GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #342: DYING IN YOUR SLEEP

I just don't understand people who want to die in their sleep. Dying in my sleep horrifies me. Granted, I understand how traumatizing dying while awake would be, but that's a long-run thing. There is no long-run when it comes to death. Is there an afterlife? I highly doubt it. So such trauma would only matter for a short while, and then I won't experience it--or anything else--ever again.

Just think. You go to sleep one night. And you never wake up. That's it. You had no idea your existence was ending. It just did. You had no time to think about it. To accept it. You figured you'd just get up the next morning and go about your day like you did for the first however many years of your life.

That would suck. I want to know when I'm leaving this life. I'm sure it wouldn't give me much notice, but I'll get some notice at least. If I get the expected heart attack, then through the pain I'll at least know. It takes a few seconds, but when you're dying I'm sure that takes longer than your typical seconds. I'm sure I'd figure it out in that brief period of time. I'd accept it. And I'd be OK with leaving the world.

I don't want to be robbed of that moment. If there was an afterlife, I'd feel ripped off. But there's not. One of my biggest concerns about the eternal afterlife was actually addressed in THE GOOD PLACE. I suspected it was coming in those last episodes, and the writers did not disappoint.

So here's my argument against an afterlife. Let's take the Christian approach since America is unofficially the most Christian nation on this planet. Say you wind up in Heaven. And you finally get to do all the things you missed out on while alive. There will come a point where you've done everything, and you have no desires anymore. Eternity is pointless. You will eventually get bored and wish for it all to end.

Conversely, you might end up in Hell, where even the lenient current Pope will agree that you will suffer torment and torture for the rest of eternity. But . . . that won't matter either. There are only so many times you can get your eyes ripped from your skull before you get bored with it. You're shoving barbed wired down my dickhole for the 666th time? Eh, yawn. I imagine Prometheus hated getting his liver eaten out of him every day at first, but I'm sure by the month point he yawned and checked his schedule as the owl did it to him again.

How about Islam? When you get to Heaven you get 72 virgins. Personally, I don't dig virgins. Why would you have sex with someone who has no experience? But say virgins are your thing. You have an eternity to deflower 72 of them. What then? Do their vaginas reseal so you can do it all over again? And losing one's virginity isn't just a physical thing. It's a mental and emotional thing. You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube, as they say. At what point do you get bored with that? You can't have sex with virgins for eternity. You'd get just as bored as the dude getting barbed wire in his dickhole.

The thing that makes us special is the fact that we are finite. We all die with unfinished business. I think Amos from The Expanse said that was the definition of death. It sucks, but if we died with all of our shit done, that wouldn't be interesting in the slightest.

That's why I'm always in a hurry. I want to get as much shit done as I can before I finally croak. And I want to be awake for that deathly moment. I want to know that this is it. I'm not going to get anything done tomorrow because I'll be too busy being dead. But if I went to bed and died in my sleep? That thought would never occur to me.

I need to die when I'm awake. I think sometimes of that guy from House of Pain that went on to Everlast. Not a big fan, but he went to bed one night and had a heart attack in his sleep. He would have died if a roommate hadn't checked on him. He survived, but imagine if he didn't. I heard that interview, and it fucked with me. So yeah. Dear Death--take me when I'm awake. Please and thank you.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #341: RESTING BITCH FACE

I'm kind of glad that I've lived with resting bitch face for all the years I can remember. There are ups and downs, but the ups are pretty good in my opinion. Don't get me wrong, if we're talking or hanging out, etc., I'm engaged and smiling and having a good time. But when I'm not doing those things I have resting bitch face. It helps.

My favorite advantage is that strangers don't want to talk to me. They keep their distance. They don't say hi. They don't even bother to ask for the time of day. Do people still do that? In this age where we all have clocks in our pockets along with calculators and flashlights? Probably not. But still. People tend to keep their children away from me, which is excellent. If I wanted a filthy booger-eating creature around me, I'd hang out at the zoo.

RBF puts a wonderful shield around me that prevents a lot of bullshit getting too close, and I greatly appreciate that.

Here's a drawback, though. Ever since I was a kid people have thought that I don't like them. Not my friends' parents. Parents always loved me. Sometimes they loved me better than they loved their own kids. But I'll take a friend's brother as an example. He was older than us, so he was tasked with driving me home one night. Along the way he asked why I didn't like him. I liked him just fine. I had no idea why he was asking me this question.

I now have an answer. RBF. That happened when I was in junior high. It still happens sometimes. I can't tell you how many times people have thought that I didn't like them or flat out hated them. Not true. I like just about everyone. On an individual basis, that is. Groups? Eh, no thanks. But I certainly don't hate anyone. Everyone I've ever hated is dead.

(He said ominously.)

I don't even hate Donald Trump. He's a piece of shit who should have had a spike shoved up his ass Vlad-style, but I don't know him personally. You have to know someone personally in order to truly hate them.

But then, if you have resting bitch face, you really don't have to think about it all that much. 

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #340: SALES WORK

 I used to believe that I was good at selling only things that I care about. That's why I try to stay away from sales jobs. There are few things I care enough about to successfully sell them.

The first time I worked in sales was at a group of local newspapers. They hired me to sell ad space. I'd done similar work in college for the campus literary magazine. How hard could it be for newspapers? It turned out to be a very different beast. In college you go for local businesses, and because they want college kids buying stuff at their stores it's a win-win to advertise with the lit mag. Selling to these people was easy. I found out very quickly that selling ad space for the magazines, in particular the ones directed at people wanting to stay in B&Bs across the country, was very difficult. People got mad at you for bothering them. I lasted two weeks at that job. But it had an advantage: my boss found out I wrote, and he offered to publish me in those newspapers. So that worked out pretty nicely.

My next sales job was at Drury Lane in Oakbrook. I sold season tickets to theater. That job went a lot better because I love plays. Added bonus: I got to see them all for free and enjoy the open bar after each one. Because I knew the plays--and liked them!--I could sell like crazy. One of the compliments I picked up was when my boss said he didn't want to hire me because men were lousy at this job. They rarely sold. I'd applied for the job, and he turned me down, but when I went back the second time he liked my tenacity and hired me. It turned out that I was the only man he ever hired who sold reliably. One week I even beat our top seller, which was damn near impossible because she was so good.

And then there's selling books. That gets me hard. Whether it's at a convention, a show or even Printers Row (which I sorely miss), I'm pretty good at selling books.

So imagine my surprise when I learned that I was good at selling auto glass. No one, and I mean NO ONE, cares about auto glass until they absolutely need it. They probably don't even give it a single thought otherwise. I've certainly never wondered about the state of, say, my windshield or even a vent glass. I'm surprised I got the job in the first place, and I thought I'd make my quotas, more or less, probably just enough to keep the job.

And then training ended. I got out on the floor. I sold like crazy. Six months after my date of hire, I was expected to make ten sales a day. Here I am in month two, and I'm routinely selling more than that. Sometimes a lot more. I've hit twenty a day a few times. My personal best, so far, is 24, and that happened today. My commission check is going to look fucking amazing. I can't wait.

And even better: this is the only job I've ever worked where the better I am at the job, the more I'm rewarded. Every other place proved that the better I was at it, the more miserable they'd make me. I remember working at places where they discontinued the annual bonus. Where they decided that if you get promoted, you don't get a raise. Things like that. And then the higher ups wonder why their employees despise them so much.

Here, after I sell a certain amount, my commissions go up another dollar . . . until the next mark, where they go up another dollar, and so on. The better I am, the more money I make. Not only that, but we don't have a vending machine at work. WE HAVE FREE SHIT. The bosses order an entire pallet of snacks and drinks every month, and they just give it to us for free. Among the drinks is the second greatest non-alcoholic beverage known to humanity (the first being Tang, naturally), Mexican Coke. They use real sugar instead of that horrid corn syrup. Sure, I have the 'Beetus, but there are some sacrifices I'm not ready to make. So yeah, not just free shit, but good shit. Happy employees work a lot better than miserable employees.

Plus I get the feeling that so long as I continue to sell above expectations, I suspect that they would be reluctant to get rid of me for any reason. I'm sure that if they found out about my books, they wouldn't care. If I turned out to be an asshole, they'd probably give consideration to determining what kind of asshole I was first. Don't get me wrong, if I raped someone they would get rid of me. But if it came out that I murdered someone, they'd probably ask why before thinking about getting rid of me.

I'm a little on edge every day, which isn't always the best feeling, but when I'm making those sales, it helps keep me hungry. I keep thinking about that commission check at the end of next month. Right now I'm looking at $1,000+, and I still have a few days to go.

If I get a second to breathe, or if I'm on an unending hold with an insurance company on a customer's behalf, I'll look at the leaderboard. I'm shocked at how well I'm doing. I think soon I'll be averaging 20 sales a day. But I look to the top of the list and wonder who the hell these people are who are making 64 sales a day, or even 45. Are they robots? Selling machines? How the hell do I get that good? Because I've gone most of my life without money. It would be very good to have a shit-ton right now before I get too old (or dead) to enjoy it.

I think they're eyeing me for a promotion already. I've been asked to serve as backup for another department. Judging from what I know about the company so far, that can only mean one thing.

Think about it this way: the more money I have, the more books I have. Not only that, but I can start affording real marketing for my own books . . . Planet Bruni, coming soon to a world near you.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #339: HIGH

 Welcome to the first ever GF column that I've written while under the influence of cannabis and cannabis alone. Yes, as I type this dispatch from the trenches, I am high as a motherfucker. I haven't had a single drink of booze. No other drugs. JUST CANNABIS.

I like it so far. I mean, I've only written one paragraph so far, but I think this is going well. It feels like I'm drunk but also really sleepy, too. And I feel certain that when I wake up tomorrow I'm going to feel bloated because of all the food I had today including a bunch of majestic beef jerky. I also feel confident that I can fall immediately asleep after I post this. Couldn't always say that with the booze, even. Hell, I might even be refreshed when I get up for work. That'll be a novel feeling.

I've noticed that I have short term memory loss while on cannabis, so I was kind of wondering if I'd be able to string together reasonably coherent sentences. I thought I might not be able to do this at all. Who knows? Maybe I'll wake up tomorrow and this will have been written in an inside out screaming cursive. Wait, what am I saying? I'm babbling. That could cause some future GF problems here. No matter how drunk I got, I was able to write reasonably well. But what if I can't do that while high?

I am struggling to keep a train of thought, but I keep departing on other tracks every other word. Either I'll quit the GF columns for a while ("Again?" I hear you ask), or things are gonna get really weird and meandering around here.

I guess I'll read this tomorrow and then figure it all out.