These Vagabond Balls Are Longing to Stray

“Update your site or I’ll gut you.”

-Noctivigant, in a voice mail on 10/9/2006

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Things have been uncommonly busy for the past few weeks. I spent a couple of them feverishly negotiating for yet another new job, which took a lot of my time. I spent a lot of evenings in front of Excel, tabulating potential expenses, costs and benefits which need to be taken into account to put forth a reasonable, fair demand. Between that and getting shitfaced and screaming, “I’m gonna ask for a quarter mil so I can finally get my fucking Scorpion rocket launcher! If I had a rocket launcher, things would be DIFFERENT, you bitch!” into the phone at my mom, I just didn’t have time to write.

I didn’t get my quarter million, but thanks to my brilliant negotiating strategy of, “I want my current salary plus an assload of extra money,” I now am in possession of the Filthy Lucre. Which is not a bad thing to have, except it’s making my dad start issuing ridiculous demands, like that I see an investment banker, and register as a Republican. All of which I will get right on, once investing in beer and cigarettes so I die before I have to worry about retirement starts looking like a bad plan, and corn-chuting teenaged boys starts looking like a good one.

Besides, even though I liked the Old New Gig, I won’t miss working in downtown Boston. Walking from North Station to the Financial District every day was good exercise, but I figure buying my way through that gauntlet of derelicts with spare cigarettes was gonna cost me seven thousand dollars by the end of the year.

Besides, my buddy Stench the Wino has gone MIA. He left a couple weeks ago, returning only once in a spiffy new set of cast-off Docker khakis. Unfortunately, these pants were of a light coloration, leading to clearly-visible semen stains, and he was quickly rousted by the law. And I don’t think I should be working in a place so unfriendly to jizz-encrusted pants. And apparently my employers felt the same way; hence the new job.

So I have been celebrating my brief downtime before the new gig starts by playing copious amounts of Major League Baseball 2K6 on the XBox 360. I got it because my buddy Keith has been after me to get a sports game he can play against me online, so it was baseball or nothing. Because while I like watching football, after seven minutes of playing Madden 2007, I discovered I knew NOTHING about it. I always thought a nickel defense was when you flushed your bag down the toilet before the cops busted the door down. My passes get picked off more than a crackhead’s scabs.

Playing video baseball is fun, although I anticipate the the cost of replacing $50 wireless XBox controllers that stop working after a 30 mile-per-hour impact against my wall will cost me around seven thousand dollars by the end of the year.

I play as the Red Sox, you see, which means that my starting pitcher is Curt Schilling. You might remember the pictures of Curt pitching in the 2004 World Series with a bloody sock. This was because he was pitching with an injury so fucking horrific that they had to reassemble his ankle with a medical procedure so completely theoretical that doctors were previously only willing to test it on a dead guy.

The doctors then took leg pieces from selfsame dead guy and stapled them to Curt’s ankle like a seven-year-old with anger management issues trying to get a Luke Skywalker action figure to hold Snake Eyes’s uzi. And then this unholy alliance of living and dead tissue, using only sheer willpower and a weird Jesus fixation to fight the urge to feast upon the brains of the living, pitched like a fucking champion, winning the Sox their first championship since 1918. Because When There Is No More Room In Hell, The Dead Will Sweep The Cardinals.

However, when this iron man pitches for me in the videogame, the moment he becomes the least bit tuckered out, he begins trying to hit the mascot. And the dugout. And Ben Affleck. And possibly me, through the TV screen. Thankfully, he doesn’t do this all the time. Unfortunately, he only does it when there are men on base to advance. I have become convinced that if I could get the resolution on my TV up to 1080 lines, I would be able to see Steinbrenner’s payoff check in Curt’s back pocket.

I shouldn’t be angry with virtual Curt, since Real Curt clearly left pieces of himself on the field in 2004 to win Boston the World Series. But every time Virtual Curt hits 49% stamina and uses my orders to throw a straight fastball down the center of the plate as an excuse to wing the ball at the third base coach, I would happily sell all of my shit if it gave me enough cash to buy the laser that sent Jeff Bridges into the Master Control Program so I could kick Virtual Curt’s 3D-rendered polygonal nuts over the Green Monster. Plus, I always wanted to try one of those lightcycles, but that’s beside the point.

Maybe I’m just jealous. I mean, I look at Curt Schilling, and the guy squirted blood into his sock to get his job done, and he’s a hero. But I do it, and I’m starting a new job.

Well, it was like blood, anyway. Just ask Stench; he knows the score.

[tags]Xbox 360, Take Two Major League Baseball 2K6, Curt Schilling, Boston Red Sox, dark humor, satire[/tags]