Job Paths from the Paper

[Bharlion]

I also ran a trio of job paths of my other comical jobs I had dreamed of having. These too. Didn't go well.

I'm your Bogeyman

   As many of you know, I have been searching for my ideal job. Well last week I had a short-lived but life lesson filled experience. I had some how got it into my head that I wanted to be a Bogeyman. I am not sure if it was from watching Se7en for the eighth time in one week or the insomnia. Regardless: I decided, slashing up teenagers in cars parked in woods, chasing cheerleaders down abandoned hallways, and not to mention being impossible to kill was the life for me. So I went to my local department store, picked up an axe, an ugly pair of coveralls and a hockey mask. It was time to go to work.
   I found my first target. It was an innocent looking van with a pair of passengers sitting in the front seat. Parked alongside the road. I snuck up oh so quietly. Hoping the fog would conceal my approach. I took the edge of my axe and began to scrape on the back window of the van. It was a police van. What are the chances? Like 1:100? 1:1000? Of all the vans I have to use for my first target I choose the only surveillance van in Lethbridge. I tried to explain I was just trying to scrape the frost off of the back of their window. They took me down the police station and lectured me on the dangers of wandering around with an axe dressed like a psychopath. I tried to explain to them: I wasn't dressed as a psychopath. I was dressed as a bogeyman. There was a huge difference.
   After spending six hours in a holding cell they only asked made me talk to the police psychologist for two hours. On the way out of the police station, the dream had died. My dream had been shattered so soon. I realized I wasn't cut out for the bogeyman business. I did not possess a supernatural talent, I couldn't even escape two policemen with super-human speed, and worst of all I hadn't been killed and resurrected by my hatred of meddling kids. I walked home that day, in the snow. The cars honking at me as I crossed the bridge in the snow. It was so dreadfully melodramatic that I realized my true calling that I would pursue once I got home. The tragic hero! So I gave the coveralls to good-will, I donated the hockey mask to the local hockey team, and threw the ax in the trunk of my car. Because if being a bogeyman taught me one thing, there is no problem an axe can't solve. Not even frost on a window.

Piracy

   When I was growing up, I took an aptitude test. It said I would excel in numerous fields. Among them there was a cult leader, a journalist, or a pirate. I had decided that my future would lie in piracy. The open waters of the ocean would be my realm. With a flower print Acapulco shirt I would reign terror upon the seas and be hailed as a scourge of the modern world. Widows would scare their bastard children to sleep with stories of me long after I had gone to Davy Jones locker. The wild and open seas, no laws, no limits, just the devil and the deep blue sea. How did I come upon this epiphany? Well let me tell you!
   I was sitting eating a marshmallow pie and realized that I wasn't sure what I was doing with my life. I looked up and there was a wall paper feature a pure blue ocean with a palm tree blowing in the wind. It was right then and there I knew my destiny. I was going to become a pirate.
   I applied to a piracy firm that was preying on vessels off the coast of Spain. They immediately rejected my application on the terms of not being 'jolly enough' and while having previous experience in larceny it did not constitute a 'booty-licous amount of larceny' as per terms of their reply. In a slump from this rejection I didn't give up. I instead bought a bottle of rum and donned my most eccentric yellow 'piratey shirt' and attempted to master the 'swagger' that the rejection notice also spoke about.
   I won't tell you how many times I fell down or what I woke up beside. But the next day I applied to three more piracy firms. One firm in the Caribbean and two near Taiwan. Again the reject notices came promptly, these ones noted that I simply didn't seem 'piratey enough' and said I might cause a mutiny on the ship with my presence. As such I decided I wouldn't work for a major firm, rather start a small firm on the islands around Vancouver. Within a week of opening up and I received a letter from the Pacific Pirate Union noting that I was operating in unionized waters. Therefore I was required to have a parrot (macaw or cockatiel) a first mate with a missing body part and a monkey. Among other things the letter also stated that I was required to join the union if I wanted to continue to operate in union waters.
   I packed my bags and traveled back to Lethbridge by rail car. I still have some of the trinkets of those wild and crazy eight days. A machete, a yellow pirate shirt, and a frayed pair of shorts. Some days when I feel nostalgic I open up my closet and look down at that broken dream and think to myself 'piracy isn't what it used to be.'

Grave Robber
 
I was going to be a grave robber. That is right. I realized my dream of becoming a pirate was foolish and was no longer going to pursue such a hopeless prospect. Instead I was going to tap into the most untouched resource of all. The dead! Every time I drive by the cemetery I couldn't help but think of all that we could have, if we didn't bury it all. Think of all the second hand suits we could have if we didn't bury them in the ground? The dead aren't going to miss having clothes, a coffin, or a silly ring. So I spent $220 dollars earmarked for my best friends wedding gift and bought my grave robber kit.
    It was a small kit, modest but had everything I needed. Well at that time I thought I needed. I never actually realized how little of this kit I would use except for the sneakers.
   - Second Hand Black Trench coat (Dark blue will do)
   - Black Leather and Latex gloves (digging and sorting)
   - Hat (Black with brim)
   - Black Sneakers (for sneaking)
   - Shovel
   - Flashlight
   - Pickaxe
   - Burlap sacks
   So I set out too my first cemetery near in the middle nowhere. First night on the job and I go to work. Or am about to go to work when there is this noise behind me. I turn around and I see this guy standing there staring at me like I am a ghost or something. So I tell him to go away, what does he do? Continue to stand there, staring, this time he lets out a low moan and out stretches his arms. I figure out that he probably upset with the fact I am 'disturbing the dead' or something so I shine the flashlight in his eyes.
   One thing nobody told me about grave robbing is the zombies. Zombies is part of the trade. Hence is why there are so few grave robbers, nobody likes Zombies. Zombies are the Yoko-Ono of grave robbing; they ruin everything. So I realize that the graveyard is full of Zombies. Everywhere, all of them moaning and groaning all sardonically at me! So I realize the severity of my situation. I was alone in a graveyard, surrounded by the walking dead, with a head full of delicious brains and sneakers full with tired feet. Parking far away was suddenly such a bad idea in retrospect.
   So I began to run as naturally, Zombies are slow I was thinking to myself. Not these zombies, some of these zombies must have been working out they were like drunken undead versions of our track team. Adrenaline and fear of death do wonders for your running stamina. So I am running as fast as I can and just can't seem to lose these zombies, I am getting tired but they are just keeping the pace. I get to my car unlock my trunk and get out my seven iron. Whoever said keeping a seven iron in the trunk of your car was 'dumb' obviously never considered being mortally threatened by zombies.
   After about a two and a half hours of whacking the undead twilight out of them. I had dispatched all of my hungry zombie critics. I decided to try another cemetery. Where there aren't so many brain eating occupants. So I drive to this really fancy high-class graveyard. They say I am not allowed inside. I tell them why I want to go inside. What do they say? Usually if people present a viable counter to an argument then I am all for accepting it, what is their terrible excuse?
   Guard: No you can't come inside and rob graves. You will wake the dead.
   Me: What do 'I' want to do? I just want to see if they have anything good.
   Guard: Are you crazy? Rob the dead? What is wrong with you?
   The guard just kept staring down at me like he was trying to get something across. I did understand though, he was very lonely working that late at night and just wanted to talk. So I stopped talking about grave robbing and made idle conversation about hobbies. Turned out he played dungeons and dragons on Thursday nights and wanted too see if I would play too. I had to refuse. My new job of grave robbing would take many late nights to become in the league of Jean-Clad Slick.
   For the uneducated Jean-Clad Slick is the Chuck Norris of grave robbers. He could unearth and sift in minutes. Some say the graves he had sacked were in the hundreds, the truth was it was among the tens of thousands. He was the only one to ever recover dirt from the top of Tim Leary's grave and live to tell of it. And apparently on a dare had once unearthed the resting place of Genghis Khan. I had a picture of Jean-Clad Slick on my wall and wished that one day I would be like him. Anyways back to the guard.
   Like they were some kind of authority. I tried to explain how I only am doing this to pay tuition and don't really want to become a career grave robber but they don't care to listen. They just accuse me of being sick! They are the sick ones, throwing away all that perfectly good clothing! So I left my second graveyard and went to do some reading up on the newest and hottest graveyards. I found out about one in Egypt that was thousands of years old made by the pharaohs at the time. So what do I do? I save up my money, sell my car, and fly to Egypt.
   Someone beat me to the punch! Empty, all of them. Every single one was empty of any kind of loot to be had. I spent the next three weeks at the bottom of cheap bottles of Egyptian beer. Rock bottom, I didn't know what day it was when I finally got the news that snapped me out of it. Every single one of the grave robbers that had looted the tombs I had set out so fanatical to loot had died from the mummy's curse. Not wanting to die from any kind of undead curse I flew home to Canada and sold my grave robbing kit in a garage sale. I hung up my shovel and pickaxe in my garden shed.
   Everything I didn't touch since, except the golf club. Once and awhile, in the middle of the night I drive out to the cemetery and release some stress on the zombies there. I am thinking of setting up a club there. Not sure where they are all coming from. Maybe put a parking lot closer so it is not such a long walk. Regardless I learned my lesson, one cannot rely on the dead to provide them with riches.

[Richter]

SRSLY.  With the fighting, rowing, and epic sagas, I may as well have gotten my BA in being a Viking.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

At Evergreen State, you could have.

[Richter]

Their Norse studies program?  I had heard they shut it down.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Unless they've changed something, Evergreen State is a build-your-own-program college... as long as there's an appropriate umbrella program, you can major in just about anything.

[Bharlion]

The machine teaches only more engineers to keep it running.

[Jasper]

It's imperfections are the air we breathe.