GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1065: AT LEAST I HAVE A PLAN NOW

 You may have noticed that I wrote a GF every day of this week. I felt a little nostalgic for the way I used to do these, and I wanted to see if I still had it in me to do one every night. I do, but I got a little tired of it by midweek, so I'm probably not going back to that release schedule. It felt nice for a while, but it cut drastically into time to write other stuff, stuff I might actually get paid for at some point, so I think next week it'll be back to two a week. Maybe three every once in a while.

In the meantime, I found out why my rent went up so much. It turns out that we have new owners here. When I go in to discuss my lease renewal, I desperately hope they don't say, hey, we need to run your credit score. If they do, they're going to discover that it lives in the toilet, right down there in the flush hole. And if that happens, I'll be homeless in time for my 48th birthday.

And this time, there is nowhere else I can go. At least I have a plan, though, and a plan that doesn't hurt too badly. It would suck to live in my car, but if I also manage to keep my job, I'll have a lot of money coming in and not a lot of expenses. I would have two monthly bills: my car payments and my car insurance. I won't have a phone bill because fuck Verizon. I'm getting a burner if that happens.

Well, I'll have three bills, because I'll also need to get another storage unit for long enough to sell my stuff. The only weak point of my plan is that I'll need movers to take my stuff out of here, and I can't afford that. At least not for now.

I hope I don't need the plan, but my head's in a much better place because I have it. It would be nice if the new owners don't run my credit score, and they don't raise the rent next year. If luck favors me, then I can kick this problem down the road for another year. It would solve the problem, but it will buy me more time to come up with a better solution.

I don't want to leave this place. I love living in DeKalb. For all the problems I've run into, it's really a good place to live. I've enjoyed calling it home, and I hope I don't have to stop doing that.

One other thing. You know how much of an alcoholic I am? I heard earlier this week that Schlitz is being discontinued, and my first thought was, oh shit, I gotta get a case. I'll never get to have Schlitz again. Even though Schlitz was far from my favorite beer. It didn't even kick in until I'd already picked up a pen to write a reminder to get that case at my earliest convenience that, wait a minute, I'm an alcoholic. I haven't had a drink in almost four years.

And then I felt regret. Dammit. Schlitz is going into the ground, and I can't even have one last can.

I had some good times on Schlitz. I remember during one camping trip drinking Wild Turkey 101 from the bottle and chasing it with Schlitz after Schlitz after Schlitz. I passed out early near the campfire, and what woke me up? What felt like about a gallon of beer going directly up my nose. I sat up fast, and it made me puke my guts out for a good long time. What had happened? Two of my friends were shotgunning beers next to me, and the knife one of them used went all the way through the can, spilling its contents into me. What had they been drinking? Schlitz.

Strat's served Schlitz once upon a time! Whenever I ate dinner there, I usually had a Schlitz to go with it. They had to stop serving beer when the car shows they regularly hosted got too rowdy. I remember having dinner with a friend of mine there. She and I were DUI buddies. Because of that, we couldn't drive, so we sat there, talking about a book she wanted to design, drinking Schlitz after Schlitz after sneaking off to the bathroom with my flask. The fight outside that night got so bad the cops had to break it up. Being drunk in public with about a half-dozen cops around didn't do much for us, so Strat's let us call a cab (neither of us had cell phones back then), and we got out of there.

I woke up feeling hungover today, which is weird because I haven't had a drink in years. It's so unfair. So yeah, I've been thinking about the booze a bit today.

RIP Schlitz.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1064: THE SOLUTION TO A VERY OBVIOUS PROBLEM

 The one thing our Founding Fathers never thought to consider: what if one party seizes control of all three branches of the government? What happens to the concept of checks and balances then? Now that we have some unfortunate insight into such results, it would behoove us to fix this very obvious problem.

And I do, indeed, have a solution. We need to amend the Constitution so that, should it turn out that one party is in charge of the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches, one of them must be turned over to the other party. I know that makes it unfair to any party not part of the duopoly, but that's a problem we can't solve for now. I mean, I've given a few suggestions over the years, but you know what I mean.

It would be too complex to let this fall upon Congress, so they're safe. It would make the most sense to handle the president, but there's no way in hell anyone is going to go for that. Which leaves the Supreme Court.

Justices aren't supposed to have biases, but that's simply not the reality we're faced with. So yes, we'll have to have stand-by justices to take over when we eject whatever number of the winning party's judges we need to, and then the losing party's judges swoop in to take their place. How do we decide on which ones to axe? It can't be the Chief Justice, but anyone else with seniority has to go. It's insane that we let these people serve for the rest of their lives, so that's where we cut. Give the new blood a chance.

The situation we find ourselves in now is untenable. The system cannot be allowed to continue as it is, or if we're lucky enough to have another election, we might just usher in the next Donald Trump. And then we get to go through all of this again, and won't that be fun?

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1063: POINT OF NO RETURN

 You may have seen the news lately that New Orleans's days are numbered. Due to the rising sea level, and considering how most of that city exists below that sea level, it is in danger of disappearing altogether. It's possible that whatever civilization follows ours might find its ruins thanks to the distant descendants of our Atlantis hunters. In fact, according to a new study, New Orleans "may be surrounded by the Gulf of Mexico by the end of the century." That's a pretty grim diagnosis.

Think about that. New Orleans is a major city. There's a lot of culture there. And it's all going to vanish soon. Your kids might not see it disappear, but their kids might. The hometown of Anne Rice inspired vampires everywhere is about to vanish from the face of the earth. That's fucking crazy. They're saying people should start leaving right now. Get the hell outta Dodge. We have a few decades, but why waste time?

So I'm sure you know what I'm wondering about. No, it's not about where people will go now to flash boobs for beads and vice versa. (That's the second thing I thought.) No, I'm wondering about . . .

There are some grand cemeteries down there. Are we going to abandon them to a watery grave? In particular, ARE WE GOING TO ABANDON NIC CAGE TO THE GULF OF MEXICO'S MERCILESS WATERS?!?!?!?!?!?!

Because in case you've forgotten, that's where he plans to be buried, under this very pyramid. Is he going to change his mind? Can he be talked out of being buried there?

He's a weird guy. Maybe he wants his body to be flooded forever. Maybe he's into it.

Which reminds me, I learned the other day that he was offered the role of Aragorn in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies. After ensuring I wasn't on the Onion's website, I sat back, shocked. How could that have been allowed to almost happen? I love Cage. I also love LOTR. But the two of them together, especially like that, would have been a disaster. It would have utterly destroyed those films for me. I am eternally grateful for the family obligations that kept him from taking the role.

See?

"NIC CAGE: LOTR"

A Shit Poem by John Bruni

"The same blood flows in my veins. The same weakness."

"Let's hunt some Orc."

"You cannot give me this."

"My friends, you bow to no one."

But with mega-acting.

Could you imagine the faces he would make during the battle scenes?

I'll bet he'd do really well with the scene where he has to throw Gimli.

He'd go over the top at the Prancing Pony in Bree

    more like Father Karras in the darkness in The Exorcist III.

What do you say we cut the chit-chat, a-hole.

    and stick to drinking beer from your enemy's skull like a bowl.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1062: TREADING WATER

 All fucking year I've suffered terrible bad luck. You know it's bad when you win a victory only to have something happen that renders the victory useless. For example, I've been behind on sales all month at work. From Friday to Sunday, I made a shocking amount of sales. That's a victory, right? Except I'm not paid on sales. I'm paid on those sales getting invoiced. So guess how many of my 70+ sales got invoiced yesterday and today? Barely a quarter of them. So I'm still behind at work. My wonderful victory meant nothing.

Here's another example: I had a cage on my foot so I could heal said foot. It worked. The cage came off, my foot was healed. But now a new hole has opened, and it won't heal, so what was the fucking point?

I remember the joy I felt when my first book, Strip, was published. I remember the soul-crushing anguish when it flopped so bad it transcended the very concept. To give you an idea, it sold tens of copies. It didn't even come close to cracking 100. Not even FIFTY. Thankfully it has sold a lot better ever since I rereleased it through Riot Forge.

And now for my favorite example: I survived the nightmare of being forced to leave my childhood home by finding a great place to live in DeKalb. I can barely afford it, but if I just keep making my commission at work, at least I'll survive.

It's time to renew my agreement with the complex, and starting July, just in time for my birthday, my rent is going up a hundred dollars a month.

But hey, my tax return this year is more than four grand, so that shouldn't be too much of a problem, right? Except today I got news that after waiting months for them to do the math to ensure I'm telling the truth on my 1040, they need yet another fucking three months to get that done. How likely am I to get that money by July?

I've been treading water since January, and all it has done is exhaust me. It has frayed my goddam nerves. I am full of stark blinding rage all the time. Frustration? No, that left a while ago. The door did, indeed, hit him on the ass, for all the good it did.

Ordinarily I have friends that I can hang out with, that I can vent my spleen with. And I do have many friends, but none of them are here in DeKalb. No one is even close. But I do have you. I'm sorry to puke all my angst at you. In fact, you don't even have to read this. Tonight you are Schrodinger's Fuckers. Obviously you are there because I'm venting to you, but I'm pretending you're not so I can just let loose.

[This note will make more sense later, but while rereading this to make sure it made sense, I accidentally thought I'd typed "I'm vomiting on you," so see? I'm laughing.]

In my awful gut-wrenching throes, my mind is starting to make plans to sell all my belongings. Get the important stuff to family, sell the rest of it, and prepare to live on the streets, and there's an ugly treacherous part of me that looks forward to it. I know that bastard is a liar and a cheat, but there is comfort to be found in ceasing to fight. I'm sick of putting all the effort I've got in me into merely treading water. That's not enough. It's worse than failure. At least with failure it'll all finally be fucking over. It will pass, I know, but that's what that piece of shit is saying right now.

There's also another part of me that is flat out insane. Those who saw me in my party days would probably say I was pretty crazy, considering my batshit conduct, but that's tame compared to all the stuff I hold back. Once the fight is over, and I've lost, there will be nothing holding that part of me back. There's comfort in that, too. If I've lost, then I've got nothing left to my life but to find ways to entertain myself, and I've got a great imagination. Without my personal library to soothe me? My idle hands would very much itch.

I'm tired of fighting every waking moment of my wretched life. I want to relax. I want nothing more than to REST. I'm not looking for riches beyond comprehension. If you gave me a Ferrari, I'd give it away to someone else. I stopped wearing watches, so a Rolex wouldn't impress me. OK, how about something not material, like sex? That's not a thing I overly concern myself with. If it comes my way, I enjoy it, but it's not all that important to me, so I don't even seek that kind of wealth. All I want is for life to stop it's constant assault on my senses. Let me have at least a week where I can get up out of the water and rest on a boat instead.

Thank you for listening. I'm not seeking advice or comfort, so you don't have to reach out. I needed to get this out of me in the hopes that writing about it will exorcise the horror. The feeling is familiar. I know it will pass. I'm trying to *force* it to pass with this.

I can still laugh. Here's proof of that, and also proof of something I would ordinarily hold back. Earlier in the process of writing this, I paused to think if there's anything in my sewer of a brain that I wouldn't talk about in these things. It reminded me of one of the GFs of old that I scratched. One of the ones I'd deleted and written about doing that instead. It was about the annoyance of getting boners at work. Like, if I'm on break reading an unexpected erotic scene in a book, for example. I'd gone into great detail before realizing, what the fuck? No one is going to want to read about this. This is . . . also, what if someone I work with stumbled upon this? How fucked up would that be?

And that made me laugh. So I figured, what the hell. I'm still me. Don't worry. Go back and reread that bracketed sentence again.

All the same, I can't believe I survived the horrors of leaving Elmhurst only to be confronted with this neverending stream of bullshit. And no, I can't find somewhere else to live. I was making a bunch of sacrifices in moving to Joliet, but I figured I'd use my time there to build my credit back up. But things went south instead, and that credit score is completely in the toilet as a result. There's literally nothing I can do about that, so I'm sure no landlord would ever have me.

My life is . . . fun.

I'll try to have something cheerful (or at least not completely full of despair) for you tomorrow night.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1061: IF YOU DON'T LIKE THE WEATHER . . .

 . . . just wait a few minutes. We've all heard some variation of this seemingly age-old phrase. I'm not doing a history of that, by the way (I heard that sigh of relief), but I did just learn, mere seconds ago, that Mark Twain said it first, so maybe it's not an ancient proverb, after all.

Just about every region claims this, and almost all of them are wrong. But I've learned during my time in DeKalb, that this is one of those places that is telling the truth. Back in Elmhurst, Addison and Joliet, one of the first things I'd do every morning while trying to convince myself to go to work was check the weather. It was usually accurate or close enough for me. In DeKalb? I've decided to give up on it. The forecast is correct maybe fifty percent of the time, and I'm not going to rely on a coin flip.

Today was the last straw because I'd been promised a nice cool day of thunderstorms. The way my apartment is placed, I can open the east windows wide and never get the floor wet, even on the stormiest day. The west windows? I wouldn't even leave them open a crack. Rain gets in there like little wet bullets.

I work at my kitchen table, which faces the east. I looked forward to the calming effects the rain would have on me, as Mondays are the busiest days at work, and it can easily turn me into a flailing jagged ball of stress.

(There is also something wonderful about being inside while it's raining out. Maybe it's the smell of the storm through a screened window. I always did love that.)

What did I get instead? A half an hour of the weather I wanted, and then a cloudy humid breezeless blah for the rest of the day. At the very least it wasn't a stressful day. Not once did I feel the desire to hang up on an unruly customer. I'd never actually do it, but the thought doesn't just creep in--it busts the fucking door down and announces its presence in a rich baritone.

I haven't even mentioned the surprise rainstorms that suddenly erupt on previously pleasant and sunny days. Storm warnings that sometimes necessitate the air raid sirens also fail to deliver on a regular basis. I got a tornado warning recently, the kind that makes your phone scream terrible noises at you with messages to seek shelter immediately. Out here I felt sure that I should probably take these more seriously than the ones we got in Elmhurst, but when I saw none of my neighbors gave a shit about it, I followed suit.

I'm irritated about barely getting a spring this year. I should expect it by now, but it is my favorite season. It was always just barely cool enough to make a jacket mandatory, and then it went straight into the eighties heat.

Do you know what this means? I've officially become a middle-aged man. I've never complained about weather before in my entire life, and here I am devoting a GF to it. I'm starting to approach 50 a li'l, and I look pretty good for my age. Alcohol is supposed to age you beyond your years, but I suspect it may have accidentally preserved me instead, like a caveman who has tripped and found himself in a bog, although my dad looked young for his age when he passed. He was just about to turn 60 and looked like he was in his late forties. So maybe I'm full of shit about the booze.

At any rate, the years have finally caught up. I no longer have a lawn, so I can't tell kids to get off of it. Is it too soon to worry about developing a taste for Werther's Original? I *do* like Necco wafers . . .

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1060: MY BODY IS A ROADMAP OF PAIN

 

It's been a while since I looked at the state of my body, so why not do an accounting tonight? I agree with Jeffrey Combs in The Frighteners, so I'm not going to go into old injuries. Just the current state of things. We're going to start with my bad foot, and in case you're unfamiliar, you can read this GF from a half-year ago about the cage. If you want to go further back, you can check this out.

Some of those lines are because I just took my sock off, but those dark spots and dents are going to be with me for the rest of my life. Which is OK with me because I'll still have my foot, which I was convinced I was going to lose. And here's what the bottom of it looks like:

No hole! I forget if I posted a picture of what it looked like when wound care expanded the hole after the GF I linked to above, but it was a lot bigger by then, maybe the size of a quarter. And there were two holes on the bottom of my foot. When I first got the cage taken off, I marveled at how smooth and soft the skin was, which is weird because I've had callused feet from years of walking everywhere. It was like I had new skin, which I sorta did. The dead toe is even fixed. The holes in my bone are still healing, so I'll wear the ankle brace for quite a while longer, but most of the pain from the foot is gone.

Photo by my podiatrist.

(I should also mention that there was a hole on the side of my foot. When they took the cage off, it had healed, too. Now it has opened back up a little tiny bit, and it's not closing. I may need surgery to seal it up, in which case I'm going to have to go back to sponge baths for a month or so. See? It really is open just a sliver.)

Moving up to my guts, I'm glad to say that I haven't suffered my mystery illness since I lived in Joliet, where I took the picture of the cage in the first GF link above. There are times when I feel like it's coming back. A couple of weeks ago I puked--still not sure why--and I freaked out, thinking I was going to suffer it again. Joliet was bad, too. There had to be something there setting me off. I suffered it just about every day for a while there. I suspect it was sleeping on the air mattress that did it.

I am, however, backed up like crazy. I've been on opioids for years, and that is a sad but real side effect. It comes in liquid form, as we learned that it can actually stop the mystery illness if it hasn't already progressed too far. I call it my laudanum, and I'm grateful to have it. Because pain has been a constant in my life for a good long time.

Because my back is fucked the fuck up. I have bulging discs, and the spinal injections are no longer helping. I went to PT for a couple of months, and I'm still doing the exercises I learned there. It does help, but I suspect the only thing that will cure me is surgery, and I really don't want someone opening up my back. I live alone, far away from any friends or family who might otherwise help me get through recovery from such a surgery. To say nothing of the risks.

And then there's my hands. A few years back I had a form of tendonitis called trigger finger in the index on my left hand and the middle on my right hand. Surgery fixed that up, but I developed it again, this time in the middle on my left and the index on my right. I got injections for those, and they worked wonderfully. I spent a few months free of pain in my hands, and I thought I was finally done with that bullshit.

And then I bought a bookcase off Amazon. I figured it would be easy to put together. I've done it before, and I expected to do it again, but the bookcase was a piece of shit. I had screws I had to put into the base of the bookcase, screws that were supposed to hold the bottom together. Guess what: there weren't holes where the screws were supposed to be inserted. No problem, I thought, I'll make my own holes, which I did. Oddly, that was the sturdiest part of the bookcase, because as I moved along, it fell apart because the material was so shoddy, it might as well have been built of matchsticks.*

What I didn't know until the next day was that I'd fucked my hands up again. In trying to get this piece of shit to stick together, I'd given myself trigger finger all over again. In both hands. And look at that, the doctor who did the injections for me just retired, so now I have to go through the process with another doctor. I don't expect to get those injections for a few more months.

I'd actually been slowing down taking my laudanum, but now that my hands hurt again? I'm very glad I managed to squirrel a little extra away. It's not great. My fingers lock up and click all the time, and I use them a lot. I'm using them right now, in fact. While the pain is numbed reasonably well, the laudanum doesn't stop my fingers from locking in uncomfortable positions.

Moving on up my body, we come to my teeth. They've never been great, but I chipped one of my crowns in the back of my mouth, one of the two implants I have, and because it would be so expensive to fix it, I've let it go for now. Half of the crown is still there, and it's still anchored in place, but the jagged edge is doing no favors for the side of my mouth, and I have to be careful when eating, lest I chew on my beloved mucous membrane.

Which brings us to my eyes. I'm fairly certain I'm going blind. I've been warned that I'm showing signs of glaucoma, and one of my eyes is developing a neat little cataract. But my problem is with the floaters. Both eyes have giant floaters in them, which gives me a lot of trouble when I'm doing my absolute favorite thing to do on this planet: reading. I'm told there is a cure for it, but I'd have to be blindfolded for two weeks while staying in bed, face down the whole time. Again, I don't have anyone in my life right now who could help me recover like that, so that's out, too.

This and a bunch of other things have me feeling exceptionally depressed right now. It was so bad that on Monday and Tuesday this week, I blew off my to-do list. I worked (which led to its own set of frustrations), and that was it. I couldn't even pick up a book. I didn't want to do anything at all, so I sat and stared at the wall for a bit, thinking about my situation. Thinking about going down the block to the liquor store, because if I was failing this badly at life, I might as well fail all the way.

But that would have required the effort of leaving my apartment, and I was so demoralized I couldn't even do that.

That's a thing I don't like about me. When something starts going wrong, and my immediate efforts to fix it don't work, I spiral and start thinking, well shit. If I'm going to fuck this up, why not make it the biggest fuckup I can possibly make it? And then I watch in horror from somewhere in my head as I tank the fucking thing on purpose just to satisfy this wretched impulse.

I've gotten my shit together (somewhat). I finished my to-do list yesterday, and I'm almost done with today's (this is one of the three last things. After this I have to mark the day off my calendar (because I swore to myself this year I'd pay more attention to passing time), and I have to go to bed. So I'm reasonably sure I'll succeed at that. I don't recall if I've gone into it before, but if I complete my to-do list, I reward myself with putting a dollar into an enveloped marked FUN FUND. Money to be spent solely for fun purposes. Not to be used to pay bills or buy groceries, etc. I've gotten so good at it that those two days I blew off earlier this week were actually a little painful for me.

But it's evidence that I'm at least moving in the right direction. For now, that's good enough.

______________________________

*I got my money back, but they said to not bother returning it. I don't suppose anyone out there wants to come by my place in DeKalb and help me put it together . . . ?

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1059: HARDCORE TV

 For many years I've been trying to remember the name of a sketch comedy show that played on HBO way back in the 'Nineties. It was made for adults, because there was cursing and nudity. I remember I'd originally watched it with my cousin, Erik, at his place, because at home I was not allowed to watch anything for adults. If it was the day before my thirteenth birthday, and I wanted to see a PG-13 movie, I had to wait another day until I was actually thirteen. I got to watch lots of stuff at Erik's place that I shouldn't have.

Every once in a while, the subject came up over the next few decades, but I never gave it much thought. Finally, the other day I posted a meme with a Bob Vila reference (who is still alive, by the way), and I realized, holy shit. I live in the future. I have the internet at my fingertips. Why not look it up?

So I did and found Hardcore TV! I watched a few sketches, and some of it is still funny. The segment I'd been thinking of in particular all this time held up well. We'll get to that one in a moment.

As I watched these, especially "Fairy Tales From the Dark Side," I realized maybe this show had more of an influence on me than I thought. "Raging Bullwinkle" is exactly what you think it is, only much more profane. "Bensonhurst 11210" is . . . just watch that. You might see a familiar face.

But the skit my pervy ass wanted to see again was "This Old Whorehouse." Yes, it's a parody of Vila's This Old House, but the house in question is indeed, a brothel. If you've read some of my erotica, like, say, 6669: Demon Porn, then maybe you can see the seeds of, uh, forget the metaphor. It's for the best.

Too bad they didn't last very long. If they'd done it today? I think they'd be very, very successful. Tim Blake Nelson was one of the writers, by the way. I wonder if he ever thinks about resurrecting the show.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1058: THE MAN WHO CONQUERED THE WORLD

Photo inside this photo by John Kopoulos

 And then from the back:

I found this with a bunch of Gramps's old Army pictures, so I can only assume he visited Warm Springs back then. But seeing it made me think about FDR.

In school we're taught about the men who conquered the known world (or even most of it) during their time. People like Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great. But they're small potatoes compared to the one man who conquered the world. The whole fucking thing. No "known" about it. That man was Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

He was an absolute master at manipulation. Machiavelli would have been in awe of this wheelchair-bound man who contained more gumption than anyone who had ever lived. He was so good he essentially got Churchill to dismantle the last remnants of the British Empire. I like how Gore Vidal puts it. In his version, FDR tells Churchill that he must give up all the colonies around the world. "Even India?" an aghast Churchill asks. FDR nods and gives a serene smile. "Even India."

I have no idea why FDR conquered the world. I like to think that he was doing it to make a safe and prosperous world for the regular people, not just the elite. What can I say? I'm an optimist.

But we do know this: it's an old story going all the way back to Moses. The great man brings his people to great things only to never enter the promised land, himself. He did not get to enjoy the fruits of his labor because he died while siting for the portrait Gramps saw all those decades ago. Would he have been a benevolent ruler? I think so. He seemed to be an elite who turned against his own. I say that because of all the good he did with the New Deal, benefits that we're recklessly throwing away today.

So Truman was left with victory, and what the hell did he know about ruling the world? Practically nothing, so the power hungry fuckwads around him held dominion over our government. Vidal says dropping two atomic bombs on Japan wasn't about winning the war. It was about intimidating the Soviets. I agree. By the end of the war, Japan was practically begging for peace, and the USSR looked like just the nation to fill their shoes.

But now I wonder if maybe Vidal was thinking too small. I think those bombs were about intimidating EVERYONE. This is our world now. This is your notice. Your compliance is expected. More to follow.

[Pardon the interruption, but I wrote this on May 6. While I was rereading it to make sure it made sense, I realized that everything after this point sounds like anti-American ranting, and all appearances to the contrary, I love America. Not the crazy, stupid and greedy shit that we constantly do. I mean what we say America stands for, things like liberty, freedom, etc. I know in my heart of hearts that we don't mean it, but I want us to live up to the lofty promise of our myth. Am I a proud American? I lean towards Bill Hicks on that one: "My parents fucked there." It's hard to be proud of America at any fuckin' time, but goddammit, this place could be the greatest nation in the history of the planet. We just need to get our collective head out of our collective ass, see things the way they are, and FUCKING FIX THEM.

Because of this, I didn't post it. I had to think about it for a while because I spoke from my heart with what follows, but it is pretty over the top. I weighed just posting the above stuff and deleting everything after this, but the hell with it. There's a lot of truth here, I think, and maybe someone else could benefit from this. You don't have to keep reading if you don't want to.

But I know you will. No one has ever read that warning and decided, nope, that's enough for me.]

The world economy is beholden to the American dollar, meaning if you expect to do business with everyone else, you must first do business with someone who has access to dollars. That and that alone is enough evidence to prove that we've had a strangehold on the world ever since FDR won it in a war. But just in case you need more: Our lawmakers intimidated other countries to put some of our laws on their books so that our corporate overlords would become their corporate overlords, too. And because we're the world hub for the entire internet, we've had access to everyone's shit. As Edward Snowden revealed, we were spying on EVERYONE. Not just our own people. EVERYONE.

Our corporate overlords can brick your car remotely if they so desire. What's to stop them from bricking the internet in, say, England? They wouldn't do that?

Sounds pretty unfair for the rest of the world, right? For them, there is great news. America currently has a president bent on destroying the boot we've used to step on everyone else's throat for decades. That boot is rapidly dissolving. Trust is at an all time low. Other countries are forming coalitions to survive whatever fresh hell we're going to throw at them in the near future.

FDR conquered the world, and Trump is throwing it away like an empty can of Diet Coke from his car window.

The value of the dollar is dropping like crazy. Our debt is now greater than our GDP, which is a pretty horrific sign. Wall Street may be booming, but that shell game means nothing for most Americans. And it is a shell game. Our corporate overlords just keep passing money back and forth to each other while telling everyone else that the exact same money that's being passed around is possessed by all of them at once. And if you think AI is bad right now, just you wait. It's the only thing propping up the economy right now. When that falls apart, and it will since it has not earned a single penny back in return for the biggest investment in investment history, what do you think will happen to said economy?

Every country in the world is in debt, and the way it's set up is, that debt will never be paid, and it will never be defaulted. With the world economy needing a strong US dollar, I can't see why the central banks would let this continue unless there was something a lot more dire happening.

I know this sounds a bit out there, but it is my suspicion that Trump and his Dickless Brigade are tanking the dollar on purpose, and I think they mean to replace it with Bitcoin, most likely, or something similar. There must be a reason why they've decided, out of the blue, that Bitcoin was important enough to stockpile. I hope I'm wrong, but it makes sense to me. The only weakness in the theory is that the central banks would have no say in Bitcoin, unless that's going to change at some point. I'm not entirely sure I know how that works, though, so I might be talking out of my ass with that last sentence.

We live in dangerous times. Never put anything past the Dickless Brigade.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1057: EASTER 1961

 I have all of my family photos on Mom's side. I've been organizing them, trying to figure out which ones I want to keep for myself and which to give to brothers, cousins or my aunt. I made piles for all the holidays, and Easter turned out to be the second skimpiest. (I only have two Thanksgiving pictures, but one of them is really good.)

But there was a batch of old black and whites in there that absolutely baffled me. At first I laughed. Then I got a little creeped out again. Then I laughed some more. These are so ridiculous that I had to share them here.

Uh, how big are these things?

Okay, maybe not that big, after all. Could you imagine if these fuckers were six feet tall? Not counting the ears?

Like the Teddy Bears' Picnic, but for bunnies.

This looks kinda . . . cultish.

Maybe this is an alternate universe, where rabbits evolved instead of monkeys.

This made me laugh until my balls hurt the first time I saw it. Look at those mustaches! What the fuck possessed them to give the bunnies facial hair? Because it's brilliant. I hope that guy got a raise.

(I'm still kind of laughing at this.)

That's my mom on the left and her sister, my Aunt Sue, on the right. Mom would have been a few months away from four years old, and Aunt Sue would have turned two a few months before. The back of this one is notated with their names and the year in Grandma's handwriting, but it didn't explain the rest of this madness. What the hell are these pictures?

I lucked out. She wrote a few more things behind one of the others:

That explains everything. If you don't know, Goldblatt's was a chain of department stores that operated back then (and they didn't go out of business until 2000). Grandma did a lot of shopping there. When I found boxes and boxes of canceled checks, a lot of them were made out to this place. The building is still somewhat of a historical landmark, but it's mostly used by the City of Chicago now for various things. I wonder if anyone back in 1961 could have seen that coming.

I think often of the transitory nature of the stuff around us. Things that feel permanent actually aren't and may even change within your lifetime.

I've written about it before, but it reminds me of Gramps driving around, waving his hand at the world around us, telling me about how all of this will be different when I'm older. Except I was a kid. I'd only been around for what, six years? Seven? What the fuck did I know of change? As far as I knew, everything was the same as it had been from the day of my birth, so I assumed it would all be the same by the time I was dead.

The older I get, the more I think perspective might be the strongest force in nature.

Just a final note. Aunt Sue is the only person on my mom's side of the family who is older than me. Just in case I wasn't feeling ancient enough today.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1056: HAPPY ASSHOLING OUR WAY THROUGH LIFE

 

In 1963 the Bronx Zoo had an exhibit they called the Most Dangerous Animal in the World. Looks pretty scary, eh? Are all those bars really necessary?

Only for effect. Nothing lived behind these bars. The only thing back there was a mirror.

Originally there was a plaque that read the following:

You are looking at the most dangerous animal in the world. It alone of all the animals that ever lived can exterminate (and has) entire species of animals. Now it has the power to wipe out all life on earth.

They eventually reworded it, but the intent, per the zookeepers, was to get people to stop and think. It certainly did the trick. People were still talking about it as late as 1989, which I believe was the time I first encountered it. I remember I was a kid, and that we'd moved from Edgewood to Vallette, so 1989 sounds about right.

But the older I get, the more I wonder if we didn't read enough into it. The zoo literally held a mirror up to us, and we only saw humanity in general. We didn't see ourselves, specifically. Maybe more people should think about that. A lot of us just happy asshole our way through life without a second thought to the damage we might be doing to someone else. Perhaps a closer look at the mirror is warranted.

To quote businessman Louis Cypher:

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1055: THE INEVITABLE

 Before reading this, you should watch this. You don't have to, but if you're reading my stuff on AI, then you'll probably find this interesting. I post it because AI is *the* social topic right now, and John Oliver has a great line in this video. "It saves significant time writing emails, and all it costs us is everything else on Earth." He's not wrong. And I understand the techbros are playing the long game, so short term returns are not expected. All the same, AI needs a lot of power to run, and it hasn't earned AI companies a single penny in return.

Why would they do this? Because the long term returns are going to be phenomenal. In their minds it will not just make them money. It will make them a shitload of money. It's because they're already planning to enshittify AI. That's their business model.

If you don't know what enshittification is, here is Cory Doctorow explaining the word he created.

So how do you lock people into AI? Who the fuck believes anything a machine would tell them? A lot of people, it turns out. Go back to that Last Week Tonight video I linked to at the top of this page. There's a guy in there who firmly believed he'd discovered a new method of mathematics, all because an AI told him so. Add to that the army of people who now depend on AI chatbots because they're lonely and the techbros are taking advantage of them. What happens if AI were to suddenly disappear from their lives? I imagine it would be a lot like what I felt when my phone died not too long ago.

In short, the techbros have to work on making their products addictive as fuck. If you're looking away from their app, then they have failed at this job. I remember a time when companies that tried to addict their customers to their products were considered evil. Now it's standard operating procedure.

At the moment there aren't enough of us locked in, but when we reach that threshold, and I'm certain the techbros have that number written down somewhere, they will introduce ads. Imagine you're a lonely person who has fallen in love with a chatbot. You depend on that chatbot to get you through the day. Without that chatbot, you'd be so lonely it's painful. You've thought about ending your life several times*, but thank goodness for your AI company of choice.

Except now that you're getting down to some sexy time with your chatbot, it suddenly informs you that Olive Garden has a BOGO deal, and when you're there, you're family. Or, even worse, the chatbot starts talking like the GEICO gecko to tell you that you could save hundreds by switching your car insurance.

Yeah, that's pretty egregious. But by now you can't just walk away from the chatbot. You depend on it for your own existence. So you put up with the ads, and our corporate overlords rush to saturate your senses with a constant slush of advertising. At least until the techbros betray their advertisers, too.

Think about all the things you hate about social media. Remember when it was fun? When it was the good ol' days? If you've ever had this thought, you should stay away from AI, because the techbros will enshittify that, too. It's the only way they'll be able to make money at this. Monthly subscription fees just aren't going to cut it for an expense this flagrant. They need advertising dollars to make up for it.

The time to draw the line in the sand is now. If we wait until they start to enshittify it, then it's too late. If you trust the techbros, they will violate that trust six ways to Sunday. They have proven it, time and again. It really will be a toothpaste-and-tube situation, as they've done to us with data brokers. Good luck getting your privacy back now that all your info is out there.

To quote Stephen King, "SSDD." So let's not let the cycle repeat. 

______________________________

*Not that a chatbot is interested in preventing you from offing yourself, as John Oliver describes in that video. That's a problem the techbros are working on. For real. It's hard to advertise to someone who has killed themselves, but more importantly, AI contributing to someone's suicide is a mild annoyance to their business practices. It takes time to deal with something like that, and they have correctly assumed that time is the most valuable commodity in the world. Hence Zuck's desire to have his AI clone sit in on essential meetings instead of doing it himself.

MONEYED CLASSES: UNDERSTANDING THE GUILLOTINE: A board game review of Billionaires and Guillotines

 

“Billionaires” and “guillotines” are two concepts that go together like mom and apple pie. Like Woodward and Bernstein. Like Ernest and Vern. In an age where our society is controlled by corporate overlords and oligarchs, one could see the attraction in a game like this.

In Billionaires and Guillotines, you play a billionaire with the purpose of filling every blank spot on your card with an asset. Typically you “buy” them from markets. On each turn, you draw a card (if you want to), but you can never have more than two in your hand (with one exception; if you are the Banker). Then you must Buy, Invest or Exchange. You choose which cards to play against the ones in the market in a Blackjack-ish showdown to see if you win that asset. Or you can add a card to any market and draw a new one. Or you can swap one of your cards with a face-up card or change two face-up cards between markets.

That sounds a lot more complicated than it actually is, but at its most basic, that is the skeleton of the game. There are different levels you can play, all of which add complexities like roles or determining government policy and so on.

Who are the billionaires you get to play? And why can’t you play as Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg, who are clearly displayed on the box? That’s a major disappointment, but you can choose from five archetypes: the Media Baron, the Property Speculator, the Aristocrat, the Tech Overlord and the War Profiteer. Each billionaire needs to get five assets, and those assets depend on which archetype you’re playing. The idea is to purchase these assets from the five markets (Power, Toys, Influence, Legacy, Vanity) before you and your fellow players raise the ire of the common people enough to introduce you to the aforementioned guillotines.

Getting all of your assets is one way to win. There are also the role cards, and you could get the Celebrity role, which means if there is a revolt, you get to live. Unless you started the Crisis event that caused the revolt, that is. There’s also a Toady card that lets you ride the coattails of whoever actually wins the game.

The key part, however, is your ability to screw over your fellow players. This seems to be the true purpose of the game. You can use the Audit card to make opponents put an asset back. You can steal assets. You can buy assets you don’t need so you can make the game harder for others. You can also throw things in your favor by investing cards in your suit into the market to give you a better shot at that asset. If you buy the asset, the price for the next one is higher due to the inflation rules. You start with two cards at each market, but if an asset is bought, then it’s three. Buy another, and it’s four.

The best feature, though, is the fact that everyone could lose the game.

Billionaires and Guillotines was created by Max Haiven: “I really believe that we can think through and use games as a platform for teaching people about what’s wrong with capitalism and why we must create alternatives.” This game was originally called The Bastards, and it was inspired by “radical political economist and Sparticist agitator Rosa Luxemburg’s theory that capitalism inevitably creates its own crises from within,” that the game “simulate[s] the way capitalist greed produces negative consequences.”

And it really does that. Not just from the inflationary point of view, but also from how their wanton impulses really are destroying society. The more recklessly you go after assets, the more likely you are to trigger a crisis, which then adds Rebel discs to the guillotine. If all ten discs are there, then game over. You all lose.

After several play tests, one tends to notice a few things. There are two kinds of people who play this game: those who go after the assets in the market, and those who screw over the other players. The latter usually does this with great gusto. It’s maybe a little thought experiment of its own. How would you react in the shoes of a billionaire?

Sometimes there seems to be a lull in the play. Sometimes you get locked into a pattern, where no one wants to make any moves. Oddly this tends to come earlier in the game, when the stakes aren’t quite so high.

And then there’s the 2-player game, which doesn’t work quite so well. It goes pretty quickly, but progress is nearly impossible, and no one usually wins. The puppet billionaires are much more likely to run a market into the ground due to the die roll, where you only have a one in six chance of gaining an asset. The rules allow you to sacrifice cards to move the die score up, but players tend to take their chances rather than give up a card.

Otherwise, this is a swift and exciting game with lots of moving parts. It’s engaging, and it keeps you on your toes. You learn strategy, and as a result, you learn to really appreciate the Art of the Ratfuck, and suddenly Elon Musk doesn’t seem all that unusual. It’s a good game if you’re just an average joe looking for something to do, but if your tastes run toward revolution (ie. you understand that the Empire was the villain of Star Wars, not the rebels), this will be great fun for you. Just remember: the more players you have, the more fun the game will be.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1054: OMG!

 LOL, LMAO, BRB, WTF, DTF, so on and so forth. I try to never use these ever*, because I am almost 48 years old. Granted, some of my fellow late quadragenarians have given in, but I'm holding the line because I'm old school, and I am stubborn.

(For example, I will not use any button other than the "like" button on Facebook. In my opinion, the other options are just unnecessary.)

But maybe I can use OMG. I probably won't, but it turns out this one has been with us a lot longer than most people realize. The first known usage of OMG dates back to 1917.

*record scratch*

So you're probably wondering how I got in this mess. No, wait, wrong record scratch.

That's right, 1917. It was in a letter addressed to Winston Churchill (before he became Winston Churchill(TM)). If you want to see the letter, you can read it here. And it is even more ridiculous than you think it is. Lord Fisher could have written for the Golden Age of comics, he uses so many exclamation marks.

There is no other way to read that letter than very loudly and very quickly, like your life depended on getting it all out within 30 seconds or less. Have the kids been reading Lord Fisher?

Short one tonight. As tomorrow is the last day of my three day weekend, I'm getting exceptionally high tonight. Maybe I'll have something else for you tomorrow.

______________________________________

*I will sometimes use LOL for reasons I'd rather not go into here.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1053: GREATLY EXAGGERATED

 

This was going to be a lamentation on the passing of Jonathan the tortoise, the oldest living land animal on the planet, but holy shit, it turns out that the rumors of his death have been greatly exaggerated. That fucker is still among us!

194 years old. He's old enough to have met Charles Darwin, and the only reason he didn't was because he wasn't on the island yet during Darwin's visit. While the Civil War was going on, this guy was just hanging out, doing whatever it is tortoises do. He's so old he could have met a carrier pigeon. James Madison was the last Founding Father to die, and it was possible that Jonathan could have met him, too.

I can't say it enough. The world is a fuckin' weird place. Jonathan's a baby compared to that one Greenland shark that's almost 400, and those things could possibly live to 500 or older.

So why did I think Jonathan had died? Because of this fucking nonsense. Some asshole posing as Jonathan's vet made the announcement, and because journalism is broken right now, everyone ran with the story without vetting it. (Also, please note that I'm not the only one referencing Mark Twain on this matter. Poking around Google, it looks like maybe I'm not as clever as I think I am. Also, if you read the article, you'll make the pleasant discovery that THIS TORTOISE FUCKS.)

I'd get on my soapbox about how journalists need to slow the fuck down and get accurate stories instead of chasing the ever elusive scoop, but I fell for it, too. I even posted about it on Squitter without investigation. Whoops. Good thing I did my research before I started writing this one. Better late than never.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1052: THE OLD FAMILIAR FEAR

 When I was a kid I was certain we were all going to die in a nuclear conflagration. That was my biggest fear until we collectively seemed to realize, hey, these warheads are a bad idea, let's not do the arms race thing anymore. I haven't been worried about it since.

Until now. The old familiar fear is setting in, and the more this Iran . . . whatever the fuck it is gets ratcheted up, the more I feel its icy fingers on my spine.

Because Hegseth and his Dept. of War Crimes is framing this fight as a Biblical one, and he's trying to get his subordinates to understand that it's good versus evil, God versus Satan type of shit. It sounds a hell of a lot like they're trying to jumpstart the apocalypse. Why wait for a prophecy to come true when you can MAKE IT HAPPEN?

I hope I'm wrong, and I'm taking the Stephen King approach. He once said that he writes things as a form of preventative exorcism. If he writes about something he fears, then it can't happen to him in real life.

So here's my fear, in an attempt at poisoning fate's well. Trump is dying. I mean, politically, but his health isn't doing too good, so maybe literally, too. If he's not going to be around, why should the rest of us get to go on living our lives? And would you look at that? A symbolic date is coming up soon: June 6. I wouldn't put it past him to fire a nuke into Iran at 6 in the morning, local time.

What happens when Putin learns of such a nuke? And what will NORAD do when they notice Putin's response?

I hope I'm wrong.

I hope you didn't read that before going to bed. Goodnight. Sleep tight. Don't let the bedbugs bite.

________________________________________

I didn't come up with the "Dept. of War Crimes." Someone said it recently, and I'm trying to remember who, but it sounded so good I had to swipe it.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1051: THE THINGS I'LL MISS

 Starting Monday, I no longer have to be in the office in Elmhurst two days a week. We've hired so many new people that they ran out of desks, so they're letting us more tenured employees work from home every day of the week. That makes me very happy because it will save me time and money. Time in commuting, so I can sleep a little later, and money because HOLY SHIT gas is fucking expensive, and I have no choice but to use a toll road for my commute.

Well, that last part isn't strictly true. If I don't mind adding a half an hour to my drive time, I can take Roosevelt all the way. And if I don't have money for the tolls, I take Roosevelt, anyway. It's called the Lincoln Hwy out here, but it's 38. Half of that road is one lane in each direction, so it's not fun when you get behind a semi (or, shudder, a line of them). Also, if I'm taking 38 back home, that adds an extra 45 minutes, so . . .

I'll have very little reason to leave my apartment come Monday. It will also be the end of my social life, because work is where 100% of my social life exists right now. That's horrifying, I know. I used to go out nearly every night, or at least on weekends. I might even lose my face to face personal skills. I *do* have them, even with a mountain of evidence to the contrary.

When I was a kid I fantasized about being a hermit. Now I might actually get my wish. It would have been nice to enjoy a youthful solitude, but I was kind of hoping to have a compound by now. Above ground, below, I'm not picky. All I really wanted was a bunker to keep the world away, and enough time to read and write to my heart's content. Is that too much to ask?

One of the cool things about my commute was seeing the natural beauty of the area I live in. DeKalb is a city approximately the population of Elmhurst, but everything else around me is farmland as far as the eye can see. It's nice to drive by the horse ranches and know, hey, if I want to get fresh duck eggs, I can stop by this place over here. I love the rickety, skeletal barns and silos, the countryside boneyards, all of it. I enjoy driving over the Fox River in Geneva because if you look off the bridge in just the right way, you can see what it might have looked like 150 years ago.

I'll also miss listening to Hardcore History on my drive. Those episodes are super long, sometimes 4, 5 even 6 hours, so they're ideal for listening material. I'm almost caught up! Which is great because Dan Carlin is currently doing a series on Alexander the Great, but it's horrible because it takes him a very long time to come out with a new episode. So I'll be waiting months like everyone else for part four of Mania for Subjugation.

The wait, by the way, is ALWAYS worth it.

Working from home is a very good thing. It will solve a few of my problems (and I can put off getting a new backpack now, as the one I've used since my Call One days has a strap that's hanging by a thread), but I'll miss these things. They did, indeed, enrich my life.

The best part of not going to Elmhurst every day and back is, it will dramatically lower the possibility of me getting killed in a car wreck. I'm a speed demon, so the first half of my commute is spent blowing away the other drivers at 100+ mph. It would have only been a matter of time before something happened. I'm an okay driver, but I have one ability that has served me well over the years: I'm very good at predicting what other drivers are going to do. I'm almost as good at reacting to that knowledge swiftly and decisively. Going that fast, though? I'd rather not James Dean myself across 88. I hate driving on tollways, and it would gall me to die on one.

I'm pretty sure I'm destined to go out like the King, anyway. Did you know that one of my nicknames in high school was Elvis?

*clears throat*

Are you lonesome tonight?

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1050: PLAYBOY

 I subscribed to Playboy for many years. I did, indeed, read the articles. And the fiction. The pictorials were nice, too, but I viewed that part as a bonus, not the point. When I had to leave home, I had to abandon many issues, but I went through them all in search of stuff I wanted to keep. Like anything involving Hunter S. Thompson or Stephen King or Chuck Palahniuk or Gore Vidal, etc. I've been going through them in my spare time (what's that?), and since I don't have a lot of time tonight, I thought I'd present a few items of interest for your perusal.

Here's some relevant words from the guys who invented Google. Oh, how the mighty have fallen!

Reading their ideas about advertising makes my skin crawl. To say nothing of their violations of privacy. They've learned from it, I suppose. Now they make you give up your privacy as a term and condition.

On to Hunter S. Thompson and the most grievous thing that a friend has ever done to him:

A crime, I say. A crime.

Speaking of HST, here's his self-assessment:

Too bad he's not around for the current clusterfuck we're all living through now.

Now that Ozzy is gone, why not look back on the time he was asked what he wanted for his funeral?

If there were, Ozzy would have figured it out.

Speaking of a celebrity talking about their own death who is also now dead, let's check in with Robert Redford:

It's good advice.

Lastly (for now), I saw this piece about promising new wild card politicians, and I couldn't help but be surprised that a future president and future VP was on the list pretty much next to each other:

Just about everyone else on the list is no longer in politics.

That will do it for now. As I collect more tidbits here and there, I might post them in the future.

To quote Columbo, "There's just one more thing." A sequel of sorts to last night's GF. The image from that one? Here's an earlier version of that for my grandparents. That's the date they were married. No, it's an artifact from this very universe. Nothing parallel about it:

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1049: WHAT COULD HAVE BEEN

 

When you walk into my apartment, this is one of the first things you would see. This is an artifact from a parallel universe. Travel between universes must be difficult, hence the streak going through the heads of my other me's parents.

Because in that universe? My mom and dad got married. I wonder what that must have been like for that other me. It would have been interesting if they'd actually stayed the course. What happened on that Earth that didn't happen here?

I'm certain other me is completely different from me. He's probably a huge reader, like me. I'll bet he's a writer, too, but I'm thinking he's known for crime novels instead of horror. Not ugly stuff, like Strip, but something more along the lines of a detective series. And I think he's got a mistrust of authority, but it doesn't turn into disgust, like it does for me. I'm also pretty sure he's not nearly as fucked in the head as I am. I'll bet he grew up in a healthy fashion, at least mentally.

I don't think he's an alcoholic. He might even be a straight arrow. I wouldn't be surprised to find that he's a little athletic, and he's probably more of an outdoorsman than I am.

But he doesn't have my siblings. He probably has a set of his own, but they're not the same as mine. My siblings are all technically half-siblings, but we don't look at it that way. I love them all, but I'm worried that they may not even exist in that alternate reality.

And that right there is enough for me to abandon that fantasy. I've raged against reality all my life, but in general I'm satisfied with how I turned out. For all my mental issues and physical problems and the emotional rollercoaster that being me entails, I'm happy with who I am, darkness and all. Do I wish certain things about me were different? Sure. But I'm not going to demonstrate the uselessness of wishing in one hand, shitting into the other.

I find this to be an unusual artifact, nonetheless. Look at the date. Mom was just about to graduate high school, and Dad still had another year to go. I'd make my debut three years later, so I wasn't even a twinkle in their eyes.

When I was a kid I used to get angry all the time over how cheated I'd been by life because my parents had separated before I was born. I wanted to know what it was like to be raised by two parents at the same time. I knew that in that situation I wouldn't have gone through some of the horrors I did, the ones that robbed me of a healthier mindframe, the horrors that robbed me of being a healthier human being in general.

I let it go finally a few years back when I realized, hey, I really enjoy my own company. Maybe I didn't get as fucked up as I thought I did. I look back at those times, and I read the notes that my mom and dad wrote to me, and I can feel the love radiating off the pages. I lucked out. They could have been twisted, vile creatures.

Now I look at their pictures from before I was born, and I wonder what kind of people they were. What went through their minds when they looked into each others eyes? What they felt when they watched the news or went to school or hung out with their friends. How did they meet? What went wrong?

Who were they before they became Mom and Dad?

I can't ask them. They're both gone.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1048: MY KINGDOM FOR A BACK SCRATCHER

 

Here's something you might not know about me. I constantly need a back scratcher. I have a very itchy back. No, it's not a matter of not washing my back. I have a brush, for Pete's sake. I don't know what it is, but I constantly need to scratch my back. I have a back scratcher in my front room. I have one in my bedroom. I have one at work. Or, at least, I *did* have one at work.

It fell to pieces except for one length which just isn't long enough to reach the places I itch the most. I still desperately tried to use that, mostly to no avail, and I finally came to the conclusion that I just needed to spend the money on a new one. But where do you get a back scratcher?

Mine all came from Grandma. The one I used at work had been the one she used near the end of her life when she sat in the living room all day and watched TV (if we were lucky). But now I had to get a new one. I did what any modern person would do: I went to Google.

I ordered a back scratcher from Target using a gift card I'd gotten, oddly enough, at work. But then, for a reason that could not be articulated to me, they canceled my order. Seriously, no representative I spoke with knew why. And no, I couldn't reorder it.

Well fuck. I didn't want to have to do this, but I'll get it from Walmart. The store didn't have it, but they could ship it to me for free. I ordered it from them.

And much to my horror, it got canceled. Again. What the fuck? Did they not make back scratchers anymore?

I hit my five year anniversary at work, so they gave me an Amazon gift card. Time to try Bezos. I ordered it from them, hoping the third time would do the charm, fully expecting to learn that they'd canceled this one, too.

Finally, after struggling with this for AN ENTIRE FUCKING MONTH, I got my back scratcher today. I know this sounds like a weird thing for me to complain about, but why did it have to take that long? Am I being unreasonable in wanting to legally purchase a back scratcher? I probably could have gotten a gun a lot faster.

Anyway, here's an odd question. Do any of you have any Public Storage real life horror stories? I'm thinking of maybe being a journalist again. Let me know if you want to talk about that.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1047: AGAIN?!

 Today there was another fuckin' art heist in the news. AGAIN.

I sense a pattern. And I would not be surprised to discover that these stolen works are all going to an oligarch auction. They're the only fuckers on the planet right now with the money to afford the merchandise. And holy shit, are they rolling in dough right now. The Trump presidency has served its purpose: to make the rich richer beyond their wildest jerkoff fantasies.

Since they suddenly have a bunch of money, why not splurge on original artwork by the masters? The museums won't sell? Well, fuck it. Let's get someone to steal all this shit, and we'll pull our puds in a wallet-measuring contest over it.

Who's going to stop them?

Do you think Peter Thiel has cockslapped the Mona Lisa? Is it possible that Larry Ellison masturbated to the Venus de Milo? Or on her? Has Zuck marveled at the weirdest Picassos and thought, man, those are so realistic, so I must have them on my walls to remind me about what humans are like?

I'm going to uncharacteristically leave Musk alone on this one. He strikes me as someone who does not give a single solitary fuck about art.

Hell, maybe the Mona Lisa in the Louvre isn't the real one. Maybe it's a dummy and the real one is in Bezos's underground compound. At least it will be safe when we launch mutually assured destruction later this year when WWIII isn't going so well.

By this point, I kind of look forward to it. At least everyone will calm the fuck down.

And if, by some miracle, I'm horribly mutated into a 'Fifties SF nightmare monster instead of being vaporized or poisoned by radiation, I'll do my best to meet Trump when he emerges from his bunker. I hope you all will do the same.

Yes, I've been depressed. Why do you ask?

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1046: I PLEDGE ALLEGIANCE TO THE FLAG . . .

 . . . of the United States of America, and to the republic, for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

I quoted that from memory even though I haven't said those actual words since I was in school. If you're my age, you probably have it memorized, too. I checked to see if kids are still required to say it every morning in school, and most states do require it. Some have it play over the speaker, and the kids can choose to say it or not. But for the most part, a lot of kids still have to say it.

Wink, wink, nudge, nudge, say no more.

I'm going to skip pondering what the definition of "all" is for the moment. I'm thinking more of the people who think of America as the land of the free, where we don't have a ruler who dictates our beliefs to us, and we don't have government officials brainwashing us with propaganda.

And yet here's the Pledge of Allegiance.

With most pledges, you only have to say it once, and you're done, right? When the president, for example, is sworn into office, he doesn't have to do that every day. He just does that once. And yet here, where we supposedly have no propaganda for our own citizens, we had to recite this every day we were in class as children.

Do you know how brainwashing works? Repetition is a key ingredient.

It's how politicians get away with blatant lies. Keep telling the lie, and it will eventually stick. That's what Trump and his bootlickers and sycophants are banking on with their lies about what's going on in Iran. More importantly, though, is his attempt at controlling his legacy.

Journalism is the first draft of history, as the saying goes. It *is* where we get most primary accounts from, aside from the journals of those involved, so controlling that first draft is essential to making sure you're remembered not just fondly but with beatific reverence.

It's impossible to escape propaganda. Every country does it, and we're no exception. But we should at least try not to be influenced by such things. What happens to people who are constantly high on their own supply?

Words of wisdom, Linus. Words of wisdom.

A good start would probably be dispensing with the need for a Pledge of Allegiance. Is that even binding? I imagine not. If you can't sign a contract when you're underage, you shouldn't have to make pledges like this until you're old enough to understand it. I get the thinking. You gotta get 'em when they're young and impressionable.

Which is possibly a thought Jeffrey Epstein had on more than one occasion. Do we really want to equate our methods with his?