GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #367: THE TRIFECTA OF THE DOOMED

 When I was in sixth grade I visited my dad and my second stepmom in Vegas. I remember I was in the middle row of my dad's Grand Caravan, and he was talking with my stepmom about me. In particular, my teeth.

My stepmom said that they should get me braces. I balked at the very idea. I was fat and had glasses. Braces would have brought me the Trifecta of Doom. I was unpopular enough has it was. If this plan went through I would be toast. Well, I kinda already was, but I made sure my dissent was known immediately.

I think Dad was relieved. Braces cost money, and it usually took a lot for him to part with that much. My stepmom didn't like that, but when I got on the plane back home, I felt like I'd dodged a bullet.

As an adult I wish she'd won the argument. The short term punishment would have been worth the long term rewards. My teeth probably wouldn't be so horrible if she'd convinced my dad. I've always had a gap between my front teeth, and it's worse in my old age. Plus I've lost three teeth so far. One was a wisdom tooth, so good riddance. The other two are now implants. My bout with gingivitis fucked up my lower front teeth to the point where my previous dentist predicted I'd lose them by forty. My new dentist says I've probably got a couple of years left with them. That fuckin' sucks, man. At least with the others I could hide my tooth loss, but with these? They're front and center.

Plus I have a horrendous underbite. The only worse case I've ever seen was Beavis from Beavis and Butt-Head. Braces would have probably fixed that.

So now we're coming closer and closer to when we can walk around outside without masks on. I feel bad for people with oral herpes. That was a good disguise for more than a year. But yeah, without the mask, I'll be exposing the horrors of my teeth to the world. That's not going to be fun.

I have my first dental cleaning in a year and a half tomorrow. I hope I can make it through with all the teeth I still have. That would be nice.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #366: MULTITASKING SUCKS

 That's it. That's all you had to read. Just the title.

OK, so there's more. Multitasking was probably invented by some corporate greed-head asshole who wanted to exploit his workers even further. And somehow it has leaked out of corporate life and has infected everyone else like the fucking virus it is.

So I can do two things at once really well. Three things? We start to see some drop in efficiency. Four things? That drop is significant. Five? You might as well just ask me to fuck up in the first place and save us all the time and energy. I imagine a lot of us are like that. So why do we continue to do this shit? Especially if it's within our daily lives outside of work?

This particularly bugs me when people think that their driving time is meant for multitasking. While driving, they should be shaving, putting on their makeup, changing clothes, eating, making phone calls or worse like texting and so on. You do realize you don't have to do this, right?

OK, the main reason I'm writing this tonight. I have worked in office jobs for decades, and it never ceases to amaze me how many people who call in looking for help do so while driving. From things like ordering auto glass (which I do now) to trying to get into web conferences, it is inexplicably stupid. We will need information to help you, and that information is something you will have to read off your phone, in all likelihood. Park the fucking car. Or even better, don't make the call while driving. And stop getting pissy with me. I can't help you without your information. And why are you trying to get into a web conference while behind the wheel of a car? Are you suicidal? There are easier ways, bud, and most of them don't involve endangering others.

I almost used the Chevy Chase meme two nights in a row, but I stopped myself. You can mail me my award whenever it's ready.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #365: THE ECONOMY IS TOO IMPORTANT TO WASTE ON PEOPLE

 

Heh. That's a helluva title. Grabs you by the short and curlies, doesn't it? Obviously I don't believe that, but a shocking number of people do. It's one of the big reasons this fucking plague has lasted as long as it has.

So I recently finished reading The Totem by David Morrell. It's a great book about a Detroit cop who moved out to Wyoming to get away from the horrors of the city and an alcoholic journalist who goes to the same place for a retrospective on a hippie commune that used to be there. Much to this duo's horror, that's when the werewolves show up.

The mayor of that Wyoming town pissed me off a great deal. When he hears about this situation, all he can think about is saving the town's economy. If word got out about the problem, then no one would buy any steers from the local ranchers ever again, and the town would dry up like the mining camp up the mountain decades ago. He does a lot of horrible shit to gloss over the problem in the name of the Holy Economy. This guy makes the mayor in Jaws seem reasonable.

I couldn't help but think of the parallel between this book and current times. Trump denied the plague existed at all, and then, when Americans started getting it, he blamed it all on China instead of his own fucking ineptitude at making sure it couldn't get to us. And then he claimed it wasn't as bad as people said it was. And a shit-ton of people agreed with him because to accept Covid as extraordinarily dangerous would kill the economy. People on the right argued until they were blue in the face that America should open up again to save the beloved economy. (Which is funny, because when Biden decided to grant their wish, the same people called him crazy for putting American lives in danger.)

But it's all crazy bullshit because Covid *is* dangerous. I know a few people who got it, and most seemed to make it out the other side OK after some pretty horrific trauma, but others did not. In the worst case, I know someone who will be breathing oxygen from a tank for the rest of his life because of this fucking plague. I recall all the dipshits who went to hospitals demanding to see Covid patients, which they figured they wouldn't find because the plague was a hoax, right? WRONG. I've been in the hospital a lot since the plague began, and when I had to stay the night (or more than a night), they had to wheel me through the Covid ward. I did not want this, but it was the only way to get through to where they wanted to keep me. That shit was scary. Covid patients kept behind giant plastic sheets like they were burn victims, hacking and wheezing and . . . it fucking sucked, all right? Let's leave it at that.

Is the economy important? Of course it is. But when you put people's lives at risk just for the sake of the economy? Go fuck yourself. You're like the mayor from The Totem. If he'd seen Tiger King, I'm sure he would have had the same thought as portrayed above. Try having an economy when there isn't anyone alive to enjoy it, cocksucker. Safety to humans first. After that, you can have your precious fucking economy.

BOOKS IN STOCK

I have a bunch of books in stock, so if you're looking to get one (or more!) signed by me and sent to you (US only, sorry everyone else), this is the time and the place. Here is what I have. Let me know what you want either in the comments or send a DM to me on Twitter or Facebook or send an email to editor@talesofquestionabletaste.com. Each book is $12. If you want two, they are $22 combined. If you want three, they are a mere $30! That's shipping included!

--TALES OF UNSPEAKABLE TASTE

--BLOOD (only 1 copy left)

--AND JESUS CAME BACK (only 1 copy left)

--POOR BASTARDS AND RICH FUCKS (only 2 copies left)

--TALES OF QUESTIONABLE TASTE (only 1 copy left)

--GONZO RISING (only 2 copies left)

I still have copies of my poetry chapbook, SHIT POEMS. If you buy any of my books here, you will get a copy of this for free! Or, if you want to just buy SHIT POEMS, it's $30 since it's a rarity limited to 30 copies.

Also, if you're interested in the literary magazine I used to edit and publish, TABARD INN, you can get a copy of issue one or two for $5 each. Issue three is $10. Or you can get all three for $15. If I published you in any of those issues, they're for free. Even if you weren't in that issue. (Within reason. I can't ship out, say, 20 of these things for free.)

Let me know if you're interested in any of these offerings! Thank you, as always, for reading!

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #364: UNEMPLOYMENT IS BROKEN

 One of these nights I'm going to write about my horrible decade-plus run of bad luck, but tonight I'm going to describe my unemployment horror stories. In January 2020 I found myself without a job for the first time since I started working. My immediate reaction was to drink myself to death, which put me in the hospital for pancreatitis, but I stayed there for two weeks because my body chose that particular time to go into alcohol withdrawal and send me down the mother of all hallucinations for just that long. Maybe I've talked about that before. If not, I'll do so in the near future.

But when I got through that, I found myself scraping around for a job. My first thought was unemployment, so I applied. Holy shit, talk about exercises in futility. It was even worse because COVID was rearing its ugly head, so no one was actually at the office. They made sure you couldn't contact them through the internet, because state governments are too good to use the internet for correspondence. You have to call them, and after being on hold forever you'll get someone who tells you you're in the wrong place and transfers you to someone who might even transfer you again. By the time you're off the phone, three hours will have passed. And then, if you're lucky enough to make progress, you'll get a letter telling you when to be available for a phone call to help determine your eligibility. If you're supremely lucky, they'll actually call you.

Because they didn't call me. When I tried calling them, guess what. Whoever was supposed to call me lied and said he did. He did not. I sat by my phone in a place with great reception, and it never rang. They claimed he left a voicemail, which he did not. Oh well. We'll send you another letter for your next phone call, which they did. Did they call? Nope.

And then there's the IL job board. It fucking blows. Almost all the posts are from Aerotek. But hey, Aerotek took me on and got me a job in Bannockburn. It's a shit commute, but what the hell? And then that job kept putting off the start time again and again, and the guy who took me on at Aerotek got a promotion, and the guy who replaced him lost my number and didn't call me back until I was in training for the job I have now.

If you're unemployed in IL, don't rely on the job board. Go anywhere but the job board. Fucking throw a letter in a bottle into Lake Michigan, and you'll get a job a lot faster than if you stuck with the job board.

I eventually gave up on unemployment, and the job hunt irritated the fuck out of me. I put out hundreds of applications, and in all of them I noted that I can't do physical labor because I have a bad leg. The only jobs I was offered, sight unseen and without interviews, were warehouse jobs. Jobs I would have to stand up for eight hours a day. I can't even stand up for eight fucking minutes.

So I got frustrated and applied for disability. Yet another exercise in futility. They did not get back to me until I got a job. I would have considered sex work, but even sex is kind of strenuous for me these days. I actually find myself trying to avoid it, which would have shocked a younger me.

It's just a fucking mess, and all of it is broken. The whole system needs an overhaul because there are a lot of people without jobs right now, and because of COVID there are a lot more homeless people out there. During the summer of 2020, I can't describe to you how many homeless there were out in the suburbs. In the city they're everywhere. In the suburbs, you'll find one at an intersection or on an off ramp. There were literally homeless people on dividers at every intersection on the highways. Mostly two of them working opposite sides, but I've seen four in each direction in some places. It's fucking insane. I'll bet a lot of them wouldn't be out there if unemployment did its fucking job.

There is one thing IL did pretty well. ONE. And that was the LINK card they gave me. Granted, I could only use it to buy food (and not even at fast food places, just stores), but I bought a lot of food with what I was given. Without that LINK card things would have gotten even worse for me. Now that I have a job, I have until the 10th to tell them that I made more than the amount I'm allowed to in a month. Which means I have one more LINK "payday" before I lose the service. It was nice while it lasted.

And anyone who bitches and moans about people who would abuse the system, I offer the words of Harrison Ford in the movie BRUNO: "Fuck off." I would rather have a few scammers taking advantage than have thousands of people out of work and suffering. Suffering like I did.

And hey. Maybe, just maybe, stop taxing unemployment benefits you savage, merciless, pusillanimous pieces of shit.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #363: THE DOOM THAT CAME TO MY GARAGE

 Yeah, my garage has been crumbling for quite some time. It sucks, because I loved hanging out back there when I was a kid. Sometimes I'd jump into one of the cars and pretend we were on a cop chase. It was a kinda-sorta clubhouse back then. It's the last original garage on my block. I loved fiddling around with the tools back there, in particular the shovel and the pitchfork and the axe.

(He said ominously.)

But the gutters have fallen off. The roof has a bunch of holes in it. Birds have nested in the mechanical garage opener, making it useless. The concrete floor is crumbling. One of the windows is broken out. Many animals have been hiding out in the junk back there. It's falling down on its own, but the City of Elmhurst, ever eager to get rid of an eyesore in the neighborhood, is tearing it down for free tomorrow. I'm really going to miss it. Sometimes I thought maybe we could convert it to a guest house like some rich people have on their property. It would be more like a cabin in the sense of the frontier world, but what the hell.

So I've been going through the garage in the hopes of finding stuff that I could salvage. I can't do that kind of thing very well anymore. I have one bad leg, the other isn't much better and because of my current tennis elbow I'm stuck with one good limb.

As you can imagine, I had to take a lot of breaks just to relax and get my strength up. As I cast my gaze about the backyard I realized that I hadn't been back here much of late. It's really a nice place to relax. The people who owned the place before used it as a garden, so it's pretty wild back there. I don't tend to it, so it grows everywhere. There are also a few atavistic things that grow back there, like the occasional corn stalk or a small tree. It's beautiful.

I sat and luxuriated in it, and I don't care if my garage is an eyesore, it looks perfect back there. It should be in a horror movie, it's that grim and beautiful.

And tomorrow I get to watch as it gets torn down. Nothing will go up in its place. It will just be a parking spot, nothing more.

And that saddens me.

UPDATE: For those who don't know, I was going to post this last night, but I discovered I'd written one of these the night previous and got too high to post that one. 

I woke up this morning, thinking it would be the last time I would look out my bedroom window at the garage. I was sorta right. The workers were about five hours late, so they quit halfway through the job today. They emptied the garage out on the inside and ripped off the roof. There are three walls remaining, so it looks more like a ghost of its former self. Perhaps a bombed out European building in the waning days of WWII. I walked in there, shocked by how much light shone down on me. I stood at the broken out window directly into my garden of surprises for the first time since I was a kid.

And the last time ever.

The workers will return tomorrow while I'm at work. I will come home to an empty stone slab where my garage used to be.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #362: DRURY LANE PERKS

 I used to work at the Drury Lane Theatre in Oakbrook Terrace. I sold season tickets to theater. The job itself was not very much fun, but there were a few perks that I miss about that place. Because the rest of it was fun. Getting as many free tickets to opening night as I wanted was good. Making use of the open bar afterward was even better. Hanging out and getting drunk with the actors and directors was a lot of fun, especially for the time we had The Odd Couple. That one was a very good show.

The sales office was next to the dressing rooms, by the way. Actors are not very shy when they're back there. More often than not, they were undressing rooms.

I got to drink free Coke when I was there. I had to go for a long walk to get it--down the massive flight of stairs, through the convention room, through the dining room, into the kitchen and all the way back--but I liked it. When I needed money badly, my boss let me stay after hours to compose new lists of leads, which I greatly appreciated.

But one of the things I miss the most is when they actually held conventions in the convention room. It got annoying when I had to prove that I worked there, since there was no other way through to the sales office. I had to show up early to give security ample time to investigate. But the conventions themselves were great and full of free shit. I can't tell you how many times I've gotten ridiculously expensive cheese and salami from vendors there FOR FREE. I also got chocolate, but I don't eat that often. I just gave that away, and since it was usually expensive chocolate, recipients of this gift were usually very happy.

I miss that. I really do.