I, Omega

Predator Press

[LOBO]

I have concluded that about one in thirty of our population is either a dumb fuck or an asshole.

Does that seem high? Really? Don’t we all tolerate one at our jobs and -rather than rooting out the Evolutionary throwback- rationalize ’There’s one in every workplace?’

I remember going to see “The Devil’s Own” in the theater about ten years ago. I’m not proud –it’s undoubtedly one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. But I fell victim to Hollywood’s big hype about Brad Pitt and Harrison Ford’s big co-screen effort.

There’s roughly thirty people in the theater. And after $10 per ticket, $10 per person for crap food actually valued in pennies, $10 for parking, et cetera, a guy decided to answer his cellphone mid-movie.

People muttered –indeed, even his date seemed aghast- but this only seemed to make him louder.

About ten rows behind him, I began pinging his noggin with ice from my $4 Coke. If your Coke is $4, every piece of ice comes out to about 10¢; still, he pretended to ignore this. And after about $1 worth of improvised ammo did nothing, I just beaned him with the whole cup.

It was spectacular, and people applauded as we slipped out the fire exit.

So due to my 30-to-1 ratio “theory,” I dislike going to the theater: I built a pretty solid home entertainment system to avoid screen talkers and lines and blah blah. And at home I can eat good food, pause the movie to use the bathroom, whatever.

-Assuming I can get the movies.

Blockbuster Video had a pretty good program to facilitate this. For about $20 a month, you can get unlimited movies -like four or five at a time- mailed to your house. And if you return them to a Blockbuster store, you can avoid mail altogether and get a free one on the spot.

But for whatever reason those movies seemed to have a problem disappearing. In the span of 4 months, 4 of the movies returned to the store simply vanished ... and despite protest Blockbuster dinged our credit card an additional $80, thus doubling our membership fees.

So Terri and I went to Netflix, and this went surprisingly well for a time. Firstly the discs seemed to be in better condition overall; we had only one single episode of an unplayable movie whereas with Blockbuster we had dozens.

But more importantly Netflix has an online “Watch Instantly” feature. This to me signals a company that has it’s eye to the future: why mess with postage and discs at all when you can simply stream them legally from home? Sure the selection was pretty crappy, but this could improve over time, right?

Well in October Netflix forced a movie player “upgrade” called Silverlight, and we haven’t been able to finish an online movie since. And despite literally hundreds of easy-to-find comment threads online complaining about Silverlight, Netflix insisted it was our bandwidth -so now we’re going to pay an additional $15 a month to our service provider for the next 2 years.

And this solved nothing.

Now there’s a new little kiosk at our grocery store called Redbox. Good idea. For $1 a day you can get a pretty decent selection of new movies. But the device is slow, and people take forever “browsing.” To simply return a movie I've stood in line for 25 minutes.

This brings us back to dumb fucks and assholes. We’ve all had people cut in front of us in line at convenience stores, right? In Illinois it had happened to me maybe once or twice a year. But in the span of 3 months in California it’s happened to me dozens of times already. Is there a connection? Is this population so docile it’s okay? Is there a significantly higher ratio than 30-to-1 here? I don’t know. But yesterday a Hispanic “gangsta”-lookin punk tried it on me at the Redbox kiosk.

I politely invited him to go fuck himself.

He, eh, “protested,” but as I edged him out of the way with my shoulder I further instructed him to “never ever ever speak to me under any circumstances.”

I then returned my movie. But now surly, I wasn’t in the mood to rent another -this would end up being fortuitous as I would have had to use my traceable credit card. I went and paid cash for my groceries and headed out into the parking lot.

And there he was with two friends, quickly surrounding me on all sides as I exited.

I had half forgotten about the previous altercation and chided myself or not seeing this coming: the gangsta dweeb started to say something I didn’t catch because I was too busy jamming a 2-liter Mountain Dew medicine ball-style into the the solar plexus of another. And as he keeled over wheezing, I pounced the original punk.

I’m not Chuck Norris. This wasn’t like we squared off and started boxing: it was all fistfuls of hair and whatnot until we were on the ground and I was on his shoulders ready to drive his skull into the concrete. The third guy courageously ran off into the store calling for help, and this alarmed me.

Long story short, I just boogied. I’m not going to jail because of a curiously high concentration of dumb fucks and assholes. Groceries lost? $8.06. Waving and beeping at the wanna-be thugs as I drove off? Priceless.

Anyway.

As far as I’m concerned, from here on out I’m sticking it back to Hollywood. Screw every writer, actor, director … hey, do you know what a ‘gaffer’ is? No? Well screw him too. I’m done “playing ball.” While I’ve spent months getting raped by Hollywood distribution deals, unconscionable middle men and souless corporations, the whole time there were numerous online sites that offer high-quality bootleg copies of movies that aren’t even out yet.

So until the multi-billion dollar “Entertainment Industry” gets all this all locked down, I’ll be at home in a big comfy chair with $1.99 box of Orville Redenbacher, twirling the keys to a woefully antiquated and obsolete empire.