The Grim Reaper Approaches

Your old pal EvilMister turns older next month. The approaching day of doom is the 26th of March, and when we hit that calendar day, the first third of my life will have officially come to a close. And me without a party dress yet.

There are a number of things I was supposed to have accomplished by now (excluding the vainglorious dreams of being in control of the world or an actual-factual superhero), and the realization that I've accomplished none of them seriously sucks donkey ass.

Besides being arrogant, I'm also realistic. My goals were never truly outrageous. I never wanted to be president of anything, partly because I can barely handle being in charge of washing my underwear let alone the smooth running of a nation. I never wanted to be a doctor, and not only because it takes a trillion years of schooling to get through, but because sticking my fingers into someone through a hole I made is gross. The same goes for astronaut, because I'm worried that if I break through into outer space, the aliens who left me behind will see me and I still haven't had sex with Ashlee Simpson.

No, I just wanted some really basic things. I'm still working on them, but becoming a published author, even a bad published author, takes serious work and I am more than a little lazy. Plus I really dislike being told 'no' all the time. Add to that the fact that busting into the literary world is now as serpentine and circuitous as getting government paperwork done AND getting representation in, oh, say, basketball, I have very little chance of getting it done on my own. It's not that I'm totally lazy or anything, it's just that I suffer from 'tomorrow-itis'. This malady is quickly followed by 'I am on hiatus-itis' and 'The book needs to be reworked-aphobia'. And then, just to round off my procrastination, there's the dreaded 'Damn this game is fun-aphilia'.

If only I could use the laser like focus I possess on leveling my characters up into my real life, I wouldn't be writing this article, I'd be pleasuring Natalie Portman (she's legal, I checked).

So while the specter of my 33rd birfday shows itself on the hill, remember this:

I accept money and candy as gifts. Address available upon request.

Well, Ain't that A Freakin' Surprise

As you may or may not know, I sometimes find it difficult to keep jobs. My most recent bout with gainful employment through normal means (I am still 'with' Express') involved me working with another print shop. It ended when the manager accused me of wanting a long weekend , and that the medical tests I was taking to determine the source of migraine headaches was 'seriously putting her out'. (I should point out that her and at least two other people in the shop were experiencing similar symptoms but never once felt that I, EvilMister, suffered from the same malady.) When she told me that I couldn't have the day I needed off (she had a week's friggin' notice), I calmly nodded. When everyone else left (I was the closer), I completed my duties for the evening, then wrote my ex-employer a long letter of resignation, where I pretty much told her that she was an evil hag and that I hoped her teeth fell out of her nose. Several weeks later, I got a call from the alarm company that responds to calls from the shop, and after telling them to send the cops out right the fuck away, I emailed my ex-employer and told her I was still on the list.

Before that, I worked in another print shop, and by then end I was doing one of two things; either purposefully hiding from customers or intentionally pissing them off as badly as I could without getting into a fist fight. It was equally some of the most fun I've ever had, and some of the worst, because no one, not even Idi Amin or Pol Pot could maintain the level of cockholery needed to destroy all the customers. Eventually, I burst a vessel in my brain and pretty much threatened to firebomb the place if I didn't get ny vacation time right away. The boss said no. I got a note from my doctor and said, up yours, captain commander, I'm on leave for a month minimum. A day later, one of the other recently promoted drones accused me of purposefully trying to fuck him over by leaving; he'd taken on the work load of three people in an effort to suck as much ass as he could without having to have collagen implants. I told him to fuck off, and never came back.

Then there was the time I threatened the lives of all my employees, and the customers, and pretty much anyone else who came near me while I was working at a well-known purveyor of fine coffee beverages. I so frightened the girl I was working with that by the time I came back from my brisk trot around the outside of the building, she'd called the district manager, who had decided that we were going to close early on accout of my homicidal rage. Have you ever heard of one of these places closing early for no reason? When a guy got electrocuted in a crawl space four doors down from one of the shops I worked in, cutting power to the entire block, we locked our doors and waited for the body to be carted away and power to be restored. I can only imagine that I must have looked like a spector of doom, and that's pretty cool.

What brings this on?

At the end of this month, I will find myself gainfully employed once more. I'll be free of the chains of mediocrity and the sadly non-mercenary jobs I received (seriously, I was always hoping to get the call, be told to go to such and and such a place at this time, pick up this money/gun/grenade and go and do something dark and twisted. But noooooooo, it was more like, go here and then pick up little pieces of cardboard for eight hours.)

Here is a syllogism (A form of deductive reasoning consisting of a major premise, a minor premise, and a conclusion) that highlights, I think, my career:

• I get a job.
• I threaten the lives and wellbeing of everyone around me.
• I should not work.

The preceding chronology of work also showed a rapidly decreasing period of time from employment to homicidal rage (the first one took four years, the second one year, the third two months). So if all goes according to plan, no less than two weeks after being officially employed, I will end up tossing someone into one of the massive mixers. Crunch crunch mulch spurble.

Waiting for the Other Shoe

I am not typically cynical, pessimistic or otherwise negative minded when it comes to my own life (I am, however, bloody minded and arrogant as well as particularly disdainful towards other people), but lately, things have been going fine. Sure, there's the addiction to online gaming, the fact that my temporary bachelorhood is now reaching it's third year and my frightening new ability to have gas after eating everything from apples to air and everything has grown to near-Chernobyl proportions, but other than that ....

Everything is just fine.

In this, I am perhaps a little like George Costanza. I am suspicious now, that something is waiting around the corner, some dread boojum of disaster, something so awful that the mighty Gods have seen fit in their 'wisdom' to allow me some respite until I get hit on the head from a falling piece of frozen airline bathroom ejecta.

Do I want something bad to happen? What are you, nuts? When bad things happen, I get really cranky. Like, Charles Manson cranky. Like Sean Penn beating the shit out of paparazzi cranky. I'm serious, when the world doesn't go my way, the horns come out and woe betide the fuctakrd or the gomer who gets in my way when I am having an 'off' day; if that happens, there will be much muttering and staring at this person when they aren't looking, fervently wishing that an anvil fall on their head.

Maybe it's not natural to expect something triply awful will happen now that I am coasting through the eye of the Existential Storm, but it is certainly the human condition. So I'm going to sit in my corner, sharpen my knives, load my guns, say a few Hail Marys and prepare myself for the coming personal apocalypse, and when it even shows the merest hint of coming at me, I am going to blow the shit out of it, cut it into pieces, flatten the pieces, douse them in high-test jet fuel (ordinary gasohol won't work) burn them into ashes and let any potential misfortune blow away into the winds.

Yeah, that's right. EvilMister has declared War on Bad Luck. 2004 sucked ass through a used septic drainage pump. 2005 will be much better, even if I have to start leaving corpses strewn about my patio in amusing poses.

Until next time, intrepid fans!

MMORPG Support Groups.

If there aren't any, there should be. I understand now why people lose jobs, relationships, all sense of societal leanings and more than a few braincells when crushed under heel by the mighty juggernaut of online gaming.

They call online gambling a sickness, a disease which afflicts people.

Why in the hell isn't there some kind of governmental relief program for people who want to spend all of their time 'leveling up' their soldier? Why can't I get some kind of medication to stop me from plotting my deadly revenge against NumskUll120 because he fragged me in PvP zone? Why can't I go on Maury, piss and moan about how weak I am (or better yet, Dr. Phil, because he'll tell me to my face how lame I am) and then feel better about it?

I haven't played an online RPG game in almost a decade. Mulitplayer first person shooter games simply don't count because it'sa a bunch of morons shooting the shit out of each other, with no real point to it, other than how many people you can kill. Massively Multiplayer Role Playing Games are exactly what the title implies; hundreds, possibly thousands of dateless geeks (both M and F) sitting in front of their computers trying to kill enough monsters to get enough XP to level up to wield the greatest weapon their class can use, then trying to kill still more monsters to get the gold(credits/froobles/denari) to but a better set of what-the-hell-ever. 10 years ago, graphic online games wasn't even a wet dream, they simply didn't exist. Back then, the were called MUDS (multi-user dungeons) and it was all text-based.

Back then, I was hooked like a fat kid sucking back Krispy Kreme donuts and Jolt Cola until I shocked myself into a diabetic coma. I am ashamed to admit it, but I have one fucking enormous addictive personality. I accept it, but I am ashamed all the same. I will devour a game until I beat it, and with the one I am playing now, this will take some time, cuz the final level you can reach is something like 300. The world is enormous, the toys plentiful.

So are the hours I've lost. I play it before work, after work, and I kill my weekends with marathon game sessions that make me feel like I"m coming down from a drug high. I'm shaky, I sleep porrly because my mind is a friggin' computer and it's busy running critical analyses on my performance for the night, riffling through attack scenarios and high-level probability quotients. My eyes feel like boiled eggs, my hands are curled up from carpal tunnel syndrome, and I think at least one of my shins has a permanent impression on it from where it rests too tightly against my cheap-ass metal desk. If I had a girlfriend, I wouldn't because all I can think about is trying to figure out how someone can find something to sell that is worth a million dollars. I need to buy a car for my character so I can fly around, except they can cost fifteen trillion dollars. My character could have an apartment, with furniture, if I wanted, but I haven't found the in-game version of an Ikea yet, and I really doubt they'll have the futuristic equivalent of the Laholm leather loveseat. When I decide to really commit, I'll join a clan and then we'll wage war against other clans, for control of cities. I might even purchase the expansion packs (the main version of the game was recently rendered free to download and free to play for two fucking years), although I'm told my character will have to be a really high level before then ... right now my dude is only level 25, and he kind of sucks still.

Why do I bother playing a game that has no real benefit to me in Real Life?

Motherfucker, if you got to ask that question, you don't even come from the same damn planet as me. It's like asking that guy why he climbed Mt. Everest, except the answer won't be 'Because it's there' but 'Because I only need fifteen thousand more experience points and then I can buy the Sword of Everlasting Geekiness, and then I can kill the Murderous Rubber Baby Buggy Bumper.'

Shit. Go home and play friggin Solitaire if you got to ask me why. Now, I need to get some sleep so I can start fresh in the morning.