Post by Kyle Shane on Jul 1, 2019 0:34:33 GMT -5
I ignored the buzzing in my pocket for the moment, because I knew the second that I read that message I would be sucked back in. I couldn't allow myself to see her. Things were on ice between me and Array, conclusively. And since she was out with her new gal pal Marki more often than not, we had kept it at a minimum, the contact between us, and honestly, I didn't know what else I could say. The stray dog had snapped once too often, and now nobody... really wanted to come around and pet it anymore.
It was when I pulled out of my own head and looked at the surroundings by me that I noticed the bar I was heading in to was surrounded by teenagers all staring at their smartphones.
"What the shit," I heard myself complain, "Will you little punks get out of here? This place has an ABC license and daddy needs to get his jagerbomb on." It was good to put up a swaggering front, to keep my mind off of her. Besides, I had left playing games behind in my other life. These little chuckleheads were just a grim reminder. They were all decked out, as you do, in something you'd probably see some little asshole in one of the later series of Pokemon, head-bands with Japanese kanji, backpacks and extraneous pockets. They looked like idiots. The one I took as the lead was a slender, long-necked, big lipped, cocky little urchin. He looked down his nose at me.
"Yo, why don't you go fuck yourself, you sad and weird old prick," he catcalled, and I, flabbergasted, went over to him. I slapped the phone out of his hand, letting it clatter to the floor. Everyone around him ooooh'ed.
"Just who in the hell do you think you are?" I demanded. He drew himself up, all maybe seventeen years of undeserved arrogance and nerdy pride. If he wasn't turning my favorite watering hole into a recreation of one of the scruffier themed gangs in The Warriors, I actually probably would've liked the kid. He jerked a thumb back at the guy working the bar. "This is a Pokestop, the owner here lets us fill up our gear and pokeballs for as long as we want, as long as we buy something non-alcoholic."
I shoot the black man pouring drinks a look with burning eyes, communicating nothing but the utmost betrayal and irritation. He just lumps his shoulders at me and says "Dude, I don't know nothing about this stuff, but the kids and this weird app are a gold mine, ever since a rare Mew showed up in the bathroom. Boss says they can say," he says, giving a laconic shrug that showcases the indifference of an underpaid employee. I can't believe what I'm hearing. If this place didn't make some of the best liquor mixed drinks in the South Boston area, I wouldn't even come here. And now, of all places, it was overrun by these little shits, all chasing after a pixelated, augmented reality little goblin? That would not stand.
I turn back to the gaggle of kids. "I want you all out of my goddamn bar," I tell them. A couple of them groan at the intrusion of an authority figure. I've never felt so far removed from a demographic. I stood there as the ultimate adult, a guy in his mid-late twenties in with a double-breasted suit on, coiffed hair, five-o clock stubble, and I telling a bunch of tweens that they couldn't play their dumb mobile app in my adult playground because I wanted to drink and disassociate myself from feeling. The look of resentment in their eyes as I shooed them away was something I knew full well. It was the look I'd give Eric when he would ransack my room in the trailer, telling me my Boba Fett toys and Slave Leia poster were tasteless garbage and that I was too old to be playing with kid stuff.
I didn't let my face crack, but something, deep down inside of me, cringed. And the phone in my pocket, as if sensing my moral dilemma, chirped in with it's tone... telling me that I had something very dear to me in my breast pocket, something I was denying myself from partaking in. I scowled. I denied that. Couldn't let it be my life anymore. I had changed my game. I had become heartless. God only knew that I died a little inside every single time one of my opponents in Pure Class Wrestling tried to make some pathetic video game analogy. I mean... wasn't it time to grow up? Double edged sword, that...
Like it or not, I was going to have to put up or shut up. I had spent so long wallowing in anger, and rage, and it bubbled over and I was stuck with it. I was stuck as the angry guy. I was stuck as the "whiny guy", the one that, despite the firm tone of my actions, everyone is going to say is complaining instead of seeing the places where I'd maybe had a point and I was served a raw deal. I was going to have to be a man, walk down there and take on a dude who's only crime was he smugly came back at me with a third-tier insult about my cock.
(But to be honest, Darren, I wouldn't be sorry about anything I'd done to you.)
The art of growing up, however, dictated that I be a man, and right now, to me that meant ignoring the phone going off in my pocket giving me it's sweet siren call back into engagement with the games, enough of the smug little children, and back into the real world. And yes, daddy did want his drink.
The leader of the pack, who's decked out with a red backwards baseball cap, and a vest he's adorned with the cheapest type of "badges" that you could get out of a 25 cent gumball machine. He steps up to me, this punk-ass kid, and he pops his gum. "Listen, dick, there's a rare Mewtwo somewhere in this building and we aren't going anywhere until we find it." He plucks at the lapels of my suit jacket, smoothing it out with the snarky lack of boundaries the young have for a generation they can't connect with. I've never met someone I've wanted to punch so much. "So, uh, why don't you and your Mens Wearhouse suit go on and read the financial section of the Wall Street Journal or something, we have Pokemon to catch."
"Pokemon, he says," I snipe back, curling my lip with utter disdain. "You little shits right now are too young to know anything about Pokemon, you're on the seventh generation and each one has slid even farther into being irrelevant. Pokemon. Please, shithead. The new games are garbage, filled with new generation crap that never lives up to when the games were really good. You little punks wouldn't have lasted five minutes playing Pokemon when you had to battle the original Elite Four, and then Red and his level 100 Charizard. You weren't there for the original Team Rocket. You don't know anything about this game you're playing, it's history, the legendary greats, or where it came from, you just jumped in on the ground floor of a new shiny addition to it and you think you own Pokemon. You don't know shit."
At the conclusion of this monologue, which they've carefully listened to, the trainer snickers, he looks at his friends, and then they all begin to laugh derisively. Let me tell you, there isn't much that hurts worse than being laughed at by teenagers, doesn't matter how self-confident you are, it will make you doubt yourself.
"Whatever, grandpa. Hey, here's an idea, why don't you let people like the things they want to like, instead of shitting all over them?" Says the boy with the badges.
His little girl friend, wearing a head scarf and short shorts that are vastly inappropriate for a girl underage, no, slap yourself, bad Kyle, speaks up in vehement outrage, "Yeah, you shitlord, why does your generation always have to make ours feel bad about what we do with our time. If it isn't bitching about kids being attached to technology and hook up culture, you always want to mock our pain for having anxiety about our gender identities. Let people live the way they want!"
I can see this is going south on me in a big way, and they're kids, so I can't resort to smacking them in the mouth or else catch a charge. What's an... adult to do? However, a bunch of them have taken to berating me, bolstered by the courage of their trainer head honcho. They throw peanuts from the little bowls at me, flinging broken shells and flakes all in my hair.
Someone's phone blings and they all crowd around the screen. "It says here that the Mewtwo is in the back near the kegs!"
They clamor like the rabble they are, working themselves into a frenzy.
Shunned, thrown debris at, and snubbed by teenagers. Your God of Game may never live this down. They're off in their own little world now, these mini Ash Ketchum wannabes. They've forgotten me. I look at the bartender, who nonchalantly continues to wipe down glasses. He ignores my "Can you see this shit" gesture as he's basically letting them have the run of the place.
That's when I see the one lone kid that the pack has left behind.
He's sitting by the wall, looking at his phone glumly. This kid looks like the height of misery. He's small, slight, so nondescript he may as well chameleon in with the wall. But there's something about him that draws my eye in, so when I go over to him, he looks perplexed at first. It's as if he's not used to being seen. And he doesn't have any of the cosplay bling that the other Pokemon go trainers have adopted. He doesn't have a costume that reflects some ancilliary character in the game, purchased badges, a backpack for use on his Pokemon adventure. His clothes are shabby, tattered. His glasses are bent on the bridge of his nose. And the way he flinches when an adult comes near, breaks what's left of my heart, because this kid has obviously been through the wringer. It touches me in ways that I thought I had blocked myself off from. Because, even more than the mirror image of myself that I saw in the necky kid with the badges, I see a lot of a young boy who lived in a trailer park and would do anything to get out.
"It's not fair," he mumbles, blackly, "they all make fun of me because I can't buy the updates and I can't afford to buy expensive lures. But I just... I play the game because I like it, you know?"
He waves an arm at them, those fucking kids. They're all crowded around one spot by the jukebox, oblivious to the rest of the bar as they're trying to find something, shouting "Get it, get it!" I look back at the little boy, who is looking up at me with the saddest, oldest eyes, having experienced so much shit in his brief span. All he wanted from this stupid game was just a little enjoyment. Nobody ever gave him anything in his life. But these punks came and sucked all the fun out of the entire thing and left him with nothing.
"It's okay, though, I'm going to be the best Pokemon trainer in the world." He puffs out his chest, affecting whatever measure of pride he can. "I have my level 10 Pidgey, and we are gonna go out and bust some Pokemon. One day I'll own my own gym, and then people will look at me. Won't they?" As if in answer, my phone vibrated in my pocket, but I ignored it.
There was something in his demeanor that spoke to me, that ignited something I thought had been stomped out of me. Just pure love of the game. Just being unapologetically who you are about liking things.
"Oh, look! I found that Mew Two!" The boy is getting giddy with excitement as he holds his cheap Walgreens smart phone up to a spot on the way. "Oh shit. Oh shit. I'm going to be the first in this group to find a legendary. I'm going to rocket to the top of the Team Instinct rankings. I'm going to go down to Kaybee and beat Derek Snyder's gym. Nothing is going to stop me when I catch this Mewtwo, nothing can - "
I slide my phone out, in one smooth motion. The app that had been ringing opened, and I found the sprite of the Mewtwo, swooping in to the space in front of it and letting fly with one of the pokeballs in my arsenal. The small nerdy boy looked crestfallen as I cut him the smarmiest, most shit eating grin. "Looks like Team Rocket is blasting off again - !" I cackled.
There was something to not denying yourself the pleasures in life that I had been missing. I was glad to get back to what I loved.
Sometimes this game feels like a long grind in an RPG. You start out with no armor, with the least helpful items in your inventory, and you basically trudge through the high grasses and the dark caves while screeching little shits attack you every few steps. You cut them down with ease, because they're low hit point little wastes and they don't provide you enough experience to really grow past an encounter with them. Facing this week after week does build you up, increase your stats, but it's such an arduous task sometimes that you start to ask yourself why you do it, when there are much faster and smarter ways to get your validation. What do you gain by taking on the wild Pokemon in the cave in Victory Road? If you're at it long enough, you'll grind enough experience to harden yourself up for the real battles ahead, get yourself in fighting shape for taking on the supposedly elite.
Yeah, I'm back to video game metaphors on this one, because in getting in touch with where I started, I can see clearly the path I've been and the upward trend.
And the simple truth is this year I've lost some that I thought I had in the bag.
I've gone up against the Elite with little prep, counting on my skills alone to get my to the top of the League. And I've fallen. When I've fallen on my own, I own it. When I didn't... I get angry. And that's what's gotten me increasingly more frustrated is that, the times it's mattered, the times I greyed out early, I was told, "Oh, Kyle, there's nothing you need to change about your approach, PCW is competitive, it was just so close!" Bullfucking shit PCW is competitive. Bull, fucking, shit it was ever meant to be close. If someone works circles around me and beats me fairly I will be the first one to shake their hand. If the referees can't make their mind up and get panicky about who's supposed to be standing tall at the end because of a lot of outside factors, then I will call them out on it. That isn't me being "whiny". It isn't me complaining. That is me saying that I come out there every single week wanting to be The Very Best, like no one ever was.
And if I fall short, it does not mean, Darren Hughes, that you ever had anything to do with it.
You think you're the first that EVER remarked I'm flawed, a God with feet of clay? Boy, shut the whole fuck up. The entire premise of Kyle Shane is baked around anxiety struggles, facing inner demons, fluid sexuality, struggling to do the right thing and be the best, and always, always questioning what being the best really means. And yet despite all of those debuffs I still manage to come out there and fight my hardest.
And you wanna talk about exposing holes in someone, Darren you came back to PCW adamant that you were gonna right the wrongs of yesterday, you were going to make this tenure memorable and you were going to reforge your legacy by taking a Kyle Shane who you barely even took the time to fucking Google and making your mark against him. And you didn't. I put your damn fool lights out. And then you went on to be a complete non-factor, a non-entity in the Underground for an entire month, so much so that the champion stacked you and two other nobodies up like cordwood and pinned you all en masse in the utter show of disdain. That you rebounded by JUST SQUEAKING BY A WIN over freaking Razor Blade isn't impressive Darren, doesn't erase the stigma of failure from your decade ago tenure, it just meant that on your best week you would struggle by the guy who can't win a match people show up to. You actively flushed all the good will you got by surprising me with base level wrestling skill in your first match and threw it all down the drain. If anything, you losing to me exposed you, for what you are, somebody who doesn't take any of this one iota as seriously as I do.
This would have been your chance to get back on track, to prove that getting crushed by Sicko was just a stumble in the road... and it would have worked, if you hadn't shot your arrow against me, running your mouth when you should have been focused on Razor Blade, and puffing your chest out by shaking your hand and saying you're the man around here because you proved something against me. Like fuck. You aren't getting back on track now if I have anything to say about it, because I'm not going to sit idly by and wait for a repeat of your mealy mouthed shit you wrote out when you were too high amid a backdrop of you saying you're really serious this time, guys. You want to prove you belong here, you'll have to really fight me for it.
You want this? You want what I've got?
Then you are going to have to level up.
You can grind your way in the Underground division, where maybe you can hide your inadequacies by participating in one of their many meaningless fatal fourways. But if you're going to try and step up to me, you're going to need one hell of a burn heal.
My goal is always, unfailingly, to be the very best, like no one ever was. And I achieve that, through arduous, backbreaking, unflinching sacrifice and pain. But I am the man here. You are just a little boy at the beginning of your journey.
And you're about to be whited out, because you're out of usable tactics.
Peace out, shitheel.
It was when I pulled out of my own head and looked at the surroundings by me that I noticed the bar I was heading in to was surrounded by teenagers all staring at their smartphones.
"What the shit," I heard myself complain, "Will you little punks get out of here? This place has an ABC license and daddy needs to get his jagerbomb on." It was good to put up a swaggering front, to keep my mind off of her. Besides, I had left playing games behind in my other life. These little chuckleheads were just a grim reminder. They were all decked out, as you do, in something you'd probably see some little asshole in one of the later series of Pokemon, head-bands with Japanese kanji, backpacks and extraneous pockets. They looked like idiots. The one I took as the lead was a slender, long-necked, big lipped, cocky little urchin. He looked down his nose at me.
"Yo, why don't you go fuck yourself, you sad and weird old prick," he catcalled, and I, flabbergasted, went over to him. I slapped the phone out of his hand, letting it clatter to the floor. Everyone around him ooooh'ed.
"Just who in the hell do you think you are?" I demanded. He drew himself up, all maybe seventeen years of undeserved arrogance and nerdy pride. If he wasn't turning my favorite watering hole into a recreation of one of the scruffier themed gangs in The Warriors, I actually probably would've liked the kid. He jerked a thumb back at the guy working the bar. "This is a Pokestop, the owner here lets us fill up our gear and pokeballs for as long as we want, as long as we buy something non-alcoholic."
I shoot the black man pouring drinks a look with burning eyes, communicating nothing but the utmost betrayal and irritation. He just lumps his shoulders at me and says "Dude, I don't know nothing about this stuff, but the kids and this weird app are a gold mine, ever since a rare Mew showed up in the bathroom. Boss says they can say," he says, giving a laconic shrug that showcases the indifference of an underpaid employee. I can't believe what I'm hearing. If this place didn't make some of the best liquor mixed drinks in the South Boston area, I wouldn't even come here. And now, of all places, it was overrun by these little shits, all chasing after a pixelated, augmented reality little goblin? That would not stand.
I turn back to the gaggle of kids. "I want you all out of my goddamn bar," I tell them. A couple of them groan at the intrusion of an authority figure. I've never felt so far removed from a demographic. I stood there as the ultimate adult, a guy in his mid-late twenties in with a double-breasted suit on, coiffed hair, five-o clock stubble, and I telling a bunch of tweens that they couldn't play their dumb mobile app in my adult playground because I wanted to drink and disassociate myself from feeling. The look of resentment in their eyes as I shooed them away was something I knew full well. It was the look I'd give Eric when he would ransack my room in the trailer, telling me my Boba Fett toys and Slave Leia poster were tasteless garbage and that I was too old to be playing with kid stuff.
I didn't let my face crack, but something, deep down inside of me, cringed. And the phone in my pocket, as if sensing my moral dilemma, chirped in with it's tone... telling me that I had something very dear to me in my breast pocket, something I was denying myself from partaking in. I scowled. I denied that. Couldn't let it be my life anymore. I had changed my game. I had become heartless. God only knew that I died a little inside every single time one of my opponents in Pure Class Wrestling tried to make some pathetic video game analogy. I mean... wasn't it time to grow up? Double edged sword, that...
Like it or not, I was going to have to put up or shut up. I had spent so long wallowing in anger, and rage, and it bubbled over and I was stuck with it. I was stuck as the angry guy. I was stuck as the "whiny guy", the one that, despite the firm tone of my actions, everyone is going to say is complaining instead of seeing the places where I'd maybe had a point and I was served a raw deal. I was going to have to be a man, walk down there and take on a dude who's only crime was he smugly came back at me with a third-tier insult about my cock.
(But to be honest, Darren, I wouldn't be sorry about anything I'd done to you.)
The art of growing up, however, dictated that I be a man, and right now, to me that meant ignoring the phone going off in my pocket giving me it's sweet siren call back into engagement with the games, enough of the smug little children, and back into the real world. And yes, daddy did want his drink.
The leader of the pack, who's decked out with a red backwards baseball cap, and a vest he's adorned with the cheapest type of "badges" that you could get out of a 25 cent gumball machine. He steps up to me, this punk-ass kid, and he pops his gum. "Listen, dick, there's a rare Mewtwo somewhere in this building and we aren't going anywhere until we find it." He plucks at the lapels of my suit jacket, smoothing it out with the snarky lack of boundaries the young have for a generation they can't connect with. I've never met someone I've wanted to punch so much. "So, uh, why don't you and your Mens Wearhouse suit go on and read the financial section of the Wall Street Journal or something, we have Pokemon to catch."
"Pokemon, he says," I snipe back, curling my lip with utter disdain. "You little shits right now are too young to know anything about Pokemon, you're on the seventh generation and each one has slid even farther into being irrelevant. Pokemon. Please, shithead. The new games are garbage, filled with new generation crap that never lives up to when the games were really good. You little punks wouldn't have lasted five minutes playing Pokemon when you had to battle the original Elite Four, and then Red and his level 100 Charizard. You weren't there for the original Team Rocket. You don't know anything about this game you're playing, it's history, the legendary greats, or where it came from, you just jumped in on the ground floor of a new shiny addition to it and you think you own Pokemon. You don't know shit."
At the conclusion of this monologue, which they've carefully listened to, the trainer snickers, he looks at his friends, and then they all begin to laugh derisively. Let me tell you, there isn't much that hurts worse than being laughed at by teenagers, doesn't matter how self-confident you are, it will make you doubt yourself.
"Whatever, grandpa. Hey, here's an idea, why don't you let people like the things they want to like, instead of shitting all over them?" Says the boy with the badges.
His little girl friend, wearing a head scarf and short shorts that are vastly inappropriate for a girl underage, no, slap yourself, bad Kyle, speaks up in vehement outrage, "Yeah, you shitlord, why does your generation always have to make ours feel bad about what we do with our time. If it isn't bitching about kids being attached to technology and hook up culture, you always want to mock our pain for having anxiety about our gender identities. Let people live the way they want!"
I can see this is going south on me in a big way, and they're kids, so I can't resort to smacking them in the mouth or else catch a charge. What's an... adult to do? However, a bunch of them have taken to berating me, bolstered by the courage of their trainer head honcho. They throw peanuts from the little bowls at me, flinging broken shells and flakes all in my hair.
Someone's phone blings and they all crowd around the screen. "It says here that the Mewtwo is in the back near the kegs!"
They clamor like the rabble they are, working themselves into a frenzy.
Shunned, thrown debris at, and snubbed by teenagers. Your God of Game may never live this down. They're off in their own little world now, these mini Ash Ketchum wannabes. They've forgotten me. I look at the bartender, who nonchalantly continues to wipe down glasses. He ignores my "Can you see this shit" gesture as he's basically letting them have the run of the place.
That's when I see the one lone kid that the pack has left behind.
He's sitting by the wall, looking at his phone glumly. This kid looks like the height of misery. He's small, slight, so nondescript he may as well chameleon in with the wall. But there's something about him that draws my eye in, so when I go over to him, he looks perplexed at first. It's as if he's not used to being seen. And he doesn't have any of the cosplay bling that the other Pokemon go trainers have adopted. He doesn't have a costume that reflects some ancilliary character in the game, purchased badges, a backpack for use on his Pokemon adventure. His clothes are shabby, tattered. His glasses are bent on the bridge of his nose. And the way he flinches when an adult comes near, breaks what's left of my heart, because this kid has obviously been through the wringer. It touches me in ways that I thought I had blocked myself off from. Because, even more than the mirror image of myself that I saw in the necky kid with the badges, I see a lot of a young boy who lived in a trailer park and would do anything to get out.
"It's not fair," he mumbles, blackly, "they all make fun of me because I can't buy the updates and I can't afford to buy expensive lures. But I just... I play the game because I like it, you know?"
He waves an arm at them, those fucking kids. They're all crowded around one spot by the jukebox, oblivious to the rest of the bar as they're trying to find something, shouting "Get it, get it!" I look back at the little boy, who is looking up at me with the saddest, oldest eyes, having experienced so much shit in his brief span. All he wanted from this stupid game was just a little enjoyment. Nobody ever gave him anything in his life. But these punks came and sucked all the fun out of the entire thing and left him with nothing.
"It's okay, though, I'm going to be the best Pokemon trainer in the world." He puffs out his chest, affecting whatever measure of pride he can. "I have my level 10 Pidgey, and we are gonna go out and bust some Pokemon. One day I'll own my own gym, and then people will look at me. Won't they?" As if in answer, my phone vibrated in my pocket, but I ignored it.
There was something in his demeanor that spoke to me, that ignited something I thought had been stomped out of me. Just pure love of the game. Just being unapologetically who you are about liking things.
"Oh, look! I found that Mew Two!" The boy is getting giddy with excitement as he holds his cheap Walgreens smart phone up to a spot on the way. "Oh shit. Oh shit. I'm going to be the first in this group to find a legendary. I'm going to rocket to the top of the Team Instinct rankings. I'm going to go down to Kaybee and beat Derek Snyder's gym. Nothing is going to stop me when I catch this Mewtwo, nothing can - "
I slide my phone out, in one smooth motion. The app that had been ringing opened, and I found the sprite of the Mewtwo, swooping in to the space in front of it and letting fly with one of the pokeballs in my arsenal. The small nerdy boy looked crestfallen as I cut him the smarmiest, most shit eating grin. "Looks like Team Rocket is blasting off again - !" I cackled.
There was something to not denying yourself the pleasures in life that I had been missing. I was glad to get back to what I loved.
Sometimes this game feels like a long grind in an RPG. You start out with no armor, with the least helpful items in your inventory, and you basically trudge through the high grasses and the dark caves while screeching little shits attack you every few steps. You cut them down with ease, because they're low hit point little wastes and they don't provide you enough experience to really grow past an encounter with them. Facing this week after week does build you up, increase your stats, but it's such an arduous task sometimes that you start to ask yourself why you do it, when there are much faster and smarter ways to get your validation. What do you gain by taking on the wild Pokemon in the cave in Victory Road? If you're at it long enough, you'll grind enough experience to harden yourself up for the real battles ahead, get yourself in fighting shape for taking on the supposedly elite.
Yeah, I'm back to video game metaphors on this one, because in getting in touch with where I started, I can see clearly the path I've been and the upward trend.
And the simple truth is this year I've lost some that I thought I had in the bag.
I've gone up against the Elite with little prep, counting on my skills alone to get my to the top of the League. And I've fallen. When I've fallen on my own, I own it. When I didn't... I get angry. And that's what's gotten me increasingly more frustrated is that, the times it's mattered, the times I greyed out early, I was told, "Oh, Kyle, there's nothing you need to change about your approach, PCW is competitive, it was just so close!" Bullfucking shit PCW is competitive. Bull, fucking, shit it was ever meant to be close. If someone works circles around me and beats me fairly I will be the first one to shake their hand. If the referees can't make their mind up and get panicky about who's supposed to be standing tall at the end because of a lot of outside factors, then I will call them out on it. That isn't me being "whiny". It isn't me complaining. That is me saying that I come out there every single week wanting to be The Very Best, like no one ever was.
And if I fall short, it does not mean, Darren Hughes, that you ever had anything to do with it.
You think you're the first that EVER remarked I'm flawed, a God with feet of clay? Boy, shut the whole fuck up. The entire premise of Kyle Shane is baked around anxiety struggles, facing inner demons, fluid sexuality, struggling to do the right thing and be the best, and always, always questioning what being the best really means. And yet despite all of those debuffs I still manage to come out there and fight my hardest.
And you wanna talk about exposing holes in someone, Darren you came back to PCW adamant that you were gonna right the wrongs of yesterday, you were going to make this tenure memorable and you were going to reforge your legacy by taking a Kyle Shane who you barely even took the time to fucking Google and making your mark against him. And you didn't. I put your damn fool lights out. And then you went on to be a complete non-factor, a non-entity in the Underground for an entire month, so much so that the champion stacked you and two other nobodies up like cordwood and pinned you all en masse in the utter show of disdain. That you rebounded by JUST SQUEAKING BY A WIN over freaking Razor Blade isn't impressive Darren, doesn't erase the stigma of failure from your decade ago tenure, it just meant that on your best week you would struggle by the guy who can't win a match people show up to. You actively flushed all the good will you got by surprising me with base level wrestling skill in your first match and threw it all down the drain. If anything, you losing to me exposed you, for what you are, somebody who doesn't take any of this one iota as seriously as I do.
This would have been your chance to get back on track, to prove that getting crushed by Sicko was just a stumble in the road... and it would have worked, if you hadn't shot your arrow against me, running your mouth when you should have been focused on Razor Blade, and puffing your chest out by shaking your hand and saying you're the man around here because you proved something against me. Like fuck. You aren't getting back on track now if I have anything to say about it, because I'm not going to sit idly by and wait for a repeat of your mealy mouthed shit you wrote out when you were too high amid a backdrop of you saying you're really serious this time, guys. You want to prove you belong here, you'll have to really fight me for it.
You want this? You want what I've got?
Then you are going to have to level up.
You can grind your way in the Underground division, where maybe you can hide your inadequacies by participating in one of their many meaningless fatal fourways. But if you're going to try and step up to me, you're going to need one hell of a burn heal.
My goal is always, unfailingly, to be the very best, like no one ever was. And I achieve that, through arduous, backbreaking, unflinching sacrifice and pain. But I am the man here. You are just a little boy at the beginning of your journey.
And you're about to be whited out, because you're out of usable tactics.
Peace out, shitheel.
