GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #333: MY GOODREADS REVIEW OF COREY TAYLOR'S AMERICA 51

 [What follows is my recent Goodreads review of Corey Taylor's book, AMERICA 51. If you don't know who he is, he is the lead singer of Stone Sour, Slipknot and his new solo project, CMFT. I'm a fan of his music, and I really wish he'd write more books, too. He's written about how the Seven Deadly Sins are character flaws, and there is nothing deadly or sinful about them. He's written about things that piss him off (which is my favorite of his books so far, as I'm 99.9% sure I'll never get that wiffle ball bat to the face). He's written about reconciling his atheism with his belief in the paranormal. This one is his political book about America. In short, buy his book.]

Another excellent book by Corey Taylor. It's shocking how much I identify with him after reading all of his books. I love his bands, but this is where he really shines. When he gets too old to tour (sorry, Rolling Stones) he should write books. He'll probably be a lot more mellow by then, but you never know.

I puzzled over the title for a while. I thought it was a reference to the 50 states with a +1. I heard in an interview, though, that it's a reference to Area 51. Very interesting.

It seems yet again, he and I agree on almost everything. I have heard the phrase "socially liberal and fiscally conservative" often. I used to say that described me perfectly. I'm a middle of the road guy. But the right turned into bootlicking sycophants and turned on their own beliefs in order to support their guy while he committed horrible acts against people who aren't white, who weren't male, who were immigrants, I mean, name it and this scoundrel has done it. The right has pushed me a bit more to the left than I used to be. I'm pretty sure if Trump had gotten that second election, I would have been pushed so far that the left that Bernie Sanders would look left and be utterly shocked to see anyone there.

I've not traveled outside of the US much, but I did go to Ireland once. I was advised even back then, in the year 2000, to tell people I'm Canadian. I knew the brash American abroad stereotype, mostly because stereotypes have some basis in truth. Taylor, too, makes this suggestion to world travelers of the American persuasion. I understand the little white lie. I chose not to take this advice because I wanted to show not all of us are self-entitled scumbags. In my tour group in Ireland, we were mostly made up of a few Americans and a lot of Australians. I hung out with the Australians, and at first, because I was considerably younger than them, they were guarded. They got to like me pretty quickly, and during a historical reenactment of Strongbow's life, I wound up marrying one. I thought I'd surprise her one day by sending a happy anniversary card to her, but I lost her address. The few Irish people we hung out with liked me, too. It turned out that our tour guide was actually Chief O'Brien's sister-in-law. O'Brien is one of my favorite Star Trek characters.

Then there's the Sauce Man story. I gotta say, I have done some stupid things in my life and accidentally hurt someone else. Not physically. Emotionally. That story broke my heart. It brought back all the shame I've felt over the years for my own behavior.

What surprised and pleased me is discovering that Corey Taylor, like myself, loves history. He even uses the same quote I do: "I'm not a historian. I'm a fan of history." It was so uncanny that I had to wonder if someone else said it, and I picked up the phrase subconsciously. And that maybe Taylor did, too. I looked around and there it is! I'll wager Taylor is a fan of Dan Carlin's Hardcore History, just like I am. Although in the chapter titled "Mother, Jugs, Speed, Sacco, and Vanzetti," he does not actually discuss Sacco and Vanzetti. I was kinda disappointed by that. I get that it's a joke, but still. However, he did say he'd be surprised if anyone not from Ohio knew who Salmon P. Chase was without looking him up, and guess what! I *do* know about Chase! I primarily know about him through Gore Vidal's Lincoln. I researched him quite a bit after I finished the book, pleased to find that Vidal was true to history as we know it. I was also sad to see how Chase's daughter Kate turned out in real life.

If I ever meet Taylor--and it's possible, as I tend to meet artists I enjoy--I would love to have a discussion with him about my theory that Alexander Hamilton had it coming, and that Aaron Burr is really the best of all the Founding Fathers. I'm also working on another theory: that Benedict Arnold's treason is actually very understandable. Wrong, definitely, but understandable. I'd like Taylor's thoughts on that.

I've been thinking about that because I like to put myself in other people's shoes when I discover I'm angry or annoyed with them. I try to see their side of things, and I can almost always succeed at that. The only one I can't fit into is Trump. His reasoning is so alien to me that I can't imagine what it's like to be so greedy that you'll let other people die just to line your pockets. But more or less, it helps me understand other people.

That's what the message of this book is really about. Understanding others so that you can learn to get along and make America the place it says it is. Like Taylor, I love this country, and to see greed and hatred and racism and all the other -isms tear us apart like this? Especially on Insurrection Day? I wonder if this is what the Romans felt as Nero did his little dance and fiddle.

Speaking of Insurrection Day, early in the book Taylor suggests that the lunacy isn't as bad as we think because it's usually extremes on both sides of the political spectrum, and they are always loud and belligerent. I used to think that was true, that the real America were scattered about in the middle, or they leaned one way or the other. They weren't extremes. They were normal.

I don't believe this anymore. Every day people are now at each others throats. Neighbors in my own town clash at each other, and they vandalize Trump and Biden signs depending on where they got their "news." But the clincher was on Insurrection Day. Those were regular Americans charging the Capitol. They were rabid and vicious and people died because of them. The very people who complained about BLM protests destroying property proceeded to destroy property in Washington, DC. You know who I didn't see at the Capitol that day? I didn't see Sean Hannity. I didn't see Tucker Carlson. I didn't even see Trump, and it was his own insurrection!

You know who I did see there? Jordan Klepper. I'm not a big fan of his comedy, but it took balls to do what he did there. He walked up to these psychos and asked them questions that they probably didn't want to hear much less answer.

So no, I think this poison has worked like Trickle Down Economics didn't work. The hate trickled down from the higher ups, and it infected the regular people of America. My own grandmother would go crazy whenever I said something negative about Emperor Palp . . . er, Trump.

Speaking of Trickle Down Economics, there is a great chapter about Reagan. I couldn't stand the guy, but I had to give him some credit for being at least presidential. I agree with Taylor that he understood people more than many other presidents. Now if only actors would stop being so political!

That's a joke, by the way. I don't understand why people constantly say, "You're an actor. What do you know about politics?" The very same thing could be turned back on them. "What? You work at 7-Eleven? What do you know about politics?" To be fair, actors have been pretty political for a very long time in this country. John Wilkes Booth, anyone?

There are a couple of points I disagree with. Taylor's take on the death penalty. He's for it and thinks it will make a difference in crime rate if we brought it back to all 50 states. I'm not entirely against the death penalty, but the horrifying fact is that we've sent too many prisoners to their deaths only to find out that some of them were actually innocent. There is a great and terrifying Naked Gun joke on this very subject. Taylor suggests extending the death penalty to sex offenders and violent criminals. The argument could certainly be made for sex offenders to die, especially child rapists. I'm more inclined to lock them up for life because that's not just their crime, it's their behavior. They will certainly do it again, even with chemical castration. It's not about sex with them. It's about power. If they can't use their own equipment, they'll find a broomstick. So I'm on the fence if they should get life sentences or the death penalty. Maybe it would depend on the severity of the crime. But violent criminals? How do we define that? I've done some violent things in my life, so should I be sent to the needle? And there are some murderers who probably wouldn't do it again. They had a bad day, and they flipped out and killed someone. A life sentence in such a case sounds fine to me. But in the case of, say, John Wayne Gacy, whom my state sent to the needle in the 'Nineties? 100%, that guy should have been killed. But we've killed too many innocents. The death penalty is broken. Until we can fix it, I think it should be off the table.

The other issue is guns. I don't like guns, personally. If someone broke into my house, a cop would be here in less than two minutes. The only reason I'd have a gun, ever, is to kill someone. Or maybe myself. I don't think I'd do the latter. I already tried to off myself once, and I don't think I'll ever do it again.

But then I think about the lonely parts of America. Farmland. Miles and miles of it stretching as far as the eye can see and more. If you live in a place like that, and Iowa (Taylor's home state) is mostly filled with places like that, that clouds the issue a bit. So is Illinois, my home state, once you get away from the Chicago suburbs. In a place like this, it might take a police officer a half an hour or more to get to you. It makes perfect sense to have a gun in such cases. A friend of mine who lives on the border between Illinois and Wisconsin, definitely a middle-of-nowhere place, had to defend himself against literal thieves in the night. He had a gun and was able to scare them away. So I see both sides to the argument. Taylor seems to also know that we do need stronger gun control laws. Are you going to hunt deer with an AR-15? And guns really need to be kept out of the hands of people who shouldn't have them. Certain mental issues should prevent people who suffer from them from owning a gun. That probably won't win me many points with a lot of my father's side of the family, but there you go. And just to point it out, I have fired guns. It does give you a thrill to do it, especially if you hit the target. Especially if that target is Tannerite. But I was firing guns in Nevada, where gun registration is more of a suggestion. You don't have to, but if you get into an altercation involving your gun, it would smooth out the investigative process. It boggles the mind.

And I've been writing this for waaaaaay too long. I really need to go out and get something to eat. Suffice it to say, Taylor's an excellent author, and I thoroughly enjoyed this book.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #332: THE SONG THAT NO ONE SINGS

 I'm in a rough mood. But I won't let this build up inside of me. 

I considered just going to sleep (again), but this day has sucked donkey balls. So let's do a deep cut.

I mentioned my enjoyment of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. It's a goofy movie, but there are parts that stick out. Like when Frankenstein is captured by his creature and asks him if he has a soul. But there is a part that I identify with most.

There is the scene where he's learning by living with the people in the woods. The others are gone, and the creature comes to the blind man's rescue. The blind dude is totally into the creature, and he feels bad for him. Especially after he touches the creature's face. He understands that the creature is ugly. But he loves the creature anyway.

And then the blind man's family comes home and drives the creature out violently. The blind man wants to help his newfound friend, but everyone else is happy to see the fucking monster out of the cabin. The next scene is of the creature sobbing his eyes out in giant shaking cries. I've felt that.

When I was younger, people told me to open up. And every time I did I got hurt. I showed a part of me that someone fucking killed me over. And I saw De Niro as the creature, and I felt it. I've been the creature sobbing his eyes out because he thought he could open himself to the world, and he was wrong.

I spent my life cauterizing those gaping wounds. I burned those nerves away so I was bulletproof. I burned and burned and burned. For the last five years I've been trying to reactivate my nerves. I want to love again.

I'm made of open nerves. I just want to be human again.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #331: I BLAME GRADY HENDRIX

[Dedicated to Alicia and Chris. Thanks for the excellent conversation tonight.]

I remember when I was a kid. I worked at the library for minimum wage, which was $4.75/hr. at the time. So I couldn't afford to buy new books. I haunted used book stores, and what a veritable feast they were back then! Most of my personal library I owe to those used book stores. My God, what beautiful covers! Even if the book sucked, those covers were worth the price of admission.

And then something happened. Now I can afford new books, but I always loved the used book stores, like Ye Olde Bookworm from the last entry. There was another good one in Berkeley, but it died when the old man who ran it died. I try to stick to indie used book stores, but Half Price took over. But! There's still the Frugal Muse in Darien.

But the thing that happened? Suddenly these used book stores dried up in the horror section. They only had King, Koontz, Rice, Saul and, occasionally, Barker. It got to the point where I wondered why I went into these places anymore. It depressed me, and I tried to figure out why this had happened.

And then I realized that this thing coincided with the publication of PAPERBACKS FROM HELL by Grady Hendrix. Damn you!

(Just kidding. I've never met him, but he seems like a pretty cool guy.)

Horror fans around here descended on these used book stores looking for lurid and astonishing horror books with excellent covers. More like vampires in From Dusk Till Dawn and Vampyrrihic than Lestat and his ilk. And I couldn't find jack shit in any of my usual places. Not even in that one Christian used books place, and that's where I got Stephen King's coffee table book about the gargoyles.

Grady Hendrix's book took so much of that magic away from me hunting for used horror books in the wild. Again, no offense to him. But I missed that world where I could find weird shit that would probably illicit gasps from my fellow train commuters. I will never forget when I had JF Gonzalez's Survivor on the train. I was on the second level, which I never liked being on. It was a crowded day. I was reading the book, and I got the sensation of someone watching me. I looked down to see a commuter standing in the aisle starring up at me in horror. It's the Leisure edition.

But maybe all those people who bought the books with the lurid covers hit the plague and realized they needed to sell them off. Like the ghoul that I am (not a Brian Keene reference, more of an old school Boris Karloff reference), I picked up the books they sold back to the used bookstores recently.

But still. I blame Grady Hendrix for putting me in this position in the first place. *sigh*

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #330: YE OLDE BOOK WORM

 So I was recently in a Half Price Books, and I made a lot of nostalgia purchases. I don't usually do that, but I found myself looking at these books, and I couldn't help but buy them. I keep saying I'm going to post a picture of my finds that day. Maybe tomorrow. Who knows?

You've heard a lot about the person who abused me when I was a kid, but I'm going to say something nice about him for a change. Like both my biological mom and dad, this guy encouraged me to read.

I've been on record before stating that without the Hardy Boys, I probably wouldn't be writing today. I'm talking, the teenaged sons of Fenton Hardy, not the WWE (F?) wrestlers. Or the awful TV shows. I mean, the books.

Funny thing about the books. I'll get to that in a bit.

My stepfather loved reading, maybe as much as I do now. He loved hard SF because he was a biologist. But whenever he had the urge to buy books he asked if I wanted to go, too. He said he'd let me get some books. So I always said YES! Please!

We walked across the tracks, went down the road, past the White Hen and the Ace Hardware. Over the bridge to York. We'd turn right and head down and just across the street from the York Theater there was this great used books place called Ye Olde Book Worm. My stepfather would browse around the SF area, which was fuckin' huge, and the owner knew me, so he allowed me into the back room, where he kept all of his Hardy Boys books.

I am 90% certain that this is where I got the book that changed my life, that sent me down this path to becoming a writer. The Haunted Fort was the Hardy Boys book. It was an updated version, but I loved it so much I started writing stories of my own. I made up The Detective Boys. Yeah . . . But hey, without my Hardy Boys rip-offs, we wouldn't have, say, Tales of Unspeakable Taste. Or Dong of Frankenstein, for that matter. Sorry, Franklin W. Dixon, even though you never existed. Yeah, Dixon was the name that all these work-for-hire writers did the Hardy Boys books under. I hear it was a flat rate of $100 a book. Not bad for back then.

My stepfather would get his books, and then he'd check with me in the back room. I always had one Hardy Boys books too many. I figured that out early., No matter how many I held, it was always one too many. He said I had to put one back. So I got into the habit of picking up an extra one that I didn't want, and when confronted with this rule, I'd put that one back. I'd fib, of course, and hem and haw over it, but that's what happened. I devoured these books as soon as we got home.

And one day Ye Olde Book Worm disappeared. In fact the building they were in was no longer there. It broke my heart. It was a great place. I loved it. It was the first used book store to go out of business on me. I'd experience that at least a dozen more times in my life.

Fast forward until I'm in my late twenties or early thirties. I was driving around, looking for a place, and what the fuck did I find in Bensenville on the railroad tracks there? YE OLDE BOOK WORM! They hadn't gone out of business! They'd just moved! I parked and, since it was payday the day before, I went directly in. Obviously the old man who ran the place didn't remember me. Shit, he'd been in his late seventies when I'd seen him as a kid. He had to be pushing 100 by then. But he was there! And he still had a back room full of Hardy Boys books!

I went on the biggest book buying spree I've ever gone on in my adult life that day. I bought a lot of books, including my copy of Poker According to Maverick. And yes, I got a few Hardy Boys books, including the one that taught readers how to become crime investigators, which I always wanted as a kid.

The thing about the Hardy Boys is this: every generation has their own version of them. In the Thirties, the originals were, to put it mildly, racist. Then they were reprinted with changes in them to make them more friendly to young boys who weren't just white. And the next generation had them rewritten again. The Eighties got kung-fu Hardy Boys from S&S And then, the generation I was a part of, just barely as I was passing out of that phase, they decided to do the gritty reimagination of the Hardy Boys called The Hardy Boys Casefiles, in which Joe's long-running girlfriend gets killed in a car bomb by a Middle Eastern terrorist whose name translates to The Bullet. Fuckin' weird, right? But I was still on board for a while. And then the next generation got their Hardy Boys, which looked really silly to me, but the kids loved it. I'm sure there have been two more versions of the series since then.

Frank and Joe Hardy will be with us for a long time. Kind of like superheroes. Bruce Wayne will never die for real. Peter Parker will always be slinging webs and might be a teenager forever. Jonah Hex will always . . . well, maybe not. He wore the Confederate uniform, after all. That's really not a good one to come back from, and I'm sure DC is done with him. Maybe.

And then Ye Olde Book Worm disappeared again. I wouldn't be surprised if it was because the owner died at the age of 300. He was a great guy, though. He loved books. Or maybe he loved the experience of the smoke shop, because he still sold tobacco products there. And Lotto tickets. But I have loved many used bookstores in my life. Most run by elderly folks who probably died and had the business sold off by their inheritors.

But I really miss being in that back room as a kid. Selecting the Hardy Boys books I wanted.

So yeah. I bought a bunch of Hardy Boys books from Half Price in the nostalgia section. I also got some Tom Swift books. My dad gave me his collection from when he was a kid. I lost them somewhere along the way. (Read as: my stepfather threw them away when moving from the apartment I grew up in.) I got a few Tom Swifts, too. It felt really good.

Really fucking good,.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #329: WHERE THE FUCK WAS I?

 I need your help. If you have ever camped in the area around Chicago, I need your help. Many years ago I went camping to a place out west. I think. I'm fairly certain it was along I-88. It inspired my story, "A Place To Be" in TALES OF QUESTIONABLE TASTE. I really want to go back someday, but I can't remember the name or location, and no one else seems to recall. In the story I called it Blackhawk Campground. Black Hawk was a Native American who was tracked through the area a long fuckin' time ago. So the name is pretty popular around here. You might have heard of a certain hockey team . . .

But I don't think that's the real name. I don't use real names when I write fiction. I did, however, go to a campground named Blackhawk up in Wisconsin with my dad many times when I was a kid.

Here's a surprise for you. I used to be an outdoors kind of person. When I was a kid I went camping many times. Then, as an adult, I rediscovered the joy, except this time with alcohol. No kidding, when I was a kid, I used to fish and all that stuff. I recently bought a new hatchet because the last one I had turned out to be shoddy as all fuck. The family hatchet and axe are too rusty. You never know when you need something like that, so I went out and bought one that is well built and sharp as fuck. Who knows? It might come in handy during the zombie apocalypse.

I know how to use a compass. (Wilderness, not math. I still can't use a math compass because I always press too hard and rip the paper.) I can read maps. I know how to collect water even in the desert. If dropped into the woods, I'm 95% certain I could find my way back to civilization with nothing but the clothes I'm wearing. Or, well, at least before I became a cripple. And I didn't even learn these things because of research for writing. I was raised during a time when learning these things were necessary to a child's education.

I fuckin' love camping. But I really want to find this place. It's pretty much as explained in the story I mentioned. I'm certain it is west of Elmhurst on I-88. Well, certain-ish. We all had tents, so we didn't stay in a cabin, though those were available. A lot of people lived there, most in RVs or mobile homes. The permanent residents tended to be veterans. There were signs all over the place dedicating stretches of land to wars or the Americans who fought in them.

And yes. I did find a place called Blackhawk, but it's in Rockford. It's possible we went there. I can't say no for sure. But I looked at pictures, and I couldn't find any of those signs I mentioned above. I really don't think it was that place.

Any ideas? I need to find this place. I had a lot of fun there. In fact, that's where I carried my last hatchet before it fell to pieces. I also carried a Bowie knife on my belt and was told that it was illegal since it was longer than the width of my palm. But fuck it. We were in the woods. When you're out there, you need that shit. Just like when I'm on the road. If I'm going somewhere waaaay out of town, I'll take with me two things: my Harley-Davidson knife, which is made in such a way that it's impossible to leave fingerprints on it, and my blackjack, which is illegal in my home state. I warn anyone I'm traveling with or staying with that I have them, as any gentleman would do. But as one man once said, "I'd rather have them and not need them than need them and not have them." The whiskey I had with me was probably a lot more dangerous. But yeah, if you think you might know the place, let me know. Please.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #328: THE ROLLING HILLS OF ILLINOIS

 Back when I was a lot younger and I still had full use of both of my legs, and I was in a lot better shape, I worked for the City of Elmhurst Public Works as a parts driver. I don't remember if I ever went over this before in GF, but my average day went like this: I'd get to work and sign in (no clock to punch, so we were on the honor system). The mechanics and bosses would have their morning meeting over coffee and doughnuts while I went about shop prep. The first thing I'd do was collect all the oil bins. The night mechanics were usually nice enough to roll them over to the drain, but sometimes I had to get them from various work bays. If they were still under a vehicle, I left them alone.

I would remove any oil filters (if any) from the basin and toss 'em into the filter bin. Then I'd empty each oil bin using a pump. I'd leave them there for whoever needed them throughout this day. By then my hands were greasy as fuck, so I washed them using the gritty soap that all mechanics use. I'd then check each rag bin and the cans that contained the grainy shit that was supposed to soak up oil spills. If they needed filling I'd go to the supply room and get what I needed, sign it out and probably spend a minute shooting the shit with the guy in charge of that department or whoever might have stopped by for whatever they needed before they hit the streets. I'd fill any bin or can that needed it.

Then I'd roll the recycling bins for cardboard and plastic out to the dumpsters on the very edge of the woods to empty them. I'd then go into the back room, to check the machines the oil pumps emptied into, just in case it got too full. Because there was this one time . . .

About then I'd take my morning shit. After that, I took the parts truck and checked the oil. I got in and checked the fuel level because the night guys also used it. If it needed a fill up, I'd take it out to the gas pump out back and do that. Then I'd park the truck just outside the front door to the garage. By then, the morning meeting would almost certainly be over. That's when I'd find out what kind of day I'd have.

Most mornings the guys needed rides to the police station or one of the fire stations. Or they'd send me to the usual places. Lincoln-Mercury or Ford or Freightliner. Or a parts store in Lombard. Those were common and local and not much fun. Sometimes I'd have to go out to Bobcat or Case, and those were cool because I had to go further. If I was very lucky they'd send me down to a place in Bourbonnais, which would take a very long time. Same with McHenry. Except with McHenry, I could drive over to Crystal Lake and have lunch with my brother who worked at a fast food place out there.

Why did I love to drive out so far? Because if I didn't have those jobs I had to stick around the garage and clean up. I'd have to sweep the whole thing out. I had to clean up oil spills, some so bad I needed special chemicals and really scrub 'em in. If I was lucky I had to fill up the wash bay tanks. That took a while, and I could write up there since no one ever came by but me. Sometimes, though, if I was a very unlucky boy I had to clean the wash bay, and that included cleaning the drain catch-all, which is fucking disgusting. Imagine having to clean ten toilets overflowing with diarrhea, and you'll get an idea of what I had to do on those days. Sometimes they had me use this chemical that everyone in the known universe knew causes cancer to clean really fucked up auto parts. No gloves. My hands were up to that shit up to the elbows.

But none of that was as bad as cleaning the mechanics' fridge. I was the first person to EVER do it, and I gagged while doing it. I never gagged at the wash bay catch-all.

So I needed to be out on that road. Which was why I looked forward every year to the supremely excellent job of going down to a place in Streator, IL. We only did it once a year, just before winter arrived, because they sold snowplow parts. We had to be prepared. If you don't know the distance between Elmhurst and Streator, please know that it guaranteed that I would not have to do a single bit of janitor work that day. In fact, it would get me extra money because I couldn't go all the way down there and back, with them loading an insane amount of parts into the bed of the truck, in the four hours my shift lasted. Yeah, I was part-time, so there was no OT, but I was paid by the hour, so . . .

For my break, I always stopped at this mom-n-pop gas station (remember those?), where I got a bottle of Coke (glass, not plastic) and some beef jerky. I wish to fuck I remembered the name of the brand, but it was fucking delicious, and I couldn't find it anywhere else.

I've been watching SCRUBS lately, and The Janitor is a great character. I really feel his pain, although sometimes he's kind of the cause of it, too. Regardless, I know what it's like to scrub toilets. I know what it's like to see someone toss their garbage at a bin and miss, horribly say, "KOBE!" and walk away without picking that shit up. Sweeping up a garage, something usually considered one of the filthiest places ever, fucking blew. Especially when we had to pressure wash for spring cleaning. I took solace in that one because I wasn't the only one doing it. Everyone not in administrative was required to do it.

Although I got to learn to drive a forklift (illegally, but effectively) and an end-loader (illegally, but effectively) and a snowplow (probably illegally, not quite so effectively). That was kind of cool. Those crazy bastards put me in charge of attaching the cage to the forks so that I could lift mechanics up to adjust the clocks up about thirty feet high on the wall (and replace the batteries) for daylight savings time. The fact that they trusted their lives and health to me spoke highly of me, but kinda low on their brains for them. I was an idiot when it came to working in a garage, and they had to know I was hungover almost every day. It was a lawsuit waiting to happen.

Although I'm proud to say that I'm not the guy who drove the forklift into the side of the brand new wall at the garage door and tore out giant chunks that are probably still missing.

I was thinking about The Janitor, though. And that made me think of how much I loved those Streator runs. And that made me think of that beef jerky.

During weekdays I like to go read at forest preserves because most people are at work and kids are at school. The possibility of me being interrupted is minimal. But I go on road trips on the weekends. I'm unemployed. I have a job interview for Thursday! Hopefully it goes better than the last one, and they're not looking for a "bubbly" person. The point is, I have a lot of time on my hands.

Why not drive the insane distance to Streator to see if the gas station still had that beef jerky? Surely they would be a corporate place now, so the chances were low, but what the fuck? If they didn't, at least I would know and not think about it very much anymore.

Except . . . well . . . I forgot the way. I was pretty sure that I-80 would get me directly there. Aaaaaaaaaaand it did not. I panicked a little and took an exit that wound up taking me through Marseilles. It's a neat little town on the Illinois Motherfucking River. And it's one of those scary big rivers. Like, all you can think of going over it is, what if this bridge collapses? I don't fear death, but I'd really rather not drown. That's a rough one, and I don't care how many people say it's a peaceful way to go. How the fuck do you know? If you're dead, you can't tell me jack shit.

And no, I'm not talking about people who have been resuscitated. THEY AREN'T DEAD.

But I started seeing the rolling hills of Illinois, and it's hard to remember that out this far from home it does get pretty hilly. Oh yeah, I'm driving into a fucking valley. You idiot, John Bruni. You're smarter than this. It's almost like being in Vegas and seeing the mountains. Obviously not as tall, but still. It was tall enough to make my ears pop several times.

And then there were the ridiculously steep roads. Some of them are almost vertical. And they're one lane roads. I'd look up and see houses perched on the very edge of a cliff. How could you live in a place like that? Especially a place where tornadoes like to touch down every once in a while? And some of these houses are really close to the road. What if your car slipped on ice, and you wound up in someone's living room? And then there are a lot of drops without guard rails. I wonder how many drunks pitched themselves off these drops and into lakes? Or simply a bunch of deadwood at the bottom of a dry creek bed? And there were more than a few small boneyards with no gates and graves very, very close to the road. I can't imagine no one has ever crashed into one of these things.

I'm not used to that kind of thing so close to home. I've been over a lot of this country. I used to visit a friend in Tennessee where we had to walk down a fucking mountain to get to a liquor store. Along the way this one time, we saw that someone had broken down an outhouse for trash pickup. The door even had a moon carved into it. No shit. So to speak. So it's something I can cope with, just not quite so close to Elmhurst.

When I found out I was well and truly lost, I pulled off on a farm road. At least I'm used to those. I was certain that my car's GPS would get me back on track. Aaaaaaaaand it was less than helpful. That's fine. My phone's GPS was more accurate, anyway. Aaaaaaaaaand I couldn't get a signal.

Fuck it. I turned around and made my way back to I-80. I turned off at Ottawa and pulled into a gas station. It turned out I'd passed up Rt. 23, which would have taken me to Streator. I went back. Long story short, I made it, and when I got my bearings, I figured out which was the gas station I needed. Sure enough, it was a corporate place now. I went in and looked for that beef jerky.

Nope. Gone. Long gone.

Ah fuck.

So I got some water (they didn't even have Coke in glass bottles, not even the Mexican Cokes that have real sugar in them) and filled up my tank (I'd burned half of it on the way). And then I headed back.

So I wasted an entire day, but so what? I got to rediscover a part of my own region that is a lot closer than one would think. Although I did expose myself to driving through Joliet, and that is never pleasant. It fucking stinks. Literally. It's like burned rubber and cat hair. (The cat hair is burned, too, in case I wasn't clear.) I also realized that I had lost all of my country driving skills. I had to relearn them, usually at night on my way back. I'm getting old, and my night vision, never great to begin with, has gotten even worse.

Maybe, if you have the time, go out for a joyride. Visit a place near you that you've forgotten about, or maybe never went there before. Explore a bit. Get lost. Find your way back without technology. I have an old battered Rand-McNally, but I just let it sit to the side. Sometimes that's part of the adventure.

Have a little fun. Fuck knows we need some of that around here.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #327: A SOCIAL EXPERIMENT

 So back when I first started making enough money at my job to have $20 bills in my wallet, back when dinosaurs ruled the world, I decided to try out an experiment. I wrote on maybe about fifty of them over the course of months my initials and a number. And over time I sent them out into the world like those dollar bills with the weird George Washington tracker. I wanted to know if I would ever see those bills again. I wanted to see if confluence would bring at least one of them back to me.

So far, after what? Twenty years? I haven't gotten any of them again.

The other day I turned into a Half Price Books, and I saw a homeless dude on the island where I would have to turn on my way out. Whenever I can, I give them something. I made a promise to a friend, who is no longer in my life, that if she died, I would carry a pack of cigarettes with me to give smokes out to the homeless while at a stoplight. She's not gone yet, but it isn't a promise like from last night about the [name redacted sex move] on Urban Dictionary. I have no way to find him. If she dies, I'll hear about it, and I will fulfill that promise even though we don't care to be in each others' presence.

Side note: I got a lot of cool shit at that Half Price Books. I keep meaning to post a picture, but my life has been a bit hectic lately. I'm sure I'll do it sometime this upcoming week.

Anyway, when I saw that homeless dude, inspiration struck. When I brought my purchases up to the counter I asked if they sold Sharpies. She said no. I asked if she had one I could borrow for a second. She was reluctant, due to the plague. I knew I was OK, that she had nothing to worry about, but some people, if you say that to them they'll start to worry about it. But she slid one over to me, and I whipped a twenty out of my wallet. I wrote something different on this one. I wrote, "PASS IT ON." I pocketed it and slid the Sharpie back, but to the side so she wouldn't worry about it. She understood without me saying a word. See? The unsaid is sometimes the most important. Just like I said a few columns ago.

I got back to my car, and as I approached the intersection I held out my hand and waited. The homeless dude came up, God-blessed me and took the twenty.

So I'm asking you for a favor that you will probably never have to perform. I'm asking that if you ever find a $20 bill with PASS IT ON written in Sharpie on it to take a picture of it and send it to me here or on social media or wherever you know me from. Again, this is just a social experiment. An experiment with confluence.

Also, if by any chance you get a $20 bill with JB and a number on it, do the same. It'll probably never happen, but if it does, feel free to surprise me.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #326: [NAME REDACTED], THE PLACE OF MY EVENTUAL HERMITAGE

It's not often that I want to keep something to myself. Well, it happens when someone else is involved, but if it's just me--AND ME ALONE--I almost never keep that thing to myself. In creating the title of tonight's column I decided to keep one of those things to myself. I have my reasons.

I'll give you an example. Something happened when I was a kid, and the only people in the world who know about this were the people there and the one person I swore to secrecy about it decades later. Before writing this, I released him from his promise. This person and I were talking about one of Gregory House's unusual obsessions.

I have a policy that those close enough to me to confide things in me know very well. You have to swear me to secrecy first, and then you can confide, and God Himself couldn't get it out of me. Oh fuck me, this is a column with a side note within a side note, but that's the kind of night it is, I guess.

I used to know this one guy who, and I can't stress this enough, I told him my policy sooooooo many times he either wasn't listening or was incredibly stupid. In retrospect, I believe both of these things. Regardless, in the cafeteria at work he told me about this idiotically unlikely sexual position he'd come up with, and he named it after himself. I ridiculed him openly to his face--AGAIN in the WORK cafeteria where others were hanging around, and he was a loud, belligerent loony--and he insisted it was a true story. I'd finished eating and intended to spend the rest of my lunch in the employee lounge reading, and he followed me. I ran into another person in the breakroom who knew all about this guy's bullshit, and I started telling her about what he'd just told me.

"No! You can't tell her!" he said.

"You know my policy," I said. He had to. I'd explained it maybe a dozen times.

He pleaded ignorance. I told her the whole thing. She laughed her ass off and went to lunch. Another coworker came in, and in front of this guy I told this coworker everything.

This sounds like bullying. It's not. I promise you. I would never do this to someone I hadn't told about the policy, or even if I'd told them twice. Three strikes, you're out. It's the next one that doesn't count anymore. And they have to be sober when I tell them. Yeah, I know, I have fucked up reasoning, but you didn't know this guy. He was a liar and a cheat and a scumbag and a manipulator and, this last part I'm 95% on, a predator. I'm not a violent guy. I can be, as faithful readers will know, but if I can defeat someone with words, I will do it.

Before my break was over (15 minutes from that moment) everyone knew. I went as far as putting the sex move--and who names an unlikely sex move after themselves?!--on Urban Dictionary. He eventually forced himself to have a sense of humor about it, and good for him. I'd do the same. He told me that I'd better get a coffee mug made with the UD definition on it for Christmas. I told him I would, and I usually live up to my word. But he's out of my life, and I didn't have the money at the time. I have it now and would have happily gotten it for him.

So I take my own policies very seriously, and I live by them to the hilt. So my friend? The one I mentioned earlier? I swore him to secrecy first. And then we talked about House's weird obsession with monster trucks. My big secret? I LOVE MONSTER TRUCKS. I was dubious at first, but then my uncle took me and my cousin to a rodeo, and part of said rodeo was a monster truck rally. AND BIGFOOT WAS THERE! And bam. I got it. I understood it. I loved it.

I don't think it was mine. I think it was my cousin's. But one of us had an RC Bigfoot after that, and there were all these shitty plastic cars that we could run it over. Oh my fuck me Jesus, I had so much fun with that shit! I wanted my own monster truck so badly. I still kind of do, especially if I have to deal with rush hour traffic.

So there it is. I finally overcame that insecurity about myself. You all know what you probably suspected already: I'm the oldest eight-year-old kid you know.

Okay, that was one hell of a left turn. So let's get back to what I was going to write about in the first place. I know for a fact that six of you on my social media know the name of this middle-of-nowhere village. I suspect ten more of you might, too. And I really want to keep that location to myself because I intend, if I somehow survive to old age and/or sudden riches, I want to cut myself off from humanity, more or less, and live out my days without ever using my voice again. No offense. I might have mentioned in a previous column that I wasn't superstitious, but there's this weird part of me thinking that if I name the place, I'll jinx myself.

To give you an idea of how out-there this place is, I'm convinced there are more horses in that village than there are people. Or township. Or whatever.

While driving through the other day, to do some forest preserve reading, I saw that a farmhouse was up for rent. The land was sizeable, too. Not that I'm a farmer or could even do a good job of doing that. I'd kinda like to have a horse. I speak a big Western game. It would be nice to actually be able to ride a horse, though. I'd hate to look like Clint in Unforgiven when he tries to get on his horse so he could go out and murder a few fellas.

I seriously considered just going there now. I even looked it up online. Turns out, I actually have enough money to pay rent on the place for five months and still live relatively comfortable. The problem is, I have no job. Well, I have one, but the start date keeps getting delayed. I can't rationally make the decision to rent the place without actually having a concrete job. Without the rent, living here, I could survive 2021 in an absolutely basic level of comfort. I have to have a job by then. Or maybe I'll win the Publishers Clearinghouse Sweepstakes?

I really want that place. The houses in that area were built in the mid to late 1800s. They look like the houses that I adore from those aforementioned Westerns. There is one that reminds me of a house from the film, THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD. If I could rent that, I would probably beat my own skull in after my money ran out.

But it might be worth it.

Man, I just can't rent that place. I wish more than anything that I could. Well, I'm fairly sure I'd be labeled a city boy by most of the closer neighbors. Sadly they'd label me a lefty. I'm not. Biden's not my guy, but he got dipshit out of office, so I'll take him. There is one house I saw had a sign bolted to the ground so it wouldn't be easily removed. One word is spray-painted on both sides: TRUMP. The owner isn't the only one, but I find faith in the others who have Biden signs up. Not many, but enough. Who knows? If it came to it, maybe I could tip the scales in local elections. Probably not.

But I really fucking want that place.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #325: TABARD INN HAS BEEN ON MY MIND

 So I was thinking about my old magazine TABARD INN tonight. I edited this thing many years ago. Three issues. But it's been on my mind for the last week or two, actually. I have a few ideas about why it was never successful. Maybe the big one was my reluctance to do POD. I printed these fuckin' things first and then tried to sell them. Whoops! I'll go into another reason in a bit. Hold that thought. I'll get to it. Probably. I'm drunk--as usual--but I think I'll remember to get to it.

Regardless, I will never edit a magazine or anthology again. I have many reasons for both. The magazine I'll explain. The anthologies? Nope. You won't get that out of me unless you take me out for drinks. Like, a lot of drinks. Enough to cripple an elephant. And, naturally, off the record.

By the way, I've become friends with a lot of comics creators I'd been a fan of previous. I've interviewed many of them. They all know I was in comic book reporting. I'm out and have been for, what, a decade? And whenever I talk to them as a regular dude, they're still kind of cagey. Sometimes I wonder if I said "off the record" they'd open up a bit more. One of them actually did. Won't say who. If you follow me, you know the name. But this person trusted me, and once sworn to silence, I will forever keep that secret.

As I am unemployed, I have lots and lots of free time. I think maybe that's why I'm writing 10K words a day. Well, more like 8K now that the therapy thing is out of the way. Still better than my self-imposed 2K a day. I think it's also why I'm reading four books at the same time. Hey, I'm down from seven on January 1.

But I thought about the ridiculously difficult time I had getting someone to print the fucking thing. Issue one was so fucking offensive that no one wanted to print it. I even got someone to do it, and the young workers were happy to get it out there. They even took my money! And then the owner read it and said to give me back my money and files. I found someone who would print it! After a fucking age! They did all three!

So since I was thinking about TABARD INN, and I had the time, I wondered if maybe the printers were still around. I drove out in that direction to drive down the road to see if they were. I won't name them, just in case they're somewhere else and might get hate mail over the offensive shit, but they were on the same road as Victory Auto Wreckers. If you ever lived in my area (Chicago, if you don't know), you know them and their ancient commercial. In my opinion, there should be a really sleazy strip club in that neighborhood. Maybe down the road a bit further, as there is a police station near there.

Side note: sleazy strip clubs are my favorite. They're the places where you might get a decent handjob if you paid enough, and you might buy narcotics off a dancer or you might even get the clap from a lapdance that got a little too close. I miss the one at the end of I-290 that eventually got shut down for shady reasons.

In fact, now that I think about it, if you drove past my printers, turned right, went down a while, then turned left on Grand, there used to be a strip club there. I remember my writing partner when I was a journalist and I tried to get into the club to interview strippers to find out what they did for Easter. Bet you were thinking Valentine's Day, huh? Wrong, silly goose. We were, uh, refused service. I also drove a friend who also was an ex there once so she could fill out an application. It was called All Stars. It's a trucking company now, but for some perverse reason they left the sign up. I wonder how many dudes go in there to get lapdances only to be sold on truck storage.

So I drove by, looking for the printer, and sadly they're gone. Too bad. They helped me when no one else would. Some metal works company is there now. Ah well.

I stand by everything I published in that magazine, even the Anthony Haversham stories about Bobby Yandell, Private Investigator. Yeah, I wrote those. And that one by Jack Graves, the one about the guy who wants to fuck his dead mom and she turns out to be alive still. I wrote that one, too. I think it's in Tales of Questionable Taste, but I'm too lazy to look it up now.

What I don't stand by is how I acted as the host, the Crypt-Keeper of TABARD INN, if you will. It wasn't me. Well, it was more or less me . . . if I was an edgy and possibly alcoholic rock DJ. Not those shock jocks in the morning. Those are actually called "radio personalities." Isn't it weird that we had that shock jock period? I enjoyed it at the time, but looking back? *collar pull* But some part of my mind thought it would be a great idea to come off as a rock station DJ. This is why I don't trust my instincts. They are always wrong. I look back on that with a great deal of regret. It came off as kind of disgusting, especially the bumper sticker contests. I'm sorry about that. That was my mistake, and I own it 100%. This, by the way, is the other reason I thought the magazine failed. See? I'm not that drunk, am I? Well, maybe.

Another side note: offensive stories. I'm not talking about offensive-offensive. I'm talking about creatively offensive. Any asshole and fuckface and prickcunt can come along and sling the n-word around like they had practice. Same with the other f-word. And so on and so forth. That shit is just offensive-offensive. I have put awful words in awful characters' mouths, but it's to prove something about their moral shortcomings. To use it just to use it is just showing you're a piece of shit.

I'm talking about writing transgressive shit that pushes the envelope but does so creatively. Like, say, a dude you thought was making a video to show he can suck his own dick but it's really because he wants to video him biting it off. Who wrote that one? Oh . . . maybe it's in a book named after the title of a certain blog. Thanks to M for publishing it first!

Here are a few other reasons I regret the magazine.

I got a lot of letters from mental patients. Nothing wrong with that. I'd be a hypocrite if I talked shit about that, especially after the psych ward. But some would go a bit too far off the beam. Like the guy who decided I was his agent, and he said I should pay Google a bunch of money to make sure that anytime someone looked up science fiction, his name would be the first to come up. I had to explain to him that I was not the guy he thought I was. I lived more or less in my grandmother's basement at the time. When I sent that to him, I never heard from him again. So yeah. If you get a stalker, and he was borderline stalker, tell them something pathetic about you. They'll go away.

Which reminds me, I regretted not getting that PO Box. I stupidly used my own address, which everyone tried to talk me out of. I figured I could handle anyone who came after me, but then I remembered that I have relatives. Awkward at least. Possibly borderline criminal at most. I thought I was saving money. Again, whoops!

I regretted the sense that because I was a publisher, I could do things for people. That was absolutely not true. I couldn't. But people thought I could. One guy asked me for Stephen King's number. Granted, now that I'm a lot older and I have more experience, I have discovered that if you're in my business, we all know each other. Or if we don't, we at least know of each other.

Full disclosure: I met Stephen King once. He was on his Bag of Bones tour at the Harold Washington Library in Chicago on Congress Pkwy and State St. Previously I'd sent him some artwork my friend did. His name is Rob Tannahill, and for mostly my amusement he would do King parodies and replace the characters with Beavis and Butt-Head. Like, this was comic book level stuff. For example, here are a couple of titles. THE DORK HALF. THE STUPID DEATH OF BEAVIS VERRILL. THE SCAMMED. So three titles, then. I even got to be in his parody of The Shawshank Redemption. So with Rob's permission I copied them and sent them to King. When I got through the line and shook King's hand, I told him that I was the one who sent the Beavis and Butt-Head parodies that my friend had made. And let me tell you, you have NEVER lived your life until you've heard King do his Beavis impression. (I seem to be thinking about impressions lately, too, I guess.) He got this demented look on his face and said, with his Maine twang, "FIRE! FIRE!"

Does he know who I am? Probably not. I was a guest twice on The Horror Show, which I've heard he listens to, so maybe? I've been mentioned a few times without me being on, so maybe? Chet Williamson, whom I worship, once did a live read for Dong of Frankenstein, which might stand out to King, so maybe? But I'm certain he doesn't remember the exchange. When you're Stephen King, you meet a lot of people. A LOT.

So no. I don't have his phone number.

I also got a lot of submissions from prisoners. I got to publish one of them, even. I couldn't pay him because the prison system forbade it. I loved those letters because I believe that any prisoner who submits a story to a publication is trying to redeem themselves. A lot of them were even good stories, just not right for what I had in mind. But then there was this one letter I got from a prisoner who wanted to pay me to write stories for him. It would have been a huge payday, actually, if I had done it. I have still never made as much money for one story that he would have paid me for one story. But I said no. Sometimes you can't take the money and keep your integrity. That's the shit you've got to turn down. I needed the money at the time. Desperately. I'm not lying to you when I say that I would be a lot better off financially speaking if I'd taken the money. I said no. What he wanted was time travel porn. He wanted mind control porn. He wanted racially charged porn that was essentially rape porn. In addition to that, he requested just plain old rape porn.

I look up all the prisoners who sent me stuff. Sometimes the crime is understandable. Sometimes it's really bad, but the person genuinely regrets it and wants to redeem themselves and maybe contribute to society. But this guy? He's going to be in prison long after I die. Long after he dies. I shit you not, he might get out a hundred and twenty years from now. Since he's not a Highlander, I'm guessing he won't see the streets again any time in his life. He's got a lot of rape charges. Manslaughter charges. FUCKING KIDNAPPING CHARGES. If I remember right, he even robbed a bank. Some of those rapes were not committed against adults.

So no. I'm going to turn down that money. I'd like to be rich someday, but there are routes I am not willing to go down. Hell, I might not even be able.

Sometimes, you morally have to turn down the money. You HAVE TO.

Yet another side note: I actually know someone who did time for a bank robbery. He got kicked out of the Navy for doing it. Again, no names. He's suffered enough.

So yeah. You'll never see issue four, as I predicted in issue three. You'll never see another anthology I've edited. For vastly different reasons, I've turned down four editing jobs for other authors in the last three months. Paying jobs. In one case, a very good paying job. I mostly did it to focus on my own shit, especially since I was going to start that new job soon. But the job keeps getting delayed. It's something I'm reconsidering. It's going into that lizard brain conversation I'm going to have soon, maybe tomorrow or the next day.

So yeah. I guess if you want copies, I have boxes of them still cluttering up my living room. I've taken to giving them away as a three-issue package for anyone who buys my books at conventions. Since conventions are canceled until the plague finally dies, what the hell? You don't even have to buy anything from me. If you want a single issue, Paypal me a dollar for shipping. If you want all three, make it five for shipping. If I actually published you in any one of them, and you want me to send you copies, you won't even have to pay for shipping. Unless you're ordering like ten or twenty or something. We'll talk. The issues will be free, but the shipping might get crazy. Contact me in the comments or social media or wherever you know me from. Hell, if I can hand deliver them, I'll do it for free.

Just know that I kind of come off like a dick as the host. Sorry.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #324: THE IMPRESSION

 [Here is where last night's video was supposed to go. I still have it. If you are unhinged and insane, I have the video. I will send it to you if you want. But why would you? I was so drunk and rambling. No. You don't want that. Granted, that's the way I write all of these, but I cut the rambling out. Mostly. So here is a cleaner, to the point version.}

So I recently went down a Clint rabbit hole. Eastwood, not Howard. Sorry. I saw some interviews, but the one that interested me the most is the James Lipton Inside the Actors Studio interview. Look down if you're watching this on my blog. It's in two parts. *points down*

So I've noticed this thing about Lipton. He never asks a question he doesn't already know the answer to. But Clint surprised him. Lipton asked about the cigarillos Clint had for the Leone trilogy, and Clint said, I forgot what, but he got them in a smoke shop in maybe in North Carolina? Just click on the link. And Lipton responds with shock. "Really?!" he asks. I thought that was funny.

Another thing: we all think of Lipton as super serious (unless we've seen Arrested Development) when he's doing the interview gig. Well, at one point he invites Clint's agent since the Leone films to stand up and say a few words, and the agent does. Then he says something about how he also represented someone else, a young actor looking for work by the name of, maybe you've heard of him, James Lipton. And Lipton gets this demonic look on his face, like he sometimes gets when he's about to make a joke that turns out to be really fucking funny, and he says, "I just want it on the record that Clint Eastwood and I have the same agent." And I laughed my ass off.

Why did I call this The Impression? I'm almost there.

So Clint said something that struck me in the heart. I always knew it, but I never knew it specifically. He said something that I've never thought about, but I've known for a long time, and it helped me understand my own approach to my art. He said, "Always take your work seriously. Never take yourself seriously." Holy fuck, that's true.

But the impression he did is fucking delicious. It's the reason I wanted to do a video version of this. I wanted to do an impression of Clint doing an impression of John Wayne who refused to do an impression of Clint. I can't make this shit up. Watch the video below, if you have 90 minutes to kill.

So Don Siegel directed Clint in many movies. Most famously in Dirty Harry. But Siegel also did The Shootist with John Wayne. The book by Glenn Swarthout is fucking amazing. But Siegel was making that movie, famously John Wayne's final. He was down to one lung, remember. When they were between takes, John Wayne was on oxygen.

So Siegel wanted Wayne to shoot a character in the back. It made sense for the character, but John Wayne--who clearly hadn't read the script--took Siegel to task. He insisted he would never shoot anyone in the back. And Siegel argued, reasonably I think, why the character would. I remember John Wayne, whose work I love despite the horrible person he was, in Red River, where he played the villain for a change. I remember him shooting someone in the back, but I can't remember for sure. What I *do* remember for sure is when he shot Liberty Vallance from ambush. That's why James Stewart thought he'd done the deed. Maybe this is neither here nor there, but John Wayne refused to shoot this character in the back.

Don Siegel, who had worked with Clint a lot, maybe five times? Clint was at the top of his iconoclastic game, changing the face of the Western. By then, they'd worked together at least twice. So Siegel says, "Clint would have shot him in the back."

At that point, John Wayne lost his shit so badly he was blue. Remember, one lung. And I watched Clint as he leaned his head back and did the Clint squint. While still being the Clint we all know, which isn't the real Clint (he's a vegetarian who hates guns and doesn't squint at people; he's usually just a dude who has a laid back joke for everyone with his eyes more or less wide open), he does this great imitation of John Wayne refusing to do an impression of Clint: "I DON'T CARE WHAT THAT GODDAM KID WOULDA DONE!"

I swear, I think I nailed the impression of an impression of a refusal of an impression. I'm sorry you missed it, but YouTube fucked me. So did Blogger. Sorry Blogger. I know you let me spout my pre-sleep madness, but you know what you did.

I have to wake up early tomorrow, so I'm going to sleep now. I hope that you enjoyed this even without my physical video for impression.

Part one.

Part two.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #323: BLOOD, TOM PICCIRILLI AND ANDREW VACHSS

 Today was slightly insane for me. I had so many topics for tonight's GF that I nearly went insane thinking about it. But after reading this I decided I had to be a writer tonight. People tell me that I should teach, but that would be so wretched to me. I'm fine with writers who are cool with that, but it's just not me. I have nothing worth teaching. I'm an asshole like everyone else. So fuck it. I'm a guy who never wants you to think about me. I want you to read my work and not think about the guy who wrote it. So against my better judgment, let's do this.

I tried writing BLOOD a few years back. I talked to a guy in a bar, and he told me that when he got frustrated, he would pull over and chop a tree down to get it out of his system. I get it.

But here is my dedication: "To everyone I've ever hurt, especially you. You'll know who you are after reading the prologue." I'm not fucking around. He will never read that prologue because he doesn't read books, but if he did, he would know why. I literally tried to strangle someone to death. I failed, thankfully, but it has haunted me forever. I didn't think I was capable of that, but I was. I did it. And then something made me turn back, and instead of killing this person, I punched the wall so hard I broke my knuckles.

I am so glad I broke my knuckles to stop me from killing someone. I would much rather have hands that don't fully work than be in prison for life. (My state frowns upon the death penalty.) And the crazy thing is, I love the man I tried to kill. He's in my house right now.

So I failed that first draft. I did my best, but I fucked it up. I learned a few tricks, and I tried them out with my story, "Amber." I wrote it and got rejected a lot . . . until it was accepted at an online zine that paid me ten bucks and two bookmarks. It was later in my book, TALES OF QUESTIONABLE TASTE. I used those same principles to rework BLOOD. I got it right this time. It was published and greatly appreciated by the few who read it.

Here's the thing. I didn't really know what I was doing until I was done. I had no idea that it would be my Tom Piccirilli book. I'd read the Necromancer/Self books, and they are fucking great. You won't read anything like them in your life. Highly recommended. I had no idea how much they were an influence until I looked over the published books. And then I read The Midnight Road. And that turned out to be one of my top five favorite books of all time. It's so amazing, I will worship that one until the end of my days. When I read it maybe a couple of months after BLOOD came out, I knew what I'd done. This is my Pic book.

I'd thought I was doing my Andrew Vachss book.

I came to Vachss through Lansdale. I picked up a copy of Act of Love, and Vachss had done the intro. If he had those things to say about JRL, I knew I'd love his work. When I realized they considered each other brothers, I knew I had to read Vachss. I started with the first, FLOOD. I loved it. I loved the Burke stories, but I loved the non-Burke books even better. I learned that Vachss was a pro bono lawyer for abused kids. That shocked me. I was abused as a kid, so I immediately identified. I followed him into Protect, and I left for the same reasons. And this guy wasn't fucking around. He is blunt as a club. I learned so much from him about how to be a man than I ever learned from any of my father figures. He was the real thing, and it's rare to find the real thing on a quest for good. Most, as I used to be, were on a quest for revenge. Some were just bad fucks. But he helped set me on the right path, and he will never know it. I didn't view it as revenge anymore. I viewed it as being GOOD.

Two Trains Running is still my favorite to this day, But even though Vachss helped me find my way back from the disaster my life would have been if I kept hating everyone around me, I learned more from him as a writer. I learned that the things that are most important are implied. Unsaid. That's why Mickey Scarlet, when he listens to people, he waits. He actively listens,, which most characters don't. And when he's ready, he doesn't speak. HE ACTS. You can never truly trust the words someone says. They might sound great, but they're just words. What counts is ACTION. What do you actually do? That's the true definition of yourself. Or anyone. Fact. There is no argument.

When you get down to it, BLOOD really is my Pic book. I meant it to be my Vachss book, but I was close. Not quite right, but close. And right now, I'm working on something that will be my Lansdale book. If published. Maybe my friends Nick Day and Don Noble will be interested, but I don't count on that. If I turn in a turd, they should reject me.

All of the things I write wear their influences on their shoulders. I won't count the short story collections, but otherwise, you know what I mean. Influences are 100% OK. I hope that I make mine my own enough to show my Edward Lee-ish voice, but my own, too. When horrible shit happens, Brian Keene was right. I like to wink at my readers. Sometimes, though, I'm a vicious bastard. No laughs. No winks. No offense, Brian. You had me figured from day one, and very few people do. Respect.

If you learned something from this, cool. I doubt it, but there you go. Maybe that's what I should do with a possible Patreon. I doubt it. I'm not just happy-assholing my way through this shit. It might seem that way, but I put an insane and possibly stupid level of thought into what I show possible publishers. Take from that whatever you can. Good luck.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #322: THE SOCIAL DILEMMA

 Sorry guys. This one's gonna be one of the serious ones, and if you're here for the laughs, well, I still have a few for you, but you might want to sit this one out.

I think about my own identity a lot, and about the extraordinary set of circumstances that led to my existence. For as long as I can remember, I was a curious child. Also, I was a child with crippling insomnia. Sometimes I'd be up for three days and suddenly crash. It could happen anywhere. When I got my drivers license I made sure to watch my driving if I'm approaching day three. Then older me discovered alcohol. Then even older me discovered Unisom AND alcohol combined.

But I'd be awake and wonder if I could get away with reading. If I had the flashlight, I could. There was a risk of getting my five year old self being beaten within an inch my life, but I risked it. Otherwise I'd be stuck with my horribly loud and unending thoughts. The one that kept me up the most was, what was here before all of this? What if, instead of black, space was green. Before that, it could have been pink, right? And before that? And before that? And where is the edge of reality? And what's beyond the edge? There has to be something, right? But if there is, it's not the edge, right? You get the idea. I learned the concept of death pretty early when my best (and only) friend died from choking on a broken pencil tip. Mom broke the news, and I asked what it all meant. She said it meant my friend was in the ground now, and the worms were eating him.

Parenting tip: try not to do what my mom did.

But I tried to think about an existence that moved on without me. Where would I be? I didn't believe even then in an afterlife. I remembered that before 1978, I didn't exist. Could I possibly remember what that was like so I could prepare for my inevitable death?

So I watched The Social Dilemma today. I'll get more into that in a bit. But there was a scene where a family is having dinner together, and the mom puts all their phones in a time lock. That wasn't what I thought about, though. I remember a time before cell phones, after all. No, the part I focused on was the concept of the family dinner.

I have never had a family dinner, where we all sit at the same table and chitchat over food. Maybe if it was a special occasion, like a wedding or Christmas, but I never experienced that part of the cliched American experience.

But what if I had? Would that make me a different person than I am? What if we had cell phones back then? Would I have become the person I am today? Sometimes I feel like Frankenstein's creature in the Kenneth Branagh version, the Robert DeNiro version. When the creature finally has his creator where he wants him, he asks questions. Significant questions. My favorite is when he's asking about the nature of the soul. "Do I even have one? Or was that a part you left out?"

Would I be so questioning of authority if I hadn't taken Mr. Tourney's US History class? Would I be so lax in research without the influence of my many English teachers? Would I have the nasty streak of rage that runs in me if I'd never been abused as a child? If you read my book, BLOOD, then you could guess that I was trying to exorcise that from myself just by writing it. Micky Scarlet is me, if I let my rage control me.

I come from a telecom tech background, which is funny because I'm usually the last person to adopt a new technology. My first cell phone was a pay-by-minute thing that was forced into my hand by someone who got it from a crack dealer. I would never have gotten a DVD player if someone hadn't given me one as a birthday gift just a few years before streaming became a thing. I didn't get home internet until maybe ten years ago, I think? Some of it is because I don't need it. I'm the guy who will hear a notification ding, and if I'm busy (usually when I'm reading or writing), I won't pick up my phone to check. I just heard three dings go off during the course of writing this, and my phone is still face down on my bed.

Recently I broke my phone. It was in a fit of rage, and it was around the time of the psych ward. Someone texted me something horrible, and I texted back that I never wanted to hear from this person again. And to ensure that this person couldn't respond, I broke my phone. But you kinda need a phone in this age, if only to--GASP--call someone. So it took a while and some money, but I rediscovered something nice in the time that it was in the shop.

It reminded me of before I had a cell phone. I absolutely despise talking on the phone, and I avoid it at all costs. It was easy when I didn't have one. It actually made me happier than I'd been in a while. No texts. No calls. I had a laptop, so I could still check emails and social media, but I usually did so only once, twice, maybe three times a day, tops. It was fucking glorious!

There's a fourth ding that I'm going to ignore.

And then I got the phone back. I'd already heard back from the person in question (there's a $200 waste of time for me), and we had an uneasy truce that lasted for a while until we finally, politely, bowed out of each others' lives. For good, I think. I hope.

Anyway, about 80% of The Social Dilemma I knew already. I suspected another 15%. The remaining 5% I was more or less surprised with. I'm no different from most. I get it. I do. When someone likes a post, you get a dopamine rush. I get it, certainly. But I recognize that and remind myself of it maybe 75% of the time. Every one of us, even those who think they're shit, have a certain level of narcissism. My level is fairly low, but it's there. Chuck Palahniuk talked about how he tries to hide just how long his neck is in author photos. I'm the opposite. I barely have any neck. My head is like a boulder sitting directly on top of another boulder. I've felt self-conscious about that and about my awful teeth and a few other things. But when my hair dries off just after a shower? Goddam, that's some gorgeous shit!

But the word is used today because of a Greek myth about a dude who was so vain that he accidentally drowned because he was enamored with his reflection in a body of water. That's the problem with true narcissists. They don't know they're narcissists. I don't use Instagram because most of the people there have a level of narcissism that is waaaaaaaaay too high for my likes. But ask one of them, why do you post these selfies? They might not even know why. I'd hazard a guess that they'd say that everyone else is doing it, so might as well join them. Don't get me started on filters. But the real reason why they're doing it is the dopamine drip that they don't even know is happening in their heads.

People on Facebook need the likes or whatever emoji of their choice. Those on Twitter need the retweets. We've become attention hogs, which is one of the funniest things about The Social Dilemma. Because we love the attention of others, social media loves our attention so they can sell that product--YOU--to advertisers. To political campaigns. To anyone with the cash, really. And we wonder why we've become so uninformed. So manipulated. I hate the phrase "fake news," but it has always existed in some form or another. Most early newspapers simply made stories up to sell copies, the more outlandish the better.

I'm gonna lose some of you on this one, but here we go. I love Escape from LA almost as much as Escape from New York. Is it goofy? Sure. It's got a bizarro streak through it. But my favorite part is at the end when Snake essentially turns Planet Earth off. Sorry everyone. Technology is over.

I love that scene and sometimes wish I had the button to do that. We've proven that we're not old enough to play with these toys. So Daddy is gonna take them away.

(Still waiting to find out how Snake escaped from Cleveland. Come on, Carpenter, get on it!)

But the toothpaste is out of the tube, and there's no putting it back. Another thing I despise is the concept of the algorithm. One of the guys in the movie talks about the two opposites in America and says that they disagree so much because they don't see the same information the other side sees. The algorithm figures out if you trend right or left, and that's the news you get. That's an extreme example. Sometimes it's just gonna tell you if you bought this, you might like to buy this. If you watched this video, you might want to watch this one. Don't forget to like and subscribe.

I try to deny the algorithm whenever I can. Sometimes it's unavoidable. But a lot of times I don't click on what they want me to click on.

What makes me this way? Why wasn't I one of the drooling idiots raiding the Capitol? Why wasn't I the guy dressed as Manbearpig? What makes me different? Was it because some guy in 1123 AD scratched his nuts instead of his asshole? Is that the set of circumstances that pushed the world into creating me in 1978 the way I am?

What if I could get an unassisted good night's sleep? What if I had that family dinner? What if my pa--er, I mean, Batman's parents didn't get killed in the supremely unlikely place of Crime Alley? Would I still be me?

Maybe there's a multiverse like some quantum theorists suggest. Maybe there's a world where I did get that family dinner every night. Who knows?

I was a wretched kid from the middle of elementary school almost entirely through college. I'm shocked that some people liked me back then (and some of you have stuck around). I felt that the universe had robbed me of a normal life, a normal childhood, and I was going to take it out on the rest of the universe. I saw people who had a mom and dad who not only loved them but also lived under the same roof, and these kids would be pissed about them all the time. I resented them the most because they had everything I wanted, and they'd piss it all away like it meant nothing.

Then I found alcohol. Alcohol made me consider a lot of things about me, and I realized what I prick I was. Not the fun kind, either. It also helped me think about something Mulder once said: "How do you define normal?" I discovered a new meaning: normal didn't exist. All those people I was angry with had all sorts of shit they were going through that I was not privy to. The appearance doesn't define a thing, just like people are not defined by the words they say. They are defined by their actions.

So I sat down. Every once in a while, I like to have an in-depth conversation with my lizard brain to assess the state of my existence. That is always a conversation that involves whiskey. When you get drunk, you're more willing to admit some things to yourself about yourself. (And I'm planning on doing that again in the next few days. I'll tell you how it goes.)

I had my first conversation with my lizard brain over whiskey, and I decided that I did not like the person I was. I figured out what my problems were, what my hang ups were, where I'd gone wrong with this or that, and then I figured out why all of that happened. I decided what I wanted to keep, and what I wanted to improve. I thought of things I would like in my personality, and I looked at people and fictional characters I viewed as role models, and by the time I was done, I had my goals.

"Fake it till you make it." I hate the phrase, but it works. It really does. It took some time, but I chiseled through my own bullshit and got myself into a good (more or less) headspace. Sometimes my personality needs editing, and I step right in with the red pen. See? That's how old I am. I still edit with red pen.

The Social Dilemma comes up with some solutions to the problem, and Zuckerberg is certainly not the guy to do it. In my opinion, he has no reason to. Why would he suddenly cost his own companies a ridiculous amount of money? One person suggested laws to restrict him and his vultures. Well, couldn't hurt, I guess.

I briefly considered saying that public schools should teach critical thinking at an early age. Then again, they have no incentive, either. Keep in mind, this is still a system that teaches kids that America, a land where there already were a lot of people, was discovered by Columbus. That Jefferson, a slave owner, believed that all men were created equal. That Lincoln is, if you'll excuse the pun, an unimpeachable man, when he planned that, after the Civil War was over and the slaves were free, he would solve the problem of racism by moving all those slaves to Grenada. I'll bet if you asked the average, say, third grader why this place is even called America, and they wouldn't be able to answer. Hell, ask any average middle-aged man, and he probably couldn't answer it. (Don't Google. No cheating. The algorithm is watching . . .)

Because this isn't something that social media came up with to serve their advertisers. They certainly came up with a new delivery system. But this manipulation of the truth (whatever that might be) begins in school.

So yeah. I don't expect a solution to this insanely big shit sandwich. Social media, and any tech company, really, isn't evil on its own. It's like a weapon. It's not dangerous on its own. It depends on the person who might use it. To quote a shady dude, "Same rules apply."

Wow, this is long. And a lot more personal than I would have thought. Maybe I didn't have quite enough jokes. So I'm going to end with an old joke that will never fail to get me to laugh. It's slightly dirty, but what else would you expect from me? Hey, don't blame me. The universe made me do it . . .

Bill is at the funeral of an old High School friend in Manhattan.

They’re all standing in the graveyard gathering their thoughts after the coffin has been lowered, when Bill notices Jim, another old friend from his High School days.

“Hello Jim” says Bill.

“Hello buddy, it’s been a long time. How are you?” asks Jim.

Bill responds positively but he’s puzzled as to why Jim is carrying an attaché case at a funeral.

“What’s in the case?” asks Bill.

“Oh, this is a tool of my trade.” says Jim.

“What do you mean? What sort of tool is it?” asks Bill.

“It’s a high velocity rifle.” says Jim.

“Now why would you need a high velocity rifle?” asks Bill.

 “Because I’m a hitman.” says Jim.

“Dream on! You’re yanking my chain, surely?” says Bill.

“I’m serious” says Jim, “I make my living as a hitman. Take a look.”

With that Jim opens the attaché case to show he does indeed have a high velocity rifle complete with telescopic sight and silencer.

“Wow” says Bill, “Can I take a closer look at that?”

“Sure!” says Jim. With that he assembles the rifle, fits the telescopic sight and then passes it across to Bill.

Bill lifts the rifle to his shoulder and peers through the telescopic sight. “Wow! This is amazing. I can see everything so clearly.”

“Impressive, eh?” says Jim.

“Yes sir. I can see right across Central Park. I can even see my own apartment on Central Park West.” says Bill. “Wait a minute I can see right through my bedroom window and I can see my wife’s having sex with my neighbor.”

“Really?” says Jim.

“Yeah, really!” says Bill. “How much do you charge for a hit?”

“Well I charge $10,000 dollars per shot but with this telescopic sight I only ever need one shot to hit the target.” says Jim.

“Right!” says Bill. “I’ll have two. I want you to shoot her right through the head and I want you to shoot him in the genitals.”

So Jim takes the rifle, puts it so his shoulder, peers down the lens of the telescopic sight and carefully starts taking aim. However he then seems to take an age, as he starts waving the rifle barrel around and keeps adjusting the line of sight.

As he waits, Bill starts getting increasingly agitated as he thinks about what’s going on in his apartment.

“What’s going on now?” he asks, clearly freaking out. “What are they doing? Why are you taking so long? Why are you hesitating?”

“Have patience my friend”, says Jim. “I’m trying to save you ten grand.”

Yeah, yeah, I know. Jim misses the opportunity to say, "And don't call me Shirley." Can't have everything, bud.