GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #695: BOOK BANNING BANNED

 Yeah, I know, I'm playing a lot of catch up on these columns. I was gone for, what, three weeks I think?

Anyway, while I was gone my home state of Illinois did something pretty fucking remarkable. They banned book banning. I cannot tell you how much this pleases me. The reasoning is pretty sound, too. According to WBEZ, there were 70 ban attempts in IL alone last year. That's fucking insane. Guess how these cocksuckers tried to rationalize their attempts? Oh yeah. We need to protect the children!

Apparently not from gun violence, though, right? Right? *awkward collar pull*

(Which reminds me, people who say that we can't fuck with gun laws because of the Second Amendment really seem eager to throw the First Amendment under the bus . . .)

Setting aside that it's probably a lot easier on children to make them survive books rather than bullets, this comes at a critical time in the country when people want to deny rights to other people, and the most important thing they can do is to make sure no one empathizes with those people who can't have rights. Because if you learned their plight, you might not be so eager to deny them said rights. It's intellectual fascism of the highest order. Strangle the thought of "the other" in the cradle before it can grow up to help others learn compassion.

I'm sure this will surprise no one, but guess if any Republican voted for the bill. Just guess.

Right, zero. Which is funny because they're usually the ones bitching about the Thought Police, never stopping to think for one fucking second that they, themselves, are the Thought Police.

One of them, an asshole state senator by the name of Jason Plummer, tried a different approach to argue against banning book banning. He said it should be in the hands of local residents because they pay the taxes that support the libraries. "None of your constituents voted for this random organization," he said. "And you're taking their powers away from them simply because you may not agree with their beliefs."

It sounds almost reasonable. It's like people who don't have children complaining about paying taxes for schools. I have no offspring in need of education. Why should I pay for local schools? Like I said, almost reasonable.

But it's horseshit. Libraries exist so people can learn things. Not so they can jerk off in their little echo-chambers. When you pay local taxes, you're paying for the betterment, not of society as a whole, but your specific corner of society. That's why non-parents pay for schools, for example. Do you feel ripped off if your taxes, used in local law enforcement, never pay off because you made it to the end of your life and never had to call the police? That's stupid.

So is the idea that a library must contain only ideas that a group of people like. I'd prefer, for example, that no young and impressionable minds have access to something like Mein Kampf, but do you see me requesting that it be banned? I'm a hetero white guy, so you'd think I'd be on the banners' side, because let's face it, most challenged books are in that spot because they represent LGBTQ and POC people. But the fact of the matter is, if you stick to what you know, in my case the hetero white man experience, then how do you grow as an individual? How can you be more helpful to the rest of society? I am currently reading a John Ridley book called Those Who Walk in Darkness, which is actually pretty spot on for our topic tonight. In a world where people have superpowers, and one of them (ONE!) detonates an entire major city, all of them are outlawed in America. Those who stay have no rights if the authorities find them. Most cops take a shoot-first attitude in cases like this.

Sound kind of familiar?

I'm getting ready to go off on a rant, and I really don't have that much time for that. This is really starting to get away from me, and I have to be up early for work tomorrow. Suffice it to say, those who want to control thought need go no further than book banning. That is step one in making sure The People think only the thoughts you want them to. I'm glad that IL, the state where I was born and where I live, made banning books illegal. They did give libraries an out. If they want to ban books, that's fine, but you lose your funding if you do.

Suck on that.

One more thing. Just because it's the law of the land now doesn't mean it's the law forever. We all thought Roe v Wade was set in stone, and look what happened to that. So we must remain vigilant to make sure assholes don't overturn this law. Just remember that.

TOY CRIME STORY PART 1

 

TOY CRIME STORY

By John Bruni

 

CAST OF CHARACTERS

Joey: Poor doomed boy

Wally: Joey’s dad, alcoholic since his son’s death

Mimi: Joey’s mom, pill popper since her son’s death

Nightbeat: Transformers detective action figure who must solve Joey’s murder

Cat in the Hat: Stuffed animal, possibly the Devil

Felix the Cat: Stuffed animal, retired Hollywood actor

Felix’s wives: sweatered Felixes who Felix hates, gold diggers

Felix’s sons: mini-Felixes Felix does not acknowledge

Don: Donald Duck stuffed animal with a paper bag face, thinks he’s Don Draper

Angel: Plush vampire detective, hates his life

Spike: Plush vampire, pain in Angel’s ass

Bunny: Stuffed animal, neurotic mess

Jack Bunnyson: Bunny’s other personality, thinks he’s Jack Nicholson

Fox in Socks: Stuffed animal, puts cocks in box

Don Snowy: Stuffed fat snowman, Italian pervert

Goombas: Super Mario Bros. villains, Don Snowy’s stuffed goons

Ratchet: Transformers medic, advisor to Nightbeat

CHAPTER ONE

“Joey! Are you all right? Did you fall?”

Silence.

“Joey!” They heard his mother coming closer to the stairs. None of them were close to the door, so they couldn’t watch. They couldn’t risk being caught.

“Oh my God! Joey!” Hurried footsteps down the stairs. “Wally! God! Wally! Come quick! Joey’s hurt!”

Heavier footsteps as Joey’s dad approached from downstairs. They suddenly rushed closer. “Oh God! Joey! Are you okay?”

Nightbeat, ever curious, approached the door. Keeping mostly hidden behind the wedge of open door, he could see down the steps as Wally and Mimi cradled their son at the bottom.

“Oh God!” Wally said. “He’s not breathing!” He touched Joey’s neck, looking for a pulse, finding none. Joey’s head lolled as if attached by a thread.

“Is he . . . ?” Mimi’s hands flew over Joey’s body, searching for his injuries.

“Call 911! For God’s sake!”

Mimi rushed away, looking for her phone. Nightbeat watched as Wally put his son’s chest up to his ear, hoping for any sign of life, tears already in his eyes. Joey’s head hung at an impossible angle, and Nightbeat saw a smudge of blood on the boy’s nose.

Broken neck, he thought. It’s gotta be.

“What’s going on?”

Nightbeat turned to see Fox in Socks’s red form, inquisitive nose wrinkled. He didn’t dare approach the door. He’d be seen too easily. Nightbeat was small and nondescript.

“I think we might have a problem,” Nightbeat said.

“Oooh, a problem?” Cat in the Hat swooped in, grinning. “I love a good problem. What is this?”

Nightbeat grimaced. The lyrical sound of Cat’s British accent made his gears grind. “I think Joey might be dead.”

“My word,” Cat said. He held a gloved hand to his mouth.

Nightbeat’s diagnosis rumbled through the other toys behind him. He shushed them as he tried to get a closer look. Down the stairs, Mimi returned with her phone, barking tearful orders into it. Wally looked up at her and shook his head.

“No!” Mimi screamed. “No! It can’t be! You don’t know what they’re doing! The paramedics are on the way! Let them do their job! They’ll fix him. I know they will!”

Wally, tears now streaming down his face, laid Joey out on the floor. He found a blanket and gently placed it over his son’s face.

“No!” Mimi cried. “You take that off of him right now! He’s alive, dammit! He’s alive!”

Wally tried to embrace his wife, but she pushed him back. “Fuck you! Our boy is alive! Alive!”

He fought against her for a moment, but then she collapsed into his arms, sobbing. They held each other, weeping, until the paramedics showed up. The cops followed. A few firemen, too. Nightbeat knew it was procedure.

“Is it true?”

Nightbeat didn’t need to turn around. He knew Bunny’s whiny voice anywhere. “Looks like it. Poor Joey.”

“Oh no!” Bunny cried. “We’re never going to play again!”

The news spread through the rest of the toys quickly. Nightbeat watched the proceedings downstairs as closely as he could. The police questioned Wally and Mimi downstairs while the paramedics zipped Joey up in a black bag and carted him away. Nightbeat tried to hear the words they were saying down there, but the distance was too far.

Everyone left. Just to be safe, Nightbeat pushed the door closed. He turned to face all of his companions. “I hate to say it, but Joey’s gone. He’s dead.”

Bunny cried out his grief, as did a few others. Fox broke down in tears, covering his eyes with his blue mittens.

“What happened?” Angel asked. “Joey looked fine to me a few minutes ago.”

“It looks like he went down the stairs,” Nightbeat said. “I know they’ll say it was an accident, that he tripped.”

“Oh please,” Cat said. “That’s obviously what happened.”

“I don’t think so,” Nightbeat said. “I think it was murder, and I think one of you did it.”

TO BE CONTINUED . . .

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #694: THE END IS NEVER CONVENIENT

 Here's an odd experience I had while I was on hiatus. My attitude towards death is pretty laid back. It's going to happen to all of us. It sucks, but that's the way it goes. I don't fear it, exactly. Maybe the how sometimes, but never the fact of death itself. I learned at a very early age, perhaps in a cruel manner, that death is inevitable, and I learned to live with that.

But while I was watching The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel a few weeks ago I had this sudden feeling. I hadn't felt it since I was maybe ten? Yeah, ten at most. Fear gut stabbed me out of the blue, and I thought, what if I die right now? And it made me think of all the nothing that came before my birth and the nothing that would come after my death, and the thing that bothered me the most was that death would probably come when I was busy doing something.

That it would be really inconvenient. I'll be busy. I've got a lot of stuff going on. When it sneaks up on me, I'm not going to finish whatever task I'm doing at the time. Since I believe there is nothing after this, I felt all the regret I would have felt if there *was* something in that moment.

It was a weird feeling, and it happened again today while I was watching the new Indiana Jones movie. Sitting there in the theater thinking that it would be really inconvenient for me to die right there. Would anyone notice in the dark theater? Maybe when the credits started to roll and my two friends wondered why I didn't stand up. And what then? Who would pick up my car and bring it back home? My brother wouldn't know how to handle something like this. My aunt would have to travel all the way from East Moline to have them transport my husk to Elmhurst (I was near Bolingbrook at the time), and it would all be one big inconvenient hassle.

There was a teeny tiny part of me that found an odd comfort because the feeling did remind me of what it was like to be a kid. I was a fearful child, which is pretty funny if you know me now. It turned back the clock for me, my own little inner Dial of Destiny.

Of course, only now am I thinking that my survivors wouldn't have felt it was a hassle. They would probably be too lost in grief. But it helps that I wrote the thing about not multitasking. Remembering my own words about unfinished work brought me back to the ground.

Oh yeah, the movie was pretty good. Better than Crystal Skull by far, although I imagine there will be a lot of people complaining about the ending. Anyway, since it's a grim GF tonight, let's end it with my ranking of Indy's movies.

1. Raiders (obviously)

2. Last Crusade

3. Temple

4. Dial of Destiny

5. Crystal Skull

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #693: TRUMP BUCKS

 

Earlier this month, when I was still on hiatus from GF, a news story broke about Trump Bucks. Perhaps you heard of it. The idea was this: companies started selling money with Trump's image on it saying that when Trump is reelected in 2024, this will all be legal tender. Of course a bunch of Trump supporters bought a shit-ton of Trump Bucks only to find out that they were all scammed.

My first thought was to laugh at them. The people who follow a con man got conned? Big surprise there. A total lack of critical thinking skills. They deserved it.

But then I thought about it a little more and realized maybe it's not as funny as I thought. Not just because people sank thousands of dollars into bullshit when they really should have known better. I wonder at how many Nigerian princes have been made wealthy by these people. But it is actually kind of sad and frightening mostly because these people aren't the real enemy. It seems like it on the surface, but they've been propagandized.

More on that in just a second. I think it's interesting that none of them filed lawsuits or charges against these companies. I assume it's because no one wants to admit they were suckered, but perhaps it's also because, according to NBC, when making these purchases they were given a popup box that declared that this was for commemoration purposes only. Like anyone faced with a user agreement, they breezed past it and got suckered. That's a little heinous right there. Like the South Park episode about the Apple user agreement. These things are too long to read, and they could very easily slip in there that you now owe them your first born. That's bullshit right there.

Back to the propaganda. Everyone points out Fox News as the propaganda machine that it is. That's people on the left, that is. Meanwhile people on the right are saying the same about the left and CNN. Both sides are being fed lines of bullshit, and neither one of them is willing to admit that. Even worse, neither side is willing to compromise with the other.

Because here's the really horrifying part of this mess we're in. BOTH SIDES HAVE TO WORK TOGETHER. We were never really good at that, but we used to be better. Compromise used to be possible. But the fact of the matter is, no matter which side you're on, you're going to have to work with the other. It's unavoidable. The other side has a lot of people, and the only way to move forward to a solution that makes sense for at least one side is to do away with the other.

And what exactly happens when a society decides something like that?

So we have no choice. I mean, going full Nazi is a choice, I guess, but not one I'm willing to so much as entertain. The only other option is to compromise. Work together. Reach across the aisle. Dick Morris once had the temerity to write a sequel to Machiavelli's The Prince, and one of his driving principles was this compromise. I'm loathe to admit this, but Dick Morris is right.

The first step is to realize that the enemy isn't Trump or Biden. It's not even Joe Rogan or Whoopi. Hell, it's not the guy in your family friendly neighborhood riding around in the pickup with the FUCK BIDEN flag waving from the bed, and it's not your Gen Z nephew at Thanksgiving dinner shit-talking Your President.

It's the corporations. We have always valued money more than people in this country, but it didn't become officially sanctioned until the 'Eighties. Angry about inflation? Look no further than corporations. Angry about skyrocketing gas prices? Stop with the Biden and Trump stickers. You're blaming the wrong people. Angry about the passing of the Good Ol' Days? Where did all those mom-n-pop stores go? Oh yeah, driven out of business by corporations.

And we not only let that happen, we *encouraged* it.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Right now I'll settle for us figuring out that we really need to learn how to work together before we do anything else. Otherwise we might not have enough torches, pitchforks and guillotines to take on the corporations. Baby steps.

I'll leave you with this to finish off your night. I don't agree with everything in the song, but close enough. Goodnight, fuckers.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #692: 347

Shortly after Gramps died I decided that my new Christmas or New Year ritual would be smoking a cigar and drinking scotch in commemoration of his ritual. On Christmas and/or New Year's Eve, he would sit in the front room, smoke a cigar and drink while looking at the Christmas tree. We haven't put up the tree in many years, and right now there's no place for it, but starting with the last cigar I bought for him, the one he never smoked, I started this ritual a few years back. I don't smoke, so it's a bit odd for me, but I felt it was important for Gramps.

Over the weekend I found the cigar I was supposed to smoke last Christmas, bought before I quit drinking. I had a lot on my mind back then, so it's not surprising that the ritual slipped through the cracks. Today is my 347th day without booze, so when I discovered the cigar I realized that was a ritual I'd never be able to do again. The cigar was on the brink of going stale. The wrapping probably helped it survive this long, but the cigar itself was almost hard as a rock. When I used the cutter on it, it almost fell apart. But I lit it up because if I didn't, then I was going to throw it out, and I hate wasting money.

While I smoked it I thought about how it's a shame that the ritual had to go. I'm not sure how many of you are alcoholics or know any, but the lizard part of the alcoholic's brain never goes away. I've talked to people sober for almost their entire lives, and they still think about drinking sometimes.

So *my* lizard brain said, why not? When Christmas comes around, maybe get a cigar. Get a pint of the Glenlivet. Nothing more than that. If it's just a pint, then you can't have anymore when you're finished with it, right? So things can't get crazy.

"And who knows?" I said to my lizard brain. "Maybe if it goes well, I'll do it all over again on New Year's Eve."

My lizard brain can't understand sarcasm, so it enthusiastically advised me that this would be a great idea.

And I thought about it for a moment. Maybe it wasn't such a bad idea, after all. I mean, it was a lack of moderation that got me into this mess, right? Maybe if I exercised moderation, then I wouldn't run into any problems. I thought about a woman in my IOP group from way back when, and she said she met her husband at AA, and he somehow drinks in moderation now. Just one glass of wine every once in a while.

So why couldn't it work for me?

And then I thought about my conduct when I was drinking all the time. Did running out of booze ever stop me from going out to get more? No. In fact, to avoid going out to get more, I always made sure I had plenty of booze in the first place. Just in case, I kept a couple of emergency pint bottles around, and I stashed airplane bottles in various nooks and crannies. I'm kind of surprised I never found any forgotten pints or airplane bottles during my time going through all my shit. I must have drank it all. Good for me. Because if I don't smoke, and I decided to smoke a cigar to avoid throwing it out, would I have poured out such a bottle?

So I guess I'm not doing that. Although don't get me wrong. I have a list of things that could make me drink again. So far I've been lucky. But who knows?  As a wise man once said, "The future's uncertain and the end is always near . . ."

PS: It never occurred to me until this weekend to smoke the cigar using Gramps's old ashtray, so I cleaned it up and used it for the first time since he stopped using it about a year before his death. It was oddly a good feeling.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #691: TOY CRIME STORY

 A while back I put together a novella and shopped it around as a one shot, and I didn't have a lot of confidence in it. It's an odd concept, but more to the point I'm sure if I'd left it as is, just about everyone on the planet would have sued me. In my cover letter I reassured editors that I would change those details for a final draft, but I wanted them to have a feel for what I intended. Not surprisingly, no one took me up on the offer.

This is either one of the funniest things I've ever done, or it's one of the worst things I've ever done. So I figured fuck it. Why not serialize it on Tales of Unspeakable Taste? Let you all decide. Plus, if I put it up for free, no one can sue me because I'm not making money off it. So I'm not changing those details I said I would.

Don't get me wrong. Not all of Toy Crime Story is funny. There are a lot of dark scenes in there. The fuckin' thing opens with the death of a child, for instance. And then there's the scene where you meet Intensity . . .

So I'm going to start posting chapters on Fridays. I know you'll laugh a lot, but I'm hoping it's with me instead of at me. And you might even surprise yourself with a few tears. And then when I'm done with the whole thing, I'll post another GF column about it because, holy shit, I discovered something about myself while writing this thing, and it was a pretty big surprise.

That's all for now. Keep an eye out this Friday.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #690: WHO ARE THEY?

 If you follow my social media, you've seen all the pictures I posted from my youth as well as a bunch from my parents' and grandparents' youths. But you can only go so far back before you see pictures of people they knew well but you have no idea who they are. Of my relatives, the farthest back I can go is my grandparents on both sides. Their parents were long dead before I showed up except for Grandma's mom, who died a couple of months before I was born. So here are a couple of pictures I found. I know Gramps, Grandma, Mom and my Aunt Sue, but the others? I had to wonder who they were.

I puzzled over it until I came to the realization that I am very stupid. Why am I stupid? Because there is one person these pictures who is still alive: my Aunt Sue. So I sent them to her to see if she could remember.

And she remembered very well. In the first picture we have my great-grandmother on the left. I kind of thought it might be Gramps's mom because I saw older pictures of her, and she looked like a woman version of Gramps near the end of his life. Gramps is next to her followed by my great-grand uncle Theo, who I'd heard about quite a bit when I was a kid. I just didn't know what he looked like. At the end is my great-grandfather, Gramps's dad. The little girl at the bottom is my Aunt Sue, and she even remembered about her favorite teddy bear.

Knowing that, you can figure out the next picture. To the right of my great-grandmother is Mom, and there's Aunt Sue in Grandma's lap.

Longtime readers know I'm a firm believer in the idea that history is never as far behind you as you think, but sometimes it is. Maybe a lot farther. I do these columns not just to entertain the rest of you (although I certainly try to do that), but mostly as a journal of my life so if I find myself getting forgetful in my old age, I can read these and remember. And it'll be good to know some of the generation before the generation I met and knew.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #689: HOLD THE DARK

 

For the past few years I've had this nagging feeling that I was forgetting something. I had a lot on my mind from 2016 through last year, so it was probably more than just one thing. I'm sure a lot of stuff slipped through the cracks, especially when I was on my downward booze spiral that really began in earnest in 2020. And then I saw Outlaw Vern's review of Hold the Dark. Of course! The new(ish) Jeremy Saulnier film! I'd meant to see it and then lost track of it.

I love Saulnier's films ever since I saw Murder Party. If I knew where you lived in the first year following the night I saw that one, then I forced you to watch it. No one ever regretted it. Blue Ruin and Green Room are fucking great. How did I keep forgetting to watch Hold the Dark?!

I didn't read the review. I love Vern's work (and once upon a time he did an intro to an anthology I was in called Straight to Video), but I know that while he warns when he's about to talk spoilers, I didn't want to risk my eyes wandering.

So I watched the movie, and it's great. The mood is perfect. It's an odd movie. I'm not even sure I can describe it accurately. A boy is stolen by a pack of wolves in the Alaskan wilderness, and his mother asks a guy who wrote a book about killing a wolf (played by Jeffrey Wright!) to find her son and kill the wolf who did this. There is the complication of the boy's father (Alexander Skarsgard) coming home from being injured in the war (Afghanistan, maybe?) and from there the movie really goes off the rails. Like, even for me, and you all know how I like it when shit goes off the rails.

Then I read Vern's review, and I was relieved that I wasn't the only one who didn't understand it. I'd watched it while I was high, so I was wondering if maybe I missed something, but no. There's something going on in this movie that I'd like to understand but I don't. Maybe, like Vern suggests, the answers are in the book the film is based on. So I'll probably get that, too.

But it's a wild ride. There's an oddball shootout that ends so strangely that I couldn't help but laugh. There's something with . . . you know, just watch it. Not even I'm sure I can describe some of the stuff that happens. I still don't get the thing where the boy's mom is talking to herself in the bath before she wordlessly lays naked with a bewildered Jeffrey Wright. I'm into it, but I'm not sure I understand it. Vern calls it "Alaska gothic," and I think that's the perfect name for this kind of thing.

It's on Netflix. I highly recommend it.

Early in the movie Wright is gifted Skarsgard's boots, and later, when the two meet, Skarsgard says to him, "Are those my boots?" And it made me laugh. Possibly waaaaaaaay too much.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #688: ZEGRUS FROM TAURED

*puts on Kolchak hat*

 

In July of 1959 a man was arrested in Tokyo for illegally entering the country with a phony passport from a phony country. When pressed on the matter he doubled down on his passport being real, and his country being real. He said he was from Taured, which had been around for a thousand years. Except there isn't a Taured on this planet. He was able to speak in the language of Taured, though, and he claimed to be there on business. Official business. While he was from Taured, he was working for the CIA to meet with businessmen in Japan, possibly on an intelligence mission. But those businessmen had no idea who he was. Plausible deniability?

John Allen Zegrus was then arrested so the authorities could investigate his claims. He was placed in a heavily guarded hotel room, but when they checked on him he had vanished without a trace. The only way out was a window, and it would have been impossible for him to go that way and not leave his corpse on the streets below.

Taured might not exist on this earth, but what about other earths? Could Zegrus have been a man from an alternate universe?

That's what a lot of people believe. Considering how I sometimes feel that I'm from a different earth, that I crossed over sometime in January 2020 and can't find my way back, I feel that I might have a kindred spirit in Zegrus. I don't actually believe I'm from another earth, but there are times when it seems so eerily true to me. Sometimes I wonder.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance said these immortal words, and they're so very fucking true. Because if you had the choice between believing the truth and the legend, almost everyone would want to believe the legend. That was what a lot of people did with Zegrus. Too bad the story you just read is almost completely fake.

Almost. Zegrus really did exist, and he really did get arrested for trying to enter Japan with a fake passport. But he didn't disappear from a heavily guarded hotel room. He was brought to trial for his crimes and apparently tried to kill himself in front of the judge, possibly to be found not guilty by reason of insanity. But he was found guilty and did his time, and when he left Japan he really did vanish without a trace. No one knows whatever happened to him.

But we do know that whoever he really was, he was a conman a la Frank Abignale. This man flew all over the world scamming people into letting him live the high life in fancy hotels with free food and drink and so on. Because almost every country he tried this in believed him without question. Japan was a little more thorough, though, and he got busted for it. No mystery there.

But lo! and fucking behold! No one tells that part of the story. It's always the legend and the mystery. Because even when faced with facts, people choose to believe in fancy. And that might be the tragic flaw in humanity. In the end it's going to be what kills us all, and there may be nothing we can do to stop that.

Goodnight, fuckers. Sweet dreams.

While looking for that picture of Kolchak, I also found this, which made me laugh.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #687: FUCK FEAR

 

I said I wouldn't do it. I swore I wouldn't. But here I am, doing it. Goddammit.

I've had a roller coaster kind of relationship with Fear the Walking Dead. When it first came out I thought it was interesting and a little different. It was fun to see how people first started reacting to the zombie apocalypse before they realized it was a zombie apocalypse. Extra points for having the junkie figure it out first. Junkies and the homeless are probably the canary in a coal mine for these kinds of things.

But then I realized that I hated every character except for the one designed specifically for you to hate: Victor Strand. He is easily the best character of the first season characters on the show, and I started rooting for him even as I started calling the show Where's Negan and Friends?, the companion show to Negan and Friends, aka, The Walking Dead. I wanted every single goddammed character to be killed off except for Victor. I wanted him to be the new star.

And then I got my wish. Almost. Nearly every character got killed off and replaced by new characters. Better characters, including John Dorie. And then the show got better. And better. And I renamed the show The Adventures of Victor Strand and John Dorie in the Nuclear Zombie Apocalypse. And then John got killed the next week, so I changed it to The Adventures of Victor Strand in the Nuclear Zombie Apocalypse. And somehow the show got even better. It got so good that I was tempted to call the show by its given name. Those crazy bastards had a looney John Glover set off a nuke in the zombie apocalypse! How fucking crazy is that?!

And then they transgressed against me. The character I hated most--I actually celebrated when they killed her off--came back from the dead, and not as a zombie. They brought back fucking Madison.

And then I swore that I would never watch this fucking show again. Fuck Fear! Fuck that shit!

I lived up to my promise to myself until the midseason finale because Negan: Pee-Pee Pants City (aka, Dead City) began on Sunday. I no longer have cable, so I had to get AMC+ to see the continuing adventures of my favorite TWD character. I realized then that Where's Negan and Friends? was coming to an end. This was the final season. I had AMC+, so why not ride it out till the end?

Because goddammit, I need to make sure Madison dies. I want her death to be explicit so there is no question about it. This has to happen. And since a few characters have aimed guns at her head over the course of the show since her return and did *not* pull the trigger, I need them all to die, too, for not granting me my wish.

I don't really hate-watch things, but I'm hate-watching this. So far it has not been rewarding. I knew this would suck, and I have been right. This has been the worst season yet, even worse than the season where most of the cast got killed.

Please kill Madison. She's expressed her own desire to die. Make it so, I beg of you.

OK, there was one good moment in this whole clusterfuck. Morgan finds a bunch of walkers eating a skunk. Later, people keep asking him what that smell is, and he has to explain about the skunk each time. It made me laugh. Rereading this paragraph made me laugh again.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #686: THAT EXPLAINS A LOT

 You may recall me being worried about work a while back. We're in the middle of what is usually busy season, but for some reason we haven't been getting as many calls as usual. I finally have an explanation for that.

Hundreds of thousands of calls went unanswered last year, and as a result my company has been outsourcing our calls. When you think of outsourcing, you usually think about other countries, but in this case it's not true. Other Americans, who do not work for our company, are now answering our calls.

Big surprise: our sales went down. Even more ghastly, *my* sales have gone down. Last week I only made my quota one day. ONE. And it wasn't Monday. Mondays are usually the best days because they're the busiest, which means I get more calls and more chances for sales. Without as many calls, my ability to sell is going down, and that's not good.

And I'm sure that if this venture turns out to be successful, then all the calls are going to be outsourced. That's not cool. Not. Cool. Especially since I have a new car with murderous payments to make.

My resume isn't all that dusty, but am I going to have to dust it off? I fucking hope not. Well. Hopefully I'm just paranoid, but experience has taught me a few things.

Which reminds me, while this is technically true, that Stephen King wrote these words, he put them in the mouth of a character. Kind of like all those Robin Williams quotes that get attributed to him but were actually said by characters he played. We should really be more selective about that shit. If people started attributing something one of my characters said as words of wisdom from me? I'm pretty sure I'd be executed for crimes against humanity. But maybe that's a topic for another day.