GODNIGHT, FUCKERS #905: THE LAST CHRISTMAS CARD

 

You may know that yesterday I was cleaning up around the house. I posted some cool pictures on social media of a few things I found. But there was one I didn't post, the one you see above.

(My middle name is Paul if you didn't know that.)

This is the last Christmas card Grandma signed for me. The only thing is, I never got it. She put the card in a dresser and forgot about it because she had dementia near the end and hid a lot of things throughout the house. It surprised me finding this. There were a few others, blank, probably meant for my brothers. This would have been 2021. She still had about a half a year to live, and she spent most of it gone. Look at the handwriting. Her cursive used to be sweeping and beautiful, but age had turned it into a tremulous thing.

But the thing that made me smile was that she was herself when she wrote this. Grandma was hard to live with near the end for a variety of reasons that I'm not going to go into here. When I think of her I think of her near the end, incoherent, screaming, nearly blind. Not my grandma, in other words. But reading this card brought back memories of how she was before. Even on her funeral card you can tell she's not all there. She just knew someone was taking a picture of her, so she tried to smile. This card, though, helped me remember her in better times. Kinder times.

One thing about the card made me tear up a little. That last word: ALWAYS. It's like she barely squeaked it out, like she'd been trying to hold herself together just long enough to finish writing this sentiment. Like maybe she thought this was her last chance to tell me she loved me.

A lot of people seek out some silly idea of closure. There's no such thing, unless you invent it yourself. In my mind things don't really end. They change into something else. Not even death is an end, only a transformation. When I die I'll be buried, and my body will slowly turn into worm food. A fisherman will eventually use those worms to catch fish. And the fisherman will eat his catch, and so I'll be welcomed into a human's digestive tract until he shits me out, and I will have transformed yet again. Closure doesn't help. Continuation does.

But now I'm not so sure, because there was a certain finality in finding this card and nearly weeping over it. A certain peace. It's like there was someone telling me a story at a subliminal level, and the story just ended.

I'm glad I found it. It has brought me comfort, and sometimes that's the best we can ask of the universe.

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 #903: FUCK THE ALAMO

 Before we begin, no, I have no intention of ever going to Texas. I'm not likely to even fly over Texas, so I wouldn't even crash land there. So I feel safe in saying FUCK THE ALAMO.

When I was a kid I enjoyed The Alamo, the John Wayne western, and I even enjoyed the Dennis Quaid version years later. It's a great story of how plucky Americans can be even in the face of certain death. A lot of men sacrificed their lives at the Alamo, and that makes for great tales. And then, of course, there's the ending when the others (Paladin played Sam Houston!) tracked down the evil Santa Ana and ended his reign of terror in the Republic of Texas, by God.

The problem is, you're not getting the full story. The truth of it reveals these men to be craven scumbags of the lowest order, and it's very easy to see Santa Ana as the doomed hero of the story. To know why all of this went down, you have to know a little history.

Spain constantly tried to colonize what we now know as Texas in the 17th century. When Spain tossed out their religious nuts, like England did with the Puritans, they planted their flag near what is now El Paso. But the indigenous peoples managed to wipe them out. Unfortunately Spain had a seemingly limitless supply of holy psychopaths, and they really wanted to hold the land they claimed. They were very concerned about the French presence in what is now Louisiana, so they felt the need to keep trying until they finally succeeded.

And then, like we did with England, Mexico cast their Spanish masters aside and declared independence. At the time Texas was a part of Mexico. To encourage settlement the Mexican government did something incredibly stupid. They invited Americans to live in Texas. They were literally *giving* land away. Free land! Unsurprisingly Americans soon outnumbered Mexicans by a considerable amount. 30K Americans to 7800 Mexicans?

But there was a catch: any American settling there would have to convert to Catholicism and give up their US citizenship in exchange for Mexican citizenship. None of the Americans did this. When the Mexican government started adding restrictions to make the Americans yield, the Americans ignored the restrictions, too.

There's one other thing to know. The Americans in question were mostly drawn to Texas because of the cotton crop. Add to that the fact that these Americans were all Southerners living before the Civil War. Are you starting to see the major problem here?

Because Mexico outlawed slavery. And these Southern Americans found that the only way to really work their land was to use slave labor. So not only did these arrogant bastards ignore conditions that were put on their ownership of the land, they also brought slavery back to Mexico.

Those sons of bitches who died at the Alamo died not for freedom or some vague sense of pride. It's much more perverse than that. THEY DIED FOR SLAVERY.

So fuck the Alamo and fuck every single American who died there. I hope a meteor lands on the Alamo.

I would also like to state for the record that it's not too late to give Texas back. I'd love to see the look on Greg Abbott's face when he realizes he's no longer an American citizen.

Texas has one saving grace: Joe R. Lansdale and family. End of list.

I'm not the only one with a distaste for the Alamo. If you have the book, Razored Saddles, edited by Lansdale, you should look up Scott Cupp's story, "Thirteen Days of Glory."

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #902: CATFISHING

 Let me start out by saying I'm not entirely proud of myself for doing this. The more I think about it the more it feels weird and gross to me, so this is a regret of mine. But it was also an eye-opening experience at the same time, which is why I'm writing this.

A while back I was dating a sex worker. I also acted as her bodyguard, but I don't think I was wholly necessary to the equation in that regard. I never had to be threatening. My mere existence was enough to make her clients behave.

But one night we were both drunk, and she said I should pretend to be her with some of her potential clients. She found them on a popular dating app. I would have never though to use that to find customers, but then again I've never sold my body for sex, so why would I? But she had a few guys who were messaging her, and she didn't really like any of them, so she thought to turn me loose. The only stipulation she gave me is that I have to be weird about it.

I know weird pretty well, so I launched into it. I quickly learned that weird isn't an issue for these guys, and women are usually two or three texts away from a dick pic. I saw quite a few dicks that night, and none of them were impressive. One guy talked about how big he was, then sent this thing that looked like a branch on a weeping willow. A very short branch. Another guy had a giant glans, but his shaft was skinny to the point where I wondered if he feared it might come off in mid-coitus.

I messaged one guy about my murderous fantasies, and he was all, yeah, that's cool. When do you want to meet up? I wondered what he would say if I asked him to kill my dad. I considered sending that to him but realized that might be going too far. And I didn't really want to see him say yes. (It should be noted that I often have difficulty in knowing if I've gone too far, so if I *suspect* it's too far, it's probably waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too fucking far.)

Catfishing technically isn't a crime, which is why I'm talking about it. For it to be a crime, there must be some kind of exchange, usually money, and I didn't do anything like that. These guys weren't even paying for sex with my girlfriend at the time. She'd already decided she *didn't* want their business.

But it was a pretty fucked up experience. I said I'm "not entirely proud of myself" because I did get useful information. I'm not endorsing this idea, but it might--mind you I said MIGHT--be a good idea for men to catfish at least once in their lives pretending to be a woman. You will learn something about men that you never really thought about before. You might choose the bear, too.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #901: A GOOD MONOPOLY?

 To those interested in comics, you might be aware that until recently Diamond essentially the only distribution company for said comic books. Now there are a few, and my comics store guys are a bit miffed about it.

Monopolies are a scourge unto the country. Praise be to the FTC for condemning Google as a monopoly, so let's see how they handle that. But from talking to my comics guys it sounds like Diamond might be good as a monopoly.

Their reasoning is this: in the old days when something went wrong, they called Diamond up, spoke to their rep and got it resolved. Now, since they work with a few distributors, they've found resolving issues to be even worse. There's one company who never answers their phone and another who insists that stores do everything online. These guys are pretty old school, so they're not too knowledgeable about the internet. They don't even take credit cards there. Cash only. So I can see their frustration.

Does this mean that Diamond was great as a monopoly? Not necessarily. As a monopoly I'm sure they took advantage of their position a few times over the years. It's impossible for a corporation to *not* be tempted to take advantage. But it does seem that the retailers were happier when Diamond was the only game in town.

So I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not. I've never bought directly from a distributor before, so I don't have any experience in that regard. But I know a lot of comics professionals, and I'm kind of curious to see what they think. Do I know anyone who owns a comics store?

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 #899: ANSWER ONLY THE QUESTIONS YOU'RE ASKED

 I feel like I've been complaining all week in these things, so I'm going to try to be helpful tonight. Many of you I trust already know this lesson, but a lot of people in the world do not know it, and it's important. When confronted with authority figures who want info from you, answer only the questions you're asked and nothing more. Do not volunteer info.

I've been thinking of a way to explain this lesson, but when I was watching The West Wing, Oliver Platt's character did it for me. He's trying to teach CJ how to answer questions in a courtroom, and the thrust of his teaching is exactly what I'm talking about.

He asks her, "Do you know the time?"

She looks at her watch and tells him. He says she's wrong. The answer to that question is either yes or no.

Thank you, Oliver Platt! I can think of no simpler way to say it. Also remember that if the answer to their question involves incriminating yourself, plead the Fifth. Invoke your right to silence.

One more thing to pass on. Always keep this in your back pocket. It's important to know your rights. A friend of mine used to have three things tacked to his ceiling: a drawing of someone touching a monkey, a map of the universe and the Bill of Rights. He felt that you should respectively know what you're doing, where you are and what your rights are.

The Pot Brothers say it best. Tomorrow's Friday, but close enough. Goodnight, fuckers. Tomorrow's 900!

This is also helpful.