I’ve been watching the wrestling tag team of The French Pirates in my head for quite sometime. It appears as if they’re living…two lives. One of the lives is Jonathan Thief. He broke away from the tag team and became a successful multi-time world champion and future Hall of Famer. He has a social security number (not really). He pays taxes (to his home country of France). He even takes out his landlady’s garbage.
The other life is Billy Rogue. He couldn’t find the same success his tag team partner did and fell into obscurity. He is also guilty of virtually every drug crime the US has a law for. One of these lives has a future. The other does not. Billy Rogue is the one who doesn’t have much of a future.
The French Pirates draw a lot of comparisons to the real life WWE tag team from the early 90’s, The Rockers. Jonathan Thief found the same amount of success Shawn Michaels did. Billy Rogue couldn’t, a la Marty Jennetty. Having said that, what do you give a man who has no future? A bottle of poison? A loaded gun? A grudge-match storyline against his old tag team partner? No, no, and yes.
But more importantly, you give Billy Rogue drugs. Lots and lots of drugs. You make him so depressed with his lack of success (that rhymes) his only option is to use every kind of illegal drug imaginable. Pot is becoming legal in a lot of states and it has no harmful side effects, so that doesn’t count. I’m talking about the hard stuff. The extreme stuff. The tubes of glue. The balloons of cocaine. The bigger balloons of heroin. And then wash it all down with a nice big bottle of vodka.
Sending Mr. Rogue to rehab would seem like the right way for a wrestling company to spend its money. If he followed the right steps, he could make a full recovery much like former WWE superstar Joey Mercury did and become an inspiration to those wanting to be sober. But how do you sell such a gigantic bill of goods to someone who still harbors jealousy toward his former tag team partner? If he gets sober, can he stay that way? Even if he does get sober, will he not find another destructive outlet for his raw feelings?
Let’s say it’s possible. Let’s say for the sake of argument Billy Rogue quits drugs and alcohol altogether and becomes a better person for it. His criminal record is spotless and he’s actually able to hold down a job. What kind of life is there for him on the other side of recovery? He didn’t have much of a life before he turned to drugs, what makes you think he’ll have one after? You think he’s going to be content with sitting in an office building or getting his computer science degree? Or maybe he can completely dork out and sell popcorn for the same wrestling promotion he was a part of.
This is a struggle that is all too familiar in drug fiction and nonfiction. It can be said about any kind of addiction, really. You don’t have to constantly shoot heroin in your arm in order to relate to addiction. There are porn addicts, adrenaline addicts, self-harm addicts, and then there’s that one addiction I personally can relate to: food addiction. Billy Rogue is to drugs what I am to food.
I’ve been addicted to food ever since going on my first round of schizophrenia medication. I used to be a skinny little twig in high school. In today’s world, my belly is large, my clothes barely fit, and my energy is gone. Food was the one thing I could turn to that gave me just a little bit of satisfaction in a world where mental illness kept me from having fun. One Reese’s Cup was more intense for me than any song written by Rammstein or Pink Floyd. Because I was so attracted to that constant high, my weight spiraled out of control and now I’m left with the daunting task of having to lose all the weight and keep it off permanently.
Addiction is the only thing Billy Rogue and I have in common. Though I live through my own characters, I don’t want to be the guy who lives through someone who openly admits to having no future. I refuse to accept dystopia. If I have a big belly and a weird appearance for the rest of my life, it wouldn’t matter to me as long as I still had a future worth working toward. That future starts with editing the crap out of Brawl Mart and sending it to a reputable publisher instead of doing the heavy lifting myself with Smash Words. I don’t know how far away that time in my life will be, but it is there. I will make my own dreams come true one way or another. I’m an adult. It’s my right to make my dreams come true.
***LYRICS OF THE DAY***
“I’m torn to pieces. I’m broken down. I still see your face when you’re not around. I sit here in misery wondering if I’ll ever be half the man you wanted me to be.”
-Pop Evil singing “Torn to Pieces”-
Let’s face it, people: we live in a world where the lines of communication are open (because of smart phones and the internet), but nobody talks to each other. I’m not proud to say I’m guilty of this myself. I have god knows how many friends on Face Book, yet I can’t be bothered to talk directly to them. Part of it is because of my own shyness. I can’t get passed these barriers between myself and my friends (and family) because I don’t know how to break them down. That’s why when I watched the “20 Strangers Kiss for the First Time” video, a part of me died and went to romantic heaven. Twenty strangers means ten random couples altogether, eight heterosexual couples, one lesbian couple, and one gay couple. I can’t put enough emphasis on the idea that these people were complete strangers to each other. Naturally, they were a little shy at first when asked to kiss each other. But kiss each other they did. Some of them were pecks on the lips, others were full-on tongue kisses. Any barriers these “couples” had between them were knocked over with authority. When somebody kisses you that passionately for seemingly no reason, it doesn’t take away from the fact that they’re giving you something worth having: trust. These strangers weren’t forced into doing this. I don’t even know if they were paid for being actors in this video. With a barrier between them and a camera capturing their tender moment, they gave each other their trust. A lot of trust. That trust was well-deserved too. None of these people would have agreed to kiss each other if the other person was a sociopath or a jerk. Even though they were complete strangers, they saw something in each other’s eyes that made them want to kiss. Again, they could have opted out of the movie and they didn’t. Just watch the video on You Tube if you haven’t already. It’s a beautiful experience and will restore your faith in a humanity tainted by violence, shallowness, and evil. The video is only a few minutes long, but that’ll be long enough to melt your heart like a stick of butter. It’ll even make you want to be a part of this video. And while you’re feeling these emotions of vicarious romance, if you have any interest in preserving them, don’t read the comments underneath the video. Among the ignorant remarks include homophobic slurs toward the gay couple, accusations of the actors being hipsters, suggestions that it’s somehow fake, etc. You have to remember that You Tubers, while sometimes entertaining, are not always the sharpest bulbs in the drawer. Or is it the brightest knives? Aw, fuck, here we go again. Anyways, just go to You Tube and type “Strangers Kissing” in the search engine. It’ll make you jealous, but it’ll also break your heart. Maybe there will be a few tears in your eyes, you never know.
***FACE BOOK MEME OF THE DAY***
“You can’t jack off to lesbian porn hours a day and then say you’re against gay marriage.”
-Being Liberal-
I’ll be the first to say that “I Can Make Out With Any Girl Here” by Ryan Nemeth isn’t the most technically sound book when it comes to writing style. Instead of a traditional novel format, this story is told through journal entries, emails, text messages, phone calls, etc. This particular way of doing things doesn’t allow much wiggle room for showing instead of telling. But even with all of these things working against the Generation Y member known as Ryan Nemeth, his book is still entertaining from beginning to end. He takes a college freshman known as Donny Blake and puts him through a humorous journey through his schooling which involves promiscuous sex, pranks involving pig fetuses, going on spending sprees, and flirting with his French teacher. Donny’s stereotypically chaotic behavior lands him in hot water with the college administration and he’s looking at a punishment somewhere between being expelled from school and being thrown in jail. What exactly could Donny Blake have done in order to deserve such a brutal punishment? That’s for you to find out when you eventually go to Amazon.com and purchase a copy of this fast-paced giggle fest. Speaking of Amazon, that’s really the only place I know of that has a copy of the book. I haven’t seen it in places like Fred Meyer or Barnes & Noble. Then again, it’s easy to get lost in those places worse than a child at Disneyland. It’s probably for the best that the only way to find this book is via search engine. And when you eventually do your internet searches for Ryan Nemeth, you’ll find out that he is the real-life brother of WWE superstar Dolph Ziggler. Truth be told, if I didn’t know that Dolph Ziggler had a brother, I would have never found out about this book. In any event, I’m very thankful that I did find out about it. Despite its unorthodox writing style, it is a fun book to read. You may even get through it in one whole day like I did. Expect nothing less than a giggling riot when you read this book that was, and I’m not making this up, published by a company called Yellow Snow Press. You sure as shit won’t find this book under the Harlequin or Del Rey banner, unless of course you consider Donny Blake boinking a girl called Ugly Jen to be romantic or if you consider pig fetuses to be a part of some sci-fi conspiracy theory.
***WRESTLING QUOTE OF THE DAY***
“For a minute there, I thought Daniel Bryan was just an old guy in his underwear.”
-Dolph Ziggler-
