Sloth

RANT MODE ON.

This past month has been like a kidney stone, in that it has been something painful I must pass in order to get to the good stuff. First of all, I had to set my vacation schedule well ahead of time in order to scam the GTA IV release week. Then, about four weeks ago, I suddenly turned into Reverse Computer Midas, in that every computer I touched or was even around decided to shit itself broken. My computer at home was the big culprit, but this also extended to some weird server nonsense at work and the big-ass plotter, which has never really worked and finally decided to die.

So, fine. These things come in waves anyway, and I hadn’t had any major computer-related anguish in a while, so I was due. All of that got sorted out, and I was in the home stretch to my vacation of violent gameplay.

Then, as I mentioned, on Saturday my Xbox fucking dies. Off to Best Buy to get another. I thought: OK, well, that’s it. Nothing else can go wrong.

Sunday: The calm before the storm.

Monday: The power goes out on our block. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, except we had a dude who was supposed to come over to fix the tiles in our bathroom shower, but with the power outage that seemed questionable. The outage woke me up at 6:30am because this building apparently has a generator the size of Rhode Island that operates at about 1.5 gazillion decibels, which was outside under our apartment. Six floors down, and it still sounded like a jet crashing into the side of a fireworks factory. This also awoke the Shorty, who unbelievably is even worse than me when it comes to unwelcome awakenings. So we wandered around the apartment like kranky Krakens until, at about 8am, the power went back on. Hurray!

OK, I figured. That’s REALLY it. I mean, Xbox dying and power outage? What else could possibly go wrong between now and game-release day on Tuesday?

So today, like a geek on Christmas, I wake up early and count the minutes until HMV opens. Why HMV? Because it’s a quick bike ride through the park from my apartment, and they were taking pre-orders. So off I go at 10am, happy in the knowledge that I was finally getting my game and my vacation could truly begin.

Except – funny story – HMV DIDN’T FUCKING HAVE ANY BECAUSE THE SHIPMENT NEVER ARRIVED. Oh, they had plenty for the PS3, but who the fuck owns a PS3? I’ll tell you who: COMMUNISTS. GODLESS MOTHERFUCKING COMMUNISTS WHO WANT TO RAPE BABIES WHILE DRINKING THE BLOOD OF VIRGIN NUNS. So no thank you, Mr. HMV worker, I do NOT want a baby-raping nun-blood-drinking commie fucking copy of GTA IV for a system I don’t even fucking have. If you didn’t have any in stock, WHY WERE YOU EVEN TAKING PRE-ORDERS????

OK, so, fine. I got on Wheels, my trusty bike, and pumped my fat legs over to Zellers. WHERE THEY ALSO DID NOT RECEIVE AN ORDER.

Let’s pause for a moment. One thing going wrong, that’s bad. Two: chalk it up to coincidence. Three? Clearly, God is fucking with me. I am, however, used to it and quite frankly when God tries to fuck with me I just get mad.

So I bike over to a bus stop and truck up to Conestoga Mall to the EB there, where OF COURSE they have approximately FIVE BILLION COPIES of GTA IV just waiting for me to lovingly fork over some green. Which I did, and hightailed it back to my place, and finally – FINALLY – started playing it.

And guess what? IT WAS WORTH IT, because the game is totally fucking amazing. Like Game Of The Year amazing. I pulled myself away from it long enough to write this because all I’m doing for the rest of the week is playing it.

So you could say, I’m sort of like Hercules (you were wondering how the title tied into this post, weren’t you?) going through the twelve trials of shovelling horse shit out of the Titan stables or whatever. I mentioned this to Shorty and she said, “Yes. You’re exactly like Hercules.”

She was probably making fun of me, but who cares. I have Grand Theft Auto IV to keep me company now.

RANT MODE OFF.