GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #967: WHAT IS DEATH?

1

 I've often talked about my beliefs regarding the afterlife here, but I have a theory as to what happens during the process of your death. NDE people talk about the tunnel, floating outside your body and even having your life flash before your eyes. Something certainly happens. Your body floods with endorphins to possibly ease your passage, but what do you experience?

I think it would be a lot like the world I lived in for two weeks while suffering alcohol withdrawals for the first time.

I did not know that was what had happened. Instead I found myself living these odd scenarios, which I believe I've discussed here before. They were dreamlike, but I didn't doubt it was reality at any time, much like in dreams. It felt weird but very real.

So I think that's what we go through when we die. Unless you get shot in the head. It's hard to produce endorphins when the brain that gives that order is sprayed out on a wall or on the sidewalk.

Obviously you won't live in that fantasy forever. The endorphins only last so long, so I think it will fade slowly until you rejoin the darkness you left when you were born.

It sounds kind of pleasant. Just don't live the kind of life where death might destroy your brain, that's all.

2

There's another option. I once mentioned my argument against the afterlife, which was, you now have eternity to do all the things you wanted to do. OK, fine. I've read all the books, seen all the movies, heard all the music, and I still have eternity left? There's only so much of that I go over again before I go crazy and want the afterlife to be over. It didn't make sense to me.

But I thought a little more about this, and what if that's what you need to get you ready to rejoin the primordial ooze and continue the cycle of life? What if the afterlife breaks you down so much it destroys you, drives you crazy, removes the very idea of you. And then it's, as Metallica once said, "Back to the front!"

I can see that, too. It's hard to fit an individual back into the building blocks of life without destroying what makes one individual. If that's true, the universe is even more heartless than I thought.

3

I didn't intend to tackle The Biggest Subject tonight, so I'm sure I'll return to the usual madness tomorrow night. Sleep tight.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #950: FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE

 A while back my stepmom sent me a note from my dad. He'd been thoughtful enough to leave messages to all his loved ones in the event of his death. I thought it would be a good idea to do the same, so I spent some time a couple of weeks ago doing just that.

Have you ever written something meant to be read after you're dead? Mark Twain demanded that his autobiography go unpublished until a hundred years after his death to ensure that everyone he wrote about would be dead. It's not quite the same thing, though, when you're writing something for a specific person to read.

The first thing I noticed was the list of regrets I'd built up without ever realizing it. I have more regrets than I ever thought I would, and I'm not a regretful guy. Not usually. But it was odd how quickly they came pouring out of me when I started writing them down. I was surprised to find I was tearing up while writing some of these. I certainly didn't expect that.

Actually, I *have* written something before meant to be read after my death. I wrote a final GF for you all to be posted as a last message. It didn't feel quite the same, though, as writing to specific people. I hope I've made it easy for my survivors to find everyone I wrote to. These are, after all, physical letters in actual envelopes.

Nature turns to wrapping up another cycle of its life. The leaves fall dead, and the trees are lined with snow. The earth curls inward. The creatures sleep. The end of the year approaches, and we wrap up everything we can. Everything we can't? That's next year's problem.

And yes, I'm wrapping up Goodnight, Fuckers for the year. Next week is Thanksgiving, so my writing vacation officially begins once I post this. (Kind of. I still have GMF on Sunday.) I'll see you all in 2025. I fucking hope. And it's got to be better than 2024. It can't possibly be worse.

Can it?

(Cue the apocalypse . . .)

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #904: DEAD AND HATING IT

 I think about the nature of the universe often. I have ever since I was a child wondering what the universe looked like before the universe existed. And what it looked like before that other thing existed. Etc. I wonder if we're in the Matrix at times, but if that were true, nothing would have real stakes. So it's a wonderful nihilistic approach, but it's not for me.

We're all dead and in Hell? That's not a very original idea, but it's one that makes sense to me at times. Sometimes I think we're all dead, and the thing we call life is us watching the lives we led unfold before us, like watching TV instead of living life. It would explain why the world is such a terrible place. We all have to go through Hell to get to Heaven, right?

Maybe. Or maybe I'm a little high and exposing you to my inner thoughts. If that's the way it is, I find comfort in that. I usually find comfort in the idea that when we die, we're gone. To go on living after death forever and ever would bore the shit out of me, and I'd not cope well with it. But if we did go on living, it would be nice to put all the misery and woe behind us and make time for only future things.

All the same I'd much rather have pleasure while I'm here rather than later. I'm happy every once in a while, but for the most part my life is a slog, and time doesn't move fast enough to get past the torturous parts.

So I like to think we're all dead sometimes. It helps knowing that you're already gone. It makes life less painful.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #866: I'M STILL HERE?

 When I was a child I thought I would live forever. And then my best friend died, and Mom explained death to me in a way that perhaps no parent should. "When you die, you go in the ground and get eaten by the worms."

And look at me now.

After that I've never felt very long for the world. During high school I got it into my head that I was going to die at 48. I changed my mind and lowered it to 46. And there it remained for a few years. Around the time I started drinking and exploring a more social side of my life I realized that if I continued in the same fashion I would live to 40, and that's it. People would ask me what I would do if I somehow lived to 41. I advised them glibly that I would kill myself at 1:59 am on July 25, 2018. My reasoning? I was born at 2 am on the dot. I didn't mean it, but I said it as seriously as I could so whoever asked me *had* to wonder if I was telling the truth.

It was a different world.

And suddenly, magically, I turned 41. As of this writing I have less than a month before my 46th birthday. That will put me within seven years of the age Mom was when she died. I felt that I could beat that score. I believe I said that during the GF I wrote last Monday.

So when I found myself in the ER, waiting for my room in the hospital to be ready, thinking I might have a tumor in my small intestine, things got a little grim for me. I felt like it really was the end, and I wasn't going to beat Mom's record. And yes, I did come up with a story idea, but that's not all I did as I rested in the darkness, morphine calming the screaming bastard in my lower back.

I thought about all the people who needed me to be around, and I thought about ways to tell them that I wouldn't be there. I felt especially bad for the brother who lives with me. He can't afford to keep living here without me. I thought about things I wanted to tell my loved ones before the end.

But it wasn't all doom and gloom in that room (ah jeez, someone call Dr. Seuss). I wondered, what if it's nothing? Or what if it's something that can be easily dealt with? What if this isn't the end?

I couldn't just keep doing business as usual, that's for sure. I don't know how the rest of you view me, but my life is fairly pathetic. It's pretty much work, then tasks around the house, then hang out watching movies and shows while getting high and waiting for bedtime. Get reading and writing in whenever I can. I used to have a rich social life. It's dried up for a variety of reasons, but one of them is that people think that since I'm no longer drinking, I no longer want to hang out. It's wrong, but here's the thought process: "Hey, all we do is drink at bars. He probably doesn't even want to see a liquor bottle. Let's not invite him for his own good." I can and have spent time in bars without drinking. Without even being tempted to drink. It's actually kind of fun because I was usually the drunkest person in the room. It's fun to see other people get fucked up.

But that's not what I wanted to talk about tonight. Because once you've had a brush with death you can't let the status quo take over again. So I thought about ways to improve my life.

I want to quit caffeine again, but more to the point, I have to stop drinking energy drinks. One positive side effect of not drinking booze is a nearly endless reservoir of energy. I'm bursting with it throughout the day. I used to be able to sit quietly and still. Now I fidget. I try to burn it off by rocking out to music whenever I drive, but it's not enough. The only time I'm tired is when I wake up in the morning. That's when I feel I need the energy drinks, so that's when I drink them. I have to stop that.

I also want to quit Caffeine Free Diet Coke. I'm only down to one or two cans a day, but that might still be too much. It's the most healthy of the soft drinks, but it's still pretty unhealthy. My idea is to spend my days drinking nothing but water. The problem is, when I do that my heartburn returns for some reason. I'll just have to battle it with Tums, I guess. I'm not getting rid of soft drinks all together. I think I'll let myself have them if I'm at a restaurant or at a friend's place for dinner, etc.

But the biggest thing I want to do is get back to working out. I can't work out my entire body. I'll have to cut anything having to do with my legs. Maybe my back, too, although from what I understand there are a few moves I can do with my back that won't impact where I have constant pain. And that pain shouldn't be a problem after Friday, when I'm getting another spinal injection. At least for a while.

Now that I don't have a bed I have the room to work out again. Oh yeah, my bed. After 30 years of service it finally fell apart on me. I flipped and rotated the mattress a lot. Hell, I rotated the box springs, too. Until finally it had to be tossed. I sleep on an air mattress that's honestly more comfortable than that bed was near the end. That bed had lumps and divots. There was only one comfortable place to sleep on it, and that was pretty sweet while it lasted.

Shit. I'll bet my bad back is because of that fucking bed.

The only drawback is, the air mattress runs low around 4 am, which wakes me up. If I'm lucky I can keep my eyes closed and reinflate it and then go back to sleep. I can also do it if I keep only one eye shut. But if both eyes open? The chances drop significantly.

My aunt says she'll buy me a bed for my birthday. I'm going to talk with her about it this week. Heh. I remember when I was trying to get out of the hospital, I sat on the couch looking at the bed. I was begging to get out of here, where I had an actual bed, to go back to my air mattress at home? I guess so.

I also plan to walk more at the forest preserves I frequent. See? I have such wonderful ideas to improve the quality of my life, but whenever I do that? Something horrible happens to me.

Naturally, with my head full of these ideas, I got a call from my GI doctor's office today. He wants to see me ASAP. So much so that he's coming in on a day he usually doesn't. That can't possibly be good news. When I talked to the hospital GI doc she said that she hadn't watched the whole video the camera pill recorded. She said she glanced through key parts of it. Maybe my GI doctor took a closer look? Maybe he found something?

So maybe I should hold off on this stuff for now, at least until after I see him. I've said before, technically this cancer scare isn't over. There's still some stuff to investigate. They scanned my whole body except my head, so maybe that's where the tumor is?

I know it's kind of pointless worrying about it now. Think of this as me whistling past the graveyard. I'll keep you updated on everything.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #770: TOY CRIME STORY WRAP UP

 OK, after all that time, Toy Crime Story is over. I just posted the finale earlier tonight. When I first started posting these chapters I said I'd do a wrap up with a revelation I had recently about the work.

I wrote this one a few years back because I wanted to see if I could do a darker version of Toy Story. I wanted the kid to be murdered and the story would be about whodunit. I didn't realize one thing, however, until I reread the whole thing in preparation for posting it online.

I had no idea why I'd named the kid Joey and the dad Wally until a few months ago. I've mentioned it here before, but the first friend I ever had was a kid named Joey. His dad Wally was friends with my stepdad, which was how we met. I think it explains a lot about me that the first friend I ever had died when I was a child. Joey was chewing on a pencil and accidentally broke a piece off and choked on it. Wally tried to save his life but couldn't do it.

It's how I learned about death and that I would someday die. I asked what happens after death, and mom said, "You go in the ground, and the worms eat you."

Yeah, if you have kids, don't tell them that. It scarred me for life and probably helped make me the way I am today. Maybe that's not entirely bad, but I wasn't off to a good start.

So here I am, probably around my 40th birthday, writing a story about a kid named Joey who dies, and his dad Wally is powerless to save him. How did I not notice that at the time? I mean, I was drinking heavily back in those days. I could put away nearly an entire handle of cheap whiskey a night. But I don't think I was that booze-addled when I wrote this. I don't write while drunk.

Weird, right? Although as I look at Toy Crime Story now, I feel like I was exorcising something, but I have no idea what it was. I think about the Catacombs and Man-E-Faces and wonder if maybe the specter of death was trying to get out of my system, but that seems too obvious. To quote an asshole owl, "The world may never know."

No, not Close Encounters. UHF, pal.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #766: ANOTHER CLOSE BRUSH

 I've had a few close brushes with death. A few times doctors have even told me that I was dying. Once they even loaded me up with Dilaudid to help ease my passage into the next life. But each of those times I wasn't convinced that I was dying.

During the early morning hours today I knew to a certainty that I was dying. I knew there was only one thing that could possibly save me, and thankfully my plan worked, or I wouldn't be here to type this out tonight.

I woke up in the middle of the night because of a light in my room. There was a blinking light coming from my laptop. Ordinarily it wouldn't bother me, but this time, for whatever reasons, it did. I scrounged around my room, looking for something to block it or cover it. When I succeeded, I felt very strange. Like, low blood sugar strange.

I shouldn't have felt it. My blood sugar should have been very high after the dinner I ate last night. But just in case, I tested my blood. It came out to 52, which is not quite disastrously low, but pretty close. So I grabbed the almond M&M bag I kept close by for just such occasions and started eating a few. Except it didn't make me feel normal. It was making me feel worse.

My heart rate zoomed, and I could feel it straining to keep me alive. I found it difficult to breathe. I realized, holy shit, 52 wasn't my final answer. My blood sugar had to be dropping more. So I ate faster until I realized I was still getting worse. The sugar wasn't getting into my blood fast enough.

I wasn't going to make it. I was going to hit zero, and then I'd be dead. Or hopefully I'd just pass out, and the sugar would get into my blood just in time to bring me back. But that was seeming less and less likely.

My mouth was full, and swallowing became very difficult. I only had one chance: to get downstairs and get my brother's help. I stood up on wobbly legs that barely held me up while I went down the stairs, and I had to stop in the kitchen. I called out to him, and while I waited for him, I grabbed a box of Count Chocula and shoveled dry handfuls into my mouth. When he came up and saw what was happening, he went back down and came up with a whole package of Halloween themed Oreos. I sat in the kitchen and ate those until I felt normal again.

What a relief, huh? I was going to live. It would have sucked dying like that. At least with the booze people would have understood. When people asked how I died and were told the 'Beetus, they'd be like, oh, too bad. That's a rough one. He must not have been controlling it all that well.

No, actually, he died of low blood sugar.

Wait, what? He died of *low* blood sugar? How the hell did that happen?

I went back upstairs to my room and decided to watch Upload for a little in an attempt to go back to sleep. AND THEN IT FUCKING HAPPENED AGAIN.

After all the sugar I'd just eaten, there's no way my blood sugar could have been that low still. I tested it again and IT WAS MOTHERFUCKING 50. That couldn't be possible! Unless . . .

How low had my blood sugar gone the first time? Is it possible score negative numbers? Had I actually been to zero and come back a little?

I went back downstairs--on wobbly legs once again, once again trying to catch my breath and not have a heart attack--and I ate the rest of those Oreos. I overcompensated, just in case, and when I woke up this morning I scored 310, so I made sure I wouldn't die of low blood sugar, but that's a wildly high number. If I hit 400, I'd have to go to the hospital. I felt lousy enough to call off work, and I'm out of days, so yeah, this ordeal was pretty fucking bad.

It was the only time I was ever dying that I knew, for sure, I was dying. I felt like I was on a downward spiral, barely holding on by a thread. I felt like I was on the very edge when I sat in that kitchen, fully expecting to collapse and not wake up again, not even in a hospital room. Depending on what stuff of mine you read, Good Morning, Fuckers yesterday morning might have been the last of me you ever heard.

Well, I do have a postmortem GF column prepared in that eventuality, but I never expected it would need to be used so soon.

I lucked out. This time.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #694: THE END IS NEVER CONVENIENT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Raiders (obviously)

2. Last Crusade

3. Temple

4. Dial of Destiny

5. Crystal Skull

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #646: ANOTHER BRUSH WITH DEATH

I took the week off from writing these, so naturally I nearly died on my first day off. Last Monday I almost fell into a coma and died because of something I would have never seen coming.

I remember taking my insulin as directed, so that wasn't the problem. I'd eaten a whole pizza all by myself on Sunday, so in theory my blood sugar should have been high. Not dangerously high, but high enough to make my endocrinologist cringe.

I went to bed at my usual time, but for whatever reason I woke up in the middle of the night, or rather early Monday morning. I felt weird, and I thought maybe it was just the sleeping pills not kicking in. I think I woke up because I was sweating, and I can't sleep when I'm sweating. I tried to go back to sleep, but there was just this feeling in my body that wouldn't let me. It's hard to describe it, but I just knew something was wrong.

It took me too long to figure out, hey, it might be my blood sugar. I reminded myself that it should be high right now, but I decided to check it just in case. As I sat up, my hands started shaking, and I felt a little ill. More than just a little off. And I knew that my blood sugar was low before I tested it. It shouldn't have been, but it was.

I pricked my finger (very different from fingering my prick), and when I saw the blood sugar reading I was shocked. 49 was very, very close to coma territory. If I'd fallen into a coma, I would have died. The only thing that could have saved me is if my brother noticed, but he wouldn't have. At that hour he's in the basement playing online games. He probably would have checked on me at some point on Monday if I hadn't left my bedroom, but by then it would have been too late.

Luckily I keep chocolate near my bed just in case. Something my grandfather once told me to do. My doctors would have preferred it to be bread, but I needed an atom bomb of sugar in that moment. So I gobbled a bunch of almond M&Ms and waited for my body to feel normal again.

That was a pretty close call, but I've been handed a death sentence before. It's like Death isn't even trying. Or maybe I keep slipping through the cracks? No, he's got to be fucking with me by this point, right?

I was once told by friends that, despite my bad habits, I would outlive everyone. Just my luck, they might be right.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #318: IN DREAMS

 To be read to this tune.

Side note before I begin. I used to come up with stupid gimmicks for karaoke nights. One time I dressed as Dean Stockwell in Blue Velvet doing this song, complete with white makeup that for some silly reason stopped at the jawline and didn't continue to the collar, but I was serenading a cardboard stand up of Freddy from Nightmare on Elm Street 5 that my friend Jesse gave me. It went over well, I think. The point was to be entertaining, not to be good.

Anyway, I've been having a lot of dreams lately in which I die in horrible ways. I'm not talking about coming within an inch of dying and then jumping awake with a start. I mean I die in these dreams, and I'm dead for at least a minute before I wake up. If I were superstitious I'd think I was being told something.

To quote Megadeth, I ain't superstitious. Well, not much. Long time readers of these columns may be aware that my grandfather on my mother's side had a lot to do with how I was brought up. He was superstitious as hell. If a black cat threatened to cross his path, and he was driving a car, he would do his best to run it over before it had the chance. He never got one. I think it was just for show, him trying to scare them away, because I remember how he nearly lost it when he accidentally ran his lawnmower over a rabbit hole with grim results. He never walked under ladders (which is actually common sense, as anyone on a ladder was probably repairing something and could drop their tools accidentally at any moment). When my grandmother broke a mirror accidentally, he'd be despondent for days, thinking she would die at any moment over the course of the next seven years.

None of that translated to me. There is one, though, that almost gets me. He was deathly afraid of the number 13. Sometimes, irrationally, it makes me nervous. For most of my life, if I was reading a book, I would not put the bookmark in on page 13 or chapter 13. To be safe, I would wait until page or chapter 15. I've always known that this is irrational, but it was browbeaten into my head by Gramps since I was capable of speaking.

I've more or less broken myself of this stupid fucking habit. When I'm drinking something, I'll swallow by fours or fives so I'll never be left on sip 13. But it's ridiculous, and I recognize that fact. I've beaten this weird superstition, more or less. Every once in a while I'll catch myself avoiding 13, and I'll metaphorically slap myself in the face. But more or less, I've beaten it.

So when I say that I'm not superstitious, I'm 99% certain I'm not.

All in all, what I mean to say is that I doubt there is any force out there trying to send me messages in my dreams. Feel free to point and laugh if I die in the next few days. But I doubt that will happen.

These dreams (or nightmares, even though they are rarely scary) happen maybe twice a week. I'll give you three examples.

Example 1: I'm having a conversation with a friend, and something detonates in the distance. We both look to see what looks, at first, like a brand new sun rising from the earth. And it keeps getting closer and closer until it hits us both, vaporizing us. But I'm still asleep, and I think . . . I'll get to that in a moment.

Example 2: I'm in a taxi going somewhere in the City of Chicago proper. And a laser beam comes down from space and cuts through the road I'm on. The cabbie screams, and I see the laser approach, and I have no way to escape. The laser hits the car first and then me. Everything goes dark, but I'm still asleep, and I think . . . we're almost there.

Example 3: This is from last night. My car breaks down in a town I'm unfamiliar with, and we're hit with a rainstorm with a flood warning. I can't find the mechanic who is working on my car, but I've been hanging out with his kid. This rain is so hard that he suggests we hide out on his school bus. We do this, him in the seat in front of me as we watch the storm get worse. I see a new river running through town, and then comes the massive wave that is taller than most skyscrapers coming at us. It crashes down. I try to put my back against it while protecting the kid, but we both die from the sheer force of the wave. But I'm still asleep, and I think . . .

I think that I'm dead. I don't panic. I know that I owe the universe a death merely by being alive. But all I know is darkness. I'm still conscious, but there is nothing to be conscious of. I can't help but think, is this it? Since my sentience is still alive, I can't help but wait for some kind of afterlife to kick in.

But it never does.

I don't jump awake like when you fall off a cliff and wake up before your body gets destroyed on the rocks below. But my process of waking up is kind of difficult. It feels like I have to wrench myself back to reality. It's a slow process, like maybe I actually did die in my sleep and had to fight for life. I never feel right when I wake up from dreams like this.

I'm sure many of you have opinions about what this means. I ask kindly and politely for you to keep these to yourself. I think I know what they mean. I've been thinking about my own death a lot. When you hit your forties, it's inevitable. That's my theory, anyway.

I think I'm mentally preparing for when the actual day comes. I'm not afraid of death. I used to be afraid of how I'd die, but not anymore. You just can't fear something that will absolutely happen to you someday. You can only accept it and make the most of the time you have. So that's my approach. Never fear the things you don't have control over.