GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #517: NATIONAL POETRY LIBRARY

 When I was but a wee lad with no significant publications to my name I fell for one of the oldest tricks in the publishing industry. I know there are some aspiring authors who listen to the gibberish I spout at all times, so this might help someone not fall into the same trap that I did.

I'm not known for my poetry. Well, except for both volumes of Shit Poems. But for a brief period of my life, around high school and college, I tried my hand at writing serious poems. The reason I don't do that anymore is because, not to put too fine a point on it, they sucked donkeyballs.

So imagine my surprise when a poetry book--full length, not some zine or journal--wanted to publish a poem I'd won a minor award for during high school. I've hit the big time, baby!

Shockingly enough, the National Poetry Library is still around ripping off young poets who are wet behind the ears. The way it works is, you submit a poem for one of their contests. You don't win the contest, but they want to publish your poem anyway. No charge to you. However, if you want a copy of the book, it is extraordinarily expensive. $80 for one copy, if I remember correctly. I'm sure inflation has driven that up into the triple digits by now.

Everyone I talked to said this was a scam, and I ignored each and every one of them up to and including my creative writing professor at the time. Whoops! But I got the book and was surprised by how many poems were in it. Looking back, I'm not that surprised. You know what PT Barnum said about suckers, and one of them was definitely born on July 25, 1978 to Frank Bruni and Kathy Kopoulos at Elmhurst Memorial Hospital at around 2 am.

But I wasn't entirely stupid. Just, you know, mostly stupid. I decided to test everyone else's theory by writing the absolute worst poem I could possibly think of and sending it to their contest the next year. It was so fucking atrocious. I might have posted it a while back just so people could gasp in horror and say, "My word." But I'm high and don't feel like looking for it. It might not be there, anyway.

If they rejected me, I prepared to howl my vindication at all the naysayers. But you already know what happened. They accepted this piece of shit poem that doesn't even rate being included in a chapbook called Shit Poems. I was soooooo angry. Back then I really fucking hated being wrong.

So. Lesson learned. No harm but certainly some foul.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #516: FORBIDDEN PLACES

I'm certain this thing lives under Jefferson Elementary.

 I love going to forbidden places. Meaning, places no one is supposed to be. I'm almost certain I've written about this here before, but I'm too high to go back and search.

I don't know why I was thinking about this tonight, but there was a place around back of the elementary school I went to that was just such a place. It was close to the building, far from the playground, so no one really hung out around there. It was a grating that led down into a subterranean level. It reminded me of Jabba's palace, where he had the trapdoor that led to the Rancor's pit. So I remember playing Star Wars there a lot and imagining I'd been sent down to fight the Rancor.

Nowadays it reminds me more of the place where the neo-Nazis in Breaking Bad kept Jesse Pinkman when they had him captured. So if you're looking for a frame of reference, it's like that.

I never got to go down there because it was always locked. I've always liked exploring, and it irritated me that I couldn't get down there. If the zombie apocalypse ever happens, I'm grabbing some bolt cutters from the hardware store, and I'm going to find out what's down there once and for all. It's probably not exciting, but what the hell?

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #515: I'M SOOOOOOO HIGH

 Maybe I'm just really high right now, but there's a certain light quality to my bedroom right now that reminds me of the early 'Eighties. Like, really early. Maybe 1981.

I don't know why it is, but my memory of being a very small child is that everything was in yellow. There were a lot of browns, too, but mostly yellow. That's what my room looks like now. I feel like I'm time traveling. It's kind of like how certain smells will bring on a wave of nostalgia.

I think it's because I'm packing my books, and I no longer have four towers of books in front of my lamp. Everything seems a bit brighter in here. Also, I'm pretty sure that my edible had something to do with this feeling.

Weird.

NOW ANNOUNCING DONG OF FRANKENSTEIN AND OTHER PORNOS YOU CAN'T JERK IT TO!

 

A while back New Kink closed its doors, and Dong of Frankenstein went out of print. It's a shame because it's the one I'm asked about the most. Well, it's back! This volume also contains other horror erotica stories that are out of print:

-"Zero Recall"

-"A Market for All Things"

-"The Knot That Binds"

Check it out here!

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #514: CYCLES OF FAT

When I was a kid in elementary school I was in pretty good shape. Skinny. Athletic. I played baseball and was hell on an obstacle course. So how did I become the fat ass I am today?

My first fat began in junior high. It really started in fifth grade because I broke my leg and had to stay off of it for a while. It irritated me because we were having our last obstacle course that year, and I had to sit it out. I loved doing that shit, and when you leave elementary school, you no longer get to do obstacle courses. I also missed out on getting my Weblos badge from Cub Scouts, which I really enjoyed doing. I learned a lot as a young lad in uniform, and it sticks in my craw to this day that I never got my final badge. And there were a few other factors.

So I learned to accept my sedentary life to the point where I started kinda liking it. I got no more exercise, and because I sat around and ate like shit all the time, I put on some weight. I was pudgy in junior high. I continued my first fat through high school. I'd decided to eat nothing but McDonald's every night for five straight years. That did not do well for my physical wellbeing.

When I saw my graduation video I looked like Chris Farley. It horrified me, so I spent that summer, before going to college, on the fast track to lose weight. I started off at 245 lbs., and by the time I started college I was down to 205. I looked pretty fucking good back then. I still needed to lose a bit more weight, and my target was 200 even. I never got that low. The closest was about 202, maybe.

Through a set of awful circumstances, I began my second fat while finishing up college. I blew up to 306 lbs., and no one believed me when I said I weighed that much. If we had cell phones capable of taking pictures back then, I would have taken one of me on the scale. (And I would have had all ten toes!) I guess I carried it well. And hey, I still managed to get laid, so it must not have been all that bad.

I got back to yoga and exercise and jogging, and while I managed to get back down to 245, I've never been able to get lower than that. I'm currently on my third fat, and I'm usually anywhere between 250 and 270. Unless I've been in the hospital for my stomach issues. I've been able to get down to 235 in those moments, but they don't really count. When I can eat again, I shoot back up to 245.

Yesterday my endocrinologist told me that I'm 249 lbs. It's better than I expected. Getting out of detox, my food consumption has skyrocketed. I thought I was back up to 270. Still, I could lose some weight. Most definitely. I hope to fuck I don't wind up doing a fourth fat. Cannabis makes me very hungry, and I've been eating more than one dinner. I've got to stop doing that.

Because with my bad foot, I can't exercise anymore. I have to stay off it as much as possible, or I risk losing that foot. So if I start that fourth fat, I'm pretty sure that will be the way my corpse will look when I die. I'll be fat Elvis again.

Did I ever tell you that my nickname way back when was Elvis? Back then I had sideburns that somehow grew beyond my control and became muttonchops. I looked like fat Elvis when I was young. It would be horrible to be fat Elvis when I'm old.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #513: A RAW AND THROBBING ASSHOLE

 

[NOTE: This was supposed to be last night's entry, but I had more time then, so I decided to write at length about my Lyft experiences. I have less time tonight, so here we go. I edited it slightly so it would appear this is what I did today.]

I needed to get lunch this afternoon, but I didn't have any money. I'm broke and payday is tomorrow. However, I had a survey coupon for two free cheeseburgers from White Castle, so I thought, why not?

Side note: always take the surveys if there's free shit involved. I've kept myself fed through such cunning and devotion. I get angry if the survey doesn't have a reward for taking it. What, there's not even a sweepstakes entry for this? FUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK.

So I got my White Castle and went back to work. Shortly thereafter I remembered why people call these things gut-busters. I felt the all too familiar gurgling in my guts, like a Predator was nearby, and my butthole started burning slightly. Whoops! I got off the call I was on and rushed to the bathroom where I shat my guts out in a horribly violent manner. If this was a scene in a movie, there would be people picketing the film for its grim and ugly violence. No kid should have to see this.

And then, as I sat with my raw and throbbing asshole, the stink hit me. It smelled like a chemical burn. If someone lit a match in there the entire building would have gone up in a mushroom cloud, and I would have died like I've always expected: on the toilet, Elvis-style.

I really shouldn't eat White Castle unless I'm in the privacy of my own home.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #512: LYFT ADVENTURES

 So a while back I found myself in need of Uber. It irritated the fuck out of me because my car was in the body shop at the time. I didn't want to download the app, but I had no choice. I tried to get Uber, but for some reason the are-you-a-robot question kept deciding that yes, I am indeed a robot. It's one of those things where you're supposed to select every square that has stoplights in it. Or buses. Or boats. Whatever it was, I kept failing it, and I knew for a fact that I was getting them right. There were no ambiguous squares like you usually get.

Fuck Uber. I signed up for Lyft instead, and they're absolutely stellar. They also have some interesting drivers. I usually appreciate silence during such a ride, but the talkative guys have been kind of weird and had a lot of experiences that I wouldn't have expected.

One guy, for example, was born in Jamaica but had lived in Europe for a while before moving out to the Pacific Northwest before moving to little ol' Elmhurst to be a State Farm rep. Kind of an odd job for someone who has traveled the world that much, but it seemed to make him happy. He actually lived a few blocks from my work and told me I was the first ride he'd ever delivered to his own neighborhood. Small world.

Another guy talked to me about workouts. This was back when I could still exercise, and I was describing what I usually did. He told me this crazy story about how he would do animal moves for his own workout. He'd lunge like a cougar, for example. I thought he was out of his mind, but the very next day, as I was watching the news, they did a piece on Chris Hemsworth's workouts, and holy shit, he was doing the exact same thing this Lyft driver was talking about.

Another guy talked about his brushes with the law. We were approaching a turn on Palmer in Elmhurst where it was prohibited to turn left between 3-6. It was 5:35, and he started to make that turn. I advised him that cops keep a close watch on this part of town because almost everyone ignored the traffic sign. He was fine with that. And then we got pulled over. The cop eventually let him off with a warning, and as we drove away he said, "It always makes me nervous when they look at my license. I'm Mexican, and so is my name. If they can get past that, they look back up at my face. I can pass for white, so they don't try to deport me or anything."

And then there was the time I legitimately thought I was being kidnapped. This was when my bad foot was still broken, and I had every expectation that it would heal. I needed a ride from my office to the train station, and this little old lady picked me up. She didn't say a word to me the whole time, which I usually appreciated, but when she started deviating from the usual route I started wondering. Well, maybe she knows a way that's less congested. But then we kept going north, away from the train station. And she didn't show any signs of turning back toward my destination. She didn't look like much, and I thought I could take her in a fight if necessary. I'd already missed my train and the one after that, so I finally asked where she was going. She pointed vaguely at her phone. I had to give her directions so I could at least get home in time to eat and sleep before getting up to do it all over again. I finally got home, but wow. You hear horror stories about these situations, but you never think it will happen to you.

You know. Like Letters to Penthouse.