Roger Westinghouse loved his job. How many nerds were fortunate enough to make a living as a hobbyist, and in their very own hobby?

Back in the day he had been among the very first five-year-olds to discover Pokemon, the collectable card game that had ignited this entire industry. He certainly counted himself lucky. Had he not gone to Lester Trumbridge’s birthday party and gotten hooked then and there, and for all perpetuity, on collectable card gaming, he would not be here now, making 40K per year as a functional nerd; one of the movers and shakers at Blue Unicorn Collectables, the largest East Coast distributor of collectables of all varieties.

There were, however, a few downsides to his chosen career—

First there was the fact that nerds of all stripes, and particularly those inclined to make a living in the field, were among the most self-loathing of people. Not a day went by when Roger Westinghouse did not look at his large, soft, pasty body and pink utter of a freckled face without feeling like life would be so much better if he were someone else; for instance the bronzed mohawked muscle guy that lived in Apartment 6-E across the hall with his tall love goddess of a wife, who went to Krav whatever-the-hell-beat-them-up classes together in their perfect SUV, walked their perfect dog together in the park—and did not cry themselves to sleep alone at night across the goddamned hall!

Secondly there was the fact that the one thing he had ever really enjoyed as a child had become his job as a man. He supposed this was his one note of empathy he shared with professional athletes. Once something became your job it sucked on principal, as if by some unerring universal law of inertia. Consequently there was nothing that Roger enjoyed that he actually did.

Thirdly—and absolutely not lastly—there were the old school dorks—the geeks that were nerds before nerds were cool. Therefore the worst thing about being in collectable cards was just then sitting across the table from him yammering on about the profit margin built into the new eco-friendly maize-plastic card sleeves that he wanted Roger, the only other member of his bullshit subcommittee, to help push at the upcoming convention.

Milford Prentice had been a baseball card nerd in the 1960’s!

Milford was now staring at him with a twitch of concern, for true preternatural geeks always developed a facial twitch in the presence of fellow self-haters when they were waxing megalomaniac about collectable card sleeves!

They were alone in the special projects room—a plexi-glass cubical to where the rest of the self-loathing nerd staff could look to the toiling occupants for inspiration.

Milford swallowed hard and began to form a word in his quivering mouth—his old sagging wrinkled baseball card nerd’s face!

Milford self-consciously touched his own wrinkled hanging face with his nervous liver-spotted hand. Their eyes had been locked in this weird sub-antagonistic trance for moments now.

Milford’s face was of a sudden creased with one slowly dripping tear, a tear that was apparently as pathetic as its shedder and would never make it all the way down across that ragged cratered face.

“I ought to rip your face off!”

As if in answer Milford began to push away from the table, quivering all the while.

“Yes, I said that! And I feel it. I really do want to rip your face off you useless old nerd!”

As if in a dream Roger felt himself lumbering over the table—all three-hundred pounds of him pouncing like a smoking hot samurai emo assassin babe. Milford was moving like someone who had once played baseball way back in the old-ass day and appeared to be getting away. Roger clumsily put more effort into his one-handed dive for the sagging face as his chant echoed from the transparent walls, “I want to rip your face off!”

As Milford was making his feeble back-peddling getaway and was poised to turn on the heels of his forty year old Jack Percel sneakers the cheap card table pancaked under Roger’s weight and pinned Milford’s retro-sneakered feet to the glorious floor!

“I want to rip your face off,” screamed Roger, and, upon hearing his own involuntary words he wanted to all the more!

As Milford tried to scamper back like some gay Romper Room kick ball player and looked up in horror into the face of his massive young conqueror, Roger was overcome with an orgasmic rush, as the King of the World thundered from heaven, “I want to rip your face off!”

Chairs were falling over. Wimps, nerds, geeks, dorks, dweebs, frustrated fatties, condescending hipster bitches, mercy-sex cows and emo girls were scampering about slamming desk drawers and crying into smartphones. Why would they not scamper like the descendents of marsupials they were? For they were in the presence of their primordial reaper; but frail skittish rodents hiding under a log while T-Rex ripped the face off of triceratops, who, it turned out after all, had no horns with which to gore!

Milford was shaking and shivering beneath him, presenting a limp hand in his own hopeless defense, a hand that his ravenous master brushed aside in his lust to feed, as the righteous voice of the Universal echoed down from the Big Bang, finally having caught up with his hand of vengeance, “I want to rip your face off!”

For hands that had done little more than shuffle, deal, sleeve and appraise collectable cards for these past two decades, Roger’s rage red paws seemed to be designed to rip flesh from bone when his ring finger and forefinger sunk into the loose bags of tired flesh beneath Milford’s bloodshot eyes and began to peel the pallid face from this inauthentic world!

“I want to rip your face off!” roared the King of the Beasts, as the rodent warren within which he had been chained for seeming ages came to frantic life with the frenzied pleas of the pathetic little creatures who had kept the lid on his cage locked—“Locked no more! The world is my river of gore!” came his triumphant cry as the being at his feet was de-fleshed with a plaintive howl and the world began once again to spin on its proper axis.

“The world is my river of gore!” came the call of the King, as the prey scampered across their roiling den of sloth, not knowing how better to greet his triumphant return.