Date Archives November 2010

Evil will always prevail, because good is dumb.

Attention citizens: there is now a group of masked superheroes fighting crime in Seattle.

If ‘masked’ includes ski masks and ‘fighting crime’ includes taking golf clubs away from raving homeless men and then not being able to file a complaint because they don’t want to reveal their secret identities counts as acts of heroism, that is. They have their girlfriend drive their godmother’s Kia Fate around, looking for evildoers. One can only imagine that they meet back for cheetos, cocoa, and some wicked-tough rounds of Mario Kart at the Rain City Superhero Movement’s headquarters, aka, grandma’s basement. The names of these heroes? Thorn, Buster Doe, Green Reaper, Gemini, No Name, Catastrophe, Thunder 88, Penelope and Phoenix Jones the Guardian of Seattle.

However, what have we learned from movies, television, and comic books? Superheroes can’t just fight regular homeless-man-based crime. They need supervillains. I hereby proclaim myself one of those supervillains: Sassmachine, evildoer extraordinaire! My evil powers include aggressive driving and making inappropriate jokes that make everyone laugh and feel bad for doing so immediately afterward. I embody anti-Seattle. I won’t let you merge! I won’t wave you through a four way stop! If you’re an Ave rat taking your sweet time sauntering across the street when you KNOW I’m waiting to turn, I’ll mow your hipster ass down and snap you like a goddamned twig with my Ford Taurus assault vehicle! To demonstrate my total disregard for the rules of the road, I have been driving with one burned-out headlight for MONTHS and I will continue to do so–take that, heroes!

My partner in crime will be Waste Stream, a domestic eco-terrorist. He will perform his evil by scattering tracts hailing our evil deeds and talking smack about the superheroes, printed on virgin paper that has been laminated so it will never biodegrade, accompanied by the occasional half-eaten food product or lead-filled piece of broken electronics.

At this time, we also retain one executive villain assistant, who shouts obscenities at passers-by, points and laughs at the attempts of the heroes, and makes us coffee.

Pure. Evil.

We are accepting further applications for our League of Petty Evil, so if you would like to join, please let us know your name and a little bit about you to make sure your type of evil really meshes with the group. A picture would also help us further determine if you are League of Petty Evil material. As you can see, we have a pretty sweet lair going already.

150570_465319603939_1881689_n Coming soon: mini-fridge. Of evil.

To further demonstrate my qualifications as an evildoer, here I am on a chart among other known evildoers:

Once you’re on a chart, you know you’ve made the big leagues.

My first evil task was to set up a facebook page announcing my evil presence, and ‘liking’ the Rain City Superhero Movement. I’m sure it will only be a matter of time before I am both hated and feared.

SnOMG! The individual doesn’t matter. It was a team effort, and I came up with the team idea–ME!

Why yes, that *is* hail bouncing off my office window!

Today, it snowed and then hailed and then snowed some more. Everyone else in the office ended up going home early–my boss offered to let me go saying that he didn’t want me to get trapped there, but the project manager had demanded package tracking numbers which I could not obtain until the late afternoon, so I stayed. At the end of the workday, I scraped the car clean, popped on the heater, drove two blocks, and my jaw dropped. Cars were way the hell backed up, and I prepped myself for a hell of a long ride home, even though I live quite close to work. As soon as I pulled onto a more main road, however, I realized there was a problem…the snow on the roads had melted a bit and re-frozen into a sheet of ice. As I made this realization, the car in front of me fishtailed, hit the curb, and then when it backed up, it nearly hit me.

I made an executive decision: turn into the next parking lot, drive back to work, leave the car there overnight and walk home.

This was the correct decision to make. I would have sat in traffic for a very long time, evidenced by me passing the car that had nearly hit me still sitting almost in the exact same spot in the time it took me to drive back to the office and then walk back. As I made my way up the hill over highway 167, I saw a group of three men helping to push cars up the hill, as so many were ineffectively spinning their tires. I decided to lend a hand, and spent the next hour and a half pushing cars, vans, and trucks up the hill, and even a goddamned semi out of an intersection. We also cleared a path for an ambulance! Along the way, we picked up more people–one woman who had just gotten back from Montana had a bunch of road salt in her truck so she stopped and started spreading salt out on the road in front of stuck vehicles. Another man showed up with a shovel and started digging people out. People in stalled cars further back hopped out and helped people who were farther up the hill. It felt really good to help these people out and be part of the solution, especially since I know I would have been part of the problem had I elected to continue the drive home.

After a while, traffic started to clear, and people were no longer having issues getting up that section of road, so I walked with the guys back up the hill–we parted ways at the hospital, as one of their wives was in the process of having a baby. I continued on my merry way home, simultaneously warm from all the running and pushing and yet cold to the bone, and still ended up pushing another car out of the hospital employee parking lot. I don’t envy those who have to drive anywhere right now, and tomorrow morning after the roads are freshly frozen again, I will envy people less, if that’s even possible. At least in the midwest when it’s so cold that cows freeze into solid blocks and mastadons start thinking about making a comeback, most everything is flat so you don’t have to contend with hills coated in sheets of ice.

This is going to be a nasty winter, and I’m not looking forward to it. If the roads are still this bad on Thursday and Friday, all signs point to me having Thanksgiving dinner at Shari’s diner instead of with friends, which is a thought that defies physics by both sucking and blowing at the same time. But I am thankful to have a little faith back in the general good nature of humanity and willingness to band together to help each other out.

A day with just the right amount of junk.

wedslabyrinth2

 

Yesterday, confusednazgul hosted a Labyrinth-watching party, to which I invited myself–a fairly bold/rude move on my part, given that we’d never actually met in person before. I was fairly certain, however, that she wasn’t going to up and murder me in a back room, and also I was promised crabcakes. Crabcakes and David Bowie Glitterjunk may well be THE enticement required to lure me just about anywhere.

One of my more useful not-so-superpowers is to be able to walk into a room of strangers and be able to strike up conversations, so while I didn’t know anyone going in, by the end of the day, we were cracking jokes and having impromptu raise-the-roof dance parties in the middle of the swankiest apartment building I’ve ever had the pleasure of seeing firsthand. It was seriously swanky. In addition to the movie theater, it had a fancy coffee bar, media center, gathering room with a ridiculous amount of TVs, a central wine-storage location…even the bathroom mirrors had embedded TVs, in case you couldn’t bear to be away from one for a moment while washing your hands! Just to put it in perspective, in MY apartment complex, people keep fucking up the hot tub by adding soap and one of my neighbors decorated for Thanksgiving by writing ‘Happy Thanksgiving’ backward on her window in what appeared to be black magic marker. (Christ, I wish I had gotten a picture of it before it disappeared later that afternoon!)

After the movie, we took the party elevator up to the roof, petted the world’s tiniest puppy, and peered in the window of a four million dollar condo to watch a man playing World of Warcraft sans pants and debate about whether or not he was wearing boxers. After we each took a turn peeping at him with binoculars (hot DAMN one of these girls was a proper girlscout), we came to the general conclusion that some form of brief was present, though one partygoer insisted that she did indeed see some junk when he leaned back to stretch…so, in the fashion of the Tootsie Pop Mystery, we may never know.