GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1004: THANK YOU FOR HELPING SAVE JOHN BRUNI'S LIFE

 I didn't think my GoFundMe would work despite the fact that I didn't believe it would work the first time, either, and that time was wildly successful anyway. If you haven't seen my GFM, it's here. I needed one thousand to save my life, and I got it. And people are still contributing! I am so grateful for you all. The extra money I get is going to good use. I said last night I thought I'd be eating cheese sandwiches for every meal going forward for the foreseeable future. The extra is going toward feeding me actual food, at least for as long as it lasts. Again, thank you all for your help.

This is the second time I'm writing a GF out of gratitude for help with a GFM (heh). In case you missed it last time, here it is. TLDR: In 2020, when I was unemployed, I'd just run out of Paxil. And all my other prescriptions, too, but Paxil was the one I needed the most. I couldn't afford the pills without insurance. I mentioned it on Twitter (back when it was still Twitter!). Shortly after that, I watched the final episode of Locke & Key on Netflix, and I said a lot of great things about the show and the comic book it was based on. Joe Hill saw my post. I'm pretty sure he wanted to vet me to make sure he wasn't retweeting a Nazi or some such, so he looked at my other posts and saw the one about Paxil. He recommended that I start a GFM, and if I did, he would pitch in. And he did! A considerable amount, too. I was able to get my meds, and I got a new job soon thereafter, and thus I got insurance again.

I bring up the previous GFM because I was acutely aware that I didn't have Joe Hill on my side this time. I was afraid that very few people would contribute. But I was desperate, and I'm so happy it worked. I am constantly surprised by the kindness of my friends. The fact that I have so many friends also surprises me. I didn't have many when I was in high school. Thank you so much for your help, everyone. Thank you from the very bottom of my heart.

I'm grateful that it worked for me, so it's time for the next thing, and that is paying it forward. I've been a fan of Wrath James White ever since I first came across him in an issue of Cthulhu Sex Magazine that I was in. It still irritates me that I didn't get a chance to meet him at AuthorCon in St. Louis. Whenever I looked over at his table, he had a big line, and I couldn't abandon my own table. His daughter is in a rough spot right now, and if you have a few spare bucks, please consider checking out his GoFundMe here.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1003: FROM

 

The only thing I got myself for Prime Day (Week?) was a 99-cent subscription to MGM+ so I could watch season 2 and 3 of FROM, one of the best horror shows I've seen in a long time. Oh yeah, and also season 2 of Billy the Kid, and it looks like there's a Stephen King show on there now I'll check out. But FROM was the impetus.

The idea is, a family on a road trip gets stopped by a tree across the road. This brings them to a small town in the middle of nowhere, where no one can ever leave, and there are horrible monsters roaming the streets at night. These creatures can't be killed. CAN'T. The people only have talismans for protection, but they don't work all the time. They have to be in an enclosed space with this talisman hanging in a window or door or something. If you hold up the talisman at an approaching creature, it will kill you in a very gruesome fashion. At first I figured they'd be vampires, but they're . . . something else. The people of this town must fight for survival every night, and this family is learning there is a terrible price to live in this place even in the day. Every time they score a victory? Something even worse happens to them to take it away from them.

There's a lot more to it than that, but at its bare bones, that's FROM. And the longer I watch the show, the more I realize why I enjoy it. These people are stuck in a horrible place they can never leave while a malevolent force with god-like powers is trying to kill them. I can relate. My life has been such a shitstorm that I watch this show, and there is an entire cast of characters who have it much, much worse than I do. I'm stuck in this terrible place I can never leave while vile bullshit keeps piling up on top of me.

I used to say I'd die at 46.* I only have nine days if I'm going to die on time, and it seems that the universe is bent on me being punctual. I scored a grand victory yesterday. It was immediately taken away from me this morning by something worse than I could have imagined. Hence the GoFundMe I set up earlier today. Holy shit! It looks like I got what I needed and more! The thousand will save my life. Anything more than that will help in other ways. I figured I'd be eating cheese sandwiches for the rest of my life. The good news: I love cheese sandwiches. The bad news: not for every meal forever. Additional funds will go toward food for as long as it will last, so I'll keep the page up a little while longer just in case.

I got off into the weeds a little. Seriously, go watch FROM. It will make you feel better about whatever situation you're in. And it will give you a mystery to think about. A good one, I think. The kind that answers your questions with more questions. And unlike a lot of shows like this, the creators actually have a plan. They're not just asking questions to confuse us so they can figure out why they asked the question. For example.

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*That's the original number. I then lowered it to 40 to make people nervous. But 46 is the number I believed all along. I'm going to try to not be a soothsayer, but at this point, I can't make promises.

I thought I was a great and terrible god to my characters, but the FROM writers make me look like I'm writing Curious George. They are ruthless to their characters. Every time I see the characters deal with a new problem, I can't help but think, What fucking now?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!! Which is pretty much how I react to everything that pops up in my life, usually because that thing is going to be bad, no matter what it is.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1002: 3 YEARS

 It's been three years since my last drink. Not bad for a guy who, if he put in the effort, could down a handle a night. More often than not he left an inch at the bottom for hair-of-the-dog purposes, because a sober moment was not a good thing for me back then. I thought I'd been sober during the days, but I was wrong about that. The booze still lived in me from the prodigious amount of drinking committed during the previous night.

The last drink I had was from my whiskey barrel. It was high proof. And it was great. It didn't get me drunk as I was hoping because by that point booze couldn't get me drunk. My body, sure, but not my mind. That's where I needed it.

I firmly believed that would be my last drink, and so far it has been, but while I was at detox, beating the physical addiction, I decided I couldn't wait to get out and drink just in time for my birthday. I moved the heavens and got out in the correct timeframe. And for some reason I didn't stop at Williams Liquor that day, as I'd been planning for at least a week. I just drove past.

So it's been ever since. I don't think about alcohol often, but when I do it's pretty heavy. The addiction is still lurking inside me somewhere, looking for an excuse, but I've been able to keep on top of it. All the same, there are a few times a month when I think, Goddam! I could sure use a drink! And maybe someday I'll give in to that urge, but it's not going to be anytime soon.

Three fucking years. I'm sure a lot of people I knew in my drinking days would find that unthinkable. Hell, my friends now probably think that. A lot of them were around for Booze Bruni. Whoo-boy. The folks over at the Corner Cottage probably think I'm dead. I'd have said the same of the guy at York Liquors, but that place just went out of business. It just occurred to me, writing this now, that the only way that guy would give up his shop was if he was dead. Did he die? I hope not. He was a friendly guy.

The weird thing is, I almost missed my anniversary. I've been drowned in shit and bad luck and horrors and hell for so long that if I hadn't checked my calendar, I would have forgotten it. The only reason I checked my calendar was because something good happened today.

All right, enough celebration. Time to make it to three years and a day.

I'm going to bed early. As you can imagine, I did not get much sleep last night. I hope to fuck I don't get sick tomorrow morning. 

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1001: AH SHIT, IT'S THIS GUY AGAIN

 *sigh* Right. Of course I couldn't quit this. The reason I entertained the idea of ending GF was because I no longer had the time to write it at night. But I've been on medical leave, and I have a lot of time, which I'm using wisely because holy fucking shit, since the last time we met at this hour? My life has somehow--SOMEHOW!!!!!--gotten way fucking worse. I'm doing my best to unfuck this horrid mess, but I won't get too much into that.

One of the things that is causing me misery is the mystery illness. It has plagued me for three days running. I can only assume that tomorrow will be day four of this madness. Through a series of events I'd rather not go into, I discovered that if I suffer a low blood sugar incident while going through a bout of my mystery illness, the mystery illness will stop.

So for the last two days, when I got up and first started feeling the symptoms, I purposely overdosed myself on insulin. Unfortunately it doesn't work right away, so I spend the next few hours trying not to go to the bathroom to puke. I often fail at this, and it ends in either puke (glorious relief for the next fifteen minutes!) or dry heaves (cursed to another trip to the bathroom in the very near--maybe even by forty-five seconds!--future). But then the low blood sugar attack comes, and I fight back because I had the foresight to have Tang or Coke nearby. Then, after my heart beats like crazy and my body slicks over with a sheen of sweat, the low blood sugar attack goes away. And so does my mystery illness.

Until the next fucking day. This solution only delays the mystery illness.

I *do* realize how insane that sounds, by the way. Some kinda Flatliners shit, just about. But the mystery illness has *made me* insane. I would do just about anything to get this fucking thing to permanently go away.

In case you're new, the mystery illness makes me puke and dry heave every 15 minutes for 3-5 days in a row, oftentimes causing me to lose significant amounts of sleep. It causes a terrible pain in my belly. It feels like pancreatitis. I know because I've suffered from that a few times in my drinking days. It feels like someone is pushing a sword through my belly and out my back. It is the worst fucking pain I've ever experienced in my life. By the time a bout is done, I've begged for death at least a dozen-dozen times. And I'll have also lost a lot of weight. Last year, for example, I cumulatively lost nearly seventy pounds because of this goddammed motherfucking mystery illness. And, as one time proved to me, there is also the risk of rupturing my esophagus from puking too hard.

So in breaking with tradition I'm not going to bed tonight. Because the ERs down in the Joliet area suck, I'm going to drive to the Elmhurst ER. They also know me better there. I also know that, if they put an IV in, it won't just fall out like it did down here. It's Monday, so I wanted to wait until later. Give the ER crowd a chance to die down. I can't have this happen to me again tomorrow morning. I have a shit-ton of very important things to do. I hope to get the treatment needed to ensure the attack does not continue. If things go well, I'll get an hour of sleep at the ER. I'll also get a couple of hours when I get home. And then I'll be ready to knock tomorrow out of the park.

If tomorrow does *not* go well, I can expect my misery to continue for the foreseeable future. So I'm focusing everything on making it go well. If I must beat reality into a much more pleasing shape, then so be it.

Wish me luck. The good kind, I mean. The bad just sorta . . . lives wherever I do, I guess.

FUCK MATTE COVERS

 

Look what arrived today! Hooray! Except for one problem: all the books are defective. Because I like to think I make sense as the publisher of Questionable Taste Press, I selected the glossy cover. I can't stand matte covers. When it gets hot, they curl up, and you can't fix them after that. Glossy will do the same, but it has to be hotter than that to do it. I do at least one outside book fair a year, Printers Row, and that's usually in the summer when it's hot. So fuck that.

I complained to Amazon, and they're fixing it, but I now have a few copies of Mail Order Bride that I can't in good conscience sell. I'm thinking of doing another giveaway, but I'll throw it out to you: do you have any ideas what I should do with these things?

Also, if you ordered a print copy, and it showed up with a matte cover, please let me know. I'll get it fixed for you. Or hey, you now have a collector's item! Could be valuable someday. (He said optimistically.)

DON'T GET THE 'BEETUS, KIDS: PART 2

 If you've ever wondered what my foot looks like with all those pins through it, BEHOLD!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I can't see the bottom of my foot, so I don't know how the hole there looks. But while talking with my podiatrist, the surgeon who put the cage on me, I called this thing a "horror show." She said, "Oh no, I think it's really quite beautiful!" I'm going to take that as a sign that this is supposed to look at this. Ergo, I'm healing.

Only four more weeks in this thing . . .

MAIL ORDER BRIDE by John Bruni NOW AVAILABLE!

 

Tessa Reeves is sent west by her pimp as a mail order bride to a goofy loser of a farmer. He sells her to a Comanche flesh merchant named Iron Trail, who teaches her how to survive in the wilderness. It's only the beginning of the horrors she faces as she tries to stay alive long enough to wreak vengeance on her tormentors.

John Bruni, author of Eye Cutter returns to the world of Trail of Blood to tell a tale of horror and woe, gore and depravity, devastation and revenge.

Buy it here!