I’m really letting it all out today – venting left, right and centre – weblogging like there’s no tomorrow. Which might indeed be the case if I fulfill my ambition and become an Evil Supercriminal.
When I was a kid, the whole ‘evil’ thing really didn’t appeal to me. I had my hair cut very responsibly, I couldn’t handle conflict very well and whenever I went to see a movie, I would come home and desperately try to build the hero’s special car or bike or helicopter or plane or spaceship (I saw fairly generic movies) out of the all purpose panacea to being a kid in a village of eighty people in Norfolk with only a phone box for company: Lego.
My imagination would take flight when I was up in my room playing – the room would look like a complete wreck when I had done with it, with mountainous valleys made out of duvets, hidden subterranean bases (Bond) down the back of the sofa, vast forces of heroic lego people on small hover bikes (Star Wars), Helicopters bristling with missle launchers (Blue Thunder), Delorean-alike time-travelling cars (Back to the Future 1, 2 & 3) etc etc etc. But in all of this it was only the heroes that really interested me. Never did I pay the slightest bit of attention to the bad guys.
Until puberty that is, when I became completely and overwhelmingly confused by everything. I’d still frantically read the books with the heroes in them, the comic book good guys were always important to me, the films where the bad guy got trounced were staples of my imaginative life. But I started to get a darker thrill from the presence of the evil supercriminals – people who didn’t have respect for society, people who weren’t interested in puppies and blonde girls and apple pie and fudge brownies, but instead would prefer to annihilate Frankfurt with a huge gun and an over-fluffed white cat.
It has remained this way throughout my adult life. I want to be a bad guy. I want to rule the world. I want to be the Sherriff of Nottingham, “You! 12.30. You! 12.45. You! 1.00 … bring a friend…”
And now I know how I can make this dream come true: So You’ve Decided To Be Evil? [via glassdog]