Post by Kyle Shane on Dec 12, 2016 16:39:49 GMT -5
"So what is it that disappoints you most about the world, Kyle?" was her question, and it was a loaded one. Particularly since I saw great irony in that she was taking notes on a datapad as we were going.
I sighed, and looked out the window, which had a good view of downtown Hawley street and a long horizon of the Boston common. It was a bitterly cold morning, and everything was overcast and washed in dark clouds. I thought hard about my answer, as I ran my thin forefinger over an abstract sculpture that purported to be a woman but was more of loops and sworls sitting on a table. Therapists offices, I'd found, were always loaded with worldly crap to fiddle with, because they wanted to to be distracted, your mind diffused so they could peck at you with tough questions and trick you into saying something worthy of a note. Almost every therapist office I'd ever had had pretentious art, statues, little baubles and gewgaws to play with or look at on the wall. It made the room have an illusion of fullness and substance instead of reminding you just how empty life was that you had to come suss things out with the most scholarly, clinical stranger you could find.
Or maybe the problem's just you.
"What disappoints me is that I asked for this." I answer, at length, in as much honesty as I can. Still doesn't sit right. Children of broken homes learn the tactic of evasion and defusion early and often as a mechanism, a way to break down escalating tensions with an authority figure. Put simply: we learn how to lie; cause if your dad rummages through your drawer once too often and finds your stash of pot, you're going to learn many alternate ways to get out of the predicament. So, yeah. It becomes ingrained. Telling the truth leads me into bigger trouble than I ever did when I lied. But I want to start telling the truth more, so I do this time. And that's pretty much why I'm where I am now.
Except, no, lie. I won't do it to myself. I came for the drugs.
The therapist makes a little "hmm" noise low in her throat, but she infuriatingly doesn't look up from playing on her tablet. I don't know Dr. Krista Greer yet. She was referred to me by a computer match after my last therapist, Doctor Bromwell, suddenly had the authorities looking at off-shore accounts he knew nothing about and he had to flee the jurisdiction. That all came about in a way that was too fast to be happenstance, the computer matching me up with a new lady and a ping in my email not twelve hours after the Doc had left for the west coast. She was pretty, but severe. Her hair was tied back tightly in a bun that was pulled back hard enough that it should be stretching skin like a cheap mask. She wore dark stockings, high heeled shoes that could cut, and a black coat. Everything about her said man-eater more than it did clinical psychiatrist. "Can you care to elaborate on that?" she wheedled me.
"Hiro and me were kids when we started this. 19, 20 years old." I sigh, recollecting. "Just game, boys, really. Two pop culture obsessed, obnoxious little turds who were too cool for school and cut the most annoying promos in the biz right in the parking garage of our dorm. We were living off of the energy of being signed and being noticed and we thought we were learning what being famous was. Being asked to go to Comic Con panels and promote video games and fuck with assholes every week and get televised doing it. But that's not what fame is, doc." I settled forward, hands between my knees. "No, fame is being noticed by the higher ups of the wrestling companies, who have their own plans in place for their Wrestlewars main event, and put roadblocks in your way so that you'll be too burned out from all that weekly grind to think straight. Too deadened by the weekly challenge of thinking up another promo idea to film to do something smart and insightful, so you just throw out some crap."
I held up my hand in the understood one moment sort of gesture. "And then, you find that the masters in the booking position have masters themselves. That they answer to the television channel that broadcasts their show, and those in turn answer to the censors, and the censors are controlled by the network." I scoffed. It was hard for my voice not to turn bitter. "Cut to a few years down the line and these tv executives who buy and sell stocks worth more than your pay for the entire back half of 2013 have you in an office in one of the highest levels of 30 Rock Plaza for a meeting with their lawyers. And they're outlining in no uncertain terms what you can and can't do. Smoke on TV, yeah, it's edgy and plays well into the crowd that enjoyed Breaking Bad and Weeds. Sell drugs, we can spin it into some kind of arc. But they dictate what you can and can't say. Who you can't spend time with, the girl has to go, underage is a bad look for our company. And then, you have to begin to shill. You're a corporate interest now, so you'll have to be in commercials, PSA's; you'll have to do time and take time off wrestling to make an appearance on some other show owned by the same network, since NBC/Universal is almost half of cable now. And you'll break off pieces of your soul a bit of a time for this thing that you got into, when you were just a kid. Your friend and you wanted to be on TV and kick people in the face and make promos that were half meme, half talking about Playstation games, and you go on from there into being a completely bought corporate drone."
"And you still feel this way, even after leaving the wrestling company, and therefore those corporate interests, behind?" the doctor raised her eyebrows, but it still didn't seem like she was seeing me. Her ruby red lips were curved upwards in a mysterious smile.
"Not at all." I have to laugh. "If you don't do business with them, you're out. You're cut off from the wrestling company, and then that gets you in dutch with the television channel, and their network. All the way up to the top of the brass, the ones who control media like marionettes flinging strings. They own your image, see, and your likeness, and they can decide to cut you off on a capricious whim. Don't do business with us? Don't get paid for doing business as far back as 2011. Don't negotiate with our lawyers? All of your tapes get erased and you can't profit off of them. You become so shackled in to the system that they use their media to paint an image of you as something nobody wants, and it's just accepted because they're educating you what to think 24/7, these huge magnates control networks spanning 589 channels, multiple languages, multiple news outlets, all spilling the propaganda of the 1% up top, because that's just the way of the world. Media."
I'm preaching now. The doctor, for the first time, is looking at me, hungrily. Her red lips are peeled back in a sneer. Her tablet is, now, forgotten. She crosses her legs.
Her tablet pings. She raises her eyebrows, and cuts her foxlike eyes down. The intriguing arch of her eyebrow back towards me, indicates I should continue.
Relaxing back in the soft couch, I looked over Boston. "Hiro and me, our generation was the ground floor of social media, when all of this started. We were so naive, we thought that we were taking marketing to the next level. We had a way to push our personal brands to everyone in the world, and that's what media is, right? Propaganda, personal media takeover. But in the same token as it connected us to everyone, everywhere, it allowed us to see so much more of the world than anyone ever had." Wave an arm around at the two windows that meet in a corner, overlooking the city. "But the networks control those, too. And they just roll out more and more ways to connect people to the rest of the world in the same breath as they make everything dull. And that's what we want. That's the price we payed for seeing our world."
She touched a finger to her lips. "Mmm, tell me what you mean by that." Insipid therapist probing, always asking what you mean, what you intend, knowing every time that you goddamn well know the surface what, but not the deep why.
She taps a few more things into her tablet, smiling oddly. I took a deep breath. "I mean, you know that there's a link in scientific study between intelligence and depression. The more this generation of kids is exposed to the world, linked to each other, building a community in cyberspace, the higher rates of suicide rise. The more people need medication. Kids in the dorms in political science, earning some of the highest degrees were reliable customers for your friendly neighborhood dopeman. Everyone needs something to dull the pain of their existence."
"Do you?"
I held up a bottle of pills, rattle it like bones. Three left in the chamber. "What do you think?"
She pulled off a scrip pad, ripping off one for me and handing it over. I took it, looking at this paper I've let run my life. Because as much as I see this effect of needing to dull out an increasingly bleak and dark world, there are things in my life I need to dull first. "But this all circles back around to being in control. People are depressed because they feel like they're losing control. The teat of corporate sponsored media is fed to us at all hours of a day to keep us sedated, and those that are contracted into it in any way can never escape it, never leave it's reach. More and more people see the strings that bind them every day. But they choose to numb themselves so they don't have to stomach living in such a world."
"So yeah. I bought this world, and paid for it."
"And now you choose to numb yourself to it rather than deal with it, to block it all out with endeavors?"
I looked down at the empty bottle of pills in my hand. "Well. That's the question, isn't it."
She closed the hasp on her tablet with a snap, looked up at me. She gave me an acid sweet smile. "Well, I think that's all the time we have for today."
As I stood, she pressed a card into my hand. An appointment card for our next session, but when I looked on the back of it, it had a marking. A weird little face, like a Purge mask with X'ed out eyes. I flicked my uncomprehending gaze back up to Doctor Greer. Her smile was liminal and unreal like a Stepford Wive's. "We can pick this back up next week. Go see Stacy in the office to handle your appointment."
Perturbed, I flipped the card at Greer as a salute and tumbled out of the office. I did a small double take, reading into how the conversation had taken it's turn and if I'd heard her right. Then, I walked down the hall to the waiting room.
There were three people and a small child in the waiting room, craning their necks up to watch the TV bolted into the corner with cow-eyed vacancy. For a moment it was terrifying, it was like coming in to the middle of a zombie movie. I was missing the red, blaring symbol that had flashed on the TV before. The anonymous mask with the Cheshire grin and the X'ed out eyes that burned like a brand on the screen. When the news cut back on, David Brinkley was reading the news from the position of an anchorman. Despite having been dead for years.
"Stock prices fell into record lows today, as our new president elect vows to get tough on deals with China. Meanwhile, Russia has begun moving troops into the border of Belarus. International treaty has condemned his action, but he wants what is best for us. An FDA inspection of hot dogs today has uncovered a rising trend of blowfly eggs per every link. Oh Absalom... Celebrity... news... Kim ...-ashian unvei... new line of undergarments that are... studded ...." the voice on the tv slowed and distorted.
I sank back against the wall of the waiting room, eyes snapping around. The world was becoming nightmarish and distended. I realized that it could maybe be in my mind. Maybe I was a little more right and this world had fallen into dystopia already. Maybe the world was already hell, and instead of getting prodded by pitchforks, we're egged on by men on the monitor screen shrieking their propaganda.
I fumbled and fumfered with the child cap of the pills, finally got them off. Sadly, the three pills still in the bottle dropped to the floor like a shot. Cursing, I got down on my knees, searching for them with questing fingers. Just to make the world make sense again.
A shadow loomed over me. It was the little boy. His round, pudgy face was covered in a lipstick of drool and chocolate, his little tiny romper suit had Thomas the Tank Engine on the front. "Don't you wanna do something?" he whispered.
Unnerved, I stood. On TV, I had just missed another red-on-black flash, the Purge mask with the crossed out eyes blazing into the eyes of those in the lobby. When it came back, the dead newsanchor was continuing his surreal pitch of madness. "Japanese apocalypse death cults unleashed anthrax in a subway today, claiming responsibility for dozens of people infected... President Elect Trump vowed to send aid to victims of the deadly hurricane today, care packages of Trump brand steaks and baseball caps... The Pope declared clemency for his parishoners today in light of a new scandal involving deacons at the Vatican... Oh Absalom..."
The creep factor had reached the Nth degree. I walked over to Stacy in the receptionist's booth. I cocked a thumb back. "What's going on with the TV, is it broken?" Obviously that was a dumb thing to say, but I couldn't think of anything else. Stacy was an older lady, she was rotund in that way older women get when their primary job is sitting, she seemed to be all top. She had horn-rimmed glasses with tortoise shell frames on a chain, and she peered at me over them.
She took my card with a smile, and began writing in her appointment book. "This is the world we're paying for, after all." She said, enigmatically, and boy, if that didn't creep me out.
"...Ratings for our President elect's new reality show, who wants to run Taiwan, hit a record high..." said David Brinkley, as bugs began crawling from his ears and his nostril. He kept on looking down at the paper in his hands, giving it no notice.
"He waits for you on the other side of the gate," she said, and slid my appointment card back to me, masked face side up.
The words "what?" silently exploded on my lips. Barring the thought of getting more pills, I resolved to just get out of there. And yet, when I looked back into the waiting room, the little boy was playing with a train, his bored, urban professional mom was reading Newsweek with vague, waiting boredom, and the TV was playing an episode of Doc McStuffins. The rapt, zombie-like gaze was gone. These were just ordinary people, here for an appointment with a doctor, going on about their day like nothing had happened. Like we weren't just gifted a look at a nightmarish world.
I gulped, and looked down at the card. Trying to make it fit with the rest of the world, because it seemed like something other. On it was written just one word, "Wake".
The receptionist, fueled by the kind of crankiness only pushing paper and setting appointments can muster, called "Next!"
I had to blink a few times as I stepped out into the morning Boston air. A cross-wind pulled at me, and I tugged my peacoat closer against me. The events of the morning, both the disturbing scene inside the waiting room and the conversation with Greer tugged at me, two loose strands I could not tie together. "Don't you wanna do something" the little boy had asked me, which had thrown me off guard.
"You choose to numb yourself to it rather than deal with it?" she had said
"Well. That's the question, isn't it." Because it wasn't strictly the world at large I'd always run from. But where had that ever gotten me, also. Numb yourself or feel everything all at once, what kind of choices are those. Knowing you had the power in your hands to change the world is one thing. But running from it because ever since you were an adolescent, the negative, berating voice of your demon told you you can't, you won't, planting an ever-present kernel of anxiety in your head. It crafted you into a perfectionist, of the worst kind. You would hone your every effort to it's best, most absolute expression of effort you can give, but then you would bail on it before you can turn it in, put it out into the world, hold it up for scrutiny because that kernel is telling you it's not good enough. Don't you wanna do something? Always, at every time. It's hell being caught between anxiety and the push to do something, to be more, between fight and flight, between stay and go. So no, the questions Greer had asked me weren't new. They were just a little more pointed.
I pulled my coat closer to me. As I passed an electronics store with TV monitors in the window, shiny new flatscreens between 35-46 inches, all set in a tiered deck like a Greek chorus. One by one, they flickered, and a blazing red mask stared out at the world from them as I walked on by. I took my phone out. All this thought about indecision versus going for it was making me think of Array. I flipped through email of my correspondence with The Authority Figure of PCW, another one of my prompts, another thing I was determined to stop waffling on. The only thing was, when I'd started it, I'd questioned, how is this going to be different, how am I going to make this special, and not having an immediate answer, that kernel of doubt began whispering to me. Like it was whispering to me now, as I pulled up Array's number, and saw her face in my phone. Her name in my phone was "Soulmate", and the picture I used as her identifier is my favorite of her, it's her lying on her side in bed one bright morning, backlit from the window in my loft, looking like an angel. Her face is sunken into a pillow, her eye is crinkled mischievously, and her smile.
I look at that picture. And I ask myself, what kinds of things have I been blocking myself from feeling with these pills.
But I know, I'm approaching some kind of watershed moment. I'm going to have to choose, whether to retreat back into my cave and play my PS4 or if I'm going to stand up. Past attempts at growing the Game boy have produced growing pains. The kernel sits dug in deep like a carcinoma deep in the basal wall of the cell, satisfied that the voice that provided it was right all along. But the kid's voice occurred to me then, in the most improbable moment as I stepped off the curb. "Don't you wanna do something?" I knew I would never be able to retreat back into that cave again, like it or not.
And that was my last thought before someone threw a bag over my head and arms folded around me.
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In times of great upheaval and change, in times of the shift between one regime and the next, the established incumbent status quo will always buck harder, will always surge stronger in opposition to make up for the fact that it's way of life is going the way of the dodo. In times like these the message gets diluted, diffused among a thousand voices, all trying to claim competence for their own small victories instead of seeing the sea change of progress coming upon them. In this time, it's important to plant your feet against that surge, defiantly say your name and reiterate that message for all to hear. For those that missed the prelude last week, that message is simple and concise. I am Kyle Shane. I'm a paradigm shift in human form. I am bleeding edge. I am the coming thing. I am vox friggin' populi for everybody who's bored to tears with the status quo of this pale, flabby entrenched establishment. When I drove that moron TEC's skull into the canvas last week, it was the first shot of a coup, an uprising that is firmly dedicated to bringing the power structures of this company to the ground.
I am not one of you. Lunacy was an ever expanding joke in his previous incarnation, a bloviating tool who's only measure of success was expanding the roster of henchmen he could hire to fight his battles for him because he couldn't win a match. Here, he was a champion, and you all fear him like some kind of unpredictable genius.
I am not one of you. You all bow down before charlatan fake priests and their cults, allowing strangleholds on championships just because you never think to question once what they're saying. I'm not one of you. I'm one of them.
I am not one of you. But I'm here, and thank any god you want to, but thank me for it first.
I know, it's easy to go cross-eyed when you hear that talk. You probably get an average of five twats who make the same claims per quarter, but the difference is, I back up everything I've ever said with the unpoachable confidence to call my every shot right before I hit it out of the park. And because I've listened when people say what they want out of this business, and my central point is that I don't think any of you ever have. It's why upheaval is so vital, it's why giving a voice back to those people, and being front row center with them is so important. I'm not the head of a "campaign", no, I'm ground zero of a movement, baby.
And that's why the irony of the pick for my second opponent smacks so strong, because here's a guy who's everything I'm not.
Quick, make a snap assumption about Kyle Shane based on my bio!, 'cause I'm 98% sure I know exactly what Desmond Campbell is going to read into it. He's going to see the video game metaphors. He's going to glom onto all of the nerdy accoutrements, the t-shirt swag, the skinny physique and he's gonna write me off as some wimpy nerd that can't even lay down with a girl and touch a booby, because when people first saw the gamer kid come across their screens they immediately thought of every cliche from 1996 about dorky teens wearing tape on their glasses and playing Warcraft on refurbished PC's armed with an asthma inhaler and a pocket protector. He might read the biography (which I, myself wrote) and sneer down his nose at my projected weakness. Calling me fearful, shiftless and wishy washy. Except maybe I wrote those flaws about myself with waiting for some vigorously Republican male to come along and lambaste me for being the pinnacle of Millenial weakness expressly in mind. Maybe I put my flaws and my fears out there as a trap, because I don't see them as flaws at all; or maybe I'm comfortable with cutting myself open on that stage so the crowd can see my guts, because I want them to see all of me. Even a flawed diamond can cut through glass. But if you put your own faults out there and wear them as armor, they can't be used against you. And that's just one major difference in how Desmond and I do business. Because Fox News Superman over there takes painstaking care not to show any weakness in his facade, no chips, no chinks in that armor. Except when you look close enough that you know where to pierce.
Desmond, I'm going to address you straight for this bit, so there's no disconnect. At no point when you stand next to me, is there going to be any comparison. Nobody is going to buy your jive as long as I'm here, calling you out, and speaking honestly and frankly. Because they're going to see it's all talk and there is precious little of what you actually think and feel, just your bullshit platform for making this company great again, or, whatever. Real always recognizes real, and homey, you're faker than stripper tits. But what you get from Kyle Shane is always one hundred five percent the best of me. That's the difference.
Second biggest difference is the dichotomy between his "campaigning" and my just being. I'm not out there politicking for people to follow along behind me. Nah, son. I don't go out there with ten nicknames. He even has a list of former nicknames, if you can believe that. Each more corny than the last. When you hear God of Game, that encapsulates it all, it tells you I've got an ego and I'm committed to getting to the next level. I really don't need to go that more in depth. Here, this guy sounds like the headers for a newsletter about the War of 1812. He calls himself "Son of Old Glory", "The All American Hero", "The Son of the Commander and Chief" which, unless he means two relatively unimportant military cronies, I'm assuming means Commander IN Chief, the President of the United States; which makes me strongly question if I'm going to be fighting Sasha Obama in a rubber muscle suit, because our current Commander IN Chief's family tree branches only include XX chromosomes. It's weird, all of our presidents up until 2008 have been mayonaise lily white men with white wives, yet Desmond purports to be from some alternate timeline where he's the son of an unnamed Republican black president, who was such a raging success that he has to get out from under his shadow, and he does so via the method of reminding us that he's the Son of the President over and over and over again with every successive nickname. Thank the Maker those are only the names he goes by now, because he dropped, yet for some reason still wants us to low-key call him, other extremely embarrassing nicknames such as "The Beast of Buffalo", "The Patriot", and "Yankee Doodle's Favorite Child".
Yikes.
Does someone else want to tell this guy that 1867 called and it wants it's easy fodder for a "favorite child got diddled by Uncle Sam" joke back or should I.
But I get it, it's patriotic, and hell, this past election cycle showed that the easiest way to embed your way into the American mindframe is to do nothing but spew out a torrent of patriotic sounding buzzwords without meaning. But the election's aftermath/fallout is also showing us why that was such a deal of buyer's remorse, because blindly and loudly shouting catchphrases and nicknames is not policy. There's a strong link between Cheeto McLoudpants and "Yankee Diddle's Favorite Child", because it is a bad, bad fucking idea to throw your hat in when you have such a clear lack of experience that you're out of your depth. Now that the transition into an office is coming, and he has to start performing the actual work, we're going to see that he has absolutely no idea what he's doing. And if you think I'm talking about Drumpf, oh no. I mean Desmond. By his own bio he calls attention to the fact that he's new to this. But so much of his message is about "The Campaign" that he expects that not to matter. Your Fortunate Son. He wants to get these people on his side in the way that they'd naturally gravitate towards me. He wants to parade out there, waving flags, shouting catchphrases to the heartland, swelling up their nationalistic bosoms by placing his hand on his heart and shouting We The People. And you know, once, I would have had faith that a country couldn't possibly be so small minded as to buy into that. But I've toured Kansas and Mississippi, I've seen people chanting USA at wrestlers from other countries (even if they're from England, which - huh?) and I do know the dangerous power that blindly spouting jingoistic bullshit possesses. It's dangerous, and it does sweep people up in a fervor. But once the heat of the moment passes, people see that their subliminal programming was in error. And I do have faith that they're going to see right through Desmond Campbell's pandering, in time. Especially after I kick the living shit out of him, but even before that; Because it is just empty words with hollow, soulless corporate rapaciousness behind it. That is the true, shameful legacy of America that Desmond can't cover with all the flags and cheesy Washington themed one liners in the world.
Besides which, Desmond says right there in the first line he's quick to flip flop to do whatever is neccessary - I'm sorry, "Sways to whatever alignment benefits him and his campaign the most at any given time" as if he's playing D & D and can just roll a die to decide if he's going to be chaotic neutral or lawful evil at any time. Is there some specific reason that DCII expects people not to see right through such obvious chicanery, does he think so little of them? Again, real will out fake. So far, all I've seen of this campaign wouldn't win you a seat on the board of aldermen in Pacoima or Shermer, Illinois. I don't give a damn how many people put their hands on their chests. I don't give a damn who chants "We The People" back at you. You're a sap in a suit and you spew nothing but hollow lies and buzzwords to cover up the fact that you are very, very afraid you won't make a mark in this business to save your life.
"The Ballot Is Stronger Than The Bullet."
"We The People."
"When you're a Campbell it's mmm mmm good!"
Again, Desmond, addressing you: Do you even listen to these lines before they're fed to you on cue cards, garbage man? Do you test them out and run them through your lips a few times before a PR team runs them through a market survey for effectiveness and likeability? Or is everything you say just generated for you by a team of sycophants who run your "campaign" for you, opening your empty head and dumping in prompts so you'll know what to say during sound bites, coaching you on when to smile so you can cover up the vacancy in your stare and panic in your eyes? What do ANY of those dumb ass catchphrases MEAN, Desmond? Did you stop to think about them? Because they range on a spectrum from mush-mouthed drivel playing off corporate sponsorship to outright frightening, empty-headed assertions that government oversight is stronger than the people that very much can rise up and pull that government down? Here's a hint, that, is called fascism, and it doesn't matter what Breitbart articles tell you, it is in fact frowned upon in this country. The more I look at you, the less I see a leader. I just see a child in a suit, so much more than you could ever mock me for being a gamer kid. I see someone so unprepared for this that he's got to have a team marketing him, projecting this image onto him. So, what, so you can live up to your dad's legacy? You're failing at that. And the question of how many sycophants you got crammed up that keister bears out because you need them down there by the ring with you. You trust your own skills to such a lacking degree that you openly, in your profile, say that should push come to shove, or, I guess, should "whatever alignment benefits him and his campaign the most at any given time", you will send your bodyguards in to do your fighting for you. That doesn't make you a strong leader, Desmond? That doesn't make you a smart competitor. That makes you a little bitch. There's no smooth way to put that. A chicken shitted, yellow striped, candy assed little bitch. You don't trust your own skills enough that you allow the possibility that if things aren't going your way you're gonna send the goon squad in to do your work for you.
Well that, there, is the third ginormous difference twixt us, mon frere. I don't allow myself the possibility that I'm going to lose. It just isn't in my nature.
But besides that, even if I did, even if there was the tiniest iota, the most microscopic angstrom of doubt in my mind that I couldn't hack it on any given week, I would NEVER admit that, and what's more I would never admit to needing, NEEDING a security team of all things. I would never admit to having a group of people at my back to clean up messes I'd be hypothetically incapable of handling. You're sounding more and more like the type of politician we need to be rid of from a start. Someone who needs damage control, someone who relies on media spin to look good.
And yes, I absolutely did glean all of that by reading a few lines of your bio.
You must think I don't see right through you 20/20, little boy. I used to run chumps like you in MIT. You were the rich bros wearing khaki shorts with hundred dollar dress shirts and a cashmere sweater tied around your neck. You were the douches with smugness seeping out of your every pores with names like Chet and Chad and Tyler and Bradley. You were the type of affluent money that walked around secure in the sense that you'd never have to really, truly work for anything in your life, as you swaggered around campus thinking you could buy and pay your way through a decent GPA until you were gifted a corner office through nepotism and worked your way up through the American Dream, and one of those lowly, whiny bleeding heart liberals better not scuff the Porsche your parents bought for you because "your father would sue them." You were the sleazy, appropriative, narcissistic twats who thought that every girl on campus should want to get with them, who sidled up to me, and, heh, heh, my good man, do you have anything I can slip into the punch at the Theta Nu kegger tonight to make Amy Palmore more... amenable to my requests? You were the pampered, and spoiled, and gentrified son of privilege of the kind of overly capitalist cronyism that's choking this country like a slow cancer. The rich elite like you, who openly mock and look down on those below, as you do in your bio, for being complacent and not working hard enough but being "whiny". But should the president ask you to pay a few thousand more dollars in taxes towards the infrastructure of this economy, you'll complain to the high heavens. I nailed your type as soon as I laid eyes on your profile, Desmond Campbell the Second. Because your tenuous connection to an alt-reality president that may or may not exist aside, you are the very symbol of the one per cent. You haven't worked for a goddamn thing a day in your life. Fact. You've got a team of people around you at all times and have ever since you left Washington, grooming you, feeding you lines, fawning over your oh so scintillating ideas and telling you that you're special and unique in your campaign to win over the crowds of PCW. Your ideas! As if you're something special. As if you can politick your way through shaking hands and kissing babies into a World championship match, devoid of any actual wrestling talent.
Speaking of which, let's talk about that. Your timeline says you started wrestling training in 2007, and you've been touring several "regional promotions" without merit or name. But you have as of this writing, nine years later, nothing to show for it. Oh, come on, a big timer like you, wrestling in Moose Lodges for crowds of twenty people? I don't buy it for a second, you would want to start your campaign for real out there on the road, in front of thousands. But even still, you consider yourself a novice, and you won no titles by your own admission, so all these sojourns availed you nothing. In any case, nine years spent winning nothing important and gaining nothing before breaking out into a more widely distributed company is far from impressive. It makes you look greener than goose shit, totally unexperienced. And also, it makes it look like you utterly failed to make any kind of impactful remembrance whatsoever. Let's be real, if you were actually talented, even a few months in a bingo hall would pay off, because talent scouts would be calling you up nonstop to sign you to their company. But they didn't, did they, Desmond. You languished away for nine years, a small fish in a goddamn bubble, because the reality is that people saw you as what you are: not special or remarkable in any way. Once you take the hook about the presidency and the Stars And Bars recitals away, what skill is there to fall back on? What heart? Look at you and then look at me, within two years of my training and coming to wrestling, I was signed by the XWF Reboot. Within six months of that, I had proved myself to be the most formidable player in that fed, and rocketed up through the ranks to the World Championship. I switched companies, and did it again in the WGWF, winning their World title twice in the span of ten months there. That's what happens when you have the skill to actually back up your talk of changing the game, and starting a movement.
We could not be more dissimilar, Desmond, and ultimately, what you think makes me weak is what connects me to these people that pay to see me; what they see in me is something to aspire to. You offer them nothing but ignorance and avarice and once you start opening your mouth and deriding them, the more are going to slough off your bandwagon. But beyond that, you're still a weak willed, backwards thinking babe in the kiddie pool that has no idea of the depths of the water you're testing. And you'll flop out there, and start flailing around, 'cause now, you're swimming with sharks.
You are the polar opposite of everything I represent and just for existing I want to smash you utterly.
You are the privileged, soft, decadent son of a government corrupted by corporate interests and controlled and paid for by oil companies and banks. Every sickening lie that oozes it's way through your wormy lips has been bought and paid for by yes men feeding you lines, paid for by blood money sucked from the working class. It must kill you to see someone like me that's actually succeeded on my own terms, without the privilege of having a "president father" to pay my way. Legally or illegally, I, someone who came from a literal trailer, worked my way up into an Ivy League school and then peddled enough money to finance my own ventures and live on my own. I had exactly nothing handed to me. Everything I had, I worked for, and that includes the championships I won through skills you will never be able to buy.
You should have learned a lesson from last week, from my decimating The Enigmatic Creature. Actually, no, PCW management should have learned a lesson and not put someone who they want featured on weekly programming against me, if they didn't want them shot to smithereens. You are going to suffer for your coming up against Kyle Shane in your very first match, because no matter what you do from here on in, no matter how high you go people are going to still give you that little pitying sidelong glance, that hesitant look that says that when you finally got your one chance to put up or shut up and prove yourself, you drew Kyle Shane, which is a bit like confidently pulling a Draw Two card in Uno only to be hit with a Reverse. There is no way around it. When we clash in that ring it is going to come as inexorably as the surf, but I'm a stony shore that weak bits of foam like you crash and break yourselves on. While I'm still here. I'll bet you recede, go back into low tide mode, just the was the Enigmatic Creature did after his collision.
And still, every second of this confrontation, you're going to be thinking it's about right versus left. Patriot versus liberal. The powerful versus the weak. You're going to think you can come in and preach to these people about your vision of this country and get them all waving flags behind you when everything you represent is against the interests of the people you pander to with one hand. You alt-right Tea Party fucks, endlessly quoting from the Constitution without ever analyzing if what you strawman the words into mean in context. You utter, complete elitist buffoon. You classist, uncle Tom, ivory tower-shitlord sellout. The hand you hide behind your back is bought and paid for. And when I make an example of you, Desmond Campbell, that is when my PCW career is going to begin in earnest. That's when the revolution takes place, the first shot at my Lexington and Concord, the first stroke of a pen on my Declaration.
Because I am not one of you. I'm not a dull-eyed, unthinking sheep. I'm not a pandering, capering little boy trying to campaign his way into power. I'm not a demagoguish preacher man, rambling to my congregation about sin. I am sound. I am fury. I am an unmatched will to push things to their next level, whether personally, professionally, or to the ultimate extent of a union.
I'm the spark that fanned a fire. A fire that is going to ignite this entire federation. We are indeed gonna burn it to the ground at Collision Course, Desmond. But when it burns, the broken, rotted kindling and corrupted foundations are the only ones that are going to break off. Like you. Spiralling into the flame.
When it all comes down to this, it's all a'comin' down.
Endgame, daddy's boy.
I sighed, and looked out the window, which had a good view of downtown Hawley street and a long horizon of the Boston common. It was a bitterly cold morning, and everything was overcast and washed in dark clouds. I thought hard about my answer, as I ran my thin forefinger over an abstract sculpture that purported to be a woman but was more of loops and sworls sitting on a table. Therapists offices, I'd found, were always loaded with worldly crap to fiddle with, because they wanted to to be distracted, your mind diffused so they could peck at you with tough questions and trick you into saying something worthy of a note. Almost every therapist office I'd ever had had pretentious art, statues, little baubles and gewgaws to play with or look at on the wall. It made the room have an illusion of fullness and substance instead of reminding you just how empty life was that you had to come suss things out with the most scholarly, clinical stranger you could find.
Or maybe the problem's just you.
"What disappoints me is that I asked for this." I answer, at length, in as much honesty as I can. Still doesn't sit right. Children of broken homes learn the tactic of evasion and defusion early and often as a mechanism, a way to break down escalating tensions with an authority figure. Put simply: we learn how to lie; cause if your dad rummages through your drawer once too often and finds your stash of pot, you're going to learn many alternate ways to get out of the predicament. So, yeah. It becomes ingrained. Telling the truth leads me into bigger trouble than I ever did when I lied. But I want to start telling the truth more, so I do this time. And that's pretty much why I'm where I am now.
Except, no, lie. I won't do it to myself. I came for the drugs.
The therapist makes a little "hmm" noise low in her throat, but she infuriatingly doesn't look up from playing on her tablet. I don't know Dr. Krista Greer yet. She was referred to me by a computer match after my last therapist, Doctor Bromwell, suddenly had the authorities looking at off-shore accounts he knew nothing about and he had to flee the jurisdiction. That all came about in a way that was too fast to be happenstance, the computer matching me up with a new lady and a ping in my email not twelve hours after the Doc had left for the west coast. She was pretty, but severe. Her hair was tied back tightly in a bun that was pulled back hard enough that it should be stretching skin like a cheap mask. She wore dark stockings, high heeled shoes that could cut, and a black coat. Everything about her said man-eater more than it did clinical psychiatrist. "Can you care to elaborate on that?" she wheedled me.
"Hiro and me were kids when we started this. 19, 20 years old." I sigh, recollecting. "Just game, boys, really. Two pop culture obsessed, obnoxious little turds who were too cool for school and cut the most annoying promos in the biz right in the parking garage of our dorm. We were living off of the energy of being signed and being noticed and we thought we were learning what being famous was. Being asked to go to Comic Con panels and promote video games and fuck with assholes every week and get televised doing it. But that's not what fame is, doc." I settled forward, hands between my knees. "No, fame is being noticed by the higher ups of the wrestling companies, who have their own plans in place for their Wrestlewars main event, and put roadblocks in your way so that you'll be too burned out from all that weekly grind to think straight. Too deadened by the weekly challenge of thinking up another promo idea to film to do something smart and insightful, so you just throw out some crap."
I held up my hand in the understood one moment sort of gesture. "And then, you find that the masters in the booking position have masters themselves. That they answer to the television channel that broadcasts their show, and those in turn answer to the censors, and the censors are controlled by the network." I scoffed. It was hard for my voice not to turn bitter. "Cut to a few years down the line and these tv executives who buy and sell stocks worth more than your pay for the entire back half of 2013 have you in an office in one of the highest levels of 30 Rock Plaza for a meeting with their lawyers. And they're outlining in no uncertain terms what you can and can't do. Smoke on TV, yeah, it's edgy and plays well into the crowd that enjoyed Breaking Bad and Weeds. Sell drugs, we can spin it into some kind of arc. But they dictate what you can and can't say. Who you can't spend time with, the girl has to go, underage is a bad look for our company. And then, you have to begin to shill. You're a corporate interest now, so you'll have to be in commercials, PSA's; you'll have to do time and take time off wrestling to make an appearance on some other show owned by the same network, since NBC/Universal is almost half of cable now. And you'll break off pieces of your soul a bit of a time for this thing that you got into, when you were just a kid. Your friend and you wanted to be on TV and kick people in the face and make promos that were half meme, half talking about Playstation games, and you go on from there into being a completely bought corporate drone."
"And you still feel this way, even after leaving the wrestling company, and therefore those corporate interests, behind?" the doctor raised her eyebrows, but it still didn't seem like she was seeing me. Her ruby red lips were curved upwards in a mysterious smile.
"Not at all." I have to laugh. "If you don't do business with them, you're out. You're cut off from the wrestling company, and then that gets you in dutch with the television channel, and their network. All the way up to the top of the brass, the ones who control media like marionettes flinging strings. They own your image, see, and your likeness, and they can decide to cut you off on a capricious whim. Don't do business with us? Don't get paid for doing business as far back as 2011. Don't negotiate with our lawyers? All of your tapes get erased and you can't profit off of them. You become so shackled in to the system that they use their media to paint an image of you as something nobody wants, and it's just accepted because they're educating you what to think 24/7, these huge magnates control networks spanning 589 channels, multiple languages, multiple news outlets, all spilling the propaganda of the 1% up top, because that's just the way of the world. Media."
I'm preaching now. The doctor, for the first time, is looking at me, hungrily. Her red lips are peeled back in a sneer. Her tablet is, now, forgotten. She crosses her legs.
Her tablet pings. She raises her eyebrows, and cuts her foxlike eyes down. The intriguing arch of her eyebrow back towards me, indicates I should continue.
Relaxing back in the soft couch, I looked over Boston. "Hiro and me, our generation was the ground floor of social media, when all of this started. We were so naive, we thought that we were taking marketing to the next level. We had a way to push our personal brands to everyone in the world, and that's what media is, right? Propaganda, personal media takeover. But in the same token as it connected us to everyone, everywhere, it allowed us to see so much more of the world than anyone ever had." Wave an arm around at the two windows that meet in a corner, overlooking the city. "But the networks control those, too. And they just roll out more and more ways to connect people to the rest of the world in the same breath as they make everything dull. And that's what we want. That's the price we payed for seeing our world."
She touched a finger to her lips. "Mmm, tell me what you mean by that." Insipid therapist probing, always asking what you mean, what you intend, knowing every time that you goddamn well know the surface what, but not the deep why.
She taps a few more things into her tablet, smiling oddly. I took a deep breath. "I mean, you know that there's a link in scientific study between intelligence and depression. The more this generation of kids is exposed to the world, linked to each other, building a community in cyberspace, the higher rates of suicide rise. The more people need medication. Kids in the dorms in political science, earning some of the highest degrees were reliable customers for your friendly neighborhood dopeman. Everyone needs something to dull the pain of their existence."
"Do you?"
I held up a bottle of pills, rattle it like bones. Three left in the chamber. "What do you think?"
She pulled off a scrip pad, ripping off one for me and handing it over. I took it, looking at this paper I've let run my life. Because as much as I see this effect of needing to dull out an increasingly bleak and dark world, there are things in my life I need to dull first. "But this all circles back around to being in control. People are depressed because they feel like they're losing control. The teat of corporate sponsored media is fed to us at all hours of a day to keep us sedated, and those that are contracted into it in any way can never escape it, never leave it's reach. More and more people see the strings that bind them every day. But they choose to numb themselves so they don't have to stomach living in such a world."
"So yeah. I bought this world, and paid for it."
"And now you choose to numb yourself to it rather than deal with it, to block it all out with endeavors?"
I looked down at the empty bottle of pills in my hand. "Well. That's the question, isn't it."
She closed the hasp on her tablet with a snap, looked up at me. She gave me an acid sweet smile. "Well, I think that's all the time we have for today."
As I stood, she pressed a card into my hand. An appointment card for our next session, but when I looked on the back of it, it had a marking. A weird little face, like a Purge mask with X'ed out eyes. I flicked my uncomprehending gaze back up to Doctor Greer. Her smile was liminal and unreal like a Stepford Wive's. "We can pick this back up next week. Go see Stacy in the office to handle your appointment."
Perturbed, I flipped the card at Greer as a salute and tumbled out of the office. I did a small double take, reading into how the conversation had taken it's turn and if I'd heard her right. Then, I walked down the hall to the waiting room.
There were three people and a small child in the waiting room, craning their necks up to watch the TV bolted into the corner with cow-eyed vacancy. For a moment it was terrifying, it was like coming in to the middle of a zombie movie. I was missing the red, blaring symbol that had flashed on the TV before. The anonymous mask with the Cheshire grin and the X'ed out eyes that burned like a brand on the screen. When the news cut back on, David Brinkley was reading the news from the position of an anchorman. Despite having been dead for years.
"Stock prices fell into record lows today, as our new president elect vows to get tough on deals with China. Meanwhile, Russia has begun moving troops into the border of Belarus. International treaty has condemned his action, but he wants what is best for us. An FDA inspection of hot dogs today has uncovered a rising trend of blowfly eggs per every link. Oh Absalom... Celebrity... news... Kim ...-ashian unvei... new line of undergarments that are... studded ...." the voice on the tv slowed and distorted.
I sank back against the wall of the waiting room, eyes snapping around. The world was becoming nightmarish and distended. I realized that it could maybe be in my mind. Maybe I was a little more right and this world had fallen into dystopia already. Maybe the world was already hell, and instead of getting prodded by pitchforks, we're egged on by men on the monitor screen shrieking their propaganda.
I fumbled and fumfered with the child cap of the pills, finally got them off. Sadly, the three pills still in the bottle dropped to the floor like a shot. Cursing, I got down on my knees, searching for them with questing fingers. Just to make the world make sense again.
A shadow loomed over me. It was the little boy. His round, pudgy face was covered in a lipstick of drool and chocolate, his little tiny romper suit had Thomas the Tank Engine on the front. "Don't you wanna do something?" he whispered.
Unnerved, I stood. On TV, I had just missed another red-on-black flash, the Purge mask with the crossed out eyes blazing into the eyes of those in the lobby. When it came back, the dead newsanchor was continuing his surreal pitch of madness. "Japanese apocalypse death cults unleashed anthrax in a subway today, claiming responsibility for dozens of people infected... President Elect Trump vowed to send aid to victims of the deadly hurricane today, care packages of Trump brand steaks and baseball caps... The Pope declared clemency for his parishoners today in light of a new scandal involving deacons at the Vatican... Oh Absalom..."
The creep factor had reached the Nth degree. I walked over to Stacy in the receptionist's booth. I cocked a thumb back. "What's going on with the TV, is it broken?" Obviously that was a dumb thing to say, but I couldn't think of anything else. Stacy was an older lady, she was rotund in that way older women get when their primary job is sitting, she seemed to be all top. She had horn-rimmed glasses with tortoise shell frames on a chain, and she peered at me over them.
She took my card with a smile, and began writing in her appointment book. "This is the world we're paying for, after all." She said, enigmatically, and boy, if that didn't creep me out.
"...Ratings for our President elect's new reality show, who wants to run Taiwan, hit a record high..." said David Brinkley, as bugs began crawling from his ears and his nostril. He kept on looking down at the paper in his hands, giving it no notice.
"He waits for you on the other side of the gate," she said, and slid my appointment card back to me, masked face side up.
The words "what?" silently exploded on my lips. Barring the thought of getting more pills, I resolved to just get out of there. And yet, when I looked back into the waiting room, the little boy was playing with a train, his bored, urban professional mom was reading Newsweek with vague, waiting boredom, and the TV was playing an episode of Doc McStuffins. The rapt, zombie-like gaze was gone. These were just ordinary people, here for an appointment with a doctor, going on about their day like nothing had happened. Like we weren't just gifted a look at a nightmarish world.
I gulped, and looked down at the card. Trying to make it fit with the rest of the world, because it seemed like something other. On it was written just one word, "Wake".
The receptionist, fueled by the kind of crankiness only pushing paper and setting appointments can muster, called "Next!"
I had to blink a few times as I stepped out into the morning Boston air. A cross-wind pulled at me, and I tugged my peacoat closer against me. The events of the morning, both the disturbing scene inside the waiting room and the conversation with Greer tugged at me, two loose strands I could not tie together. "Don't you wanna do something" the little boy had asked me, which had thrown me off guard.
"You choose to numb yourself to it rather than deal with it?" she had said
"Well. That's the question, isn't it." Because it wasn't strictly the world at large I'd always run from. But where had that ever gotten me, also. Numb yourself or feel everything all at once, what kind of choices are those. Knowing you had the power in your hands to change the world is one thing. But running from it because ever since you were an adolescent, the negative, berating voice of your demon told you you can't, you won't, planting an ever-present kernel of anxiety in your head. It crafted you into a perfectionist, of the worst kind. You would hone your every effort to it's best, most absolute expression of effort you can give, but then you would bail on it before you can turn it in, put it out into the world, hold it up for scrutiny because that kernel is telling you it's not good enough. Don't you wanna do something? Always, at every time. It's hell being caught between anxiety and the push to do something, to be more, between fight and flight, between stay and go. So no, the questions Greer had asked me weren't new. They were just a little more pointed.
I pulled my coat closer to me. As I passed an electronics store with TV monitors in the window, shiny new flatscreens between 35-46 inches, all set in a tiered deck like a Greek chorus. One by one, they flickered, and a blazing red mask stared out at the world from them as I walked on by. I took my phone out. All this thought about indecision versus going for it was making me think of Array. I flipped through email of my correspondence with The Authority Figure of PCW, another one of my prompts, another thing I was determined to stop waffling on. The only thing was, when I'd started it, I'd questioned, how is this going to be different, how am I going to make this special, and not having an immediate answer, that kernel of doubt began whispering to me. Like it was whispering to me now, as I pulled up Array's number, and saw her face in my phone. Her name in my phone was "Soulmate", and the picture I used as her identifier is my favorite of her, it's her lying on her side in bed one bright morning, backlit from the window in my loft, looking like an angel. Her face is sunken into a pillow, her eye is crinkled mischievously, and her smile.
I look at that picture. And I ask myself, what kinds of things have I been blocking myself from feeling with these pills.
But I know, I'm approaching some kind of watershed moment. I'm going to have to choose, whether to retreat back into my cave and play my PS4 or if I'm going to stand up. Past attempts at growing the Game boy have produced growing pains. The kernel sits dug in deep like a carcinoma deep in the basal wall of the cell, satisfied that the voice that provided it was right all along. But the kid's voice occurred to me then, in the most improbable moment as I stepped off the curb. "Don't you wanna do something?" I knew I would never be able to retreat back into that cave again, like it or not.
And that was my last thought before someone threw a bag over my head and arms folded around me.
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::SYNCHRONIZING::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
In times of great upheaval and change, in times of the shift between one regime and the next, the established incumbent status quo will always buck harder, will always surge stronger in opposition to make up for the fact that it's way of life is going the way of the dodo. In times like these the message gets diluted, diffused among a thousand voices, all trying to claim competence for their own small victories instead of seeing the sea change of progress coming upon them. In this time, it's important to plant your feet against that surge, defiantly say your name and reiterate that message for all to hear. For those that missed the prelude last week, that message is simple and concise. I am Kyle Shane. I'm a paradigm shift in human form. I am bleeding edge. I am the coming thing. I am vox friggin' populi for everybody who's bored to tears with the status quo of this pale, flabby entrenched establishment. When I drove that moron TEC's skull into the canvas last week, it was the first shot of a coup, an uprising that is firmly dedicated to bringing the power structures of this company to the ground.
I am not one of you. Lunacy was an ever expanding joke in his previous incarnation, a bloviating tool who's only measure of success was expanding the roster of henchmen he could hire to fight his battles for him because he couldn't win a match. Here, he was a champion, and you all fear him like some kind of unpredictable genius.
I am not one of you. You all bow down before charlatan fake priests and their cults, allowing strangleholds on championships just because you never think to question once what they're saying. I'm not one of you. I'm one of them.
I am not one of you. But I'm here, and thank any god you want to, but thank me for it first.
I know, it's easy to go cross-eyed when you hear that talk. You probably get an average of five twats who make the same claims per quarter, but the difference is, I back up everything I've ever said with the unpoachable confidence to call my every shot right before I hit it out of the park. And because I've listened when people say what they want out of this business, and my central point is that I don't think any of you ever have. It's why upheaval is so vital, it's why giving a voice back to those people, and being front row center with them is so important. I'm not the head of a "campaign", no, I'm ground zero of a movement, baby.
And that's why the irony of the pick for my second opponent smacks so strong, because here's a guy who's everything I'm not.
Quick, make a snap assumption about Kyle Shane based on my bio!, 'cause I'm 98% sure I know exactly what Desmond Campbell is going to read into it. He's going to see the video game metaphors. He's going to glom onto all of the nerdy accoutrements, the t-shirt swag, the skinny physique and he's gonna write me off as some wimpy nerd that can't even lay down with a girl and touch a booby, because when people first saw the gamer kid come across their screens they immediately thought of every cliche from 1996 about dorky teens wearing tape on their glasses and playing Warcraft on refurbished PC's armed with an asthma inhaler and a pocket protector. He might read the biography (which I, myself wrote) and sneer down his nose at my projected weakness. Calling me fearful, shiftless and wishy washy. Except maybe I wrote those flaws about myself with waiting for some vigorously Republican male to come along and lambaste me for being the pinnacle of Millenial weakness expressly in mind. Maybe I put my flaws and my fears out there as a trap, because I don't see them as flaws at all; or maybe I'm comfortable with cutting myself open on that stage so the crowd can see my guts, because I want them to see all of me. Even a flawed diamond can cut through glass. But if you put your own faults out there and wear them as armor, they can't be used against you. And that's just one major difference in how Desmond and I do business. Because Fox News Superman over there takes painstaking care not to show any weakness in his facade, no chips, no chinks in that armor. Except when you look close enough that you know where to pierce.
Desmond, I'm going to address you straight for this bit, so there's no disconnect. At no point when you stand next to me, is there going to be any comparison. Nobody is going to buy your jive as long as I'm here, calling you out, and speaking honestly and frankly. Because they're going to see it's all talk and there is precious little of what you actually think and feel, just your bullshit platform for making this company great again, or, whatever. Real always recognizes real, and homey, you're faker than stripper tits. But what you get from Kyle Shane is always one hundred five percent the best of me. That's the difference.
Second biggest difference is the dichotomy between his "campaigning" and my just being. I'm not out there politicking for people to follow along behind me. Nah, son. I don't go out there with ten nicknames. He even has a list of former nicknames, if you can believe that. Each more corny than the last. When you hear God of Game, that encapsulates it all, it tells you I've got an ego and I'm committed to getting to the next level. I really don't need to go that more in depth. Here, this guy sounds like the headers for a newsletter about the War of 1812. He calls himself "Son of Old Glory", "The All American Hero", "The Son of the Commander and Chief" which, unless he means two relatively unimportant military cronies, I'm assuming means Commander IN Chief, the President of the United States; which makes me strongly question if I'm going to be fighting Sasha Obama in a rubber muscle suit, because our current Commander IN Chief's family tree branches only include XX chromosomes. It's weird, all of our presidents up until 2008 have been mayonaise lily white men with white wives, yet Desmond purports to be from some alternate timeline where he's the son of an unnamed Republican black president, who was such a raging success that he has to get out from under his shadow, and he does so via the method of reminding us that he's the Son of the President over and over and over again with every successive nickname. Thank the Maker those are only the names he goes by now, because he dropped, yet for some reason still wants us to low-key call him, other extremely embarrassing nicknames such as "The Beast of Buffalo", "The Patriot", and "Yankee Doodle's Favorite Child".
Yikes.
Does someone else want to tell this guy that 1867 called and it wants it's easy fodder for a "favorite child got diddled by Uncle Sam" joke back or should I.
But I get it, it's patriotic, and hell, this past election cycle showed that the easiest way to embed your way into the American mindframe is to do nothing but spew out a torrent of patriotic sounding buzzwords without meaning. But the election's aftermath/fallout is also showing us why that was such a deal of buyer's remorse, because blindly and loudly shouting catchphrases and nicknames is not policy. There's a strong link between Cheeto McLoudpants and "Yankee Diddle's Favorite Child", because it is a bad, bad fucking idea to throw your hat in when you have such a clear lack of experience that you're out of your depth. Now that the transition into an office is coming, and he has to start performing the actual work, we're going to see that he has absolutely no idea what he's doing. And if you think I'm talking about Drumpf, oh no. I mean Desmond. By his own bio he calls attention to the fact that he's new to this. But so much of his message is about "The Campaign" that he expects that not to matter. Your Fortunate Son. He wants to get these people on his side in the way that they'd naturally gravitate towards me. He wants to parade out there, waving flags, shouting catchphrases to the heartland, swelling up their nationalistic bosoms by placing his hand on his heart and shouting We The People. And you know, once, I would have had faith that a country couldn't possibly be so small minded as to buy into that. But I've toured Kansas and Mississippi, I've seen people chanting USA at wrestlers from other countries (even if they're from England, which - huh?) and I do know the dangerous power that blindly spouting jingoistic bullshit possesses. It's dangerous, and it does sweep people up in a fervor. But once the heat of the moment passes, people see that their subliminal programming was in error. And I do have faith that they're going to see right through Desmond Campbell's pandering, in time. Especially after I kick the living shit out of him, but even before that; Because it is just empty words with hollow, soulless corporate rapaciousness behind it. That is the true, shameful legacy of America that Desmond can't cover with all the flags and cheesy Washington themed one liners in the world.
Besides which, Desmond says right there in the first line he's quick to flip flop to do whatever is neccessary - I'm sorry, "Sways to whatever alignment benefits him and his campaign the most at any given time" as if he's playing D & D and can just roll a die to decide if he's going to be chaotic neutral or lawful evil at any time. Is there some specific reason that DCII expects people not to see right through such obvious chicanery, does he think so little of them? Again, real will out fake. So far, all I've seen of this campaign wouldn't win you a seat on the board of aldermen in Pacoima or Shermer, Illinois. I don't give a damn how many people put their hands on their chests. I don't give a damn who chants "We The People" back at you. You're a sap in a suit and you spew nothing but hollow lies and buzzwords to cover up the fact that you are very, very afraid you won't make a mark in this business to save your life.
"The Ballot Is Stronger Than The Bullet."
"We The People."
"When you're a Campbell it's mmm mmm good!"
Again, Desmond, addressing you: Do you even listen to these lines before they're fed to you on cue cards, garbage man? Do you test them out and run them through your lips a few times before a PR team runs them through a market survey for effectiveness and likeability? Or is everything you say just generated for you by a team of sycophants who run your "campaign" for you, opening your empty head and dumping in prompts so you'll know what to say during sound bites, coaching you on when to smile so you can cover up the vacancy in your stare and panic in your eyes? What do ANY of those dumb ass catchphrases MEAN, Desmond? Did you stop to think about them? Because they range on a spectrum from mush-mouthed drivel playing off corporate sponsorship to outright frightening, empty-headed assertions that government oversight is stronger than the people that very much can rise up and pull that government down? Here's a hint, that, is called fascism, and it doesn't matter what Breitbart articles tell you, it is in fact frowned upon in this country. The more I look at you, the less I see a leader. I just see a child in a suit, so much more than you could ever mock me for being a gamer kid. I see someone so unprepared for this that he's got to have a team marketing him, projecting this image onto him. So, what, so you can live up to your dad's legacy? You're failing at that. And the question of how many sycophants you got crammed up that keister bears out because you need them down there by the ring with you. You trust your own skills to such a lacking degree that you openly, in your profile, say that should push come to shove, or, I guess, should "whatever alignment benefits him and his campaign the most at any given time", you will send your bodyguards in to do your fighting for you. That doesn't make you a strong leader, Desmond? That doesn't make you a smart competitor. That makes you a little bitch. There's no smooth way to put that. A chicken shitted, yellow striped, candy assed little bitch. You don't trust your own skills enough that you allow the possibility that if things aren't going your way you're gonna send the goon squad in to do your work for you.
Well that, there, is the third ginormous difference twixt us, mon frere. I don't allow myself the possibility that I'm going to lose. It just isn't in my nature.
But besides that, even if I did, even if there was the tiniest iota, the most microscopic angstrom of doubt in my mind that I couldn't hack it on any given week, I would NEVER admit that, and what's more I would never admit to needing, NEEDING a security team of all things. I would never admit to having a group of people at my back to clean up messes I'd be hypothetically incapable of handling. You're sounding more and more like the type of politician we need to be rid of from a start. Someone who needs damage control, someone who relies on media spin to look good.
And yes, I absolutely did glean all of that by reading a few lines of your bio.
You must think I don't see right through you 20/20, little boy. I used to run chumps like you in MIT. You were the rich bros wearing khaki shorts with hundred dollar dress shirts and a cashmere sweater tied around your neck. You were the douches with smugness seeping out of your every pores with names like Chet and Chad and Tyler and Bradley. You were the type of affluent money that walked around secure in the sense that you'd never have to really, truly work for anything in your life, as you swaggered around campus thinking you could buy and pay your way through a decent GPA until you were gifted a corner office through nepotism and worked your way up through the American Dream, and one of those lowly, whiny bleeding heart liberals better not scuff the Porsche your parents bought for you because "your father would sue them." You were the sleazy, appropriative, narcissistic twats who thought that every girl on campus should want to get with them, who sidled up to me, and, heh, heh, my good man, do you have anything I can slip into the punch at the Theta Nu kegger tonight to make Amy Palmore more... amenable to my requests? You were the pampered, and spoiled, and gentrified son of privilege of the kind of overly capitalist cronyism that's choking this country like a slow cancer. The rich elite like you, who openly mock and look down on those below, as you do in your bio, for being complacent and not working hard enough but being "whiny". But should the president ask you to pay a few thousand more dollars in taxes towards the infrastructure of this economy, you'll complain to the high heavens. I nailed your type as soon as I laid eyes on your profile, Desmond Campbell the Second. Because your tenuous connection to an alt-reality president that may or may not exist aside, you are the very symbol of the one per cent. You haven't worked for a goddamn thing a day in your life. Fact. You've got a team of people around you at all times and have ever since you left Washington, grooming you, feeding you lines, fawning over your oh so scintillating ideas and telling you that you're special and unique in your campaign to win over the crowds of PCW. Your ideas! As if you're something special. As if you can politick your way through shaking hands and kissing babies into a World championship match, devoid of any actual wrestling talent.
Speaking of which, let's talk about that. Your timeline says you started wrestling training in 2007, and you've been touring several "regional promotions" without merit or name. But you have as of this writing, nine years later, nothing to show for it. Oh, come on, a big timer like you, wrestling in Moose Lodges for crowds of twenty people? I don't buy it for a second, you would want to start your campaign for real out there on the road, in front of thousands. But even still, you consider yourself a novice, and you won no titles by your own admission, so all these sojourns availed you nothing. In any case, nine years spent winning nothing important and gaining nothing before breaking out into a more widely distributed company is far from impressive. It makes you look greener than goose shit, totally unexperienced. And also, it makes it look like you utterly failed to make any kind of impactful remembrance whatsoever. Let's be real, if you were actually talented, even a few months in a bingo hall would pay off, because talent scouts would be calling you up nonstop to sign you to their company. But they didn't, did they, Desmond. You languished away for nine years, a small fish in a goddamn bubble, because the reality is that people saw you as what you are: not special or remarkable in any way. Once you take the hook about the presidency and the Stars And Bars recitals away, what skill is there to fall back on? What heart? Look at you and then look at me, within two years of my training and coming to wrestling, I was signed by the XWF Reboot. Within six months of that, I had proved myself to be the most formidable player in that fed, and rocketed up through the ranks to the World Championship. I switched companies, and did it again in the WGWF, winning their World title twice in the span of ten months there. That's what happens when you have the skill to actually back up your talk of changing the game, and starting a movement.
We could not be more dissimilar, Desmond, and ultimately, what you think makes me weak is what connects me to these people that pay to see me; what they see in me is something to aspire to. You offer them nothing but ignorance and avarice and once you start opening your mouth and deriding them, the more are going to slough off your bandwagon. But beyond that, you're still a weak willed, backwards thinking babe in the kiddie pool that has no idea of the depths of the water you're testing. And you'll flop out there, and start flailing around, 'cause now, you're swimming with sharks.
You are the polar opposite of everything I represent and just for existing I want to smash you utterly.
You are the privileged, soft, decadent son of a government corrupted by corporate interests and controlled and paid for by oil companies and banks. Every sickening lie that oozes it's way through your wormy lips has been bought and paid for by yes men feeding you lines, paid for by blood money sucked from the working class. It must kill you to see someone like me that's actually succeeded on my own terms, without the privilege of having a "president father" to pay my way. Legally or illegally, I, someone who came from a literal trailer, worked my way up into an Ivy League school and then peddled enough money to finance my own ventures and live on my own. I had exactly nothing handed to me. Everything I had, I worked for, and that includes the championships I won through skills you will never be able to buy.
You should have learned a lesson from last week, from my decimating The Enigmatic Creature. Actually, no, PCW management should have learned a lesson and not put someone who they want featured on weekly programming against me, if they didn't want them shot to smithereens. You are going to suffer for your coming up against Kyle Shane in your very first match, because no matter what you do from here on in, no matter how high you go people are going to still give you that little pitying sidelong glance, that hesitant look that says that when you finally got your one chance to put up or shut up and prove yourself, you drew Kyle Shane, which is a bit like confidently pulling a Draw Two card in Uno only to be hit with a Reverse. There is no way around it. When we clash in that ring it is going to come as inexorably as the surf, but I'm a stony shore that weak bits of foam like you crash and break yourselves on. While I'm still here. I'll bet you recede, go back into low tide mode, just the was the Enigmatic Creature did after his collision.
And still, every second of this confrontation, you're going to be thinking it's about right versus left. Patriot versus liberal. The powerful versus the weak. You're going to think you can come in and preach to these people about your vision of this country and get them all waving flags behind you when everything you represent is against the interests of the people you pander to with one hand. You alt-right Tea Party fucks, endlessly quoting from the Constitution without ever analyzing if what you strawman the words into mean in context. You utter, complete elitist buffoon. You classist, uncle Tom, ivory tower-shitlord sellout. The hand you hide behind your back is bought and paid for. And when I make an example of you, Desmond Campbell, that is when my PCW career is going to begin in earnest. That's when the revolution takes place, the first shot at my Lexington and Concord, the first stroke of a pen on my Declaration.
Because I am not one of you. I'm not a dull-eyed, unthinking sheep. I'm not a pandering, capering little boy trying to campaign his way into power. I'm not a demagoguish preacher man, rambling to my congregation about sin. I am sound. I am fury. I am an unmatched will to push things to their next level, whether personally, professionally, or to the ultimate extent of a union.
I'm the spark that fanned a fire. A fire that is going to ignite this entire federation. We are indeed gonna burn it to the ground at Collision Course, Desmond. But when it burns, the broken, rotted kindling and corrupted foundations are the only ones that are going to break off. Like you. Spiralling into the flame.
When it all comes down to this, it's all a'comin' down.
Endgame, daddy's boy.
