Home of Dementia

I Is Busy ... SOreEE

2006-07-13T11:21:00.000-07:00

Check-check-check it out, ya'all

2006-06-27T14:15:00.000-07:00

Some of you know me as a writer of scathing diatribes, paranoid delusions of grandeus and the occasional heartfelt plea for people to stop being stupid, but do you also know i have delusions of authorship? i do, and here is where you can find out all about it:

The Prime Time

Son of a Bitch! (long ass post)

2006-06-19T21:29:00.000-07:00

Alas, alack, dear reader, for I have been chewed up and shat out by the mighty corporate Nazi-engine that is known as starbucks. no longer will i be able to spy from the inside, quietly making my way through the ranks and causing mayhem where and when i can like Archibald 'Harry' Tuttle (See if you can figure that one out!). No, now i lay, gently steaming in the wake of the mighty Engines of Destruction, forgotten, a pale fugtive cast out. I am become a Pariah, unclean and unwahsed, and horribly, horribly addicted to coffee.

My crime? Affecting the status quo, preventing greedy fatcat backroom managers from claiming their even fatter bonuses, cash rewards, i might add, that are written on the skin flayed from the backs of underpaid employees and signed with their blood stained tears. i fell prey to draconian cash handling procedures. i was demolished by stringent policies that would make even the most rightest-right-wing ultra-conservative wince like they'd sucked a lemon, inhaling that sharp gasp of air that is usually reserved for when a guy gets royally sacked in a nasty game of Rochambaux.

not to put too fine a point on it, i'm a numerical retard. it's kind of funny, if you find pointing at the less intelligent and making chimpanzee noises at them. lord knows i find that kind of shit hilarious. but there it is, the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

much like california, starbucks believes in the three strikes and you're out policy. it helps rotate the bright, sharp minded and ultimately cynical employees out and bring the easily molded, clay-minded yesman and yaywomen in.

first warning is basically, hey, spaz, knock it the fuck off. learn your numbers, and don't give me any lip, bitchass, or it's garbage run time for you. (sidebar: there is a term for the liquid detritus that sits, stewing under pounds of garbage in the heat, assisted by the warm, smothering warminess of expired coffee grind. it is called dumpster juice. it is some foul, fucked up, truly repellant and repugnant shit. for the first time in a long time, i discovered that yes, eyeballs can actually taste things, but only if nose and mouth have been cauterized shut by a furnace of heated goo steam kept under pressure for hours on end)

second warning is a little more serious. out comes the paperwork, and boy howdy, does them people at starbucks love them some paperwork. it gives them something to do, i expect. the official party line on phase two is that it's a 'recorded coaching conversation designed to affect a change in a person's behaviour and/or learning curve'. more of a swat on the hand, really, but there you have it. at this point, there is much in the way of serious eye contact, heartfelt 'you're a good member of the team', and 'i will keep my penis in my pants when working'. it's all very soft, touchy feely and not at all intimidating.

don't fall for it. this is a ploy designed to lull even the most hard-hearted rational mind into a sense of soporific bliss. Ah! you think to yourself, walking away with a fistful of pink-for-partner carbon copy papers in your left hand, they truly need me! all is well, i shall simply avoid doing the things (or not doing, whatever the case) that got me into the position in the first place. this shall be easy peasy, much like making ice cubes or that thing were you don't stare into the sun for too long. the Dr Phil-esque avuncular or Oprah-esque avauntular semi-praise is a prelude to step 3.

step 3 is officially classified as 'final coaching conversation'. don't let the innocuous term fool you. this is ultra-level enigma classified crypto-speak for MAn, you done fucked it up good now. you are on the bench, fuckface. gone are the encouraging words (you can do it, evil! you can enter the numbers so they come up the right way ... i am so fucked on a debit machine i'm somehow entering cyrllic in there. four dollars squiggly squiggly pi? what kind of price is that for a mocha??). gone are the gentle tones, and the low-level sense that it ain't that serious.

you get to step three at starbucks, you need to be looking over your shoulder and counting your hands and toes when you get off work, because man, there ain't no such thing as a time limit at this point; you fuck up after level 3, you get your shit fixed for you so fast that, if you listen closely, you can hear a sonic boom. that is you, losing your job, faster than the speed of sound. you drop the ball at this point, it's like flubbing the winning field goal for the team that has never ever ever been to Superbowl, and, thanks to your suckitude, never will again.

now, if you're lucky, you're like me: big, mildly intimidating and utterly, utterly unashamed to use a voice loud enough to cut through concrete to your advantage, you get two people for your 'exit interview'. this is to presumably ensure that, should i decide to go ted bundy, someone will be able to shout for help.

my 'exit' interview was hilarious, at least to me, because my fourth and final mistake on cash happened just prior to a weekend off. i spent the weekend considering the pros and cons of working at starbucks for any reasonable length of time and discovered that, beyond an inordinate number of beautiful women, there was very little there worth putting the effort of staying forward. i made my peace with the decision, because as anyone knows whose worked for a large American company, once the paper trail has started, nothing, not even a promissory note to behave, signed and ratified by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and notarized by the Pope himself, can stop the Juggernaut of Beauracracy.

so. two people, both of them looking profoundly ... well, embarassed is a good word to use. they think i don't know what's coming, which makes me smug like charlie sheen for not getting AIDs after banging all those hookers. they tell me, in quiet, whispered tones, unable to really look me in the face, that today is my last today, but i'll have until the end of the day to get my coffee of the week. it went a little like this:

them: this is your last day.

me: uhuh. yeah, i kind of figured, on account of, you know, i'm a retard when it comes to cash.

them: this has nothing to do with who you are as a person, you know. if it wasn't for your cash handling, you'd be perfect.

me: yes, well, clearly i belong with that tribe in new guinea who lacks the necessary gene to even comprehend numbers, so if you could just stop being condescending and give me my walking papers, i'll mosey on out of here and spend the next six months poking merciless fun at you behind your back and inciting your fellow dissatisifed parnters into riots.

them: ??

me: separation papers? those forms you fill out when you heedlessly hack and slash a man's only source of income from him? yet another thick sheaf of carbon copy pages that are the main ingredient on going on EI? without them, i am likely to become an enraged and penniless beast.

them: this is news to us. what are these ... separation papers ... you speak of?

me: it is a part of the termination process. it is the culmination of the legally binding decision on your behalf to end my employment with the company for failure to adhere to the strict, neo-Nazi protocols for selling legalized crack cocaine to twelve year olds and mentally deficient wannabes. it lists, in no particular order, when i sold my soul, when my soul was returned to me, the number of unshelled peanuts i received per hour, and the amount of skin stripped from my bare back for things like a pension i will never see.

them: this is the first we have ever heard of this. all we do is send an email. it's taken care of on the other end.

me: yes, well, without these papers i can't apply for ei, so unless you want a man dousing himself in gasoline and setting himself alight in your storefront, i advise you to actually pick up the phone and discover for yourself just what it is you should know.

them: we shall do this. we cannot even comprehend you now that your soul has been returned to you. the light is so bright, the shadows even darker, and we want to walk into it ...

me: of course you do. it is the natural way of things, but unfortunately for you, i'm a selfish prick who won't let you touch me, now that i am bright and shiny once more.

we exchanged a few pleasantries, i bade those few working who i genuinely liked farewell, and made my way home, where i ate an entire pizza, spent four hours playing Empire Earth 2 and surfing the internet for a way to hack into a secure starbucks server.

i suppose my next post will chronicle the starting stages of finding a new job.

until then, this is evilmister, not down, not out, and certainly unstoppable.

Is i t Really Only 'Just Coffee'

2006-06-14T08:31:00.000-07:00

No. It really isn't. And for a number of reasons, some of which make us look like money hungry capitalist oil barrons trying to squeeze blood from a stone, and some of which that make our customers look like hopped up junkie addicts trying to get something for nothing. The irony of this, is, of course, that on both sides of the fence is a shared mantra, repeated over and over again as the day draws long or the need for caffeine pressures us into acting like retards ...

'It's only coffee'

Oh, how I wish that were true.

If it were only just coffee ... or cream based blended beverages ... or iced teas ... or the soul-blood of high priestesses ... customers wouldn't stand in line for upwards of fifteen minutes. they wouldn't suffer the indignity of going through Soup Nazi-esque ordering procedures, nor would they willing choke down our super-fat-saturated snacks or sign over the fifteenth mortgage on their two bedroom bungaloo that overlooks the Pitt River. They wouldn't put up with our strenuous adherence to a completely made up lingo, that, as far as i can tell from my lofty perch on the fence, is designed to do nothing more or less than make the customer feel stupid. they wouldn't, if it was just coffee. but it's not. we're a meme plague, a social and cultural icon now, and one that has invaded the lives and minds of millions of people -and all without the need for advertising. seriously. our advertising budget is slim to none, and i bet you'd be hard pressed to find even one print ad, let alone radio or television. but i digress, as is my usual wont, because it's not about the cultural or social aspects of being a part of the Starbucks Hive Mind that I'm addressing today, but the Junkie Effect. People need our coffee. they tell me every day. they can't function without, and they've tried, like heroin users switching to that sub-classic replacement methadone, to switch to Tim Hortons or McDonald's or whatever else is out there. Tried, and failed, miserably slouching back to my front door with a fistful of dollars for an overpriced drink, the bulk of said proceeds coming nowhere near my pocket, or the pockets of the slave labor camps on the other side of the world. they pony up their hard earned money to get their fix and, because like beer, you really only rent coffee, there's a damned good chance they'll be back before the end of the day, haggard, withdrawn, irritable. God forbid that you should give them one sip less than they ask for, because then they become the other side of the junkie, slipping from the amiable jitterbug shuffling from one foot to the other like they have to pee into the raving lunatic, shouting incoherent threats against everyone in your family. All ... for ... one ... more ... sip.

Oh yeah, it's just coffee to our customers.

And for us, the few, the proud, the stylistically termed 'partners'? Is it really just coffee to us as well?

Not by a fucking longshot. For us, it's about the dollar dollar bills ya'all. Oh sure, we chant the mantra like any good puppets, reminding ourselves not to take our jobs too seriously -wait, how can that be when i live hand to mouth, paycheck to paycheck, penny to penny- and when the line gets gritty and rough and we are beseiged on all sides, we actually mean it for awhile, safe and secure in the knowledge that unlike Enron, our stock portfolios are strong enough to see us through the dark hours. But like i said, it ain't. Might have been once upon a time when a pot smoking, hash-brownie eating hippie started the company up in the seventies, but that Starbucks is a far hue and cry from what it is now. Now we are run by Capitalists born and bred with dollar signs for eyes and when you prick them, they do not bleed the good old red stuff, but an endless tickertape parade of critical stock watches. their dreams are the dreams of variance, labor percentages, customer counts per diem, waste management, and salary caps. they, too, say it's only coffee, but they can afford to say that, and truly mean it. for us, though, the ones serving on the front lines of Junkie Central, it's a whole different story. if we fall behind budget, our labor hours are affected, so we're forced to work harder to provide a level of service that the fiends demand and the SS-esque customer snapshot droids ensure. if we don't meet projected sales goals, the manager's crack-tastique bonus is affected, so he or she or it -depending on how far along the Bean Path this person is- will come down like Thor's mighty hammer. i remember the day our mission statement added the capstone to the mighty monument of Starbucks, and while i'm legally prevented from line-for-line iteration, it bascially says we need to realize we gotta make money if we gonna stick around.

Yeah, it's just coffee all right, at least until someone starts fucking with the bottom line or the urge to fix.

Evilmister, from the fence, from on high, passing judgment ... out.

Hitler-Jugend? Try Starbucks-Jugend!

2006-06-10T00:35:00.000-07:00

Since the last post, i have been labeled as 'Legendary' on the till. essentially this means i have the unending capacity to stand in one spot for hours on end regurgitating an endless spew of crap while maintaining the semblance of giving a shit what goes on around me. I've got it down to a motherfucking science. i can take your order, make eye contact, smile, laugh, and give you the feeling that not only is the eighty-three dollars you just dropped on your coffee well spent, but that i am a genuinely nice guy who cares about you, the consumer.

i don't.

I know, i know, it's shocking. but i don't. what i see when you come to the counter -and this isn't all the time, really, but it's more often than not- i see someone who thinks they should go to starbucks because everyone else goes there. honestly, it's like fucking high school ... you know, you gotta have the new Nike Hi-Tops because your buddy Steve does, that kind of thing. if everyone in the line up confessed that our coffee really did taste burnt, that our prices were outrageous (if we were the pentagon, we'd be selling eighty-thousand dollar toilet seats) and that our zealous committment to phony jargonistic jibber-jabber was the most annoying thing in the universe, we'd be out of business by the end of the week. no fooling. and i don't even wanna get started on our supposed 'Green' business practices. the shit i throw out every fucking day would make PETA have a heart attack, and they ain't even interested in garbage.

but none of this happens. the siren's eye has you, and her song is culturally pervasive. we, the baristas (checkit, read coffee mongerer), are more resilient than cockroaches. when the end times come, it'll be us, hawking our wares through deserted streets, waiting for the mutated roaches to scuttle up out of their underground cities in search of fine coffee and tasty snacks.

but i digress.

if children are the future, then we are truly fucking doomed, because they come to starbucks. the other day, i served three tween girls. ordinarly not that shocking, but they had Farrah's hair, Cassie's clothes, Jordache jeans and those ultra-fancy sunglasses that whatserfuckname ... the one with the big mouth from The Mask ... anyways, big fucked up sunglasses. it was like looking at a goddamned Sex In the City pre-trainer school. i swear i heard a voice over discussing how awful it was to be dateless in coquitlam.

the point i'm trying to make here, and i think somewhere around glow-in-the-dark cockroaches eagerly waiting for coffee and the episode of Family Guy I'm watching through the corner of my eye i forgot where i was headed, is that children shouldn't be drinking coffee. of any kind. hell, they shouldn't even be allowed out of the house until they can prove that they can have an intelligent conversation with words longer than 'like' and 'uh' and 'y'know'. they shouldn't have bank cards, cell phones, or body piercings. they should be fucking kids, watching Power Rangers and Stawberry Fucking Shortcake.

and most especially, they shouldn't be looking over the rim of their faux-designer sunglasses like they're my fucking granny to ask me if we have non-fat milk. when i was a kid, i didn't even know there was such a thing as non-fat. the scary thing is, these ultra-glam tweenies in their haute coteur will eventually transmogrify into jackbooted Ilsa-clones of the far-flung future, spouting mealy-mouthed condescendions to brain-dead peons.

if children are the future, then Lord forgive me. i'll be sitting on my porch forty years from now, shotgun loaded, waiting for them to come for me.

BIG SMILE! BIG SMILE! BIIIIG SMILE!

Direct and Live from Ingelwood ... Coquitlam

2006-06-01T17:03:00.000-07:00

So it turns out that I've still got one single fan out there who just happens to run his own site, and I just got through this whole Skype (sounds like some kind of grifting term if you ask me) interview dealie with him, and he mentioned in passing that he misses dear old me and my caustic sense of bloody wit, so here I am, posting live and direct from Ingelwood, Coquitlam.

First off, earlier this year I rejoined the Company (Starbucks). Now, you might think that I'm being needlessly pessimistic and overly dramatic about referring to an American Corporation as 'The Company' in an attempt to draw a comparison to the ubiqutious 'Company' in many of Stephen King's earlier novels, but you mofo's don't whatchu talking about. Let me explain it for you. Starbucks will control the world by 2020. We will be in charge of everything. you will wipe your asses with company approved toilet paper, you will drive to work in cars powered by coffee grinds, and you for sure as hell will march to the relentlessly crappy blues music that I'm forced to listen to on a daily basis. Why do i know this? because by 2020, i will be the guy in the funny hat and the armor plated Coffee Car shouting libellous statements at non-Company affiliated scrubs. it will be me dictating policy change and forcing Timmy Ho employees to walk through a gauntlet of perpetually buzzed 'partners' in green aprons, balancing a sample tray of the new Mocha Delight Ultra-Uber Shot Caffe-Maccha-Latto on their motherfucking heads.

where do i get off saying this? how dare i slam my own alma mater of business? well, firstly, i'm a thinking rational human being, and i am inherently skeptical of anything that seems remotely like positive reinforcement or fucking Skinner-box type environments.

Part of my employment requires that i go to things called 'Rallys', wherein new drinks and pastries are unveiled for my delight, as well as new procedures, etc. imagine a hot, sweaty room filled with the shiny, eager faces of young twenty-somethings all kneeling in front of the mighty coffee altar, receiving benefactions from the font of all coffee wisdom. then put me in that room, balls full of skepticism and a mouth full of acid. we are divided into teams, and these teams are expected to go around the room to various stations where we learn things that we did not know, and that we are blessedly divine to be introduced to. (i will point out that most starbucks chicks are super-sexy, so i had lots to do while the conditioning was going on). the shiny eager beavers cavort and twist for treats, prizes, and the nominal affection of their superiors, who are all themselves withered carcasses, freeze dried and perpetually ageless thanks to hundreds of cups of coffee.

i want to go home, but i can't, because i am being paid.

towards the end of the Rally, during which we were expected to repeatedly chant different mantras so that our minds will echo with their magic-making powers well into the next day, the Grand Poobah of the event shows us a video. it's a video of how unbearably kind and sweet we are, how helpful and awesome we are to the third and fourth world countries we get our coffee beans from. we put up schools, and medical facilities and give these poor people all they could ever want in life except the opportunity to make decisions for themselves. i am touched, but only in my left pocket, where i keep my bullshit monitor.

i don't tell my thoughts to my partners, though i do ask that one or more of them kill me dead on the spot lest i turn into my avatar, Evilmister. the poobah is crying slightly, overcome by the glorious sight of a world where We is All There Is.

When the rally ends, we hear a statistic. it is this:

By 2017, 1 in every 750 people in america will have worked or will work for starbucks. one in every 750. that's not an employee pool.

that's a motherfucking militia. And we serve you addictive coffee, sell you pastries that are packed with four hundred percent your daily allowance of calories so that when the war does come, more than eighty percent of our customers will be too fat and slow to run away. we do it with a shit-eating grin, a hearty sense of radicalized bonhomie and fearlessness. we do it because we can, and the whole thing is wrapped up in a nice, neat Environmentally friendly package.

i ain't saying don't go to Starbucks. Quite the opposite. Join the Company, be one of the few, the bold, the brave.

But for fuck's sake, don't drink the coffee. they put something in that, for sure.

Peace out!!

Here's the Deal

2006-02-04T21:58:00.000-08:00

If you're either the bad guy or the good guy (it doesn't matter which, for the purposes of this tirade), and you're chasing the enemy, and they run into the elevator, don't just shoot the doors! Stick your hand or your gun or what-the-fuck-ever in between the door and the frame. Elevators have this thing where if the sensors detect something passing through the entrance, the doors open again!!!! Even the old elevators have manual doorstops. It's not like it hurts, and for fuck's sake, you are chasing the enemy who's got the plans/shot the president/murdered your poodle/eaten your lunch, so I'd think catching the fucker is of paramount importance.

If they are running away, it's because they don't have ammunition, or they are frightened of you. If you stick your hand in the door, they're not going to pull you in because they don't want anything to do with you. You are the last person they want to see on the entire planet. And because you are chasing them, you have been smart enough to bring a handful of people with more guns as well.

So what if you get a little bruise, you puss-bag, you're catching the enemy! Suck it up, take a hit for the fucking team, and open the door with your hand. Or shit, throw a fucking grenade in there or something. Don't let the fuckers get away just because you're a sissy. Shit.

If it was me, my evil Lair would totally be a ground level ranch style affair. No elevators anywhere.

Shit. I don't even know why the fuck I bother.

Yikes

2006-01-24T23:13:00.000-08:00

Stare at the word

CHAPTER

long enough and it ceases to have any meaning.

Fuck Me Sideways

2006-01-23T17:20:00.000-08:00

Oh, and hand me a big tall glass of unemployment for good measure.

Say what, Evilmister? Unemployed?

Yep, that's what I said.

So here's the scoop, the skinny, the low-down on the 411. Awhile ago, the powers that be asked me if i wanted to become all supervisory and stuff like that. Evilmister ain't no fool. He knows that if he says no, well, that severely limits the dollars attached to his paycheck, but he warned 'em!

Say what?

Evilmister told them right from the get go, before he got gone, that he has ... issues ... with anger and stress management. He needs to be calm and relaxed, like unto a calm flowing river, lest he turn into one of the biggest fucking spazzes on the planet. Only with even less concern for the foolish mortals packed around him like so much human chaff.

Flash forward a couple of months, and the scene is this:

I ask my crew (I switched to nights to sleep better and that kind of crap) if they thought it would be a good idea if we shortened our breaks a little so we could all fuck off a little earlier. They said sure, why the fuck not, and I said groovy, because this made my bus ride home a lot shorter.

Remember: I am a supervisor. I supervise, and I am under the impression that I am able to make, um, supervisory decisions. We worked our asses off all the same, perhaps even harder, and we still managed to get things done.

Flash to today.

I go to work. I am called into the office. I am told I did some things wrong. I was prepared for this, because I knew I'd done some thigns wrong on my last shift, but really, I didn't think they were too bad.

Then I was told I made rules that I shouldn't have. I was like ...

WHAT?

I was told that I'd been spied upon for the previous week, and they were shocked to learn that we were all leaving early and signing out for 1030. This, I learned, was both theft and lying.

I explained that we took shorter breaks, therefore making our departure time, while early, equal to that of staying 15min later than actual. I didn't think this was anything terrible, as most of the time shaved off was from our unpaid lunchbreak.

I was asked why I hadn't told anyone else.

I said because I didn't think it mattered all that much, so long as the work got done. I was a

Then, uhm, things got kind of ... angry. I was a dissapointment, firing me was the hardest thing in 10 years, how could I do this ... that sort of thing.

Oh well.

I have more time to write my book and surf for porn.

Eff me

2005-12-26T18:56:00.000-08:00

Well, shit.

It has been one assfuck of a month, let me tell you.

First, I get what can only be described as the Sleeping Plague. I haven't been so sick in something like ten years, and goddamned if I still ain't better. If you got it, you know what I am talking about.

THEN my computer ACTUALLY AND FOR REAL blows up. There was smoke. There was some sort of a fire. There was the smell of burnt silicon.

I LOST EVERYTHING.
Everything.

I don't care about the films of gentlemanly leisure, or the software. Those are easily replaceable. What I lost are digital versions of my three latest novels in roughly complete form and all of my music. All of it.

This, this is an affront. This killed me dead.

I was forced to go out and buy a hunk of crap computer called an 'emachine' like some kind of noveau retard computer geek, like some kind of ninety year old fart who wants to 'check the Interweb'. I am forced to resort to, in my opinion, subpar computer equipment.

But whatever. I'm rewriting my shit and staying off the games.

I ain't dead

2005-11-24T04:30:00.000-08:00

but i do have a case of crippling writer's block so profound that even the act of writing this sentence took ten minutes, because i am an anal retentive freak who has to make sure each word is the right word.

i am working on it, though.

i promise.

I am a sad, sad television hoor

2005-09-22T20:32:00.000-07:00

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

2005-09-14T19:56:00.000-07:00

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

2005-09-11T17:50:00.000-07:00

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

2005-09-07T16:45:00.000-07:00

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?

2005-09-06T16:23:00.000-07:00

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 ...

2005-09-05T14:18:00.000-07:00

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!

2005-09-03T10:27:00.000-07:00

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!!

I say, BAH to the whole damned thing.

2005-08-28T18:08:00.000-07:00

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 ...

2005-08-26T15:21:00.000-07:00

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

2005-08-24T07:41:00.000-07:00

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

2005-08-22T23:19:00.000-07:00

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

2005-08-21T16:32:00.000-07:00

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!

2005-08-17T05:01:00.000-07:00

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

2005-08-08T10:36:00.000-07:00

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.