GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #342: DYING IN YOUR SLEEP

I just don't understand people who want to die in their sleep. Dying in my sleep horrifies me. Granted, I understand how traumatizing dying while awake would be, but that's a long-run thing. There is no long-run when it comes to death. Is there an afterlife? I highly doubt it. So such trauma would only matter for a short while, and then I won't experience it--or anything else--ever again.

Just think. You go to sleep one night. And you never wake up. That's it. You had no idea your existence was ending. It just did. You had no time to think about it. To accept it. You figured you'd just get up the next morning and go about your day like you did for the first however many years of your life.

That would suck. I want to know when I'm leaving this life. I'm sure it wouldn't give me much notice, but I'll get some notice at least. If I get the expected heart attack, then through the pain I'll at least know. It takes a few seconds, but when you're dying I'm sure that takes longer than your typical seconds. I'm sure I'd figure it out in that brief period of time. I'd accept it. And I'd be OK with leaving the world.

I don't want to be robbed of that moment. If there was an afterlife, I'd feel ripped off. But there's not. One of my biggest concerns about the eternal afterlife was actually addressed in THE GOOD PLACE. I suspected it was coming in those last episodes, and the writers did not disappoint.

So here's my argument against an afterlife. Let's take the Christian approach since America is unofficially the most Christian nation on this planet. Say you wind up in Heaven. And you finally get to do all the things you missed out on while alive. There will come a point where you've done everything, and you have no desires anymore. Eternity is pointless. You will eventually get bored and wish for it all to end.

Conversely, you might end up in Hell, where even the lenient current Pope will agree that you will suffer torment and torture for the rest of eternity. But . . . that won't matter either. There are only so many times you can get your eyes ripped from your skull before you get bored with it. You're shoving barbed wired down my dickhole for the 666th time? Eh, yawn. I imagine Prometheus hated getting his liver eaten out of him every day at first, but I'm sure by the month point he yawned and checked his schedule as the owl did it to him again.

How about Islam? When you get to Heaven you get 72 virgins. Personally, I don't dig virgins. Why would you have sex with someone who has no experience? But say virgins are your thing. You have an eternity to deflower 72 of them. What then? Do their vaginas reseal so you can do it all over again? And losing one's virginity isn't just a physical thing. It's a mental and emotional thing. You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube, as they say. At what point do you get bored with that? You can't have sex with virgins for eternity. You'd get just as bored as the dude getting barbed wire in his dickhole.

The thing that makes us special is the fact that we are finite. We all die with unfinished business. I think Amos from The Expanse said that was the definition of death. It sucks, but if we died with all of our shit done, that wouldn't be interesting in the slightest.

That's why I'm always in a hurry. I want to get as much shit done as I can before I finally croak. And I want to be awake for that deathly moment. I want to know that this is it. I'm not going to get anything done tomorrow because I'll be too busy being dead. But if I went to bed and died in my sleep? That thought would never occur to me.

I need to die when I'm awake. I think sometimes of that guy from House of Pain that went on to Everlast. Not a big fan, but he went to bed one night and had a heart attack in his sleep. He would have died if a roommate hadn't checked on him. He survived, but imagine if he didn't. I heard that interview, and it fucked with me. So yeah. Dear Death--take me when I'm awake. Please and thank you.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #341: RESTING BITCH FACE

I'm kind of glad that I've lived with resting bitch face for all the years I can remember. There are ups and downs, but the ups are pretty good in my opinion. Don't get me wrong, if we're talking or hanging out, etc., I'm engaged and smiling and having a good time. But when I'm not doing those things I have resting bitch face. It helps.

My favorite advantage is that strangers don't want to talk to me. They keep their distance. They don't say hi. They don't even bother to ask for the time of day. Do people still do that? In this age where we all have clocks in our pockets along with calculators and flashlights? Probably not. But still. People tend to keep their children away from me, which is excellent. If I wanted a filthy booger-eating creature around me, I'd hang out at the zoo.

RBF puts a wonderful shield around me that prevents a lot of bullshit getting too close, and I greatly appreciate that.

Here's a drawback, though. Ever since I was a kid people have thought that I don't like them. Not my friends' parents. Parents always loved me. Sometimes they loved me better than they loved their own kids. But I'll take a friend's brother as an example. He was older than us, so he was tasked with driving me home one night. Along the way he asked why I didn't like him. I liked him just fine. I had no idea why he was asking me this question.

I now have an answer. RBF. That happened when I was in junior high. It still happens sometimes. I can't tell you how many times people have thought that I didn't like them or flat out hated them. Not true. I like just about everyone. On an individual basis, that is. Groups? Eh, no thanks. But I certainly don't hate anyone. Everyone I've ever hated is dead.

(He said ominously.)

I don't even hate Donald Trump. He's a piece of shit who should have had a spike shoved up his ass Vlad-style, but I don't know him personally. You have to know someone personally in order to truly hate them.

But then, if you have resting bitch face, you really don't have to think about it all that much. 

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #340: SALES WORK

 I used to believe that I was good at selling only things that I care about. That's why I try to stay away from sales jobs. There are few things I care enough about to successfully sell them.

The first time I worked in sales was at a group of local newspapers. They hired me to sell ad space. I'd done similar work in college for the campus literary magazine. How hard could it be for newspapers? It turned out to be a very different beast. In college you go for local businesses, and because they want college kids buying stuff at their stores it's a win-win to advertise with the lit mag. Selling to these people was easy. I found out very quickly that selling ad space for the magazines, in particular the ones directed at people wanting to stay in B&Bs across the country, was very difficult. People got mad at you for bothering them. I lasted two weeks at that job. But it had an advantage: my boss found out I wrote, and he offered to publish me in those newspapers. So that worked out pretty nicely.

My next sales job was at Drury Lane in Oakbrook. I sold season tickets to theater. That job went a lot better because I love plays. Added bonus: I got to see them all for free and enjoy the open bar after each one. Because I knew the plays--and liked them!--I could sell like crazy. One of the compliments I picked up was when my boss said he didn't want to hire me because men were lousy at this job. They rarely sold. I'd applied for the job, and he turned me down, but when I went back the second time he liked my tenacity and hired me. It turned out that I was the only man he ever hired who sold reliably. One week I even beat our top seller, which was damn near impossible because she was so good.

And then there's selling books. That gets me hard. Whether it's at a convention, a show or even Printers Row (which I sorely miss), I'm pretty good at selling books.

So imagine my surprise when I learned that I was good at selling auto glass. No one, and I mean NO ONE, cares about auto glass until they absolutely need it. They probably don't even give it a single thought otherwise. I've certainly never wondered about the state of, say, my windshield or even a vent glass. I'm surprised I got the job in the first place, and I thought I'd make my quotas, more or less, probably just enough to keep the job.

And then training ended. I got out on the floor. I sold like crazy. Six months after my date of hire, I was expected to make ten sales a day. Here I am in month two, and I'm routinely selling more than that. Sometimes a lot more. I've hit twenty a day a few times. My personal best, so far, is 24, and that happened today. My commission check is going to look fucking amazing. I can't wait.

And even better: this is the only job I've ever worked where the better I am at the job, the more I'm rewarded. Every other place proved that the better I was at it, the more miserable they'd make me. I remember working at places where they discontinued the annual bonus. Where they decided that if you get promoted, you don't get a raise. Things like that. And then the higher ups wonder why their employees despise them so much.

Here, after I sell a certain amount, my commissions go up another dollar . . . until the next mark, where they go up another dollar, and so on. The better I am, the more money I make. Not only that, but we don't have a vending machine at work. WE HAVE FREE SHIT. The bosses order an entire pallet of snacks and drinks every month, and they just give it to us for free. Among the drinks is the second greatest non-alcoholic beverage known to humanity (the first being Tang, naturally), Mexican Coke. They use real sugar instead of that horrid corn syrup. Sure, I have the 'Beetus, but there are some sacrifices I'm not ready to make. So yeah, not just free shit, but good shit. Happy employees work a lot better than miserable employees.

Plus I get the feeling that so long as I continue to sell above expectations, I suspect that they would be reluctant to get rid of me for any reason. I'm sure that if they found out about my books, they wouldn't care. If I turned out to be an asshole, they'd probably give consideration to determining what kind of asshole I was first. Don't get me wrong, if I raped someone they would get rid of me. But if it came out that I murdered someone, they'd probably ask why before thinking about getting rid of me.

I'm a little on edge every day, which isn't always the best feeling, but when I'm making those sales, it helps keep me hungry. I keep thinking about that commission check at the end of next month. Right now I'm looking at $1,000+, and I still have a few days to go.

If I get a second to breathe, or if I'm on an unending hold with an insurance company on a customer's behalf, I'll look at the leaderboard. I'm shocked at how well I'm doing. I think soon I'll be averaging 20 sales a day. But I look to the top of the list and wonder who the hell these people are who are making 64 sales a day, or even 45. Are they robots? Selling machines? How the hell do I get that good? Because I've gone most of my life without money. It would be very good to have a shit-ton right now before I get too old (or dead) to enjoy it.

I think they're eyeing me for a promotion already. I've been asked to serve as backup for another department. Judging from what I know about the company so far, that can only mean one thing.

Think about it this way: the more money I have, the more books I have. Not only that, but I can start affording real marketing for my own books . . . Planet Bruni, coming soon to a world near you.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #339: HIGH

 Welcome to the first ever GF column that I've written while under the influence of cannabis and cannabis alone. Yes, as I type this dispatch from the trenches, I am high as a motherfucker. I haven't had a single drink of booze. No other drugs. JUST CANNABIS.

I like it so far. I mean, I've only written one paragraph so far, but I think this is going well. It feels like I'm drunk but also really sleepy, too. And I feel certain that when I wake up tomorrow I'm going to feel bloated because of all the food I had today including a bunch of majestic beef jerky. I also feel confident that I can fall immediately asleep after I post this. Couldn't always say that with the booze, even. Hell, I might even be refreshed when I get up for work. That'll be a novel feeling.

I've noticed that I have short term memory loss while on cannabis, so I was kind of wondering if I'd be able to string together reasonably coherent sentences. I thought I might not be able to do this at all. Who knows? Maybe I'll wake up tomorrow and this will have been written in an inside out screaming cursive. Wait, what am I saying? I'm babbling. That could cause some future GF problems here. No matter how drunk I got, I was able to write reasonably well. But what if I can't do that while high?

I am struggling to keep a train of thought, but I keep departing on other tracks every other word. Either I'll quit the GF columns for a while ("Again?" I hear you ask), or things are gonna get really weird and meandering around here.

I guess I'll read this tomorrow and then figure it all out.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #338: MATT DILLON, US MARSHAL AND PRANKSTER IN CHIEF

 So tonight was the season 16 finale of GUNSMOKE. For those not playing along, I picked my favorite western TV shows years ago, and I decided I would watch each episode on the 50th anniversary of each air date. Since Gunsmoke aired for 20 years, it's the only one I have left. I have expressed my joy over this show many times, and especially over James Arness as Matt Dillon, US Marshal. But let's get kinda weird.

Many years ago I read James Arness's autobiography. This was back when he was still alive, and I even have a signed photo of him. My favorite scenes from the earliest episodes were when he was giving a monologue at Boot Hill, lamenting terrible decisions made by misled people he had to kill. That's the picture I got signed of his.

But reading that autobiography helped me realize that he was a clown at heart. He wanted to make people laugh, and that doesn't line up with his best known character. Matt Dillon laughed at a lot of things, mostly Doc versus Chester or Doc versus Festus. But he never instigated the laughs, which Arness always did.

My favorite story is when they were filming the opening for all the early shows. Matt Dillon was supposed to face up against the fabled Man in Black, and while the Man in Black always fired first, Matt Dillon always fired last . . . and killed his quarry. But while they filmed that scene that would grace at least ten years of the show, James Arness pretended to be shot by that Man in Black and die. Just for the laugh. Seeing the pictures in his autobiography made me laugh myself into a hernia.

Why mention this tonight? Well, at the end of this season of Gunsmoke they showed a thing called Ben and Becky Talk Gunsmoke Season 16. Ben wrote a book about Gunsmoke. Beckey wrote a book about Miss Kitty. They discussed their favorite season 16 episodes. And then they started talking about how the Gunsmoke actors were like family.

After 20 years, they had to be. Granted, only Dillon and Doc were the sole characters throughout the show, but still. Kitty made it to the second to last season. Chester and Festus could break it up in the middle. Quint Asper wasn't as big as people thought, and Thad and Newly couldn't hold a candle to the others, but still. Ben and Beckey talked about the scenes that were my favorites. I loved when Doc got a bug up his ass, and he had to verbally battle either Chester or Festus. Those were the best. When everyone was busting each others' balls.

And it turned out that the Gunsmoke family was actually centered around these scenes, per Ben and Beckey. They were all professionals, but they loved screwing with each other during those scenes. In particular James Arness. He'd mess with Milburn Stone, who would go after either Chester or Festus, and then Kitty would crack up, etc. It all seemed to start with James Arness.

A lot of people, even Hunter S. Thompson, a hero of mine, would say that Arness as Matt Dillon would beat the shit out of anyone to get what he needed, but that wasn't true. Matt Dillon always had a sense of fairness about him. The people he beat the shit out of always had it coming. Kind of like Dirty Harry. Harry kicked the shit out of a lot of people, but none of them were ever innocent. And Dillon was no bigot. He treated all races equally. Can you say the same thing about the generation who wrote the character?

James Arness was a surfer. He played guitar on Venice with a bunch of youths. He was not the John Wayne character most associated him with. He was a laid back guy. Like me. He loved playing pranks on people. Like me. He loved to fuck with people who thought life was a certain way when it actually wasn't. Like me. Sorry.

It's this trickster persona that I would like to think about tonight. I have a lot of months to wait before the seventeenth season of Gunsmoke begins . . .

MY THOUGHTS ON GORE VIDAL'S CALIGULA BY WILLIAM HOWARD

 

*sigh* I really wanted to say nothing about this book. I didn't post a review on Amazon, and I certainly won't put one on Goodreads. This book is not to be encouraged. To give you an idea, William Howard is a penname. The actual author is William Johnston. Not to be confused with William Johnstone, mind you. This Johnston was mostly known for writing novelizations of TV shows, especially Get Smart. It ranged from Dr. Kildare to Happy Days, so yeah, I wouldn't want my actual name on this book, either. And it's not for the reason you might think.

Before we go any further, it is worth noting that we really know nothing reliably about the real life Caligula. The only contemporary extant account of him was written by an enemy, so it's altogether possible that Caligula got a raw deal, that this guy just had a vendetta against him. Still unlikely but certainly possible.

That in mind, let's talk about being offensive. Many of you know how much I delight in being offensive, but I hope, aside from the childish tee-hee moments, that you don't think I go for the lowest common denominator. I put a lot of effort into being offensive. The delight of being offensive is getting creative with it.

Plain old offense is really fucking easy. White guys who use the n-word offend me. Child rapists offend me. The former president of this country deeply offended me. See how easy that is? I never want to go that route. I want giant space cocks destroying humanity. I want . . . well, you know. If you're reading this, chances are you've at least read one of my books. You get it.

I've loved the movie, CALIGULA, for many years. Much to my delight I got to watch the Forced Viewing crew sit through the X-rated version to do a podcast, and that version is really the only version you need. Forget the R-rated version. It doesn't go far enough. While the depravities of the movie are creative and glorious and shocking, even decades after it was unleashed, it doesn't go as far as the book, and that's a good thing.

The book goes too far. It crosses the line. In theory this book is based on Gore Vidal's screenplay, not the movie, but I have my doubts. Ever read a Vidal sex scene? It's as vanilla and brief as possible. Vidal might as well have been making scientific observations about the act. I find it hard to believe that he wrote these insane fuck scenes. And I have no objection to fuck scenes. God knows I've written many, and I've been paid by porn magazines for my fiction, both hetero and gay. I have no problem with any of that.

In the movie, yes, Caligula is in love with his sister, and they enjoy sex a lot. That's borderline for me. But it's nothing I haven't experienced before. As much as Robert A. Heinlein is remembered for great SF, he is not quite so remembered as a huge fan of incest and nudism. In one of his books he has his main character go back in time to fuck his own mom. For example. I give this brother-sister thing a pass because they're adults. It's gross, yes, but it's not William Howard-gross.

Because in the book he depicts their first mating as children. With great detail. And it describes how Caligula seduced another sister when he was 16 and she was 12, I think? Only to be surprised by his other younger sister, maybe 9, joining the act. That's pretty fucking disgusting.

Remember Tiberius's harem in the movie? His "little fishies"? They were very young, but not as young as they were in the book. These kids are barely into double-digits, age-wise. And then there's a horrible story about something Tiberius did with a newborn infant. Let's just say the word "pacifier" and leave it at that.

When I read these scenes I thought I should just stop reading even though the paperback cost me thirty bucks. But when I was very young and the Big Bang was only a few years old, I promised myself that I would finish any book I started no matter how bad it got. I got through it.

Some of the other sex scenes are great, like when Caligula meets Caesonia (played wonderfully by the ever-sexy Helen Mirren). Their sex scenes are delightful, even when they get the Greek actor involved. A lot of the movie glosses over Caligula being bisexual, and I found his sex scenes with men, in particular his Gaul servant, interesting. The ones involving slaves from Africa were very weird, but it seems that Caligula doesn't mind being a bottom to them even after they've fucked and whipped his sisters in an imitation of the Rape of the Sabine Women. (Howard calls it "a marvelous game for the children.")

But I found it disappointing that it left out a lot of the movie. The scene I'm thinking of mostly is the wedding of Proculus. In the movie and book Caligula exercises his right of prima nocta with the bride. In the book he does the same to Proculus. In the movie Caligula shoves his fist into a vat of lard and proceeds to fistfuck Proculus, which I think it much more depraved.

When the book gets to my kind of depravity, it hits on all cylinders. For example, Caligula declares war on Britain and the Germans. They get to the British Channel only to realize that he forgot to order boats. Instead they gathered a bunch of seashells as proof of their conquest. They then bribe a bunch of Gauls, change their hair color and teach them some German so they can pretend to be prisoners of war, thus proving Caligula to be the conquering hero of Rome! And he has them executed even though they're just acting! When he gets home, there is a delightful passage that's almost a throwaway moment. I picked it up, though. Here it is: "The common people of Rome turned out to the last man, woman and child. They wouldn't miss a parade for anything, particularly these days, when Caligula allowed so few of them. Several babies were born near the roadside, and a number of children wandered off and were eaten by wild dogs." Our modern minds couldn't conceive of something like that!

I didn't pick up a few things from the movie that were in the book, or if I did I didn't remember or was too drunk. One thing is ridiculously funny to me. What was the last straw for the senators to decide to assassinate their emperor? Was it that Caligula loved to charge them with treason just so he could seize their estates? Nope. Was it when he made his horse a senator? Nope. Was it even when he forced the senators' wives and daughters, and sometimes even the senators themselves, to prostitute themselves in the imperial brothel? Not even that.

It was when Caligula declared that the next day Rome would convert to Isis worship. Holy fuck, I know religion is stupid, but even this shocks my atheist's heart.

The other thing that got by me was how much the common people of Rome loved Caligula. I figured they were just terrified of him, but as it turns out it was the senators who feared him. Caligula gave the people what they wanted: bread and circuses. They got to watch bears attack lions at the Circus Maximus. Or maybe even tigers versus gladiators. And certainly gladiator against gladiator in death matches. Upon the birth of his daughter, Caligula gave every Roman citizen a gold piece. How could they not love him?

I know this is an awful thing to think, but maybe our senators don't fear the people they, in theory, serve enough. Would they be so quick to shoot down a $15 minimum wage if they feared for their lives? Would Ted Cruz have gleefully left a frozen and dying Texas for Cancun if he thought for a second that the people could rise up against him? It makes one think about the beatings that used to take place in the early days of Congress. Of the duels. Now that all of that is gone, do they have a reason to even respect their people?

Probably not.

Just a Caligula-ish thought.

Ultimately, even though this book disgusted me nearly from page one, I'm glad I stuck with it. I had a few new things to think about that I hadn't noticed before. It's just weird thinking that the guy who wrote this book also wrote novelizations for shows like The Munsters, The Brady Bunch and even F-Troop.

Caligula got this line from Tiberius, but yeah.

SOME THOUGHTS ON CHUCK

 

What can I say about this amazing show that hasn't been said before? You all know the formula. Nerdy dude develops a superpower (in this case, the Intersect) and becomes a spy and falls for his CIA handler and she falls for him and they become a team of . . . okay, maybe the formula was on when I started this sentence, but it's kind of gotten away from me.

Chuck works for the Nerd Herd at the Burbank Buy More (meaning, Geek Squad at Best Buy). One day a former college friend/enemy, who has become a spy, sends him something called the Intersect. It's a classified database containing all the information any branch of the government has on anything up to that moment. It also allows him access to training, letting him become a deadly weapon just so long as he "flashes" on the information. This guy is played by the loveable Zachary Levi.

He finds himself trapped between Sarah Walker (Yvonne Strahovski), a CIA spy, and John Casey (Adam Baldwin), an NSA spy. The funny thing is, these aren't even their real names. They are also both assassins. They get assigned to Chuck's case and to protecting the Intersect. Sarah's cover is that she's Chuck's girlfriend. Casey's cover is . . . poor bastard . . . a sales associate at Buy More. Straddling both worlds is Morgan, Chuck's best friend since childhood and a fellow Buy More employee.

The supporting cast is made up of their boss, the general, and several coworkers at Buy More: Big Mike, the boss, and two shady perverts by the names of Jeff and Lester. The last two have a delightful band called Jeffster, and I was very pleased to see they have a song in the series finale. There is also Chuck's sister Ellie and her boyfriend Awesome. Er, Devon. Ellie is a doctor and Awesome is a surgeon.

Naturally there is a will-they-won't-they thing going on between Chuck and Sarah. I don't think it's a spoiler to say that it's a will-they situation. To me, that's the most boring part because it's the most predictable. How many times have I seen this? I will admit, though, this part was done well. What I truly enjoyed was the transformation of John Casey. When we first meet him he's a cold blooded assassin, and he's been ordered to kill Chuck if it seems like he's off the beam or he's in danger of falling into enemy hands. Over the course of the first season, Casey comes to actually like Chuck, which is weird for him. He doesn't make many friends outside the Marine Corps. When he's actually ordered to kill Chuck, he hesitates. But he will still do it. He clearly doesn't want to, but his loyalty is to his country. God, country, Marine Corps. In that order. He's even got a rotating target in his apartment! First it's Osama bin Laden, which he promptly shoots, and then there's Ronald Reagan, and he doesn't! He salutes!

Thankfully the kill order is rescinded, and we get to watch him change over five seasons until the point where he actually feels love again.

The show has the best guest stars. From Mark Hamill to Richard Chamberlain to Kevin Daniels to . . . I could go on forever. My favorite might be Bo Derek because she actually gets to play herself.

But there are two things in particular that stand out for me. The first is that Chuck has this brilliant way of using people's words against them in adverse conditions. My favorite is when Brandon Routh's character explains his evil plan and ends it with a stoic "mwuh-ha-ha." Just a throw away comment. Later, when Chuck has Routh's character by the short and curlies, he ends his execution of the plan by offering an equally stoic "Mwuh-ha-ha." I love those moments.

But I love this even more: no matter how small the detail, it will always be important later in the episode. It's the pistol on the mantel times a thousand. But even better than that, there are two instances where the writers played the long game (or, at least, two instances I'm aware of). In the first episode it is established that everyone calls Devon "Awesome." In the very last episode it becomes very important because a character who should know better (who has actually been brainwashed) calls him Devon instead, therefore revealing this person to be the enemy. And in another instance two characters carve their names into the wall of a house they want to own. Fast forward maybe a season or two, and that very carving is used to try to undo the brainwashing I just mentioned.

And then there's the ending. I'd rather not say much about it, as it is definitely a spoiler, but it wasn't happily-ever. Close, but not quite. I can never really trust an entirely happy ending.

In short, if you haven't seen it, watch Chuck. It's fucking incredible.

PS: If you're not going to watch the show, at least enjoy these Jeffster songs. That wedding scene is one of the best put to film ever.

PPS: There has been some talk--not much, I'll grant you--of a Quantum Leap reboot. If it happens, only Levi could play Sam Beckett. Not just because Scott Bakula plays Chuck's dad. Levi and Bakula have the same kind of charisma and an ability to at least look great while doing fight scenes. Plus Chuck had to be different people a lot, just like Sam. It's a perfect match, and it's the only way I'd watch such a reboot.