GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #458: BE CONSISTENT

 "Oh dear God. Please don't be a serious rant about how we're all getting fucked by corporations. Please be one of the funny columns. I need a laugh before bed."

Don't worry. Tonight's GF won't be serious. It's going to be about a childhood memory that is, I think, funny and pretty gross, too.

I don't remember much about this man. Except for one thing, which we're going to get to. I think he was related to someone a relative of mine married. I also remember his name, but I won't mention it here. I'm being vague because I'm almost certain this is a story he wouldn't want me to tell. I'm not even sure he's still alive, but why take the chance?

I actually learned something valuable from him, something I practice every day, but when he departed this wisdom to me, it wasn't what I immediately remembered. That thing that I still remember. We're getting to that.

I don't recall how young I was. Maybe ten? I know I hadn't hit my growth spurt yet. It was a family reunion for a family I was related to by marriage (probably), and it was the first time I met most of them. Anyway, after he and I and someone else (sorry, I'm in protect-the-innocent mode for this one) finished up going fishing, we returned to civilization and I had to piss. So did this guy I'm talking about. There were two urinals, so we wound up next to each other.

He said to me, "Paul, if you learn nothing else from me, I want you to remember this. Be consistent."

(He called me by my middle name because that's how family referred to me. I've never really liked my middle name, which is why only a select few are currently allowed to call me that. And no, it's not because of all the questions I'm asked because of it, like, "Where's George and Ringo?" And, "Were you born before John Paul II was named Pope?" I just never liked the sound of Paul Bruni. John Bruni sounds a lot better to me.)

So he kept talking about being consistent, but I zoned out because while he was talking to me and pissing, he'd turned to look at me, practically shoving his huge cock in my face. Up to that point in my life, the biggest dick I'd ever seen was my grandfather's. While he wasn't a nudist exactly, he wasn't shy to be in the house naked. But now I had this giant porn cock mere inches from me. If I sneezed, or he did, I would have been in danger of getting cock slapped. It was kind of terrifying, actually.

But I'll be goddammed if that lesson didn't stick with me. Every once in a while I say something that I think is witty and new, and someone reminds me that I said it years ago. So I'm nothing if not consistent. There was even one time I mentioned something on Twitter that I could have sworn I'd never said before, but sure enough I'd posted it verbatim almost a year previous to the day.

So what the hell? Be consistent.

COVER REVEAL FOR THE LIFE AND TIMES OF HIERONYMUS ALOYSIS ZIEGE, MY NEW BOOK FROM BIZARRO PULP PRESS!

 

Isn't that a thing of great beauty? Special thanks to Don Noble who designed this cover! For all the details click here.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #457: MORE CORPORATE BULLSHIT

 I went shopping for food the other day, and as the cashier rang up my shit I noticed something missing. Usually, as the cashier moves the food down the belt to the back of the station, a bagger stands there, putting everything into bags very carefully because certain items can only be bagged with other certain items.

The cashier must have noticed me noticing this. "We don't have baggers anymore," he said. "I'll take care of it when I'm done ringing you up."

And sure enough he did just that after I ran my LINK card (probably for the last time since they're taking it away from me next month). As he bagged everything he added, "When we have a spare moment they also send me out into the parking lot to get the carts."

I thought that was fucking nuts, but it's par for the course for corporate bullshit. It's something I've noticed throughout all the years of my working life. Corporations will do anything--ANYTHING--to get out of raising workers' wages. At every one of my jobs (except for the one I'm currently working), if someone quit or got fired, rather than hiring someone else to do that job, they will simply assign that work to someone else who already works there, thus adding to their workload. And do they get a pay raise?

What do you fucking think?

The Fox News mantra of "no one wants to work" is absurd. Of course no one wants to work. Almost every corporate job isn't necessary. We're supposed to be hanging out in forests, getting high, sharing art that we made ourselves, etc. A lot of jobs are necessary, and big surprise, they all have unions, hence protection from the corporate overlords.

But that's besides the point. Let's forget that for now. No one wants to work? *buzzer* Wrong. No one wants to work for a pittance. The job I do today, for example, could pay for a house and a car and all the things the American Dream stands for back in the Golden Age. Today? Not so much. Same for any of the telecom jobs I've worked.

No one wants to work? Sure. If you're hired as a cashier, all well and good. But then you have to bag, too? And corral shopping carts? And whatever else this poor bastard is going to have to do next? Are you seeing a pattern, here? It's abuse, is what it is. If corporations are people, and as far as I'm concerned THEY'RE FUCKING NOT, then they'd be in prison for what they've done.

Yesterday I posted a documentary about Noam Chomsky, and he shows in a nice flowchart how the system works. Corporations want more power, more deregulation, more rights than actual people. So they use the wealth that they should be using to give raises to their workers and give it to politicians so they can make laws that make corporations stronger and get them more money. And the cycle continues.

The crazy thing is, that's legal. Everyone knows about Shakespeare's line about lawyers, and maybe back then he was right. Today? I'd change it to lobbyists. Get rid of all those motherfuckers, and when we find out that even though they are legally forbidden from influencing politics they then do so anyway? As far as I'm concerned, that's treason and should be dealt with accordingly.

But that will never happen. We're doomed to ride this empire right into the ground. That's what happens, by the way. All empires fall in the end. America had an OK run. Could have been better. Could have been worse. But it might just collapse in our lifetimes.

And corporate bullshit will be to blame.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #456: I READ BANNED BOOKS

 

So the most recent news in banning books is that a school board in Tennessee voted unanimously to ban MAUS from their school. I'm sure it's not the first time MAUS has gone through this, and it certainly won't be the last, but I can't think of anyone who isn't a Nazi who would want to ban this book. But if you want to know the finer details, here is the transcript of that meeting.

Fair warning, it's a difficult read, not because everyone involved is an asshole (they are), but because no one cleaned up the transcript. I suspect they ran the recording through a program and didn't have an educated (ha!) human being go over it. There are typos and missing words, etc. But it's worth reading if you have the time (and I know some of you are insomniacs, so you probably do).

Anyway, they're trying to do their best to make it about a nude image and eight naughty words and not about the Holocaust. So they're not entirely batshit crazy. But still. If they're willing to chuck such an important book because of those things, then they're probably being disingenuous. There is talk of redacting those things, but they don't sound all that serious about it. They seem to be looking for copyright excused not to do that. And those things shouldn't be redacted, anyway.

It makes me somewhat grateful for the way I was raised. I mean, I was forbidden to experience a lot of art. If an album had the Parental Advisory sticker on it, I couldn't listen to it. I remember when I was a kid in Coconuts begging my grandmother to buy me Undertow by Tool, and she examined the cover art and tried to get me to confess that it was something dirty. She eventually bought it for me (reluctantly), but she asked a lot of questions about how it might be vulgar. And if I was twelve years and 364 days old, I was still forbidden from seeing a PG-13 movie. Renting an R rated movie from Video Magic? Don't even think about it.

Which made me glad to hang out with Dad when he had me for a weekend. He'd let me watch R movies, and if boobs showed up? He wouldn't make me close my eyes. And I hung out with friends who didn't have such domineering authority figures in their lives, so I was able to watch awesome and grotesque horror movies while sleeping over at their places.

BUT! When it came to reading? Nothing was forbidden. If Wrath James White had a book out when I was, say, eight years old I'd be allowed to read it. I could read anything I wanted, and that went a long way toward making me who I am today, and for that I'm very, very grateful. Not even my grandmother would have stopped me from reading MAUS as a kid. I didn't know about it at the time. I read it in college while working at the library. It should be noted that it was shelved in the 940's. For those unfamiliar with the Dewey Decimal System, that's a nonfiction section for history books, particularly WWII. So it's impossible to underestimate the importance of this book.

More to the point, the Bible has a lot more offensive scenes in it than MAUS does, and you never hear about an American school board so much as thinking to ban it. So if you're reading that transcript, keep that in mind. You'll note that one guy talks about being a sinner and a hypocrite, so religion is an important factor to at least his decision making.

I forgot who said it first, but when authority figures ban books, you should go out of your way to read them and find out why. It's almost never really about offensive language and sexless nudity. You'll see a very obvious pattern, and it's always about trying to prevent people to think about things in a particular way.

I didn't take a critical thinking course (fuck the word "module") until college. There are two reasons for that. The first is that I'm paying for that course, and I didn't pay for public school. The other reason is that no one wants you to think critically when you're not eighteen yet. If you did you'd realize how fucked things are. Why eighteen? Traditionally speaking, that's when they can send you off to get killed in some war, but we don't have the draft anymore. But what the hell? Tradition is all that matters to most people. We do things because our ancestors did them. I'm glad to see that attitude finally changing, but it needs to be outright killed.

Do new things. Think things through. Read banned books.

Don't you know the Dewey Decimal System?!

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #455: A REAL BUMMER

 I had to go grocery shopping Monday night. I fucking hate to do that because there are always a lot of people there, and almost all of them are inconsiderate and lost in their own worlds without a single fuck for anyone else around them. I prefer shopping Sunday mornings when most people in town are at church. But I had no choice because there was no food in the house, and I was not very motivated to go out on Sunday due to a snowstorm that left my backyard and car buried.

When I sat down in my car after I was done I realized something was off, and I saw that I'd popped a button on my beloved trench coat. One that often comes off because of the way I sit. But the difference between this time and all the others was I couldn't find the button. Fuck! What if I'd lost it in the store? Well, if that's the case, then it's gone for good. Once I leave a store I don't go back in for anything.

It bummed me out because that button was kind of special to me. Back when I was unemployed for more than a year I decided to teach myself how to do things that I ordinarily depend on others to do for me. One of those things was how to sew a button. It took me a lot longer to learn than it should have, but I got it, and I was very proud of myself. It was a symbol of my success at trying to do something I had never done before.

So yeah. A real bummer.

I resigned myself to having to find another button because I didn't want to cut a spare button off my coat. It felt too destructive. I hoped that maybe I'd lost the button at work. I doubted it because I remembered buttoning it up before leaving, but it was my last hope. No dice, of course.

But then I found the button! I don't know how it wound up in my backyard, but I found it in the snow. Now I just have to find the time to sew it back on. That's the thing. The older I get, the less time I have, it seems. That, too, is a real bummer.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #454: CHUCK NORRIS

 

So Chuck Norris and I go waaaaay back. In fact he was present the night I was born. My mom had just pushed me out, but Chuck Norris wanted the honor of holding me first, so the doctor passed me into his arms. He brushed placenta out of my already full head of hair. "It's good to meet you, John Paul Bruni. I've been waiting for this moment to arrive. It's time for me to pass on the torch. You are now the greatest man to ever live. When you do push ups, the earth will just move up and down. You will be able to divide by zero. When the boogeyman goes to sleep at night, he'll check the close for you."

Little baby me looked him in the eyes. "I cannot accept this honor," I told him. "I have to earn it."

Chuck Norris smiled and nodded. "I respect the hell out of that. You will be even stronger than me, John Paul Bruni. May I call you sir?"

A serene feeling came over me. "Yes, Chuck Norris, you may."

So why have I told you this obviously phony story? Well, I told a joke recently that Chuck Norris will do what Meat Loaf wouldn't do for love. It's usually pretty obvious when I'm joking, but some jokes call for deadpan delivery, and this was one of them. When I do that, people around me take me seriously to the point where they ask me to explain myself. I don't know why people do that, but they do.

This person said, "How do you know that?"

So I crafted this story on the spot in the same deadpan I used when telling the joke. None of it fazed him. He waited patiently for me to finish, and then he said, "I don't believe you."

I almost sighed myself to death.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #453: PICKING AT A STAR WAR

 

[Heh. Outlaw Vern likes to call individual Star Wars movies as a Star War, and as a collective he calls them Star Warses. I like that, so I've adopted that policy.]

I'm not one to agree with everyone, but in a few instances they are right. Case in point: The Empire Strikes Back is the best of all the Star Warses. A friend of mine teaches guitar, and one of his students (I think) thinks this film is not just the best of them but is also a perfect movie. I don't like the term "perfect movie." None of them are perfect. But this kid's pretty adamant to the point where every objection my friend came up with was shot down. So he asked me if I thought of anything that could disprove the kid's theory, I should tell him. That was months ago, and the only thing I could think of was Darth Vader constantly calling Luke "Skywalker." Imagine if I had a son and called him Bruni all the time. It wouldn't make sense, right? An argument could be made that he doesn't want anyone to know his real identity, but I call bullshit on that. The Emperor, of all people, knows Vader is Anakin Skywalker, and when the two of them are talking, Vader keeps referring to Luke as Skywalker. He doesn't need to hide anything from Palpatine. Why are they talking about Luke like this?

Well, I recently got Disney+ so I could take a month and burn through all the Star Wars and Marvel stuff and then cancel before I have to pay for another month. I succeeded at this (except for The Book of Boba Fett, so I'll probably have to pay for that extra month while the rest of the show plays out), but yesterday, while trying to get up the nerve to go outside and brush my car off, I decided, fuck it. I haven't seen Empire in a while. And I'll pay extra attention to any flaws that might come up. I considered it an interesting intellectual exercise, so you all might be curious to see how things went. This is what I found:

-When the wampa captures Luke on Hoth, how the fuck did it get him to hang upside down? Did it melt his boots into the snow? How? And why doesn't Luke just slip out of his boots to escape?

-Why does Obi-Wan pick that moment to contact Luke? He could have told him about Yoda anytime. Why wait until Luke felt like shit and was on the brink of passing out?

--Why did Han's tauntaun die of cold exposure? Hoth is its home. It should be used to the weather.

--This one irritates me the most. According to the crawl, Luke is in charge of the rebellion on Hoth, but there isn't a single indication of his leadership there. He strikes me as just another freedom fighter who has a few extra tricks up his sleeve. Who should have been listed as the leader in the crawl? Leia, because she's clearly the one in charge. I suspect I know why they did it that way, and you probably have the same suspicion.

--When the Falcon is being pursued by the Empire and can't go to hyperdrive, both Han and Chewy leave the cockpit for repairs. That doesn't fucking make sense, for one, but for another, how did the TIE fighters not kill them in that moment? Is Leia (or Threepio for that matter) an expert pilot? Granted, everyone in the Star Warses is apparently a pilot, so maybe she is, too. Maybe I'm wrong about this one.

--If Lord Vader needs an update on the Falcon from the admiral, maybe he's not as strong with the Force as he thinks he is.

Your thoughts? Objections? Suggestions?