I bought UT2004 the day before yesterday and played with it just a little bit. Yesterday I eschewed more responsible uses of my time to explore it a little further. The usual gaming sources have been full of praise for this latest addition to the Unreal franchise, but then, they’re usually full of praise for almost any turd that slides out of the glossy cardboard sphincters of major game publishers. I have been playing a lot of U2XMP, the wonderful add-on to the justafiably maligned Unreal II single-player game. If you stayed away from Unreal II because you heard it sucked, you owe it to yourself to buy the Special Edition that ships with the XMP add-on, or fish a copy of Unreal II out of the bargain bin and download the free multiplayer mod. It’s well worth it.

I’ve been very impressed with U2XMP’s gameplay, and running around in tanks or a three-man death machine is a lot of fun.

UT2004 is fantastic. The maps are all polished, and I’m really, really glad I bought this Radeon 9800 card. I’m sure my venerable GeForce3 would have turned it into a slideshow. While the game does retain a lot of the twitchiness of the UT line- you know, the double-side-jump-diagonal-dodge moves that baffle geezers like me, and DON’T get me started on how much I hate the Translocator, the gameplay is solid, and the vehicles rock. The Onslaught mode is definitely deserving of the kudos it’s received. I’ve always loved area control games.

Anyway, I want to urge all my readers (yes, both of you) to purchase UT2004, so that I may show them what coccydynia is all about.

I’ll tell you, getting up at 2:30 every morning is bad enough, but getting up at 2:30 in the morning tired sucks even more. This is more than just not being fully cognizant of one’s surroundings at a time when even most insects have the good sense to stay under their rocks. No, this is stumbling like a drunk for a good twenty minutes tired.

I’m glad I don’t have hemorrhoids, because then I’d probably be running the attendant risk of brushing my teeth with ass cream every morning as I fumbled through the drawer of human condiments in the bathroom. Let me warn all and sundry right now that neither bacitracin nor zinc oxide make for savory dentifrices.

Thankfully, I am generally awake once I get into my car. If I’m not, at least the streets in my subdivision are lined with many soft buffers like plastic trash bins, fiberglass bumpers, and mailboxes that guide me, nudging my chariot ever so gently towards the interstate. Once on the dark, dark freeway, I have to be awake and alert. The last time I wasn’t aware of my surroundings, I was actually quite awake, listening either to music, or the mellifluous voice of Bob Edwards on NPR, and I got lit up by The Man, who was in no mood to split hairs about, or provide any slack, regarding the extra 22mph propelling me down the road. That was fun.

It is interesting, though, driving around at 3:00 every morning. Little things to see. The guy at the end of the street who always has his upstairs bedroom TV on, but no lights. The people a couple blocks over who I see playing billiards in an always brilliantly-lit rec room of sorts on their second floor about every other day. The cop who’s always driving past this one particular gas station just as I turn my last corner before the freeway.

Interesting, to be sure, observing this confraternity of the wee hours, but it still SUCKS to drag myself out of bed that early.

Hard work pays off in corporate America! That, and the skillful disguise of cynicism and sloth as earnest toil and quick wits.

Good news, anyway, so far. I got promoted. Kinda more or less. I can’t get into the gory details of how I’m "kinda" promoted, seeing as how some of my colleagues may very well be reading this blog, and that would be poor form indeed. Suffice it to say that I’m pretty much off the phone, and have had an upgrade in status. Yea, I have been elevated again above my peers. First from contracted cannon-fodder to a real employee, and now into the second tier of my department. Look upon me, ye lowly, and despair!

What’s interested me about the whole thing, though, is the bureaucratic process behind the move. I’m used to much smaller organizations, where things happen because people figure it’s a good idea to do whatever it is they’ve a hankerin’ to do, and they happen right then, on the spot. In this large corporation, there are more or less ossified processes that must be followed. All the right forms must flow through the right hands and departments, all the correct runes must be struck; the requisite seals, blessings, signatures, and nodding of heads in Cthonian kaffeeklatsch rituals must take place before the anointment can occur. It’s really a trip.

The downside of all this, of course, is that there’s nothing like an impersonal, massive, bureaucratic process to illustrate one’s place as a nameless, puny cog. It tempers the hubris accompanying the promotion. I suppose that’s a good thing, overall. I’m sure my supervisors would express- or feign- shock and dismay that I would ungratefully paint the company- which prides itself on a worker-friendly look and feel- as impersonal, but the biggest place I’ve ever worked before was only about 80 people strong. To use a hoary old cliché, it was better being a big fish in a small pond.

I may also have the unfettered joy of resentment to deal with, as I suspect that a particular person I work with resents that I was promoted, and they were not. Can’t say for sure, but I think I’m picking up that vibe.That’s a new thing, too. Such fun we get to have when we’re all grown up!

Yep, I lied about posting last Thursday. I tried to stick to that promise, though. My sorry excuse follows.

So out I go to the beautiful coast of Northern California for a few days to soak up the sea air and generally relax in the quiet community of Pacific Grove (minutes away from Pebble Beach, for those of you with golf on the brain. Eat your hearts out). The first couple of days passed pleasantly enough, and it seemed like I was actually going to chalk up one of those rarest of holidays: a restful one.

This, of course, was when the horror began.

It started out innocuously enough; after all, a little sniffle is nothing alarming, and, well, the bathroom window had been open all night, so obviously it’s just a bit of a chill. Nothing to worry about. Nothing, at least, until I awoke with a sputter, and realized that my sinus cavity was a cavity no more. Instead, it had been filled with an obscene gelatinous goo, not unlike the wiggly "chicken Jell-O" that forms at the bottom of the roasting pan overnight when you’re too lazy to wash the dishes from some celebration of gluttony, only more viscous, and not nearly as tasty. I speak from bitter experience.

Its usual companion in crime was also present, the Lump What Don’t Move. You know what I’m talking about. It feels like a garden slug in the back of your throat, just barely outside your gag threshold, never quite reaching it. No amount of swallowing, drinking, or gargling will send it down the pipe to intestinal oblivion, and even the fiercest nasal exhalation- enough to cause seabirds to scatter in terror for miles around, send dogs into whimpering tremors, and the conductors of nearby municipal symphonies to cast sudden, stern glares at their horn section- will not move it one jot.

The last two days of vacation were spent in this state, muddying the otherwise satisfactory delights of not being at work with the omnipresent and terrifying companionship of the wad of nasty glop occupying the front of my head. Even so, this was barely tolerable until the final night, when the denizens of some trailer park were lodged in the neighboring room. Why they were put there I cannot say, because the inn was rather vacant. I also don’t know why the oafish wastrels even decided upon this inn in the first place; they didn’t move from their room once ensconced, and there were much cheaper places to stay to PLAY HAIR METAL ALL NIGHT LONG. What the hell is it with 40-year old people who rent rooms to do this? I resolved then and there to bring a revolver along on every subsequent vacation.

You know how punk-ass kids crank the bass way up in their cars so you can hear the cheap Wal-Mart fiberglass bumper kit rattling loose from their riced-up ‘91 Hyundai Excels in perfect time with the vibration of your fillings? Well, imagine that, only now you’ve got a highly pressurized mass of snot in the front of your head that seems to throb and double its volume on every downbeat, or at least attempt to, within the confines of your skull. Not fun. By the time I clawed my way across the room to open the door and ask them to shut the hell up, the manager had arrived, and convinced them to turn the music down. Until ten minutes after midnight, that is, when somebody decided that the Stryper song, or whatever plays at such an hour, was worthy of further disturbance of the peace. Up went the volume, loud, louder, louder; down came the manager’s heavy footsteps, clomp, clomp, clomp. A few more minutes of scintillating repartee between the manager and the scumbags next door brought the volume back down, and would have brought blissful sleep, but the lump next to my brain continued to pulsate for many hours. Perhaps it was as annoyed as I was to have been woken up, and was taking it out on its host.

I eventually made it back to work, but had to stumble home after half a day, and stayed home on Friday, treating myself to the worst long weekend in recent memory. Things were finally good enough on Monday to risk a return to the living world, where I delighted all and sundry with various awful hacking, retching noises as I gobbed up into my wastebasket, phone reciever, Cup O’ Noodles®, keyboard, and desk drawer. Retreating to the men’s room to engage in a final battle royal with my sinuses, I noticed that the entirety of my forehead -apparently sunburned some five days ago- was peeling, great sheets and ribbons of dead, translucent skin hanging down like the rent sails of a derelict schooner. Quite the dashing visage.

I’m sure all my colleagues are glad to have me back. News of my return seems to have spread quickly, and people I don’t even know are stopping by my cube. Most of them don’t say anything, they just kind of whisper to each other, shoot me a furtive glance, then walk briskly away, but I guess it’s because they know I’m a busy man, back on the job. Yessir. Good to be back.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to empty out my wastebasket.

I get a lot of spam. Happily, most of it goes to the junk folder of the junk Hotmail account I maintain, but every once in a while I peek into that folder and have a look at what’s inside. It’s a good thing that I don’t do it very often, because sometimes that stuff just ticks me off. I don’t mind the “h0rny.m0mZ”, the “V_I_A_G_R_A”, the “ezmortgage-quote jk543ljjkl3jklj4k”, or even the “Re: found your pancreas” stuff. They’re all pretty laughable. Pathetic, really. I mean, what moron is actually going to think a legitimate business offer will be preceded by the subject line “u can refi ur home”?

What I really need is an Explicit Teen Viagra Mortgage, guaranteed to increase the size of my apparently minuscule organ. Either that, or something from our friends in Nigeria. Sadly, I have not yet been blessed with the opportunity to assist in the financial looting of African nations, which happens to have been a particular dream of mine since childhood. But I digress.

No, what really gets my virtual goat is the way some spammers try to drown you in bullshit about how their unsolicited message was requested by you, because you probably once walked down a street that someone’s cousin’s cousin once drove down, and he knows this guy who used to play Quake with that dude down the street who heard about a domain name that started with the same letter that what’s-his-face used to scrawl on antiseptic urinal cakes, and, hell, that’s tantamount to beating on the spammer’s door late at night, begging to perform acts of oral copulation on the spammer for the privilege of getting on the waiting list to receive said messages. There’s something obviously suspicious when the sender spends three-quarters of the message telling you how legitimate it is.

Every once in a while I succumb to the maddening urge to write one of these fools back. Like now. From another, even less-used address. I do this partially to avoid even more spam, and also because I am a craven coward. Well, that, and I heard that the CIA and NSA have commandeered the “e-mail tracker” once rented by Applebee’s, and nobody wants a piece of that action, at least, not until they figure out a way to get Scotch tape to reliably secure the psychically protective aluminum foil helmet and scrotum shields to my body. No, sir.

Anyway, I found a few administrative addresses searching whois databases, and sent the following message to the vile spammers at:

iblins@aol.com, info@mediasoftstudio.com, and mediasoft@onebox.com.

Hi,

You have been sent this message because you sent me spam at another address, one of my affiliates, citing a nonexistent contact with some domain I have never heard of, much less visited, and have therefore given consent to receive this message in return.

Thanks for the worthless fly-by-night offer to receive even more spam about online gambling, but I would prefer to pass, opting instead to seize this opportunity to suggest that you:

• Piss off.
• Die.
• Leave your bloated, rotting corpse to be repeatedly violated by chainsaws.

Note: This is not an unsolicited e-mail, as you have opted in to my shit-list by sending me your stupid waste of time and bandwidth. This, though, is a one-time mailing; if you do not respond to this message with more of your blather, you will never, ever, be subjected to one of these flames again.