THEORY OF RELATIVE CHAOS

I was never in the Boy Scouts (not gay enough), but growing up with wussies in my class who were, I heard about their motto: "Always be prepared (for an ass-fucking)". Sans the "for an ass-fucking" part, those words stuck with me, and soon I was to have forged my own motto which has served me well throughout my frolicsome life. Actually, it's more of a scientific theory than a motto, but it goes a little something like this: "For every non-recurrent or repetitive event in your life, expect the unexpected, and prepare for anything, as whatever you THINK will happen will not." See, not very catchy, and it rambles, but it's basically Einstein's Theory of Relativity, Ian Malcolm's Chaos Theory, and the Boy Scout motto all rolled into one. And I came up with this long before Dr. Malcolm ever stepped foot in Jurassic Park. Sometimes I just impress myself something fierce.

Anyway, what my Theory of Relative Chaos means is that no matter what you plan or even THINK might happen in any given situation (that does not occur or take place regularly), it will NOT develop or transpire as you plan/think it will. For example: say you have a date coming up with a really hot chick (God only knows why she's even bothering to go out with you [she probably lost a horrible, horrible bet]). You set up in your mind several outlines for the evening and believe that you will have her in the sack by 1AM. You bargain for dinner, a concert, a stroll on the beach, and some wine sipping at your place in front of a warm fire, culminating in the tearing off of clothes and gratuitous usage of Motion Lotion (TM) by no later than 1:02AM. You cannot fathom what could possibly go wrong. You made sure your roommate was in the red light district with $200 cash on him -- so he's out of your hair. Your parents have been told that you died earlier in the day, so they won't be calling you on your cell phone or stopping by for whatever reason (you'll apologize tomorrow). Your credit cards aren't overcharged, and you know your chick is oversexed. This evening will be perfect. You just fucking KNOW it.

Here's what will happen: At dinner, your date orders an entree that she didn't know had bits of crab in it, and she's highly allergic to shellfish. You then spend 2 hours holding her hair up, and making sure she doesn't choke on her tongue while she pukes out the past three days' worth of stomach contents in the fancy restaurant's loo. You miss the concert because of the up-chuck marathon (and you curse yourself for this, because Billy Ray Cyrus won't be back in town for at least another 5 years!), but you try to salvage the night by continuing with the stroll on the beach in the moonlight after an adrenaline shot directly into your woman's heart in order to stop the convulsions. At the seashore, you end up stepping on a sharp, broken, sea shell, and your chickie gets pushed down as you dance around on one foot, brushing the sand off your injured sole. She lands right on a discarded hypodermic needle, improperly disposed of by a heroin addict with the AIDS and cholera. You pull the needle from her butt, and actually convince her that you just dropped the needle yourself a second earlier, and that she doesn't now have the AIDS (which you were planning on giving her later on that night anyway), and that you still have fancy plans waiting for you at your place (which is the only place you can go to now that you lost your wallet somewhere on the beach during your "ouchie dance."). When you show up to your place you find out that your roommate brought back a bunch of $10 hookers with him when he came home early, and that your parents are in the middle of ransacking your room looking for any kinds of valuables since you didn't leave a will. After kicking them all out, and miraculously talking your girl into staying, her bodybuilder husband calls your phone and tells you he knows where you live and that his wife better come out to his waiting car in ten seconds or he's burning your place down. She does, but he still arsonates your home, and you have to wait for the fire department to arrive while you stand out in the cold night air in nothing but your tighty whities and you nurse your new black eye.

Actually, none of THAT stuff will happen because now you've already thought of it. You can think that your night will end prematurely as you'll get into a nine-car pile-up on your way to pick your honey up instead -- but that won't happen now either, since you've thought of it as a possibility now too. See, this theory of mine can be used for good (think of all the worst possible ways for a good time to end, and they won't come true), but just be careful that you don't forget to think that you might be knifed by a confused pimp, or shot in the face by a bartender's magnum or else those might be potentialities.

To wind up this long introduction so that I can get into the meat and potatoes of this article, my main point is this: Plan for the worst and never expect the best. Or you can think of it like this: Nothing ever works out the way you think it will. My main point for the rest of this article is that I did not follow my own advice, and therefore suffered a most heinous Uber-Week because of my own stupidity.

A MOST HEINOUS UBER-WEEK

I honestly don't know what I was thinking. I almost ALWAYS remember my own rules for Relative Chaos, especially when it comes to e-ticket events in my life (like Uber-Weeks, birthdays, hot dates, movie premieres, etc... Stuff I don't fuck around with). I start thinking weeks in advance, "Oh man, I'm gonna get drafted into the service right before Christmas break, aren't I... Damn!" Or, "Dammit! I just know that Grandma Ross's gonna try hang gliding again right before that big presentation at work, and Johnson will get that promotion instead of me when I have to go to her funeral! Goddammit, Grandma!" Then those things will never happen. Oh, sure, on the flipside the best possible outcome will never happen either since you thought of them as well (VERY IMPORTANT TO REMEMBER), but at least the worst won't. Life if chock full of averageness. The worst only happens when you don't think about it, but on the flip-side, the best tends to happen when you don't plan for that also. It could all just be a mental thing (wherein because you've already THOUGHT of the worst outcomes you aim away from them and make sure they don't happen, and when you think of the BEST outcomes you try too hard to attain them and therefore fail like a US diplomat to North Korea who quotes Team America - World Police to Kim Jung Il throughout dinner), but many more hours of experimentation are required before I can either prove that or "Harry Potter magic" as the cause.

Anyway, this year I started planning for my Uber-Week months in advance. I started losing weight (that I knew I would put back on during my week of sloth and gluttony) 2 months in advance, I put in my time for work (the entire week of Thanksgiving would be mine!), made some home repairs so that no major leaks occurred during my time off, bought all my food the week before, and picked up some pizzas and my game rental as I sped home from work on that final Friday before Turkey Day (the game was Kingdom Hearts 2, which will be a very relevant part of the plot in a little bit).

I got home at around 6 -- my house was clean, and I had no freelance projects bugging me to get them done... I was ready to have a grand ol' time playing, from start to finish, the sequel to one of the biggest pleasant surprises, in terms of great video games, that I've ever played (that would be the original KH)... And then I got the phone call. Karen's Grandfather was at death's door and she needed to go up to Iowa (or some shit state... sorry, Iowans, but it's true) to see him one last time and attend his funeral. See, I planned for a grandparent of MINE to kick the bucket, not of Karen's. Major set-back number one. This brought me down a bit, but I wished her a safe trip, and then proceeded to stuff my face with honey barbeque buffalo wings and peanut M&Ms and Gumby's Pizza while I got back into the game... But I had forgotten, Karen was supposed to be my line buddy at the midnight Nintendo Wii launch at Wal-Mart that Saturday! Dammit! That meant I could only show up at about 9PM if I wanted to make it to the launch without a bathroom break and my bladder exploding (I have the bladder of a three-year-old child, don't forget). "Oh well," I thought, "nobody's lame enough to be planning to go to Wal-Mart for the Wii at midnight on launch day. Who the fuck is as lifeless as me during an Uber-Week? They'll get 50 Wiis in, and there'll only be 5 of us in line... It's a gimme that I'll get one. Karen's absence will be no real loss to my domination of the Wii!" Yes, that's really how I talk to myself.

That was my most pessimistic vision of Saturday night too. There was no possible way that Nintendo (who was launching with 600,000 units) would fuck things up like Sony did earlier that very Friday (with only 120,000 or so Playstation 3 units on their launch day, which caused hold-ups and breaking and enterings nationwide by desperate fucks who weren't willing to camp out all night in order to pay $600 to play a crappy line-up of launch titles)... Plus with all the dicksucks online blowing Sony's tiny Asian wang, and shitting on Nintendo's parade (for being "gey" and nothing but a "kiddy company") I thought that Nintendo might even have a surplus of their new system after the Wii release day... But I'm getting ahead of myself here. Let's get back to Kingdom Hearts 2... If ever I could go back in time and tell my younger self not to bother with a certain sequel to a fantastic earlier work of entertainment... well, I'd tell myself not to bother about being the first in Georgia to see Phantom Menace... or Attack of the Clones... but after that I'd tell myself not to even bother with the trash known as Kingdom Hearts 2. Oh, the huge manatee..... Anything but Kingdom Hearts 2!!!!!