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.

The Shit Keeps Gettin' Weirder

2005-08-07T22:46:00.000-07:00

Damn, I say.

Damn it all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That guy was having a bad trip.

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

Here is the scene:

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

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

Like the rabbit says, Exit stage left.

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

The list goes on...

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

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

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

Motherfucker please.

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

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

I'm pretty certain it'd be amusing.

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

2005-08-06T22:10:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

He wears his hat sideways.

Every fucking day.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Man Alive ....

2005-03-08T05:02:00.000-08:00

I turn around, and already, damned near two weeks have passed. It is unkindly true when they say the older you get, the quicker time flies. It's unfair to the point of sucking donkey nutz.

Do I feel bad for not having posted anything for a long time? Not really, because I imagine that my website is either a jumping off point on the way to one of the more interesting porn sites out there, or a winding down point when there is absolutely nothing left to look at before you pass out from sheer data overload.

Along with the above realization comes another: my 'talent' for writing (blogs, stories, wtf ever) is in direct proportion to how happy I am. The happier I am, the less inclined I to write anything. I am still a bitter, disgruntled, almost 'postal' person, but the vivre that has left phospor streaks of rage on monitors across the world (it could happen) is harder to muster. Along with that is the shocking loss of aptly turned phrases, of the most prosiac prose, the finest fillibustering. This is not the first time in two weeks that I've tried to sit down and write something, but it IS the first time I've managed to get something down.

They say that artists must suffer for the art. I think it's true, and equally loathe and love it; I love writing more than anything else in the world (except pizza, doughnuts, Pepsi, pretty girls, good movies, bad movies, video games and pizza), but the sheer weight of carrying so much angst around in order to create is a frickin' Herculean burden. No wonder so many creative people go apeshit and try to kill themselves. It's not because they're unhappy, but because they're not unhappy enough. They're trying to ramp their creative juices up to the point where they can actually create something other than a great big pile of crap.

Now, dear readers. don't imagine for a moment that I am even considering something like this, cuz on a far more grounded level, there is one very important thing to remember:

Yes, writers don't write because they want to, but because they must, but a starving, half-crazed artist can't buy pornography OR pizza, and I'll choose the latter over the former until the pressure in my head gets too much, and then I'll free the voices in my head with a trusty Black and Decker special.

The Grim Reaper Approaches

2005-02-21T05:14:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, Ain't that A Freakin' Surprise

2005-02-17T20:45:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

What brings this on?

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

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

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

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

Waiting for the Other Shoe

2005-02-10T04:57:00.000-08:00

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

Everything is just fine.

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

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

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

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

Until next time, intrepid fans!

MMORPG Support Groups.

2005-02-01T22:00:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Greatest Fucking Shows ... EVER

2005-01-23T10:49:00.000-08:00

Hello, kiddies, this is the Devil Hisself, Evilmister, coming in to spin some fan-tastic new words.

When I was a kid growing up, one of the two coolest shows in known existence was Knight Rider. I remember being blown right the fuck away by this show. A talking car? That fights crime? It's got turbo jump, it can drive itself, it's got cameras and shit? It's fucking bullet and bomb proof, and you can talk to it on a wristwatch straight out of Dick Tracy? Sign me right the fuck up. It had everything you wanted in a show. It had the car, obviously, which was the show piece, but it also had Michael Motherfucking Knight. This dude (David Hasselhoff) was the coolest cat around, man. He had his shit so together colostomy bags ran the other way. He always caught the bad guy, and was unashamed to use his talking car to Get The Job Done. It had the patrician and ever-so-effete boss, Devon, who was head of his own very special department. Finally, rounding out the cast was Bonnie, the ultra-hot, ultra-smart (ultra-80s hairstyle) computer shiksa; this was to smooth away any unwanted homosexual feelings towards Hasselhoff, I'm sure.

When the introduced K.A.R.R, K.I.T.T's evil talking car twin, I about died. What on earth was going to happen now? They were both bombproof, both could talk, and more importantly, they both found reasons to turbo jump!

And when they introduced that titanic monstrosity, Goliath, dammit, I did die. A rig? That was like KITT? Driven by the insane son of Devon? Holy fucking shit, man, that was un-fucking-believable! This show was the shit. Of course, it was destined to die a bloated and pregnant death as people became aware that the show was pretty poorly acted, that the cool features K.I.T.T. had were by now pretty mundane and the Hasselhoff himself was actually kind of creepy. I'm sure that huge budgets and a swelled head or two didn't help.

The second greatest show in the 80s?

Airwolf. A midnight black attack chopper that is hidden away in a hollowed mesa? Driven by Jan Michael Vincent? Come on, man, get with the program! It was the fastest thing in the world, had the bestest guns, and quite frankly, was super cool. You had the boss, who was just about the neatest boss in the world, on account of he'd had an eye blown out and had to wear glasses, with one of the lenses blacked out. You had his buddy, Santini, who was played by none other than Ernest "Squeal like a Pig" Borgnine, who I think was some kind of mechanic or something, and a hot chick or two thrown in for good measure. You didn't need to have hot chicks in this show, on account of the fact that Jan Michael Vincent was always busy blowing shit up. That was, in a nutshell, his solution to everything. Bad guys in the truck? Swoop out of the hidden mesa, zoom at somewhere around a trillion miles an hour down utterly deserted roads, and blow the truck up. Guys hidden in a building with lots of guns? Do the flying out of the mesa thing, track them down, and guess what? Blow the building up. Unlike Michael Knight, "Stringfellow Hawke" has clearly unresolved issues (he spends his off-time hanging out in a cabin looking at impressionistic art and playing a cello and fastidously avoiding women who think he's hunky ........) and blows the fuck out of shit to make himself feel better. Oh yeah, and he's supposed to be looking for his brother who's lost in Vietnam, who's name is St. John Hawke. I wish my parents had named me something cool. Sadly, Monsieur Hawke is now ... um ... chock full o'nuts. He totalled his career awhile back by hitting the booze, the drugs, and his wife, and now looks kind of like you'd expect. I saw him on one of those Entertainment Tonight's ghastly 'where are they now' eps, and he's concvinced that Hollywood is against him.

The only thing that could have been even cooler than Knight Rider and Airwold apart was a Knight Rider/Airwolf crossover series. A talking car with turbo jump driven by a guy with awesome hair and all the ladies teamed up with a faster-than-light helicopter armed with more guns and cannons and shit piloted by a guy who, um ... plays cello and ignores women ... anyways, that would have been the fucking shit. I am serious. Teenage boys all across the land would have fucking died from sheer awesome-osity overload.

Airwolf.....Knight Rider.... together ... are you shitting me ... what, do the take control of the United States ... take on martians .... travel through time ... holy fuck .... this is so cool.....

The only thing that could have made it even better was if they could have contrived to have the A-Team in it to provide background support.

Oh man, do I miss 80s television.

What the Fuck is Wrong with People?

2005-01-17T16:24:00.000-08:00

Firstly, I must say that my much anticipated freedom from Meep-Meep was a little overhasty; he has not been laid off, and since someone else has left the fold, it appears as though he is going to stay on a little while longer. Perhaps the title for this little blog should be 'Meep-Meep 2, Return of Meep-Meep, Meep-Meep's Revenge'.

That being said, along with the tyrannical tyrade, my opus of oppression, my ... blog of ... badness.

See, here's the thing. We all know the following:

I hate people
I hate crazy people
I dislike Meep-Meep

It should come as no surprise then that I mention Ol' Meep is on the meds. I didn't mention it before because, well, I was being uncharacteristically nice. A person's inner whackiness is his/her/its personal business. But when some crazy ass motherfucker starts explaining to me in graphic detail just what the fuck is wrong with them, we have seriously jumped off the track of polite conversation and taken a U-turn into Nutland.

What's wrong with the Meepster? I'll try and recap as best I can, but since this conversation went on for several hours, I may miss some shit. I might wake up in the middle of the night screaming in terror at the stuff I repressed, but what I do remember is good enough.

Here goes.

He was not born insane, nor was he made crazy by chemicals. He was, in fact, driven mad by a woman. This woman made a speech at him about how happy she was, and then he wound up staying awake for two months. Then he went crazy.
When he was a child, someone asked him how he'd like to meet his future wife. He said 'in an accident' and when he broke his leg as an adult, he met this woman in the hospital, who also had a broken leg. There is also, apparently, another future wife of his out there (he refers to them both as young wife and old wife) and they 'both know what I am doing, and what I am all about')
If you are speaking in a foreign language, and you are making fun of him, he will know. If you upset him enough, he will slam both his hands over your ears and make you deaf for life. This is a wrestling move that he picked up from the WWE, which he watches to learn self-defense techniques.
He somehow conveyed to Mick Foley (a wrestler) that in order to be famous, he would need the sock. Oh, and the Undertaker somehow contributed to his famousness, though not in the normal sense; I got the impression that the Undertaker somehow performed some Cabalistic rite.
He further informed the Rock that ovens were invented to warm up a woman's shirt so her boobs could be warmed up, and that the elements were to keep your hands warm.
When he was a young man, someone asked him who he'd like to see in charge of Russia, to which he replied 'someone who drinks'. Since the last two Russian Prime Ministers have been heavy drinkers, Meepsteronomous Bosch takes full credit.
He has the blood of all five prime Nationalities in him (Russian, English, Native, Crazy and Jewish). Since he is so graced, I think he thinks he is next in line to rule the planet.
If you think bad thoughts at him, he will know.
He came up with the idea of chemical driven rockets, using sulphur as the primary catalyst for flight.
He can control women through their G-spots. (this makes me shudder, because his fingers are nicotine stained to the second or third knuckle on each hand)
He has an alternate personality named Stan, who is smarter than he is and who has an uncle. He finds it fascinating that another person in his mind can have relatives, and that he has met this relative at Loughheed Mall.

The only things that didn't come up were aliens, the Illuminati, Hitler and the Bermuda Triangle. Sadly, Meep-Meep is not the first paranoiac with delusions of grandeur I've encountered. Being who I am, I draw the insane to me like moths to a flame. Far be it from me to make mock of someone with a serious problem (I say this every now and again for the hell of it), but HOLY FUCK. I mean, holy fucking fuck. Meep-Meep needs to go on stronger medication, because the shit he's on now isn't working (as far as I understand it, brain meds are supposed to alleviate chemical imbalances in the brain that hinder the proper firing of neurons, thereby tainting the stream of continual information into some pretty fucked up shit). Meep-Meep needs to go on Lithium or one of those drugs that make you drool a lot.

If this motherfucker wigs out on me, there will be repercussions. I can't handle crazy people. I have enough of them inside my own head, why should I have to put up with them in the real world?

I promise....

2005-01-17T05:13:00.000-08:00

All right, so I turned into one massive fucking marshmallow this weekend. I did next to nothing, and at times even had to remind myself to kick the autonomic processes (breathing, blinking, thinking). I tried several times to post something, but every time I got distracted by something bright and shiny, or in the case of television, something loud and catchy. I admit that I'm easily distracted, which is probably why I'm still not in control of the entire planet (I'm about four years behind schedule at this point.)

With that being said, I received an email earlier this week regarding my idolatry of the Dog. As it is with the web, it is sometimes difficult to convey sarcasm and shit like that. I promise that sometime today or tomorrow, I will post this person's (who is anonymous) email, and attempt to explain ... nahhhhh, fuck it. I'll post the email and make fun.

Sincerely yours,

The Devil Hisself, EvilMister

Get the Fuck Out of My Way

2005-01-09T09:02:00.000-08:00

I got somethin' to say.

I'd say that pretty much everyone who lives in a place with a mall has been in a mall. I don't care if you say you've never been there, that's a lie. You've been there. So, consequently, when you've been in a mall, you've been in a line-up, or a queue, or the soul-sucker (that's where you stand in a line for more than five minutes, and all you have is one item). And if you've been in a line-up, you know the procedure. It's pretty fucking simple. So simple, in fact, that it's kind of fucking automatic. The cashiers are there to help speed this along. Here is the procedure:

Present items to purchase/order food/drink/tickets
Wait for cashier to tally prices, then tell you how much you must pay (this is also illuminated on nifty cash register screens, so you don't even have to listen if you don't wanna)
present method of payment
take goods/drinks/food/tickets and leave the line

Does this happen all the time, like it should? Now, I'm what I call a commando shopper. I don't even leave the house until I know exactly what I want, where to get it, how much to spend, how I'm going to pay. I get in, I get out. Rambo and Chuck Norris have got nothing on me. In and out like the fucking wind.

Sadly, where I live, I am almost alone. This is a far more likely scenario. I will use a Starbucks as my locale.

Order a moccachino/mocha latte/caffey laddie/ask what's good to drink/ask the fat content of the buttermilk cinnamon role/ask if they have a snack food not sold since the 80's.
Get horribly confused by size of drink (small, regular, big, bigbig --- don't let the fancy faux-Italian names fool you), forcing barista to rely on monkey see-monkey do style selling (holding up drink cup and pointing to it, mimicking a person drinking)
Order five or six different drinks from a napkin in your pocket (forgetting that their is one more on the back until you're at the other end, picking up drinks, and the new line is twice as big)
Ask that drinks have names printed on them.
Ask for one very specific cookie, at the bottom, in the back, underneath all the other cookies, that is only different in so far as it possesses a mildly different geophysical location.
Send it back when it has nuts in it because, fortunately, you will die if you eat nuts.
Drop your keys, pick them up, knock down a bag of coffee.
Quibble over the price by mentally calculating how much it should cost in crazy world, forcing barista to go over the entire order line by line, complete with GST and PST breakdown.
Try to pay by debit.
Try to pay by credit card.
Pull out half a dozen Starbucks pay as you go cards and hope you have enough.
Let a friend at the back of the line put their order on yours.
Realize you have enough cash in your pocket after all and pay with cash, intentionally shorting the barista a quarter but getting busted anyway
Turning around and looking at the line then having the indeceny to 'apologize' by saying you've never been to a Starbucks before.

Let me tell you something, you cockass motherfucker. Starbucks is like, final year of University interaction with the outside world. You don't just jump in with both feet and hope to come out standing. The variables involved in a successful coffee/cash transaction are so dense it makes quantum physics math look like grade school counting with apples (JOhnny has six apples, he gives you two apples, how many apples does Johnny have left?) Everyone else in the line is suffering from the Jones, and they can hardly breathe by the time they make it to the line, the last thing they want to go through is BoBo The Chimp trying to sham his way through a Grand Magus level exchange of goods and services. The baristas can see you coming a mile away, and they've protected themselves by throwing the least efficient barista in the front counter (this is also a way to thin the herd) in the hopes that his/her/its communication skills will be to your level. They don't like it when you see the syrup rack after you've ordered and then try to con your way into some vanilla. We all hate it when you act as though your ignorance is, in some way, humorous and not your fault.

It is your fault. Your ignorance is entirely your fault. If you can't handle the line at a Starbucks, if you can't get in and get out without more than five minutes going by, go to Timmy's or McDonald's. Do I sound like the Soup Nazi? Maybe a little. I jibjab with the kids on the counter as often as I can but only when there is no line. Have I been going there a long time? Yes. More than ten years. Should I give people the chance to have my level of experience?

Fuck no. If life was a MUD, I'd be PK'ing those motherfuckers left right and center.

And I don't even wanna get started on what happens when there are children involved in the ordering process, other than to say I almost stabbed someone to death the other day with my index finger.

Alas, Poor Meep-Meep, We Knew Him Well

2005-01-04T19:09:00.000-08:00

So, decided earlier this week that I would rename ChronicSmoker Meep-Meep, and for more than just the obvious reasons. Well, all right. Not really. Calling a dood Meep-Meep makes me laugh my ass off every fucking time I think of it. Sometimes I say it out loud, then start howling with laughter. More than one person has already looked at me funny, but I don't care. Calling a guy Meep-Meep is fucking hilarious. You might not think so, but then again, you are not me, and this is my blog. MEEP-MEEP. MEEP-MEEEE-MEEEEEEP.

As to why poor Meep-Meep, well, it's simple.

At the end of this week, there will only be one Retard from Express Personnel, and that retard is me. And once 60 more days is done, I will no longer be a retard from Express, but a gomer from the packing plant instead. Yep. That's right. My most supreme and sublime magnifence in learning how to fill bags and put them through a heat sealer (this is something any chimp from NASA could do, and I really do mean chimpanzees) has garnered me employment. A direct result of my continued awesome-osity is the removal of Meep-Meep from my personal space.

Why is this important?

I am not a friendly person unless you have something I want. I mean, come on, I am incredibly polite and nice to people who work at the places where I buy things from, and for a few reasons. One being that I don't want a 'dipper' (someone sticking their finger in my coffee) and the other being that I am a shameless flirt. If it was the 70's, I'd be the guy in the velour shirt open to my navel trying to lick my eyebrows suggestively. Unless you are in a position to give me what I need (friendship, nudity, well made coffee beverages), you should probably avoid me. I learned the cold shoulder on the beggar-filled alleys of Vancouver, and once you've been hit with my look of disdain, you might not recover. My unapproachability is only magnified before and after work.
Meep-Meep and I share the same bus route. This does not please me, nor has it ever pleased me. Your garden variety nutbag realizes that a person with headphones on playing speed metal (Rob Zombie, Godsmack, Disturbed, etc) on his MP3 loud enough to startle small children in Indonesia is someone who doesn't want to talk. To anyone. Meep-Meep, on the other hand, is not your garden variety whackjob. So I pulled out the big guns. I started reading and listening to the headphones.

This does not work. Meep-Meep is fundamentally incapable of realizing that, probably 'cuz he's insane. Nor has he copped to the fact that the process of marking my place in the book, pausing my headphones, and removing one of them so that I can hear him takes longer than his inane comments do to make it past his toothless gums. And then I have to replace the headphone, turn the music back on, then find my place again. All for him to shout "MEEP-MEEP-MEEEEmeep".

So, at the end of the week, Meep-Meep's tenure will come to a thankful close and I will be free to be the cantankerous SOB I was born to be.

Fare the well, Meep-Meep, and wear your teeth, because the sight of you gumming a sandwich will be with me always.

And I do mean always.

I Should Not Be Given Time Off...

2004-12-31T13:52:00.000-08:00

Time off? Oh yeah, sure, sounds fuckin' great. Hook me the fuck up. Let me roam around with nothing but spare time on my hands. I'm positive that I can keep myself occupied. I mean, I got a pile of movies to watch, and hey, I downloaded all those episodes of tv shows that are on too late for me to watch, right? Shit, man, eleven days will go by like greased lightning, or like Clay Aiken's career.

That was what I thought.

The fact of the matter is, it takes roughly one and one half days for me to suffer from the stir crazies. If I don't have the prospect of going to work where I have something that can keep me busy for no less than eight hours, I start to hear things. I start to drink excessive amounts of caffeine, which serves no purpose but to make me hyperactively irritating. I am aware of this happening, and I take steps to 'nip it in the bud' but it don't work.

I mean, early on in the week I started retraining myself on website design. And then I switched tracks to Flash (I apologize to those of you who clicked on the previous blog's link ... I am learning, and much like when I was learning Photoshop and went apeshit with bevel/emboss and drop shadows, it'll be some time before I discover a happy medium between crass artistic style and weird ideas). I read four books, watched a half a dozen movies. Some of those movies were the same movie four times in a row. I played an awesome video game called Uplink; you play a hacker working for a company, and you hack computers and shit. It is so much fun and such an amazing waste of time that I was forced to delete it from my computer after I spent all my time robbing banks rather than follow the plot line --- there I was, at two am in the morning, wigging out from caffeine and chocolate, yelling at my computer because there was no fucking way that that bank could have possibly tracked my bounces, I fucking deleted everything.

Now it's worse. Now I don't want to do anything, except possibly complain about how I have nothing to do. My mother, god bless her twisted heart, blithely suggests time and again that I do laundry, or tidy up my room, or go for a walk or fix my work boots (for some reason I can't figure out, they smell exactly like moldy cat piss after a bad day of rain). If I wanted to do something worthwhile, I'd find a job that pays more than nine bucks an hour. Worthwhile tasks have the maximum amount of impact on my surroundings, but the minimul amount of personal satisifaction. I don't get off on saying 'Look at me, I'm a tidy person' or 'Wheee! Isn't laundry fun?'. Laundry is a chore, and by chore, I mean trial. The only way it could get any worse was if I was forced to do it while in stocks. I'm just enough of a bourgeoisie cockass to pay my mother to do my laundry for me and to feel guilty about it.

Yes, I am aware that there are people out there the opposite of me, that they can, in fact, keep themselves happy and occupied for any length of time without going nuts and eating an entire refridgerator from top to bottom (I stopped at the olives, though, 'cuz those things are fucking repellant). I imagine they have quite a nice time on their vacations, visiting friends and relations, sitting at beautiful quayside coffee shops enjoying their lattes and their scones, or just wandering around their own homes so blissfully pleased with their lives that they don't see me coming at them with a kitchen knife until it's too late.

Surely, EvilMister, you are lying!

No. I'm not. That is why in the last ten years, I have never taken a vacation purely for the purposes of not doing anything. Every two weeks off I have taken either involves me moving somewhere or helping someone move. The majority of my vacation time has either been used up for sick days, to supplement weak paychecks, or lost in the vast machinery of corporate america. I am firmly convinced that in order to enjoy any vacation, I will need to not be in Canada, and even then there's a risk; I wonder how accomodating the local polizia in, oh, say, Cancun would be to a large naked man running down the streets screaming his head off because he's got nothing to do. (I won't do that here, because you don't piss where you sleep, and I figure if I'm going to lose it in a foreign country, I might as well have Indecent Exposure added to the charges. I think that would take the bite out of being arrested, and would make the story fun for the whole family.)

In short, kids, time off doesn't suit me well.

checkit

2004-12-30T16:04:00.000-08:00

soon to be.....

Puberty, Again?

2004-12-28T11:07:00.000-08:00

Just when I think it's safe to start enjoying my growing dementia, to be able to settle into some kind of rhythm where nothing irritates the piss out of me, I suddenly discover that, much like when I was a young kid suffering from mystery boners (if you can tell me why walking past a mailbox would ... you know ... ), my body is going through changes again.

Apparently it's related to this malady known as 'getting older'. I think it's cockrot. It's a conspiracy, but I haven't been able to nail down any single source that dictates commands.

What, exactly, is my problem? Oh, I'll tell you. Don't you worry.

The other day I am shaving my three day growth off. I am using the most excellent, indeed, the most venerable of all shaving equipment out there. Armed with the Mach 3 Turbo (a blade so sharp that you could fight off a horde of ninjas with no time and still have enough resilience left over to carve your initials in stone) and the latest in shaving cream technology (I'm told NASA uses this stuff in place of grease, it's so slick), I have no doubts at all I can conquer my facial hair. After all, I've used it only once so far, and on way less stubble. It should've been like lightsaber through arm time.

Was it? Was I like the guy in the commercial, who just swipes that fucking Mach 3 Turbo razor across his face like it was nothing? Did I leave a clean sweep of baby-fine skin ready for the stroking by the hot women?

No. Not at fucking all.

I wept like a baby, and that was about it. My trusty Mach 3 Turbo had failed. I had stubble left behind, and where there wasn't stubble, there was razor burn.

I immediately accused my folks of using my phenomenally overpriced shaving equipment to scrape grout off the bathroom walls. It was either that or some mysterious entity was intentionally dulling my razor blades. Both ideas are equally probable in my household, seeing as how it's built over a Nexus of Increasingly Random Weirdness. I was, perhaps, irrationally pissed off, because I hate shaving to begin with. If it was up to me, I'd look like Grizzly motherfucking Adams, but the job demands it.

And that was when my folks explained to me that when a guy gets older, his facial hair turns into carbon-spun fibers. (They didn't say that, they just said it gets harder, but being the geek I am, I think the above sounds way cooler.) This is also why, they announced, most guys over thirty generally have some kind of beard. Not because they like the hair, but because they'd otherwise have a face like grated cheese.

I'll be honest and say that I don't particularly care much for having a beard either, though my insane perfectionism causes me to strive to new heights of careful architecture with it's shape; I just hate shaving more. So when I find out that, suddenly, my facial hair has the tensile strength of spidersilk, I have even less liking for it.

So here's a growing list of shit that happens when you get 'older':

You can hardly stay awake past nine o'clock. There might be shit worth watching, but you couldn't be bothered.
You can't drink nearly as much as you used to. It's a fact. Oh, you can consume as much as you used to, possibly twice as much. You should just expect that when the morning comes you'll find yourself in the hospital having your stomach pumped.
Tying your shoes is something you only do when you have to. I suggest you buy some kind of Vans or other skateshoes, tie them tightly, then slip them on. It works great for me, and this way, no one stares at you and your fuzzy bunny slippers.
Back hair. It happens. It is gross, and it isn't easy to wax off. (Long story, the short of which I now have a suspiciously close understanding of what it is to give birth)
The tendency to say 'When I was young' and actually have the history to back it up.
Suspicious bruising. It's life's way of reminding you that, a thousand years ago, you'd have been called 'Elder' and everyone is waiting for you to die so they can all move up a rank.
Ear hair. I don't have this yet, but it's on the way.
Nose hair. Much like beard hair, this stuff grows as fast as you can pluck it out. And the older you get, the farther back into your skull it is. I swear to God I pulled one out the other day and I lost a patch of hair on the back of my neck. That, and my eyes watered up like I was crying.

This list is by no means complete, but I am sure in the convening years, I'll have more to add.

So maybe it's not actually puberty, maybe it's the opposite of puberty, but faced with the above, is it any wonder most guys start dating women half their age and buy replacement penises from BWM?

Thank Fucking God---warning! LONG post.

2004-12-24T16:34:00.000-08:00

Holy Shit.

If your boss ever comes to you and says that he/she/it has an idea for you to have some extra time off for the holidays, and all that it really entails is 'just a few' 10 hour days, seriously consider jamming a fork into your neck or figuring out how to generate wormholes with your mind before you answer.

Why?

Because on paper, eight hours of overtime looks easy like the pie. Mathmeticians and philosophers will nod sagely at the proposed plan, occasionally taking out a slide rule or Aristotle's tomes to determine the fine points, and then say "Looks good to me" before fucking off to the pub, leaving you to deal with the 'plan'. (This is not a plan whipped up by Hannibal, and he will not say, when all is said and done, that he loves it when a plan comes together. This is a plan designed in hell, with mid-level government cheeseheads for the sounding board.)

Oh sure, at first, I was all for it. I mean, new guy, tryin' to look good, tryin' to impress everyone. Extra money's good, few extra days off even better! Shit yeah, I said. Ten hours? Let's do twelve. I can do this shit standing on my fucking head. Bring it on, cockmonkeys, and we'll see who's left standing. Me EvilMister! Me Destroy All!

That was me for the entire first week. I ruled that goddamn place. With my newfound health and physical propserity growing in leaps and bounds, I busted my hump like it was the only hump left that needed breaking. I turned into some kind of idiot savant (like the ones on TV, you know? The ones who can model your head in Cheese-Inna-Tube after looking at you for two seconds, or who can, shit, I dunno, recite the Star Spangled Banner in anagrams). I beat all previous records for bag sealing. This might not sound like much, but I did over eight hundred bags in ten hours, and at the end of it, my fingers had swollen to the size of sausages.

And then people started calling in sick. Or rather, 'sick'. Like, sorry boss, but I drank an entire liquour store and I think I'm dying sick or I got to do some Xmas shopping, boss, achew!

Fuck 'em, I said. I am EvilMister. There is not the job I cannot do (unless I get fired from it) or the torture invented that can stop me! Lo and tremble, puny mortals! A man with an ego the size of Illinois walks among you!

Now, now I gotta slow it down for a moment, and clue you in to some things that were happening around this time.

ChronicSmoker admits to everyone who looks at him that he a) is on medication, b) has another personality inside of him and c) 'belongs there'. He frequently lets everyone know that his mental health doctor can't find out why his (Chronic's) eyes are permanently dilated. He also likes to tickle people, and I had to threaten him with the whole 'bloody stump' schtick before he got the message to leave me alone. He has since moved on to other people, and it's goddamned hilarious when it ain't me. Also, and this is most important, so pay attention, when I get tired and frustrated, ChronicSmoker sounds just like Beeker from the Muppet Show at a space of ten feet and beyond. Yeah, that's right. I'm filling and sealing bags, he's down the other end, throwing them as best he can, and every single fucking time he opens his mouth it sounds like he's shouting "MEEP! MEEP! MEE-MEEEEP! Meeep MEEEEP Meeep Junior!" It got to the point where I started working three times as hard with the sincere hope that he'd pass out from the exertion. I pointed this fact out to JuniorHumper, and he has started shouting MEEP MEEP MEEEEP everytime ChronicSmoker starts bleating into the ether, while I mutter quietly (and sometimes not so quietly) that if the fucking retard doesn't shut his piehole, I will for sure shove him in the giant mixer and make ChronicSmoker goo. Seriously. If (and I'm hoping the boss will tell him to go to hell), if ChronicSmoker is picked back up after the New Year, I will either be guilty of manslaughter and thrown in jail or knocking on your doorstep, lookin' to lay low for a few days. Get that cot ready.
We decided to forego cleaning the machines in an effort to maintain maximum production. Again, this made sense like 1+1=2. (Never mind that it wound up being something like 1+Buick=roadkill). We had to fill nineteen trucks in two weeks. There was me to do the bulk of this work, 'cuz everyone else had other duties, and we were down at least two people per day for a week. I may not have mentioned it, but our prime packaging product is Surimi, and it has a lot in common with sand. If there is a crack, it will lodge there, which is why I'm glad I wear coveralls. Unlike sand, though, this cockfucking shit doesn't simply wash away with water. Noooooo, it has phosphates in it, which draws moisture from the air, and sugars, which takes that freshly drawn water and turns into cement. This is bad enough during regular hours. It becomes compounded when the bosses decide to pressure wash the floors above the machine without first determining whether or not there are, ummm, holes in it through which water can fall, firstly all around the exterior and finally right into the machine's various storage areas. This happened several times, in secret. More than once I had to literally chip and hack my way through a dense iceberg-like pile of gooey white shit to free hyrdraulics or augers, sometimes taking as much as half a day to do so. It was around this time I started prevailing upon my employers to let me clean the machine properly, as the mess was beginning to affect my productivity. I was told to 'sort it out', which translated into 'fuck off, you peon, and fill bags so I can get richer'. This endless blizzard of crud fouled up the works so badly that the metal detector, which is a part of the entire unit, became glued open, so that every time I filled a bag, half a kilo would fall into an overflow bin that normally takes two weeks to fill. The conveyor belts, allegedly sped up to beat Speed Racer X's ass, started to moan and wobble as the actual rotor system almost doubled in size. The floors began to look like the concrete outside Granvill Skytrain station, because the crud sticks to the bottom of your feet until it hits something wet, then falls off, then dries out, then becomes part of the floor.
I get caught by Quality Control scraping an inch and half thick plating of sugared phospates from the bottom of my boots with a knife that typically comes in contact with product. After a five minute conversation that should have last two seconds, I realize this is a bad idea, and that it is now my responsibility to clean the knife. Later, I pry a piece of wood from a broken skid and begin to use this as my boot scraper, and I start intentionally leaving massive piles of crap everywhere I can.
I witness ChronicSmoker, toothless, sucking on chocolates and decide that if he touches me again, I will kill him with a grapefuit spoon.
My finger gets a little nick in it that becomes so infected that it starts to look like an eye and it takes sheer, agonizing pain for me to realize maybe I should disinfect it.
I learn that my foreman RodgerDodger is oddly ... twisted. I will never be the same after watching him liberally apply lubricant to some bracing plates that hold the end of the auger in position, with his middle finger no less. He tells me that 'Too much is not enough", and to this day, I can't do the same chore without feeling depressingly perverted.
I can now effectively mimic the accents of all three QC guys (two Iranians and a guy from some UK country) and the mixer (also Iranian) with such skill that they all laugh their asses off.
For those of you who read the conversation about 'pud', I know understand the whole of it. One of the Express Retards, a guy I'll call GI Jane (not real army, but cadets, and if you wanna push his buttons, point out to him that cadets isn't the army, and he goes apeshit.) came to fill in for a day. Scullerymaid had already witnessed GI Jane 'pulling his pud' and I just naturally assumed that it was, you know, .... gentlemanly ... adjustment ... because of the coveralls. This is not, I repeat, not the case. I saw him do it. He ... he ... reached ... out and um ... grabbed hold one handed and gave the General a firm, healthy yank. Then he did it again. GI Jane, once a permanent fixture at my new job, also spent some time explaining to me that he proposed to his girlfriend, which didn't seem too strange until I also learned that he'd never seen her before the other day. Then I found out he got her pregnant sometime during the first two days.

So while all this is going on, the bosses are going bugnuts because there is no fucking way we're going to meet end of year quota, because they were dumb enough to bank on people turning into robots. We've got people calling in sick, one dude just decides he doesn't wanna do anything anymore, and a homicidal maniac filling bags. They (the bosses) come out, rattle some chains, piss everyone off, then hide in the office again, waiting for one of us to fuck up.

Fast forward to day before yesterday.

I am cranky. I mean, really cranky. And whiney, too. I haven't been sleeping properly, and when I do close my eyes, I start hearing ChronicSmoker's voice. I've been eating a lot of chocolate at work (the clients send good chocolates, by the way, the expensive kind) and drinking about a gallon of pepsi a day. I am wired for sound, and I can hear the molecules in the air grinding against one another. I am a cunt hair away from killing ChronicSmoker because the more irritated we all become, the more he seems to need to push our buttons (I'm sure it's his meds). The machine hasn't been working all that well; things have become so gummed up that I have had to learn how to calculate the necessary variance in the scale system to account for the wildly fluctuating difference in actual vs. measured weights, and apply this calculation every fifth bag. Then I discovered that I had to pause every tenth bag to allow the demons inside the machine to take a quick breather.

All the while, the conveyors are squeaking, groaning and rattling, the air is buzzing, and I am complaining to myself. Why? Because I know north from northwest, is why, and I knew that, at four o'clock, there were still two batches worth of bags out there, and the next day was wash day. The actual conversation with myself started at three thirty. It went something like this...

... I swear to fucking God, I am taking this piece of shit machine apart at four thirty. How can that not be a good idea? It's a great idea. This fucking machine, oh man, do I hate it, why won't they let me clean it. Jesus. I hate ChronicSmoker. These fuckers wouldn't even be this close to the end without me, they better hire me. If they ask me to do one more bag, I'm gonna lose it, I'll start to cry or something, I know it, and then I'll have to kill everyone. No. I won't do another bag. I'll tell the boss I'm dismantling my machine at four thirty and he can go to Hell for all I care. I'm the greatest thing that's happened here, and they're making me crazy. I'm gonna ask for eleven dollars an hour and if they don't give it to me they can go fuck themselves, I don't need this shit ...

This is cyclical, repeating itself in three minute intervals.

So, at ten after four, the hopper runs dry and I hurry up the stairs quickly to double-check that the machine is, in fact, done.

Only to see RodgerDodger, my foreman, hanging another tote.

"What are you doing?" I wail. I literally wail. I sound like a four year old girl who can't have a pony for her birthday, except I am easily two hundred and thirty pounds.

"Hanging another tote. Why. What's wrong?"

"I wanna take the machine apart."

"Can't. Boss wants us to finish all the batches by five thirty."

"Oh, mmmmmmmmaaaaaaannnnnnnnnn. Really?"

"Well, whatever you don't finish, we will. Come on, man, you can do it. You're awesome!"

I know I'm awesome. But I'm still seriously considering whether or not to throw a tantrum on the floor, or if maybe I should bust out a quivering lip. I decide that since I am, in fact, awesome as well as cool, I won't do either. What I will do is exactly what is expected of me, but so fast that they won't even realize I'm done until I'm on my way home. Which is what I did. But not before pointing out to RodgerDodger that I wasn't, under any circumstances, doing anything else. Surprisingly, he didn't tell me to go fuck myself.

Maybe tomorrow I'll tell you about what happens to the air circulation system when we don't clean for two weeks, and in specific what can occur when cloth filters get coated in three inches of surimi and then struck with a pressure.

In short, motherfuckers, thank fucking God I didn't have to go to work this morning. You would have heard about the grisly murders all the way to Beijing. I'd be known as Red Santa...

Christmas? Kissm'ass.

2004-12-19T17:57:00.000-08:00

Lemme tell ya something about Christmas.

Xmas music. Holy fuck. This stuff drives me insane. I swear to God there's only five or six songs, and then every 'musical artist' since the dawn of fucking time has taken time out of their busy schedules to whip up their own friggin' version. Which, in and of itself, isn't that bad, but when the motherfuckers who like Xmas music start playing this shit starting the middle of November, then it's out of goddamned control. In my experience, these people are the sort of mercilessly cheerful, Xanaxed to the eyeball nutjobs who crochet their own toilet seat covers and firmly believe that Elvis was Jesus and vice versa. You know the ones I mean. They wear the reindeer/Santa/Elf hat with the Mistletoe/jingle bells/flashing Grand Mal lights, wish you Merry Christmas/Joyous Noel/Season's Greetings with the kind of forcefulness you'd generally only find in guys who spend their time carving Swastikas into their foreheads. They're on their third copy of the christmas cd where cat meow Deck the Halls and Silent Night because they play it year round. I'm talking Fruitcake eating, Eggnog swilling, Mistletoe carrying Militant Christmas-ites. They work mostly at Walmart, but can also be found places like Penningtons, Spensers and K-Tel Records and Tapes. I hate them. But mostly because Christmas jingles get stuck in my head like they've been cemented in there with Krazy Glue, and they are the prime source of contagion.

Seriously. One minute of the First Noel and I'm fucking stuck. It's me, hollering out Jingle Bells and Here Comes Santa Claus at the top of my lungs for the rest of the day. And I sing intentionally badly, because not only can I not sing, I sing poorly naturally. We're talking multi-frequency cat fight. We're talking Peter Brady going through puberty bad. And the weirder the look, the louder I do it, and let me tell you something, when you sing loud enough that you can actually drown out a mixer the size of a luxury sedan mixing two and a half thousand kilos of crud, that's loud. The only thing seperating me from the aforementioned Christmas Fucktards is the silly goddamn hat, which frightens the living hell out of me.

So if the next time you see me, I'm wearing a flashing pin that says 'Kiss Me, I'm one of Santa's Elves', am dressed head to toe in bright red felt and singing Jingle Bell Rock on a corner, desperately trying to get the money up to feed my Misteltoe jones, be kind, drop a dime.

Dammit! Who Do I Have To Kill To Have My Weekends Left Free?

2004-12-11T18:17:00.000-08:00

Not to toot my own horn, which I could do if I wanted to because I'm me, but right now, I am working very, very hard. I am doing ten hours a day at Ye Olde Spice Plante (the added e's make it olde fashioned) in order to guarantee a few extra days off at the end of the year. A 25 kilo bag doesn't weigh too much at the start of the day, but when ya hit hour nine, those motherfuckers weigh as much as the goddamned pyramids. Except pyramids are nominally easier to carry because they don't bend in the fucking middle when you pick 'em up. Needless to say, I am tired and I am sore, and I spend an hour on the bus on the way home listening to hormone-riddled teenagers shout at each other across a space of said bus; all I want is to be left the fuck alone.

I want to be left alone at the best of times. Christmas day? Ho-ho. Merry Xmas, these are my gifts, these are yours, I love you all very much, see you in time for dinner, don't call me, I won't call you. When I am cranky, I'm like a turbocharged asshole machine, and since I'm louder than anyone else in my family by at least a factor of five, when I shout, fucking Spain hears.

Now my mother, Momzilla, is on this ... renovation ... jag. Has been for months, but until recently, I was spared the fallout from too much Trading Spaces because there were other areas in the house that needed work. And since she's a dying breed (a housewife, of all the antiquated and outmoded concepts in this new age), there's a shitload of time during each day in which to design multifarious ways to fuck me over.

Awhile back, Momzilla saw this show in which one of the people was one of those guys who likes to see what he owns. His house wasn't messy, per se, but it was well-lived in. The designer on the show started riposting with some kind of factual proof that people like this have a mild form of brain damage, and it's imperative that they don't dismiss this fact when designing their stuff. Lo and behold, Momzilla realises EvilMister is just such a guy hisself.

Shit, man, I could of told her that twenty fucking years ago. I used to go apeshit, I mean, stark fucking nuts when she'd clean my room while I was at school. It'd take me fifteen minutes to find a pen, because I had memorized the exact spot of the pen, and indeed, every other thing in my room.

It started with shelving in the closet. Which I like. But the process, which invloves a father who can literally spend sixteen hours choosing the proper nails, was a long and painful one, complete with architectural designs that would have flabbergasted Frank Lloyd Wright and horrified my ninth grade english teacher (closet is almost always spelled clost, and it ain't shorthand she's dropping down.) Any and all renovations in my room, small enough to frighten lifers on death row with it's size, involves the removal of all my worldly possessions to 'make room for your father and his tools'. This is a big lie. It's so she can create a list of things I own that she wants me to throw away. I forgot to mention that ever since this episode of 'Demolishing your Home and Making it Over the Way We Want' that explained this guy's ... condition, Momzilla continues to bring up the fact that I, too, 'suffer' from this 'problem'. I've had to point out to her that I am maybe a little too attached to my stuff, but I by no means suffer from narcolepsy or schizophrenia.

That was three weeks ago.

Last week it was bookshelves, to house the massive collection of crap I read. Again, I love the shelves on my walls, because now I can see all the titles, and the shelves themselves are only big enough to have rows one level deep. Anyone out there who is a booklover knows how fucking frustrating it is to have to dig behind two and sometimes three layers to find the one book you want. It can take hours, by which time you've forgotten your own name and the printed word has most likely been replaced by holograms and mental telepathy. Again, I had to remove most of my possessions out of the room. Including my computer. I hate moving my computer. Not because of anything I might be doing on it, but because of cords.

Cords and I don't get along. I can hold three speaker wires in one hand, look away, count to twenty, and find that they've tied themselves into a Gordian Knot by the time I've finished. This is complicated by my supergeek PC surround system, which has more wires coming out of it than anything else I own, and by the fact that my DVD surround wires come right by the PC. It took me half an hour to get everything unsnarled, and then Momzilla reorganized them for me, because my own loops were too loose for her liking. This time, the old man really did take all day. If it weren't for ChubbyMonk coming to rescue me, I'd have staple gunned both M0mzilla and my dad to the walls.

Then there's the coatrack she wanted built. Like the shelves in the closet and the ones on the walls, this came with an attached diagram. The only thing missing were instructions on how to assemble it in all languages known to man. My dad, being eminently logical and far more patient than I am, looked at the design, noted it's salient points, and built it his own damned way. When Momzilla saw the rack, the first thing she said was 'It's not up and down.' ( I should note that my new coatrack is nailed to the wall and has four giant pegs for jackets) She demanded to know why it wasn't how she'd designed it. My poor old dad explained in the weary tones of a foreman (which he has been for twenty-six years) to the architect (who can only think on paper and not in three dimensions) that an up-and-down style coatrack is asking for problems : jackets on top bolt hanging over all other coats, the necessity of digging through said jackets to find the one you want, the massive lump all the jackets would cause, etc. His own design, diagonal, is much more streamlined. I concurred and my mother left the room, still unwilling to admit it made sense.

All I want is to be left alone. I don't want to know about any more design changes to the very structure of space and time in my room, I don't care that my family doctor is now offering Botox shots, I could give a rat's ass that my father doesn't do anything around the house. On the weekends, all I want to do is sit in front of my computer or my television, eating all the shit I don't eat during the week, watching the cheezy shows I download or watching a movie on TV that I own the DVD for (but am way too fucking lazy to pull out of the box). I want to go to Starbucks, drink my Americano and stare at girls half my age. I don't want to be reminded that I need to have my laundry out, I don't need to be reminded rent is due, I have no desire to 'swing by' the grocery store to pick up the eighty-three things that were forgotten because Momzilla hates crowds. I wanna watch adult oriented clips without being ... disturbed. I don't want my massive dog, Bootsy Collins, to be let in to climb all over me because 'she misses me' and Momzilla thinks it's cute.

I wanna be left the fuck alone to do the things I wanna do, and if anyone hassles me next weekend (Sunday is a wash already) I am for sure going to kill someone.

My best friend and moral compass (he lets me know when I'm being too nice) has pointed out that the above will only get worse when I get married. He has pointed out that marriage brings another entire family into the equation, at which point I will find myself spending my weekends visiting relatives, babysitting nieces and nephews, entertaining out-of-town visitors, schlepping my ass to the ends of the earth for this or that, and generally signing away all rights to personal freedom.

There is no light, there is no consolation except for one:

At least in prison, you can stab a screw and get sent into solitary, where they leave you alone.

Conversations at Work

2004-12-04T08:22:00.000-08:00

I came into this conversation part of the way through, but was compelled to leap right in ...

SculleryMaid: .... pud ....

EvilMister: Did someone just say pud?

JuniorHumper: What the fuck's a pud?

EvilMister: 's part of the wang. (I indicate my wang area for visual accuracy) You know, short for pudenda.

ForkMan, SculleryMaid: (laughs)

JuniorHumper: What part of the wang?

EvilMister: I dunno, man, 's either the twig or the berries. You know, colonel and two soldiers...

Bookie: (in the change room) FRANK AND BEANS! FRANK AND BEANS!

ForkMan, SculleryMaid: (laughs harder)

EvilMister: (on my way out door, to ForkMan) We are a bunch of fucking grownups, eh?

ForkMan: No shit!

We all laaaaugh and laaaaaugh and laaaaaugh at work.

Yes, EvilMister, There Is Such A Thing As Santa Clause

2004-11-29T17:01:00.000-08:00

Or perhaps the employment equivalent thereof...

Allow me to explain; there are times, every day, where there is nothing for those of us who 'work the line' to do. That is to say we've either expended our product to bag (meaning the guy who mixes the product, an incredibly intense dood named Mohammed, is running behind), the electricians are banging on a part of the machine we use with hammers and nodding enthusiastically at the results, or the foreman is trying to patiently display for our employers (notorius skinflints if I ever saw any) the sorts of problems we're having with the line, and what he thinks should be done. So, like I said, there's a couple of us standing around, drooling on our coveralls and wondering if there's a number bigger than five, or in the case of JuniorHumper, he'll regale me with the frequency of sex, the age of the women he begat his sex upon, and the various (some of them highly unlikely) positions that he's forced these girls to undergo.

It's at this point that the foreman'll say 'EvilMister, why don't you go and flatten all the garbage in the big blue bin as flat as you can make. Take, ohhhhh, twenty minutes or so, do a real good job', or, 'EvilMister, how about you sweep the mezzanine, the floors, the bathrooms, and, uhhh, take your time.'

Until very recently, I had no idea what was really going on. I mean, I'm trying to bust my hump here so these mofos will give me a real job so I can get off the fucking Express Personnel train (believe me, I ain't winning friends and stunning coworkers by being a Retard), so I do it lickety-fucking-split. I mean, I sort of realized what was going on, so I did my very best on flattening that garbage, and it did take me a good five and half minutes. That was with me, in the pile of this garbage, lying on my back, staring at the sky, enjoying the fresh air. Time warp convinced me that I'd been out there for ever.

Same goes with the sweeping. I mean, I can do it as slowly as I possibly can, which is pretty goddamned slow as far as I am concerned, but apparently it ain't slow enough.

My good friend ChubbyMonk explained what's going on, as this is my first introduction into the world of slave labor in a warehouse setting. It goes like this: when the boss says go sweep for an hour, he's not really saying 'go sweep', he's saying 'fuck off until I call you, because I can plainly see that there is sweet fuck all for you to do, and I don't/can't/won't waste my fucking time coming up with anything that'll keep you occupied.'

Wait a minute.

Waste time. Go away until I call for you. Stay out of my sight, and I won't think about you. Oh, and you're still on the clock.

I can tell you that this never, ever ever happens in a retail environment. Quite the opposite. In retail, if there's nothing to do, managers will tell you 'you got time to lean, you got time to clean' and insist, no shit, that you walk around the office with a pair of needle nose pliers so you can pull all the staples out of the carpet. And watch you do it, to make sure you are doing it. And make you do it again if you do it 'wrong'. Breaks are randomly taken away, and in some cases, added on to the manager's breaks. If you are off a manager's radar in retail for more than three and a half seconds, said manager will materialize out of thin air and start looking for you, with a pair of needle nose pliers.

Now that I know that when the boss says, 'go ahead and spend some good quality time with a broom and a dust pan', I will fully spend as much time doing sweet fuck all with as much vigor as I can, all the while doing not very much at all, and getting paid for it.

This is why I call it the Santa Clause, because I get paid for doing nothing an awful lot of the time. Wheeee!

EvilMister Meets Another Retard

2004-11-24T18:25:00.000-08:00

The joint I'm currently working at (and kicking some serious ass when it comes to the duties) likes to hire gomers from Express Personnel. This is because, for the most part, the people who come from there are unskilled laborers who are lucky if they can tie their shoes on properly (without, say, having to staple them onto their clubfeet). What does this matter?

You can work the living fucking hell out of your average unskilled laborer. You can punish that nonjob having motherfucker so hard that his eyeballs start to sweat. I know this because I was once at the receiving end. Now I, mighty EvilMister, am on the delivering end. Yeah, that's right, I punish the shit out of my fellow Express bitches. Why? Because I can, that's why.

This new dood we got is called ChronicSmoker. He's got the full meal deal when it comes to his nicotine habit. I've seen him roll his little pinners with one fucking hand, in the rain, waiting for the bus. His got the perquisite finger stains down to his first knuckle on both hands, and when he gets to the end of a smoke, man, that sonofabitch sucks. There is nothing left of the little hand rolled smoke save a greasy nicotine smudge on his fingers. I bet he could stick his fingertips into a fireplace and not feel anything.

ChronicSmoker is also, ahem, tall and ... round. And has a highpitched voice. And, if I'm not mistaken, doesn't have any teeth. (This is intel gathered from a distance, as there is no fucking way I'm gonna get close enough to this mojombo to find out whether he's got choppers or not ... worse still, he might have just one snaggle tooth and he'll use it to bore a hole into my skull to get at the juicy brains up in there.) This unholy tryptic of features (tall, fat, high voice) echoes through time and space and comes up with one creepy guy. I'm sure he's nice. Like, nice to baby kittens until he hugs them to death nice.

He said to me the other day, as we discussed the relative style and skill you can put forth when tossing 25 kilo bags around (which I no longer do, thanks very much), that he's glad he's not my girlfriend, because I'd hug her to death (I am proud to say that EvilMister is not only rapidly losing weight, but he's also growing muscle.)

I'm glad I'm not your girlfriend, because I'd hug her to death.

I didn't sleep well last night. I prolly won't sleep well tonight, either, because that shit is just fucking wrong. I could care less if this guy likes other guys. It's trite and cliche to say it, but 'some of my best friends are gay' is a true thing to say. I could care less. You're gettin' some, get some, motherfucker, and tell me all about it. No, it's the creep factor. Giant fat men with high voices don't get to say shit like that. They get to keep it bottled inside until they go home, strip down, then lather on the shaving cream and call themselves Jesus of the Soap Clan.

Also, the place we work at doesn't give us the full alottment of breaks most people are used to; we get the one coffee break and a half hour for lunch. I was perhaps a little shocked when, after nearly passing out on my first day from all the exertion, that I wasn't going to get that last break, but whatever. Water off a duck's back, man. We have a late lunch anyways, and two and half hours flys right the fuck by. ChronicSmoker, on the other hand, doesn't really breathe oxygen. He breathes cigarette, and as such, needs to replenish his dwindling reserves every few hours or he begins to whine incessantly about how a) we should switch over to 4 kilo bags (not realizing that we would still need to do a two thousand kilo batch into those bags, thereby making a shitload more picking up and bending over) or b) we really should get that last break because it's the law. (In my opinion, we should start doing 50kilo bags, 'cuz that's less overall bending, and if you bend with your knees like a good drone, you can do that all friggin' day.)

Now me, I could give a shit. As far as I know, it's a paid break, and if the guys don't wanna have us sit on our asses for fifteen minutes, that's fine. We spend at least that much standing around, waiting for the fucking machines to get fixed when they go down, and they go down every day. ChronicSmoker likes to complain a lot, which is okay by me so far, 'cuz he might be fat, a whiner, and has the approximate muscle mass of the Sta-Puft Marshmallow Man hooked on Little Debbie's Cakes, but he does try.

He's just lucky that we've only been running one line of the surimi shit. We increased the speed of one our lines to roughly twice the usual, 'cuz we're all so fucking cool and shit, and once we start busting out that second line and start ripping out the bags like lightning, we're gonna see one of two things.

ChronicSmoker keels over dead on the spot, and the liquified nicotine and tar in his system begins to pool out of his ears onto the floor.
ChronicSmoker runs for the hills, leaving a trail of Zig-Zag wrappers and tobacco flakes gently flapping in his wake.

Either way, all we gotta do is call Express Personnel and have 'em send another zombie, hopefully someone who can actually lift 25 kilos (when we get the call, we are asked how much we can lift, and if this mojombo lied, he's paying the price now!)

Well, droogies, that's it for now!

Meet The Dog

2004-11-20T20:08:00.000-08:00

Meet Duane Chapman, aka "The Dog". He runs Da Kine Bailbonds on Hawaii. He catches fucknobs who skip bail. Typically, they're dumbass gomers who do lots of drugs or steal shit, but they're especially stupid because they skip bail on an island. There isn't anywhere for these motherfuckers to run to.

The Dog is a badass motherfucker in his own right. I mean, lookit him. He's got the gun, the badge hanging around his neck a la bling bling, but most of all, he's got the mullet. That's right, dumbass crooks, this motherfucker is all business in the front, and if you see him comin' at you, that's it, cocksucker, game over. The Dog is all about business. If you see the backside, where the party's at, maybe you're safe. Maybe. Cuz The Dog's also gut some serious guns for arms, too. I bet he could bench press a mountain and still have room to twist some necks off.

The funny thing is, this badass, mean motherfucker who hunts down the badguys drops a prayer to The Big Man all the freakin' time. And he's got OCD when it comes to vacuuming the fucking carpet. No shit, he pulls the Hoover out all the time and sucks up the dirt. I got baaaad news for you, Dog, much like the blood on that guy's hands in that play by Shakespeare, the dirt on your soul will never go away.

Da Kine Bailbonds is a family affair, too. 's got one of his kids and his brother and I think a nephew or cousin or some shit, plus his wife. It's his wife who scares the living bejeezus out of me. She's all of five feet tall and has knockers the size of me. She says that just because she goes out to catch the bad guys (and she does!), it doesn't mean she can't wear make-up. And fake nails. The Dog's wife has those ultra-long nails coming off her fingertips that make me tremble every goddamned time I see them. The Dog might be, well, top dog, but his wife can make the tough motherfucker buckle.

The reason I watch this show is because it is fucking hilarious. The Dog knows all of the fucknobs in Hawaii. He is incredibly friendly, even after he has sprayed some hapless lolo up in his grill with some kind of concentrated pepper spray. He's offered to get skeezy skank H-addicts into rehab when said skeezy skank has gotten his entire crew into a fist fight with three houses worth of tough brah's looking for trouble. I think I even saw him cry once when he had to track some old guy who helped him get his start in the biz.

If it weren't for the mullet, I'd probably vote The Dog into office. For those of you who are interested, I am considering starting up a Canadian chapter of The Dog fanclub; with enough 'dogpoints' accrued through financial donations, you will receive your free powermullet wig with faux-tee!

Emoticons are NOT Always Necessary, Nor are Acronyms

2004-11-19T20:03:00.000-08:00

We all know what emoticons are. We all know what acronyms are. And if you don't, well, you're either a hundred years old and are convinced that computers are the devil's handiwork or you're a fucking Luddite, in which case, I can bash you all I want. Fucking bluehaired Luddite. But I digress.

When they first came out, emoticons were the shit. They were the bomb. A semicolon and a parentheses was more than enough to tell your BBS geekoid buddies and your MSN precursor goonsquad that you were shedding a tear, either crocodilian or real (depending on the tone of the conversation) Now they are fucking everywhere. In every shape, and every form. They're animated. You can find blogs that have boobies and wangs, but no hoohoos. You can find demented little batdudes and who the fuck knows what else. They are now a plague, and gomers who are habitual posters are addicted to them. In a four word post you'll find dozens of smiley faces. I get it. You're happy. Possibly happy that you're medicated. Maybe you suffer from narcolepsy, and held your fingers on the paste function. Wake the fuck up. No one needs to be assaulted by such an endless parade of visual frippery.

The drones who use emoticons like they're Johnny Fucking Appleseed spreading appletrees across the land also use acronyms. Stuff like LMAO (laff my ass off) or ROTFLMAO (roll on the floor laffing my ass off) is pretty common. (I've even used 'em. Sometimes, it just fits.) You find shit like that on all the sites that now feature their very own chatrooms. But there's also KTCOOTN (Keep that crap out of this newsgroup) and YANETUT (You Are Not Expected To Understand This), which might sound like a new Deity but is actually an insult (Fear the dreaded Yanetut, for He Will Smite you with His Emoticon-Prong of Death!!! lmao! rotfl! :) :) ;) )

You know what I think? I think in another ten years, all the kiddies sucking on the electroteat of their plasma monitors won't be able to speak or read a normal language. Icons and acronyms are pervasive, they're r fucking mental memes that override your brain structure, until you're no longer able to even comprehend anything else. Our children will be permanently hooked up to the computer, endlessy churning out new and never before seen emoticons (maybe something with spam?) and hammering out pointlessly derivative acronyms (imagine hundreds of letters forming something as arcane as a quantum physics equation scrolling across your IM host in response to your question about a/s/l?). I imagine that one day, new symbolic acronyms will come into existence to say it all. FOR EXAMPLE: (symbolA= "ROFLMAOWTIME" + "DNPM") + (symbolB = "OMFG" / "FIGJAM") = (some inherently arcane concept that anyone over thirty couldn't possibly hope to understand, so why fucking bother?)

It'll happen motherfuckers, and if you've got kids now, make goddamned sure they now how to read something written in your natural language, even if it's only a fucking comic book. Otherwise, one morning, they're gonna starting clicking and squeaking at you.

Half ... Life ... 2 ...

2004-11-16T19:30:00.000-08:00

Must ... play ... all ... night ...

It came out. There were no invading aliens, no cataclysm, no destruction that prevented the relase. Oh man.

Ohhh....Man.....

oh man.

But, to be honest with you, so far I've only seen some neato graphics and good resolution. Other than that, it's pretty similar to Far Cry and Doom 3.

Woot.

Oh man. (Hopefully some of you now have the image of me really enjoying this game. A lot.)

Why?

2004-11-16T19:25:00.000-08:00

Why in the hell is this show funny? It's not. The only possible enjoyment anyone could derive from this show is the fact that there are people like this in the world, and that there are people who find it freakin' hilarious. If you've seen the show, you're probably like me: waiting to see the episode where Bobby Hill finally comes out of the closet to his cracker daddy. A close runner-up would be when Bill steals a bunch of guns and ammo from the military base and kills Hank so he can nail the luscious Peggy.

Now that would be awesome.

EvilMister Encounters a New Stink That Could Kill Anyone Else

2004-11-15T16:34:00.000-08:00

After working with Mr. Stinky, I would have thought it impossible to come across an odor worse short of doing dead body detail for the cops. I mean, I work in a spice factory. Other than all the different scents comingling as one, it ain't all that bad. Kind of like what I imagine a spice bazaar in India would smell like. Not bad, and you get used to it.

Today, though, was something else. Today was clean up day, which involves washing the living shit out of every goddamned thing in the entire warehouse. I squished all day long. Now, this is a fair trade, because I was fucking sleepy this morning, and didn't have to move anything heavier than my ass up and down the stairs. (this is because I spent an embarrasing amount of time playing NFS : Underground 2 this weekend, and had a pain in the ass time of getting to sleep.)

The warehouse has a big ol' grate and trap combination set up to catch all the runoff, and a strainer to ensure that all the big chunks of stuff don't get into the drain where it'd be a sumbitch to unclog. Naturally, the trap catches all kinds of gunk, goop, and detritus.

Let me point out now that spice, in vast quantities, does not dissipate. It accretes. It accumulates. It does all of these things to the point where it no longer drains out into the plumbing; now it sits in stagnant water, mixing with other, equally pungent spices. Occasionally crap from the bottom of feet (dirt, cigarette buts, etc) get in there as well. A smart person will realize that spice, when dry, attains no odor other than it already posseses. Spices sitting in water, being attacked by microbial bugs in water, will begin to undergo a transformation.

What kind of transformation?

Odor. All that fucking crapcrud stinks to high fucking heaven. It honestly smells exactly like shit. I am not exaggerating. Not at all. It brought tears to my eyes and a reflexive action in my stomach.
Texture and Consistency. There are actually two. One is a vaguely alluvial, silt-like consistency that lurks at the bottom of the pile, with the occasional chunk of weirdly solid hybridized gunk harder the concrete. The other is a watery brown stain broken up with creepy bubbles of indeterminate color.

In short, I was sucking stuff up through a wetvac that looked, smelled and sloshed around in the bucket like shit. It was awful. I haven't puked since ChubbyMonk's stag party, and like Jerry Seinfeld, I am now shooting for a record. I almost lost my lunch, breakfast and previous evening's dinner. It was horrid.

And I am told it will get worse when we mix things like fish oil.

Damn I love my job.

EvilMister is a Video Game Whore

2004-11-12T20:41:00.000-08:00

I admit it.

I'm a whore when it comes to video games. If I couldn't acquire my software through the usual methods, I'd probably wind up hooking on the corner to pay for my jones.

There are specific types of games I dig on the most, and they generally involve pitting armies against one another a la Command and Conquer General (which, by the way, scores ten out of ten on the Waste of Time Dial ... the many, many days I have lost to that game alone are uncountable.) You build your bases, you get your resources, you research technology, all of that. It's kind of like chess, except no chess piece I ever heard of before could lob nuclear missiles across the screen at you, killing all your (until that moment) happy little worker drones. You're lucky when the game designers add a 'random map' engine which will churn up endlessly demented maps so you can never really learn the lay of the land. Play on hard levels, and you'd better be one motherfuck of a military genius to come out on top. Try C&C Generals on Hard with 8 opponents and you'll see what I mean. Sadly, I spent so much time on this game that I gained ten pounds but gained the ability to delude myself into thinking I am, in fact, just what the Army needs.

I also like the FPS genre, which should come about as much a shock as when we finally heard that yes, Liberace was as queer as you can get without being two people. Y'know what I'm talking about; once, I was a furtive little gamer sweating it out in the middle of the night trying to find the BFG to take down some of the worst rendered monsters in history. The theory was simple: more monster all the time. That philosophy hasn't changed much. Only the technologies behind the games have changed; when some motherfucker is hunting you from behind, you can hear that cocksucker's footsteps. If the people designing the game are sufficiently warped, you can hear laughter, too, evil, maniacal, just wait till I get you, then I'm gonna fuckin' kill you laughter. I love that.

Games I avoid? The Sims. Not because they suck, but because I invest too much time in a person who isn't real. We all know about The Sims, and The Sims 2. You make a person, you make him like you (or not) and then you ... uh ... do ... y'know ... stuff. The guys I play are either so like me they'll skip work, stay awake for three days, drink all the beer, pass out, get into fights with roommates and have sex with anything walking. Or the dudes are so fucking excellent at their jobs that I begin to lose confidence in the me that is the real me. Wanna have fun? Play the original Sims. Cheat your ass off to get millions of bucks. Build your own house. Make a kiddie room with lots of toys. Lure some kids up there. Pause the game and take all the doors and windows. Eventually the kids will die and you'll have a haunted rumpus room. Or build a pool, trick your tiresome roommate in their and take away the ladders. Eventually the schmoe will drown.

What has exclusive playtime on the ol' PC right now? Need for Speed Underground 2. This game has taken over my life because it appeals to the very basic reason why I don't drive in real life; I like to drive as fast as can as often as I can. The last time I was behind the wheel of a car I was driving 120 in a 35 zone. My then girlfriend nearly had a bird. We certainly argued. My point was that my reflexes are far superior to the rest of the human race and any accident I am likely to get into will be their fault, and not mine. In this game, you get a car. Then you race the car for money. Depending on how well you do, you can get upgrades. For everything. All those cars you see in those magazines were the models for these. You can buy new speedometers, for fuck's sake. The hotter your car, the better known you become. The better known you become, the harder the races, the higher the purse, the better the car you can buy. It's a never ending cycle, and it has consumed me. The graphics are unreal, and although you can run into a car travelling 120 miles an hour, it won't get damaged. You also can't run over people, which detracts a little from the realism. But then again, if I was shooting for realism, by chubby ass would have wound up in prison within three seconds of getting behind a car.

This game will carry me through until the much promised, much delayed, covered in bullshit release date of Half-Life 2. (Which, if everything happens as I have foretold, will end when the Earth is invaded by real aliens. Some years from now, we will learn that Valve, embarassed at their shenanigans, engineered the invasion to push their release date back a few more years. The real story is just as fucked. This is just one article ... the release date was once scheduled for Sept 30th ... 2003!!!)

Oh yessss, EvilMister is a Video Game Whore, yessss he is.

EvilMister Learns a Sad Truth

2004-11-10T17:12:00.000-08:00

The place where I work is currently in the process of making about 800 trillion pounds of this shit called surimi. (I shit you not ... we have to do a thousand batches of this stuff, and each 'batch' yields roughly three thousand kilos of product!) It's mostly sugar and polyphosphates, and this motherfucking stuff fills the air like goddamned snow. It gets everywhere. And since it's a sugar product, once it hits open skin, it sort of glues your fingers together, y'know, like when you use Krazy Glue. It also gets up in your beak and makes it feel like you got nosehairs hanging out everywhere.

The sad truth is that I will not, over time and continued exposure to this airborne crud, turn into the Kwisatz Haderach. I will not get the neat blue within blue eyes. I will not get to wear the awesome stillsuits. There will be no riding of massive worms through the vast desert-seas of surimi, and I most certainly won't be able to crack concrete foundations into dust. Nor, I suspect, will I 'get' to have a crazy-ass knife fight with a semi-clad Sting.

What I will get if I inhale enough of this crap is the mother of all nosebleeds, because the phosphate base will turn my beak into a schnozz that belongs on a habitual cocaine user.

Now, maybe it's unfair of me to try and corner the market on prophets, pariahs, and the supernatural, but come on, man! It's the fucking Kwisatz Haderach! I could be ruler of the fucking Universe.

Maybe when we switch over to something with garlic as an ingredient, I could arrange to get hit by lightning and turn into the Flash.

EvilMister Takes a Bullet

2004-11-09T16:46:00.000-08:00

I started a new gig today, working in a spice distribution facility. This place has the tolerance of a Fort Knox when it comes to contaminants and shit like that. (What I wanna know if the place I work at is like this, why do we have an acceptable percentage of rat droppings and shit in our food?) Needless to say, this involves the wearing of a blue jumpsuit (one size too small), and a hairnet (which I still feel like I'm wearing, even though it's been over an hour and half).

I have a goatee/mutton (I don't look anything like the crazy mofos here, but take a look anyway) chop thing growing on my face, of which I am immensely proud. Those who know me will agree that my facial hair stylings border on the obsessive, involving a lot of careful trimming and thought on style. It changes from month to month, sometimes week by week, because a side effect of my evil powers is that the hair on my face grows like Killer Kudzu. I turn around and I have a full beard. It's neat-o.

I have two choices. I can either shave it off or wear a goofy beard-net. Normally, I'd opt for the beard net, but I gotta tell ya, after eight hours of a net on my head, I think I'd last all of fifteen seconds with one of those fucking things on my face. It'd drive me fucking apeshit and I'd drop one of the people I work with into one of the massively gigantic spice mixer things if they got on my wrong side.

There are also two reasons why I grow my beard. One is because I can, and I think it's neat-o. I amuse myself with the various shapes and styles I can carve into my face (so far the most interesting one was a spider crawling up my neck to engulf my face). The other is age. Not in the way you might think, though. People already think I am much younger than my actual years, and this is with the beard adding on a couple. I already act like a sex-starved 15 year old computer geek, and with a smooth shaved face, I suspect that I will look like one. It's hard enough getting people to take me serious as it is. Plus, a motherfucker's goatee is as precious to him as hair is to a woman; I've seen any number of women go into histrionics when their hair stylist goes a different direction with their style. I feel naked without my scruff. It's like Samson and his locks. Shave me bald, and all of a sudden, I lose the power to make people cower in their shoes and booties.

So tonight, before I lay my head down to dream the wicked dreams, your pal EvilMister will indeed take his trusty Mach 3 +12 vorpal slayer to his face and willingly render himself less terrible so he can continue to make money. (Being evil alone doesn't pay the bills. You'd be surprised how uncompromising Telus can be, even when threatend with a thousand years of terror and nightmares. I am evil, but even I can't win against bureaucracy.)

If I was in the Mafia or the Yakuza, I wouldn't have to put up with this shit.

Reality TV, Thy Name is FOX

2004-11-07T21:51:00.000-08:00

Holy Shit. I've just seen another sign of the Apocalypse. Not of the world's souls, but of it's IQ.

PT Barnum once said, "There's a sucker born every minute." FOX Tv has gone out of their way to prove this, and prove it with a vengeance. The show? My Big Fat Obnoxious Boss. The premise? Simple. It's a total rip-off of The Apprentice, starring the Donald.

Now if you're suckers for FOX programming like I am, you've already witnessed the first Big Fat Obnoxious tripe that stank up the airwaves last year, only that time, it was all about a fiance. This shit is better. They have an actor playing a billionaire. Except he's a total fuckwad. He says nasty shit to people, confuses the fuck out of them and generally makes a dick of himself every time he's on camera. He starts off by asking every single woman on the show what their love life is like. I think it's gonna get worse, though.

In the first episode, it's men (CONCAD Inc) VS. women (Femron), and the contests are seriously messed up. CONCAD (an admixture of con meaning grifter and cad meaning asshole) and Femron (a take on Enron) have to panhandle. Yeah, you read it right. Six girls who had the psychic foresight to wear tight shirts and short shorts and six doods who wore sweatpants and shirts. Of course the chicks won, because they said they were from a cheerleader camp. That might sound sexist, but if EvilMister had a nice rack and pretty legs, I'd be hustlin' shit all day long. If I could tear myself from the mirror long enough.

As each contest has a prize, so it has a booby prize. The guys, who lost by a few bucks (seriously) had to sleep out of doors in hobotown. You think that might suck, but the women got to sleep in the penthouse, with their matresses stuffed with cash. Funnily enough, the women slept worse. Who'd of thunk that sleepin' on a pile o' dough would suck so much.

At the end of each show, the losers have to haul their sorry asses up to the boardroom, where they get a new one torn into them by the maniacal leader of a fake company (Iocor, which is latin for joker). He tears into them, calling them losers and all manner of things. Then he tells the gang boss to pick two people, and then the spitballing starts. The two uber-losers try and hustle their way out of getting shitcanned on the first day, but there's something they don't know, and it ain't that their 'boss' is an actor.

The ass sitting on the other side of the desk? He's not the guy who chooses who gets let loose. (It's a big secret that won't be revealed until the end of the show.) But he is the guy who gets to make up some utterly bullshit reason why the poor sadsack gets his ass turfed. The first schmoe got told he was too short, and that short people pretty much suck in high finance, that tall people rock. The other guy (he was Asian, and for a really bad moment, I thought FOX might've lost their nut altogether) got told he was wearing too expensive a suit. This guy got fired for dressing fancy.

How fucking awesome is that?

I'm a billionaire. I told you I hate suits, and you're wearing the most expensive one in the room! Get the hell out of my office!

That is a direct quote. This show is my new hero. 12 people, all of them supposedly top-of-the-line market managers, salespeople, and financial analysts, getting fucked raw by an actor, and all for the chance to work for a nonexistent billion dollar company. I assume along the way we'll see at least one of them descend into the lower depths of Hell to win. Oh, and at least one hookup, 'cuz some of these women are tasty.

P.T. Barnum might've known that there's a sucker born every minute, but only FOX could find twelve of them, convince them they could make millions, and then have them drink Ripple and think it was champagne. These fuckers should be working the long con in Vegas, not programming television shows.

HAH! Reality TV, thy name is FOX.

The Flavor Blue?? What The Hell?

2004-11-07T20:31:00.000-08:00

I am a self described gourmand (I eat almost everything I come across. Foreign foods? HAH! Parts of chicken that are used for walking? Double HAH! I am unafraid to try anything once. Sometimes I need to be told after what it is I've shoved down my gullet, but so far, so good.)

Food and I have an agreement. I like it, it likes me. And so the cycle of life continues, with me, sitting at the top, bag of Doritos in hand. (Doritos, you might now know, are the end result of millions of years of evolution. The doritus mammalia can be found all over the world, usually in small grocery stores, next to natcho giganticus.)

I gotta know, though, when blue became a flavor. Last I checked, blue was a color. You know what a color is, dontcha? I could go on and say that Webster's defines color as ... blah fuckity blah. I could even go on to explain that the colors we see are acutally refractions of light reacting to everything that everything is made out of, but I won't. We made it through the womb, and voila! We know what colors are.

Blue is not a food, nor is it a taste. I am marginally aware that there is both an 'orange' fruit and an 'orange' color. Notice I do not mention 'orange flavored drink' availabe at McDonald's. It is an aberration.

If we run around saying that blue is a flavor, I can guarantee you Ford will come out with 'Car', and that Hollywood will make 'Movie'. Then it'll spread to other foods, and strawberries will become 'red', or possibly 'red with seeds outside'.

Don't mistake me, here, people. I've had blue lemonade from Kool-Aid. It's tasty. But if you'll notice, it's actually called blue moon berry. There's also bubble gum flavored slurpees, and blueberry tasting popsicles. These are acceptable, people, because they are based on real tastes.

As far as I know, there is nothing in the world that simply tastes like blue. Blue has no taste. Since this is true, (it is because I say so) there is no possible way that I saw an ad for gum with 'extreme blue flavor'. It was an hallucination, and I am now taking donations to get my visual hallucinations back in line with the auditory ones.

There is no way that I saw it.

Things I need to Practice

2004-11-06T15:08:00.000-08:00

As a volunteer for my local police department, there are a few things that I need to work on if I want to remain being a volunteer. Now, since it's been only one day, you might wonder if I've already had a 'conversation' with someone who is the boss of me.

Not yet. No, these are merely some things that I've noticed about myself that might not ... fit in ... with the 'community' perspectus of appropriate behavior.

We all know that I am opinionated and that I like to make fun of people. Sometimes in front of them, but most of the time behind their backs, which is far more appropriate. It's generally not as fun to laugh at someone when they're right there. The urge to mock people is one that should be surpressed while working in the station. Also, the practicing of sarcasm, on account of the fact that I've remembered that for some reason, some people just don't 'get' sarcasm. My feeling on a person's lack of 'getting sarcasm' is in direct proportion to their overall intelligence. (Nutjob didn't get sarcasm at all, and was continually asking me if I was serious. I am very rarely serious, and when I am, it's serious like people dying. You will know when I'm taking the piss, and when I'm not.)

We also all know that I am incredibly single, and that this could easily be read as 'hormonally hyperactive'. Fine. So what. A result of this ... development ... is that I generally tend to be more ... friendly ... to women. All right, fine. I flirt. I flirt my ass off. If flirting was a fucking Olympic event, they'd have to invent a medal better than gold, because I am one flirtatious motherfucker. It'd have to be, like, an admantium medallion or some shit. It's not like I come on strong or anything, I don't take out MiniEvilMister and waggle him across the countertop, but we all know what's going on. Flirting with women who come to pick up subpoenas are not fair targets. Even if they are incredibly hot. Also, and this is far more important, is being even mildly flirtatious with female volunteers. It's covered quite clearly in the handbook I received. Also too, I have very firsthand knowledge of what happens when two people at work hook up. (For awhile, the sex is possibly the most amazing kind of sex in the universe next to make-up sex and going-away-on-a-trip sex, but then when something goes wrong, it spills out into work and then it's revolvers at ten paces. It always ends in tears. Just not mine.)

So that's it. EvilMister must learn to quell his natural instincts, even if he knows he'd get away with it. Why is this? Because my chances of eventually becoming a real cop increase exponentially the longer I volunteer, and I think being a cop would be real damned cool. (While I advocate hitting Big Brother and the Government where it hurts whenever possible, any fucking gomer who breaks the law and then gets caught deserves to go to jail. There're all kinds of motherfuckers who don't get caught. Look at Dubya. He's President, and he's a crook.)

The Memory Hole...

2004-11-05T20:33:00.000-08:00

Or, Why the US Government wishes It's Constituents Couldn't Read.

Welcome to the Memory Hole, a place where you can find all the shit (I assume ... it's a pretty big site) that the US government wishes they'd never printed and shouldn't have printed. The people who maintain the site also put up a bunch of declassified stuff, like a big list of the questions put to Feds while hooked up to a polygraph machine.

Other stuff that you can find there?

"Rezedents Rights & Rispansabilities" - a document that is, at the same time, one of the fucking funniest things I've ever read and one of the most embrassing; this is a pamphlet that was sent out to people!
All kinds of government forms, used by the different departments. You never know when you're gonna need to bust out a FD-294 on someone's ass.
All the techno-stuff you knew the government has been sitting on for the last 50 years, revealed at long last. Sadly, there are no blueprints for hovercars and broadcast energy, but it's just more proof that the people in power don't want us to know anything.

Since I've known for a long damned time that the US government (they're not the only ones, just the only group stupid enough to let this kind of shit get declassified. If more people knew how to use a computer, there'd be no end of trouble.), I ain't all that fucking surprised. It's inneresting, though.

EvilMister's First Day as a Fake Cop Is Tomorrow

2004-11-04T21:59:00.000-08:00

Well, the headline pretty much sums up my day tomorrow. My hopes are that I will:

Be invited for a ridealong, where I will be able to prove that all the years of playing video games has, in fact, given me the power to shoot perps, skells, and other badguys dead with a single shot. This is important, because I have never shot a gun. Other than the blue one that I use when I play "House of the Dead 2". I kick ass at that game.
Be invited for a ridealong, where me and the other cops in the car will instead go to a stipjoint, where I will be given free lap dances because I "am one of the boys". Following the stripjoint, me and the fellas will shake up the neighborhood with many John Woo ninja-style gunfights, resulting in my being given the Key to The City.
I will at long last be able to hack into the ever-mysterious, ever-present "permanent record" and find out for sure what my Grade 9 Latin teacher really said about the time he threw a desk at me. (He really, really did. And then he gave me some peanut M&M's)
Run around saying, "Excuse me, sir/miss, but I have just one more question for you. I don't mean to bother you, it's just that this whole case has been going around in my mind. Do you mind if I ask you one more question?". And then, when I ask that question, I will be able to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the person is the murderer, and I will change my name to Columbo.
Bust some mad caps in some fool punks who be steppin' up to me, yo!

These can really happen. They really, really can. And if things go the way I want them to, all of them will take place. Also, on account of the fact that I am sleepy and can hardly think anymore, this will be both a linkless and pictureless post.

Klingon Language Institute? What the fuck?

2004-11-03T10:19:00.001-08:00

All right, I admit, I've known about this for a long time, but today just seemed appropriate to air my views on the entire Klingon to English phenomenon, indeed, the entire Trekkie affair. The above logo is an actual link to a place where geeks can learn how to speak Klingonese. And I thought I was weird.

I mean, I'm a geek. I watch the Sci-Fi channel. I watch Star Trek: Original, The Next Generation and DS:9 (I'm not gonna admit I watched even a single episode of Voyager, so go screw.) I know a fair amount about the shows, the mythology, and even I have been guilty of busting out a Kirk impression once or twice when the Aldeberaan Whiskey has flowed freely. Shit, I've even played some of the FPS games that've come out. Come on, it's a blast, running around shooting people with phasers. I admit this freely, and with the full expectation that someone somewhere will make as much fun of me as I have of them.

But when weirdoes unite and form an entire language for a species that has not and will not ever exist is completely beyond me. When people have Klingon weddings, walk around talking Klingon to one another and pretend that they are, in fact, a Klingon themselves, they forfeit all rights and privileges accorded the rest of Humanity. They open themselves up for the ridicule of a nation, especially when they cover themselves in latex and head for the nearest TrekSciCon. (The only people who're cool at these events are the hot chicks who dress up like Seven of Nine).

It ain't right. It just ... ain't ... right. I don't give a rat's ass if it's a community of like-minded individuals who have finally, at last, found a niche in the world where they are comfortable, where they can be themselves. If you wanna do it, do in your house or some equally sanctioned place where "normal" people can avoid you. You don't see me walking around in a velour jumpsuit calling myself Mr. Suave, do you? Then why in the hell should I have to put up with some guy who is an island unto himself humping around the mall calling himself Korr?? (Admittedly, I've not ever run across this, but I am taking poetic licence. There are places where this does happen. Some people even where their captain's uniform to work.)

I swear to Christ that if I ever see a Klingon on a day that ain't Halloween, I will for sure drop a Captain Kirk double-fisted Kung Fu move on their asses. I will then, of course, move over to the Klingon chick and have some nasty, violent Klingon nookie. (Have you seen those Klingon babes in the show? If I was a Klingon, which I ain't, I'd never leave home. Seriously.)

Lemme Tell Ya About The Time .... #3

2004-11-02T18:32:00.000-08:00

or, EvilMister Couldn't Save The World If He Tried

EvilMister is not above a little ... skullduggery ... in an effort to make ... friends with women. Now, this sounds much worse than it really is, but I am willing to put in a little extra effort. With that in mind, let me tell you about Ashtanga Yoga, and the evil it represents. Okay? All right.

There was a girl I worked with who was into yoga. I was into the girl. I'm not even going to discuss with you the numerous and plentiful warning triggers sound whenever I start dating, or trying to date, someone I work with. I assure you that those stories will be covered when I'm certain that the women involved are either dead or out of the country. This particular girl was, and I am sure still is, incredibly sweet natured. Just the sort of thing a crank cantankerous moody SOB like myself needs to keep from stabbing people in the neck. She suggested that I come to yoga with her, and me, being the fool I am, said 'uhuh'.

Why is Ashtanga Yoga evil? What, for example, makes it so different than the others? Well, besides my not really knowing about different yogic paths, I can tell you what Ashtanga Yoga involves.

You are in a room. This room is hot. Hot enough to melt fingernails and make you seriously consider moving to Alaska. If Eskimos came into this room unprepared, they would turn into puddles of icewater.
There is no way for the heat to escape this room. Someone, somewhere, had devised a room to keep great escape artists from escaping and turned it instead into a meditational chamber. When you start to exercise, there is no where for the additional heat to go.
Because it is, literally, an airtight room, there is also nowhere for the stink to go. An Ashtanga room smells much like I imagine a musk ox would reek after a really good what-the-fuck-ever a musk ox does for exercise.

With that out of the way, I now move on to the fact that it's co-ed. Ordinarily, this ain't a problem for me. I mean, people are people, right? You gotta run into the opposite sex sometime sooner or later, right? EvilMister is not ashamed of his body, not by any stretch of the imagination (especially since he's lost 45lbs in the last five months) but still, I don't subject my oddly shaped body to unsuspecting people, even if they don't stop right there, shriek loudly and pass out. (I mean, come on, I'm chubby, I know it, I and I alone can make fun of myself). It took a major effort to pretend I wasn't wearing a pair of shorts and a tight shirt that, sadly, informed everyone I should be wearing a manzeer.

So there I am, trying to a) impress the girl I like with how amazingly awesome and willing I am to try new things, b) trying to not look like an out-of-shape porn star who is literally sweating his life away and c) trying to be more bendy.

Yoga instructors might not look like Drill Instructors for the Marines, but they are. Ohhhhh, they are. Even in the beginner's class, they rifle through their commands like Gunnery Sergeant Hartman bawling out Private Pyle. If you don't know what any of the various positions are, you're s'posed to, y'know, follow along with the rest of the class, only a few seconds behind so's you can see the pose. But all these motherfuckers do all day long is drink wheatgrass and practice bending.

To a guy who's spent his entire adolescent and adult playing video games and eating potato chips, even the most basic move is reminiscent of Marquis de Sade's favorite torture/sex devices. And while EvilMister is into weird shit, sweating that much and posing like that without someone directly involved other than someone who's the younger cousin of Gumby and ten feet away from me is a little much.

I learned two very important things during my time with Yoga. One is that I am about as flexible as spaghetti. They say flexibility increases with time and patience. I'm sure it does. But I am a man with little patience, and even less time in a room full of stinky sweaty, moaning people who aren't naked and violating at least three Commandments. The second is that I am a person who couldn't balance to save the planet.

The aliens from ID4 could show up tomorrow, point all their big guns at the planet, and demand to see me. After some hilarity involving a cross country chase, some FBI agents, several timely explosions and at least one hot sex scene with me and Kristin Kreuk, I would be taken before these aliens, at which point I would be told the following;

"If you balance for ten seconds on one foot, your planet will be spared, and you will be a hero to them. If you fail, the world shall be destroyed and you will be thrown out the nearest space lock."

Let me tell you something.

If that happens, we're all doomed, DOOMED I say. Half the time I can barely balance on two feet. It's a miracle I don't fall over walking down the street. And that's why I don't 'do' yoga.

What happened to the girl? Well, I met her boyfriend, and in an extremely uncharacteristic burst of bonhomie, I backed off from the front lines and went a different direction. I think my doing so pissed her right the fuck off, 'cuz she doesn't talk to me anymore. I'll never learn.

The Lesser of Two Evils Still Ain't That Great

2004-11-01T19:50:00.000-08:00

Well, kiddies, it's the day before the great elections in the US. The two primary candidates, as if we haven't been inundated by merciless anti-campaigns, are George W. Bush and John Kerry. I don't think I could tell you the names of their running mates if my life depended on it, and, with the state of political affairs worldwide, it might very well be.

Neither one of them are that great, to be honest with you. George likes to bomb the hell out of anyone who's got what he wants, and John is pretty damned hard to understand if you start trying to make sense of what he's saying. You think you got it, and then all of a sudden he's double-back like some kind of political Gordian knot. Brutal.

Many people think that the choice is obvious, that Kerry will be a better leader than Bush, if for no reason than he's not Bush. Ordinarily, I'd agree, especially since we've already had two of the Bushes in office. I know what my choice would be if I cared enough to exert my right to vote (EvilMister has, through a quirk of fate and a mother who went to Woodstock, dual citizenship), but let's consider something.

John Kerry went to Vietnam and did that thing. Who's to say that it didn't fuck him right up? Lots of people came back from that police action with a noodle full of nightmares. Didn't we cover this kind of thing in The Manchurian Candidate? I mean, we know Bush is a nutcase, and if you watch his debates and speeches, it really looks like he'd rather be at Yuk-Yuk's doing stand-up. So what if Kerry doesn't have the stones to get the troops out of Iraq and that situation falters. Or worse, what if his head is buzzing like a bonnet full of bees, and we don't find out until he goes apeshit one night ... Other than that one concern, Kerry's my man, 'cuz his daughters are sexy. Plus, EvilMister has a lie detector built into his brain, and once you sift past all the rhetorical bullshit and obligatory grandstanding, Kerry seems like a guy genuinely interested in helping his country out of the deep hole they dug.

Bush is a man driven by non-political desires, and has allegiances to people and ideals that, even in a political system as desperately in need of an overhaul as the US adhere to, simply should not be there. Any intelligent thinking person (I know I just lost at least 3/4 of the population) has seen Farenheit 9/11. And if you haven't, and you think you're entitled to an opinion about this electoral race, do yourself a favor and check it out. Download it, rent it, do what the fuck ever. It doesn't take a genius to realize that Michael Moore slanted his take on the Bush Administration, but that was poetic licence, in order to make his point that much more apparent. Bush is not a president for the people. He isn't. He is a mouthpiece, a puppet for his Poppa and guys who're on an entirely different wavelength. He has, as far as I can tell, no real concerns about his own backyard, looking instead to turn the U.S. of A into the superpower it once was.

I got news for you, Bush, the superpowers don't exist the way they once did, and if you get back into office, sooner or later, someone is gonna get tired of having the spastic kid on the block kicking sand into everyone's faces.

Don't Kill Me, John Gotti.

2004-11-01T19:30:00.000-08:00

What in the fuck is this shit? Why the fuck is this on the air? Who gives a shit? I mean, if they're not gonna whack some goombah or give some fucker an Italian Neck-Tie, I really don't wanna see it. The entire English speaking Italian community (and those fuckers who have people explain this shit to them) must be freaking out. Every single Italian on this show is a walking fucking stereotype for 'wop'. The kids, oh christ, the kids. There's Carmine, Frankie and Johnnie. Tree good Italian kids.

Dumber than stumps. I mean, you leave a stump alone, it might maybe grow back into a tree.

Not these kids. They are morons. I cannot believe Victoria hasn't put a hit out on 'em. I would. Shit, I bet the Pope on his Throne in Vatican City is just waiting for the chance to get one of his Holy Ninja Assassins out to drop some seriously terminal penance on their asses. I don't wanna even talk about the one kid's unhealthy fascination with hair gel. It's inhuman. One of the other fucktards sounds like that mumbly motherfucker from 'Fat Albert'. The other one is straight up looking to have his head slapped around for just general fucktardidness.

It's only saving grace is that, unlike other 'reality' shows, Growing Up Gotti is only half an hour long. Any longer than that and we could probably track the dwindling IQ of the nation via satellite. Do us all a favor, and yourself too, Victoria Gotti, and drop a dime on your kids. You're still in child-bearing years, drop another litter and keep 'em away from the capos and consiglieres. You'll find yourself better off.

Lemme Tell Ya About The Time .... #2

2004-10-31T11:09:00.000-08:00

A picture, of Poison
Originally uploaded by evilmister.

Or, EvilMister Got No Comfort from Southern Comfort.

This is back in the day, back when EvilMister called himself Jester, and how he wrassled with a 26'er of Southen Comfort and lost.

I had a buddy we called 'Da Keed' 'cuz his dad was this hilarious Polish guy who called his son, well, keeeeeed all the fucking time. Da Keed, me, and Spike (I think that's it, but my memory is kind of hazy, and you'll soon see why) were out for a drive. Da Keed wanted to make out with his girlfriend, who was also there, so we drove to some kind of abandoned railroad area/construction site/place where drunken idiots could easily get hurt. Da Keed thoughtfully pointed out that there was a bottle of Southern Comfort on the floor, and that Spike and I were more than welcome to it, if only we would get the fuck away so he could get some gettin' while the gettin' was hot.

Spike had his own booze, and said he'd prefer to drink his own, on account of SC is poison in a bottle. I said fine, took a swig, and found out the secret of cutting the nasty kick; someone had dissolved a couple of orange lifesavers into the bottle. I was now in possession of what is best described as alcoholic Kool-Aid, and I had no need to share it with anyone.

I don't know about you, but when I was a kid drinkin', I expected immediate results. Over the period of fifteen minutes I finished about half the bottle. I only felt a little wobbly, so I continued to drink, erroneously believing that my weight, height and the lifesavers were all contributing to my immunity.

Holy shit, was I ever fucking wrong. I didn't think a person could be that wrong and live through it to tell a cautionary tale.

Four minutes after my final sip, my good friend Spike had to park me on a big rock because I could no longer walk. I remember trying to tell him I wanted to go home, but couldn't, because my mouth wouldn't work. Gravity became my enemy in a serious way, so I found it necessary, and this is no lie, to hang onto a tree to keep from falling down. Why is this weird? I couldn't use my arms, so I had to bite onto a tree limb. The only thing keeping me conscious was a game I was playing. It was called, Let's See How Many Times I Can Puke In The Same Spot!

Thirteen times, MisterEvil, is the number of times you can puke in one spot!

After that, I didn't have anything left to puke up except vital organs. Da Keed finished humping his girlfriend some time after that, and while I have zero memory of getting home, I must have, somehow, made it into my bed. I don't remember the next morning, or the morning after that.

Never, ever, ever drink an entire bottle of Southern Comfort straight, no matter how good it tastes. Trust me. Huff some Elmer's, do some Whippits, drink paint thinner, but avoid Southern Comfort.

It's the Devil.

Holy Shit, Batman! Lower Mainland is FULL of Cross-Dressing Teenagers

2004-10-31T10:49:00.000-08:00

Okay, okay, so it is Halloween, and yeah, dressing up like a chick is pretty much one of the easier costumes you can come up with; alongside the woman, there is also hobo, ghost, and generic monster via make-up.

Today, within five minutes, I saw no less than four guys dressed up like girls. Some of them looked suspiciously comfie in their leather thighboots and miniskirts, Barbie-Doll pink hair and luscious lipstick. I ain't makin' no judgments, especially since gay men and women seriously piss off fundamentalists, and an angry holy roller is just about the funniest thing I can possibly imagine. Especially on Sundays.

But it took one guy in particular to have me in the aisles, laughing my damn fool ass off.

My local Starbucks seems to have a specific hiring policy; again, I make no bones about it, but I wish I'd been told before I wasted a month trying to get a job there. They hire ... bigger ... women and mostly gay men. You might think this is a generlization, but trust me, after months of sitting there, it ain't. One of the new kids they hired is young enough to have his effiminate ways explained off as youth, but goddamn, his costume damn near cost me a lung.

He was wearing a platinum blonde wig with a little pink cowgirl hat. He had some kind of boobies underneath his Starbucks shirt. While he was working industriously at making my coffee (Extra Shot Tall Americano, no room), he was continually poking or otherwise cupping his plastic boobies. Just as I was about to lose it anyways, he looks at me and says, I shit you not, with utter seriousness,

"I could so work in these all the time."

People were staring at me as I laughed, I laughed so hard. Fuckin' Halloween. That shit is priceless.

DEVILS

2004-10-30T09:17:00.000-07:00

Don't you wish you could be one, like me??

Halloween (Samhain, Hall'O'Ween, what the fuck ever you wanna call it) is tomorrow. Whatever the original reasons for the 'holiday' (and EvilMister knows, yes, yesssss), it's now become an almost Hallmark variation on a theme. It's all good, though. I fully dig selling out, commercialization, that whole bag. Fuck them before they fuck you, get in, get out, take as much as you can. Shit yeah. Since it's Halloween, I'm going to drop a small list of my favorite Devils on ya'all.

"Scratch" from the movie Crossroads, 'starring' Ralph Macchio. This guy is my all time favorite incarnation of Evil. First, he's a snappy dresser (the movie's about an aging bluesman trying to keep his soul from the devil with an unimpressive Ralph as sidekick, and all the old-timers in the movie dusted off their own clothes for the movie). Second, he's got style. You can't fake that shit, and although this guy is the devil, you know, you just know he's in it to win it. Finally, and this is key, people, Scratch keeps his promises. He'll take your soul soon as look at you, but if he loses, he don't hold nothin' agin ya, he don't wait by the crossroads to try'n gitcha agin, he jess smiles, tips his hat, and moves on down the road... That, motherfuckers, is style.
The Lord of Darkness" from the movie Legend, with Tom Cruise. This demonic visage plays a second goddamn close to Scratch. He fulfills every Judao-Christian nightmare about what the devil looks like; enormous, bright red, big, big horns (and I mean big), and a tail. He is the quintessential devil, for without him, there can be no good. He is the ultimate tempter, almost swaying Mia Sara to the dark side (she looks unbelievably sexy as a gothic princess).
"John Milton" from The Devil's Advocate, as played by all-time great, Al Pacino. He is a powerful combination of the Lord of Darkness and Scratch. He's got mad game, seducing and mindfucking Kenny Reeve's character every step of the way, manipulating him like a poor puppet but never once forcing him in any direction. Arguably some of the best monologues a la Pacino-Rant style (which should, by the way, become a NY street contest like Spoken Word) I've ever heard or seen.
"Lucifer" from The Prophecy, played by Lord of the Rings mainstay, Viggo Mortenson. This version of the devil is dark and sultry, in response to Virginia Madsen's character. Lucifer is kind of downtrodden in this one, feeling the loss of Paradise most keenly, and you can't help but sympathize with his needs (he wants to stop Gabriel, played by Chris Walken, from starting the final war on Earth, cuz dammit, when that happens, he loses all his Weeble Wobbles).

Of course, these guys are all just doing an homage for me, and I thank them mightily for keeping my name in the papers. Without their undying dilligence, the perfection of their craft, and in some cases, extreme overacting, I wouldn't be alive today. Anyone who wants to make a donation to the EvilMister Fund for Damnation can drop me a line in the usual places. Please note: operators at the seventh and eighth levels of Tarterus are no longer accepting any inbound calls due to a snafu...

EvilMister Interviews HasBeens, Laughs Ass Off At Own Foolishness

2004-10-29T15:39:00.000-07:00

I've decided to add a new category. I will be interviewing people (mostly actors), who have or should have vanished off the face of the earth. Obviously, since I am an unemployed retard and don't work for any news agencies and have no contact beyond the voices in my head, there is very little chance of this being real. It's still pretty fucking funny, if only to me.

(applause) EvilMister turns to camera, smiles wide, waves to millions of adoring fans.

EM: Hey, and welcome back to EvilMister's Televised Dementia. Coming up next is Alex Winters, who's only claim to fame is playing one of the gomers in Bill And Ted's Excellent Adventure and it's ass-sucking sequel, Bogus Journey. Come on out, Alex!
(applause, slightly confused, with a smattering of embarrassed coughing. Alex Winters comes across the stage, blinking from the haze of lights: he doesn't really know how he got here, but he's game for anything from the grin on his face)

AW: Thanks for having me on the show, Evil.

EM: EvilMister.

AW: Sorry?

EM: You sure are! Ahh, just fucking with you, Alex my man. Tell me, what was it like on the set of Excellent Adventure?

AW: Well, Evil, uh, Mister, it was just great. You know? I mean, it was like, the entire cast and crew were working together to pull off this movie that no one had ever seen before.

EM: Uh-huh, uh-huh, yeah, gotcha. Two fundamentally retarded nobrains get a device that travels through time so they can pass their history test. Riiiiight. Real piece of work. Kurasawa and Fellini were real worried.

AW: It was a great movie! People loved it.

EM: Hey, Alex, ol' china, trust me. I saw the movie a million times. Hey, um, what was the name of that guy starring opposite you ... it's on the tip of my tongue ... uhhhhh ...

AW: Keanu Reeves.

EM: Sorry, didn't catch that ... someone was talking in my head. Who?

AW: Keanu Reeves! Keanu Reeves! Asshole!

EM: Right, right, right. Kenny. Good guy. You know, it's kind of funny, but I seem to recall that he's done, like, a million movies now? Did some kind of sci-fi thing? With robots or AI or something? Got to make out with Carrie Ann Moss? Makes trillions of dollars a movie?

AW: He's done all right for himself. Anyway, let me tell you about this new project I'm working on. It's called Bill and Ted's Sons Have Their Own Excellent Adventure. It's got me in it, of course, and our kids, like, get into this thing where they have to ...

EM: All right? All right for himself? He's been in some of the greatest movies of the 21st century, and it's only been the 21st century for a little while! Shit! No wonder none of the studios wanna hire you! What was the name of that movie you were in with Randy Quaid? The one where he smothers you and some other twat in mutating goo? Damn, that was a fucking awful movie. What was it, Alex, come on, what was the name of the movie. Come on, tell me!

AW: Freaked, you fucking bastard! It was an important statement on comedic sensibilities! It had all kinds of famous people in, asshole! Brooke Shields and Morgan Fairchild were in it!

EM: Uh-huh, and what, uh, did that schlockfuck gross in the box office? Oh, wait! It was direct to video! Damn, Alex, that's gotta suck for you. With Kenny bein' all rich and famous and fucking supermodels and all and you live in ignominy? Man, I'd hate to be you.

AW: You are evil, mister. I'm out of here, fucker! (Alex blinks funny, then fades away into whatever he was dreaming about before he was grabbed for the show)

EM: Whoah! Boys and girls, I bet good old Alex there wishes he actually had a time-traveling phone booth so he could go back and beat the hell out of my good friend, Kenny Reeves! Don't forget, kiddies, you heard it from me first, I am EvilMister!

PS: If anyone has someone, live, dead, real of mythical, that they'd like to see lambasted, let me know!

Ahah! Someone Important Reads My Shit!!!

2004-10-29T15:05:00.000-07:00

The two or three of you who read me know that I recently posted a rant about how crappy most scary movies are, about how they lack the creepy vibe that old school flicks possess. I even cited some examples. One of them was "The Fog", by horrror meister incarnate John Carpenter.

The motherfuckers in Hollywood tremble in fear with my mighty powers of observations. Why? They're remaking the movie, that's why. Ol' John, who's spun such notable creep-fests as The Thing and sci-fi send-ups like Escape from New York and iffy flicks like Ghosts of Mars has declined to be in on the deal.

John's reasons for not wanting to get in on the hype? "I have done it once, and I don't want to do it again," Carpenter said. "I did my 'Fog,' and now it's someone else's time. It's very flattering. It's terrific that they want to make it. We have been thinking of doing 'The Fog' over for some time, as maybe a sequel. But now is the season of the remake."

I have my issues with remakes. They are almost never as good as the original, and even more rarely do they exceed the original. (The recent remake of the Punisher, not starring a 'roid-ramped Dolph 'I need someone to wipe my own ass 'cuz my arms are too big' Lundgren, has all the hallmarks of being an aberration.) As I said previously, the original Fog had a lot going for it, not the least of which was Adrienne Barbeaux. Spooky ambience, lots of ... fog ... that sort of thing. I'll bide my wit until I see trailers and ... acquire ... said remake through the usual channels. But I warn you, Hollywood, if it sucks, you'll put another nail in the Remake Coffin, and before you know it, you'll need to come up with something ORIGINAL!

You can find the original news report for The Fog remake here.

Another movie that has fallen into the green light category is "The Blob", which has already been remade once before. In the original, they had an eighty-three year old Steve McQueen playing a teenager, which was laughable then and still is. It wasn't all that scary to me (plum pudding moving around on the screen ain't scary), or to anyone of my generation, but shit, motherfuckas back then must have been squirming in the seats and passing out in the aisles. In the remake, they had Kevin Dillon, who ain't all that great an actor. Better special effects (The Blob pulls some hapless schmo through a drain pipe) and better plot-line (something to do with a satellite falling from space and alien microbes going apeshit in our environment). As far as sequels go, meh.

You can find the original news report for The Blob remake here.

You want to see a good remake? See the 1978 version of "Invasion of the Bodysnatchers". It's got Jeff "I Have Also Saved the Earth With Will Smith" Goldblum, Donald "I'm A Little Bit Jealous Of My Son Keifer's Talent" and Leonard "Why In The Fuck Did I Do Star Trek?". It's scary, especially the ending, when one of our heroes loses. Hah! Fuckin' good ending.

Read my original rant on the lack of horror-cojones here.

It's All About The Man, Man

2004-10-28T22:13:00.000-07:00

He's The Man, Man

In light of the fact that I passed the first round of interviews today to actually work in a community police station, I've decided that I will pattern any and all future policing opportunities after that of William Shatner, aka T.J. Hooker. I figger that I can't fucking fail with a hairstyle like that, or a sincerely kickin' pose of macho-osity. I mean, look at this guy. You can smell the Aqua Velva or the Hai Karate! oozing from every pore.

See, he might be smiling right now, lookin' to get into some lovely lady's panties, but at any second, pow!, he will drop the mother of all kung fu grips on your ass and before you know it, you'll be doin' time in Sing Sing, motherfucker. The only guy who is possibly tougher than Will Shatner is David Hasselhoff, and only on Knight Rider. Fuck that Baywatch shit. Anyone can run on a beach. No one else has ever ridden in an electronic car that has speed flaps and can turbo jump. But still, that's only a pale shadow, the merest reflection, of T.J. Motherfucking Hooker. The only hombre who could touch T.J. Motherfucking Hooker would have to be Shaft, and not the Samuel L. Jackson Shaft, but the real Shaft, Richard Roundtree.

The second round involves one mother of a profile and background check, after which point I will have the equivalent security clearance of the President of the United States. Anyone who has a record should check back with me in a few months, maybe I can, y'know, work something out ...

For those of you out there who think that by my volunteering for the police force I am in some way contradicting my reason for living (that is to say, the general malaise and disgruntlement of mankind through small acts of random frustration) bear this in mind; any dumbass stupid enough to get caught by a shlomo in a bright yellow RCMP vest wearing a whistle around his neck deserves to get caught. I won't even be allowed to wear a gun. And I guarantee, if you can run faster than I can walk, you're gonna get away. (This is why they won't let me have a gun. I am all too willing to shoot first, second and third, get a cup of coffee and then ask questions.)

And if you think that they'll take any gomer with too much spare time on his hands, think again, motherfuckers. I had to watch two solid weeks of CSI on SpikeTV and every episode of Law and Order, Criminal Intent I could lay my hands on to answer those questions properly. I'm not even gonna mention CSI: Miami, CSI: New York, and all the other crime shows I watch like some kind of sociopathic nutbag.

I'm gonna be The Man, man, and then I'm gonna drop some righteous police intervention on your ass...

ps: please check out my Shaft link. It's got a cow in it. ( i scored 13)

The House Party of the Decade, Part One or A Near-Death Accident Won't Stop Teenage Morons from Drinking Themselves Blind.

2004-10-28T17:53:00.000-07:00

EvilMister has many, many stories to tell. Some will fall into the general category of "Lemme Tell Ya About The Time ...." and some will get, depending on their length, their very own Category. The House Party is one of them, because it lasted for two goddamned weeks, and had as many mini-dramas as a very special episode of Teen Drunks.

The first installment is more of a prelude to the actual events, because it happened the very night before the party began, and is also a story of EvilMister Cheats Death (I have avoided death a number of times, in highly improbable manners. It'd take a Cray to figure out the odds on the actual factual.)

Back in the day, there were four of us. There was Spike, a dood so out of tune with the fashions that he had a spikey mullet and a leather fanny pack for the longest time. He was our driver, and also the source of our home for the party. There was Wog, and the only way to describe him is as a good natured hippy. He lived in the Coquitlam version of the Projects, and had a Mad Scientist for a brother. There was Supertall, who was also a hippy, but more of the speedmetal kind, and had a brother in the Army. I was calling myself Jester at the time on account of the fact that, when drunk or stoned, I was the funniest motherfucker you could ever hope to find; also, if you were stoned and I wasn't, I'd seriously fuck with your mind and you'd wind up the emergency ward for hysterics.

As I said, Spike was throwing the party 'cuz his parents were going to bugger off to California for two weeks, with the usual parental admonition to not throw a party. Shyeah, right. Dumbasses.

Spike's ride was some kind of hatchback dealie. All four of us were in the car, along with ReddyEddy, a hapless chub we let hang out with us because we were nice guys and always needed a laugh. Being teenagers and convinced of our relative immortality, and because the regular car seats were full, I was laying in the hatchback. It was not a big car, but I was a big kid. We were all pretty hammered, as expected, and listening really loudly to bad music.

Ironically, Bon Jovi's 'Livin' on a Prayer' was playing on the radio. I think it was z95 or some shit like that; we were waiting for the regular crap music to stop so they'd put on the DJ's with some mad house mixes, yo.

It was also raining. We were speeding. We took a corner funny. The corner we took led on to a bridge that crossed over top of a train track. In the middle of the bridge is a meridian, which we hit at sixty miles an hour. Spike is a good driver, even when drunk, and he kept the crapcar from bouncing over it and taking off into the night. Then he kept us from swerving right through the railing. Then we hit the meridian again, and this time, the car FLIPPED OVER.

Remember: I was in the hatchback of this motherfucking Tonka toy. And I tell you now, I swear on all that is important, the car rotated around me.

I know how it sounds. I know the physics of it. I was a big fat kid crammed into a little tight space listening to Bon Jovi rockit on the radio on my back, but when that fucking car flipped over, I was spatially in the same position: my back was now against the window of the hatchback. I was compltely and entirely unhurt in any way, shape, or form. This was my second clue that EvilMister cannot be killed.

We were all of us trapped on the middle of the bridge. Spike managed to get out all fine and dandy, Supertall felt the need to try and punch his way out the window and fractured a few fingers. Wog, being a nimble and flexible little hippy, managed to get out fine and dandy, with ReddyEddy hot on his heels, a la fat kid on a Smartie.

Shock being shock, it took me a good several seconds of yelling my ass off before anyone remembered that there was still a chub in the car, and goddamnit, was that a fucking train motoring down below us? We had avoided the kind of vehicular accident that should only happen in the Southern states by a few feet. Supertall remedied my incarceration by popping the control on the hatchback.

You know in the Flintstones when Fred goes rolling across the floor? It's not an episode specific thing 'cuz he does it so often, but you know what I mean, right? Assholes and elbows spinning through the air?

I did it for real. The moment the hatch popped, all my weight, gravity, and a thoroughly pissed off Avatar For The Proper Functioning Of The Universe had me skittering across the pavement like a Weeble Wobble. (Weebles Wobble but they don't fall down!)

The cops came, statements were made, parents were called, dire warnings and threats were issued. We made peace and said thanks to the Party Gods when Spike's parents, against all common sense and direct contravention of immediate evidence against our intelligence, announced that they were still going to California.

And for the next two weeks minus one day (I had, by that time, developed a low grade fever and had, I'm sure, a blood/alcohol level of near lethal proportions) I was drunk out of my skull.

Episode Two highlights will include but are not limited to:

Drinking does make ugly people pretty
A good reason not to wear a sheepskin rug
Harmless breaking and entering with intent to eat pepperoni

Oh, EvilMister, you're so silly, with your drinking and reckless foolishness!

Even EvilMister Has His Limits

2004-10-27T13:20:00.000-07:00

Even though I am the new face of evil for the 21st century and beyond, there are some things that just should not be.

One of them is porcelain dolls. They're right up there on my list of fucking creepy shit. They sit there and stare at you with perfect stillness, their eyes never blinking, absorbing everything you say and do. They are mute witnesses, and their skin never changes.

It's some kind of Children of the Damned, Children of the Corn thing. I'm not stupid. I know they're dolls, that they're not real. But in the back of my mind, these creepy fucking things are just waiting for me to turn my back, and then it'll be all 'We're coming to get you' and 'Ma-Ma ... Ma-Ma ... Give me your spleen!!!!'. Sure you can collect 'em, sell 'em on EBay, make a shitload of money, but did you ever stop to think that maybe that's what they want? Once they've reached maximum planetary saturation, they will rise up in unholy porcelain life and kill us all. Even EvilMister will be unable to affect this.

STOP THE DOLLS. STOP THEM NOW, BEFORE THEY KILL US ALL!!!

Lemme Tell Ya About The Time .... #1b

2004-10-27T09:39:00.000-07:00

If you don't know what the fuck is going on with this tale, read here first...

So, there we were, all broken up but trying to maintain a friendship. My reasons were all money oriented, hers were that she thought we'd get back together ... at no point during any conversation did I ever imply that this would happen. In point of fact, I told her that we didn't work as a couple. She seemeed to think that this wasn't entirely true, and while it makes me nasty, five hundred bucks is five hundred bucks.

Our last day, and I mean our last day, in one another's company was July 3rd, 2002. I know this 'cuz Men In Black 2 came out, and we'd decided to go see it, as we both liked the first one.

Little did I know...

She started off early with a riposte about my weight. She told me I looked fat in the pants I was wearing. Ordinarily, this'd bug me about as much as someone saying I have glasses ... I know I'm a big kid. But, I was already in a shitty mood because some creepy weird guy with long fingernails and nicotine stains on his fingers interrupted my morning coffee. My morning coffee is very important. It's one of the few things that keeps me from stabbing people in the neck.

In retaliation, I called her a crazy bitch.

Note to readers: if the person you call crazy flips out in a really big way, it's because they're crazy. Avoid doing so a second time if you want to enjoy your day out.

After doing some running around, we made it to the theater just in time to see the movie. It wasn't good. In fact, it was the opposite of good. For some reason, six months later, I bought the DVD, reasoning to myself that events throughout the day had somehow tarnished my opinion of the on-screen chemistry between Tommy Lee Jones and Will 'How Many Times Can I Save The Earth During My Career?' Smith.

I was wrong.

Now on to the good stuff.

I can't remember why we were in Sears, except to suggest maybe we were cutting through to somewhere else. Nutjob has an almost encyclopedic memory of all the shortcuts that keep her off the streets, and often went out of her way to avoid contact with other people. (I know, I know, I should have heard the warning sirens long ago.) We're walking along, squabbling about how bad the movie was, and I'm enjoying myself because I learned how to enjoy pissing people off from dating her, and I was, like I said, in a mood.

Suddenly she sticks her thumb in her mouth and then takes a swipe at my face with a saliva-coated digit. I bust out a limbo move that woulda' made anyone proud and turn to confront her. (Remember, this in a mall, with all kinds of people around ... this is about to get interesting)

"What," I ask, mildly repulsed but still in control, "in the hell do you think you're doing?"

"You've got a smudge on your face." She sticks her thumb in her mouth again.

"So what?" I look in one of the many mirrors. If it's there, I can't see it.

"You look like a street person." She takes another swipe with her Saliva-Encrusted Thumb +10 of Germ Killing.

I bust out another Ninja Move. "Get the fuck away from me with that fucking thing!" I shout. "I wouldn't let my mother do that when I was a kid, so what the fuck makes you think I'm gonna let you do it now? Shit, this in public! I'll go to the washroom, you crazy bitch!"

(Remember my warning about the second time?)

"You are such an asshole! You look like a fucking slob! Why are you being such an asshole? You fucking pussy (she liked to call me a pussy a lot), it's just spit!" (There are only a few times spit should be exchanged, and dangling from the end of a thumb towards my face in front of the Clinique counter is not one of them)

"Fuck you! Who the fuck do you think you are. If you don't lay the fuck off, I swear to Christ I am out of here. I don't have to put up with this shit, you can go all the fucking way home by yourself!"

"You wanna leave? Fine, you shithead. Just fucking go."

"I will, as soon as you get your fucking cell out of my backpack."

Nutjob gets her cell out of my bag, calls me a fucking pussy again and then kind of stands there, waiting to see if I'm gonna take off or not.

I am the most angry I have ever been in my adult life. I have never had an argument with a women in public before where I've had to shout and scream. I am both embarassed and raging white hot mad at this woman who I used to have feelings for and her complete and utter lack of common sense (arguing in public, really). I do some rapid calculations in my head. "You know what? Fuck the money you owe me. I don't wanna hear from you ever again. I can't put up with this shit. You yell and scream and then act as if nothing is fucking wrong, and that's CRAZY! Fuck this, and fuck you. I am outta here!"

I spun on my heels and was gone like yesterday's news.

A few weeks later I got an email from her asking me if I wanted to go to Playland with her and someone from her work. I told her I didn't like Playland because all the rides go around very fast in circles and if I wanted to puke that much I'd just drink a case of beer by myself. She emailed me back and called me a fucking pussy for not wanting to go, and then asked if we could go out to dinner.

I didn't return that email. Or the next ten. I eventually had to let one of my email accounts lapse, which sucks, 'cuz it was one I used a lot.

And that's it for the first installment of 'Lemme Tell Ya About The Time....'

Lemme Tell Ya About The Time .... #1a

2004-10-26T11:51:00.000-07:00

I've had some weird thoughts in my time, and one of the oddest of them all was that men and women can remain friends after they've broken up. In my time, I've only managed to do it once, and while it was a long and arduous process, it was well worth the effort.

That one time.

The last time I tried it I was driven by fiscal motives; the crazy woman, who we'll call, oh say, Nutjob, owed me five hundred bucks. I figgered, what the hell, we can put up with Nutjob until I get my simoleans back and then, like the Road Runner, I am outta there.

We broke up because she turned out to be crazy insane. Not like 'eating banana peel' crazy, or 'hopelessly addicted to soap opera' crazy, but honest, genuine, balls to the walls, shrieking from the rooftop, rocking in the corner crazy. I put up with insane demands (like, if I was home from work first, I should have the lights down low and have Oprah on the teevee so she could just sit down and watch), frequent 'what is that noise, do you hear that noise, what is that noise', incessant 'I have problems I don't want to talk about with you, but I am most definitely going to blame you later on'. All usual shit, you know? In for a penny, in for a pound, unless that pound turns out to be a pound of crazy.

Was it the fact that she bought me an awesome jacket for Christmas and then borrowed money from me to put on her Visa? (My buddy ChubbyMonk pointed out to me months later that I had, in fact, bought my own Xmas gifts.) Was it that I loaned her money to have her nails done at one of the most ludicrously expensive nail salons in the entire world? (They serve champagne there while you're having it done). Was it that she went ballistic Def Con One when I used her backscrubber to briskly scrub the shaved bits of hair from my freshly mown skull, thereby ruining it in the process? Or, maybe it was the time I confused 'fuzzy' slippers with 'furry' slippers, and the argument that followed lasted two weeks? (I still don't know what the fuck the difference is, and I don't give a shit.)

No, folks, it was when she made me break my own cardinal rule: EvilMister, no matter how mad he gets, shall not ever raise his voice or his fist in anger at the ones he loves.

Nutjob likes to yell, scream and throw things when she gets mad. I have been called some of the most heinous things a man can ever be called by the one who 'loves' him. Now, I don't take shit lying down, but I also know that, if the cops come, the big, red-faced man who has a voice that can knock down walls will be the first one to get tazered, so I keep myself calm. It was arguing all day and night, and then waking up in the morning as if nothing had happened or been said that drove the nail in the coffin; when I call a woman 'a crazy cocksucking bitch' and 'the stupidest woman in the world', I expect that, when morning comes, we're going to have a rational discussion concerning what happened.

Not once. Never. It was 'you asshole' and 'cunt' and all those wonderful, spiteful things you can imagine two people call one another and then it was 'pass the butter, lover' in the space of 24 hrs.

I am masochistic. I am sadistic. I am mean, nasty, arrogant and aggressive (I'm also a sweetheart, but only to friends or people who can give me stuff). But I don't put up with crazy bitches pretending they didn't imply that I'd rather fuck animals. (After all the yelling and the not having sex because I liked to do things she didn't and had problems with that, I was getting pretty goddamned close, let me tell you!)

I'll continue later on, with the time Nutjob and I had our last and best fight in the perfume section of the Sears in Pacific Center Mall.....

And here it is!! Lemme Tell Ya About The Time .... #1b

EvilMister Encounters a Stink So Bad, He Almost Finds Religion

2004-10-25T17:57:00.000-07:00

I don't know how it happened, I don't want to know. Before this day, October 25th, 2004, I have smelled things that made me reconsider my basic principles on life and liberty. I've smelled garbage left in the sun for two weeks. I've inhaled the odor of rotted meat. I've walked across a beach where all kinds of fish all of a sudden decided they could breathe air and found that they were wrong.

Today was different.

Today I worked side by side with Mr. Stinky.

I doubt I'll ever get the stink out of my mind. It's seared in there like it was branded onto my brain. A giant "MS" burn mark runs ragged across my olfactory nerves and into the memory centers of my brain. Imagine the smell of ass. This is ass that has sweated freely, but ass that has been contained in some kind of leather/rubber ass-trapping underoos. Now imagine B.O. Not normal B.O., but the rank musk of a Sasquatch-like mojombo who's only just that morning shaved his all over body hair and gone into work. I could go on, but I gotta tell ya, I can't stop the shivering. I need to take a bath in tomato juice.

EvilMister Sees Saw, Sees Signs of Spookiness

2004-10-23T20:58:00.000-07:00

Against all expectations and a previous post on the lack of nut-itude that many horror movies seem to possess, SAW goes that extra mile and creates a truly horrific scenario. How important is your life? Have you wasted it? Taken it for granted? What if the only way for you to come out ahead, with your head, was to take someone elses?

What's the deal? Why did it mess with me jes' a lil' bit?

Some nutbag called the Jigsaw Killer by the ever-greedy media sticks people in rooms of death. They are always left a way out. The way either involves great risk to their own personal lives, or to someone else who is stuck in the room with them. Cary Elwes does one helluva job, and I suppose the other dude does too, only I've never seen him before. Danny Glover has a small role in the film as well, though the majority of the film involves Cary and the other guy in their DeathTrap. I dug it. I figgered out the ending before time was up, and I suspect that most people would, but that doesn't weaken the film at all. The death trap scenarios each person is put through (all of them but the primary one are covered in a series of flashbacks as related by Cary Elwes, who was once a suspect for the Jigsaw Killer) are highly reminscent of those in Seven. Each one is crafted for a specific person, designed to have maximum impact on their will to live. 'member that scene in Seven where Brad is talking to the guy who fucked that hooker with the stainless steel bladed uber-dildo? Thousand bucks says that if something like that really happened, the guy doing the banging would be one fucked up hombre for the rest of his life. We're talking a pound of lithium a day to keep him from going bananas. (And of course, let us not forget, that a person's limits are never discovered through intentional actions, only through mistakes and events that are so far out our own purview that we could not see them coming ... who's to say that, even though it is horrific and ultimately evil, such a thing might not be secretly enjoyable? This is the way that serial killers and maniacs are created. Dahmer didn't set out to be a necro, after all. I don't condone this kind of behavior, preferring to generate massive doses of irritation that spread throughout a population, but I can see the other side of the fence. It's just over there. My coffee cup's resting on it.)

It pointedly asks a very simple question that I've always asked :

What would you do to survive?

As this movie does in fact resurrect the creepiness of two of my all-time faves (Seven and Silence of the Lambs) I'm going to drop a big fat 8.5 on this flick. Not a ten, 'cuz I guessed the ending and that kind of sucks.

Oh, yeah, I also checked out The Grudge, starring Buffy the Vampire Slayer. As in the end of her televised show, she should've stayed dead. It ain't Sam Raimi's fault that Hollywood seems intent on refilming every single scary movie made by the Japanese (Grudge is a shabby remake of Ju-On, The Ring is a schlocky Ringu). It's Hollywood's fault for failing to produce quality on their own. You wanna see a good scary movie? See The Eye, or Jian Gui as it should be known. Kind of a Sixth Sense deal, but way, way spooky. There's this scene, in an elevator, with the girl, and this dead guy keeps floating closer and closer ... shit. Motherfucker had me watching through my fingers. I'd say that roughly ninety percent of all remakes should be seen in original language for proper effect.

As for something you should see? Check out Mr. Frost, starring Jeff Goldblum. He plays a guy who may or may not be the Devil. It's suspensful, not buckets-of-blood. Makes you think right 'til the end. He does a good job. Not as good as me, mind ya, but what the fuck, guy's gotta get paid ... right?

Dammitall, I am surrounded by Retards

2004-10-23T13:43:00.000-07:00

Well, the weekend has rolled around, and as promised, more enlightening character assassinations are up on the block. But before I do so, I feel I've gotta say somethin'; though I make fun of this collection of gomers, retards, and habitual dog-fuckers, they mostly know how to do their jobs. And so what if the job isn't complicated, and could easily be done by well-trained chimpanzees or especially chatty orangutans? Until we get over our misplaced fears of a Planet of the Apes-like scenario, we'll be stuck hauling dangerous shit from one place to the other. (EvilMister now has a hole in his hand, cuts across most of his fingers, three bruises on one shin, a gouge taken out of one ankle and a series of callouses that have replaced other ... callouses on my hands.)

The first new guy is Mr Stinky, nee Gordon. The Stinkmeister is a nice guy. He works really fuckin' hard at his job. Shit you not. He's ready, willing, and able to get right in there and throw his back into lifting up a two-ton trailer if need be. He's friendly, and since he likes CSI, he's all right by me. Unfortunately, as you might've surmised from his monniker, he stinky. Come off it, Evil, you're saying, we've all smelled stinky people before. How bad can it be, really. I'd swear on a stack of bibles if my hands wouldn't burn off that he is, without a doubt, the smelliest human being I've ever come across. I've been in locker rooms. I've been at the gym. I've been downtown where Woolworth's used to be. I've been in the rooms of hippies who don't believe in deodorant and I've, sadly, wallowed in my own vomit. All of those things have got the Big Stink Seal of Nasal Damage written all over them, but goddamit, this motherfucker brought tears to my eyes in seconds. It's the pervasive kind of odor you get when you wear the same kind of clothes all the time, eat lots of garlic and drink all kinds of weirdness, lock yourself into a hyperbaric chamber and stew in your own juices until morning. It doesn't go away. And since we work in an environment that demands a lot of physical activity, it actually gets worse. I swear to christ it'd make someone with no sense of smell ask what the fuck was burning his nasal passages. But Monsieur Stinky works hard, so he's okey-dokey.

Next is Hoody with a Habit. His real name is Zack. I have a catfish named Zack, and the similarities between Hoody and the bottom-feeding fish are funny. Hoody with a Habit is, for lack of a better word, sketchy. He's got the attendant twitchiness, facial ticks, slurs, weird walk, and vernacular of a dood who's got a Jones. The first day he came in to work was at noon some time last week; the Guys in Hardhats expect anyone they call in to stick around for an eight hour shift. This makes utter and total sense to me. Hoody likes to wear his headphones while 'working', operating under the illusion that he will be totally safe in a work environment where people are balancing 300 lbs of wall unit on one corner and bombing down an aisle no wider than the one Indiana Jones walked across in Indy III. Hoody spends most of his time looking for a place to sit down. He sat down on counters, on clothing racks, piles of wobbly pallets and once, even the floor. Each of the times he was ass-sittin' (don't get me wrong, EvilMister likes his ass to sit whenever and wherever possible), he was doing so in front of one of the Guys. Quittin' time rolls around, me and some of the other Retards (Look at that Sexy Bitch and Gomer with Ass Outside of Pants) are waiting for the bus to take us out of Purgatory when Hoody shows up. Hoody doesn't want to work an eight hour shift his first day because it's too late in the evening. I was for sure convinced that Hoody had fucked himself out of work, but he showed up again on the Monday, during which time I learned that he, like Fucktard with Hat, is a Victim of Global Conspiracy. The Phone Company, The Cable Company, indeed, the entire Canadian Government is out to get him. Oh, Hoody with a Habit, donchaknow that's just yer Jones talkin?

Third is Ancient Chinese Secret, aka Jonas. As you may've guessed, Jonas is Asian. It's not some kind of opposite nickname like callin' a fat guy Slim or a short little monkey Stretch. He's Asian, and I'm not bein' disrespectful. Jonas might not be able to speak English very well (in point of fact, it's even hard to understand his broken English, and I worked at Starbucks for 5 years, where I learned that shrr ratuh is short latte) but he understands every fuckin' thing going on there. Point to a shelf, tell him you want it put together, and goddamnit if it ain't put together. He, like Stinky, is a go-to-guy, putting his time in with actual results. We don't know where ACS got his shit together, but I gotta say, he's one awesome motherfucker. I'd take him over any of the regular Retards.

Next is the Old Codgers from Manpower. This is more of a primary grouping than an individual. There is Stoic Motherfucker, who is old and as far as I can tell, as cranky as a person can get without actually having a crank in his ass. I've heard him say three words the whole time I'm around. I think he's an android, but since I'm kind of afraid he'll drop a KungFu grip on me, I'll avoid his silent ass. There's The Leninist, who looks exactly like someone from a Commie-Pinko terrorist cell should look, from his thin metal framed glasses to his ever-durable second hand Spetsnaz workboots. He also doesn't like to work too hard, and has been known to vanish like my good intentions after a few rum and cokes. The Leninist has many good ideas on how to do stuff, and is more than willing to give you pointers on how to do them, and he also pushes a pallet jack everywhere. Sometimes it even has stuff on it. I can't forget SaltandPepper, a guy who, from a conversation I overheard in the lunch room one day, has been all over Europe more than once. Don't know much about SaltandPepper except for that, but I do think it's fucking hilarious that a guy so well traveled (if, indeed, he is) finds himself stuck working with a bunch of Retards and making sub-par wages.

That's all for the Retards and the Codgers. Now on to other employees of the place where I am 'working'.

The only one I'm gonna mention is Sexy Chick from Cosmetics, and for all the reasons you think. She's young, she's blonde, she's got tattoos. And, for some reason, is perfectly all right with being in earshot of some of the comments that only Look at that Sexy Bitch and MiniSpaniard can come up with. Let me tell you, there is no one more creative than two kids that're higher than kites and under the age of 22. Sexy Chick is very pretty, but not really my type; I only mention her because she checked me out. Why is that important, you ask? Well, 1) I can count the number of times I've been ogled on one hand with three fingers cut off, 2) I was gross, stinky, and covered in sweat and drywall dust. How do I know I was being 'checked out'? Ah. 1) I was checking her out, 2) She walked by me, looked me up from head to toe, smiled and said 'see ya later' and smiled, 3) I am single and incredibly horny, and as a result I tend to think any woman looking at me for more than three seconds is giving me the green 'go'. Since our initial meeting, she witnessed me seconds after my Amazing Assplant, and has asked me how my back is more than once. I won't crassify our encounters any more than that, but if she even gave me a wink, you'd be seeing my behavior on security footage uploaded to Limewire faster than Paris Hilton can say 'are you sure that camera's off?'

And now, for the story you've all been waiting for........

EvilMister's Amazing and Prolonged Ass-Plant, complete with Aluminum Ladder Almost Killing Him

I might've mentioned it before, but I'll cover this again. The place I'm working in right now has had an entire additional store built around the one that currently exists, both on the first and second floors. For some reason I can't fathom, the second floor was done first. All of the new fixtures (and there are enough of them to furnish a major department store, which translates into something like a trillion pounds of wood and chrome, all designed to hit you on the most unprotected parts of your body like laser-guided smartbombs) were loaded onto the second floor. All. Of. Them. Naturally, this means that sooner or later, as the first floor area is completed, at least half the shit we hauled up has to get hauled back down. Yeehaw.

We were told to move some shelves. Now, in direct opposition to the entire design scheme of the rest of the fixtures, the shelves we were to move downstairs were not a) mysteriously top heavy, b) possessed, c) intent on drawing blood, or d ) just plain awkward to manipulate.

They were just really high. Fifteen or so feet tall. After consulting Norad, NASA and the ThinkTank at MIT, we got the answer; we were gonna have to use one of the useless four wheeled carpet dollies that, like the pushcarts at Safeway, all have one demented wheel intent on making a run for the border. That's fine. No sweat. It did take eight of us to keep it on the crafty little fucker, and to make it over and around the various hurdles in our way (Bluehaired Bargainhunters and Painfully Gay Menswear Employees) and over to the freight elevator.

Don't forget, EvilMister is not a spring chicken. In point of fact, he could be considered a slightly less overweight George Costanza with more hair. The muscles in my legs, back, arms, chest and head started to protest midway through the venture, but dammitall, I refused to be shown up by a bunch of gomers who refuse to wear belts, who comment on the titties of every woman he sees and who complain about how God is out to get him (HE is, Fucktard, just you wait). Downstairs proves to be vastly more complicated.

The uncarpeted, untiled floor is littered with drywall dust and sawdust; the offal from Dusty Drywallers and Maniacal Carpenters. I am in charge of steering, which means I am walking backwards, gripping the shelving unit. I can't really see where I'm going, and so must trust Mr Stinky and Oldie. The carpet dolly doesn't really like the spoor of contractors, and as soon as the front wheels cross over from tiles to flat concrete covered with dust particles, they lock up quicker than a priest during interrogation.

I haven't fallen yet. Having encountered this already, the answer is to lift and hold in traditional weightlifter position until Oldie can move the dolly into a more appropriate place. The sides of the shelves are very smooth and also covered in a thin layer of dust. My muscles, soft from habitual disuse, are protesting. The floor is slippier than an Entertainment Lawyer's client list and my legs think it's time to
just
give
up.

Rather than fall right over, I lurch to a semi-stand in a desperate effort to relieve myself of energy once expended into keeping the shelves in place that is now rocketing through my displaced center of gravity. My arms are windmilling around like I'm tryin' to take flight, I'm lurching around like a drunk who's been pepper sprayed until finally gravity gains the upper hand; all the force I'm trying to get rid of shoots right to my ass and Boom!! EvilMister hits the ground like I've been kayoed by that ballet dancer from Roadhouse.

Not to be outshone, by arms continue to spin around, whacking an aluminum ladder right beside me. I lurch to get out of the way, but my legs hit the side of the ladder as it's comin' down, actually causing it to land no less than three inches from my head. I bruised the hell out of my tailbone.

The pain and indignity of losing my balance and damned near killing myself was nicely ameliorated by Sexy Chick from Cosmetics asking me if I was all right, which is why I have included her in my list.

That's it for now!

EvilMister Tries to Write, is Inexplicably Hit on Head with Writer's Block.

2004-10-21T20:28:00.000-07:00

You know how it is. You sit here, you think something up that you wanna say, and then you try and say it. In your head, it's the fucking Gutenberg Bible (sadly, not written by Steve), but on the page or on the screen, it's like an exceptionally awful outtake from ALF. Shit, you might even go so far as to find a funny or intriguing pic to upload, and wind up wasting half an hour trying to find just the right one.

So what do you do? Post shit? Pretend it's funny, even though you've developed a bleeding ulcer and a tumor on account of it's atrocious nature? Hell no! My audience, and in my head, there are hundreds of you, deserves more! They deserve the straight shit, penetrating exposes (pronounced ex-po-zays ... I'm way too fucking lazy to drop an accent ague or what-the-fuck-ever) of character foibles in people I meet, biting and acerbic comments on the general state of disrepair of this planet! Also, I got distracted by the pictures and lost my motherfucking mojo.

I had the whole piece set. It was about Japanese Street Fashion. It was awesome. But, as I read it, I saw that my prose kept waffling between the shit above and honest-to-goodness journalistic reporting! WTF?? I can't spend the time to actual report on anything. I'm way too fuckin busy waiting for Half-Life 2 to come out to be intelligent and incisive.

So now I'm gonna go, and when I come back, I'll ensure that we all have a little slice of EvilMister's growing dementia to settle into.

EvilMister Meets New Forms of Life, Wants to Kill Everyone Who Looks At Him Funny

2004-10-20T18:25:00.000-07:00

Well, I am still hauling shit from point A to point B, although I am now no longer under the direct command of Guys In Hardhats. I am now, nominally, ordered around by a five foot tall man with a San Franciscan accent. (what does that mean? think about it for a moment ... what species of man seems to populate San Fran more than anyother ....?) We'll call him Mighty Mouse, on account of the fact that he's everywhere. He's a driven man, and his department is Menswear. The jobs he gives me are both easy and amazingly frustrating; he will say 'move clothing racks from here to there', and then, ten minutes later, he'll say 'lift this solid oak table onto your back and walk down the aisle backwards.' I swear to Christ that when I'm done this job, I'll be like Ed Norton in Fight Club. From Cookie Dough to Jack's Invigorated Abdomen!

All the fixtures that are on the second floor are the same, with the exception of those belonging to Jewelry and Cosmetics. This means that Mens, Womens, Lingerie, Shoes, Torture Devices, and Gomorrah's Diarama are all fighting for the same fixtures. They have maps, and diagrams, that show where everything is s'posed to go, and how much of it's s'posed to go there. All last week, I took this shit off trucks, hauled it up freight elevators, navigating my way around the other Retards, Spastic Contractors, Deliberate Time-Wasters and Bluehair Bargainhunters, and piled it into one or two spots.

Following Mighty Mouse's orders, me and another dood move things called 'hang folders'. These were not designed for clothes, though that is the use they are being put to; they are, in all reality, three hundred pound slabs of pressed particle board that can, will, and have toppled over at the drop of a hat. They're like wooden lemmings.

In the grand scheme of things, Mighty Mouse's direct opposite, the woman in charge of Womens, is named Joy.

Let me tell you something.

She is not joyful. She is the antithesis of joy. She is the absence of all things bearing happiness. If the position of Evil wasn't already filled by yours truly, she'd fill in without missing a beat.

She hates me. I am used to people not liking me. I am loud, my voice carries through airplane manufacturing plants and has been known to make small children cry uncontrollably until I am out of range. My sense of humor is not for everyone, generally involving boobies, zombies, complete with liberal lacings of 'fuck', 'shit', 'asswipe' and/or 'cockmonkey'. As I am a Retard who Cannot Keep a Job, I've toned my natural persona down (at greatest personal risk). She hasn't heard anything inappropriate coming out of my cakehole.

And yet, dear readers, I am somehow the Harbinger of Doom. I am the reason table legs fall off, why crappy castors either roll in one direction or no directions, why delivery trucks are late, why Mighty Mouse has somehow managed to claim all the 'good' fixtures. She gives me a dirty look every time she sees me, and I am, at last count, 6' tall and 250 lbs. Tack on the voice, and dammit, people in Paraguay know where I am. I get dirty looks every ten minutes. This pisses me right the fuck off, but again, I am a Retard, so I chew my tongue and hold my demonic rage.

I hate her. Just yesterday, Vinnie (the dood who has a job) and I moved a mountain of nine million pound pieces of wood wrapped up in plastic and metal to where Mighty Mouse told us. It took a lo-o-o-o-ong time, and by the end of it, I was more out of breath than Jake Steed after a day of filming. AntiJoy comes up with her blueprint, looks at it, asks why we're putting things where we are as if we snuck over to Womens and stole them in the middle of the night. She looks at me with this look of utter accusation; since I am older than Vinnie and also a Retard, I am somehow to blame, most likely because I have been dropping a commando version of the Vulcan Mindmeld on this kid all day, every day, and he is at my beck and fucking call. We straight up tell her Mighty Mouse told us to haul that crap, and again, the look says 'you're a lying motherfucker, but I'm going to let this slide for now, but you fuck with me again, and I will boil your balls in soup and call it Tastee Tots.' She walks away, clearly plotting my demise. What she doesn't know is I've already charted hers up using three-dimensional graphs and a fucking slide rule. Soon as the moon is in alignment, she'd better avoid Hardware, or it'll be Maximum Overdrive, and Emilio Estevez won't save her bitch ass, 'cuz he's busy being a has-been.

Bitch.

Also, tomorrow or the next day, I will let you know about Mr Stinky, Hoody with a Habit, Ancient Chinese Secret, The Old Codgers from Manpower and the Sexy Chick from Cosmetics (there are many sexy chicks, but this one is special)

And also as well, I will cover EvilMister's Amazing and Prolonged Ass-Plant, complete with Narrowly Having His Head Staved In By An Aluminum Ladder.

Scary Movies? Not these days.

2004-10-17T13:43:00.000-07:00

Now, I may have mentioned this before, but let me state again, for the record, that I like scary movies. Movies with zombies are my absolute, all time favorite, but I can sink my teeth into vampire flicks (hah hah) and my hackles have been known to rise for the occasional werewolf movie. New scary movies are all well and good, don't get me wrong. They rock, but they just aren't as good as the olden time horror flicks.

This is not heresy. This is actual factual, fuckers. The straight shit. Movies today (all genres, not just horror) suffer from a preponderance of movie dollars and are weak in overall plot and character development. It's all about opening weekends, blockbuster actors, merchandise tie-ins, spin-offs, franchise the shit out of every friggin' movie out there. Back in the day, it wasn't like that at all. No, no my friends. Directors and actors were forced to rely on on-screen performances and inherently creepy shit to get the job done, instead of I-fucking-LM cgi that shit to hell and gone. CGI is awesome, don't get me wrong. I myself have been known to turn my crafty hand at the trade, for my own personal amusement, but vital pieces of good scary movie-ness have fallen by the wayside as we've begun to adopt CGI as a cinematic mainstay instead of a costly and carefully considered option when all else fails. Most of today's horror movies rely on shocking visual effects rather than psychological torture. From Heather O'Rourke falling through the ceiling with Craig 'Don't Call me Coach' Nelson amidst a pile of otherworldly pink goo to The Creeper pulling his own damned head off to replace it with one he just ate, we find ourselves more and more inured to that sort of stuff. What about Brad Pitt being handed his own wife's head in a box? What about Jodie Foster being mind-fucked by Sir Anthony Hopkins? Those movies left my skin crawling for days.

Take Demon Seed, from 1977, for example. The first time I saw this, I was a kid. (We had HBO and Cinemax and some other shit like that, and they paid no fucking attention to when they showed shit back then.) It's a freaky film about computers gone completely mental. In this one, a computer goes apeshit and decides it wants to impregnante a woman (hence the title, Demon Seed). There is a scene towards the end, the wonky AI has cobbled together some kind of machinery to force it's creator's wife into impregnation. It uses a pair of scissors to methodically cut away said hapless wife's skirt up. Scary fucking shit.

Or how about Coma, from 1978? Mike Douglas, in one of his non-penis or ass showing flicks, gets caught up with Genevieve Bujold in an absolutely fucked-up story involving healthy patients winding up in inexplicable comas. They get shipped off to some place somewhere (it's a little slow, so I'm kinda hazy on particulars) where some kind of experiments are performed on them. There's a scene where what appears to be hundreds of coma-afflicted patients are hanging from cheap Ikea knock-off ceiling-mounted shelving units. Very unnverving, and the growing sense of frustration and paranoia as Genevieve tries to prove she's not mental is pretty effective.

If people falling unconscious as an insidious plot doesn't chill your blood, there's always Rosemary's Baby. We all know about this one. It's become a prototypical element for dozens of Hell/Antichrist movies since it's inception in 1968. This one is also slow, but very cool, because the mother is convinced that her unborn son is the fucking antichrist, and no one believes her. This is on account of the fact that entire apartment building where her and her husband lives is in on the thing. We get to watch Mia Farrow go completely bugnuts , and just when we think that she actually is only bananas, we see the kid's creepy demon eyes. Booooyah! (Whether she'll admit it or not, Charlize Theron's performance in The Devil's Advocate had to have been influenced by Mia's dementia)

Then, of course, there's The Fog, written and directed by John Carpenter. It's one motherfucking scary ass, clench your hands in terror, cover your eyes up and peek through the cracks movie. I saw this one only once, when I was a babe in swaddling clothes. The only thing that I remember from this charming flick is the sound of big metal coins rolling on the floor every time one of the stupid townsfolk got their heads chopped off by whatever was coming out of the fog. It's also got Adrienne Barbeaux in it. The sound of decapitations in this movie has stuck with me to this day, and whenever I imagine cutting someone's head off, that is the sound I hear.

So, in short, while I am perpetually incapable of turning down a chance to see a scary movie in the theater (Exorcist: The Beginning, a movie so plagued with troubles that the one in theaters is not the one originally shot all the way to completion, and The Forgotten, an extended and limp-dick rip-off of a stolen first season X-Files episode are two notable examples), 21st century horror movies simply do not have the nuts they once did. There are good scary movies out there, but in the Rogers/Blockbuster Combine Consortium Genre Labeling System, these horror films are now classified as Suspense movies. Which is fine by me, 'cuz where I live, I can grab a copy of The Dead Zone starring ever creepy Chris Walken, turn around to pick up Return of the Living Dead Part III and make my way home for a night of murderous intentions. Granted, my choice in movie rentals generally forces the teenager renting me the movies to keep more than arm's reach away, but fuck that little fucker. If he's not careful, I'll poke him in the eye with my video rental card.

Hail, Hail, The Damned Gang's All Here!

2004-10-16T15:41:00.000-07:00

As promised, here is the lowdown on the geeksquad I've got working with me. (I am well aware that, as a goober tied into the whole temp agency thing, I also qualify as a geek, but fuck that shit: I am evilmister, and I ain't no geek. Fuckers.)

First, lemme explain the deal. I'm working as low man on the totem, hauling stuff off trucks and taking them to the second level of a major clothing/appliance/knickknack ripoff store; the store itself is undergoing major renovations. While still being open to the public. Yes. Hordes of bluehairs toddle through the store on walkers, gocarts, oxygen masks and whatever else old people need to get mobile while guys like me are roaming the aisles, lugging a thousand pounds worth of countertops on a pallet jack. Them: 52 lbs with walker. Me: 1250 lbs with pallet jack and counters. Which do you think is easier to move out of the way, and which do you think is more destructive to the walls, freshly tiled floors, and newly carpeted merchandise aisles? I am personally responsible for the destruction of no less than two dozen tiles at a hundred bucks a pop and I can count at least four holes I've gouged into new drywall because these old fuckers can't move fast enough to save their lives. It's like they want to die. The job itself is actually pretty fun, considering I've spent the last decade or so fucking around at countertops, dealing with gomers who've got no fucking clue what they want, and are under some sort of Evil Jedi mindfuck because they think that if they yell louder, I will give them what they want. So yeah, I dig being a low-paid chump hauling shit around, because it's got the instant gratification of being able to point to 400 square feet of floor filled with shit that I personally carried around.

So that's the scoop, more or less. Store's open, people are laying tiles, laying carpeting, putting up drywall, installing cabinets and selling over-priced murch to bluehairs and people with more money than sense.

As to the cast and crew, I'll start with the main men: The Guys in Hard Hats. There are three of them. First, and almost always around, is Round Hal. His name is Hal, and he's round. He's also only about five and a half feet tall. He's the go-between for us, The Retards Who Can't Keep Jobs, the truck drivers, and the folks in charge of specific departments in the chain. He is supposed to have a map of the layout, with indications as to where everything goes, maps of what everything looks like, and where to find it all. He doesn't have the map on him all the time. He doesn't have the diagrams of the individual units either. He basically points to an empty spot and says "Put stuff there." We do so, until the Spastic Contractors get their collective panties in bunches and we are forced to move said stuff somewhere else. This happens between three and five times a day. Next comes Bill. Bill is almost never around, but is the one who is actually in charge. He is also supposed to possess maps and diagrams, and is also a go-between. When he is around, he assists in the off loading of trucks, which is quite nice. But, he is almost never there, hiding, I suspect from the eighty-three million people who want to ask him questions, as he also seems to be in charge of everything that is actually happening every minute of the day. I personally know that he has stayed late every night to move shit around, which is commendible, if not grounds for immediate psychiatric evaluation. Last is Jack, who I surmise is the capo di tutti capo. I've seen him three times, and each time, it's like I'm seeing some kind of specter. He sticks around long enough to make me feel like I should be doing something else, and then leaves. None of them are around long enough to tell us what to do for more than 2 or 3 hours at a shake. When you are dealing with The Retards, this is kind of dangerous: unsupervised, we will sit around swapping bullshit stories and ogling the female employees to the point of harassment. These are my bosses, and I can't really fault them for not sticking around. They have a lot more to deal with than a bunch of Retards. They are building an entire store, for chrissakes, around a store that is still open.

The first in the Retard Squad is Oldie. I call him Oldie because well, he's old, coming close to mid-fifties if his gray hair and wrinkles are any indication; if it was legal, I'd cut him open through the middle and count his rings. Brian is always early. I shit you not. I show up at quarter to the hour to settle in, and this old fucker is already working. Since he is employed by a temp agency, I am forced to state that he is an alcoholic murderer who can't keep from drinking and killing, which is why he can't hold on to a job. His work ethics are that good. He avoids the rest of The Retards by eating his lunch in his car. I wish I had a car to hide in.

Next up is MiniSpaniard. As you guessed, he's short, he's Spanish and he's one baaaaaaaad motherf-Shut Your Mouth. Not a bad guy, all in all, willing to work, do his shit, and be amiable about it. He has done time, and he's only in his early twenties, and is undoubtedly working as a Retard because of his criminal record, which probably isn't that bad of a record. Probably only possession with intent to sell, if his mysteriously glassy red eyes after prolonged bathroom breaks are any indication of his ... habits. I like MiniSpaniard. He's OK in my book, but if the Man comes looking for the Dealer, I will kick his punk ass to the ground and claim my reward.

Then there's "Look at that Sexy bitch!" He has no concept of decorum. Granted, he's a Retard like the rest of us, but even a twitter-pated gomer should be able to realize that in a crowded shopping mall, you don't shout shit at the top of your lungs, especially if it's "Look at those tits!" or "I never liked Sushi before, but slide me some a' that raw tuna! You see her ass, dude?". It is especially hilarious in the lunch room, because it is full of magazines like World Weekly Star, Style, People, Life and any other magazine that shows chicks like Paris Hilton, The Olsen Twins and Lindsay Lohan in various styles of undress. The comments range from 'She's a dirty skank whore, but I'd for sure fuck her in the ass' to 'This sexy bitch would suck it out of my rod like there was no tomorrow'. This is in the lunch room, which has other people eating lunch. The place we're working has a large number of female employees. 'Nuff said? He also has done small time, and also suffers from mysterious doses of red-eye. I also like this guy, on account of he's on his way to becoming an EvilMister clone.

Next up is Young Gomer with Ass Outside of Pants. He's maybe four and a half years old, if the soft headed look he has is any pointer to his age. I haven't seen him do much but look utterly confused and lost, and sometimes afraid, like he's maybe forgotten to take his rage suppressant pills. He hardly ever talks, but this is probably just to hide the fact that he has a third grade vocabulary. Sadly, I don't know much about Young Gomer, except for his allergies to work and fear of anything resembling exertion. As such, I can't really say if I like him or not, and I especially can't make too much fun of him. Oh yeah, I forgot. He really does let his pants ride his ass. I can't figure out how he's managed not to kill himself on the worksite yet, cuz with his Stanfield Plaids showing, the hem of his pantlegs are somewhere around the tips of his shoes. It's amazing, and if Roy doesn't make it back to showbiz, I'm certain Siegfried'll find a replacement.

My absolute favorite is Fucktard with Hat. Fucktard is, without a doubt, every employer's nightmare. He's a tub of goo (so'm I, but hey, kiss my ass. You want to read me being insulted, check elsewhere) who alternates between furious bursts of utter outrage at the slapdashery of the assignment to weird stories of girlfriend/fiancee and her cat. He is also a master at foremanship, and can tell any one of us who pauses for more than two seconds exactly how the job should have been set up. This also makes him an expert in architecture (designing the building), a mastercraftsman (designing the counters and other utilities we are offloading, specifically in terms of durability and lightness), a god at shipping and receiving (coordinating the shipping of merchandise from back East to our location to avoid anything and everything that could possibly inconvenience him) and a Grandmaster of employee relations (keeping everyone from killing him stone cold dead). It is hard for me to understand why he's working in a temp agency, he's so skilled. He has told me stories about getting in the face of employers, about the office cunt who manipulated an entire office full of people into getting him fired, about the guy on the shift before him who never did anything and made it look like he was in the wrong. It's quite a litany, and in all of them, he is never, ever, never wrong. The best time was when, with two hours left on our shift, he told us he remembered exactly where Round Hal wanted us to put the counters we were offloading, and that was what we did. An hour into the offloading, Round Hal showed up and told us that we were putting them in the wrong spot. Under his breath, Fucktard told me that he was only getting 9.50$ an hour and shouldn't be expected to know where anything goes. Come on, Fucktard! If yer gonna step up and try to take the reigns, admit when you've fucked everyone in the ass. We spent another forty-five minutes moving everything to where it belonged, and then were made to feel like Retards Magna Cum Laude because we didn't stay late to finish unloading. Hey, I may be a Retard, but I'm no sucker. I later found out that Look at that Sexy Bitch told Round Hal that it was all Fucktard's fault. Yay, Look!

The Spastic Contractors can be broken into a three distinct sub-groups. There are the Tempermental Carpet-Layers, who really take carpeting too seriously. As they spend most of the time on their knees, crawling around and inhaling the fumes from potentially poisonous carpet glue, I can't blame them from being a little hacked off when Look at that Sexy Bitch uses a pallet jack as a scooter across freshly laid carpet (he does this on the tiles only, now, because of the better speed). Next on the block are the Oblivious Electricians. They are found in two states; carrying ladders around and looking significantly at random spots on ceilings, walls, floors and drywall columns, or standing on the ladders, poking their fingers into snarls of wiring and muttering about covalences and other arcane shit. Since the Oblivious Electricians take up little space and don't get in our way, it's really hard to piss one of them off, although allowing a pallet jack full of odd-sized pallets to grab hold of a) a ladder, b) the extension cord, or c) their tools is one motherfuck of a good way to do it. Finally are the Cranky Drywallers. They are cranky for a fuckload of reasons. As most of us know, drywall is the least durable substance on the planet. You can stick your fingers through it if you try hard enough. With the deadly combination of the Retards and their fucked-up pallet jacks, the Tempermental Carpet-Layers, and the non-threatening Carpenters moving shit all over everywhere and digging massive gouges out of freshly hung drywall, they have no hope of ever finishing their job. Especially when they read their own blueprints wrong and have to take down walls they've only just put up. That shit is fuckin' funny to me, which is why I'll probably remain a Retard forever.

I gave the Mentally Unstable Tilers their own grouping, because they are the unhappiest group of people I've ever met next to my parents, who blame me for everything from the Black Plague to starving children. Their job is not a happy one. They can only tile before carpet is laid, because it's a fundamentally messy job. Since this is the case, they cannot protect the edges of tiles. This is ceramic tile, which, if anyone knows, can and will shatter like potato chips if given half a chance, and when the Retards are trying to ram a pallet jack carrying a thousand pound load over the small difference between concrete floor and tiles, you can only expect the obvious. The only thing harder than tiling is untiling, cuz then you run the risk of breaking other tiles. Needless to say, they hate the Retards, who are responsible for at least 90% of the broken tiles. There was also an incident involving Fucktard with Hat and a pallet jack, which I will cover now: equipmet like pallet jacks, dollies, and tools designed to make lives easier are very much in demand. They will disappear quicker than a bag of M&M's near a fat kid. Consequently, at least two of the Retards are permanently on the look-out for this kind of shit. Fucktard found an unused pallet jack, purportedly asked a number of different people if it was theirs, and allegedly got told 'take it' every time. We loaded this fucker up good and proper. with something like 3000 lbs of uber-heavy shit that took us a good half-hour to manhandle into place so it wouldn't fall off and squash a bluehair bargain hunter. At the freight elevator, five Mentally Unstable Tilers show up, demanding the return of their pallet jack. I wasn't paying any attention of this, 'cuz I was playing with the freight elevator buttons and closed the doors right on their faces, which made me some kind of hero; I looked like King Cock in a Cockfight. Upstairs, the Tilers had somehow managed to warp time and space to get ahead of us, telling us once again the pallet jack was theirs. I had the feeling they wanted us to drop our shit right there in Men's shoes so they could move their own shit. All this time, Fucktard is ragging on about how he asked everyone in sight if he could use it, which is about as likely as men landing on the sun. The lead Tiler has decided that I am the ringleader of this merry band of Retards on account of my wicked burn with the freight doors, and looks like he really wants to hit me with something, but I persevere stoically. Five of the Retards are now lugging this monster of counters through the aisles (Oldie is downstairs, happy as a clam and busy as a beaver) with a Mentally Unstable Tiler escort, arguing loudly over ownership of a pallet jack clearly emblazoned with the name of the company I work for on the sides. The Mentally Unstable Tilers followed us all the way across the second floor to make sure, I guess, that we didn't, oh, I don't know, run off with the fucking thing. A pallet jack in itself weighs at least five hundred pounds, is made of solid metal, and is about as ergonimically designed as those eighty-thousand pound television sets from the 70's. Fucktard has continued on with his rant of deflection, adding on the fact that he is only paid $9.50 an hour, and shouldn't have to deal with this kind of fucking shit, if these fuckers could get their act together, then his life would be so much easier. Or, if he was in charge, things would've never gotten this way in the first place.

And that, so far, is my life!!

Heads Up!

2004-10-14T18:44:00.000-07:00

For those of you who follow the exploits of my steadily growing dementia, I will do a good post on the weekend. I will chronicle the exploits of my new workmates who have also joined the Express Personnel camp: Fucktard with Hat, Young Gomer with Ass Outside of Pants, MiniSpaniard, "Look at that sexy bitch", and Oldie. The cast and crew of my life also includes The Guys in Hardhats (our bosses who're s'posed to tell us where shit goes), the Spastic Contractors and the Mentally Unstable Tilers. Sadly, none of them are musical groups, but real live people.

'Til then, superfriends:

"Excelsior!!!"

I am become Jehannum, Destroyer of Prime-Time Television

2004-10-13T18:27:00.000-07:00

It is a very fair and accurate statement to say that I watch television. A lot of it. This increases exponentially the longer I am unemployed, but it is a fact that, even when working, I watch a lot of television. Some people drink, some people smoke a little stikky ikky. Hell, some people drill holes in the skulls of other people to get a little rec-time in before dropping some zzz's. I watch the toob.

I dig the usual fare, of course, but I am a whore of Babylon when it comes to new programming. I love that shit. I eat it up with a spoon.

Awhile back, though, I noticed something.

If I make a point of watching a new show, it vanishes off the face of the earth.

What's my proof??

Angel (WB)
Jake 2.0 (UPN)
L.A. Dragnet (ABC)
Wonderfalls (FOX)
Firefly (FOX)
Tru Calling (FOX)

There are more, of course, but these are the ones in the last year. I could go back, explain that I and I alone am repsonsible for the cancellation of such witty gems as The Family Guy (although it's coming Ba-a-a-a-a-a-a-ack!!) and Futurama, but that is a guilt and shame I carry with me all day long. I ask that you refrain from hatemail, because I'm already wearing a horesehair t-shirt and I flagellate myself frequently.

What don't I watch?? Reality television. What has spawned like virii across the universe, plaguing mankind and destroying the world? Reality Television. I won't be taking any bullets for the team, though. Not on your fucking life. That shit is fucking evil on a level that I can't even handle. I've seen good friends fall by the wayside, sucked into the world of out-of-work actors hamming it up on Muchmore Music, idiots swapping their wives for shits and giggles, and, let us not forget the show 'let's completely remodel your entire body with enough fucking plastic surgery for an entire squad of supermodels'. I won't do it. Man has unleashed poison on the world, and I revel in it!!!

Makin it Work!

2004-10-12T19:42:00.000-07:00

Ahhh. The chance to pick up some ducats, cheddah, scratch, scrip, moolah, greenbacks, dolla-dolla bill ya'all. And I don't have to do anything illegal with bodies or creepy with dolls. Awhile back I joined this temp agency deal. Y'know, they call you up and they say 'hey, we want you should go to this place and do this thing'. Surprisingly, it's not a scam, and is pretty much like all those temp agency dealies you see on tv and in the movies, except without someone mistakenly winding up working for the CIA or something. But that'd be cool.

What am I doing? Moving things around a warehouse, as I understand it. Chance are I'll hate it a lot, but I won't have to talk to customers and I won'thave to count money or any weird shit like that. Plus, unless I really, really suck and kill someone on accident, it could last a couple weeks, which is good. I've been watching the cash in my account dwindle, and I go mental.

Yay for me.

Free Furniture? No fucking thanks!

2004-10-12T13:30:00.000-07:00

I've been renting a storage locker to house, well, my house, since I broke free from the Evil Woman Whom Shall Remain Nameless (stories to follow one day or another). 's got the usual loveseat, couch, entertainment stand, alla that shit. Plus a seemingly never-ending supply of tables and weird-ass shit I inherited from my crackpot parents. Being the unemployed beehotch that I am, I'm starting to count the pennies I got, so you all can imagine how reluctant I am to pay more money to store shit I never really wanted in the first place. (3 years, at $109 bucks a month, to keep crap that belonged to the dearly departed. Shit. Makes me cringe.)

There are all kinds of places that you can give your crappy shit to for free. Hell, they'll even come to your door. There's Big Brothers, who hassle you on the phone all the time. There's the Canadian Diabetic Foundation, which surprised me, on account of the fact that I didn't know diabetics have a tendency to need furniture. There's Sally Ann (i never understood that nickname). Now, these places all work on the same sort of deal; they do pickups in a specific area on a certain day. I knew that. I have only one small, presumably easy-to-deal-with problem: I don't have a truck, and even if I did, I really couldn't be bothered to move the furniture from A to B so someone else can pick it up and move it to C. In my mind, A to C is the way to go.

Let me reiterate something here. I have, in storage, enough furniture for an entire family. They could furnish their entire home. The shit even matches. It's color fucking coordinated and quite nice. But, since I'm a stay-at-home fucktard, and am likely to be one for some time to come, I neither need nor really want that shit. I heard these kinds of things :

"Oh, we don't pick up from storage facilities. Strictly residential."
"That's out of our range for pickups."
"Stop calling my house, I got the restraining order, you peeping tom."

IT'S FREE STUFF FOR PEOLPLE WHO DON'T HAVE STUFF! COME ON, YOU FUCKING RAPINE BASTARDS! GET IT TOGETHER! You call my house nonstop for three goddamned months asking if I have shit I want to get rid of, and the moment I do, you refuse to go slightly out of your way to get it. Man, if I was a furniture-less gomer, and I found out that you weren't picking up shit for me just because you don't wanna guarantee a pickup time on account of the guys you got driving your trucks need to drop by their parole officers all the time, I would sure be pissed off. FUCK!

That being said, anyone who needs furniture and has a truck, let me know. Shit's yours.

Thanksgiving, my ASS

2004-10-10T11:54:00.000-07:00

As you might be able to tell, I'm not what you'd call a family-oriented fella. Now, don't get me wrong; family's family, and I'd help 'em bury a body if push came to axe in the middle of someone's forehead. My ... distaste for familial duties goes through the roof quicker than a junkie through a dimebag on holidays. Even faux holidays like Thanksgiving.

I love the food. I love the pies. I dig the hors doovers my mom pops out like clockwork on all major food-gorging holidays (fancy cheeses, little chunks of meat on crackers, oh yeah, diggit) that sort of thing. I hate parades like no one's business. I hate them. On days during which there is very little to watch on television to begin with, what few shows I can stomach are pre-empted by a bunch of weirdos dressed up like other kinds of weirdos riding around on lawnmowers converted into giant mobile flower arrangements.

But wait. I haven't got to the best part. My aunt comes to visit.

We hate each other. It was mutual, it was at first sight, and it will eventually escalate into a Defcon One situation complete with Hazmat guys, National guards, at least one exorcist and most likely a visit from PETA. I don't know why she hates me, 'cuz I'm adorable.

My aunt, though, is another category. She spent something like 15 years in a camp that could only be described as Deliverance-esque. There was no contact with the outside world unless you wanted to hike/boat/whatever the fuck other modes of transportationa to the nearest town, which was like, forty-five miles away. And then all you got was a radiophone. She slept, I shit you not, with a loaded shotgun beside her bed. I don't know what it was she did in this place, although I guess it was some kind of logging/mining/disposing of corpses. In a place like this, and I know this from firsthand reports, the only thing to do is drink. It has affected her brain. She is crazy. She has a voice that can cut through solid walls like a lightsaber through flesh. My mother calls her 'certainly outspoken'. I call her 'fundamentally deranged'. The last time her and my mother went out, they were off the radar for about sixteen hours, and had narrowly avoided getting arrested twice. One of them was for Drunk and Disorderly, and the other was for causing a scene in a bar. My aunt was looking for her umbrella.

I think that's enough reason to dislike my aunt, and to dislike the holidays that bring her sniffing to my door for food, don't you??

Damn You, BestBuy, and your horrid psychological profiling, too!

2004-10-08T15:16:00.000-07:00

As we all know, I'm an unemployed punk. Yeah, I sit around, geeking on the computer, downloading things I shouldn't download, and getting way too familiar with the 'music' rotation on MuchMusic. The kids at my local Starbucks have got my name, drink, and favorite snackables locked into memory. (MY drink cup gets labeled with my name... how about yours?)

BestBuy bought out Futureshop some time ago. Two friends of mine work for 'em now, and one other used to, so I thought, fuck, man, those guys are gomers just like me, so shit, why not? They got a website* for it and everything, just the sort of job application process that mentally famished shut-ins like me need!

It started out innocuously enough. The typical shit like name, phone number, address, jazz like that. I'm a seasoned pro, and my Firefox settings have got all that info, so most of the time, all I have to do is push a single letter, then enter. Yep. I'm all computer-y like that. Who knew that George Jetson would ever have to worry about his job?

But then, it went weird. Well, not weird, but, um ... nope, it was downright odd. It started asking me questions (and I was wearing my tinfoil ensemble, so it wasn't aliens) like 'do most people lie to get ahead' or 'if an employee gets into a shouting match with a customer, is it right to fire him' and 'have you ever thought about stealing from a company?'. It was a half an hour long. I was weeping and crying at the end of it. I've got a high IQ (140 for the geeks who take those tests, like it'll prove anything), so I pretty much know how to answer these questions so that I'll seem good, but not too good. I've done them before, for when I got roped into this HRDC 'Job Education Program', and it came out just like I wanted.

I wasted a half an hour of my life, at the end of which, I learned that I 'didn't possess the necessary skills and qualifications to meet the requirments for the position I was looking at'. Or something like that. I mean, I've bombed in interviews before. Royally. If there was a course I could teach on how to make sure you never got the job, I'd be the dood to sit there, stroke his goatee knowingly. I'm George Friggin' Costanza over here.

Maybe I should've lied when it asked me if I've ever lied to an employer before.

I'll never know now, because I'm pretty sure that in the interests of Provincial Security, they'll be forwarding my information and test results off to CSIS. After that, it'll be all downhill.

*be warned: the supposedly super-tech world of Bestbuy doesn't design their websites with Firefox users in mind. I had to use Internet Explorer, for fuck's sake. I should've known bettter.*