GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #498: TODAY'S PROBLEM

 OK, it's not really today's problem, but since I got out of detox it has amplified quite a bit. This goes back a few years to the first time I tried quitting caffeine. But now, not only am I alcohol free, but I'm also caffeine free, too. And I'd like to stay that way as much as possible.

It pisses me off that whenever I go to a restaurant, be it fast food or whatever, I need to choose between having sugar and having caffeine. They simply don't have an option that is caffeine free and sugar free. I'm a diabetic and an addict, so it's a tough fucking choice for me.

And I know. A lot of you may be saying to go with the caffeine because no one cares if you're addicted to that shit. It's practically a requirement to be human. "Don't talk to me until I've had my coffee" says just about everyone who works in a corporate office. Some of the same people who say that also look down on alcoholics and junkies and other addicts, which is pretty hypocritical if you ask me.

What's the harm? How does hypertension sound to you? Caffeine drives up your blood pressure, as it certainly did to me, so that's pretty unhealthy. And if you think you're not addicted to caffeine, try to stop. I'm good at quitting caffeine. I've done it at least a dozen times. The withdrawal headaches are debilitating. You can't concentrate on anything except the pain, and aspirin is not going to work on that. I went into caffeine withdrawal once while I was in the hospital on morphine, and not even that cut through the headaches.

But I'm getting away from myself. Whenever I'm home, I drink Caffeine Free Diet Coke. It would be nice if that was an option in restaurants. Shit, I'll even take the Pepsi option, and I don't like Pepsi. I usually go with the caffeine free option because I have insulin that I can up the dosage on. But that can't be healthy, and it's certainly not cost effective for when I no longer have my insulin pens.

So f I get a diet drink, it's got caffeine. If I get something without caffeine, like Sprite or Sierra Mist or Mug root beer, it's got sugar in it. I could get water, but I drink water all the time. When I'm eating, I need a beverage with some taste to it.

I've found there is one and only one exception to this rule: White Castle. They have a Freestyle machine, so I can get my Caffeine Free Diet Coke. I guess I'm going to start answering the Crave more often these days.

And don't come at me with Burger King. Yes, they have a Freestyle. No, they don't have Caffeine Free Diet Coke. They only have a handful of options on their Freestyle, which defeats the fucking purpose of having a Freestyle. You're supposed to have those in order to have ALL Coke products on it. Might as well go back to the regular fountain machine, those fucks.

PS: I went to the York Theater today in Elmhurst, and though they have a mere fountain machine, THEY HAVE CAFFEINE FREE DIET COKE. So at least there's that.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #497: NO MORE WORLDS TO CONQUER

 

Worldhistory.org believes Alexander the Great looked like this.

Months back I was having a conversation with a friend, and the famous Alexander the Great quote came up. You know the one. "Alexander the Great wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer." And it is such a great quote, if historically inaccurate. Too bad he didn't try his hand in America.

Here's the problem: in all likelihood, this never happened. My friend mentioned this, and being of an historical mind and a curious sort, I decided to find out for myself. Sure enough, there is no evidence to support this. To be fair, it would be difficult to prove anything about him as he died in 323 BCE.

So where did this quote come from? Someone probably misremembered Edmund Waller writing this in 1655:

When for more worlds the Macedonian cried,
He wist not Thetis in her lap did hide
Another yet, a world reserved for you
To make more great than that he did subdue …

—“A Panegyric to My Lord Protector,” lines 73–6

That's not quite as pithy as the quote we all know, but it's possible that it goes back even further. Plutarch, who was born just a little more than a decade too late to see Christ hang from the cross, had a few things to say about it, but it wasn't translated into English until 1653. Give this a whirl:

Alexander, whan he herde Anaxarchus argue that there were infynite worldes, it is said that he wept. And whan his frendes asked hym what thing had happened him to be wept for: “Is it nat to be wept for,” quod he, “syns they say there be infynite worldes, and we are nat yet lorde of one?”

Not quite the same as our quote, but kind of related. Here's the thing. Even Plutarch, who is almost as old as two millennia, could not have possibly met Alexander, who lived 300+ years before. That's longer than America has been a country. Imagine the shit we've forgotten or don't know about what happened in, say, 1776. So how accurate could that possibly be?

There's one more quote that might have been the seed from which this quote grew. It's from Valerius Maximus, who lived in a time where he could have actually run into Jesus on the way to the Golgotha.

Alexander’s heart had an insatiable longing for glory. When his friend Anaxarchus told him, following the authority of his teacher Democritus, that there were innumerable worlds, Alexander said, “Alas, poor me, because so far I have not even gained possession of one!” To possess the world was too inglorious for this man, though the world is great enough to serve as the home of all the gods.

Still not our quote. So we can go back about 2000 years, and we still don't have any evidence. So it's probably bullshit, which is a shame. If it didn't happen, it probably should have. And you know what The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance says about legend versus truth.

Print the legend.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #496: GET BACK

 So a while back I got kind of curious about the documentary on the making of Get Back. I thought it was kind of an odd project for Peter Jackson, but then again, if I'd directed six Tolkien movies I'd probably want to get as far away from a CGI film as I could get.

You wouldn't think it, but when I was a kid I was a huge Beatles fan. I remember in junior high I won a contest in music class. The teacher would play a Beatles song, and the two students had to write the name of it on the chalkboard. Whoever did this first won. The loser got replaced by the next contestant. And I got 'em all. Interest waned when I hit high school, though, and it occurred to me while I was thinking about watching the documentary that I'd never really seen these guys as *just* guys. No one really does. People see them as musical icons, not flesh and blood people. That's what made up my mind for me.

And that aspect is my favorite part about this documentary. My least favorite is how fucking long it is. I decided I would just watch it fifteen to twenty minutes at a time while getting ready for bed. I'd be high out of my mind, and when I was ready to pass out, it was time to turn it off and resume it tomorrow.

It's interesting to see how they conduct themselves. Ringo clearly doesn't want to be there. George just wants to go with the flow, evident when he says that he'll play anything. John seems like he wants to be elsewhere, but he wants to get along to get along. And Paul just wants to make music.

I identify with him on that one. All I want to do is write. If it doesn't get published, that's a bummer, but on to the next thing.

(It should be noted that I was named after Paul. Not John. I was named John for my grandfather. My middle name is Paul because Mom was such a fan. It irritates me when I'm in a doctor's waiting room, and the nurse calls out my name as John Paul. I'm not a John Paul. This thing has haunted me my entire life. It could be worse. I have a cousin named Erik after Estrada, and one of my brothers has Cornelius for his middle name, as in Planet of the Apes.)

All in all, I consider the documentary worth the ridiculous investment of time. If you have Disney+ and you like the Beatles, I say go for it.

See? I told you some of these GF column ideas were a bit old. Wait until I talk about the Peele Twilight Zone that I watched months ago.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #495: I STILL FUNCTION!

You and me, both, Megatron

 

It's been a while since I've written one of these. I just seem to run out of time whenever it pops up in my head. In case you've missed it, I went to detox recently, and it's been 17 days since my last drink. Hard to wrap my head around. I recently told someone about my sobriety, and this person practically did a spit take.

And I went back to work today for the first time in more than a month. I dreaded seeing my inbox, but the emails weren't quite so bad as I was expecting. It's good to know that I still have a job, and I'm still fairly good at it.

Just wanted to let you know that I, indeed, still function. Some of the next GF columns will seem odd because I planned to write them a while back, so don't be surprised if I go back in time a bit for some of these.

I plan to meet you all back here tomorrow night, so I hope to see you then.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #494: WHAT'S GOOD FOR THE GOOSE IS, UH, WHAT?

 You can't blame cannabis tonight. I had a few drinks instead. To be fair, this doesn't sound like a drunk thing to think, but it sounds like a high thing to think. And maybe I'm just explaining too much here.

So if Mother Goose wrote all those nursery rhymes, what the fuck did Father Gander write? I have a sneaking suspicion that he was responsible for playground rhymes. You know, like "milk milk lemonade." Or "Jingle Bells, Batman smells." And, naturally, "beans beans the magical fruit." And probably some of the racist ones, too, like the one about "peepee in your Coke." And the one about "dirty knees look at these."

Probably also wrote, "King Kong went to Hong Kong to play ping pong with his ding dong." Someone had to write 'em, yes? Evan Dorkin has a theory, and I like it. That it was really some down on his luck loser who got screwed out of the credit and the reward.

But maybe it was just Father Gander.

[EDIT: Turns out there actually is a Father Gander. What a waste of a perfectly good Goodnight, Fuckers.]

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #493: CANCEL CULTURE

 GOOGLE! GOOGLE! ON THE WALL! WHO'S THE BIGGEST BESTSELLER OF ALL?

Yeah, that's the answer I expected. A bit of a, uhhhhhhh, weird author photo, but you answered my question. I have an audience participation question, as much as I can in this space. Who are the loudest people who screech about cancel culture? I have an easy answer for you: people who have some pretty big platforms.

James Patterson is the most recent of a pack of assholes who claim that cancel culture, or wokeness, is destroying the writing community. He says that white male authors are losing jobs because of the so-called phenomenon. That's coming from someone who has never lost a writing job in his life.

(I saw someone mention on Twitter that he couldn't get a job writing his own books, which made me laugh.)

How can someone in such a powerful position make such a tone deaf statement? Well, it's pretty common. Congress is a hotbed of people screaming about being silenced in front of an open mic for the entire country to hear. Same goes for Fox Opinions. I'm not seeing a lot of silencing going on, here. Probably because they need a boogeyman for their fans, constituents and viewers, so why not make one up that will make everyone fear that they're next? It's got mass appeal, after all. Self-interest is one of the most motivating forces on the planet, so why not make people think that's going to be taken from them against their will?

Here's the key to not being next: stop being an asshole. You are not being silenced. You are doing the exact opposite of Mark Twain's advice. To wit: "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt." Now, if you really were being silenced, you'd be detained, murdered and quietly buried in a long stretch of lonely desert. 

This is what being silenced looks like.

So I'd like to hear you stop blubbering about the First Amendment.

But to get back to creative endeavors, where I started with Patterson, one of the things I hear the most is that wokeness means not being able to push the envelope anymore. There is only an approved set of things to write about, and if you stray from that, then you're canceled. Which, by the way, is not true. If it was, I would be in deep doo-doo. For Dong of Frankenstein alone, I'd be hung from the yardarm.

I identify with Bobcat Goldthwait a lot, mostly because he makes extremely offensive movies and yet doesn't have people coming after him with pitchforks and torches. Dare I say he's a man of Questionable Taste? Look at World's Greatest Dad in particular. That is some dark shit right there, offensive on so many levels. But why listen to me talk about him. You can read his own thoughts here, and you can see what I mean.

So why is it that he and I don't get those pitchforks and torches I mentioned earlier? I have a theory, although I can only speak for myself. Very little of my writing comes from a place of hatred. Some of it comes from anger, which leads to hatred, which, eh, you know where I'm going with this. But for me it more or less stops at anger, and it's always in reserve for people who take advantage of the powerless, corrupt politicians and the corporate overlords who pull their strings. I think, if you read Poor Bastards and Rich Fucks, that comes through pretty clearly.

All right. Rant over. Probably.

Sorry. False alarm. That is all.

Just kidding. There is one more thing.

The funniest thing about cancel culture is when Fox Opinions exploded over Dr. Seuss being canceled. I wonder sometimes if they even listen to their unhinged rants. First of all, never happened. The Estate decided to pull one of his books from publication because maybe, just maybe, children's books shouldn't have the n-word in them. Secondly, I seem to recall when they were trying to ban Cat in the Hat, in particular Peter Roskam. What was it Jesus said about those who should throw stones?

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #492: THE HILL

 Wait a minute. What happened to GF #491? I assure you, it exists. But just as I was hovering over the publish button, a weird sensation came over me. Whenever I get that, I don't publish whatever I'm about to publish. In this case, it's because I got even more personal than I've ever been here before, and it was a little unsettling. I decided not to publish MY DEEPEST DARKEST SECRET. I saved the draft, so if someone finds it after I'm dead, they can feel free to publish it. I won't care by then. Think of it as the LOST GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS COLUMN. People like uncovering "lost" things.

So let's not get grim tonight. I haven't been in a good mind frame in quite a while, now, so let's think about something pleasant. A happy memory. Back when I was a kid, my grandfather would drive my cousin and I to school every day. It was down the street from where we lived at the time, and there was always this hill we'd go down. And if Gramps hit it just right, it would make us jump off the seat and hit our heads on the ceiling.

Wait, what? Seatbelts, I hear you ask? It was the mid-'Eighties. It would have been shocking if we were in the front seat wearing them, much less the back.

But every weekday we would go through the ritual, and it made us laugh each and every time. I miss doing that. I still live near that hill, but they did something to it near the end of the 'Eighties that made it impossible to replicate the experience. It was a shame, and even though it was probably dangerous, I wish I could still do that. I'm sure the size I am now would prevent it from happening even if I went back in time, but still.