I say, BAH to the whole damned thing.

So tomorrow I return to work. I say this with the notion than when tomorrow morning comes, I will in fact crawl out of my bed and do the things asssociated with getting my ass to work. I don't really want to, and there's actually a fairly decent chance that it might not happen at all.

Why?

Let's point out the obvious first, just to get it out of the way. No one wants to work. Nobody. If you gave a random number of people the option of going to work at a job they didn't like, to work with people weirder than they were, for money that was more insult than anything and not doing the above, I'm pretty sure most people would choose to sit on their asses and contemplate why exactly Demi Moore is starting to look like a man. (Seriously. Watch her 'run down the beach' scene in Charlie's Angels 2 and you will see what I mean.) Of the people who say they'd rather go to work than sit at home, oh, I don't know, having fun, a clear percentage are lying or holding on to some noblesse oblige crapola OR, and this is worse, are doing the whole martyr thing (never mind, dear, I'll go to work and slave over an open grease fire ...). Those people are should be given over to the doctors for evaluations involving lubes and shiny, sparky prods. The remaining few who say they'd rather work are, for lack of a better phrase, the miserable cunts whose lives are dedicated to making everyone else's lives miserable. They do enjoy their jobs. So yeah, I don't want to work, big deal, wanna fight about it? If I could marry someone who'd pay me money to sit around and think the weighty thoughts of the world, I for damned sure would. And they'd be the most awesomely weighty, deeply thunk thoughts this world has seen. I'd out Nietzsche Nietzsche and prove that Aristotle was a prat in a dress. That's what I'd do.

Now that the obvious is out of the way, and with only a modicum of backpatting and auto-eroticism, let's move on.

I know, that no matter how much I beg and plead, how much I hope and dream, has changed since I've left. Everything will either be exactly the same, or worse, which doesn't really count as count, because going further down the slippery slope is way, waaaaay easier than climbing back up. Just look at Kevin Costner's career. (HEY, Kevin! Try and make a movie that's not so long and you might make some money for once, you reprobate American wannabe cowboy hippy).

Blenderman, if not already married to his mail-order, Islamically pre-arranged bride, will no doubt be completely mental over the subject.

Bewoop will still be bewoopin' his ass off. If I am sincerely lucky, he'll have added a few other sounds like 'Krang' or 'Boiiiiiiing' to the mix so we can have ourselves a good old Commodore 64 video game soundtrack goin' on. I plan on bringing a recorder to work so I can eventually mail the sound bytes to Carl Cox and make myself some fat money. (Apparently some people still do listen to techno.)

Smurfette ... ahhh Smurfette. I never really talked about her. She's ... well, she's crazy. Kind of like me crazy but without the self control. When I left, dear old Smurfette (so named because one day at work she was asked to do the powdered colors and wound up, well, colored, head to toe, in deep blue. It was quite fetching in a bizarrely Smurf-rotic way), was seriously on her way to an addiction to diet control pills. Here's our last conversation :

Me: Seriously, though, that shit you're taking is full of amphetimines.
Her: Really?
Me: Howfuck else you think you lose weight without exercising and eating right? The uppers raise your metabolic rate through the roof.
Her: Is that why I can't sleep at night, d'you think?
Me: What the fuck is wrong with you? Says right here on the box, don't take every day, it might be habit forming. How many of these do you take?
Her: 2 or 3 a day?
Me: Are you asking me or telling me?
Her: I take about two or 3.
Me: Shit on a stick, woman. You're all hopped up on goofballs. Get your frickin' head straight. That shit is poison. Bah.
Her: I have to lose weight.
Me: You don't have to do nothin' except get your ass to work on time and do your job. If you think you gotta lose weight like this, you're fucked in the noodle. Tell your boyfriend he's a cockgobbler. (It is because of her boyfriend that she's doing this in the first placez.)
Her: ...
Me: Now excuse me, I see someone that needs to be run over with the forklift before lunchtime.

So she'll undoubtedly be much skinner by now, but inarguably psychotic. Yay.

RodgerDodger will still be there. That in itself is a horrid thing, much worse than a visit from Cthulu and Nyarlhotep combined. HP Lovecraft wasn't insane, he just knew someone like the Dodger.

AGH. The list continues. It's endless. MeepMeep and his chainsmoking nicotine stained toothless mouth working ceaselessly on a piece of turkey jerky, the various gomers and nutbars wandering their way through the serpentine confusion of tying their shoes the right way on, the minions who can barely gabble their way through the English language when you need to explain something to them but become Masters of the Spoken Tongue when you short them fifteen seconds on their time sheets, the irate truckdrivers who don't know how to work a simple door, misplaced purchased orders, unprinted purchase orders, purchase orders that don't exist anywhere but inside the head of the man who thought he ordered the product, exploding forklifts (happened twice), malfunctioning brains, short-circuited hydraulic systems, Lippy the Cancerous "it's a fine job you're doing" Douchebag, Creepy Airduct Mike, surprise last minute orders, last minute cancellations, erroneous recipes that result in the loss of a thousand pounds of sugar, weird visits from Rabbi Whatever (in order to be kosher, we need to be blessed, if you can believe that frickin shit), getting hassled because I leave my fork to one side of the table, shoes that smell for no good reason like cat piss and sweat, hairnets that remind me also for no good reason of used condoms (picking up used hair nets is revolting), the drain trap that smells like the end of the world (I'm thinking of selling it as bile beer at the next rock show), and on and on and on.

The thing that worries me the most, though, is this question;

So. What did you do on your vacation.

Variations include: Did you have fun on your time off, did you go anywhere while you were gone, Was that you outside my window last night, Why does someone claiming to be your parole officer keep calling here looking for you?

I will also hear : We missed you, did you miss us? We are so glad you're back. Than GOD you're back. It's been so quiet without you.

When I tell the people I work with that I did nothing, they won't believe me. I know they won't because they never believe me. No one does. I did nothing of import this whole entire time I was off. I drank coffee and talked with people. I didn't go anywhere, I didn't do anything that could be remotely considered as large amounts of fun. I didn't eat out, I didn't go on any dates, I didn't hang out with friends. I didn't invent anything nor did I intend to. I did nothing. That was the entire purpose. I sat there, for an entire week, and did nothing. I relaxed. I removed from myself the pressures of having to do anything. I had no set time table, other than the one that comes naturally from choosing to do A, B, and C, in that, through the natural progression from one to the other, all things got done. And when I tell them this, they will listen politely enough, and then, out of their gaping pie holes, they will ask:

No, really, what did you do?

And then I will kill them.

And as to the other statement, wherein I find that it seems all they did while I was gone was pine for my return, well, that doesn't make any fucking sense at all. The entire time leading up to my vacation I was a miserable bastard. Everyone was afraid to talk to me. People who needed to get their jobs done, and who needed me to help them get it done, came up to me like I was going to bite their heads off. I would have, but shit, that's just who I am.

Why in the fuck would anyone miss someone who was so easily irritated by someone else? I know that I am pretty funny, and unfailingly nice, even to those I don't like, but when the control slips and I come out through the cracks, the person I am is pretty nasty. Combine that with a terribly literal and analytical mind and a complete and utter lack of concern for sugarcoating anything that comes out of my mouth, and you've got yourself someone who people shouldn't be missing at all.

If I was them, I'd move the plant before I got there tomorrow morning. Maybe leave a sign on the grass saying 'Gone Fishin' or some shit like that.

At least, that's what I'd do.

I've said it before, so why not say it again ...

I don't know how to take time off. Sure, there's the getting of the time off, which I excel at. I've found that if "Hey, can I have a week off" doesn't work, you could always try "Hey, can I have a week off or I start shaving people's necks with a grapefruit spoon" will for sure work. Granted, if you choose the latter over the former, you're pretty much going to have to go in for the whole hog and start walking around with your underwear on your head or spontaneously yodelling into the phone. I've also found that, if you go with option B, it's always best to keep asking people (even better if it's during a staff meeting) if anyone else can hear the noise/see the bugs/understand the gibberish coming out of the walls.

As to what I do with my time off, well, this is pretty much it. Oh, and of course, eat more than usual and sleep more than I like, but I read or heard somewhere that this is called 'recharging my batteries'. I can dig that concept, fully and without reservation. I should note, though, that if the whole battery thing lasts longer than one weeks, two at the outside, you are no longer on vacation, but are unemployed and run the risk of eating your weight in ding dongs (whatever you do, don't actually google ding dongs, you get way more than the snack cake...). I demolish my d/l rate by at least a factor of 10 (I'm allowed 10gigs a month, like most people ... last time I took time off I downloaded ... 1000gigs. Yes. In one month. It is possible, and no, not all of it was Russian pornography. Some of it was good old homegrown Canadian.) I play video games and treat myself like a bad funhouse run by that creepy clown from the Rob Zombie movies.

In short, I reintroduce myself to me.

Having divested myself of a brief synopsis of what I do when I'm left to my own devices (and I can't get access to semtex), let me move on.

Among the vast horde of reader (did he drop the 's' on purpose, or is he making some kind of funny joke), someone asked for my views on homeless people on buses. I gotta be honest with you on this one, out here in the ass of the suburbs, lovingly sandwiched between a real, semi-city and the honest-to-God Okeefenokee swamps of Maple Ridge, there aren't a whole lot of homeless people who ride public transit.

They are far too busy hiding from me. Now, I know what you're thinking. How on earth could this be? Well, simply put, the homeless goons out here aren't as militant as the ones in the city. A couple of 'I'm not a motherfucking bank machine' and 'Get a fucking job you fucking hippy' shouts and you pretty much get left alone. It does help you're a big guy with a bald head, but you should try it. The first couple of times out the gate it's rough, you feel like shit for talking to another person, another human being, that way, but you get over it pretty quick. especially since the guilt you feel over tellin' 'em to fuck off once or twice (they will get to remember your face) is easier to get rid of than the guilt you invariably feel when you tell them you got no money and you just came out of the fucking bank machine where they watched take out a hundred bux so you could go to the Doc Maarten store. Just because they're homeless doesn't mean they're stupid, and these mofos can hear dropped change sixteen blocks away. It happens like in the Highlander teevee show when another immortal comes along; they look all distant for a moment, and then they're off.

The occasional time I do see a homeless person on the bus, they're busy making the rounds. You know what I mean. Asking for change, asking for food, asking for what-the-fuck ever it is that they need to get done with their day. After working downtown and having to use alleys as a means of getting from A to B quickly, I am completely innoculated to the way they dress and the way they smell. So when Captain Commanda and the All-Hankie Accordion Choir sits down next to with breath like Hai Karate and stank like he rubbed some funk on it first, I do what I am immensely skilled at. I ignore him/her/it. If they are especially frantic with their funkified demands, I turn and stare at them. I don't say anything. At all.

I

Just

Stare.

Now, I imagine homeless people have seen all kinds of things. Hell, I imagine they've done all kinds of things. The life of a person on the street cannot be an easy one, for all it's worth. I can tell you now, without doubt, that even the most hardened homeless person/panhandler/grifter will think twice about continuing on in the face of sheer disinterest. It helps if you make eye contact. It really does. Now, again, if you're three foot two inches and weigh eighteen pounds, this might not be the best approach for you. You might want to try something like yelling 'FIRE' or 'Why is your dick on my leg!!'. Homeless people do not want any attention at all. They know the score. Mr or Mrs Upstanding Citizen can call the po-po on Crazy Joe the Salami Snorter in less than two seconds, and thus ends the whole day.

The weirdest encounter with one of these guys? Back in the day, I was what you'd, um, call a freakin' hippy weirdo. Yeah, it's true. I had the hair, and the penchant for black, and had friends who were bona fide Wiccans (both the Dianic kind and the normal, garden variety kind ... who were essentially ... sorry for this ... incredibly out of shape men and women who were and probably still are seriously unhealthy who thought that sitting around on the weekends and talking about the latest article on Math Mathonwy was cool). So there I was, on some downtown bus somewhere thinking the deep and morose thoughts that only a pagan teenage boy can possibly summon (can you say angst, motherfucker?) when this homeless dood starts talking to me. He's got this crazy frizzed out white man's homeless fro thing goin' on and this whole, soup and cigarette stained beard action happening, you know what I mean, and those gnarled old yellow fingernails that you know can claw through concrete and alla that shit.

This was before I learned how to deal with freaks. I still attract em, of course, but some kind of underground stories pass about me. He says somethin' like ...

HIM: They lookin out for you boy.
ME: I'm sorry?
HIM: You got nothin to worry bout.
ME: What?
HIM: You can't hide from em, but you got nothin to worry about, they gone look after you, keep you in the headlights.
ME: ...
HIM: I seen you, I seen yer gift, I seen you in my dreams ...

I'm sure the conversation would have gone all night if I'd stayed on the bus.

Stupidest encounter with a homeless person? Well, we've all been asked for food before, right? Hey buddy canya spara dime for a bite to eat? I ain't eat nuthin since day before, and so on and so forth. These are the people I am nominally more inclined to at least treat like people because they're asking for food. I had one guy, and this, I cannot make up; he asked me for food when he had:

1) A Big Mac in one hand
2) two hot apple pies in the other
3) a scorching case of lip herpes.

I told him if he was going to ask someone for food, he should damn well make sure that he wasn't eating something. The lip herpes had nothing to do with my answer, although it did make me run away from him pretty quickly, because I think one of them was trying to talk to me.

And, that's pretty much it ... oh ... wait ...

HEY! Bus driver!! How much longer are you gonna have a fucking conversation with the assmunch there? He doesn't HAVE THE MONEY to get on! No one here is going to give him money! Shit! If we actually measured the amount of brain power actively being used to pretend that stink ass hair pile doesn't exist we would be able to launch the shuttle into space! Isn't there some kind of LAW that prohibits air pollution? THAT guy smells like he crawled through a latrine with Johnny Knoxville! You're letting him ON? WTF? JEEEEZUS ... oh man, if he sits next to me I am so seriously gonna fuckin' freak right the fuck out! Sit in the back sit in the back sit in the back ... OKAY! We have been cleared, I repeat, the situation is over, the nutbag with the cardboard shoes and the Aqua Velva breath is in the back ... oh man ... was that close ...

The Dog has lost his mind

Ordinarily, I try to avoid posting more than once about any given topic. I might be wrong about that, but then again, I don't really care.

So last night I am flipping through the channels in search of something worth watching. This is Olympic style channel surfing, not your average click click ahhh fuck there's nothing on. 10th dan Ninja Style Olympic quality uber-surfing requires near lightning reflexes and a sadly encyclopedic knowledge of everything that's been on, will be on, could have possibly been on and in some (most) cases, should never be on.

I've talked about the Dog before. My last post even received some sort of weird attempt at a flame. I chose not to hassle the gimp who dropped me that line because if you can't get sarcasm, then there is something wrong with your brain anyway and I don't really like to make fun of the handicapped. Not because shit ain't funny, but because God has a sense of humor and I am already going to come back as a mutant albino flipper baby. (Don't ask.)

The Dog and his family have become caricatures of themselves. It's bound to happen when you get ordinary people and put them on television. Ultimately they will come to believe their own press, imagine themselves greater than they are, envision themselves to be on top of the world. What they fail to recognize is that we are a society that will take geeks like that asian kid who can't sing and catapult them into the stratosphere, not because we think they are cool, but because we think it'll be cool to see them fall. There's a word for it. It's schadenfraude. It's a neat word, and I think sums up this and all my blogs pretty decently.

First off, Dog insists on calling his eldest kid 'youngblood'. This is so immensely, patently ridiculous I can't even find the words. I'd have to invent an entirely new language to point out how fucking retarded this sounds. If I am ever called youngblood more than once, and am not drunk when it happens the one time, there is going to be a serious conversation involving pointy objects and soft throats.

Then, there's the wife. I think she has gotten somehow shorter, and her breasts have gotten larger. Oh! And her fingernails. Her fingernails are definitely longer. She's so hot, it's like looking at the sun. A midget sun that's had too much plastic surgery. I think her breasts are as long as her arms now, which makes me wonder how she wears a bra. Probably doesn't have to, though, because of the iron struts put in there.

Then, then, there's the Dog himself. I don't know what kind of delusional world he is living in, but it's a pretty goddamned good one. He's cast himself in center spotlight, of course, because that is the only place a megalomaniacal solipsist belongs. He's got some kind of metal weave thing coming off one side of his hair. At first I thought it was some kind of mistake, that I'd missed something in the previous ten minutes of delicious air time, but no, it was there on purpose. Some kind of fashion accessory to enhance the already delicious mancandy aspect of the Dog. They're all busy chasing this suspect, of course, but this time they're having to deal with the police, who have to be pissing their blues because it's like the Keystone Cops have shown up in the form of Hawaiian hillbillies. Eventually the police decide they're not going to catch the guy so they bugger off, and then the Dog really kicks into action.

He takes off his bullet proof vest.

Meh, you say. Big deal.

Dog is not wearing a shirt.

That is right. Seminaked Dog running down highways and through bushes.

With bitchlets. (You might think of them as old man boobs.)

And that weird hair thing that I am now convinced is a Borg implant gone awry.

And youngblood beside him.

Now, I didn't know this, but Dog's dad wasn't a bichon frieze (heheheheheh look it up). NO! He was, in fact, some kind of ancient warrior from beyond time and space who taught Dog how to hunt, how to track, how to be one with the nature. Why is this important? Because Dog is going on and on about how his old man taught him how to hunt deer, and how to follow the tracks, and shit like that. Without his shirt on.

Ahhhhh, I can imagine it now. Dog and Dad, sitting in the soak tent, sharing the pipe, the uncomfortable tension of two super macho men building to a point that is unbearable, so powerful that it can't be broken but can be changed. Their eyes meet through the steam ...

GAH. The Dog and his weird group of Hawaiian hillbillies need to not be on television. I need to take some kind of mental diuretic to rid myself of giant boobs and little boobs, of youngblood and of hunterDog doing his thing without a shirt on....

MAN, is it LATE

So here I sit, late at night (late-ish ... I am sure some people are gonna be up later than me, but those people are not typically the sort of people I would like to associate with ... ahhhhhh who am I kidding ... look, call me, I'm great at parties ... ), staring at my monitor, wondering what the fuck I should do. What I am doing. What is worth doing.

But before I go off on an existential diatribe of Ethan Hawke-ian proportions, lemme just say this.

If you are a mouth-breather, don't go out in public. I shit you not. If you breath out of your mouth, and it sounds like you've got marbles in your lungs, and you put ten packets of sugar into a small cup of coffee, you have got way more important things to do. See your cardiologist (is that a real word) and for fuck's sake, get your deviated septum looked at by Dr Nick. Don't creep the bald guy standing next to you out so bad that you follow him home inside his head.

Girls under the age of nineteen. Whatever the fuck it is you are wearing, it's not decent. You'd make Caligula blush and have a lie down. To the girl who showed me and my buddy (doesn't matter we weren't at your table, you were at the table next to us) her bra and panties (okay, she was showing her friend, but shit!), knock shit like that out. Sooner or later, someone's going to do something you don't like. At least, I hope you don't like it. If you do, well, call me. I hate to say crap like in 'my day' and 'this isn't the way it used to be', but dammit. There are all kinds of problems with the way you all dress, most of them stemming from the fact that, although literate and educated, I still find potty jokes hilarious and will stare until I realize that the year of my birth, to you, makes me older than Moses. Judges probably won't allow my general attitude to be indicitave of my true mental age any more than I'd eat a bowl full of chicken gizzards.

To the pole lampreys on buses and skytrains. When the fucking bus driver tells you to move further into the back of the bus, it sure as shit doesn't mean lock yourself onto the pole like it's your lifeline. It means move on down the fucking line. If you don't move, if you persist on pretending that the driver is talking to everyone else but you, the next time you want to get on the bus, I will personally ensure that every motherfucker on the bus stands up and blocks the way. Also, if you have to run for the bus, I will drop the driver a fifty to stop just long enough for you to think you've got hope, then have him speed away. When this happens, I laugh and laugh, because it never happens to me.

To the people who don't make eye contact, I gotta ask, what the fuck is the problem? Does everyone have something to hide? Sure, eyes and windows and souls and all that fucking whacked out whoohaa, but still. I have got some personally deep and bizarre shit I keep locked behind the walls in my noggin, and yet I still believe in making eye contact. This is not aggressive, or belligerent, or Tim Bundy-like. If I wanted to kill you or beat you over the head and steal your woman I would do it the proper way; I'd buy you a bunch of drinks, wait until you're puking in the toilet, and drown you in your own vomit. Now, maybe because I'm a big guy people find it disconcerting. Maybe.

To ATI. Fuck you. Simply and honestly, fuck you blind, blue and sideways. Find a serrated edge and make yourselves new holes, and fuck those too. Your graphics cards are shit, not the good kind of sheeyit, but the bad kind, the baby poo kind. Dear readers, you might find this language worrisome, but if you'd spent close to a thousand dollars over five years on their merchandise, you'd be kind of pissed to. It's not like I'm using my computer to model reality here. I'm just blowing the shit out of zombies and crap like that. You are ON MY LIST. I had to rebuild my computer because of you, and soon enough I am going to start sending you encrypted snailmail messages. You better watch out.

As to what the hell am I supposed to be doing? Well, fuck that shit right now as well, because Evilmister is ON VACATION. I am only interested in finding some new hobbies because my best friend Chubbymonk pointed out to me that I might perhaps want to work on lowering my stress levels even further. He seems to think that I am on the edge, maybe, and that it's not a good edge. Think Sword of Damacles dangling from that fine thread and you get the picture.

Evilmister is tired now. He sleeps. Until tomorrow, when I am pretty sure that something else will piss me off.

SlowPants Bewoop Part 2

We've all met Slowpants. He's the slowest guy in my plant and the most hallucinatingest mofo I have personally met. This is including the kids in my class who ran around chomping on shrooms and pretending that they could walk through walls.

Slowpants has got another problem.

What's this?

Do I mean to tell you a guy who has massive hallucinations and couldn't walk fast to save his life has more than the usual grabbag of mental spastications?

Shit, I think I do.

Slowpants either suffers from or is protected by the singlemost handy phrase in the entire world. It's 'I was gonna say'.

Think about it for a second. 'I was gonna say' can keep you from looking like a total goon whenever you are caught standing around for more than, oh, say forty-five minutes drooling on to your shoes. Here's a viable situation:

Me: Hey, Bewoop (as I personally think of him, especially since he's been Bewoopin' his ass off nonstop for a couple days now), what's goin' down, man? Is the concrete right there gonna float away if you move?

Bewoop: No, I was ... blending ... this stuff right here. (I should point out that everything we blend takes less than fifteen minutes. In fact, if we blend some things for too long, we could use it to build a new Great Wall, and seperate Port Coquitlam from the rest of the Tri-Cities, which is something I think we should all look into)

Me: Uh-huh. I can see that. How's about we speed things along by puttin' this yere shit on that there skid so's I can put it up top for you?

Bewoop: I was gonna say that you should do that, because this stuff won't pack itself.

Me: Of course you were, Bewoop. Here's a Scooby Snak for thinking so quickly when nothing else about you is fast.

It's really kind of funny. If you think about it, for too long. Which, sadly, I have.

Oh, wait. I'm also thinking about adding another name to Slowpants Bewoop. He shall also have Tittlet added to his name; a direct result of his being so slow that I can actually hear the air particles collide against his skin is that he's gaining weight. Just in his pectoral region.

All Hail Slowpants Bewoop Tittlet, mighty creator of the "I Was Gonna Say" cult that will one day swarm the planet!

Crap, Wouldja Lookit Sourpuss!

I've been all over the world, I've seen all kinds of things, and I've done even more of them, and I've seen even more types of people than I've ever really wanted to ... but this beats the cake hands down. It beats the cake so bad that the cake has decided to go home and call it a day, and is now seriously considering a Restraining Order.

I never in my life imagined that there really are people who like they've sucked on a lemon. I always assumed it was a kind of metaphorical sourpuss, you know, someone who's just so damned crabby all the time that you can't help but assume there's some kind of lemon or equally citrussy (?) sour fruit action goin' on.

Enter Sourpuss, stage left.

Sourpuss came from the Land of Express Personnel, that freaky, weird domain that manages to catch people in it's all consuming, entirely misleading ads (Want to Work in the World of Retail, call us 1-800-EVIL-LIARS and start today ... two weeks later you're digging ditches in abandoned mine shafts, hoping that the bird in the cage doesn't die). Sourpuss had some kind of bizarre Machiavellian response to the limited and suffering hierarchy of power, probably operating under the delusion that since we called her back more than once, she was in like the proverbial Flynn.

Silly Sourpuss, we hire people from Express with the ... express ... purpose of using you like human chattel. But I digress.

Sourpuss immediately went to work on pitting the other few woman against each other by doing the usual combination of backstabbing, lies, misrepresentation and at least one attempt at character assassination. What she failed to realize was that every single person she talked to went immediately to the person being gossiped about and warned them. The whole time she was there, I don't think she said a nice thing about another person, and yes, her face did in fact look like it was being consumed from the inside out by the GrandMaster of All Lemons, a mighty citrus fruit god that hovers on the brink of existence, merely waiting for the moment when Sourpuss herself finally figures out a way to bridge the gap.

Sourpuss was also a knowitall. There is only room for one knowitall in any one place, because the concentration of knowledge is simply too dense to support more than one. Trying to cram two knowitalls into the same space/time is roughly like trying to fit Andre the Giant and Louie Anderson into the same Volkswagen Bug.

If you had been to the Andes, she knew someone who had climbed to the top. If you graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard Law, she had traveled back through time to lay down the shaky ground rules that would result in the laws we follow today. Get the picture? Somehow through this, her lips, cheeks and even her forehead maintained that swirly position you get when you taste something truly awful.

If you can't tell, I hated Sourpuss more than anything else in the entire world. During her time there, I think I said three words to her. I was physically incapable of saying anything to her. Simply looking at her made me want to reach out and snap her Sourpuss having, Knowitall doin neck and then throwing her out with the trash. Too harsh? You didn't witness her making the same mistake twice.

There's a saying. Fool me once, shame on me, fool me twice shame on you. Usually it applies to liars and the lied, but it works in this situation.

One of our packing lines has a free standing metal detector. The sealed product comes down the conveyor belt and goes through the metal detector. If we've put razor blades and used hypodermics in there, it goes off, and the mini-conveyor belt stops to let you know you've got Chernobyl in a bag.

The two conveyor belts are seperated by a small gap, and actually move in different directions, so if, IF, IF you are stupid enough to try and stick your arm in there, the motion will actually pull your arm in right to the armpit. It's not incredibly dangerous (I did it one day just to see if I would be able to pull my arm out ... I did and I got caught and reamed out like a bad day trip to OZ), but it's not advisable.

Sourpuss was working that line at the end, throwing the bags onto the skid. She spent too much time writing the next great planetary opus or drooling into her coveralls, because more than once, the bags got all squished up by the metal detector and we all had to stop and watch why she tried to yank the bags out with brute force instead of simply turning the belts off. The first (notice FIRST) time she almost got her arm caught in the conveyors should have been indication enough that it was DANGEROUS to stick your hands in MOVING machinery.

Not so.

Not 3 minutes later, I got the awful joy of watching her shriek her freakin' head off as the conveyor belts grabbed hold of her hand like a possessive mother and yank her right down to the armpit. Now me, because I a) knew she was in no serious danger and b) hated her ass more than anything else since the Major Ass-Hating of 1997, I didn't move. I watched as the linesman calmly flicked a switch to stop the belts from munching her armpit and then laughed my ass off while everyone had to get involved in moving all the conveyor belts and metal detectors and skids full of product so we could extricate her without further damage.

It was a three ring circus, lead by the Sourpuss Knowitall, complete with soundtrack provided by White Zombie (the track Living Dead Girl played through my head that week non-stop).

COming up sometime soon ... Slowpants Bewoop and "I-Was-Gonna-Say"

Starbucks Announces Unholy Pact With Nazi Furniture Designers

This is no joke, people. I am serious when I say this. Starbucks has joined forces with the Nazis to create a brand of exterior patio furniture that can kill a person stone dead in less than fifteen minutes. Where did these Nazi furniture trolls come from? Well, I can only guess, but I'd say that they're a splinter branch of Ikeadrones who broke free from the Nesting Instinct and are using the skills they learned in the hidden Furniture Caverns to promote evil.

Ordinarily, I wouldn't mind so much, as any evil is good evil, as far as I am concerned.

But this shit hits me where I live.

Back in the day, Starbucks used to have these awesome chairs you could sit on for hours in the hot sun, sucking back Grande Mocha Mint Frappucinnos like there was no tomorrow, performing the Canadian equivalent of Hank Hill and his buddies shotgunning brewskis in the back lot, going 'yup' and nothing but 'yup'. They were bucket recliner seats, and son of a bitch, they were comfy. It had to do with the green plastic wrapped metal 'ropes' they were built out of. Given enough time in chair, you could mold that thing to your very own ass, and after that, it'd take a legion of underpaid Starbucks zombies to get you gone by closing time. Of course, they were cheaply made, and the welded joints weren't so much welded as, well, put together with hopes and dreams for a better tomorrow. If you weren't careful and didn't pay attention, you'd sit in the bad chair with the broken joint and get your ass cheek caught in the mother of all gooses. I have broken skin, lost blood and one time I swear to crap the thing bruised me through my entire hip, front to back, but damn, it was still comfy, once the paramedics patched you up.

There have been some changes since then, some sort of 'moving forward' uber-American deconceptualized restructuring of patterned trends that has resulted in the CHAIR.

I'm certain Ayn Rand had a hand in developing them. If you've tried to (or have) read Atlas Shrugged, you know just what kind of torture I am talking about. These chairs are ennui and Galactic Heat Death rolled into one, the sort of slow-rolling trap that takes decades to implement fully. The Yakuza, with their 'long plan' view of things would certainly approve.

You can point to CHAIR and say, this is certainly a chair. It has all the necessary components of a piece of furniture on which I can park my ass and watch the world go by. It has arms, legs, a seat and a back. It is interestingly made out of blonde ash wood and fancy, unpretentious black metals. It is CHAIR, and it comforms easily to the standards of form and function.

The form, people, is a deSadian nightmare, it's function is destruction of nerve endings and tissue.

I am a professional Starbucks customer. I know the ins and outs, and how to avoid giving up the cherished 'favorite spot' and 'good chair'. I can't count the number of hours I have wasted sitting around, drinking coffee and doing the whole 'Aren't I sophisticated because I am working on (insert unpublished manuscript name here) while I sit at Starbucks drinking my McDrink' shtick. I can generate a Sith-like mind pattern that keeps the creeps at bay, giving me an entire table all to myself while other, semi-professional Starbucks wannabes hover uncertainly nearby, wondering if they should risk it.

But CHAIR has changed all of that.

I can't sit on these things for more than five minutes. I've sat in a chair that could and would dig a hole right through my right ass cheek if I forget what I'm doing. I've repaired old chairs using stir sticks, napkins and the hockeypuck shaped ashtrays.

CHAIR defies me. CHAIR shakes the concept of chairishness. It looks like a chair, it acts like a chair, but it is, in all actuality, the embodiment of "The Customer Is NOT Wanted".

What do I mean by this? Well, Starbucks has achieved a level of power where they no longer need to draw customers in. There are so many of the places, with so many employees, that they can close their doors and still make money selling things to other Starbucks employees and their families. There are enough Starbuckses now across this planet that they could successfully wage war against their enemies.

And CHAIR is the first step. Potential enemies are rendered virtually useless by CHAIR. Once hobbled, the Starbucks barista can easily decapitate said enemy with a razor sharp triangular object that looks like a Pumpkin Scone but is actually a ninja star.

I'm serious about this. The CHAIR is watching, it is waiting. And soon, it will claim your ass and legs, too.

I warned you all.

The Shit Keeps Gettin' Weirder

Damn, I say.

Damn it all.

As I was zooming around the warehouse on my trusty forklift(I haven't hit anyone yet), I was doing a headcount on the people around me who are seriously, seriously in need of some kind of mental enema.

There's MeepMeep, of course, but he's on some kind of new meds, and has hit that normal zone of weirdness where you can stand to be around him for more than a few minutes. Any longer than that and the small hairs on the back of your neck stand up and you start trying to remember if he's got a knife or not.

Then there's RodgerDodger, who, shortly after my arrival and ascension as Master of the Known Universe, suffered what can only be described as one seriously massive hissy fit. He was gone for several months, his ailments ranging from high blood pressure, high cholesterol, heart murmurs, plantar's warts, thin blood, thick blood, thin veins and some sort of vaguely-described condition that has it's roots more in Toben's Spirit Guide than anything else (trust me, I know from nervous breakdowns, and this mofo had the kind of nervous breakdown normally reserved for a Pope who find out everyone has been sleeping with the Vienna Boy's Choir).

Now, I could for sure go on, because the list actually continues (Blenderman, for example, is awaiting his arranged bride from Kuwait, Smurfette is simply awaiting the moment when the Telus Ninjas come sailing through the roof for her 7k cellphone bill, Mollymaid's Dad is, I shit you not, Arthurt Spooner for real, and so on), but I'm gonna take this moment to introduce you to SlowPoke McDragass.

I have never, in all my life, seen someone this slow. I thought Meep was slow, and lazy, and easily confused (look! SHINY!), but goddamn, even Eyeore with his every ready slow-and-steady-wins-the-race philosophy'd be shovelling methamphetamines down SlowPoke's gullet. This guy is slow.

He also has epilepsy, but it's not the normal kind. There is, apparently more than one kind, which I didn't know, and I can honestly say that no matter what, I would much rather be around someone who has the kind where the flop around the floor and you have to keep them from swallowing their tongues.

SlowPoke has the kind of epilepsy where he has ... hallucinations. And, WOW!

We've all seen Fear and Loathing, and if you haven't, you really should fuck right off this very second and don't bother me anymore, that movie is some seriously messed up shit and you need to enlighten your sorry asses. You know that scene where Benicio del Toro's in the tub, very, very fucked up and wants Johnny Depp to drop a radio (i think) into the tub at this part in the song?

That guy was having a bad trip.

I have seen worse. And, this is the nutty part, without the use of any drugs.

Here is the scene:

I have decided that I am in a shitty mood, which isn't all that strange, except today I am given the opportunity to punish SlowPoke for being slow. (Insert image of molasses pooling gently on a table). As such, I have been hammering at him relentlessly for something like 3 hours, intent on seeing if I can actually make someone quit. (It failed with SlowPoke, but it worked(s) with other people). Needless to say, this is quite a physical workout. I dash upstairs to check on the machine and product and all, and then I come barelling back down the stairs. Here is the conversation:

SlowPoke: Evilmister ... do you trust me?
Evilmister: (wondering what the fuck is going on) Uh ... ya, shur.
SlowPoke: No one else is going to get hurt.
Evilmister: Why would anyone get hurt? (I can take SlowPoke, he's little.)
SlowPoke: You've got to be more careful.
Evilmister: Safety is the name of the game, there, SlowPoke, don't you worry about a thing. (Feeling now like that fancy trick shot they do in movies where the camera zooms in on the character and the background zips away into the margins)
SlowPoke: I promise, no one else will get hurt.
Evilmister: That is just super, SlowPoke, you make sure no one else gets hurt while I just call 9-1-1 ... we'll make certain you get a soft comfy bed, color-coded food and bouncy walls to play with...

Like the rabbit says, Exit stage left.

I am also not the only one who has been on the receiving end. Mollymaid's husband got told, during lunch hour, in decibels loud enough for the King of Siam to hear, that HE WAS NEXT, HE WAS GOING TO GET IT NEXT! He tried to pick a fight with the boss' son moments after being told he was going to get permanently hired, while the boss was schmoozing with customers in the very next room ...

The list goes on...

Now me, I am not against garden variety weirdness. Shit, I don't mind the Marilyn Manson hump a security guard's neck while singing weirdness. I am a motherfucking weirdness super-conductor. I am also so hip, I can't see over my own pelvis, and I have made a lifetime career of never blinking an eye when something stupendously fucked up is happening. This skill helps when you are being busted by the police for public drunkeness and the contribution to the delinquincies of minors, but it also helps when the guy you're working with starts quacking like a duck and demanding to see the King of CheeseTown.

Now, I thought I would never say this, but SlowPoke creeps me out more than MeepMeep. Meep is crazy all the time. I have habituated myself to hearing how two of his wives are also Horsepeople of the Apocalypse, and how Stan got him into trouble over the weekend. That shit has become like Muchmusic; you know, you put it on in case something interesting happens, but ultimately it's just filler noise.

SlowPoke, on the other hand, is like a GrandMaster chess champion of weird shit. Since that first time, he hasn't wigged out on me. I'm pretty sure this is because I told him later (he never recalls these hallucinations) that if he ever tripped out on me again I would feed him ass first into the blending machine and make SlowPoke flavored jerky out of him.
Am I wrong to be insensitive to the guy's serious medical condition?

Motherfucker please.

If I can laugh my ass when some dumbass gets her (yes, her) hand caught in between two conveyor belts a second time (yes, twice), then I can sure as shit find something comical about a guy who will all of a sudden shout 'BEWOOOOP' and then yammer on about the massive lemur hanging around by the dust collector.

You guys think this is funny, I'm sure. I know I do. So remember, kids, if you ever see a short little Native American (what? I can't be politically sensitive) guy in a mall somewhere and he starts going BEWOOP BEWOOP BEWOOP like some kind of cheezy cartoon effect, do what I would do: canter in real close and try and see what ever the fuck it is he sees.

I'm pretty certain it'd be amusing.

Well, Jeebus Aitch Cripes ... I'm Back

To all of you who thought I was gone for good, congratulations, you're probably still going to be right. What the hell should I care if you think I've gone all senile and possibly moribund (look it up, it's a word). Half the time, I wish I was the fattest man on the earth. Then I could eat an entire KFC without having to explain myself.

As to what I've been doing, slowly and surely going insane is a good place to start. If you've been reading my previous posts, you know I work for a Spice factory. After explaining this the other night over and over and over again to a room full of people I didn't know or hadn't seen in some time, I realized that it sounds far less cool than it actually is. The next time people ask me what I'm doing, I am going to tell them that I am working on undermining society from within, and then ask them rather innocently where it is that they live, and are there security cameras.

Anyways, back to my job. I do, in fact, still work in a spice factory. Or, more to the point, a place where I could, if I wanted, make poisonous weapons of mass destruction out of the same ingredients people make flavored potato chips out of.
Now, me, I really don't like a lot of people. I just don't. It's built in, and I can work at keeping my sincere disgust at the morons around me to a dull roar, and I've finally mastered keeping my inside voice, well, inside. But GODDAMN, some shit pisses me right the fuck off.

Take this new gomer we hired from Express Personnel (if you don't know what this is, think temporary agency, only with the the entire cast and crew from Welcome Back, Kotter on the roster). He's a young kid, okay, so he's gets a small amount of understanding for being a complete and utter fucknob, but there is some shit that I just cannot HANDLE.

He wears his hat sideways.

Every fucking day.

His hat, on his head, sits, with the bill of the cap, a full ninety degrees to the left.

I mean, what the fuck is this all about? The last time this particular fashion trend came around was sometime in the 80's and early 90's. This is the urban solution to the mullet, as far as I am fucking concerned. You might as well wear a nametag that says you're a total dumbass, and start looking to get into Dumbass University, where they'll show you the proper type of clock to wear around your neck and what kind of soother you should suck on so you can well and truly bust out your mad street rep. This kid is so dope with his shiznit, that if I was Flava Flav, I would be sweating in my black BK's, yo.
Seriously. I hate the sideways hat so much it's not even funny. The other morning he was sitting at my table (in the mornings I am about as approachable as some kind of poisonous snake who's been stepped on by someone wearing golf shoes), with his sideways ass hat, eating a Subway sandwich.

You know those people who inhale popcorn in the theater like it's going out of style? Like if they don't eat their popcorn fast enough, it'll transform into a solid block of corn and concentrated butter fat? You know that noise. That lip-smacking, finger-licking, semi-audible grunt of masticatory fiendishness that is a language all to itself, complete with semaphore handwaving and foot tapping?

This kid, in his sideways hat and G-Unit RocaWear Sean-Jon attire, was sucking back his sandwich, at 645 in the morning, with the kind of energy I last saw while watching A Clockwork Orange (you know the scene ... he's all paralyzed and he's being fed chunks of steak ...). I almost killed him dead on the spot. I almost knocked his hat the right way on his head, which would have resulted in his fatality right there, because I am certain that resulting shift in the center of his gravity would have caused his head to slam forward like Casey at Bat time.

I asked around, and I found out that it is, in fact 'The Style', and that he is somehow transformed into some kind Ur-fashionista by being rebel enough to turn that hat sideways. I bet he uses a caliper to get it the precise distance required by the SideWays Hat Calibration Law passed in the late 1980's.

Whatever. All I know is it makes me crazy insane. Sideways hats. Cripes.

Next thing you know, they'll all be wearing the pants backwards.