GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #883: #NOTALLBILLIONAIRES

 You hear me talk shit about billionaires a lot because nearly all of them deserve it. But there are a few that seem like decent people. One of them is Mark Cuban. He doesn't seem to be dedicated to sucking as much wealth out of our planet as possible. In fact he seems to want to make our lives easier. I'm talking about those of us who don't have much money or any money at all, not the dickheads trying to take more of that money.

I read about this a while ago, and I'm only now getting around to it. It's one of those ideas I had when I was out sick, and I'm still playing catch up on those, hence the lateness. But Cuban hit a point near and dear to my heart: medication prices. He singled out CVS in particular, asking them in an open letter why their pricing is obfuscated. A fair question since 52% of Americans get their meds from CVS, and I'm one of them. I'm angry that I *must* go to CVS, or my insurance won't cover my meds, so any time I see someone calling them out for something, I pay attention.

It's a topic John Oliver should do sometime. Or maybe he already has, I don't know, but this is right up his alley. Because nearly all pharmacies use middlemen to broker deals for medications.

Right off the bat you should be suspicious. Whenever a middleman is added to any economic equation, you are going to spend MORE money, not LESS. Every time you add another cook to the kitchen, you must pay that extra cook. Even if the middlemen were nonprofits, I'd still suspect them of graft. All it takes is one unscrupulous executive, and suddenly millions of dollars are disappearing into their pockets, and no one is the wiser. Why would they be? No one knows about the middlemen, anyway.

CVS decided not to make their process transparent, so Cuban did what any reasonable billionaire would do: he started his own pharmacy.

He's not entirely altruistic. I get that. He's got to make some money, too, and he's doing that by becoming his own middleman, as according to the website they have a "pharmacy partner." The difference is, he's not price gouging while the others are. Or at least he's gouging in such a way that it's barely noticeable. If you're going to gouge, that's the way to do it. Make it painless if possible.

I looked up my own medications, and they're pretty cheap. I wish I could use his pharmacy, but my insurance requires me to use CVS. My regular meds are free through CVS, so that's not bad (especially when it comes to insulin), but if I get something off the beaten path I have to pay for it. For example, the painkillers I'm on right now. And everything the GI doc added to my daily regimen. I'd love to get any break I can on that, and I'd love to see a large corporation like CVS suffering.

Just about every fucking industry uses middlemen, and it's driving the prices of everything up. The middlemen for CVS, CVS Caremark, claim they do this to negotiate prices on behalf of the consumer, but that is clearly bullshit. No middleman has ever existed to make life easier for consumers. They all exist to suck more money out of you than Mega Maid sucking air out of Druidia in Spaceballs.

If you take a lot of medications like I do, you might want to check this out. It could save you money.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #882: IT'S A BIRD, IT'S A PLANE, IT'S . . .

 . . . I don't know. But I'm pretty confused. More confused than the guy who thought Superman was a bird or a plane. Jeez, guy.

On my way home from work I saw a bunch of people looking up into the sky, and I wondered what they were looking at. If I still had my old Civic I could use the sunroof to find out, but in my Accord all I see is the ceiling. As I got closer to home, I saw a bunch of cop cars parking in the general vicinity of my home, and they were all getting out to look at the sky.

Goddammit, what if this is the day aliens finally show up, and these neighbors and cops are all looking at a flying saucer? Am I going to miss the aliens? That's bullshit! Or it could be a weird light show like the one in Day of the Triffids or Christmas with the Dead, so maybe me not being blind or a zombie, respectively, is good news.

I drove past my elementary school, and there were maybe four cops in the west parking lot looking up at the sky. When that many cops get together it's usually bad news for someone, possibly even me. And it made me think back to one of my previous jobs.

I was tech support for Call One, a telecom company. The receptionist quit without putting in her two weeks, and I was recruited to cover the front desk until they could get a replacement. And that took a lot of time.

But the groups of cops today made me think about the day that about 6-8 of them showed up at the office asking to see one of my coworkers. I was advised to not tell him that the cops were there to see him, and as they kept an eye on me, I was unable to warn him. When the City of Chicago sends that many cops to arrest you, they're really worried about something.

But the cops milled about, and the CEO's secretary came up to talk with them about what was going on. Later, when she was telling the story to someone else, she said I looked very nervous when the cops were here. That might have something to do with the fact that every time I've dealt with cops outside of my City of Elmhurst job, they were there specifically to make my life miserable, and it pleased me whenever I could turn that around on them. I would never gloat. You can't. But if you play dumb you can reverse it on them, and they won't do anything about it. Your mileage may vary, so don't do this unless you're sure of yourself.

But the real reason I was so nervous was because all of those cops were armed. Also, did I mention they were CPD? So yeah, they've probably had the chance to pull those guns, maybe even the chance to pull those triggers. Maybe the chance to pull those triggers while aiming those guns at someone.

I really, really don't like cops, especially groups of them. I consider a group to be more than 2 of them, although 2 are plenty dangerous as it is. I don't like being around armed people who are very likely to shoot people if they haven't already. So yeah, I wasn't exactly in the best of moods that morning.

They arrested my coworker, but whatever it was didn't stick. Have I mentioned that cops are objectively bad at their jobs?

Oh yeah, when I got home I checked the skies. I saw nothing. It wasn't a bird, it wasn't a plane, it wasn't even Superman. I feel like one of the guys from Ernest P. Worrell's family album special, the one who was always certain that the gambler had nothing. Which he did. And the skies held more of the same for me today.

Dammit. I better not have missed aliens.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #881: GRUMBLE

I spent the last half-hour or so working on this GF when I suddenly realized I was ranting like a madman. What I thought was intelligent was actually me being super angry about something kind of related to the subject. At any rate I told myself that I'm always trying to make the world a better place with these things, so fuck it. I deleted the whole thing, so now I got nothing, and it's getting late.

In my defense I'd had a lot on my mind. But it's all . . . I'll spare it time tomorrow. For now, uh, hi? How are you?

How am I? I'm not in the hospital, and I'm not puking my guts out. That has suddenly become good instead of just neutral.

Speaking of my health, I did learn about my bloody stools. They weren't bloody. Because of my blood loss I'd been taking iron supplements. I recall an ER doc asking about it and never coming back to it, but now I know that iron supplements can make your shit look black. It's technically dark green, but it looks black as fuck. Maybe that's what threw the ER doc off?

Good to know I'm not dying of cancer or slowly leaking blood in my guts somewhere. I'm putting weight back on, so maybe my blood levels are back up to where they should be. The only real question is, where did my blood go in the first place? Maybe I'll never find out.

Damn. It's been a while since I scrapped a whole GF, but I hope this will suffice because I am tired as shit. My fingers are recoiling off the keys as I try to snap them back awake, so yeah, it's that time.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #880: GODDAMMIT

 

LOOK WHAT YOU MADE ME DO! GAZE UPON THE HORROR YOU HAVE WROUGHT! No one had the courage to stop me, and now Butt Montana, Esquire is happening. For good or ill. And it's your fault.

Goddammit. What have I done?!

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #879: BIRTHDAY CHECKLIST

 Good morning! Heh, as if you would read this in the morning. No, I just woke up, and I'm putting together a checklist of stuff to do today. Yeah, I was planning on doing jack and shit for my birthday, but now I have a bunch of fucking things to do. I'm going to come back to it later tonight when I write this for real to see how well I did.

There's a new episode of Last Week Tonight! Finally! I'm going to watch it as soon as I'm done with the checklist.

Get my DL renewed.

Get my new glasses.

Make an appointment with the hematologist I finally got the referral for.

Go to the dispensary for my birthday coupon.

Go to Anderson's in Naperville for my birthday coupon.

[CENSORED]

Order copies of my own books in preparation for Printers Row (and possibly the EPL author fair).

Update my bios on various sites.

[CENSORED]

Get money together for bills.

Go to CVS to get my insulin needles and Walgreens for my headache powders.

Read more John Ripley and Gore Vidal.

Write more of "The Big Send Off" and hopefully finish the first draft.

Submit rejected stories.

Find out where the fuck my disability check is.

Yeah, two of those sound familiar from my GMF newsletter. I felt pukey that afternoon and was unable to do these things. But that's the checklist. Let's see how well I did later!

[LATER]

How did I do? Let me count the ways.

Last Week Tonight was great, showing that not only is migrant crime not an actual thing, but overall crime rates have gone significantly down. Not exactly what the law and order party would like you to believe, but who cares about them? They're running a literal felon. Still, all they can say is THEY are coming for us! THEY are sending murderers and rapists to OUR country! And that pisses OUR murderers and rapists off! Keep your murder and rape AMERICAN, dammit!

Let's not get too political. I'm trying to take it easy today. It would be horrible to fuck it up at this late hour.

Not that I needed John Oliver to tell me that migrant crime is bullshit. If you're going to enter a country, legally or otherwise, would you a) keep a low profile so you don't risk having to go back, or b) risk getting sent back home (or to prison in some states, TX I'm looking at you) by committing crimes? These things work themselves out if you apply critical thinking skills and stop listening to dickheads shilling for their own power.

OK. Stop. Breathe.

I tackled EarthMed next. I got my birthday discount, and everything was on sale at 30% off. Except one preroll, which was 25%. Good enough. Tallying everything up, I got some free weed today. Nice.

I got my drivers license renewed next. Even though I had an appointment it was still an ugly scene. But it only took a half-hour out of my day. Compared to the past, that's not bad. I feel like my new picture is kind of a joke. They make you take your glasses off these days. Also I think I'm too tall for their camera. The guy kept telling me to lower my head, and when I got as low as I could he asked me to lower my chin. Fuck. I'm gonna give myself a double chin. Wait a minute. I have a beard these days. Never mind, I'm good. But I felt like my eyebrows were too high. I think I dropped them just as the picture was taken. You can see one of them still up, and I look slightly rakish and sloppy at the same time. Still not the worst DL picture I've ever had. That would be my 2016 picture, which somehow my doctor's office still has on their online profile of me even though I changed it myself on my end.

I took Rt. 53 toward Naperville and stopped off at my optometrist next. I got my glasses pretty quickly and was out the door in five minutes. It usually takes a half an hour. My timing is excellent so far. (Dammit, my fucking eyebrows are acting weird again. How do I stop doing that?)

It took me a while to pick out a book for my birthday coupon at Anderson's. I usually find a couple of maybes in the fiction section, which I'll get if I don't find something in their smallish horror section. If I don't find anything there, either, my last stop is biographies. I got Tom Selleck's autobiography. My dad looked a lot like Selleck during his Magnum days when I was a kid, so I always associate the two of them. I think Mom might have done the same back then.

I stopped off at the Graue Mill to get my reading in. I got through a lengthy Gore Vidal essay on the life and work of William Dean Howells, the only popular author of his time to stand up to the IL governor and the judge in the case of the Haymarket Riot. (Apparently even Mark Twain remained silent on the subject.) I think I need to read Howells soon. Because the State of Illinois murdered four men and drove a fifth to suicide, all because a group of awful people thought the First Amendment meant nothing. That's something I take an interest in.

I also read more of John Ridley's A Conversation with the Mann but not as much as I would have liked. It's the last book of Ridley's that I haven't read, and I'm going to be sad when I'm finished. But I do need to finish it because I have two Joe R. Lansdale books waiting, unread, for me to finish. I'm a Lansdale superfan. That is fucking unheard of for me, but I'm not on disability anymore. I can't be reading more than three books. I'm at three right now.

I got my headache powders from Walgreens, which will help me not rely so much on the opioids. I hope to stretch those out because I don't know when they'll let me get that spinal injection. I also got my insulin needles from CVS, at which point I went home to schedule with that hematologist.

And that's where time got away from me. Calling the clinic was a fucking hassle. I read the referral, and they didn't have a number for me to call, so I called the usual one. After some time I got a new phone number, which I called only to find myself, horror among horrors, on what seemed like an infinite hold. Guess what happened after I was on hold for 45 minutes. Just guess. If you said, "They were the wrong people to talk to," you win the grand prize. They said they could get me over to a scheduler. When I got there it sounded like the first person I talked to. Guess how much help they were. Right. So I'm expecting a callback sometime tomorrow. I said to call around one, my lunchtime, and I'm going to guess that's not going to happen. At least I tried to tackle this. I failed, but I tried.

Since I had so much luck on the phone I decided to find out where that disability check is. It was held up due to mistakes my doctor made while filling out the forms, but the doctor sent everything back correctly this time, and I'm still waiting. I could not get through to them, so I had to leave a fucking message.

Because of all my problems I've been dipping deeply into my emergency money. I NEED THAT DISABILITY CHECK. Because I don't have it, I had to dip deeper to pay off the fucking bills.

Changing the bios went pretty well. It was more or less easy (check out the one for this blog: I removed the part about drinking heavily) except for the one on Amazon. I didn't add anything to the bio. I subtracted from it. And then Amazon told me that there is troubling language in my bio. I'll be damned if I know what it is. Take a look if you care. One of the things I tried to get rid of is the "screaming children" line, so that's not it. Maybe it's the title, POOR BASTARDS AND RICH FUCKS? Unlikely, because, well, dig it. If they didn't censor it there, they certainly wouldn't in my bio. So fuck it. I'm leaving it as is for the rest of my life. Sure, the parts I tried to remove are a bit awkward and more of a young man's kind of thing to say, but Amazon is unreasonable, as are all corp . . . not gonna get political. Not tonight.

The two censored items: I did one of them. The other was a bit too ambitious for today. I took a swing and a miss. But that's all right. There was something else I got sucked into, though, that cost me an hour of time today, and I'm fucking seething over that.

I ordered copies of my books for Printers Row and maybe that local author fair. I also wrote. Not much, but enough to check it off. And finally, yes, I did submit those rejected stories. So all told I handled everything, more or less, except one thing, and I knew that was a longshot anyway. I'm still angry over the hour I lost to a credit card company that's desperately trying to use AI instead of actual human eyes, but I'm about to finish this preroll and go to bed. I hope to have pleasant dreams from that point on.

Goodbye 45. Hello 46. I am now closer to 50 than 40. Yikes.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #878: EVIL

 

I'm fascinated by Evil. The show, I mean, not actual evil. Actual evil is pretty fucking boring if you think about it. It's all the same. The only reason evil is so successfully persistent is because it's really good at convincing decent people of things that are not true. And if it keeps fooling those decent people, they eventually turn to, well, you know.

I go over all sorts of horrible shit happening in the real world in these, so it's nice to take a look at evil in a fictional setting, where if things get too fucked up you can laugh at the absurdity and hope that no one would really do any of this stuff. I'm thinking mainly of Leland training the young boy to become first an incel, and then a mass shooter. That stands out as pretty fucking fucked up.

Of course now that I'm watching Evil I saw today that this is going to be the last season. Can they really wrap this up in a handful of episodes? Maybe, but I'm leaning toward maybe not. Although it does seem that they got extra episodes this year.

What I really enjoy about it is that it doesn't preach at you. Showrunners Robert and Michelle King are smart enough to know that the show wouldn't be as successful if they went in that direction. I see Robert is a Catholic. I don't know about Michelle, but the show comes off as if written by Catholics, which makes sense. In the show the Catholic church has assessors to judge the merits of cases possibly needing exorcism: a priest (in David's case he's in training), a scientist (Ben) and a psychologist (Kristen). Whatever they recommend is usually the direction the church goes in. It's interesting because they don't focus on David, which would be the natural thing to do. Instead they focus on Kristen as we delve deeper and deeper into the nature of evil, up to and including the birth of the Anti-Christ?

Their immediate answer to the Anti-Christ is very interesting. SPOILER UNTIL YOU SEE THE WORD SPOILER AGAIN: They baptize the li'l guy! Who ever thinks to *save* the Anti-Christ? That's fucking great! END SPOILER.

The Kings also know that evil doesn't stop at Black Masses and devil worship. Evil is technologically advanced with nods to VR reality, hacking, memes, etc. And they don't flinch, either. They lean into the horror.

But what I really like is when the credits come on, and the show threatens you. SKIP THE INTRO AND YOU'LL BE HAUNTED. THE SKIPPING GHOST IS ANGERED WHEN YOU SKIP THE INTRO. DON'T SKIP OR THE SKIPPING GHOST WILL VISIT YOU TONIGHT. And so on. I particularly enjoyed JENNY PARK OF SUN VALLEY, UTAH, SKIPPED THE INTRO AND LOST ALL HER HAIR. And I can't help but hear each and every one of these in Mike Colter's voice, the guy who plays David (Luke Cage!!!!!!!)

I'm bummed out that they're ending the show, but I'm happy I found it. This year has been pretty miserable for me, and I gotta take my wins somewhere. If you want to check the show out for yourself, it's on Paramount+. For now . . .

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #877: JONATHAN

 It irritates me every time I go to the doctor, dentist or optometrist. And it happens each and every time despite me telling them otherwise.

I'm pretty sure I've talked here before about how I am *not* a John Paul. My full name might be John Paul Bruni, but I am not a fucking John Paul. I am John, goddammit.

There is, however, a new thing happening. I don't know where it fucking came from, and I don't want it to fucking stay. But more and more people are doing it, and it puzzles and angers me. The worst part is, it's mostly happening at work where I just sort of have to suck it up and accept it.

For some reason, unfathomable to me, people hear me introduce myself as John, and they start calling me Jonathan. Which I most fucking definitely am not.

There are many forms of the name John, but I only use one of them. Contrary to idiocy's belief, John is not short for Jonathan. Never has been, never will be. There are a few exceptions, like Johnathan, but they are so rare I shouldn't even have to go into this.

I think people hear what they think is an abbreviated name, and they decide to do some weird super-adult "polite" thing where they won't refer to you by that abbreviated name. I find it difficult to call a grown man named Joe, for example, Joey. Or Timmy or Johnny or whatever. I will call them what they want me to call them, regardless. Jonathan *does* have an abbreviation: Jon. And I am not a Jon.

Some people call me John. Very, very few people call me Paul. Most people just call me Bruni unless there's more than one of us around. (In theory. I remember once when my dad, my brother and I went shooting in the Nevada desert, and my brother's friends called him Bruni despite our presence.) But I can't stand being called John Paul, and I'm learning a brand new fresh anger when people call me Jonathan.

I can't say this to my customers at work, but it has to get out of my system somehow. GF is, unfortunately, a great place for me to vent my grievances and psychoses. Apologies for the rant.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #876: FUCK

 I can't catch a break, can I? I felt so sick this morning I couldn't go to work. It stopped around 10-ish, but I was so exhausted I collapsed and slept for a few hours. I feel okay now, but all things considered, hopes aren't high for tomorrow.

I don't know what it is. It doesn't feel like my usual pukey sickness. Maybe it was food poisoning? I'll know for sure when I wake up tomorrow. Short one tonight. Sorry.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #875: BUTT MONTANA, ESQUIRE

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OK, that was pretty lazy of me, but I was strapped for time tonight. By the way, there is still time to stop me from writing Butt Montana, Esquire. But that time is running out . . .

I could have been lazier. I could have used this to add to my word count today, but did I? Nope!

All right, for something a little more substantive I discovered today, my first Friday back at work, that during the last 90 minutes of this shift a supervisor plays US history trivia with my colleagues. I knew the answer to each and every question, but due to the nature of my work I couldn't answer them quickly enough. Except one. Would you care to know the question?

What US vice-president fought a duel with Alexander Hamilton?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! No one at work knows of my appreciation for Aaron Burr.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #874: BITCHFEST

 Last night's GF column was probably very confusing for the people who didn't read the previous one. At any rate, tonight's is going to be me in bitchfest mode. Apologies in advance.

A few weeks ago I got a letter from the State of IL Drivers Services. It's the one I get every four years for my license renewal. When you get the same letter several times over the course of twenty-ish years you tend not to read it. You tend, instead, to put it aside for when you're ready to get the deed done.

For me that time was today. As I sat at a train crossing, waiting, I decided to read it because I hate doing nothing, and I'll read just about anything. There was a time I had the ingredients of Head and Shoulders memorized from toilet reading. So I read the letter, surprised to discover that the two forms of ID needed are different this time, and I would have had both forms if I hadn't taken my credit cards out of my wallet to remove the temptation to use them. (IL needs one for proof of signature.)

Not only that but nearly all of the DMV locations in my area now require appointments instead of just being able to walk in. That infuriated me because I have one week left to get my license renewed, and I had doubts that I would be able to get an appointment today. My only days off are Sundays and Thursdays. The DMV might be open on Sundays in an alternate universe where we don't have religion, but that is not *this* universe.

(Yes, I realize that if I'd read the letter sooner I would not be in this situation. I would argue that the reasonable thing would have been for IL to put, in big bold letters at the top of their missive, ATTENTION: THERE HAVE BEEN CHANGES TO OUR REQUIREMENTS. PLEASE READ THIS LETTER CAREFULLY. I shit you not, the letter has been identical for decades. I don't think the font even changed.)

To get an appointment I had to either call the number or go online. Whenever I can skip a phone call, I will do so. According to the website I was eligible to renew online! Which would have been great if it was actually true. But as I had, indeed, read the letter, I knew I had a vision test I had to take, and people who need to take those aren't allowed to renew online.

So I fucking called the phone number. And what was the first automated message I got? You can skip the phone call and do everything online! Ho-ho. And then it continued to give me all sorts of information I don't--or ever will-need. I'll have something else to say about that in a moment.

I got through to a person in a timely fashion, be still my beating heart. I asked for any appointments in Lombard today. Nothing. Call back tomor--

"That's impossible," I said. "How about Schaumburg?"

Nothing. Call back tomor--

"That's impossible. How about Addison?"

Nothing. Call back tomor--

Someone wasn't listening or didn't understand the definition of the word I was using. "That's impossible." Just to see if that word would catch on finally. I usually hate repeating myself, but I occasionally make an exception. "How about Westchester?"

"Are you 65 or older?"

Finally, a different response. Still not what I was looking for, but at least we're on a different part of the script now. "I'll be 47 this time next week."

You have to be a senior citizen for Westchester.

I accepted failure. "Is there anything in Lombard for next Thursday?"

Nothing.

"Schaumburg?"

Wide open.

So I got an appointment next week on a day I was hoping to do nothing that was necessary. Just stuff I wanted to do. It's not often I get my birthday off from work. Except my job at Call One. You got a free extra day off on your birthday there.

As if that wasn't enough of a fuckalizing fuckaloo I'm also running low on painkillers. Since my spinal injection didn't happen last week, I'm still in constant pain. I requested the refill last week when they canceled the procedure. I'm required by my insurance to use CVS (unless I want to pay full price for my meds, which is an effective form of corporate blackmail), but CVS has told me that these pills are on national back order. Which is a lie. As I've been through this before, it's on national back order for CVS and CVS alone. I called Walgreens to see if they had my pills. They did, but I was warned that supplies are limited. They can accommodate me if my prescription is only for 45 pills, which it is. I called the clinic and tried to get them to send the prescription over to Walgreens before they run out.

The doctor won't do it until he's done with his patients for the day. Fuck me.

By the way, I called Walgreens twice. One for fact-finding, one to see if my prescription arrived. Both times I had to weather their automated system. Can you guess what it started with? Whatever you're calling for, you can do it online! Which I would do because as someone who has worked jobs done via phone since 2007, I fucking hate talking on the phone. I wasn't a big fan of it before 2007, either.

The automated system also suggested that I skip talking to a person and do whatever I needed to do by, unfortunately, using said automated system. Which I would do IF I DIDN'T NEED TO TALK TO A FUCKING LIVING HUMAN GODDAM BEING.

I can't stress this enough: as someone who is literally on the phone for eight hours a day, I notice a lot of trends with IVRs. When someone is on the phone, chances are they need to talk to a person. I'm sure there are a few people in the world who hear this shit and go, "Oh, that's right! I can do this online!" But a majority of people need to speak with a person, and they need to speak with them ASAP. So giving everyone who calls in a massive infodump without giving them the option to skip it is inhuman. I would venture to say that it's cruel, too. It's bad enough that corporations are too big to care, but they feel the need to be cruel when it's completely unnecessary?

Stop with the info dumps. Or if you insist on having them, at the very least give us the option to skip it. Almost all of us are calling you because we *can't* do what we need to do online. Can't. Not won't. CAN'T. Dare I say, impossible? It would also be helpful if each option could be explained in less than three seconds by the AI robot you're using.

I swear to you I'm not a senior citizen, and I'm not yelling at a cloud. I'm raging against the machine?

In the interest of fairness I should say that Walgreens finally got my prescription. Just in time. My pills are waiting for me. I'll have to get them tomorrow, though. I have one pill left. I'll have to save it for when I get to work tomorrow. Talking on a phone for eight hours also requires sitting down for eight hours, and that's hell on my back. My new bed is pretty comfortable, so if I get myself in the right position I don't feel too much pain.

All right. I think I got that out of my system. I feel like I'm forgetting something, though. Oh yeah! BUTT MONTANA, ESQUIRE!

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #873: THIS FUCKING LIFE IS WHAT I'M ALL ABOUT

 To be read to this song.

Unlike in previous years I actually *did* start working out again on Sunday. For the first time in maybe 8-9, I think? It was hard remember the workout that I used to do every other day for two decades, but I managed to get the important shit down. I had to cut some leg stuff because of my bad foot. However, I tried to keep the lunges. They don't seem to impact my bad foot, although my good foot is pretty awkward because of the two missing toes.

Much to my delight I found that I was a lot more flexible than I'd expected. I can reach past my toes to my wrist. Unfortunately I can't get my feet behind my head like I used to. Maybe that will change with more workouts. But by the end of my Butt Montana, Esquire, I realized that I felt really fucking good. I felt proud of myself, which doesn't happen often. I knew the next day would suck, but in that moment I didn't care.

Yeah, the next day *did* suck, and it was hard to move, but I'd forgotten that the soreness the day after is kind of pleasant at times. The next workout was scheduled for Tuesday, and I knew that I wouldn't be recovered by then. I'd forgotten that I used to start exercise regimes on Thursdays, which gave me extra time to recover before my Sunday workout. It turned out not to matter. The Butt Montana, Esquire, was a bit more difficult than the first one had been, but I got through it and felt even better.

The next Butt Montana, Esquire, is scheduled for tomorrow. I feel good about it. The soreness took itself down a bunch of notches. It's still there, but after yesterday I'm more confident about the next attempt at working out.

I know I'm probably imagining things, but I think I'm seeing my muscle definition coming back. Already I can see my bicep roll again when I flex, and I have dimples at my shoulders again. Although my stomach muscles seem to be pushing my fat out a bit now. It wasn't doing that before. Weird.

I wish you could have seen me just ten years ago. I had fuckin' guns, man. Now I have skinny arms. My legs have also gotten skinny, especially the left one due to the brace, but there's nothing I can do about that. Soon I might be able to get my FOID card for the guns I'm gonna have. And I'm not gonna conceal-carry, either. I just might go full Mac from Sunny.

Yeah, the loose Butt Montana, Esquire, around my waist will probably never go away, but it would be nice to be in shape-ish again. Maybe I'll even crack 200 lbs, which I've never done as an adult. The lightest I've ever been is 205.

I'll never be able to say, "Just look at my glutes, what a perfect butt," as I have Nobuttatal, but that's OK. I'm feeling a li'l too optimistic, anyway. We'll see if I keep it up. Weird to be saying that about something not having to do with erections, but there you go.

For extra credit, check this out.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #872: A CRY FOR HELP

 I need your help. I find myself in a terrible situation where I have no means of escape or survival unless I do something I really, really don't want to do. All too often I find myself consumed with something I shouldn't be, and all too often I indulge myself, making more work for me to complete for a possibly nonexistent person or people.

It's plagued me for nearly a week, but my thoughts turn constantly to this thing. I find a phrase encroaching upon my mind all the time, sometimes a whisper, sometimes a shout. But it's always there, sneaking into my speech, tormenting me when I'm trying to sleep.

I can't stop myself. Someone is going to need to stop me.

You must stop me.

YOU MUST STOP ME!

Please stop me from writing Butt Montana, Esquire.

It started out as a joke about Butte, MT, but I was high, and thoughts turned to Beavis and Butt-Head. The next thing I know my mind is screaming at me: BUTT MONTANA, ESQUIRE! YOU MUST WRITE IT!

My plate is full enough as it is. I have no idea how I'm going to fit writing Butt Montana, Esquire (or shout I go with Esq.?), into my schedule. I can think of maybe five people who might want to read something like that, but am I really going to go out of my way to write a short book, probably Kindle-only, and release it for such a small audience?

Yeah. Yeah, I would. And I probably will. Unless you send help immediately.

Operators are standing by . . . in another reality where I have gobs of money to pay them. You know how to get ahold of me. You can stop me. You must stop me.

Because when I get like this, the idea usually takes over my entire existence eventually unless I write it as quickly as possible. Do you really want me to ditch out on all my other projects and dedicate myself full time to Butt Montana, Esquire?

He didn't start out as a lawyer. It was originally Butt Montana, MD. But (heh) then I thought maybe he was Butt Montana, Private Eye. Father Butt Montana, Exorcist to the Stars? Captain Butt Montana of the Sex Boat?

See what I mean? I've already put waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too much thought into this. There's no way I'm not writing Butt Montana, Esquire, right? Unless you can stop me.

Only you can stop me. Please. Before it's too late.

I've already started thinking he might be a series character. Fuck's sake, please don't let me go down this rabbit hole. He's had full fucking adventures in my head already.

Don't let me write it. Don't let me write BUTT MONTANA, ESQUIRE!

Just so we're on the same page, yes, I have started some light research. In that research I discovered that people who live in Butte, MT, are called "Butte Rats." Unless you live out there, there's no way you knew that. Why would you? But knowing that enriches your life. It's certainly enriched mine.

Have you heard Butt Montana, Esquire, whispering to you yet? Not to worry, you will.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #871: 2 YEARS AND 1 DAY

My first author photo. Of course I'm drinking.

 The leap year threw off my two-year anniversary of not drinking, so this is the actual date of the day I went to detox two years ago. Yeah, I know, my birthday is still on the same date even though I lived through X amount of leap years. I was also inside my mom for nine months, and you know what many people in this country believe about when life begins. Unless it fucks with doing taxes, so capitalism does, indeed, trump religion here.

But even if you don't want to count yesterday, you have to admit I made it to two years today. So that's the end of that discussion.

When I first showed up at detox I thought I was going into withdrawals, but it turned out I was still drunk from the night before. That makes me wonder how many times, over the years, I've gone to my various jobs still drunk, just not knowing it. Good thing no one thought to test me.

I was dismayed to learn that I would have a roommate, at least for the first half of my stay, but it turned out that he was a pretty good guy. I fell out of touch with him. I hope he's doing OK. I know when we did IOP together he fell off the wagon a couple of times. He was kind to me when I had no idea how he was keeping himself together. He'd only arrived 30 minutes before me.

I wasn't a great fan of communal living. What I really wanted was time alone, but that was pretty hard to come by. I don't recall how many people lived in that space. Maybe fifteen? When I first arrived the plan was to stay for three months, and I didn't really want to do that, not with so many people always being around. I don't mind saying I was hurting pretty bad. Not just the withdrawal. There was that, but there was also Ativan to keep me from seizing up. I mean the swift change in my life. I was living with just my brother (Grandma had just passed, what, a couple of weeks before?), and all of a sudden I found myself in the midst of this crowd? Changing one of the most powerful parts of my life? I didn't feel confused or even weird. I felt fucked up. Just fucked up. I hadn't even thought about the food they'd serve. I'm pretty particular about what I eat, and I knew they'd be serving shit I wouldn't like.

I will say this. Being in detox was a lot better than the psych ward. The only thing the psych ward had up on detox was the food. Psych ward food wasn't great, but it was good. Detox food was downright awful. At the very least I didn't have to ask permission to go to the bathroom. That was nice.

The only comfort I found was in writing. It would turn out to be a story I started while still in the throes of booze but finished on the other side of detox. If you want to read it, it was published in The Rainforest Strikes Back. I also found solace in Julian by Gore Vidal. When I was waiting for the driver to pick me up I had the wherewithal to grab the nearest Vidal book I had. If I have to go to institutions every once in a while, it might be a good idea to bring Vidal with me.

The only other thing I enjoyed while I was there was the environment outside. Yeah, it was hot as fuck, but it was beautiful out there. We were supposed to walk back from the cafeteria to our living quarters together, but I regularly fell behind so I could admire the beauty of the land around me. One of the therapists saw me, and I explained what I was doing.

"You're the only one I've ever seen who does that," she said.

To be fair, the people I was staying with had their minds occupied elsewhere. Everyone was there to dedicate themselves to being sober. Not me. I was there to put drinking behind me. Except . . .

I don't think I've told this part before. I may have mentioned it to a couple of friends, but I don't think I did.

This was near the end of my time in detox. I'd beaten the physical addiction. But I wanted a drink badly. Maybe even needed a drink. So I decided I was going to get the hell out of there specifically to drink the instant I got home. Not putting it off until my birthday, like I told everyone.

I worked as diligently as I possibly could. I canceled the three months, explaining that I felt pretty good now, pretty confident. I wasn't. Those were flat-out lies. After signing a mega-shit-ton of paperwork they finally packed up my things (the stuff they didn't allow me to have) and got someone to drive me back home. This driver went a different way, a longer way, which irritated me to no end. I could practically taste the bourbon I was going to get as a gift to myself. Congratulations! You made it through detox!

Dammit, why is he taking the scenic route? I need to get home so I can get in my car, go to Williams Liquors and get a bottle for myself. And I wasn't going to cheap out on myself, either. I was gonna get me some Wild Turkey 101. Maybe a handle!

I finally got home and dragged my shit inside. My brother, who expected to be living alone for three months, was surprised to see me. I got up to my room and knew I had to take a shower first. Detox showers suck. They're better than psych ward showers, but not by much. I needed to take my first shower as a free man IMMEDIATELY.

Then I got dressed and grabbed my car keys. Out to the car. I was hungry for anything that wasn't detox food, so I stopped at McDonald's, a couple of blocks from my actual destination. And then, as I approached Williams Liquors, I . . . just drove past. I still have no idea why I did that, but the urge to drink was suddenly gone.

Don't get me wrong. I miss booze. A lot. But the urge to drink only happens every once in a while, and it's easy to fight.

So. How did I make it to two years? When so many alcoholics fail within the first week? And not being in AA? There are very few people in the world who think that an alcoholic can get away from the drink without AA. Everyone I was in IOP with was in AA, or at the very least they attended meetings. The therapist in charge of IOP is one of the few people who understood me when I said I only have a problem with booze. I'm OK with other drugs. And then even she said that it's a difficult row to hoe without AA.

But I can't stand AA. I know it helps others, and that's a good thing. But it is NOT FOR ME. I'm fine with Step One. Every alcoholic really does need to start there with admitting that you have a problem. I did that on Facebook, called friends and told them about it, had in person conversations, you name it. The one thing I most definitely did not do is proceed to Step Two, which is the problem for me.

If you're an alcoholic reading this, AA is probably a good idea, especially if you're not an atheist like me. It's a good place to start, and who knows? If you don't have a god, you might find one there. The first AA meeting I went to where I actually talked to people, they wanted me to take that second step. If you don't know, you have to acknowledge a greater power than you and that you have to place your trust in that power, that the power will get you to stop drinking. All you have to do is ask. All of them, each and every one of them, says it doesn't even have to be a god. It could be a doorknob. It could be a paperweight. And because a friend of mine had dragged me into the meeting, one of them said that I could even choose her as my higher power.

Incidentally, I told her about that on the drive home. Even she, an addict herself, said that was a bad idea.

I'm not such a staggeringly big asshole in that I don't believe there is a greater power than me. There are plenty of greater powers. My go-to example is the ocean. The ocean is a greater power than me. Unfortunately it has nothing to do with my drinking, so fuck the ocean. It's not going to help me. None of the greater powers is even sentient, so how could it know anything? Much less a method of getting me to stop drinking?

I am, however, kind of an asshole, so I suggested that I use myself as the greater power. Everyone said that was a bad idea. Really? Everyone?

If the ocean isn't going to give a shit about me drinking, and I'm not going to pray to a god about it, then the ONLY thing to do is put it all on me. And it's not really that hard. All you have to do is keep telling yourself NO. And you know how I feel about that word.

So I don't know how I do it. Probably not willpower alone. There *is* a reason I had to go to detox, after all. But here's what I think.

Even though I didn't drink on that very first day out of detox, I made a promise to myself. One day I absolutely will drink again. It will happen. Because I came up with a list of things that could get me to drink again. Some of them happened, and I didn't start drinking. A lot of these are not very likely to even happen, but I'm sure eventually one of them will knock me off the wagon.

The key is to make sure that day is as far as possible into the future. And if I die before that day comes? I win.

If you're an alcoholic looking for help, don't listen to me, even if you're an atheist, too. What I'm doing is very unusual and off the beaten path. It seems to be working for me, but addiction is fucking crazy. There seems to be very few hard and fast rules in overcoming such an addiction. AA isn't the worst place you could start. Hell, you might even get something out of it. A lot of alcoholics do. Just in case, here's the link to their website.

As one friend on Facebook said, while congratulating me on two years free from booze, good work. Now I gotta do it again.

HEY, FUCKERS #28: 1 YEAR AND 364 DAYS

 WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT? What the fuck is this? Hey, Fuckers? Number 28?!?!?!?!?! Yeah, I haven't written a Hey, Fuckers column in almost ten years. But I wanted to commemorate something, and I didn't want to use Goodnight, Fuckers for it. Rather, I'll have a similar GF on Monday celebrating something related to what I want to talk about right now.

Most alcoholics celebrate the anniversary of  quitting the booze. I'll be doing that tomorrow, and then I'll tell you all about it Monday night. But Hey, Fuckers was a column for when I wanted to discuss things right off the top of my head instead of waiting for it to be the last thing I do before bedtime. And there is something I want to celebrate today.

Two years ago *this* day I drank for the last time. This time two years ago I was hammered out of my mind. I'd spent the night previous talking to this guy named Sonny, possibly the most Italian man I've ever met, and I'm Italian, myself. Whenever I was in the hospital for booze related illnesses, they'd send him in to try to convince me to clean myself up. He'd sit down and talk at me for at least a half an hour each time, and he was somehow more profane than I am. But I talked to him that night. I talked to a few others. The conversation I had with my buddy, Zeb Carter, is the one that tipped me over, helped me decide that yes, I'm going to call Sonny and have him help me quit the sauce. (Incidentally, Sonny looks eerily like Mad Sam DeStefano.)

This time two years ago I knew the following day I was going into detox, but I had all this booze still in my bedroom, including the dozen or so hiding places I had for back up bottles. (I didn't find them all. Not too long ago I found the rest of them, including a bottle of Wild Turkey 101 that still has an inch of bourbon left in it, which I have not thrown out. I keep it as a reminder.)

I hate it when things go to waste, so I decided I'd better drink up everything I had. Later, when I was in detox, I decided I was going to drink when I got out. I thought it would be a good idea to continue to drink, just not nearly as much as I used to. I'm super glad I didn't feel the urge to actually follow through on that. Now that my head's on straight, I know that I would have tried that, but I would have failed spectacularly. I'd be back to guzzling directly from a handle of cheap shit in no time.

[Here's an aside. I went back and forth on posting this link because contrary to popular belief I sometimes *am* embarrassed by myself. But if you really want to know how bad I was, you should read this. I am absolutely mortified by my behavior in that post. I do not remember driving that day. I *do* remember the sunlight coming through the open curtains destroying me, and I remember picking up that handle of Fleischmann's so I could continue drinking that morning. And then I blacked out again almost immediately because I don't remember anything else for the rest of the day except the moment at the strip mall where I can back to myself before the booze took over again. I don't remember anything else until I woke up the following day. I cannot stress this enough: I SHOULD NOT HAVE DRIVEN THAT DAY. I can count on the fingers of one hand the times I've driven drunk when I shouldn't have.  But I know this story is 100% true, because others have told me about my black outs, and they stress me shouting everything and calling people YOU FOOL! So yeah, if you think I made a mistake by quitting the booze, then read that post and realize that I was like that OFTEN.]

I figured I'd throw myself a little party. I had about two inches of cheap Canadian shit in a handle, so I drank that. I forget what it was called, but you could get a handle of it for six bucks at Corner Cottage. I also had some Fleischmann's, maybe half a handle, so I drank that. I had a sleeve of Jim Beam airplane bottles, so I drank that. And I still was not drunk enough for this to be my final hurrah. (Yeah, I was a fucking heavy drinker if you weren't around for that period of my life. I was like Julian on Trailer Park Boys, always with a drink in one hand. The problem is, unlike Julian, I didn't pace myself, so I was always rip-roaring Jim Lahey drunk.

Back then I aged my own whiskey, so I had a small barrel on the kitchen counter filled to the brim with high proof whiskey. So I drank that, too. I don't remember finishing it, but I did because the next morning I went looking for hair of the dog and found none.

The guy Sonny sent to pick me up got me and drove me out to Carol Stream. Along the way he told me it was nice not driving someone who was shitfaced to detox because he, too, was an alcoholic. In that moment I realized my foolishness. I should have saved some for the ride over. What was I thinking?!?!?!?!?!?!

But that all happened two years ago *tomorrow* so we'll skip that. This time in 2022? I had the blowout boozer to end all boozers, at least for me. And I really enjoyed myself, from what I remember.

To quote a great man, "OK for now." To be continued in Monday night's GF.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #870: BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, SERIAL KILLER?

Is it possible we have a serial killer on the $100 bill?

 

"The law does not prevent our obtaining the body of an individual if we think proper; for there is no person, let his situation in life be what it may, whom if I were disposed to dissect, I could not obtain." --Astley Cooper, anatomist.

For a while before the American Revolution one of our forefathers, Benjamin Franklin, lived in London at what is now a museum unsurprisingly called the Benjamin Franklin House. During renovations in the 'Nineties, the workers found in the basement around 1,200 bones belonging to 15 individuals. Human remains. Understandably they went to the law, but the coroner figured out many of them were more than a hundred years old, some even older.

It's not out of question that they dated back to when Franklin lived there. And so a lot of people started wondering if Franklin was a serial killer. I vaguely remember this news from back then, and I remember thinking, well, Franklin was a scientist. I'm sure he was sciencing up some cadavers. I doubt he killed anyone.

It turns out, I was right. But it wasn't Franklin who was studying the corpses for anatomy purposes. It was William Hewson, an anatomist who taught privately in Franklin's house. In fact Franklin helped Hewson become a member of the Royal Society at the time. But there's still a legal issue with Hewson's lessons. Studying anatomy (involving dissection, of course) was illegal back then. So it's no surprise that Hewson buried his materials in the basement when he was done with them.

Hence the need for resurrectionists. These are the people who robbed graves to deliver fresh corpses to doctors who wanted to dissect them for science. It was good money. So good that decades later a couple of assholes named Burke and Hare decided, hey, why wait for people to die before stealing their corpses? Let's just . . . kill them and get paid!

The world has a funny sense of humor. While Hare may have escaped to Ireland, throwing Burke thoroughly and without question under the red double-decker bus, Burke wound up getting hanged, his corpse turned over to an anatomist for dissection itself.

It's even funnier when you realize that back then robbing graves WASN'T A CRIME. Here's a quote from Ruth Richardson on the topic: ". . . exhumation was not technically a crime or theft; for although dead human bodies were in fact bought and sold, in the eyes of the law a dead body did not constitute real property and therefore could neither be owned nor stolen." It would be nice to know which Ruth Richardson the article meant, but they named her without naming why she's important. I think it's the professor of psychology they meant, and the footnotes you're going to glance through at the end of this seem to support that.

London authorities suspect there are more bones, but it's not a priority. It's pretty obvious that Benjamin Franklin was not a serial killer, that it was all Hewson's anatomy lessons in a time when anatomy lessons were not legal. All the same, I found this quote interesting. Marcia Balisciano, the director of the Benjamin Franklin House, said, "If you keep digging down in London, you can find anything--Roman remains, Viking remains or anything." Here in America we're not going to find much if we dig down. The original City of Chicago is still under the current City of Chicago, for instance. You'll find the ruins of native cultures around my area, but they're usually just arrowheads because the people who lived here were nomadic. But in the St. Louis area there was a fucking huge city hundreds of years before Europeans started building shit here. The original name of the city is lost, but archaeologists called it Cahokia after the tribe who lived there. I'm sure there's a ton of stuff to find when digging in that area.

One more thing I want to bring up. Hewson studied anatomy under the Hunter brothers, but I want to talk about John Hunter in particular. Check out this dazzling quote from one of my source articles:

John Hunter was known for collecting cadavers with medical abnormalities. Ruth Richardson writes of his collection containing, “monstrous births (animal and human) in bottles, the skeletons of physical freaks, a cast of the brain cavity of Dean Swift’s skull, death masks, murderers’ skeletons and relics, and all sorts and conditions of medical prodigies – feet, heads, internal organs – pickled or dyed to show their peculiarities to better effect.” ³⁷ 

One such example of this was the body of Charles Byrne. He had a tumor that caused him to be abnormally tall, measuring 8 ft. 4 in. by the time of his death. He was part of a traveling exhibition using the title of “The Irish Giant.” ³⁸ When he died at age 22, he wanted to be buried at sea so anatomists would not be able to dissect him but, John Hunter was able to obtain his body for approximately £500. After he was dissected, his skeleton was placed on display. ³⁹ According to the Royal College of Surgeons, when the Hunterian museum reopens,“…Charles Byrne’s skeleton will not be displayed…but will still be available for bona fide medical research into the condition of pituitary acromegaly and gigantism.” ⁴⁰

1. Ruth Richardson, Death, Dissection, and the Destitute (London: Routledge & Kagan Paul, 1987), 64. 
2. James Quinn,“Byrne, Charles,” Dictionary of Irish Biography, last modified October 2009, https://doi.org/10.3318/dib.001320.v1. 
3. Alexandra Topping, “‘He did not want this’: one man’s two-decade quest to let the ‘Irish Giant’ rest in peace,” The Guardian, January 14, 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2023/jan/14/he-did-not-want-this-one-mans-two-decade-quest-to-let-the-irish-giant-rest-in-peace. 
4. Royal College of Surgeons of England, January 11, 2023, “Hunterian Museum to reopen at Royal College of Surgeons of England in March 2023 after five-year closure and £4.6 million development,” accessed March 27, 2023, https://www.rcseng.ac.uk/news-and-events/media-centre/press-releases/hunterian-museum-reopening-2023/.

Those are numbered incorrectly because Blogger won't let me renumber them. But they're the footnotes in order, in case you were interested.

So John Hunter was essentially the Mutter Museum before we had the Mutter Museum. Interesting.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #869: TRENDING IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION

 Yesterday I got some pretty good news, but I'd already set my heart on making fun of Elon Musk some more, so I put the good news off until tonight. I'd already read the articles I was going to use as a source, anyway, and I didn't want to forget it, which I would if I didn't get it down last night. But there's good news!

I'm trending in the right direction. Yesterday I visited my primary doctor and discovered that my suspicion was correct. I did, indeed, put more weight on! My jeans are still loose on me. I suffer from Nobuttatal, so the seat of my pants always sags. But I can still pull the waist away from my belly pretty far, and I'm back to the final hole on my belt. I currently weigh in at 235 lbs. It was 222 when I left the hospital. Schwarzenegger says that the reason weight is so easy to put back on after taking so much off is because the body hungers to be whole again. My body is snapping back pretty fast.

Not only that, but it's been more than a week since I had bloody stools, and my blood test yesterday morning confirms that my blood count is picking up again. The lowest it was at was 7 out of 13, which is the exact point one needs a transfusion. When I left the hospital last it was 7.5. Now it's almost 9, so I'm not out of the woods, but I'm in much better shape than I was in after the horrorshow hospital visit.

So I followed up with my GI doctor later yesterday afternoon, and he says right now all we can do is observe and hope that my usual illness doesn't come back, and that my stools continue to look normal. If my blood count drops again, he wants to redo the colonoscopy. I really don't want it to come down to that, so I hope when we test my blood again in August that the trend will continue.

Near the end of the appointment my GI doc asked me an odd question: "When did they take you off your diabetes meds?"

A hospitalist did that. She said to continue with both insulin pens, but to stop metformin and glimepiride, my two oral 'Beetus meds. She said, and I quote, "I don't want that kind of chaos in your blood right now."

The reason he asked, it turned out, was because side effects of both drugs could cause the symptoms I was feeling whenever my usual illness took me over. I tried thinking back, and I'm pretty sure that I never had this illness before I was diagnosed with diabetes. With that diagnosis I was prescribed both of those drugs. Is it possible that my usual illness is caused by the side effects of these drugs, and no one thought to investigate that?

I went a year and a half without getting that sickness, and I thought it was because I'd quit drinking. But maybe, just maybe, it was caused by these two drugs this whole time. The only way to know for sure is if I get sick again. We'll have to see.

Just to keep me honest, when I wrote that paragraph my lizard brain whispered to me, "See? It was never the booze. Let's celebrate! Go to Williams Liquors and treat yourself!" Yeah, maybe, but even if the sickness was never caused by the liquor, I still had a pretty bad problem, and I was pretty clueless about it despite everyone's best efforts. I'm a fairly smart person. I'm not a genius, but I'm smarter than the avera . . . oh no! Whatever that word is that I pondered last night? The one I want to apply to Elon Musk? OH DEAR GOD, IT CAN BE APPLIED TO ME, TOO!!!!!!

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #868: IS THERE A WORD FOR IT?

 It's been a while since I shit-talked Elon Musk, so I'm overdue. In related news (and we're taking the scenic path here, folks), when I was in high school and college, I took Spanish classes. Some of it stuck, most of it went out my head quicker than if someone had actually shot me between the eyes. Fast forward a few years, and I decided I wanted to be Daniel Jackson on Stargate: SG-1, so I tried learning Spanish again, as well as German and French. What I learned instead was that I don't have a head for languages except my own. Yet even with my fairly large understanding of the English language, I don't think we have a word for the kind of person I want to talk about tonight. Your first impulse will be to say "idiot savant," but that doesn't cover it. That's more like someone who has very little intelligence but who knows a lot of stuff.

Let's set aside the enormity (the original definition, not the one indicating largeness) of Elon Musk, just for the purposes of this column. I think he's a complete piece of shit, but I didn't start out that way. I liked Musk when I first heard of him. I thought his goals were noble. Colonizing Mars won't solve all of our problems, but it will buy us time that we desperately need. If there is any single person on this planet who can possibly accomplish this, I have to grudgingly admit that it is Musk. But we're going to look past that for tonight. Because we can all, even grudgingly, call him a genius, right? He is very smart. Much smarter than the average bear. But there's a reason he's not a scientist. He's a businessman, and his business is stealing other people's ideas and claiming them as his own. Take Tesla, for example. Heh. Funny I should bring Tesla up, as I'm sure their namesake would be embarrassed to be associated with Musk, who is nothing if not the embodiment of a modern day Edison. Not the guy who came up with the light bulb. I'm talking about the Edison who electrocuted elephants. (A word of warning, do not click on that link if animal torture is a trigger for you. I think people who treat animals poorly should in turn be treated poorly, but I also have a point to illustrate. My honest opinion: that film sickens me. He did it to prove that AC (Tesla's current) is dangerous, whereas DC (Edison's current) was not. So he electrocuted that elephant for the sake of fucking commerce. So fuck Edison.)

But put that all aside except for the genius thing, because Musk is a genius. But back in 2012 he overlooked the most obvious fucking fact in his entire life and was rendered speechless because of it.

Dennis Hassabis is the man behind Google DeepMind, and back then he was looking to get an investment from Musk to make AI possible. Musk took him on a tour of SpaceX, bragging about all the cool shit he was doing. More to the point Musk talked about how Mars colonizers will escape Earth's problems, like overpopulation, for example. To quote one of the articles I read, "Hassabis agreed, with one caveat: if AI surpassed human intelligence, it could easily follow us off-planet, and kill us there, too."

No. Fucking. Shit.

That's not just AI. That's *all* of our planet's problems. I think hunger should go on the list, too, because the first colonizers won't have anything to eat except for what they brought with them. Sure, they could pull a Matt Damon and "science the shit out of this," but if they fuck up, what then? Pollution would be a problem down the line somewhere. I know it would take a lot of fucking effort to terraform even a patch of Mars, much less the whole thing. Who has deep enough pockets to fund a terraforming mission? Oh, I don't know. Say . . . corporations? You know they would blow money on this much sooner than paying a fair wage to their workers on earth. The scientists would understand the strain it would take to terraform like that, but the corporations have bullshit on their side, and bullshit trumps science nearly every time. How long do you think it would take them to shit where they eat? Or would they keep corporate HQ on earth? With Musk probably being the first one to Mars, I imagine that he would be the one to make the rules, and I don't see him NOT giving a huge tax break to those corporations who would incorporate there. I think it would be fair to say that Mars would be one big celestial tax haven.

But none of this even occurred to Musk, and his answer to Hassabis was NOTHING. He was at a loss for words, and with all the shit he talks, have you ever seen him at a loss for words? How can someone who everyone (especially him) says is a genius be so stupid as to miss that very obvious fact?

One other thing. That article also calls Musk's Mars aspirations a "pipe-dream." They worded that incorrectly, I think. Colonizing Mars is not a pipe-dream. It's a pipe-dream for Musk, specifically. He's 53 years old. I don't see him not having the best healthcare in the world, so I wouldn't be surprised if he lived to be over a hundred. But even that is not enough time to colonize Mars, and it's nowhere near enough time to terraform it. So if there's one thing I can take solace in, I know that Musk will never live to see his dream be a reality. He's a dick, and he deserves that. But he'll somehow still get us there. Eventually.

So yeah, I don't know if there's a word for what Elon Musk is: a very smart person who is prone to occasional extreme stupidity. Can we get the Oxford Dictionary on that?

PS: It's Nikola Tesla's birthday today! He would have been 168 years old!

A horrible thought just occurred to me. What if Musk goes the Kevin Kline route in Fierce Creatures? Ever see that one? There's a scene where he plays both a father and son, the former being wealthy beyond imagination, the latter desperately hungry for that wealth. The father says he's going to be crygenically frozen, and the son is aghast. "You mean, YOU'RE GOING TO BE IMMORTAL?!?!?!" I hope to fuck he hasn't seen that. Don't give him ideas. He has a fickle sense of humor as it is.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #867: MORE GORE

Vidal, that is.

 

The other day I found myself with an extra hour before I needed to meet up with a friend for lunch, so I went down to the Frugal Muse in Darien, my second favorite bookstore in the area. (Anderson's beats them out.) I suddenly found myself confronted with this book that you see above.

Rewind back to the late 'Nineties. I was a student at Elmhurst College (now University), and I had a job as a page at the Elmhurst Public Library. We'll get to the student part in a minute.

One day I was working in my section, which was the 800s. I'd already finished shelving my books, and there were no books at any of the nearby tables or the drop off cart. When that happened it was my duty to make sure the books are in Dewey order. We all had sheets where we would write down our progress. It was super boring work, so whenever I got the chance I would sit down and pretend to read the numbers on the lower three shelves. When I was fairly certain I was alone I would pick a book and read. That day I saw the book you see above (hardcover edition instead). I remembered, hey, didn't I read a story by him for class? I didn't recall the title (still don't), and I don't remember what happened. I do recall that it was a bit scandalous (*gasp!*) for its time. It was kind of interesting. I'll read some of the essays,

They had some really boring titles, so I only read one or two. I recall being pretty interested in the essays I did select, but I didn't really ever think about the book again, not until decades later when I was on a psych ward and found his book, Empire, and it helped me get through that rough patch of my life. It also converted me into a Vidal fan.

So of course I had to buy this book from the Muse. Only later, after I'd bragged on social media about it, did I think that maybe I should read an essay a day. So I started that yesterday.

I read the second this afternoon at one of the forest preserves. It brought me back to my time in college. The piece is called "Novelists and Critics of the 1940s." It is exactly what it sounds like and more. The thing that made me laugh is that it's a critique of critics. It's done with his usual dry wit, which was not something I was much into when I was a student working across the street at the library. But it brought me back today because it resurrected all the names of critics that I've tried to forget from my time as an English major. (I was also a Philosophy major, which explains a lot, unfortunately.)

It reminded me that once upon a time not all that long ago (jk, as the kids say; it's still happening today) people took literature waaaaaaaaaaaay too seriously.  I will never get my head around the study and act of critiquing literature at an academic level, and I intensely studied it for four fucking years straight.

I'm not a complete idiot. I know that this is a necessary part of the process. And when I'm talking about critics, I don't mean someone reviewing something. I mean a legitimate deep study of something to see how it works, why it might not work and where its place is in society if it is even relevant. So yes, as with all other aspects of human life, study of literature is important. That kind of thing is just not for me, though. I'm more of a Vonnegut kind of guy in that regard. I do the work mostly for entertainment's sake, but I also think it's important to throw in some deeper meaning, too, for those who look for that. I look for that, so that's what I would want.

And I apply everything from the previous paragraph to stuff that a lot of people don't think is literature, like the kind of thing I write. Studying genre fiction might be even more important because it's easy to be deceived by such Trojan horses as werewolves or alien cultures or even the Middle Age feudal society you've got going on in the background of your Harlequin romance. A lot of those critics I talked about? They're only interested in lit-rit-chure, so they're not going to do it. It has to be someone else. Maybe . . . NOPE. Not me.

Either way, I'd want nothing to do with it, personally. If I wouldn't read it for fun, I wouldn't write it. That's been a promise of mine since I graduated said college. Back then I had to write SO. MUCH. SHIT. That I didn't want to write. At that point I'd done it all my life, and it was no longer a requirement. So I stopped.

If you want to do it, feel free. It's just not my thing.