The Thunder Eagles

***THE THUNDER EAGLES***

How about we take a break from the high school drama known as Silent Warrior so that I can tell you a little story about my childhood. I promise you we’ll get back to our regularly scheduled program after these messages. Although, chapter thirteen will contain graphic sexual content, so if you want to look for it when it’s up, go to Wattpad. Until the day I write that chapter, you’re getting a story from my past.

In spite of the fact that I was raised on WWF, WCW, and ECW, I didn’t have much love for sports or exercise of any kind growing up. I’m paying for it now that I’m north of three hundred pounds, but even back when I was a skinny little string bean, athletic competition was hard for me. I’d gas out after the first few minutes. Imagine this kind of negative attitude applied to elementary school-level soccer.

In the early to mid-90’s, I lived in Elk Grove, California and achieved success in my third, fourth, and fifth grade academics. Athletic achievements? Not so much. My parents signed me and my brother James up for soccer, albeit different teams. James’s team, the Laguna Lasers, was successful and happy to be so. My team, The Thunder Eagles (not to be confused with the Thunderbirds), were an intergalactic disaster. We only won two games out of god knows how many and one of those two games was against a team of children who were much younger and smaller than us. For all of you wrestling nerds out there, it’s basically Bone Soldier beating the shit out of James Ellsworth.

As a child, I’ve always been a sore loser no matter what the game was. When I brother beat me at Connect Four, I threw a hissyfit like no other. When I played Hero Quest and my barbarian was killed, I threw game pieces across the living room in frustration. When the Thunder Eagles lost over and over again, I wanted to beat something up. It didn’t help matters that I was always getting knocked down (accidentally) or hit with the ball (accidentally) by the other players. Whenever one of them would hit me, I’d chase after them and throw hammer fists until I was benched for the rest of the game. And then when both of our teams formed lines to high five each other, I withdrew my hand. Hell, as angry as I was, I might as well have flipped them off instead. Vinny Jones would be so proud of me.

It also didn’t help matters that my own teammates were conspiring against me most of the time. I remember during practice how they would play keep away with a soccer ball I brought myself. I never could get the ball back from them, but every time someone kicked it away, I’d either shove them to the ground or kick them in the legs. I also remember a time when a fellow teammate named Jorge kept bouncing the ball off my legs, so I ran up to him, kicked him in the asshole, and made him cry. I’d later recall these stories as an adult to James, who kept asking me why I took everything so personally back then. I’d jokingly respond with, “They tried to kill me!”

If I had been an adult and committed these violent and vengeful acts against other players, I’d probably be in jail right now. But as a kid, you can get away with pretty much anything and the worst you’ll get is detention or a suspension (which is really just a nice vacation away from the stresses of school). In the case of soccer, my mom bribed me with a trip to McDonald’s after each game on the condition that I didn’t clobber anybody who accidentally bumped me down. One particular game, I got smacked in the thigh with the ball and it stung like hell. But instead of beating the shit out of another kid, I cried my eyes out. Needless to say, I earned my Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese that day.

The lesson I learned from all of this soccer immersion was that if at first you don’t succeed, cry and cry again. As I said before, the Thunder Eagles lost every game except for two. Plus, I was getting sick and tired of being smashed around and gassing out after only a few seconds of activity. While my brother James continues to enjoy an athletic lifestyle, I’ve resigned myself to a life of videogames and have remained injury free since then. That reminds me of another lesson I learned from soccer: if you get hit in what’s supposed to be a no-contact sport, the admins might as well make it as violent as possible. I would have loved to bring steel chairs and kendo sticks onto the soccer field with me, maybe even a barbed wire bat. Extreme Championship Soccer! ECS! ECS! ECS! ECS!

I’d like to think that this is why I continue to watch wrestling and MMA as an adult: because violent sports don’t try to hide behind the façade of being safe and conscientious about self-esteem. I guess football could be considered violent because of all the concussions the players get, but I have yet to see any of them whip out some martial arts moves on the gridiron, so football doesn’t count in the end. And now that we’re on the topic of violent sports, when, oh when are the Wrestling Observer Newsletter awards going to come out already?! That Most Disgusting Promotional Tactic award is ripe for the picking this year! Come on, Meltzer! I’m Garrison Kelly and I’ll see you next time!

***LYRICS OF THE DAY***

“I’ll hypnotize you like a vampire. Bite your neck and set your head on fire. Shoot me with silver bullets, okay. I’ll pull ‘em out, pawn ‘em, and get paid!”

-Violent J from Insane Clown Posse rapping “Bring It On”-

Sarah Tonin

NAME: Sarah Tonin
AGE: 23
OCCUPATION: Rebel Clown
CANON: The Macaroni & Ownage Project


The canon Macaroni & Ownage Project should sound familiar to anybody who read Makoto Lionheart’s profile. If you haven’t read it, go read it now on my Deviant Art account, Good Reads blog, or Garrison’s Library. You have to do some serious excavation to find it, but I’m not repeating everything I said about the canon in that profile. All you need to know that the MOP is a group of Juggalo-like clowns who rebel against a religious king named Rajim Kane and his demon giant Broken Soul.

One of the rebels for the cause is Sarah Tonin. Go ahead and laugh at the obvious pun, because that’s what was intended. I wanted a name that was a play on words for serotonin, the chemical in the brain that registers euphoria. Sarah, the actual character this word is based on, is anything but euphoric. In fact, she’s bat shit crazy and she’s carrying a wooden staff: not a good combination. People worry about the mentally ill obtaining guns and they should. But what you should really worry about is Sarah Tonin carrying a fucking staff. She can split your skull like a coconut, crack your ribs like crab legs, and blow out your knees to where you have to crawl from point A to point B.

Sarah doesn’t show much of her wild personality in the beginning of the movie script. In fact, she stays quiet while the other two surviving clowns, Lee Murdock and Makoto Lionheart, are constantly at each other’s throats. It’s when the three clowns join a martial arts tournament that things really begin to heat up. Sarah loses to a capoeira fighter named Sonny Fu in the quarterfinals and because she’s a sore loser, she beats the shit out of him in the locker room area. But here’s the million dollar question: though Sarah is the prime suspect in Sonny Fu’s hospitalization, is she really to be held responsible or should we take into account that she has multiple personalities as a result of a traumatic past?

Sarah eventually has to face the music when she takes a nap in the woods and finds herself in a different world brought on by psychosis, where she has to fight two warriors named Rowan Z and X King. The two warriors beat the shit out of her until she learns how to control her psychotic mind and returns the favor. She then wakes up from her traumatic nightmare when Lee and Makoto shake her body into consciousness. The whole thing was a fucking dream. Before you scream Deus Ex Machina, you have to know that Sarah Tonin might not have woken up from that dream. She could have died in her sleep and that would be the end of her. Yikes!

This whole time, Sarah, Lee, and Makoto have been traveling to an ancient temple where they were going to seek counseling from a clown sage, who supposedly has the answers on how to defeat Broken Soul. I say supposedly, because the sage’s advice sounds like a bunch of gibberish and jargon. When Broken Soul finally arrives, the three have no idea how to interpret the advice and Lee Murdock gets stepped on while trying to save Makoto’s life. The battle ends when a fourth clown, who was crucified by Rajim Kane, arrives to interpret the sage’s answer: just be your disgusting and creepy selves. Apparently, that advice was good enough for the nameless clown, Lee, and Makoto to finish the job and put an end to Rajim Kane’s reign of terror.

Does this sound like a credible story to you? Maybe after a few tweaks here and there, it could have been something great. But my money is on the fact that anything I’ve written before 2013 is beyond repair due to my lack of reading experience and unwillingness to listen to the critics who are trying to help me. So now Miss Tonin is in the unemployment line of my imagination. And yes, she will keep her name Sarah Tonin despite the fact that it’s an obvious punch line.

If you think Sarah Tonin’s name is a joke, listen to this. In my WIP psychological fantasy novel Watch You Burn, Mario Bryan’s ex-girlfriend is named Terri. For the longest time, she hasn’t been assigned a last name…until now. Her last name is…Bull. If you’re going to call her Terri Bullshit, you’ve got the wrong punch line I mind. Just Terri Bull will be good enough. Now say her full name really fast and you get…”terrible”! Hahahahaha! Oh, that’s so funny! But trust me, Terri Bull and Sarah Tonin have nothing in common with each other. One of them is a crazy bitch who will beat you to death with a wooden stick…and the other is a rebel clown.

　

***MOVIE QUOTE OF THE DAY***

“Look, I don’t mind people snickering at the stupid uniform I have to wear, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to let some self-righteous lucky turd come over here and treat me and Dante like we’re a couple of fucking porch monkeys!”

-Randal Graves from “Clerks II”-

Makoto Lionheart

NAME: Makoto Lionheart

AGE: 18

OCCUPATION: Samurai Clown

CANON: The Macaroni & Ownage Project

Those stats alone should tell you how much of a colorful character Makoto had the potential to be. How many samurai clowns are there in this world? And how many people can genuinely say they were part of something called The Macaroni & Ownage Project, whatever the hell that is? It’s a delightfully weird hodgepodge we’ve got going on here. And yet, when I dropped the ball with Makoto, it was the size of a bowling ball and it broke my fucking foot. What could have possibly went wrong with such a chaotic character? Well, seeing as how none of the chaos was controlled, I can think of a number of ways.

In 2007, I wrote a fantasy movie script called The Macaroni & Ownage Project, where a bunch of medieval juggalos rebel against an oppressive and religiously zealous leader named Rajim Kane. The group of clowns responsible for the rebellion would ambush and humiliate Mr. Kane’s forces, just like lunatic clowns do. They’d do things like dry hump a few knights, throw shit-flavored pies in preachers’ faces, and smack around a noble king with a popping jack-in-the-box. Think of the most bizarre and disrespectful shit you can and these clowns did it all. I’m sure a dead ringer for The Artist Formerly Known as Goldust was somewhere within their ranks.

Makoto Lionheart was a member of this organization and even wore the face paint and clown nose to prove it. She just wasn’t as degenerate as her cohorts. In fact, her male counterpart Lee Murdoch seemed to think she was too soft, so he would subject her to sexual ridicule to try to bring out her inner demons. Smart strategy, right? Not!

Although, to Makoto’s credit, she eventually turned to the dark side when it mattered the most. She was kidnapped by a group of Amazon prostitutes (I’m rolling my eyes just saying that) and broke free by disgusting them to death. How did she do it? By ripping out a client’s skull and spinal cord and then coating the body parts in sugar before licking it like a lollipop. Yeah, there’s no way such a movie would get under an NC-17 rating.

Unfortunately, that Faces of Death-style grotesqueness was Makoto’s shining moment in that movie. Well, that and choking Lee Murdoch into unconsciousness with a head scissors leg lock during a fighting tournament. If such sickening sights are the high point of a movie, what are the low points? And you know what the worst part about all of this was? These horrifying antics were normal to me. They still are a little bit normal to me. Yes, I’ve mellowed out considerably over the years, but something deep inside me keeps yelling in a Cavalera-esque voice, “Blood! Fire! War! Hate!” Either that, or I’m listening to Soulfly’s “Conquer” album, one of the two.

So now that another story is about to get Makoto’s sloppy seconds, what exactly am I supposed to do with someone who could be a repeat offender for the Worst Gimmick award if she was in the WWE? What do I do with the illegitimate sister of Gold and Stardust? Should I take the same route where she’s soft at first but then becomes nastier as the story moves on? It’s a reasonable technique, but maybe I could tone down some of the nonsensical violence. Don’t get me wrong, she can still have weird quirks, but they’ll be PG-13 quirks. Makoto will be strange enough to make everyone around her uncomfortable, but peaceful enough to avoid being labeled a sociopath.

Now that I think about it, Makoto Lionheart is a female version of me! Oh, this could be something to cash in on for sure! Maybe she can blow her nose in public as loudly as an elephant. Maybe she can drink fake liquid cheese with bacon bits stirred in; a whole gallon, to be exact! Maybe she can get in an elevator with a lot of people and make it go to an entirely different floor than what everyone intended. And when she does the latter, she won’t say a word to the other passengers no matter how many times they try to engage her in conversation. If she did say something, it’d be like, “Well, I don’t have a chance at a five-way, so I might as well act as crazy as I want.” Now we’re talking! Hey, they wanted conversation, right?

Yes, Makoto Lionheart took a hard fall when it came to character unemployment. In fact, her presence alone might have been part of the reason why my friend at the time Sarah was too afraid to read The Macaroni & Ownage Project. Sarah even admitted to me that she was afraid of clowns. Never mind the disgusting antics of the rebel group, just the fact that they wear juggalo makeup is enough to creep this poor girl out. If such a movie script can creep out someone of sensitive psychology, imagine if it went up against an audience who was tough minded, which is hard to find these days, to be honest. Would they still be disgusted? Part of me says yes, which is why I’m going to be careful with Makoto’s character development in the future. Good call? I’d say so.

　

***LYRICS OF THE DAY***

“Because I was born this way. I got lightning running through my veins. Ain’t nobody gonna stop this train. So hop onboard or get out the way.”

-Thousand Foot Krutch singing “Born This Way”-

　

***POST-SCRIPT***

Is it wrong that I’m quoting a Christian metal band in a blog entry about sexually deviant clowns?