Disrespecting… talented… actor…

Why couldn’t he have admitted to this earlier? I would have so flown to Vancouver to kidnap him around 1996 or so.

Except in the original ‘Star Trek,’ where people tended to be pretty sanguine and ‘Cower, primitive aliens’ about things, there’s always a moment in sci-fi where the heroes look around in total horror at their new planet (on which they have generally crashed and therefore need to get adapted to in a hurry). You know the scene. They’re wearing spacesuits because they don’t know about the air yet. There’s a white woman, a black man, a youngster, a genius, a bully, and a strange cool individual of uncertain background who tends to save the day. And they straighten up from the hatch of their disabled ship and look around, wordless with amazement, fear, dislocation.

And that’s me, here, every day. Still! I keep saying ‘Still!’ every time the plant freaks me out. Still! Because it seems it will never quit resembling an alien planet – the dead landscapes, the crumbled cities, ruins peopled entirely by xenomorphs. The other day I had to get from my office to a monitoring well about 600 yards away. It took almost twenty minutes and it went like this:

2:10: Put on hardhat, steeltoed boots, safety glasses, and hook respirator loosely around neck. Forget visi-vest. It doesn’t help.

2:12: Actually leave office.

2:13: Jump nineteen feet in the air when face gets blasted by vapours coming from unlabelled pipe just outside office door. Attempt to calm down.

2:14: Almost fall down set of rusty-doily metal stairs built in 1958 to provide passage over pipes carrying enough hydrogen sulphide to kill Godzilla. Attempt to calm down.

2:19: Dodge forklift travelling at Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift speed, driven by guy in full coveralls and facemask with no peripheral vision whatsoever. (This happens so often I don’t even blink.)

2:22: Almost at my destination, discover construction area in most direct route. Try to detour.

2:23: Navigate minefield of just-poured concrete, old soil, bluish dustpiles visibly exhaling poison, pits full of fresh asphalt, stacks of screws, bales of wire. Come a cropper in an evil-smelling puddle. Swear at the top of my lungs, realize I can’t hear myself swear, because:

2:26: Have reached loudest building in the world. Move with exquisite stealth and wariness past corrugated sides, because the walls shift and will hit passersby unexpectedly. Hop a thickening dome, slide down side, swear again.

2:27: Climb a four-foot concrete berm. What happened to the stairs? Drop down side into pile of rubble next to trembling five-storey tank full of compressed death. There’s a date written on a sticker peeling off the side: LAST INSPECTION. I refuse to look. I already know it was when disco was king. Attempt to calm down.

2:28: Reach well. Put on respirator. Take measurement.

2:31: Start return journey.

This is my reward for saying “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in a lab,” for the gods have an excellent sense of humour and when you say things like this they cannot resist filling in the punchline. Next time I shall keep my big mouth shut.

Tomorrow I’m headed out with some consultants to the tailings pond. It’s supposed to be thirty-four degrees, not including humidity effects. Pray for me. But pick a literal-minded god please.

This is a little off-base for me, but last night I was subjected to like the least polite phonecall I’ve had for… oh, at least three days. Normally I’m unfazed by rudeness, and I have an unusually high tolerance for arrogance and lack of empathy and class, what with me living in a glass house and all. But some people you just want to boot off a cliff.

It’s been building up for weeks, too. This… individual, let us call him Thoughtless Jerk, this guy e-mailed me out of the blue on an e-mail address I abandoned two years ago, of which he was notified at that time, and he demanded that since he was coming back into town from a very far away place, I should e-mail all his friends at once and insist we all get together.

Compounding the rudeness of such a gesture (that is, making me the middleman), I obeyed.

So, a few weeks later, he’s now calling every couple of days whining about how so-and-so – whom he’s now contacted out of pique, since I’ve told him they were unavailable – still can’t come. Woe! It really came to a head last night. TJ’s exact words were, “Well, when you see _______ again, you can tell him I’m just really disappointed in him not coming. Just really disappointed.” I gently pointed out that this young man had made plans literally months ago. “Well, there are such a thing as priorities! God.”

Leaving aside his subject-verb agreement, I repeated that some people had prior plans which they did not care to break. (And I was being nice. Some people, upon hearing that he was in town, spontaneously retched. Others hurried to make plans for that night. Some simply asked me, “Can you just tell him I really don’t like him all that much?”)

TJ goes into a rant about how everyone should have – seriously – cancelled their plans on the Saturday of the August long weekend in order to attend his lame-ass barbecue at his inlaws’ house, complete with screaming kids and his idiotic cliques of friends who won’t even talk to each other because they’re too ‘cool.’ I made an excuse and got off the phone and just seethed. OK. He thinks we’re all the impolite ones. Two weeks ago he invited me to dinner, then cancelled at the last minute. Then he rescheduled to Saturday – meaning I stayed at home all night – and didn’t even bother to call. “That? Oh, yeah, I called that off. Anyway, are you getting everyone to come to this thing?”

Have you ever encountered anyone who was so overweeningly arrogant as to assume that his mere presence is enough to attract attendees to an event? I mean, other than Prince? Why should anyone give up their time to involve themselves in this guy’s life, when he never involves himself in anyone else’s? “Oh, I’m busy,” he whines. Yeah. You’re busy half a world away, but it doesn’t make you any busier than us. We’ve all got twenty-four hours in our day no matter where we live. And amazingly, we all work forty hours a week – which you don’t even do – and we commute, have hobbies, play sports, and hang out with family and friends too. I just cannot believe this guy. What makes his time so much more valuable than ours? What makes him so special that we should give a flying hoo-ha about him, when he doesn’t give one about us – even going through someone else (me!) to contact the so-called friends whose friendship he has basically invented. I hope he finds out eventually, and not through me, that a lot of people think he’s an intolerable little shit.

(rant, spazz, thud)

PS. For those of you about to ream me out for talking about him behind his back, thus being even ruder than him, he’s getting an abridged version of this later in e-mail. But I appreciate your attention to detail.