Fantasy and Reality

I’m a peace-loving liberal who loves action movies and violent literature. Like the Scottish Koreans in the Starburst commercials, I’m a walking contradiction and I don’t make a wee bit of sense. How exactly is this possible? It’s because I know how to do something that I wish everybody would learn to do: distinguish fantasy from reality. In the fantasy world, violence is dazzling and fun to watch, as evidenced in movies like First Blood and TV shows like the WWE. Even the UFC has a level of fantasy in it, probably because it’s heavily regulated. In the real world, violence is a disgusting thing to watch. There’s a huge difference between watching First Blood and watching a war documentary on MSNBC. That’s why I wish everybody could distinguish fantasy from reality, because people play videogames like Halo and Gears of War and automatically assume that they too can become ass-kicking soldiers who go undefeated throughout their military careers. Bzzt! Wrong! If you join the military and somehow make it back to civilian life with your body intact, no matter what the outcome of the war you’re fighting, you will never be the same again. You might return home missing a few limbs. You might wake up in the middle of the night and not know where you are. You might burst into tears when you hear someone popping balloons because it sounds like gunfire. In the world of mixed-martial arts, the same thing is true. Just because you went undefeated in a game of Tekken Tag Tournament or Super Street Fighter II, doesn’t mean you’re going to excel in the UFC. The fighters who work for that company? They’re super athletes who spend anywhere from eight to twelve hours a day training in the gym and even then they get injured from time to time. If you have the body of a god and that god happens to be Buddha, stay away from the cage (unless of course your name is Roy Nelson, in which case, you’ll do just fine). Do you know why they call it a fantasy? Because it exists in the mind and nowhere else except for in artistic expression. If The Hobbit was a documentary instead of an action-adventure movie, we would be seriously fucked as human beings. Or elves. Or dwarves. Or even fire-breathing dragons and walking rock people. Just to be on the safe side, whenever I self-publish one of my books, I put a disclaimer at the beginning that reminds my readers never to copy anything they read. They will die a miserable, slow death if they do. I don’t just do it to get a laugh out of people. I do it for their own good. That and I don’t want to get sued. Are you paying attention, Stephanie Meyer? Maybe you should tell your own audience to stop biting each other’s necks. I’ve bitten people when I got into fights at school. It’s not fun. So please, Twilight fans, stop biting each other’s necks! Got that? Good! I don’t think there’s anything more that needs to be said, except…

　

***WRESTLING QUOTE OF THE DAY***

“Pro-wrestling is real. People are fake.”

-Mr. Anderson-