Hornswoggle

 

Goodbye WWE

***GOODBYE WWE***

I’ve been watching WWE television since 1991 with a brief vacation from the product during the Attitude Era. I’m sorry to say that now I’ll be taking a permanent vacation from the product here in 2018. I tried to hold on. I tried to see the silver linings. I tried to remain faithful purely out of habit and hope. But Raw and Smackdown have gotten so unbearable to watch that I just can’t do it anymore. I don’t care about the wrestlers as characters, the ones I do care about are being made into walking punch lines, and all of this under a three hour and two hour show respectively just makes watching WWE a miserable experience.

That’s not to say that I’m abandoning wrestling completely. This is the same form of entertainment that inspired me to write a novella called Occupy Wrestling, which isn’t doing so well in terms of sales or ratings, but it’s still my baby and I love it. There are certainly other wrestling shows outside of WWE. New Japan Pro-Wrestling constantly gets praised by hardcore fans, but the one promotion I really want to start watching is Lucha Underground, which is presented in the form of a dark fantasy serial drama rather than a pure wrestling show. I want some dark magic in my wrestling, damn it! I want necromancy! I want creatures! I want death (fictional, of course)! And the best part about this? Lucha Underground is on Netflix and I can binge watch it anytime I want. All I have to do is figure out how my brother’s TV works, because his is the only one that has Netflix access.

You won’t get necromancy in WWE. You know what you’ll get? Toilet humor. Unfunny kid jokes. Terrible storytelling. Lackluster pay-per-views. NXT call-ups who fail on the main roster. The list goes on and on until the end of time. I’m not even going to get into Most Disgusting Promotional Tactics this year, because those award nominations are peanuts compared to a boring product. I kept watching throughout the years because I hoped things would change and eventually get better. I’m still waiting for that change. I’m still waiting for Vince McMahon to step down and relinquish control to someone else. Nope. Not happening. I’ve waited too long and now it’s all over.

So what do I do now that WWE Raw and Smackdown are no longer going to play on my TV? I’ve already mentioned the possibilities of watching New Japan and Lucha Underground. But what about non-wrestling shows that I’ve missed out on over the years? James’s TV is capable of digging up those old shows and I can watch them anytime I want. I could finally watch “A Room With No View” from Millennium and cry my eyeballs dry while wanting to heal Landon Bryce. I could binge watch Outlander and cry even harder when Jamie Fraser gets raped at Wentworth Prison by Captain John Randall. I could watch Gilmore Girls and cry happy tears instead of sad ones. I could watch Dragon Ball Super and take back my anime fan card. I could watch Game of Thrones and bypass the slow-paced books altogether. Or I could cry my ass off once again watching a dark comedy show known as BoJack Horseman. Goddamn, that’s a lot of crying! Could my 2007 record be broken by one of these shows?

As long as I’m looking for hobbies outside of writing, reading, and fucking around on my computer, what else could I do to keep my brain from sinking into a depression? I could play the keyboard and get my musical magic working again. I could play videogames with my brother even though noobs are shunned by the gaming community. I could do some more photography, but with different subjects. I could carve things out of my five million soap bars. I could make plans to travel the world even though plane rides are a literal pain in the ass. So many possibilities, all of which could keep me entertained long enough to avoid overeating out of boredom. Yes, eating out of boredom is a real thing and it’s one of the reasons I’m still overweight.

Shit, man, there are a lot of things I could be doing that are better than watching WWE. I could shove a cactus up my ass. I could have my cat Piper perform a lobotomy on me with her claws. I could jam a screwdriver up my dickhole. I could listen to “Love Is Blue” by Paul Mauriat over and over again while having a cute girl tell me how much she loves my mediocrity, although that’s not fair to Paul Mauriat since that’s actually a relaxing song. I could do Tope Suicidas down the staircase, to reference wrestling once again. I could perform a circumcision on myself with a steak knife. I know I’m exercising my hyperbole muscles when I say these torturous things are better than watching WWE, but certain podcasters like Jason Solomon and Greg Morgan would actually agree with me if they read this.

I’m only one and a half pages into this rant and already I feel as though a weight has been lifted off my shoulders. Goddamn, that was liberating! I’m Garrison Kelly! Even when you feel like dying, keep climbing the mountain! Or in this case, if you feel like dying, turn off WWE Raw!

***BEAUTIFUL MONSTER RELOADED***

I figured these blogs would be a good opportunity to track my progress on Beautiful Monster since I can’t post the chapters online. I’ll go ahead and say that the prologue is finally written and I have twenty-seven more chapters to write, including an epilogue. I like the fact that I could stretch Windham’s introspection out into 1,500 words, but I fear he’s still an emo kid of sorts. I’ll try to tone that shit down in the oncoming chapters. Chapter one is where Windham will get captured and taken to Shelly’s bedroom for sex slavery. Windham can bypass the dungeon altogether, because Shelly is head over heels in love with him. Sound familiar?

***CONCERT QUOTE OF THE DAY***

“I asked myself the question. I wrestled with myself. Should I put this out there? Should I put this out there? Should I put this out there? Are people going to embrace it or are people going to stab me in the fucking heart? And I said fuck it, I trust them. I’m putting it out there. And if it happened to me, it probably happened to someone else. Hopefully, this song will help anybody that this has happened to. I want you to know that you’re never alone. This is a song called Hush.”

-Chad Gray, lead singer from Hellyeah-

***POST-SCRIPT***

In case you follow my posts about concerts and are curious, no, I haven’t been to a Hellyeah show before and I might not get the chance now that Vinnie Paul Abbot is dead. That makes me sad. Who’s cutting onions around here? I’m not crying, you’re crying! I’m not watching Outlander, you are! I’m not watching A Room with No View, okay, you get the point by now. Rest in peace, Vinnie Paul.

Sleep Study Results

***SLEEP STUDY RESULTS***

Warning: this journal about my sleep study results will be so boring that you yourself will fall asleep reading it. Hopefully, you’ll be listening to new age music and snuggling with a kitty while you’re sleeping. If you’re snoring loud enough to wake up the whole household, you too will want to undergo a sleep study. Read at your own risk.

Five days after my 31^st birthday, I finally had the sleep study that I’ve been meaning to do since forever. I filled out a questionnaire describing my symptoms (snoring, waking up drained, lack of motivation, etc.) and the doctor said they were all consistent with sleep apnea and being a night owl. In order to combat the night owl syndrome, I’ve been waking up earlier in the morning with no excuses. The first week it was 10:30, the next week it was 10:00, the next it was 9:30, and from this point forward, it will be 9:00. It seemed like I was having more energy, but I was still taking naps in the middle of the day that lasted hours.

A few days ago, I took a home sleep test where I wore a heart monitor around my chest, had tubes in my nose, and a patch around my finger. If my bed was capable of spinning, I would be able to empathize with Crazy K from “Tales from the Hood”. All joking aside, the equipment was pretty goddamn uncomfortable to wear to bed and I never got a good night’s sleep. I went to bed at one in the morning and took the gear off at five. Despite only wearing the gear for four hours, the heart monitor was still able to get a definitive result.

Later that morning, I had a weird ass dream where Smokey was kidnapped Final Fight style. There were grizzly bears in my backyard, but I don’t know how they fit into the dream. I got out of bed and scoured the neighborhood for Smokey while trying to blast a confession out of everybody with an energy shotgun. Nobody confessed and I couldn’t find Smokey, so I wrote a heavy metal song about this incident called “Scour”. I couldn’t remember the lyrics when I woke up. Otherwise, I would have written and posted it to my social media accounts. It was a damn good song if I do say so myself.

A few days later, I get a call from the doctor in charge of my sleep study saying he has the results of the home test. Not only do I have a bad case of sleep apnea, but it was worse than he expected. He ordered a CPAP machine for me to use at home for thirty days. I have yet to pick up the machine, but it’ll definitely happen. My mom’s friend from high school Sandy uses one and she sleeps very soundly at night. Hopefully, it’ll give me the same amount of energy.

This past Monday and Tuesday, I spent most of the day helping my family move a bunch of heavy crap out of their storage locker and into our garage. After both sessions of moving, I felt so exhausted that I took a five hour nap. No creative work got done during those days, which I will talk about in further detail in the next few sections of this journal.

***WEEKLY SHORT STORY CONTESTS AND COMPANY***

Before the contest in which I posted “Zion Heart” ended, I told the WSS that I wanted to take a one-week vacation from the next contest so that I could catch up on my backburner creative projects, which included editing the shit out of Poison Tongue Tales, beta-reading for my Deviant Art bestie Zero Urrea, building a WWE Lego set that I got for my birthday, and catching up on watching the last few episodes of NCIS: Los Angeles. I also planned on catching up with reading the “Final Curtain” stories and voting for my favorite one. But like I said, the last few days have been exhausting for me, more so than usual, so I can’t work under those tired conditions. Hopefully, the next few days will be more productive. It’s probably best that I opted out of this week’s contest since the topic was “Game of Thrones”. I’ve never watched that show or read the book a day in my life, so I would be flying blind the whole time. Plus, there aren’t any story ideas in my archives that could take “Game of Thrones” as wordplay. A game and a throne? That’s two prompts in one. What am I supposed to do with them? Sorry if I sound like a whiny bitch. That wasn’t my intention. I’m just sleepy today from all the heavy lifting and getting up early in the morning.

***LYRICS OF THE DAY***

“We don’t need no education. We don’t need no thought control. No dark sarcasm in the classroom. Teacher, leave them kids alone. Hey! Teacher! Leave them kids alone! All in all, you’re just another brick the wall. All in all, you’re just another brick in the wall.”

-Pink Floyd singing “Another Brick in the Wall, Pt. 2”

***POST-SCRIPT***

It’s funny that I should randomly select those lyrics from my quotes archives, because “Zion Heart” is about Roger Waters and his “controversial” statements about Israel. It also takes place in a high school, so there’s an added bonus. I swear this is just a coincidence. Maybe. It could be. I don’t know. Anyways, we have ears, say cheers!