I am a sad, sad television hoor

All right. I admit it. One of my most favorite times of year is the fall roll out of new shows. Sure, I watch the premiers of the new ones, because hey, when your abysmally single and hermitlike, nothing is as friendly as hooking up with the people you spend most of your time with; it might suck that most of them aren't really real, but at least I can have conversations about what happened on NCIS without people asking me if I've taken my medication.

But the new shows are where it's at. Sitting down in front of the cathode ray tube and watching a new show is like getting inside someone's head. How so? As you sit there, catching some brand spankin' new sitcom or one of the endless CSI-spinoffs, one of two things is likely to happen: One, you get into it, or two, and this is almost as good as diggin' the newness, you try and figure out what the fuck happened at the channel to spawn such awful, crap-occluded, brain dead piles of decaying matter. It's awesome.

Think about it. A show has many stages. It starts off as an idea and then makes a torturesome climb all the way up the ladder to some bossman sitting in his house in Maui drinkin' mai tais and looking at the wahinis. For a bad show to get on the air, someone at every single step fucked up. They fucked up so badly that is almost impossible to imagine. The amount of their fuckitude is virtually limitless. There are the actors, who got paid to blow goats, the camera people, who filmed the blowing of the goats, the stylists, who made the actors look pretty fellating the farm animals, the directors, who tried new and interesting ways to capture the goat's look of shock, the scouts, who picked the neat-o locations for the goats to find heaven, the screenwriters, who tried to add snappy dialogue so it wouldn't be a complete goat-fest, the caterers, who were advised not to have goat cheese or goat milk on their menu so the real goats wouldn't feel threatened, and so on. It gets worse if there's a 'live studio audience' because if the show really sucks and there are people present who waited in line to watch a half hour goat fucking session, you could have a soccer-style coup de t'at resulting in, sadly, a new form of Reality TV.

The amount of money spent on a bad television is money you cannot ever get back. It's gone. The higher-ups, in typical monkey mentality, start blaming people and sending off furious emails, covering their asses and basically saying that there was no way in HELL they gave a green light to some flop of shit that stank up the televisions across America and butchered the Nielson Ratings so badly that other channels were affected. Eventually, all the hairdressers and prop guys will get fired because they made the mistake of saying that they were 'really, really excited to be a part of television making history'.

That's why I like new television shows. The amount of chaos spawned by a crap show is truly monumental. It is friggin hilarious.

~Evilmister~

OMFG

I am too tired to post once again. Maybe it's the air or some kind of whacky and intense Super Asiatic Death-Flu. Whatever the case is, I'm tired. My days take all day. So when I am better rested, and able to form a cogent thought, I'll hit ya where it hurts.

The Nature of Me

For whatever reason, the topic of my eternal disgruntlement is one that makes the regular rounds at work. When we aren't talking about what everyone else is eating, another extremely popular topic, we are trying to dissect and locate the source of my dis-ease.

When I say 'we', I mean 'them', because for the most part, I really couldn't give a fuck. There are people who make me happy, and it is not a staggering coincidence that I do not work with any of them.

I was sitting around the ole lunch room the other day, working my way through my patented 'Bucket o' Meat' (the previous evening's leftovers, which habitually consists of nothing but meat, carnivore that I am), with this kind of puckered scowl on my face. I am currently practicing the whole 'if you can't say anything nice' crap-ola in an effort to keep from carving my initials in everyone's forehead with a dull awl. The Boss' Son sees the look of 'leave me the fuck alone' and decides to ask me what's wrong.

Nothing, I say. I'm in the middle of a midlife crisis. (let's not belabor the point that I am immortal, and only thirty-ish to boot. I can have a fucking midlife crisis when-the-fuck-ever I want.)

He asks me what about?

I look at him and say, "Shit, man, if I knew what the crisis was, it wouldn't be a crisis, would it?" That shuts him down but now Smurfette and Mollymaid decide they want a piece of the action. I should mention that there is a new game at work, and it's called 'Let's Try and Get One Up On Evilmister'. So far, the only one who can trick me or trap me or otherwise get a chuckle at my expense is the Boss, who is old and has been around the block a few times. Honestly, it's like those little feeder fish that swim around sharks getting tiny little morsels of flesh trying to suddenly take a bite out of the shark. It's just plain old foolish.

Smurfette: I don't believe that you are angry all the time.

Me: Actually, I am.

Mollymaid: Noooo, I don't believe it. No one's angry all the time.

Me: (inside my head, counting down a la Electric Avenue from Sesame Street ... one two three four five, six seven eight nine TEN, eleven twelve) No really, I am pretty much always irritated by something. (LIKE YOU, with your weird obsession with trying to finish everyone's sentence before they do, it sounds like you're some kind of creepy broken down reverb machine!!)

Smurfette: Well, like what?

Me: I am so easily irritated that even asking me that question has raised the level of my irritation by a factor of three.

Mollymaid: You just need to relax.

Me: Ah. Yes. Thank you for pointing that out. Relaxation is like kryptonite; very hard to come by and most certainly lethal. If I were to actually relax, something nice might happen, and then there's the whole George Costanza Domino effect that'll go down, and no one wants to see that.

Smurfette: Are you sure people bother you this much?

Me: No, no, of course not. People don't bother me at all. Or ... no ... wait. They do. When you are an egomaniacal, arrogant, moderately self-obsessed superiority complex-having bastard who thinks you're better than everyone except for a few peers, everyone else pisses you off. If I didn't have an overwhelming dislike of the penal system, you'd all be dead by now and I'd probably be wearing your face as a junk hammock. Please, it's not your fault. It's all mine. When you've spent as much time as I have watching people, and paying attention to how people react, you just get to know how they will react, how they will behave. When you get to the point where everyone you work with seems like a series of if/then statements, you just get depressed. I'm truly sorry, but that's the way it is.

Mollymaid: Are you like this with the women you date?

Smurfette: Yeah, are you?

Me: Well, not to start off, no. I've been told that I'm actually kind of nice and decent. It wasn't until very recently that I began to suspect that it was more of a Vulcan mind meld, Obi Wan Kenobi 'I am a nice person' thing happening in my relationships, but whatever.

Smurfette: No wonder you don't have a girlfriend right now. Your expectations are too high.

Me: Oh! Oh my. I certainly never thought of that, either. Again, I must point out that I have had this conversation with you in my head more than once, and it is sadly coming out exactly the way I figured. Again, the fact that if we were playing chess, and chess was life, I'd have finished your life off twenty minutes ago shouldn't deter you or Mollymaid pointing out that I drink too much caffeine, which is probably why I'm so aggressive and irritable.

Mollymaid: You drink ... er ... Your next girlfriend is going to have be perfect, isn't she?

Me: Perfect? Perfect doesn't cut it, because I'd get bored then, too. But ladies, we're off topic here, aren't we?

Smurfette: I'm going out for a smoke.

Mollymaid's husband is laughing his ass off. Fuckem, he says, fuckem all.

Mollymaid: No!

Me: Hell yes. Fuck them all.

That conversation really and truly happened in almost exactly that way. Having two people try and dissect you emotionally so they can find your problems out is amazing fun. Especially when one of them, Smurfette, helped out troubled teens and is using hackneyed phrases and double-blind psychological jibjab that an Internet-trained four year old could backhand across the table.

Sometimes I enjoy myself so much at work it should be fucking illegal.

Oh, For Crying the Fuck Out Loud

Who do I have to fuck, fight or fool to have my goddamned checks cashed? I mean, first of all, I'm an anachronism; I despise credit (I say this knowing that anyone who works for Visa or Mastercard are laughing their asses off at me right now because of previous indiscretions) and I try to avoid using my bank card anywhere except a bank machine. I am a cash in hand kind of fella. It makes me walk a little taller, feel a little thinner, look a little cooler. Second of all, it's damned near impossible for me to find my checkbook in the pile of paper detritus that follows me like Pigpen's ever-present dust swarm. (it's not really a dust swarm, it's a swarm of nanobots that keep him and all the others from the peanuts gang alive and youthful.)

Now that I have readily made it apparent to everyone and Jeebus that I dislike anything but cash, I really really HATE writing checks.

Why you ask so sweetly?

Shit, motherfucker, it's because of two goddamned reasons.

Uno: My bank (BMO, somehow even worse than RBC, if you can believe that shite) HATES me. There is a five business day holding period on my checks above a 300CAD withdrawal limit. I have tried on more than one occasion to explain to those people that I am working, they are paychecks and they will not bounce. They are always deposited at the same series of bank machines, they are always the same amount, and the same dollar amount is always withdrawn right away ... that's for rent money. They tell me that if I want to adjust this, I will need to come into the bank and sign some paperwork. FUCK! My original bank is in goddamned Kitsilano. That is one hundred sixty three hours away by public transit. I told the person on the phone that I would just transfer to another branch, and then sign the paperwork there. They told me that it doesn't happen that way, if I tried that, I would have to wait until the Second Coming.

Duo: The people to whom I have written checks do not cash them right away. This is so phenomenally evil, so underhanded vile, to pernicious, that I actually lack the capacity for coherent thought. What the fuck do they do with them? Do they stare at the pretty pictures and compare them to the other checks they've received? Do they pile them on their bed and roll around in them? Or, and this is most likely, they hold up to the light and go "Mwahahahahaaaaa, now, now I shall make Evilmister go INSANE with the waiting. Mwahahahahaaaaaaaaaaahha. Igor, bring me some more wine spritzer."

This irritates the living shit out of me. Cash your checks when you get them, fucknobs, or I won't pay you when the frickin' thing bounces higher and faster than a day-glo green superball.

Ehhhh, Whats Up, Doc?

I've had the same doctor for as long as I can remember. He's a pretty decent guy, except for the fact that he's what I like to think of as a pill doctor. Got a headache? Here's a big blue pill. Got an undisclosed emotional aberration? Here's a tiny little white pill. Can't sleep? Here, take these. And if those don't work, try some of these, and well, if those don't work, let's have you come back in and we'll poke you with some needles.

Having said that, he also cracks me up. He's super Jewish, not that it makes an real difference, except I find older Jewish doctors to be insanely hilarious. It's got to be their eyebrows or something. Think Judd Hirsch dispensing meds like a Pez Dispenser with a medical degree.

When I was younger, and my eyesight was failing faster than Hulk Hogan's career, I swung by the ol' Doc there to have my glazzies checked out. He came back and said "You are fucking blind."

I'm sorry? My doctor swore? And told me I'm blind? As in, "I am fucking blind?" What planet does this guy come from, that this is his bedside manner? And, for that matter, why isn't my doctor Gates McFadden? She's better looking, for one, and doesn't have studiously ignored nasal hair.

When I set about trying to figure out why I was supremely pissed off all the time, I went to see him, and of course, he gave me the kind of meds that Bluto used on the donkey. (can anyone get that reference?) When I say I am pissed off all the time, I pretty much mean it. I've got this crock pot of rage, and it's percolating like mad, brewing up Evilmister's Gamorrah Style Chili Explosion around the clock. It is only through Zen-like Jedi breathing that I haven't crammed someone's head into their left nostril. When I asked him why I'm cranky all the time, he dropped the following nugget of wisdom on me:

Doc: People are like cars. You got your midrange cars, like a Ford of a Buick. Then you got your performance cars, like your porsches and maseratis. People who are Buicks go along at a normal pace all the time, and give it the gas or slow down as they need. You are a maserati. You are going flatout all the time, non stop, day or night, rain or shine. You're gas pedal is hair trigger, and the slightest pressure sends you rocketing.

After filtering this through sixteen layers of gentile medical wisdowm, I figured out what my doctor was saying.

He was calling me a spaz.

My doctor thinks I am a spaz. He has medical knowledge to back up his claims, whacky approach notwithstanding. Not only does my doctor think I'm a spaz, he could, if pressured, prove it. Scientifically.

Now, I'm sure it hasn't taken anyone out there to realize that I am something of a spazoid. Sure, it makes total sense. If I wasn't some kind of emotionally retarded, chemically imbalanced freak of nature, then the explanations for why I get irritable and moody begin to take on a kind of flavor I'm not overly fond of; the spice of insanity is great for other people, but not this kid.

The more I think about that turn of events, the more I consider trying to 'fit in' better with the general population. You know, being friendly, even helpful to people beyond my limited circle of friends and the ones who make my food for me (you do not want to piss off the guy making your hamburger, trust me). You know, doing the whole 'confront what bugs you thing' like you're supposed to do with your fears. Which, btw, works just fine.

Except when it comes to people. I can't do it. I try every day. I wake up each morning, clean slate and every damn thing. So far, I've managed to get out of the house and all the way to Tim Horton's before some dipshit pisses me off. And it's usually something completely innocuous, like him or her ordering a sandwich. Why should I get upset at someone ordering a sandwich? It's not like I'm in a hurry to get to work (which I think I now hate more than anything else except for olives), because I try and walk as slowly as possible to the skytrain station. So it can't be the time involved in the making of said sandwich, because this person is in fact assisting me in my slowness.

Could it be the type of sandwich? Hardly. I'd need Steve Austin's eyes to tell why kind of grinder is being made.

How about the slowness of the queue, then? With one cashier making some nosh, there's only one working the register, so it's got the be that, then? Right? But then again, the slowness of the line is also contributing to my slowmotion avoidance of getting to work.

It's none of those things and all of them. It's the sandwich guy, and the woman who wants a hundred and eleven donuts, all of them different, all of them fresh, all of them in different bags, it's the guy who wants to use a Diner's card to pay for his thirteen cent donut, and the woman who's talking too loudly and the smell of the construction guy, and the two kids outside who're trying to get money to buy drugs and the fucking guy in the benzo who hooks them up with a fitski, it's the sound of my mother's voice still echoing inside my head and the scratch on my chest from when Bootsie jumped up and on and on and on ...

My doctor calls me a spaz. It's lucky for him he's right on the money, or I'd kick him in the nuts. He's a doctor, he'd know what to do to save himself, right? Right?

Ahhh fuck it. I think might skip work again tomorrow. I hate them all so much. There's no discipline there at all. I could probably get away with working in my underwear and a pair of flip flops if I tried hard enough, and that makes me completely mental. No structure at work is like giving me free license to do what-the-fuck-ever I want.

Gah. I am a spaz.

I am considering ...

For no other reason than I find myself very introspective of late, I am considering working on a new novel. Unlike my previous works, which the few people who frequent this site have read, this one won't be science fiction or horror.

Nope.

I am considering working on a general fiction novel. It would be loosely autobiographical, in that the main character would, in addition to being incredibly insightful and damned funny, work through his self-perceived flaws and some of the more painful experiences in his life.

WHy would I do this?

Well, not to put too fine a point on it, people eat stuff like that up. I think it'd be a good story, because I've been through a sufficient number of evil girlfriends, awful jobs, strange friends and unbelievable encounters to make things interesting. The book would be similar in structure to my logs here, though with rather more of a present tense narrative element (If I can manage it, that is), and more coherency, instead of just me getting all pissed off and barking like a madman.

The underlying and primary focus of the story would be the one thing I am looking for in real life. True happiness instead of the fleeting joys brought on by self-gratification.

If the one or two people who read this site think this might be interesting, let me know.

PS: I won't stop writing insane dialogue here. How could I? I keep getting emails telling me to continue, and it's a nice ego stroke, to boot. IN point of fact, I was considering posting my rough copy here for critique. After all, I've got to do something more than video games and Internet pornography. So yeah, lemme know what you think...

Bees Bees BEEEEEES!

Firstly, let me say this: I am an inherently lazy bastard. It's true. Look up the word lazy on wikipedia, you might see a picture of my handsomely horned mug grinning back at you. Having said that, is it really any surprise that I can't be bothered to write anything until the weekends most of the time? Besides that, very little shit happens on a day-to-day basis and I need to generate a really good head of steam before I either let loose on something or someone, or to work over the shit that did happen until it gets funny.

Now that that's out of the way, let us proceed.

I am not afeered of anything (except committement, success and failure. The last two can get to be quite funny if they start operating in tandem: I work really hard because I hate to suck, and then people start noticing how awesome I am and tell me so and then I subconsciously start to self-destruct while still trying to succeed. Oh yeah, I am fucked.) Sure, if a giant tiger or a huge rapist showed up on my doorstep looking like they wanted to do something to me, I would be concerned. I'd do all the normal things a person would do when in that situation, and once running around in circles banging my head with a plastic soup ladle didn't work, I'd move on to trying to save my life. I have done incredibly dangerous and stupid things with little or no concern ... like the time I climbed onto the roof a car, had the driver start it up, and then drive, at high speeds with no lights on, through the hills of Port Coquitlam while it was raining ... like the time we got busted by the cops for possession and I clammed up tighter than OJ ... and so on and so forth. I am reckless, but not without a quick assessment of the dangers.

The shit we blend, more often than not, has a pile of sugar in it. So much, in fact, that even people who like sugar would suggest maybe we look into less sugary methods of making our products. We get monthly cheques from the Dentist Consortium to ensure that we continue; there's a proposal on-board right now to just start shipping sugarX, the next great thing in tooth decay and obesity. Everything we use comes in a package, because if it didn't, we'd have a real hard time with mixing and blending. We'd have to use our hands and shit, and that doesn't strile me as a good deal. All of those packages, containers, cardboard boxes and whatthefuckever else stuff gets put into needs to go out into the garbage cans outside. We produce so much waste that I have to empty massive totefulls of crap two or three times an hour.

In and of itself, this sucks major ass. I am not the sort of person who thinks to himself 'Hey, this place needs cleaning up' and 'Hey, this garbage can is kind of full'. It takes a major exertion of effort to change my socks, so why in the hell would I volunteer to throw out garbage? Ordinarily, I wouldn't, but since I want to drive the forklift into walls and nearly flip the thing every now and again (seriously ... I took a corner too fast day before yesterday and the fucking machine was on one wheel for three feet ... my boss looked like he shit himself when he saw it), I am the designated garbage chucker, unless I can find some Express Zombies to do it for me. And then it's all ... "Do this, slave, or I will make you hoist yourself by your own petard".

As the garbage containers are outside, they are affected by Nature. I don't even want to get into what happens to the combined ingredients of thirteen different products when they are blasted randomly by rain, sun, rain again and then some guys urine (TRUE! Some truck driver took a piss on my garbage cans yesterday so I called his dispatcher and unloaded.), but it's pretty gross. When you throw kilo after kilo of sugar a garbage can, bees will show up.

A bee is not scary. It isn't. After all, we are roughly one zillion times it's size. Sure, it's stinger can hurt us, but hell, it's only one bee. If we want, we can go walk away or swat the fuckin' thing.

Hundreds of bees, all hopped on sugar, is another matter. And when I say hundreds, I really, really mean more than three hundred bees.

At the beginning of the week, the freakin' insects were tiny. They were kind of cute. Tiny little baby bees all zipping and zooming around the garbage container, freaking out at the unexpected bonanza of mountains of sugar. It really was like looking at a fat kid in a candy shop. Or a fat man who lives in his mom's basement in a comic shop on 'Next Issue Day'.

That changed. Rapidly.

You know how Bruce Banner got zapped by gamma radiation and turned into the Hulk?

Same thing.

The cute lil' baby bees turned into giant monsters with wings that flap slowly overhead, blotting out the sun and heralding the coming of the Great Dark Ones who slumber behind the Sun. They became the kind of bees that would hunt William Shatner down in a cheezy 1970's man vs. mutated bugmonster movie. If an Africanized bee showed up looking to lay down some nasty bee-sex and make some more Africanized killer bees, these motherfuckers'd just pull out their Insect Hierarchy Stinger Cannon of Doom and blow the shit right out of that frickin' tourist bee. In short, I experienced a moment or two of nervousness when I had to throw out the garbage.

The other day, someone neglected to throw some totes full of garbage into the container. After doing some local recon and determining that the threat factor was pretty low, I grabbed hold of tote number one and got ready to chuck it.

Has anyone else ever seen a column of bees outside a Disney cartoon? I have. It's not comical, and the only shape they took as they swarmed around me was a SWARM OF GIANT BEES. There were no arrows, no humoursly shaped hammers, nothing other than a SWARM OF BEES THAT ARE GIANT. I have never stood so still in my life. (I lie ... I perfected the art of not swaying and staggering when being 'interviewed' on the sidewalk by police officers). Eventually the mondo bees decided that I wasn't a threat and went about the business of genetically engineering a new species of bee that can change color.

I went inside and told everyone I could find that if I got stung, I was going home. And I meant it. Luckily, there was no stinging, although one bee did decide to fly right into my earhole. It was one of the hardest things ever to resist the instictual urge to slap.

Bees. BEES. BEEEEEES. At the end of the week, the bees and I signed an historical document wherein they promised to spare me and my loved ones from the pollen farms so long as I continued to bring the massive amounts of the raw sugar they require to bootstrap themselves into the next evolutionary phase. If any of you out there come across a bee, I encourage you to be as friendly as possible, because although they aren't our Overlords yet, they soon will bee.

ALL HAIL THE MIGHTY BEES, GIVER OF HONEY AND SLAYER OF MAN!!