On Becoming Unstuck In Life. (TIIT #3 and Final)
Jun 3, 2019 20:44:48 GMT -5
Gerard Angelo likes this
Post by Kyle Shane on Jun 3, 2019 20:44:48 GMT -5
I am not where I should be, where I needed to be.
If I'm going to be really candid, I felt that way through the latter half of my World Title reign. Because my feud with Seromine provided a throughline for my character, the persona I made to brand myself as The World Champion. And I know that as wrestlers we are conditioned to project this invincible, unbreakable, unfuckwithable aura and never showcase a hint of our vulnerabilities but now, in the moments before we come to the show that I've been looking forward to for three months now I am going to speak truthfully, from the heart about why I want this. More than want it, need it, am frankly desperate for it. And maybe it'll backfire and be counted as a negative against my character. Maybe people will see me talking about being vulnerable and desperate and think that that's the key that breaks the lock for the Kyle Shane persona, I don't care.
Maybe people will just pass by this, get annoyed, bitch because Kyle Shane does sooooo much talking and soooo much writing and it's not LIKE Pure Class Wrestling for people to talk so much, to spend so much time examining their feelings and the length of the talking should be counted against him.
But I have to be honest.
And I want to bring the lights up. Let the artifice fall away for just a second, expose the fact that we are every one of us in this tournament looking for the win because all of our careers are at the same crossroads. Lost titles, lost opportunities, wanting to move up to the top of the card for the first time for Hunter or the twentieth for Stormm, or just one more time for me.
I'd been feeling stuck for a long time. I still do, occasionally.
For starters, the Kyle Shane you all see who graces the promo section with these pieces is very much a construct, it's me, but me through a prism that allows me to filter whatever segment of light I chose to shine on in that instance. But for so long, I have just been turning that light in on me, shining it on my darkness, and using it to showcase my demons. Because I have lived with demons in my head that I have been compelled to draw since I first learned about them, they manifested from the ugliness and the hate I felt at the world in the wake of my mom's death and since then they've just grown and continued to be there and I always used everything I created ever to speak about those demons. The meta act of talking about them in promo form is therefore very much all I've ever known. And I use that and I work with that and I make it my brand. I say to everyone, yes, this is me. Yes, I am fucked up, narcissistic, lowkey in love with sadness, and full to the brim with rage. This is me, and if every single day I put my feet to the ground after I wake up and I manage to keep going without exploding from these demons, that makes me stronger than any of you.
If you'd say that leads me to constructing different personas and I'm not wholly honest or I'm fake then maybe you're right. Maybe none of it was ever wholly me, just pieces. Or maybe I constructed a persona that allows me to have the Devil and God raging inside of me, but to only show one side when I wanted.
Or maybe, when I started in Pure Class Wrestling it was all narcissism, all ego, I was the best thing ever created and I showed it every single week, and I was a World champion no matter where I was on the card. (If that sounds familiar, hi David Hunter, you ain't done shit new under the sun.) Maybe when I started racking up main event wins and won the 2017 Icemann Invitational Tournament it validated me, and it gave me strength to someone who hadn't felt this connected with wrestling in... God. 5 years previous to that. Maybe 6, when I first started my solo run in a Reboot.
And then I met someone who was just as adept at creating a persona to match his station and amplify his demons and his narcissism in Seromine and I fashioned myself into the opposite of him. He was a preacher, a cult leader that had taken over the fed, so I made myself into a strong, handsome, gritty underdog, a cult of one, a rebel. And that was the mold I cast myself in at the start of my World Title tenure and dammit, if it didn't stick out of necessity because I continued to be needed in that role. The feud with Seromine didn't die out, it became a cold war that lasted until September. I had Stormm and Vivacious jumping me from behind and stealing my belt and playing Carmen Sandiego with it. I had people targeting me. I needed to stay the underdog, fighting from underneath.
Then, those rivalries petered out. Well, Seromine's did, Stormm has kind of... continued to hover around me as a tertiary annoyance I have never taken time to properly squash. But the important one to me, the one I patterned myself after, ended. And I was stuck with this belt, and I was rapidly losing motivation to continue being the underdog, to continue being the hero.
Frankly I was losing all motivation for wrestling again.
The fatal burnout, what killed about three tenures of mine in WGWF, when I've felt like I've said literally all I can say. I've ripped open scars, I've exposed demons, I've mined wells of angst for so long and every new promo is a chore of four hours to put down. You guys complain that I say a lot. Imagine having to fucking write all of that down but I still do it because that's who I am. And I get so tired.
All the way up until Gerard Angelo beat me I was in that mode and as I'm continuing my vein of honesty here I not only am glad for that loss, for kicking me in the ass, I'm glad for the months preceding it for being so uninspired and old hat for me to see it that I was becoming really and truly stuck. It made me examine why that was.
Who I kept around me. Who I had feeding me. Being stuck, be it in your job, in your hometown, anywhere in life is so often a state of mind. And as you feel your passion begin to die, when you look at those around you, if you don't have those that inspire your passion, bring you up with them, if you're just running in a damn hamster wheel, then you are going to begin to feel lost. People that don't assess their own wants and needs. People that live off nostalgia.
I never wanted to be one of those people. I hate it when I am, and I hate myself for being it. Sure, maybe I have things that bring me back to yesterday, but I don't want to be one of the kinds of people that gets off on it, that lives there, because that is simply saying that I never plan on improving, never plan on thinking up something new and better. Nostalgia is the death of innovation.
And so I asked myself what I was missing, and why I felt stuck where I was and I'm thankful for the insights. That's why, despite being called a "Remaster", I'm feeling a lot more new and refreshed, because I have the perspective of where I've been, but the renewed dedication and passion not to just live off what I did before.
And that's what every one of the three of these semi's competitors are lacking, that invaluable passion, the unshakeable belief and the self-awareness of what they've done wrong. They to a man think they've all got this in the bag, because they're on the top of their game. What they don't understand is that all they have is paltry wants, a desire to win the tournament and just get a title shot and the cash. It isn't about that for me. I'm doing this because I want to repay my passion and prove myself. I'm doing this because I was stuck running in place for so long, and I am finally pushing myself, getting off my ass and trying. Not to be a hero, not to be a champion, but to be the best version of myself there ever has been.
This is how you get yourself unstuck.
By extricating yourself from those around you who are frozen in their ways, unwilling or just unable to change who they are.
Primest example of that is Stormm who's a caveman frozen in the year 2000, thawed out in whatever pissant year he started his run in Pure Class Wrestling and re-solidified whenever he last remembers something happening. Fuck knows I make fun of him about it enough but it really is just the most grating experience to watch Justin Michaels come out there in the year of our lord 2019 with the baseball bat and a trenchcoat, jumping people, spray painting belts and acting like some superior main event specimen with every breath he takes. Stormm is stuck. Profoundly and quite pathetically, he has not improved and I am almost 100 percent certain his issue with me, my talking and how I handle business is because they didn't work like me back in his heyday. But the business has moved on from Stormm, and he gets so bitter and angry that he isn't considered for World title shots, he deserves them, on the merit that he has been here so long and brats like me never paid the same dues. Justin, also, is stuck because he was in the unenviable position of losing his longest running title on the same night as me.
I owe Justin Michaels a beating for every time he's insisted on pushing himself in and forcing the issue, every single time he's cried about not understanding why people are talking about Kyle Shane, every time he's stood on the ramp and smiled in my face after giving a lackluster, shitty effort that lost us a tag match. For stealing my title, and spoiling my moment, and then acting like they were playing mind games that broke my spirit until I refused to play it exactly his way and then he broke the title like a child. For every single time he's been just enough of a thorn in my side for me to cave his head in on a random Trauma but not hunt him out for a feud to close our rivalry out. For being nothing but a nostalgia act, an 80's hair metal band that now plays their sad hits at every fucking county fair to a crowd of fifty.
This dude is, for some fucking reason, continuing to talk about the 2006 Icemann. I don't care if that's just a starting point. I can not imagine a less fucking relevant topic. Justin Michaels strategy isn't to beat me in a wrestling match, it's to bore me to fucking sleep with stories about a tournament he won when I - and I'm pretty sure, when David Hunter, was in fucking middle school. Does he not see that that's not an entry point anybody cares about? Has he never gotten any closer to the finish line in any following TIIT's? And therein lies the entire problem. He's so in love with talking about what he did in 2006. And yet, this man right here was the first to say that I must have management's hashtag #Favoritism because they push me to the main event so much, even when the more mundane answer if he's shut out because I keep beating him.
The reason, the REASON I can't stand Stormm, even with his datedness. Even with his jaded, pedantic insistence everything revolves around him. Even with him being so fucking boring. Is that he's still convinced he's in his prime and we need to be treating him as such. That his legend should precede itself, that we should step out of his way because he's still main event ready. Justin Michaels is a fucking dinosaur, a relic of an era that does not matter. I'm in the back half of my twenties and I find him so past the point of shelf life that I wish he would just go the way of that stegosaurus. It's a little bit like the Rolling Stones. Baby Boomers who are rock scholars can bluster and pontificate all the live-long day about how they "Changed rock and roll" and how their sound makes them all time greats. But it is not only retarded but quite honestly disingenuous to say they are still relevant, musically today, when they haven't done anything fresh or interesting in decades.
And, just like Mick Jagger, I would not be sad if Justin Michaels just fucking died, so that both the Stones and Stormm would just go away.
He is so trapped in his backwards little world and given no opportunities to better himself, to grow.
But he isn't the only one. Consider David Hunter.
He's trapped now.
He pigeonholed himself into the Underground title so hard when he won it, even when it was plain from the start he didn't altogether want to be in that division, but he was so happy to scoop gold because the little magpie wanted something shiny he could point to. He devalued it in numerous scraps against also-rans that aren't even active anymore, but because he came out on top of their wars for it he counts himself as a victor. And because he happened to be holding the bag when the Underground title main evented, as it has for every Underground champion there ever has been, he's proclaimed himself the main eventer whenever myself or others are busy. He goes back and forth whether he even needs the Underground title back. He's quick to throw out bluesky about introducing Tag titles. It's become obvious that David just needs a small trinket to make himself happy. David Hunter is trapped because he doesn't love himself enough to be really whole, to really matter without having a belt. Without a belt, who is he? Just the son of Hawaiian Hardhead, himself a Trivia Pursuit answer that nobody remembers. Without the crown, and the paltry victories to create ever escalating metaphors about him being a King around, he's nowhere.
See the problem with David is that he's good enough that he can get by the Muscles and the Tylers of the world, but he thinks that means that he owns them. If he was as good as he's been saying, then his record would speak for itself. Except both Dominator and I had gotten to where he was before, and I, at least, did it on my first try, I got through a string of nine title defenses before I ever lost it, and I did it with my challenges escalating. I didn't have repeat performances against David's apparent bae Razor Blade to pad it out, I faced Eira, I faced Non Compos Mentis, I faced Brenna Gordon. We aren't the same. I worked my way to the main event level by facing the toughest and the best while I was Underground champion. I even had two matches against Grimm, all in the time David was still bragging about defending his third title reign once in a main event against a man he doesn't even think is on a caliber to give him a challenge.
So, in that, David Hunter is a much lesser version of myself. He's barely even stepped outside of the little fiefdom he's proclaimed. Every non-Underground match he's had has ended in defeat and embarrassment. David barely even scraped a win by Rick Majors. He's made such an obvious ass of himself that he's ripe pickings to get outwitted and, I'm sorry, but verbally raped by a clown. Dude, if Sicko is enough to see through all of your quirks and inconsistencies, it's clear you're just spewing a bunch of shit. And that's all it ever was. Just a bunch of shit David never believed, marked by a lack of conviction, and a lack of belief in his own abilities. David isn't going to go anywhere until he works out for himself what he really NEEDS. What he needs to be his own man, not just a series of catchphrases and waaaacky backstage antics about flooding toilets. Who cares about that? Who ARE you, David? What do you need in your life? Who do you really want to be, besides an arrogant, empty headed little boy? I ask you this because you are just parroting lines I'd said two years ago, you are acting like everything you do is the most amazing thing we've ever seen, but every single thing you've managed to accomplish is basically worthless. David, is not, and until he figures this out never will be a real main eventer.
And the big one.
The truest expression of someone who's stuck.
The juggernaut that can't sustain his momentum.
Oh, Dominator won big at Mass Destruction. He ended the never ending. He did the unthinkable.
And sure, he won the champions triple threat match. But we've seen Dominator take two steps roaring forward, only to take four back before. Anyone who's paid attention will be able to count the times that Dominator was supposed to have made good on his potential as the true monster of this federation and yet he has never done it. In two separate Deadly Rumbles, he didn't even crack into the final competitors, let alone get to the end. In last year's Icemann Invitational, the one that he was riding a wave of Underground title defenses into, he choked at the clearest podium he could have ever had on the big stage. And still, here he stands. Someone who, at only six months behind when I started on the clock, has a fraction of the accomplishments I had. Dominator barely even managed to achieve a slice of what I did in the same opening time frame. He didn't go undefeated before he claimed the Underground title, we all saw Rick Majors pin his shoulders to the mat, and we saw him struggle his way through a round robin tournament against Crazy Boy and High Tide.
And the simple fact is, Dominator CAN'T do it alone. He needs Horacio Mortimer in his corner, hell sometimes at his side sliding him equalizers and shouting advice. He needed to form the Black Hand, the world's crappiest non-stable since the Defenders with Grimm, just so he can have it in his back pocket if he ever really needs to call in that marker. Dominator needed Mini-Stormms and doppelgangers and smoke and mirrors to get into the head of Justin Michaels, when he could have just done like I did and kicked his fucking head off. Dominator tries to use all the help he can to bolster his failings and paper over the deficiencies in his game plan, but he can't make up for the fact that time and time again the big man has been exposed as a premiere choke artist, falling just short of gaining the win that matters.
All of this past bringing up is just to expose the pattern; that I have seen Dominator get to his peak, his absolute Zenith to play off his nom de guerre and I've seen him take that roller coaster all the way back down the valley. Every single time. And he is stuck. The monster, the juggernaut that should and rightfully probably would be owning this federation if he just nailed the consistency is a victim of the same cycle I am. Except I've seen him lose his motivation and fizzle himself out like a Roman candle faster. Dominator gets himself stuck because he, too, shares one particular piece of himself and wears it out. Dominator and I may be cut from a similar cloth; but he is a lot weaker in ways I am not. And I've proven time and time again I'm more of a juggernaut than he will ever be.
And so I know that Dominator will be thinking that this tournament is going to be the one where he finally puts it together and fulfills the promise, lives out his prophecy or whatever, I know what I can expect from Dominator, and I know, as brittle as he is, the exact pressure points I need for him to crack. Because he hasn't worked out this fatal vanity. He'll be so confident, so ready to claim his biggest victory, but he won't be approaching it with the same sober honesty and clarity.
He wants it. He wants it so bad.
But I need. To be unstuck. To step out onto that stage, and become the most fully actualized, best version of who I can be, and I cannot let my own fatal vanities, my own narcissism or my obsession with my demons hold me back this time. It took me experiencing a complete and total change of perspective, seeing life through an entirely new set of eyes for me to see who and what I am the clearest.
It is time for me to be the Kyle Shane I should always have been.
I'm taking the 2019 Icemann Invitational, and I am standing tall with that trophy over my head, finally on the road to accepting every part of who I am, not just a piece I show to parse myself into something you can understand.
I am always, and forever, honest. And even in pieces, I have given you the best of me.
But now, it's time for the Remastered Kyle Shane to take center stage.
And I am going to get to be where I need.
And be myself.
**
"Kyle?"
"Yeah, Hiro."
"B- Before we start... I just - ... I wanted to say..."
"Yeah, Hiro."
"What was all of this for? We just... go back to who we were? So nobody ever knows you were there? Nobody ever knows I was here, that I mattered? We just - "
"Hiro... you hurt a lot of people."
"I know... God... I know... I'm sorry.
".......I just - felt so stuck, where I was. So empty. And so alone. I just wanted it to be like it was before, in all of the ways. All of it, every bit of my life, with Kit and the baby, with dad and Rumiko and my budget, it was getting so terrible, and I felt so - trapped, you know? So stuck. And I couldn't - couldn't get it back to where it was good again, and I just wanted to start over..."
"We all need to start over, sometimes."
"And you - Kyle... you have been stuck too. You're stuck and you just can't extricate yourself from this life, and I thought maybe, just maybe if you saw what my life was like for a little while you would get it."
"Maybe we've both felt stuck, for a while, Hiro."
There's silence for a few moments, silence and flipping switches.
"So if we're going to go back, then I need to know if it was all for nothing. Can you understand why? Can you ever forgive me for... all of this?"
"... I understand."
"What's going to happen?"
"We're gonna hope this works, is what's gonna happen."
"Fuck..."
The machine clicks, and begins to hum.
"Kyle... bro, I'm so sorry."
"I know, Hiro. I know."
If I'm going to be really candid, I felt that way through the latter half of my World Title reign. Because my feud with Seromine provided a throughline for my character, the persona I made to brand myself as The World Champion. And I know that as wrestlers we are conditioned to project this invincible, unbreakable, unfuckwithable aura and never showcase a hint of our vulnerabilities but now, in the moments before we come to the show that I've been looking forward to for three months now I am going to speak truthfully, from the heart about why I want this. More than want it, need it, am frankly desperate for it. And maybe it'll backfire and be counted as a negative against my character. Maybe people will see me talking about being vulnerable and desperate and think that that's the key that breaks the lock for the Kyle Shane persona, I don't care.
Maybe people will just pass by this, get annoyed, bitch because Kyle Shane does sooooo much talking and soooo much writing and it's not LIKE Pure Class Wrestling for people to talk so much, to spend so much time examining their feelings and the length of the talking should be counted against him.
But I have to be honest.
And I want to bring the lights up. Let the artifice fall away for just a second, expose the fact that we are every one of us in this tournament looking for the win because all of our careers are at the same crossroads. Lost titles, lost opportunities, wanting to move up to the top of the card for the first time for Hunter or the twentieth for Stormm, or just one more time for me.
I'd been feeling stuck for a long time. I still do, occasionally.
For starters, the Kyle Shane you all see who graces the promo section with these pieces is very much a construct, it's me, but me through a prism that allows me to filter whatever segment of light I chose to shine on in that instance. But for so long, I have just been turning that light in on me, shining it on my darkness, and using it to showcase my demons. Because I have lived with demons in my head that I have been compelled to draw since I first learned about them, they manifested from the ugliness and the hate I felt at the world in the wake of my mom's death and since then they've just grown and continued to be there and I always used everything I created ever to speak about those demons. The meta act of talking about them in promo form is therefore very much all I've ever known. And I use that and I work with that and I make it my brand. I say to everyone, yes, this is me. Yes, I am fucked up, narcissistic, lowkey in love with sadness, and full to the brim with rage. This is me, and if every single day I put my feet to the ground after I wake up and I manage to keep going without exploding from these demons, that makes me stronger than any of you.
If you'd say that leads me to constructing different personas and I'm not wholly honest or I'm fake then maybe you're right. Maybe none of it was ever wholly me, just pieces. Or maybe I constructed a persona that allows me to have the Devil and God raging inside of me, but to only show one side when I wanted.
Or maybe, when I started in Pure Class Wrestling it was all narcissism, all ego, I was the best thing ever created and I showed it every single week, and I was a World champion no matter where I was on the card. (If that sounds familiar, hi David Hunter, you ain't done shit new under the sun.) Maybe when I started racking up main event wins and won the 2017 Icemann Invitational Tournament it validated me, and it gave me strength to someone who hadn't felt this connected with wrestling in... God. 5 years previous to that. Maybe 6, when I first started my solo run in a Reboot.
And then I met someone who was just as adept at creating a persona to match his station and amplify his demons and his narcissism in Seromine and I fashioned myself into the opposite of him. He was a preacher, a cult leader that had taken over the fed, so I made myself into a strong, handsome, gritty underdog, a cult of one, a rebel. And that was the mold I cast myself in at the start of my World Title tenure and dammit, if it didn't stick out of necessity because I continued to be needed in that role. The feud with Seromine didn't die out, it became a cold war that lasted until September. I had Stormm and Vivacious jumping me from behind and stealing my belt and playing Carmen Sandiego with it. I had people targeting me. I needed to stay the underdog, fighting from underneath.
Then, those rivalries petered out. Well, Seromine's did, Stormm has kind of... continued to hover around me as a tertiary annoyance I have never taken time to properly squash. But the important one to me, the one I patterned myself after, ended. And I was stuck with this belt, and I was rapidly losing motivation to continue being the underdog, to continue being the hero.
Frankly I was losing all motivation for wrestling again.
The fatal burnout, what killed about three tenures of mine in WGWF, when I've felt like I've said literally all I can say. I've ripped open scars, I've exposed demons, I've mined wells of angst for so long and every new promo is a chore of four hours to put down. You guys complain that I say a lot. Imagine having to fucking write all of that down but I still do it because that's who I am. And I get so tired.
All the way up until Gerard Angelo beat me I was in that mode and as I'm continuing my vein of honesty here I not only am glad for that loss, for kicking me in the ass, I'm glad for the months preceding it for being so uninspired and old hat for me to see it that I was becoming really and truly stuck. It made me examine why that was.
Who I kept around me. Who I had feeding me. Being stuck, be it in your job, in your hometown, anywhere in life is so often a state of mind. And as you feel your passion begin to die, when you look at those around you, if you don't have those that inspire your passion, bring you up with them, if you're just running in a damn hamster wheel, then you are going to begin to feel lost. People that don't assess their own wants and needs. People that live off nostalgia.
I never wanted to be one of those people. I hate it when I am, and I hate myself for being it. Sure, maybe I have things that bring me back to yesterday, but I don't want to be one of the kinds of people that gets off on it, that lives there, because that is simply saying that I never plan on improving, never plan on thinking up something new and better. Nostalgia is the death of innovation.
And so I asked myself what I was missing, and why I felt stuck where I was and I'm thankful for the insights. That's why, despite being called a "Remaster", I'm feeling a lot more new and refreshed, because I have the perspective of where I've been, but the renewed dedication and passion not to just live off what I did before.
And that's what every one of the three of these semi's competitors are lacking, that invaluable passion, the unshakeable belief and the self-awareness of what they've done wrong. They to a man think they've all got this in the bag, because they're on the top of their game. What they don't understand is that all they have is paltry wants, a desire to win the tournament and just get a title shot and the cash. It isn't about that for me. I'm doing this because I want to repay my passion and prove myself. I'm doing this because I was stuck running in place for so long, and I am finally pushing myself, getting off my ass and trying. Not to be a hero, not to be a champion, but to be the best version of myself there ever has been.
This is how you get yourself unstuck.
By extricating yourself from those around you who are frozen in their ways, unwilling or just unable to change who they are.
Primest example of that is Stormm who's a caveman frozen in the year 2000, thawed out in whatever pissant year he started his run in Pure Class Wrestling and re-solidified whenever he last remembers something happening. Fuck knows I make fun of him about it enough but it really is just the most grating experience to watch Justin Michaels come out there in the year of our lord 2019 with the baseball bat and a trenchcoat, jumping people, spray painting belts and acting like some superior main event specimen with every breath he takes. Stormm is stuck. Profoundly and quite pathetically, he has not improved and I am almost 100 percent certain his issue with me, my talking and how I handle business is because they didn't work like me back in his heyday. But the business has moved on from Stormm, and he gets so bitter and angry that he isn't considered for World title shots, he deserves them, on the merit that he has been here so long and brats like me never paid the same dues. Justin, also, is stuck because he was in the unenviable position of losing his longest running title on the same night as me.
I owe Justin Michaels a beating for every time he's insisted on pushing himself in and forcing the issue, every single time he's cried about not understanding why people are talking about Kyle Shane, every time he's stood on the ramp and smiled in my face after giving a lackluster, shitty effort that lost us a tag match. For stealing my title, and spoiling my moment, and then acting like they were playing mind games that broke my spirit until I refused to play it exactly his way and then he broke the title like a child. For every single time he's been just enough of a thorn in my side for me to cave his head in on a random Trauma but not hunt him out for a feud to close our rivalry out. For being nothing but a nostalgia act, an 80's hair metal band that now plays their sad hits at every fucking county fair to a crowd of fifty.
This dude is, for some fucking reason, continuing to talk about the 2006 Icemann. I don't care if that's just a starting point. I can not imagine a less fucking relevant topic. Justin Michaels strategy isn't to beat me in a wrestling match, it's to bore me to fucking sleep with stories about a tournament he won when I - and I'm pretty sure, when David Hunter, was in fucking middle school. Does he not see that that's not an entry point anybody cares about? Has he never gotten any closer to the finish line in any following TIIT's? And therein lies the entire problem. He's so in love with talking about what he did in 2006. And yet, this man right here was the first to say that I must have management's hashtag #Favoritism because they push me to the main event so much, even when the more mundane answer if he's shut out because I keep beating him.
The reason, the REASON I can't stand Stormm, even with his datedness. Even with his jaded, pedantic insistence everything revolves around him. Even with him being so fucking boring. Is that he's still convinced he's in his prime and we need to be treating him as such. That his legend should precede itself, that we should step out of his way because he's still main event ready. Justin Michaels is a fucking dinosaur, a relic of an era that does not matter. I'm in the back half of my twenties and I find him so past the point of shelf life that I wish he would just go the way of that stegosaurus. It's a little bit like the Rolling Stones. Baby Boomers who are rock scholars can bluster and pontificate all the live-long day about how they "Changed rock and roll" and how their sound makes them all time greats. But it is not only retarded but quite honestly disingenuous to say they are still relevant, musically today, when they haven't done anything fresh or interesting in decades.
And, just like Mick Jagger, I would not be sad if Justin Michaels just fucking died, so that both the Stones and Stormm would just go away.
He is so trapped in his backwards little world and given no opportunities to better himself, to grow.
But he isn't the only one. Consider David Hunter.
He's trapped now.
He pigeonholed himself into the Underground title so hard when he won it, even when it was plain from the start he didn't altogether want to be in that division, but he was so happy to scoop gold because the little magpie wanted something shiny he could point to. He devalued it in numerous scraps against also-rans that aren't even active anymore, but because he came out on top of their wars for it he counts himself as a victor. And because he happened to be holding the bag when the Underground title main evented, as it has for every Underground champion there ever has been, he's proclaimed himself the main eventer whenever myself or others are busy. He goes back and forth whether he even needs the Underground title back. He's quick to throw out bluesky about introducing Tag titles. It's become obvious that David just needs a small trinket to make himself happy. David Hunter is trapped because he doesn't love himself enough to be really whole, to really matter without having a belt. Without a belt, who is he? Just the son of Hawaiian Hardhead, himself a Trivia Pursuit answer that nobody remembers. Without the crown, and the paltry victories to create ever escalating metaphors about him being a King around, he's nowhere.
See the problem with David is that he's good enough that he can get by the Muscles and the Tylers of the world, but he thinks that means that he owns them. If he was as good as he's been saying, then his record would speak for itself. Except both Dominator and I had gotten to where he was before, and I, at least, did it on my first try, I got through a string of nine title defenses before I ever lost it, and I did it with my challenges escalating. I didn't have repeat performances against David's apparent bae Razor Blade to pad it out, I faced Eira, I faced Non Compos Mentis, I faced Brenna Gordon. We aren't the same. I worked my way to the main event level by facing the toughest and the best while I was Underground champion. I even had two matches against Grimm, all in the time David was still bragging about defending his third title reign once in a main event against a man he doesn't even think is on a caliber to give him a challenge.
So, in that, David Hunter is a much lesser version of myself. He's barely even stepped outside of the little fiefdom he's proclaimed. Every non-Underground match he's had has ended in defeat and embarrassment. David barely even scraped a win by Rick Majors. He's made such an obvious ass of himself that he's ripe pickings to get outwitted and, I'm sorry, but verbally raped by a clown. Dude, if Sicko is enough to see through all of your quirks and inconsistencies, it's clear you're just spewing a bunch of shit. And that's all it ever was. Just a bunch of shit David never believed, marked by a lack of conviction, and a lack of belief in his own abilities. David isn't going to go anywhere until he works out for himself what he really NEEDS. What he needs to be his own man, not just a series of catchphrases and waaaacky backstage antics about flooding toilets. Who cares about that? Who ARE you, David? What do you need in your life? Who do you really want to be, besides an arrogant, empty headed little boy? I ask you this because you are just parroting lines I'd said two years ago, you are acting like everything you do is the most amazing thing we've ever seen, but every single thing you've managed to accomplish is basically worthless. David, is not, and until he figures this out never will be a real main eventer.
And the big one.
The truest expression of someone who's stuck.
The juggernaut that can't sustain his momentum.
Oh, Dominator won big at Mass Destruction. He ended the never ending. He did the unthinkable.
And sure, he won the champions triple threat match. But we've seen Dominator take two steps roaring forward, only to take four back before. Anyone who's paid attention will be able to count the times that Dominator was supposed to have made good on his potential as the true monster of this federation and yet he has never done it. In two separate Deadly Rumbles, he didn't even crack into the final competitors, let alone get to the end. In last year's Icemann Invitational, the one that he was riding a wave of Underground title defenses into, he choked at the clearest podium he could have ever had on the big stage. And still, here he stands. Someone who, at only six months behind when I started on the clock, has a fraction of the accomplishments I had. Dominator barely even managed to achieve a slice of what I did in the same opening time frame. He didn't go undefeated before he claimed the Underground title, we all saw Rick Majors pin his shoulders to the mat, and we saw him struggle his way through a round robin tournament against Crazy Boy and High Tide.
And the simple fact is, Dominator CAN'T do it alone. He needs Horacio Mortimer in his corner, hell sometimes at his side sliding him equalizers and shouting advice. He needed to form the Black Hand, the world's crappiest non-stable since the Defenders with Grimm, just so he can have it in his back pocket if he ever really needs to call in that marker. Dominator needed Mini-Stormms and doppelgangers and smoke and mirrors to get into the head of Justin Michaels, when he could have just done like I did and kicked his fucking head off. Dominator tries to use all the help he can to bolster his failings and paper over the deficiencies in his game plan, but he can't make up for the fact that time and time again the big man has been exposed as a premiere choke artist, falling just short of gaining the win that matters.
All of this past bringing up is just to expose the pattern; that I have seen Dominator get to his peak, his absolute Zenith to play off his nom de guerre and I've seen him take that roller coaster all the way back down the valley. Every single time. And he is stuck. The monster, the juggernaut that should and rightfully probably would be owning this federation if he just nailed the consistency is a victim of the same cycle I am. Except I've seen him lose his motivation and fizzle himself out like a Roman candle faster. Dominator gets himself stuck because he, too, shares one particular piece of himself and wears it out. Dominator and I may be cut from a similar cloth; but he is a lot weaker in ways I am not. And I've proven time and time again I'm more of a juggernaut than he will ever be.
And so I know that Dominator will be thinking that this tournament is going to be the one where he finally puts it together and fulfills the promise, lives out his prophecy or whatever, I know what I can expect from Dominator, and I know, as brittle as he is, the exact pressure points I need for him to crack. Because he hasn't worked out this fatal vanity. He'll be so confident, so ready to claim his biggest victory, but he won't be approaching it with the same sober honesty and clarity.
He wants it. He wants it so bad.
But I need. To be unstuck. To step out onto that stage, and become the most fully actualized, best version of who I can be, and I cannot let my own fatal vanities, my own narcissism or my obsession with my demons hold me back this time. It took me experiencing a complete and total change of perspective, seeing life through an entirely new set of eyes for me to see who and what I am the clearest.
It is time for me to be the Kyle Shane I should always have been.
I'm taking the 2019 Icemann Invitational, and I am standing tall with that trophy over my head, finally on the road to accepting every part of who I am, not just a piece I show to parse myself into something you can understand.
I am always, and forever, honest. And even in pieces, I have given you the best of me.
But now, it's time for the Remastered Kyle Shane to take center stage.
And I am going to get to be where I need.
And be myself.
**
"Kyle?"
"Yeah, Hiro."
"B- Before we start... I just - ... I wanted to say..."
"Yeah, Hiro."
"What was all of this for? We just... go back to who we were? So nobody ever knows you were there? Nobody ever knows I was here, that I mattered? We just - "
"Hiro... you hurt a lot of people."
"I know... God... I know... I'm sorry.
".......I just - felt so stuck, where I was. So empty. And so alone. I just wanted it to be like it was before, in all of the ways. All of it, every bit of my life, with Kit and the baby, with dad and Rumiko and my budget, it was getting so terrible, and I felt so - trapped, you know? So stuck. And I couldn't - couldn't get it back to where it was good again, and I just wanted to start over..."
"We all need to start over, sometimes."
"And you - Kyle... you have been stuck too. You're stuck and you just can't extricate yourself from this life, and I thought maybe, just maybe if you saw what my life was like for a little while you would get it."
"Maybe we've both felt stuck, for a while, Hiro."
There's silence for a few moments, silence and flipping switches.
"So if we're going to go back, then I need to know if it was all for nothing. Can you understand why? Can you ever forgive me for... all of this?"
"... I understand."
"What's going to happen?"
"We're gonna hope this works, is what's gonna happen."
"Fuck..."
The machine clicks, and begins to hum.
"Kyle... bro, I'm so sorry."
"I know, Hiro. I know."
