GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #934: A DAY SOAKED IN YOUTH

 Today was the perfect type of day. A sunny day, but also a cool day. You can feel the chill against you, but you can also feel the heat of sunshine on your face, vanquishing it in an instant. Your body feels flush, luxuriant. It's a day soaked in youth.

It brings me back to the end of high school and the beginning of college. I was in shape and attractive enough that gay dudes would hit on me. I had the world ahead of me. I just had to get through the drudgery of school, and then the real world could begin. Get that backup job, but put everything I've got into writing. If I keep getting rejects, well, then, uh, fuck. I'm just not trying hard enough. So I tried harder. Always harder.

It's the kind of day that I would spend in the wilderness. I walked everywhere back in those days, never taking a ginger step because I had two perfectly good and healthy legs, all ten toes present and accounted for. I walked difficult trails at forest preserves for fun. If I was lucky I had a lady friend with me. It didn't happen often, but it did happen more frequently than my high school self would have thought. A cool and sunny day was a lot more fun when you had a warm hand in yours. Or even better if you found a particularly abandoned stretch of forest . . .

The leaves finally changed color and sacrificed their lives for my aesthetic enjoyment. There was a crunch in my step today as I made my way through the parking lot to get my last haircut until spring. As I walked back to the car I felt the cold breath of our mother on my freshly exposed neck, and I traveled in time once again to those days when the crunch of the leaves beneath your feet was fresh and new. Even though at the ripe old age of nineteen you're an old hand. A very old hand, indeed. I already knew the secrets of the world. What else could I possibly need to know?

Never aware that while innocence might be the winged cherub in midflight, experience is a Neanderthal with a big club. It always lurks in the shadows, waiting for the moment to beat some dark and terrible knowledge into you, something that eradicates some previously cherished piece of piece of you.

I came back home, and just as I was about to go back inside I turned back to the world and felt the warmth, the chill. The stuffy house behind me waited, old and decrepit while the sprightly new day danced in the glow of forgotten ecstasy newly discovered.

To quote a great man, "The world has moved on. O Discordia!"

Nostalgia twists the knife, and you feel an ugly disgust with your past self. That motherfucker'd better appreciate what he has. He has a lot more than he thinks. Knowing, having lived it, that the motherfucker in question did not appreciate what he had. He didn't until he started to lose those things. The second rule of Thermodynamics.

The grief for a world lost to time sinks its fangs in, and you suddenly hate the world around you. You want it to perish because goddammit, this can't be the way things are supposed to be. Nothing works, and everything is getting worse. My sacred world was destroyed to pave the way for this ghastly monstrosity?!?!?!?! And then the manifesto starts writing itself. What I would do if they put me in charge . . .

You can't let that happen. You just have to remember that this is the way of the universe. The kids living today will mourn these days when they are adults. And their kids will do the same, as will their kids and so on. The wheel turns. The pendulum swings. What goes around, comes around. We have so many clichés for this, I think, because we have ALL noticed this trend whether we admit to it or not, and we're trying to make a square peg fit in a round hole in our attempt to make sense of it all.

I went back inside, into the stuffy house and away from the youthful vigor of the day. I wanted to go out for a walk and cursed my bad foot, knowing that my days of even going around the block are over. To quote another great man, "So it goes."

There is one thing I'm truly grateful for: humanity's ability to remember so powerfully. It wasn't a thought or an image or a sound that sent me back in time. It was a *feeling* so perfect it can't ever be replicated by the machines we're desperately training for . . . what, exactly? But I could feel the world so strongly in myself that it overwhelmed me. For a moment while I was crossing the parking lot I saw an old Cadillac, and there was no one around looking at their phones. No other cars. No sounds from the present that would seem alien in the past, and I was there. 1999. A world far from perfect, but a world I at least found acceptable. I didn't feel torn apart by everything like I do today. My mind has never been a peaceful place, but there were times when it was a lot less of a storm. The waters were manageable.

But we have those memories, and we have ways to be teleported to them. And that is one of my favorite parts about being alive.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #900: TIME MACHINE

 If I rubbed a lamp and a djinn came out of it, offering three wishes, the first would be for a limitless supply of money. The second would be to never get sick again. The third? No, wishing for more wishes doesn't work. So I have something else I want for that one.

Remember a while ago I begged the universe to send me back to my freshman year of college so I can try at life again? Because I think that would be a good starting point for me to try again. I'd know so much more (and I might be able to skip the money wish if I invested in Apple just before they introduced the smart phone). But I wouldn't want to go back to that time for the wish.

Everyone gets nostalgic, even me. I try to look toward the future as often as possible but even with that mindset I think about the past often. And I'm not talking about capital-H History here. I mean my own life, in particular my childhood before the world was ruined for me by child abuse.

This is a different kind of nostalgia. Those of you my age will know the usual kind when thinking about Thundercats and TMNT and Transformers and 'Eighties horror movies, et al. But when you're just a kid your parents drag you around in their world. Do you, like me, ever feel nostalgia for your parents' youth? Their youth was dying when you were just a kid. The world was moving on, and it was leaving them behind. The world was all but yours at the time.

I remember Mom driving down the road, me sitting in the passenger seat of her Mustang, when I accidentally knocked the cup holder off the window. It was the plastic kind with the tab you slid down into the window trim. I was horrified because it went right out the window. I started crying uncontrollably even when Mom said it was okay, that it was just a cup holder, that we could get another one.

Maybe that's the origin of why I'm almost a hoarder. I sometimes think it was the baseball my dad's parents got me, the one I lost on the Prairie Path, but the cup holder thing happened before that. I'm not too much of a hoarder now, but I still have the impulse. I'm going to have to get pretty tough about it soon.

But that's what I'm talking about. That moment I was in Mom's world, not mine. And I know it sounds crazy to label that incident as traumatic, but I think it really *did* have a say in how I turned out. But I miss her world, the one where she had friends she saw regularly before they stopped coming around. Which coincided with Mom's marriage to my stepdad, not too much of a surprise there.

But I feel a little nostalgia for my stepdad's world, too. When he would drag me around with him to hardware stores and theaters and such, I was in his world, not mine. It wasn't mine yet as we crossed the tracks, him fishing a Winston cigarette out of his shirt pocket with his Zippo from the Army. Though he wasn't Southern he did, indeed, have his name on his belt buckle. For as much self-loathing as he had, he was pretty narcissistic about it.

And then there was Dad's world. When he'd bring me to Dominick's where he worked at the deli, he'd pull lobsters out of the tank with their pincers rubber-banded. I'd touch their weird soft stomachs in wonder. Or when we'd go camping with his Viking pop-up. It had a kitchen in it which he thankfully never used. All cooking during such events was to be done over the campfire. Or the times he'd go to a party because when I was a kid, after his marriage to my first stepmom, it was his world, and he was still making grand use of it. I remember one time my cousin and I slept on one side of the camper. I say "slept," but we were kept awake because the other side of the camper bounced slightly. His world, indeed.

My third wish would be to go back in time and experience living in their world. To experience life before my world started taking over.

I'm kind of surprised that we haven't been kicked out of our house yet. A new bank bought out the bank that owns our house, and they've shown an interest in us again, but we're still here. So I've been going through the house, trying to undo my hoarder-ish ways by throwing out stuff we don't need. Part of that process involves finding caches of photos that Grandma hid all over this house during her last year or so. Many of the photos are of my world, but not all. Quite a few are pictures of Mom's world. Of Dad's world. Of Grandma and Gramps's worlds. But looking at pictures, while amazing, isn't good enough. When you look at old pictures it's easy to think of that old world as being in black and white, for example. Or oversaturated with yellows, browns and greens like photos from the 'Seventies and early 'Eighties. Photos don't do it justice.

I want to immerse myself in that world. Not for long. I wouldn't want to stay there. I think maybe five minutes would work.

When you live a full life it's easy to look around and think of things as permanent. I'll bet the dinosaurs never suspected that they would be wiped out. Just like I'll bet that almost each and every one of you thinks America will go on forever. I know *I* think it will. It won't because that's what the world does. It moves on. The world of my parents is gone as if the Langoliers had eaten it up by the second. *My* world is gone. The generation who would have been my children's age if I had them? Their world is gone, too. If I had grandkids it would be *their* world right now, at least until the world moves on again. Stein's Law: "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop." Not even the planet is permanent. There will someday be no Earth.

Which is why we should all strive for excellence, as Outlaw Vern would say. If all we have is our moment in time, we should make it the best we can.

900 Goodnight, Fuckers columns. When I started these I knew I wouldn't stop, that I'd keep going and going until the world stopped me. The only reason I'm surprised that I made it to 900 is because I'm surprised that I'm still alive. I always figured to die at 40, and I almost did. But before I figured that, I used to think I'd die at 46. I'm 46 now. I was probably wrong about that, too.

Thank you for reading, everyone. Sometimes I idly think I might stop at 1000 if I made it that far. Now that I'm close to that milestone I can safely say I'll keep writing these as long as I keep getting ideas. And one more! The one I wrote for when I die. Nighty-night. See you next week.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #816: THIS ALSO SHALL PASS AWAY

 The older I get, the more I hear people say, "Oh God. I'm so old!" And the funny thing is, I hear people in their fuckin' twenties saying it. Granted, the world is so fucked right now that I'm not surprised they feel old. But I have a theory. People who say they're so old absolutely fucking love saying it. I think deep down they don't actually believe they're really old.

I think I'm old, but 45 isn't that old, big picture. Not only that, but the longer I live, the more I realize that appearance of age has changed drastically since I was a kid. People who were in their sixties when I was a wee lad looked more like they were in their eighties. Sixties looks a lot younger these days than it used to. Not sure what caused that, but people are staying more youthful than they used to. As a result, I think the only people allowed to say they're old are people aged seventy and above.

Conversely, don't ever dare tell a young person that they're young. Young people fucking hate that with a passion. I think it's their urge to grow up and be taken seriously. Young people look even younger to me today. College kids look like junior high schoolers to me. And they will fight tooth and nail to be considered old. Maybe that's why they start saying it in their twenties. It's an attempt to appear more worldly in the eyes of others.

I swear to fuck, youth is wasted on the young. If I knew all the things I do now back when I was still a teenager, I would have maximized my youth to its fullest potential. But I didn't. I was too busy thinking old. But there are things that I was very much aware of back then.

I was one of the very few kids who didn't want to grow up. (Yes, I was a Toys Backwards R Us kid.) I tried to hold onto the things of childhood later than others my age because I knew that the real world would be waiting to chew me up and spit me out, and I wanted to prolong that day for as long as possible. I still played with my GI Joes and Transformers long after I should have. I'd tell you when I stopped, but I'm going to leave that to your imagination. You'd think I was crazy. Considering all the other crazy shit I've said here, that's probably saying something.

I remember the last class I had in high school. I remember looking around, thinking I would never see this place again. I'd graduate, and that was it. When I walked out the main entrance to the buses, then I would no longer be a student. And I have never gone back to York Community High School since graduation. I clutched at these things, trying to stop time from moving so goddam fast. Savoring experiences that no one else ever would simply because I knew I wouldn't have that in adulthood.

When I hit adulthood, I hit pretty hard. I accepted that my world had moved on, and I had to move on to keep up. The world is always moving on. And I think that's what's at the heart of my midlife crisis.

"This also shall pass." Contrary to popular belief that's not in the Bible. It's in Solomon's Seal by Edward FitzGerald. It's probably an old Persian saying, but FitzGerald popularized it. I suppose it's easy to see why so many people think it's biblical. But here's the quote: "The Sultan asked Solomon for a signet motto, that should hold good for Adversity and Prosperity. Solomon gave him, 'This also shall pass away.'" I'm certain it's what Chuck Berry was thinking of when he wrote "Pass Away."

It's possibly the wisest thing someone could say. It's 100% true in the best of times and the worst of times. It was true before humanity rose from the beasts, and it will be true after we're gone.

I want you to think of your favorite toy from when you were a kid. Some of you may even still have it, but I'll bet for most of you it's long gone. Do you long for it? Or do you think, ah, that's just kid stuff. Now hold your most prized possession and know that one day either you will not have it, or it will not have you. You always hope for the former, but the latter is always there, waiting. As Chuck Berry said, "But mortal flesh must come to clay, even this must pass away."

"I'm so old!" Maybe. Maybe not. But the next time someone says that to you, look them in the eye. You'll feel the words are exaggerated frustration, and that there is a gleam of pleasure in that person's eyes. Don't be so quick to age. If you live long enough, you'll get there, and I'll bet not a single one of you will facetiously say you're old. When you say it in the future, YOU WILL MEAN IT. And then there's no turning back. The world will have moved on.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #807: STOLEN

 Its been unseasonably warm lately, but last week there was one night in particular when the temperature was perfect.

It's hard to describe. That night had a certain quality to the air, and it reminded me of when I was young and getting ready to leave home for the evening. There would be adventures, and you really wouldn't know what you'd get up to, just that it was going to be awesome.

A chill to the night air. Nothing excessive. Just slight. It's a spring night stolen from winter. You might not even need a jacket. There are friends waiting at a house party or a bar, or we're just chilling somewhere. Whatever it may be, adventure is in the air.

But I'm 45 now. Adventure still has its allure, but I just don't have the energy to take it on. I felt sad when I realized that I wasn't going out last week, that I was just going to go home and relax and wait for the next day. Because it feels like a missed opportunity. To be young again, to go on said adventures. When those times end, that's when you know you're getting old.

The world has moved on. So have I. O Discordia!

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #569: 37?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

 

Holy shit. I've been writing stories for 37 years. To give you some perspective, I'm 44 years old. That's right. I barely had enough of a conscious life before I decided that writing was what I wanted to do with my life. That's crazy.

I know it's been 37 years because my mom made me date my first story, and that goes back to this day in 1985. To give you an idea of how different the world was then, here is a list of things that happened in that year.

Calvin and Hobbes debuted.

Gorbachev became the leader of the USSR.

Coca-Cola introduced New Coke.

"We Are the World" happened.

Michael Jordan was the Rookie of the Year.

Nintendo was released in the US.

And if that's not enough, the price of gas was $1.09 per gallon. A house cost $22.1K. Monthly rent was $375.00. You could buy a brand new car for less than ten grand. And so on.

To quote a great man, "The world has moved on."