fee (because of course there was) of $40. So I buckled like a belt and got the new phone. And she got the price down to $29. I luckily had cash in my wallet.

She was very nice and helpful. I'm casting no aspersions on her. But I do have to marvel at the fact that all I had to say was, hey, I'm going to free myself from the tyranny of this tech, and suddenly a phone that cost who knew how much was suddenly down to $29 and change.

By the way, when I got my new phone up and running, none of the pictures survived. I lost all of those. Which is a shame because I had some real quality memes on there.

Clearly my watchful eye wasn't good enough. Now I'm going to have to be super vigilant in my phone use. For example, when I eat out at restaurants with friends, my phone is no longer going on the table next to me. It's staying in my pocket. No more looking at it on commercial breaks. I will find something else to do with my time, because I'm certainly not watching commercials. (And yes, I did forget that terrestrial radio has 10 minute commercial breaks, why do you ask?) I want to not have it next to me when I write, but I often times need to look shit up, and the computer I write on isn't connected to the internet. I'll have to think more about that one. You get the idea.

You might want to think about your own phone usage. You know my feelings about our corporate overlords and what they're doing to us. These phones are, without a doubt, mind control devices. Look up "necessary evil" on Wikipedia, and you'll find a picture of the cellphone. Just a suggestion. I don't know you, but if you're reading my stuff, I have a suspicion you like to think of your mind as your own, not the property of a corporation. As my sci-fi PI used to say, "It's something to consider."

Oh, one more thing. Looks like DeKalb is where radio signals from Chicago start to die. Just about everything I listened to was on the brink of fading out.

It occurs to me that if we did, indeed, suffer a zombie apocalypse we wouldn't make it as far as any of those idiots on The Walking Dead. As soon as we ran out of ways to power our phones, we'd have gone out of our fucking minds. Sure, maybe a handful of Jeremiah Johnsons would be out there, living off the grid, but the majority of us? Not a chance.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1041: RASPUTIN

 This song recently came on after one of my Spotify playlists ended, and it's been stuck in my head ever since. It's so deep in there that when I wake up every day, it's already roaring through my synapses. I wondered, what would Mom think of this song? She liked some of my heavier music, so she might have enjoyed this, especially if she knew the subject matter. It hit me then.

I often say that my love of history goes back to when my grandmother on my dad's side got me a book called Don't Know Much About History by Kenneth C. Davis, and I learned about all the American propaganda I'd been taught at school. I wanted to know what really happened (ah, sweet naivete!), and I have never been bored by it. But my interest went back beyond even that.

(In a perverse twist of fate, it was also school that taught me to distrust that American propaganda. Mr. Torney's US History class at York introduced me to George Orwell and gave me most of the tools I'd need to ferret out bullshit wherever it reigned supreme.)

Because Mom was big into history, and I got an earful of it when I was a li'l kid. Her favorite topic was JFK and Jackie, but her second favorite was Nicholas and Alexandra. Which is why "Rasputin" reminded me of this. It was like opening a secret portal into the past for a very brief memory. Sitting in my mom's Mustang, driving along with the radio on, the wind whipping through the windows, a McDonald's drink in the cupholder clipped to the rubber in the window. She told me the story of Rasputin. She always knew my interests went dark, and she correctly guessed that was the part of the story I'd be interested in.

She did not, by the way, tell me about the alleged story about Rasputin's cock (which is a great name for a rock band, as Dave Barry might say). I found that out when I was researching the black market for famous body parts. That story turned into "A Market for All Things," which was originally published in Strange Sex 3 but is currently available in Dong of Frankenstein and Other Pornos You Can't Jerk It To, should you decide to give it a shot. In case you were wondering, Napoleon's dick suffered much the same fate.*

You can take that one to bed with you. Goodnight, fuckers.

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*Fine, fine. Allegedly. For Pete's sake. But, ah, check it out.

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.