Warning: All opinions expressed henceforth belong to Matt "Smoot" Bowyer, and do not in any way, shape, or form reflect the opinions of Fortunecity, Left of Nowhere, or probably anyone.

Hmm. Okay. So telling everyone that I'd be updating weekly was a bad idea. Truth be told, there really isn't any reason I missed this one. I just made up a lot of idiotic reasons, and then dumped them all. I have no reason to do anything today BUT work on this update, so I will.

  Matt Bowyer's Pet Peeves of the Undetermined Amount of Time

  1) The Fact That I Change The Layout of the Pet Peeves Every Week: I mean, what? Am I stupid, or something? Every week, something new's bold or underlined. Sheesh.
  2) Finals: Or, rather, the fact that I have to study or die.
  3) WWF No Mercy for Nintendo 64: Apparently this one shipped with a small bug which will randomly erase things. Like wrestlers, and seasons, and unlocked wrestlers, and my patience.
  4) My Computer: We have a real love/hate thing going on. We love to hate each other. It's working NOW, but fact remains that it's a Celeron 266. Bah.
  5) Stupidity: You can run from the man, you can run from the draft, you can run from your problems. But wherever you go, however you get there, you will never escape stupidity.

  I think Radford's mucking with my brain. Ever since getting here, I've started having weird dreams. Not just your average, run-of-the-mill weird dreams. I mean, these dreams are starting to get out of hand.

  I don't want to write all of my dreams down on here, because that'll take up too much space. But I definitely remember on where Johannes, his father, and I were in Cairo on some rescue mission to save one of my friends from being sold into white slavery or something like that, and WWF wrestler Chris Benoit told me he'd help by fighting the warden. That one was odd.

  I'll transcribe another one, while I'm here.

  Andrew, Billy, Johannes, Jennifer, and I are in a cavern, all running from something, hopping over rocks and other debris. It feels like we're underground in a cave, sort of. Really high ceilings. I can hear something behind me, and I definitely don't want to be around when it gets to where we are.

  We come up to a fork in the path, and Billy shouts, "Johannes and I will go right! You guys go the other way! We'll get the bastard mixed up!" So Andrew, Jennifer, and I beat hell in the other direction.

  On the way, Andrew runs off down a side tunnel, saying that he can only chase one of us. Jennifer and I nod, and keep running.

  We eventually make it into this huge open room with a small steel door in the far side. Much to my dismay, it's stuck, and it seems to be the only way out. I keep pulling at it, if for no other reason than it seems to be the thing to do.

  Then I hear this low rumbling noise. Looking up, I notice that the ball from Indiana Jones, that really big ball, is coming at me.

  This isn't good.

  I go to work, beating like hell on that door. About half a second before I'm going to get crunched, I ram my shoulder into the door, it gives, and I grab Jennifer's arm as I tumble to safety.

  Apparently safety poses as a run-down church sanctuary.

  There are five people in here, all on the left side. An elderly couple, with the whole white-haired, wrinkly-skinned package deal going on. There's a large motorcycler-type guy sitting off by himself, numbly staring straight ahead. Then there are two girls, looking to be eleven and seven years of age, dressed in ratty Sunday dresses, sitting in the front pew.

  Andrew pops up from the baptismal pool and half-shouts, half-whispers "Matt! Jennifer! Over here! He's coming!"

  Whoever "he" is suits us as reason enough to run and hide behind the curtain. Andrew sticks his head right over the glass to watch, and I'm sticking most of my upper body out of the curtain.

  I hear footsteps, and then I see this man walk into the sanctuary from the back. He's dressed in a moth-eaten jean jacket, dirty blue jeans, and steel-toed brown boots. A ratty, unkempt bread dominates his face, at least the parts of it left untouched by the rat's nest of brown hair covering the rest of his scalp. His eyes are dark and sunken in.

  Basically, he's Satan. I've seen him in real life. He wrecked his truck into a house out on Route 11. Billy and I drove by him once. We drove away a -lot- faster than we were going before.

  Well, Jennifer has to haul my ass out of the way as soon as I see him, because I have this urge to go hurt him. She barely can drag me out of his line of sight before the guy starts stalking around the room, trying to figure out where we are, I suppose.

  Then a little crumpled piece of paper falls to the ground in front of me, and I look back. My dad is leaning through the second row of chairs with a grin on his face. The paper says, "Let's go."

  Without any further words, Dad and I shoot out of our hiding places, despite attempts on Jennifer's and Andrew's part to reel me back in. Satan looks dumbfounded for about two seconds before I spear him into one of the pews and Dad and I proceed to take him apart.

  This goes on for a few moments. I'm amazed that the guy wasn't broken wide open and dead and the end of it, but he wasn't.

  "Matt!"

  Jennifer's shout breaks me away from my quest to be a professional ass-kicker and we're running again, out through a door in the back and through a series of hallways. After a few quick twists and turns, we find a door, and I don't even hesitate for a second before ramming my shoulder into it and unceremoniously tumbling out into the light.

  The door leads out into my downtown, right next to the gaming shop I frequent. We exit, and look around rather dumbly. This is weird.

  The next day, after not hearing anything out of anyone else, we decide to go find them. We drive to the high school, which isn't MY high school, but it's where my school should've been. After navigating the parking lot, we find Andrew, standing underneath a tree, with his trumpet case in one hand, bookbag on his back, and wearing his Leemen jacket. (The latter is odd, because this wasn't Lee.) He says that Billy and Johannes found a way out through the catacombs underneath the Dixie, an old movie theater downtown, and that we're all planning to go back down son and "clean it out."

  And then I wake up.

  There are caverns underneath Staunton reachable via the Dixie basement, but I've never been in them. I don't know if I will, now.

  And now, the whore.

  I recently finished one of the best five books I've ever read in my life, and the only complaint I have about it overall is that I never read it before. If you haven't found a copy of Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card and read it fifteen times by now, well, shame on you.

  For those of you who don't know anything about it, Ender's Game is a story set in the not-so-distant future. Earth has fought a strange species twice in huge wars, known affectionately as "the buggers." The second war was dangerously close, with the deciding battle won by the greatest military genius of the time, and it left the planet wary of a Third Invasion. To counter the threat of a final strike, the world government begins "breeding" military geniuses, and then training them to be the best soldiers possible. Ender Wiggin, the focal character, is one of those children, sent off to "war camp" at the age of six.

  The training itself takes place in the form of "games," intricately designed games set up to evaluate the talents and abilities of the children involved. Ender wins all the games easily, and distances hmself from his peers. He's a quick enough learner to understand that there's more going on than meets the eye. But there's no time for him to think about anything; the time keeps ticking away.

  There's a whole series of books Card's started, following up after Ender's Game. I haven't read any. But that's about to change.

  Ugh. I feel dirty.

  I treated myself to a little auditory present three days ago, and I haven't been disappointed. I got U2's latest, "All That You Can't Leave Behind." I'll tell you now, it's a great CD.

  This is actually the first U2 CD I own. Somewhere, I have "The Joshua Tree" in cassette form, but the Hanukkah goblins got that too, for all I know. Haven't seen it for months.

  The first single off this CD is "Beautiful Day," which I'm sure you've heard on the radio at some point. It's on my list of personal best songs of all time, if for no other reason than after hearing it, I want to dance around and enjoy the day. 

  If I didn't wear a black ankle-length trench coat, that would be a lot less notable. And a lot less funny.

  "If ya smellelelelelelLALELL..... what the ROCK.... is.... cookin'."

  Ahh, I love the WWF.

  WWF No Mercy just came out on Nintendo 64 a short while ago. I pre-ordered it,  because I knew how good of a game it was going to be. Well, for that and the fact tat I need a reason to keep my N64, and the new WWF game seemed as good an idea as any.

  Well, they updated a lot of things from "WWF Wrestlemania 2000." A lot of the basic moves have new animations now (I've never been so happy doing a standard suplex), and now when you block a punch, you fling the opponent's arm out before paintbrushing them with one of your own.

  And for the first time in a THQ game, we have backstage areas to dish out the hurt in. You've got the locker room, the parking lot, the boiler room, the hall leading up to all of this, and the much-ballyhooed bar/pool hall.

  However, I think my personal favorite out of those is fighting on the Armageddon stage. I don't know, there's a little charm to basking Shane McMahon's head onto a tank that just gets me right in the heart...

  The ladder matches are fun as hell, too. Nothing like a Jeff Hardy Swanton Bomb off the top of the lader over the ropes all the way to the outside, or Chris Benoit's headbutt from the same spot.

  So go buy this game. IGN gave it a 9.0, if you don't believe me. It's about sixty bucks at Ebworld.com. Yeah, that's a lot of money. Deal.

  Okay, enough of that.

  I've decided to put my bastardized attitude to a good use for the next few months. 

  (Read that: I'm so bored I'm going to actually do something.)

  I've said many times that I'm not exactly bursting at the seams with joy here at Jackass University. In fact, I've said it with surprisingly regularity and venom. So I decided to do a little something about that.

  I'm going to write a column here.

  I haven't decided on a name or anything else yet. I'm just going to rant on paper every so often, print out a decent amount of copies, and put them in random places on campus. Why? Why not? I've got a good mean streak, I'm a pissy guy, and I enjoy annoying those around me that deserve it.

  As Calvin once said, "Nothing helps a bad mood like spreading it around."

  Well, that's it from me for this week. I'll try to update this blasted page a little more often from here on. See you guys next week.

  This is Matt.
 

  Matt  Bowyer apologizes for the lateness of this update, as he has been doing many wonderful and glorious things that he would share with you, but his escapades are nearly too great for words. .....yeah, that's it.

Hey, here's an idea. Email me and tell me what you thought. C'mon, it'll be fun. Really.