I’ve been quite busy.  I’ve discovered that the internet provides a means for me to communicate with people without warping their minds to my will with my proximity.  Granted, this works with phones and mail as well, but it just doesn’t have the same impact a web-cam conversation can.  Thus far, its been absolutely fascinating, frightening, dangerous… exciting… amazing, for me.  It might sound mundane to you but its fucking profound to me, if you know anything about me.  Since I can have any one of you killed at the drop of a hat, I’m sure I’ll go into more detail later, but for now… gotta go.  I’ve done some naughty things that are preventing me from jockeying a keyboard for too long.

My first vivid memories occurred when I was 6, or perhaps 7 years old, when I first began to realize the power I had over people…. and when I was adopted by Aaron and Carol Zuwinski.

The other children at the orphanage and I had a game which I’d invented,  where I would sit indian-style on the end of the oval-shaped carpet that stretched out in front of the sofas in the 2nd floor common room, and one of the other kids (It didn’t matter which, they ALL wanted to play and get to be the one) would lay down in front of me… and the rest of the kids who were playing would stand in a line on the other end of the carpet… and I’d give the laying down kid a push, and they’d start rolling on their side, usually gleefully shouting “Whhhoa!  Whhhoa!  Whhhoooa!!!” as they rolled towards the giggling, standing kids.   The ’standers’ kept  saying things like ‘Oh no!’, ‘Here they come!’ and ‘We’re all gonna go boom, eeeee!’ in excited tones, making each other laugh….and then when the roller hit the other kids’ legs, they’d all tumble down in a pile, laughing like they were having the greatest time in the world.  I called the game ‘Tumblers’ and whoever the roller was got to be ‘Tumbly’.  It didn’t make a lot of sense, but then, we were kids; it didn’t have to, it was fun… at least, I know I thought so.

Today’s Tumbly was Gwen, a tall-for-her-age and skinny girl with a scar along her left jawline, long brown hair, brown eyes, and a smile that never went away.  She didn’t talk much about herself, or how she got her scar, but she was always smiling… I remember liking that about her.  I think she was about a year or year and a half older than me.

As Gwen rolled toward the standers, the door to the common room opened and closed… and when Gwen hit the standers’ legs with an ‘Oompf!’ and they all fell down giggling, from my point of view it revealed Aaron and Carol standing behind them, holding hands and regarding us with warm amusement.  I gasped.  The rest of the kids turned and looked, and gasped too, and got real silent.  They’d visited before, and one of the nuns had told us that they were interested in adopting one of us – taking us home with them and being our mommy and daddy forever.  I guess they were unable to have kids of their own, and wanted some.  Us children, we’d all talk about how good, or scary, or terrible it would be to have parents, or in some cases, to have parents again… I was among those who had always wanted some, having been denied my own by a mad scientists’ accident. 

   Carol looked like an older, more “growed up” and plumper version of Gwen to me – she had the same hair and eye coloring, and the same permanent benevolent smile I liked so much… and when she made eye contact with me, I saw there someone I really could call Mommy and mean it.  Aaron was a big, muscular man – intimidating to look at, but he had a very quiet voice and calm attitude, which made me feel as if I could really trust him.  I knew right away that these were the parents I’d always wanted.

Unfortunately, Gwen was the little girl that they’d always wanted. 

When I found out about it, I was devastated.  They didn’t want me.  Everybody liked me, how could they not want me? It made no sense!  Raging to myself, I noticed the kids around me slamming things around, sulking, kicking things… I guess they felt rejected too.  I didn’t care though.  Why would they pick her?  Sure she has a pretty smile, but she has a scar!  She’s flawed.  Nobody played games by HER rules and had fun!  That was MY role here!  I began to really resent her… and after Aaron and Carol finished up in the office of the head nun (I forget her name… I forgot all of their names.  They were just floating habits to me.) they’d met up with Gwen in the common room.  I glared and glared at Gwen, wishing something bad would happen to her, or she’d somehow make the parents *I* wanted hate her… I wanted her to feel bad for taking the parents I wanted away from me, even though I’d never told her about those feelings I had for the couple.

When Carol approached Gwen, and asked Gwen, “Would you like to come home, and live with Aaron and I, and become a part of our family?” Gwen was smiling… and then she started crying.  We all assumed she was just so happy… Gwen ran up to me sobbing and gave me a big hug… and she said, “Sorry…” I was shaking and nearly crying too, watching my friend prepare to leave with MY family… it was all I could do not to push her off me.  In my head, I was SCREAMING at her to get away from me. 

With a scream, Gwen pulled away from me, ran as fast as I’ve ever seen her run towards the window facing the parking lot, jumped and smashed through it, and plummeted out of sight.  All of the children screamed in terror… the nuns of the orphanage (there weren’t many, but it was a pretty large place) came pouring in the room from all over the building trying to control the children… Carol was beside herself with grief, and Aaron had immediately sprinted out of the room and down the stairs.  I was dumbfounded; I was so scared and shocked I couldn’t move, or even cry.

I had actually thought the phrase, “Go jump out a window!” when Gwen was hugging me. 

   I finally managed to regain control of my body, and ran downstairs in time to see Aaron, in tears, cradling the body of little too-tall Gwen in his arms… she’d landed very akwardly on the pavement, and was already dead when the ambulance arrived.  I felt so bad… I’d killed my friend… and now, the parents I wanted would never want me.  All I wanted in the whole wide world was a mom to give me a great big hug and tell me everything was going to be okay, a father to tell me I’d been good…

In that moment, I turned around, and Carol was there, looking down at me with tears in her eyes… she got down on her knees, embraced me, putting her hand on the back of my head and squeezing me close, and stroking my hair… and she said “Don’t feel bad, angel; Don’t feel bad.  It’s going to be alright.”  I was doing everything I could not to think or speak.

Two weeks later, I went home with my new family.

My family and I had just gotten out of afternoon Mass, and decided to go to Denny’s afterwards… I love the cheese & brocolli soup they have there!  Anyways, right as we walked in the door, the hostess behind the counter like, literally leapt over the counter, and began to sing at us, like, it was right out of the movie ‘Chicago!’  She sang,
“Good afternoooooooon!  Would you like to sit in smoking or non, y’all!”
and she had her arms like this, and she was shaking her waitress pad in one and a pen in the other.
Surprised, my father said “Uh… non, please.”
The hostess spun around twice and then bowed, pointing in this weird, dramatic way… “Riiiiiight this way!!!!” she sang, with a Maria Carey-like high note at the end… I was laughing real hard.  I thought we were on like, Punk’d or something. But this is where it got weird.
For some reason my family was walking really slow to the table… and as  we’re walking, we only walked slower, because everybody in the restaurant was staring at us, and moving their lips… there were a lot of old people, and like, a trucker guy, a group of teenagers… anyways… it took a sec to realize that they were like, singing, and it got louder and louder….they were saying;

Have a seat here away from the smoke
So ya don’t have to cough, don’t have to choke
Have a seat and they’ll bring you a drink
Give you a menu and some time to think

They just kept repeating it until we all actually sat down at the table, when every customer at the restaurant stopped singing, looked down at their tables, and then kept eating and talking to each other like nothing happened. It was so creepy! My little brother started crying.
It was quiet for a minute… but then the hostess  jumped up on the table, and tore off her shirt, so she was wearing only her bra… and she pulled a spoon out of her apron, and sang into it! We all jumped out of our chairs and backed away all together towards the door, as this lady started singing about the specials, and something about french fries… all the customers, all the workers in the back were dancing around… my mom yelled “STOP IT!” at the hostess all freaked out like… and she did, and everybody in the restaurant suddenly snapped out of it, were looking around wondering why they were standing up and stuff… the topless hostess looked me right in the eye then… and she just stared at me… and stared and stared… then she screamed… and stuck the spoon right into her eye. Like, right into her eye and into her head! I freaked out and screamed, and most of the restaurant did, too. That was the freakiest thing, like …ever! I see a therapist now ‘cuz of it twice a week, so does my brother.
Right then, someone walked out of the back room… this guy in this half-mask covering his eyes… he was holding a plate of chicken fingers. Just before he reached the door, he looked at my family and smiled and said ‘GOOD EVENING, FRIENDS!’ like people did in like, old times or whatever… and walked out of the front door, laughing like one of those diabolical laughs you hear in old cartoons.

Well, it was all a part of my most recent public appearance.

I’d heard about a small, secret fundraiser party through my spy network.  It was being held in the center of  the Theodore Roosevelt Island National Memorial Park in D.C. for a pet project of some lobbyists to allow endangered species to be captured in the protected woodlands of the United States, and shipped overseas for reasons completely undisclosed.  There were about 20-22 people in all that I can remember, including the aforementioned lobbyists, a few congressmen, representatives from the overseas countries (I won’t get into which countries they were from; it becomes moot shortly)… enough people to quietly pass some promises of currency to each other, finalize some deals, and make some phone calls.

When I found out about this, I was instantly enraged.  You see, I’ve studied a lot.  You’ve not much else to do between high-profile crimes but hide out for a bit and wait for the fur to stop flying, so I’ve read up on a lot of subjects, including history… particularly the history of great men and women, because I know myself to be great.  Theodore Roosevelt was a real outdoors kinda guy, he absolutely loved being out in nature… history calls him a ‘naturalist’ which means about a billion different things, but what it boils down to is that if he knew about a plot unfolding on an island named after him that’d send America’s endangered species into places where they’d be endangered, he’d be spinning in his grave.

Also, I fucking love animals – its beautiful how they think their own thoughts, and not mine.  So I decided to be an activist for a day.

The meeting was scheduled for 8:30am – Our little base of operations was roughly two hours’ flight from the nation’s capital, so we had to wake up and get on our helicopter by 5am.  I was only bringing four henchmen – My favorite pilot, a backup pilot in case he gets shot, some random thug who had cool tattoos, and Smitty.  Smitty was one of my first henchmen, having been there for all the crimes that made me famous… he’s a sentimental favorite.  Anways… having mindfucked the military and civilian air traffic controllers of most of the Eastern United States over the years, we had no problem snaking our way through for a landing on the western bank of the Potomac, within rock-throwing distance of the George Washington Memorial Parkway.  We made our way over to the island, and waited in ambush.

We threw a frisbee in the park for a while as we waited for everybody to arrive and mingle a bit.  Me being me, we didn’t have to carry a lot of weapons – I carry a simple Wal-Mart lockblade camping knife and a handgun, and each of my boys had their own twin pistols, with the exception of Smitty, who was really fond of his Uzi.  Once we were ready, we approached the group.  Donning my mask, I singled out the four people that I knew were the ones I wanted to punish most, and mentally ordered them to hit the deck.  They did.  “Now,” I whispered.

We opened fire, and ripped all of the guests to pieces, completely emptying our entire clips into the group.  The only survivors were the four men I’d ordered to hit the deck.  The park was pretty crowded that day - screams in the distance were heard, and it didn’t take a long time for sirens to follow.  Without any prompting from me, but plenty from reloaded handguns, we herded these four men – two men of asian descent, two fat white washington fatcats – along the path and across the river bridge to the west bank, where we were stealing a getaway car just as the police arrived.  When they saw my mask, they started firing immediately – they know what I’m capable of.   My spare pilot and both of my fat white washington guys were hit, fatally.  Furious, I rounded on the four policemen.

“Fire at each other on the count of three!” I yelled.
All four men froze, and then paired off, each pointing their guns at the others’ chests.
“One!”  They began to plead with me, swear their asses off, pray….
“Two!”  The fourth one said to the others, “I’m sorry, but I have to.  We all do.  It’s been an honor serving with y’all.”
“Three!”  Four simultaneous shots.  Four dead cops.
Still in a rage, I screamed at Smitty, my pilot, and the two asian men to get in the van we’d chosen.  We piled in, and I drove us across the river and north, and into the Smithsonian National Zoological Park.  Along the way, whenever police cars would appear, I would concentrate, and moments later there’d be a mangled cop car in a ball of flame mashed up against the nearest bridge support, ditch, or building.  We dragged these two men at gunpoint through the entire zoo, finally stopping at the cougar exibit.  We waited there until we were completely surrounded by the police and news media.   I addressed the throng.

“You all know who I am.  You know what I can do.  You listen to me because I will not give you a choice.  None of you will open fire upon us.  In fact, should any of you point a gun at any of us standing here, the rest of you are ordered to kill them.”  Gasps.  Typical.  “These men were plotting to buy our endangered species, like these cougar here, and take them back to their country.  You!”  I grabbed one of the men by the throat.  “What animals were you seeking!?”
Tears rolled down the man’s cheeks.  He was well aware of who I was by that point, and knew he could not disobey.  “Cougars.  Puma.  Sea-lions… some mice… voles… anything endangered or rare, really.”
The entire world consisted of me and this asshole at this point.  “Why?”
The man swallowed hard.  “My clients have… exotic tastes.  They want to sample things that are… once in a lifetime experiences.”
“They fucking EAT them?”
“Yes.”
“What the fuck!  Ugh!”  I sliced him from neck to nuts with my lockblade, I couldn’t help it.  “Have you ever seen a Choctawhatchee Mouse? They’re so fucking cute! And you want to FEED them to people? Fuck!” I pushed him into the cougar pit. Luckily for my sense of wrath, they were happy to use his worthless screaming body as a snack. I handed the terrified survivor my handgun. “Shoot yourself in the foot, one wrist, and then the groin.” BANG BANG BANG. He collapsed, screaming.  I looked up at the stunned crowd that I’d just remembered was there.

“Anyone who raises a finger against me dies. The rest of you, see to it!”

I dragged the bleeding living-carcass of the self-shot man behind me by his wounded wrist and walked towards the nearest vehicle. Suddenly, shots rang out, as the police in the crowd began opening fire on each other. Apparently one decided they would try to take me out (or, appeared to, because I wanted him to), and the crowd wisely put a stop to it. Unfortunately, it snowballed… and carnage followed us all the way back to the helicopter.  I say it was unfortunate because I got fucking blood on my helicopter.

So… yeah. That’s what happened, and how I ended up patiently torturing that diplomat to death.  By the way, that white room?  It was a room in an office at Six Flags.

It gets pretty lonely, being able to alter the thought patterns, emotions, decisions, and opinions at will; people have essentially been nothing but toys to me since I got the hang of it.  Whatever it is I do, its proven itself irresistable thus far; that is, I’ve never had someone maintain their own will against my own.  I don’t “hear thoughts” nor am I “a telepath” or anything like that… its just that if I’d like you to think differently, in any sense, you will.  And this applies to everybody and anybody.  Sometimes I take these solo jaunts out in public just to get away from a world that I don’t completely dictate.  I’ll not use my gift, have a hotdog on a street corner, people-watch from park benches… essentially, be a person, alone. 

   It only gets interesting once I’m either forced to interact with someone, or manage to have the tranquility doing this brings me disrupted.  For example… I despise the Dave Matthews Band.  Utterly.  I don’t know what it is about that guy’s face, or the songs they’ve produced, but I can’t stand to hear them, can’t stand to see them.  So when I was rudely bumped into by a large, jockish teenager wearing a Dave Matthews Band t-shirt, it certainly put a crimp in my afternoon.  

As he walked away, I followed him.  It wasn’t the direction I was going, but that wasn’t important.  This douchebag was wearing a fanny pack, and as he flip-flopped up the street he pulled a cell phone out of it and seemed to be sending a text message to someone.  I kept pace with him, to the point where I gave him a ‘flat-tire’, stepping on the back of his odd flip-flop sandal thing.  He glanced back, but kept walking without a word… so a minute later, I did it again.  He turned around and said, “Hey, back the fuck up off me aiight?” and began walking again.  I stopped, and just smiled back at him.  He nodded, turned 90 degrees, and walked off the sidewalk and directly into traffic, was struck by a bus, and instantly killed. 

It wasn’t a very satisfying murder.  It was so… hum-drum.  On top of that, my mood had been disrupted, and I’d been forced to use my mind control, which I didn’t want to.  It’s just too fucking easy.  I kept walking, purchased my street-corner hot-dog, and sat on a bus stop bench to eat it.  Having broken my rule for the day already, I gave the hot-dog vendor the notion to strip naked and throw the contents of his coin dispenser at people as hard as he could.  That passed some time, as he was a good shot – he’d chipped 3 teeth and taken out 2 eyes before police arrived at the scene.  My hot-dog finished, I took my despondent ass back to where I’d left my stolen helicopter and had my slaves take me back to my hideout.

I really don’t know why I bother trying to hold on to any shred of my humanity.  The only real joy I get, the only times I’m not bored to tears by people, is when I’m making them suffer or die for no good reason.

Unfortunately for my family and the other residents of the township they lived in, their friend and neighbor, one quiet man they knew as Sammy Wilson, was the alter-ego of the costumed menace to humanity, ‘The Mad Minute Master’, a.k.a. Dr. Seril Mason.

His experiments in causality and time-travel caused a rip in the fabric of space-time that July; all the worst things you can imagine and some you can’t happened, and more or less everybody died.  People aged backwards until winking out of existence, or aged into dust, monsters that only exist in two dimensions ate people in half, the grass melted, the sky exploded, et cetera… the end result was a smoldering hole where a county used to be, its reduction in population from 44,000 or so to 17, and baby me becoming an orphan.

Not sure how I survived, really; the other survivors I found over the years have no idea either.  The man who found me happened to dive in his well during ‘The End of Franklin County’ and escape with minor injuries.  He said I was in a crib that was covered by the wreckage of a collapsed roof, crying my ass off.  He wasn’t a big humanitarian or anything at the time, hell, he was looting the property for whatever he could find… but he wasn’t a bad guy, so he picked me up and dropped me off in front of the nearest police station, who promptly took me to the nearest orphanage.

Oh, that Mad Minute Master.  Talk about balls!  The End of Franklin County claimed the lives of at least half a dozen costumed goodie-goods along with all those civilians.  Magnificent!  Anyways, I like to celebrate my birthday on May 23rd.  And I tell people I was born in 1980, because with my looks, I can get away with it.

   An example of the kind of crime I like is when I went to bingo with my underlings the other day.  A pair of them and I went very early, with a crate of bingo-dabbers.  If you don’t know what a bingo-dabber is, its a bottle full of ink with a spongey blotter on top so you can make spherical marks over the called bingo numbers on paper disposable bingo cards.  Anyways, we kidnapped the standard bingo-dabber vendor who’s there, donned some fake gray hair and moustaches and suspenders, and sold our bingo-dabbers.  The crate we brought contained 63 very normal bingo-dabbers.

It also contained one very special one, rigged with a detonator and quite a lot of C4.

Before people started showing up, we seperated the tables into 5 rows of 5, and took bets on which of the 25 tables the explosion would take place at.  My minion picked the winning table (that one who got the soda and pizza promised him!) I acknowledged him as winner without bitterness; the reaction of the other players was just too awesome.  Just before it happened, some lady on the other room had cried out ‘Bingo!’ as she obviously had won on the number just called – after the building-rocking explosion sprayed the room with body parts, table parts, and floor parts, that same woman said ‘I SAID BINGO!’ in a pissed off voice.  So classic!

Uh anyways I’ve gotten way off track.  What was I writing about?  Oh yeah.  My lack of an arch-enemy. 

   I’m not upset about it, but after watching all 4 Die Hard movies in a row recently, I’ve decided my dream arch-enemy would be John McClane.  He’s just such a badass.  He’s so cool that you could lose to him, and when you went to jail and your cellmates want to know what happened, you can tell them who caught you, and they’d say ‘damn’ and you’d get more badass by association.  John McClane is so balls-out tough and ruthless that you’d earn street cred being sent to prison by him!

   What I love most about John McClane is that he’s just as evil as any bad guy, but he’s playing for the other team.  He’s getting to do a lot of the stuff us rampant psychopaths and nutjobs would love to do, which is remorselessly kill people and cause massive property damage, but he gets to do it in the name of the law!  Don’t come at me with that ‘he’s just doing his duty, he doesn’t enjoy it’ shit either, if you think that, you weren’t really watching.  The man was genuinely gleeful about the killing he did. 

DIE HARD:

• Writes ‘Ho Ho Ho I have a machine gun now’ on the corpse of the first bad guy he kills, and sends it downstairs in an elevator to mindfuck the rest of them.
• While beating on the brother of the first bad guy he killed, talks shit about having killed the guy’s brother.

DIE HARD 2: DIE HARDER:

• Gotta admit, he was more of a goody goody in this movie.  However, he did howl with laughter after blowing up an airplane full of people.  Just because they were all murderous traitors doesn’t mean blowing them up and laughing about it wasn’t evil.

DIE HARD WITH A VENGEANCE:

• Lies to Samuel L. Jackson’s character in order to get him to help, saying that a bomb that was found in Chinatown was instead found in Harlem.  Cold as ice: lying for the greater good.  Gigantic balls: lying to Samuel L. Jackson!
• While beating a man to within an inch of his life with a gigantic steel chain, shit-talks something incoherent about Lurch from the Adam’s Family.  While not specifically evil, a taunting, gloating speech isn’t part of his ‘duty’.
• Laughing walking away from the helicopter explosion that claimed the antagonists’ life.

LIVE FREE, OR DIE HARD:

• Takes a great deal of pleasure in taunting the head honcho hacker guy about having killed his asian girlfriend.
• Is very amused when the acrobatic guy trying to kill him falls into a fan and is diced to death.

Let us not forget the fact that he has a cold, post-murder of a bad guy catch phrase:  Yippie-ki-yay, motherfucker.

Gloating after a kill makes it gleeful murder.  And that’s all spouting that catch-phrase is.  Truly this good man is a bad man, and I love him for it.  He can thwart me anytime he likes.  It breaks my heart that he is fictional, because verily, it would be entertaining to have him as my enemy!

I know this was sort of a long, rambling post.  But fuck you, isn’t that what all blogs are?  I don’t feel like bothering to fact-check, spellcheck, name-check, or disclaimer-check.  Shit, this is a disclaimer.  ARGH!

*Mindfucks you all so you beat yourselves with keyboards*

Doing this is confusing.  It’s far easier to control someone else’s mind and make them do it for me.  Unfortunately, they have to know how to use WordPress first… and honestly my powers don’t allow me to just sift through someone’s stupid brain and work out whether or not they’re a good blogger.  Thus far I’ve picked a theme, worked out how to change colors and stuff… but much escapes me, and it bothers me.  I feel old now.  I need suggestions on what to do to feel better about this.

The best one my minions have come up with was to go to bingo and blot someone to death as if they were the Free Space.  This was a good suggestion.  If I do go, he’ll get to come with me, and I will allow him a slice of pizza and a soda.

I’m sitting directly across from a wooden table, in a wooden chair.  This room is completely white, with nothing in it but me, this chair I’m sitting on, and this table.

Upon this table is most of what’s left of some diplomat or another, a victim of my most recent senseless attack on the public… whom I’ve been poking with a pointy stick on and off for the past 20 minutes.  At the end of my last poking session, the limbless and luckless diplomat chewed through his tongue sucessfully and bled to death.  It’ll be another hour or so until I go back to my lair; good thing I brought this laptop, else I would get really bored.

Hrrrrmmmmm.  Where to start.  Oh right, me.  I am The Catastrophe Syndrome.  “How can a person be a syndrome?” you might ask.  Well, I can either give you the trite answer, which is ‘I keep happening’, or I could give you knives in the eyes.  The origin of my name is not that interesting.  It’s what I call it when life is so good that you fuck things up subconsciously to self-inflict the reverse-karma you sense coming;  That, and it’s a pretty cool local garage band I listened to growing up that’s long been defunct.

What’s important is that I’m very powerful, very intelligent, and have absolutely no moral barometer.  I essentially do whatever the hell I want, consequences be damned.  Also, when I get the drop on the costumed douchebags who go out of their way to foil my more elaborate schemes, I kill or at least maim them, every time.  I don’t bother giving some sort of scathing speech of gloating victory until I know they’ve lost enough blood to be fatal, and even then I don’t push it, in case they’re magic or something.

Well, my helicopter is here.  Gotta tell ya, when it comes to evil powers to have, mind control is tits.  Free body disposal, free helicopter rides, free entrance to Six Flags… sure does make most problems easy to deal with.  I’m a thrill-seeker though, I don’t really use it for anything but mundane things unless I’m well and truly in a jam.  I prefer good old fashioned manipulation, mind-fucks, and cruelty!

Anyways, that’s me, so far.  If you’re reading this, remember;  knives in the eyes.