GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1098: A WINDOW INTO THE PAST

 I woke up this morning to a Facebook message from one of my cousins on my mom's side. It contained two video clips labeled Thanksgiving 2003. She's the archivist for our family when it comes to videos, and much to my surprise I found myself looking at video of Grandma and Gramps for the first time in a very long time.

The only footage I have of them is on 8 mm film. Actual film, with sprockets and everything. I also have the projector we used to watch them on when I was a kid. As far as I know, the projector still works. The bulb is burned out, though, and they don't make 'em anymore, so I figured I'd never see video footage of them ever again.

It was a delight. Grandma hated having her picture taken under any circumstances, so in the video you can see her having a conversation with my cousin while facing Gramps. When she turns and sees the camera, a cross look comes over her face, and she holds up a hand to cover herself.

That gesture alone brought back memories that I never expected to think about again. It was also great to hear Gramps's voice again. The film that I have doesn't have audio. so I figured I'd never hear him again. Ever. And here was his voice.

I always say that the past is never far behind. I'm usually referring to big picture things, not anything like this, but this morning? The past was the present. It was like I was living it again for just a brief moment, and that was worth a great deal to me.

I don't remember the apartment we were in at the time, though. My aunt lived in a lot of places. My favorite was when she lived above the pizza place by the tracks in downtown Elmhurst, because whenever we got together there, we just had to walk downstairs to get dinner and bring it back up. It was called Two Brothers from Italy, and they were still there the last time I checked. (That apartment was also the first time I saw a bidet in real life.) But this place in the video? No recollection, and I hadn't begun drinking in earnest yet. The guy my aunt used to date was in the video, too. I recently came across a picture of a bunch of us with him and was trying to remember his name. Weird that he came up twice in my life recently.

And then there's the footage of me. I weighed 306 pounds at the time, so I didn't enjoy the reminder of what I looked like back then. Whenever I go to see my podiatrist, I sit in a chair that can accommodate perhaps two of me sitting side by side. I think, were I to sit in that exact same chair as the 2003 version of me, I might feel a little claustrophobic.

Despite that, it was good looking through a window into the past, where I got to see my grandparents again. Too bad my mom wasn't there. Back then she wouldn't have been too far down the road that eventually killed her. But since my brothers weren't in the video, I assume they were with my stepfather, their dad. It would have been nice to see her again, too. Ah well.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1097: PLAYBOY 4: TRUMP VS CUBAN

 Back when I was a subscriber, Playboy interviewed both Donald Trump and Mark Cuban (separately over the course of years, I should add). Here are a few highlights that I thought you might be interested in.

I wonder if Hochman is still "comfortable" with Trump. Also, "sumptuous" is possibly the grossest way to refer to Trump's office. But the part about him being enthralled with himself is by no means a stretch of  my imagination. The Duke of Mammon only thinks about other people when he's in a room with an attractive blonde woman, and it's not because he's considerate.

How's the Taj Mahal doing these days?

That was probably the extent of it back then, but now I want to know who does his combover. Ever watch Penn & Teller's Bullshit? There was an episode on hair featuring a Vegas magician with the most elaborate combover ever. I suspect Trump might use that guy. I mean, Trump knows Penn, so . . .

He keeps talking past tense here. I think he's still a brat, which is a little weird considering how, in the 2024 election, it was his opponent that kept getting called a brat. But did you notice the lie he told in this answer? He lies so often that it's hard to catch them all, but he just claimed to not be violent, yet he gave one of his teachers a black eye?

Everything you need to know to understand this piece of human offal is right here. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: if Fred Trump had only told his son that he loved him, we wouldn't be going through this fucking disaster.

This interview was in 2003 or 4, so he really hasn't changed all that much. He's been using the same tactics all these years. Also, there's that V word again. I've listened to a lot of Washington insiders who used to work for him talk about the experience, and they all agree: if Trump doesn't get his way, and he's not in front of a camera, he throws a temper tantrum, which I think is a more accurate term than "controlled violence."

That part about the Guinness Book of World Records is true. He was very, very briefly listed for this comeback. However, per Politico, they dropped it a year later because the idea of a comeback "was subjective and not standardizable across the globe." I wonder how he feels about no longer having that record. Is he even aware of it?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! If you're wondering what my laughter is in reference to, look up how that foundation is doing these days and, uh, why it doesn't exist anymore.

I do believe him when he says he's never had booze or drugs. I even believe the coffee thing. He gets his caffeine from Diet Coke instead. The good news is, when we get to the Nuremburg part of this shitshow, he can't say, hey, I was drunk at the time. Or, I was high at the time. All of this madness is him. Sober. No excuses to save him from being found guilty. Also, why are you talking to people who are fucking on a table in front of you? They're busy, and that's rude.

So. How's that call to Saudi Arabia going?

I would pay good money to see that clown doing his jerking-off-two-tall-invisible-men dance while listening to Eminem.

Hm. Something sticks out in that block above. What could that possibly be? When you see it, please join me in wondering where *that* Donald Trump went. Oh right, he never existed. This is just more bullshit.

I'm just going to let that one stand on its own. Because holy shit, that is a staggering level of hypocrisy. I mean, he had no way of knowing that one day he would be in such a leadership role, but still, if you're going to talk about how the world should be, and then find yourself in a position to make those changes, and you do the exact opposite? I don't believe in Hell, but I'm pretty sure that if Hell existed, it would be built specifically for people like Donald J. Trump.

And don't get me started on John Trump.

(I guess I didn't let that one stand on its own. Ah well.)

Oh yeah, I almost forgot. This was Trump vs. Cuban. Don't worry, there aren't a lot of excerpts from Mark Cuban's interview.

There are two things happening here. Remember those insiders I mentioned earlier? They all agree that almost all of Trump's bullshit is performative. Behind the scenes he's polite, and he always apologizes for giving someone a hard time publicly. So if he's on TV calling you names, he usually gives you a call after to say, hey, sorry for all of that, but you gotta play the game.

The second thing is, of course, Trump's love affair with himself. I'm sure Cuban has a high opinion of himself. He's a billionaire. It comes with the territory. But it's refreshing to see someone on his level note this about Trump.

This probably goes without saying, but this was before streaming was a thing. This idea was clearly ahead of its time. Playboy was right in this case. It was too early. There's more:

Here is the key difference between Trump and Cuban. Trump clearly cares more about money than anything else on the planet except maybe for himself. That makes him like almost every CEO on the planet. To them, the purpose of a business is to make money. And while it's true that this is *a* purpose, it's not *the* purpose.

Cuban understands the latter. He concerns himself with the consumer experience. A business exists to solve a problem for the consumer. The byproduct of that is putting money into the hands of the business. Also note that he wants to cut the theaters in on the profits. If Trump had come up with this idea, sharing the profits would be unthinkable to him. That's why, if I had the choice to work for either Trump or Cuban, I would pick Cuban. Trump's employees get yelled at. Cuban's employees make money. Just ask the people who worked for him at MicroSolutions. How many of them walked away from that business as millionaires? Almost all of them.

I'm ending on this note because Cuban is warning businesspeople not to buy their own line of bullshit. Sure, it's easy to look back on that particular bubble and say, yeah, it was destined for failure. Yet here we are again, except this time the bubble is AI. The techbros are drunk off their own shit, thinking they have the ability to print money.

Except . . . do you keep an eye on the Stock Market? I do, enough to know that facts are meaningless in the current market. Confidence is the only thing holding it up. What's the percentage of the market that's currently propped up by AI technologies? I've seen numbers ranging from 30-45%. Even if it's closer to the former, what happens if that bubble pops?

I think we're about to have another depression, one that will put the Great Depression to shame. I know in America we're trying to turn the clock back to when heterosexual rich white men held all the power, not just most of it, but can we not rewind to the 1930s, please?

I'm at a loss as to why we don't do what we usually do: wait for someone else to figure out the AI thing, then kill them and steal it and claim it as our own. We'd save a lot more money that way. Although to be fair, we don't have a lot of weapons right now due to our quixotic Iran jerkoff fantasies*, so if China beats us to the punch, we probably wouldn't be able to take them in a fight.

All right, that's all for now. The Playboy series will continue. I already have a new batch of shit, including a Dustin Hoffman fart joke told by John Malkovich, but we'll get to that at some point in the future. I'll try to make tomorrow night's GF shorter.

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*I think we went into Venezuela first because Trump's administration knew, 100%, that we'd be in Iran for months, if not years. The oil in Venezuela is supposed to tide us over until we conquer the Strait of Hormuz. And by "us" I mean US oil companies.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1096: RIP ZEB CARTER

I'm sitting here trying to remember the first time I met Zeb Carter. I was almost certainly drunk at the time. I'm sure it was at a party thrown by the Forced Viewing folks, Jason and Jori. They threw great booze parties. It was probably 15 years ago? Maybe longer? But he and I have had many great conversations over the years. He wrote for Forced Viewing under the name Blick Tolkien, and almost all of his reviews were Walking Dead related. I probably haven't seen him in two years, but every time we met I always asked him about his fucked up superhero anthology. It was a work in progress for him for nearly the entire time I knew him. I liked to rib him a little over it (and even offered to help him with it!), but now I can't believe I'll never get to have that conversation with him again.

I heard this morning that he passed away. He was a friend, but he also had a special place in my heart because of one night/early morning four years and 53 days ago. By that time I knew I was a full-blown alcoholic, something I'd been denying for many years, and my life had gotten so lousy that I found myself in a state of emergency over what to do about it. I called everyone I thought might pick up, but it was one or two in the morning, so it was a lost cause.

I remembered Zeb had said something about always being there if I needed to talk, so shot in the dark, I reached out to him on Facebook Messenger, and he dropped everything. He got on a video call with me, and without his help, I don't think I would have called Sonny next, and Sonny was the guy who got me into Recovery Centers of America. I'm reasonably sure that I'm alive today because of Zeb.

And now Zeb's gone, and I'm absolutely stunned to say that. This is a man who sat in my lap on several occasions. If I ever get back to one of those Halloween parties, I'm not going to see you there. I won't get to ask you about that anthology. Well fuck.

Rest in peace, Zeb.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1095: JOHN'S APARTMENT, PART 3

 [This happened before the exterminator came by to spray my apartment down.]

I'd just finished filling the left side of the kitchen sink so I could soak my dirty dishes overnight. I went to my bedroom, took off my clothes except my boxers and sat on my bed, hand on my laudanum bottle for my last dose of the night. Then, I realized I'd forgotten something in the kitchen, so I put my slippers on and went back out. As soon as I turned on the light, I saw three roaches on the floor. They're smart, I think. They know all the signs that point to my bedtime and stay out of sight until they see them.

Except I forgot something tonight. I felt cornered, like a rat, no weapon, so I took a fighting stance and waited for the end of my life. Because I wasn't going to die alone tonight, no sir.

All right, I stomped two of them. The third got away. And that's when I noticed a fourth chilling on my kitchen counter. The only thing I had close to me was the dish soap bottle, so I grabbed that and brought it down on the cockroach with the fury of a thousand suns.

And missed. Little fucker jumped into the full kitchen sink and evaded me. I figured he'd make his escape while I was asleep. Or I'd find him the next day when I did my dishes.

Fast forward to the next morning. I'd forgotten about the roach by then, so it was a surprise when I found his corpse floating at the top of the water. Huh. I didn't know cockroaches could drown, but there it was, the evidence before my eyes.

I did my dishes--very, very diligently--and when I unplugged the drain, I said to the dead roach, "So long, sucker." I checked to make sure it did, indeed, swirl away.

I then went about my day. It was maybe an hour later when I realized, you know, it seems really absurd that roaches can drown. Aren't they supposed to be able to survive a nuclear holocaust? A little water shouldn't be able to kill a survival machine like that. So I Googled it, and much to my relief, the first thing I saw was that yes, cockroaches can drown.

My victory was snatched away instantly by the second sentence: that roaches can drown, but it's very hard for them to do so. They breathe through holes in their bodies instead of a mouth, and they have the ability to close those holes and survive without oxygen for 45 minutes. So they are very good at playing possum. How likely was it that the roach had actually drowned in my sink?

Out of curiosity I went back to the kitchen JUST IN TIME TO SEE HIM RISING FROM THE DRAIN LIKE JASON FUCKING VOORHEES. But I think he was wearing the hockey mask just to intimidate me. I brought down the dish soap bottle again and watched with satisfaction as bits of the little bugger came off and stuck to the bottom.

Victory, yes. But for how long? FOR HOW LONG?

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1094: JOHN'S APARTMENT, PART 2

 

I usually wake up sometime between 3 and 4 in the morning because I have to take a piss. The problem is, I can't go back to sleep after that, so I'm pretty much up after that.

Two weeks ago I got up for the usual. As I went, I blew my nose and dropped the tissue into the toilet, where I promptly peed on it. Then, as I washed my hands after, I glanced up and saw a glob on the spot where my neck and chest meet. What the fuck? Did a booger escape the Puffs?

I peered closer at the mirror and discovered, much to my horror, that it was not an errant clump of nasal beef. That was a dead fucking cockroach.

Oh yeah. They've been back for a bit. They trickled back in, but now I have to kill about a half dozen of them before I've even made breakfast.

Not too long ago I went out to run some errands to see the cops evicting my downstairs neighbor. They were wearing protective suits. One of them advised me to stay away from the stuff they were carrying out. "You don't want to get any bugs on you."

My dick shriveled at that, thinking BEDBUGS. No, we were later notified that she was the source of the cockroaches, and that the exterminator would be coming by periodically to spray everyone's apartments for the next month or two.

A couple of days before I saw that dead roach on me, the guy came and sprayed the kitchen and bathroom. The day after I'd noticed that they were now hanging out in my bedroom. I keep my Mom's ashes on a small table next to my bed, and while I was having a word with her (as I sometimes do), I noticed one of the little bastards crawling around next to her urn.

Back to the mirror. I scraped and scrubbed, and that clump of bug body just didn't want to come entirely off. I figure I must have rolled over on him in my sleep, and he'd just sorta . . . stuck around for hours before I woke up. It did not bring me joy to know these fucking things are so brazen that they'd crawl into bed with me in it.

So yeah, ever since then I've occasionally woken up to feel a tickle on my back. My first thought used to be, oh, that's just sweat, I'll wipe it off. Now, after feeling something tickle my finger a couple of times, my first thought is, oh, for fuck's sake.

They're starting to thin out. I only saw two of them this morning when I went for my 3:15 am Morning Piss (TM). Maybe we're finally on our way to being rid of them once and for all.

Because one time, while I was heading out the door to go to work, I saw three roaches between the door and the frame at eye level. I had to turn back, get my Raid, and return to spray them with all the force I could muster, like Hunter S. Thompson with a can of mace and Nixon within arm's reach. I'd rather not have to do that again.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1093: AN OPEN LOVE LETTER TO ANDERSON'S

 My favorite indie bookstore is Anderson's, specifically the one in Naperville. They have other great locations, but this is the original and best. It's a great place to find new and interesting books (and to support bookstores that aren't Amazon or B&N, etc.). It's also a business owned by women, so if you're desperate for such a place, look no further. And yes, they do have an online store, and you can buy signed copies there. Hell, it looks like Chuck Wendig is going to be there tomorrow. I wish I could make it. Now that I live in DeKalb, my visits are unfortunately going to be few and far between going forward.

Merely walking in the door is enough to raise my spirits. My first stop is the fiction section, but I'm likely to spend the most time in the biography and nonfiction section.

There is a high possibility of finding books signed by the author. They're still at cover price. And you never know who might sign there. I have books autographed by Andrew McCarthy, Henry Winkler, Curtis Armstrong (Booger himself!), David Spade, the list goes on.

And they're legit. These celebrities have all signed here. (Or, because there's more capacity, at the nearby college instead.)

I try to go to as many signings as possible. I love meeting authors here. I've gone to see Clive Barker, Chuck Palahniuk, Chuck Tingle, Irvine Welsh, Cory Doctorow, Sarah Pinborough and so on. I also saw Weird Al and Penn Jillette, among others from different media there. If I was so moved, I could have met former President Bill Clinton (at the college, of course) when he was on tour with James Patterson.

I am much more of a worldly man because of Anderson's. This is my love letter to them. Thank you for years of service. I wish many more on you.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1092: A FAMILY DINNER

 One of the most frustrating things about going through Grandma's photo collection of the family over the century (and I mean that literally; many of them go back to before 1926) is that she didn't write on the back of all of them. I have so many pictures of strangers I am probably related to, but I have no way of knowing who they are. I've sent them to my aunt, the only person on Mom's side of the family older than me, and she's unfortunately at a loss most of the time.

I've had to let that go. On the off chance that someone else posted their copies of the pictures online, I ran them through Lens, and I still came up with nothing. Ah well.

One of the good things of going through this collection, though, was finding a treasure trove of letters from Gramps's cousin, Bessie, which oftentimes also had photos in them, although there were a few that were photocopies of the originals. So now I have a bunch of other pictures of strangers I'm probably related to, and I'll never know who they are.

But then I found this utter gem of Gramps's family taken back in Greece:

I don't know who almost all of these people are, but I recognized a few faces. I'll point them out below:

This is my great-grandfather, Nick Kyriakopoulos, Gramps's dad. This is one of two pictures I have of him before he was horribly burned in a fire that happened at his shoe repair shop in Chicago.

That little girl is Gramps's sister, Helen. I also have a few of her letters, in addition to her last will and testament, of which Gramps was named executor. She also sent him lots of info copied from medical journals about colitis, which he suffered from back when I was in college. Oddly enough, the gastroenterologist who helped cure him of that is currently *my* gastroenterologist.

[Side note: One of Helen's sons, like me, is named after Gramps. I found a picture of him sitting with Gramps in front of a coffee table with some books on it. Among them is The Anarchist's Cookbook, so he and I may have more in common than who we were named after.]

This little baby will grow up to be Bessie Gruning, Gramps's cousin who sent this package to him. She is flanked by her parents. I believe his name is Harry, but I'm not 100% sure.

That is my great-grandmother, Jennie Demeroukas. She couldn't read or write, and when she had to sign things, she had to "make her mark," meaning she would write an X or a + on the dotted line. I have one paper she signed with her thumbprint. She couldn't speak English, only Greek.

These two are George and Mike Demeroukas, Gramps's uncles. They, too, would come to America, and I found pictures of George at Grandma and Gramps's wedding. Mike was Gramps's godfather. I have a separate picture of him holding baby Gramps with that info written on the back.

Not even Bessie knew who all of these people were, but she did have a few notes with names. Even though I have some names for the faces, I still don't know how they're related to me. But then I saw she made a note that one of the people in this picture was her grandma. Meaning, Gramps's grandma.

MEANING MY GREAT-GREAT-GRANDMA.

Holy shit! I raced to find which one she was. I look like Mom. Mom looks like Gramps. I discovered Gramps looked like his mom. I wanted to know if she looked like *her* mom. I wanted to see how much of me I could find in her. And what did I see when I got to the position she was supposed to be in?

Dammit! Now I'll never know! Although I could see a cheek that looked kind of like what Gramps had going on when he was in his old age. I had to assume that Jennie looked like her mom, but I would never know for sure. Disappointed, I got back to looking through the rest of the letters Bessie wrote to Gramps.

There were quite a few of them, so it took me a week before I found this picture in one of them:

You'll recognize George and Mike in the back and Helen on the bottom left. It's hard to tell from the other picture, but the woman standing above her is Jennie. And who is that sitting in the chair?

According to the back of the photo (in Helen's handwriting, by the way) it states that this is her grandma. My great-great-grandma. Helen had sent this to Bessie, who had sent it to Gramps, but Helen had written on it, "Her name's Bessie, too."

Bessie Demeroukas, my great-great-grandma. I think that's about as far back as I can get to see the evolution of faces that would eventually become mine. Photography goes back a lot farther than most think, but it was usually reserved for important or rich people. Maybe one day I'll discover more, but wow. I can't believe I managed to find a picture of my great-great-grandma.

That baby she's holding? In case you were wondering, that's Gramps.