Post by Kyle Shane on Apr 30, 2017 22:28:00 GMT -5
I. The Greatest Lie...
It all started with the possibility of letting go.
That was the lie I told myself when this all began. I made a big mistake at a point in the past, and, in quintessential Kyle Shane verve, I knew that I had to fix it. In fact, if there's one constant in my mercurial gypsy soul it's the fact that things so often fall apart in my presence, because it's who I am. When I want to be, I can be hard, difficult. I'm not telling you all anything you've never heard of course. But the questions I've always had revolved around legacy. That was what every Kyle Shane promo ever has revolved around, the "what are we leaving behind". So while I recognize this is a topic any of you reading the journal of my thoughts have encountered before, at this point in time, everything feels fresh. If it reads as if I'm looking back on memories from decades ago, from a point in the ether that has long since passed from memory, forcing me to re-learn and re-earn my way into every new moment, that's because that's exactly what's happened.
I'm not the Kyle Shane you all knew.
I'm a Kyle Shane from 20 years from now, describing this entire journey.
You all have, I know, been accustomed to some kinds of wonky timey-wimey shenanigans with Kyle before. He's flirted with high-concept sci-fi before, and we've glimpsed so far into the past and the future that I'm pretty sure that half of you, seeing that this involves a time machine, are going to channel your inner Comic Book Guy and pull up footage from some forum post with a date-log a few years previous. But this time is different, because this time, the Kyle Shane of the present had no knowledge and no will to film one of his avant-garde efforts. He didn't even know what was going to take place.
I suppose I should start at the beginning and work from there, linear time is such an odd construct.
The Animus machine was a work of art. I was admiring it in Chad Jacoby's lab, one day, far from this point in time. All the venom, all the animosity between me and Chad had faded into the background over the years, and what we were left with was just this setup. Two very old friends, creeping past middle age. Neither of us had much left. Wrestling had passed me by some time back, it felt. You see the truth of it is this, Kyle Shane from the start was always meant to be a Roman candle, come in, burn bright, fade out. But extending the life of that into a career that was a distance and not a spurt meant spending more and more on fuses. And bit by bit the fuses would just... burn out faster, if not fizzle halfway through. It was bleak. But if there was a way to go back to the start and do it all over again, would I? That was the question Chad posed to me that day. I sat over on a stool, looking at the curved, shell-fish like metal seat. In my hand I held one half of the sandwiches and a coffee that I'd come to split with him.
And he said, as he fed some data into a small pad, "For as much as I enjoy these talks, Kyle, you bringing lunch and us reminiscing over the good old days, I know there's so much about what you've done that you would change if you could."
Frowning, I looked over at him. He peered back at me through his thick rimmed glasses. "What do you mean?"
"Imagine you could go back to your younger self and tell you, safely, with no harm, that there's things in the future you could avoid? It could be a small warning," he ruefully poked at his own belly, "such as to skip so many trips to Taco Bell and hit the gym, or it could be more important stuff. Bigger stuff. If you could go back, do it from day one, and talk to yourself when you were young, would you?"
The idea of going back and improving myself physically was never a question in my mind. But what was intriguing was the idea. I was mesmerized as I stood, cautiously looking over at the steeled lobster back of the Animus chair, picking up a curved helmet with suckers on the inside of the brow. A chance to go back... talk to my younger self... there were so many places my mind automatically ran to that my brain nearly crashed by default.
My eyes narrowed. “What’s the catch?” Chad knew what I was getting at immediately, and he looked at his machine sideways. “You are going to be taking over your body from a certain point in your own timeline. And you can only control yourself, you can’t control how people or events respond.” That didn’t seem like such a game-breaking deal to me, so I edged closer to the seat of the Animus. “It’s tempting, isn’t it?”
I had to admit that it was. I held the helmet in my hands. Chad, as if trying to sell me the merchandise further, held out an apparatus. “Attach that helmet, and wear this gauntlet. And you can control anywhere you want to go. You can slide in to the past and bop back here whenever you want.”
“But what about the ramifications, the- the butterfly effect? If I went back and stepped on one bug I could wipe out all of China,” I had, of course, read all the pertinent literature here… “If I go back and start smacking my younger self around I could drastically alter the world. The future. Everything could be different when I come back, things could cease to exist.”
Chad settled down onto a stool, looking glumly into the rim of his cup of coffee. “Isn’t that,” he said, “Exactly the point? Is this the future you wanted, Kyle? Both of us have our scars from all these years… both of us are worn down to the nub from a million failures. Wouldn’t it be a better world if it was wiped away and replaced with something better?”
I had never heard my friend so nihilistic. But he had… a point. I know I, personally, at that point in time could feel the weight of so many old wounds, and I saw there, cradled in my hands, a chance to let them go.
That was a world that everyone could want, I told myself. And that starting point, was predicated on the greatest lie.
But as I started strapping the machine onto myself, I knew I had to choose wisely. I could only control my actions, and not affect those around me. But I knew exactly where to start. Because in the end, the biggest source of misery was something I’d been wanting to fix since I was 21 years old.
I touched the button on the sleeve, and began my slide, my mind already set on how I was going to do things differently…
II. The Difference Between Poison and Medicine Is In The Dose.
The WGWF and I have been joined at the hip for so long that in many ways it’s the longest relationship I have.
And if I’m being candid, my time here is a microcosm of my relationships outside, to the point where I’m not sure where the metaphor starts, with the girl or with the fed. Either way, it goes like this.
There are some relationships that are so toxic you have to wonder how the elements can even combine, even briefly, without forming a reaction that’s either poisonous or explosive. As I alluded to a couple of weeks ago, it’s one of those relationships where you go home every night asking yourself, God, why am I all in on this, when the simple truth is that I don’t get much from it? But then, you’ll turn around and you’re the asshole sometimes just as much. That you’re the one that breaks things due to your temper, that you’re the one that leaves things high and dry instead of staying and hashing things out. Sometimes the relationship that’s killing you could also be the one that heals you if you just work it right. The difference between healing and toxic is all in how you dole it out.
Sometimes, in order to heal... you have to let go of something you loved for a long time, and hope that it’s still there for you when you come back.
So it’s in saying all of that that I bring this back around to here, now, my comeback at Wrestlewars and my motivation for throwing my hat into this mini-tournament dealy for the vacant Intercontinental title.
I’ve already explained the whys and wherefores of my thought process on Brawl, on my leaving. And deciding to come back could just be chalked up to one of those mercurial Kyle Shane whims; just for lulz, I decided to come back, kick five other doofuses’ keisters and take a title back I already won once. But there’s more… and in all honesty, this means a lot to me so I’m going to lay this out plainly as possible.
(And all you babies are going to do is complain about the length, waaah.)
Somebody recently asked me if I could go back in a machine, and talk to my younger self and fix some of my past mistakes, what would I do?
I’ll be honest, I’ve made some mistakes in my time here. A lot of them had to do with walking away at the wrong time. Or giving the wrong people the power to validate themselves by getting under my skin. Letting penny ante trash talk kill my motivation. Letting people compare me to others and say I’d never achieve what they did. I’ve not been the best partner in this relationship. But hanging on to those old arguments are what turns the air toxic. It clouds the issues, makes it harder to focus on what we really have.
When I talk about the WGWF and me and old wounds, I know precisely where to start. The assertion, which I'm sure is coming, that I was never as good as I thought I was. That I was NEVER in the league of people who didn't accomplish half of what I did, and if a Collins or a Money was here when I was I'd never accomplish anything. And in response to that toxic drama, I responded like an abusive, jilted, scorned brat. I made things hard, unfair for everyone else. In my compensating, I scorched the earth for the WGWF so that nobody could ever follow. And the thing about it is, is that when we're both thinking and see things clearly, we all know my worth. We know that Kyle Shane is on a level that few can match. A Kyle Shane promo, no matter how slapdash or weak the premise carries a gold standard of quality, where it's a given that even on the weakest efforts I'll outshine just about everyone on the roster. It got to the point where I was JUST doing a promo, one that would make the type of people in this tournament look irrelevant, but it would just be written off as "JUST another Kyle Shane promo". Can you understand how abusive that is? My standard of being the best makes it so that even when I put out an effort, I have to outdo myself every time. But it's also me saying that Kyle Shane, at his weakest, stands head and shoulders above everyone else in this match; some of whom might even, surprisingly put out a promo that's on the standard of "Good" but it's never going to be "Kyle Shane good", or coming close to the elite class of "Kyle Shane A-game". And the more I recognize this, and stop being bitter, the freer I will feel. The less this toxic relationship will stop feeling like work, like hashing out my shit in therapy.
So this is me, letting go of those old wounds. This is me putting energy into fixing what I broke, by walking away, by leaving things in the wrong hands, and by leaving words unsaid.
And by letting the Intercontinental Title fall by the wayside.
When the IC title went away in the summer of 2014, I was in an annoying rivalry with Zach Rizza of all people, and he was focusing on engaging in a prank war with me of all things, covering my belongings in shit and generally acting like a C-level Youtube annoyance. So when the topic of unifying the World and IC titles was brought up, my ego jumped at it. Partially because it would rid me of Rizza, but it agreed with me that I would have that accolade. The last ever Intercontinental champion, the last one to hold the lineage of a belt that was once worn by Hall of Famers like Dean James and RJ Palmer. That was wrong. I hurt the WGWF by taking the IC title away, because it meant we were left with the lesser TV title to fill a void for the longest time, and that meant the midcard had to be propped up by also-rans and never-would-bes like Citizen Truth and Jason Twisted. Small wonder the TV title got shat on. Then, no brainer, last fall the Powers that be decided we needed to bring back a belt that mattered, but since I still had possession of an IC title, they had to sort of gift-wrap the IC title and hand it over in a tournament even weaker than this one. The finals of it were Tristan Slater versus Vegas, folks. It couldn’t get less high stakes if you’d tried.
Since then, further harm was done to the belt by Tristan Slater defending it, which doesn’t help it’s case or credibility one bit, for only two months, before deciding to vacate it. Well, actually, Tristan tried to straight up hand the belt over to Andy Johnson, a kid who, last I checked in August, didn’t even know a single wrestling move. A kid who’s currently locked in a life or death struggle with a fat, fifty year old manager.
And this is the state of this place since I’ve been gone. This is why I’m ashamed of myself for letting things progress to this point in multiple eras on the timeline, and why if I have to Quantum Leap from one to the next putting out temporal aberrations, that’s just what I’ll do. The IC Title should never have fallen to such a state that it was passed from Tristan “My Personal Bitch” Slater to Andy fucking Johnson. The IC title should never have been deactivated. If there’s any one person who has a right to fix their mistake, who has a right to step in to the scene and take what’s hanging right there, it’s your favorite weapon, the God of Game.
The difference between healing and killing is in the intent when you have something in the palm of your hands, but the difference between medicating and poisoning is all in how you dose.
So I'm not at all sad to say, if I want to heal the Intercontinetal title of the wrong that's been done to it, first, I'm going to have to spit some serious venom on five other noobs.
However will I manage?
III. Travel Hymn
I wish I could describe to you what travelling through the timestream to psychically imprint myself on a younger body earlier in my history was like. Really, I'd love to tell you. It would fit my sense of grandeur if it was some mind-breaking visual concept, some sort of brilliant use of CGI that would make Doctor Who look like that shitty show on Syfy from the 90's called Sliders. If I had an sense of it, though, it felt like being on a long road trip in a car as you're driving through a country back road at 7 am on a Sunday morning. A long, expansive, never ending mile, that you glimpse through your eyelids. A pushing, rambling sense of heading towards a fixed destination. Preachers on the AM radio extolling the virtues of their gospel as their organ music plays you a travellers hymn.
Least, that's sort of what it felt like to my old senses.
But then you shut your eyes and the hymn lulls you back, and the warm of the sun brings you back to sleep. And you open your eyes a little later, and you're somewhere else.
When I was somewhere else, I was standing in a familiar, storied penthouse apartment, that I remembered from decades ago. I took it all in for a second, the Playstation console still in it's on position, the row of bongs and bowls lined up on the coffee table for consumption, the baggies of product next to a potted line of hydroponics, and I knew what point in time I had cast my mind back to. In a wonder, I poked and prodded at my lineless, melanoma-free twenty year old skin. The traveller's chorus sung itself a hallelujah. I had done it. Chad had done his work so well. But before I could exalt very much, I knew why I was here, on this night. I had just enough awareness of how Kyle had felt this night to get a sinking feeling of loss and betrayal, because I had put down my pipe very seriously and forcefully that night and torn out a young girl's heart, when all she had ever done is try really hard to be with me.
She was hugging herself in the frigid Boston air, looking out over the Mystic River bridge in the distance. She clasped her hands on each elbow and just stood there, for the longest time, trying not to break. It hurt to see her in this point in time, because this was the first break.
When porcelain first breaks, it's because it's too brittle.
"Hey, kid, come on, let's get you inside."
"I think I'm going to wait out here on the balcony," Array said, "My Uber's coming after it finishes it's next stop."
"Yeah, but come on, it's freezing and all you're wearing is that hoodie," I said, and I was amazed, looking back on that scene, realizing it was my hoodie, and that endearing, cloying little memento was her trying to take something of mine with her.
She laughed, a little bitterly, too old sounding for someone like her. For a second it made me wonder if places weren't switched and she was the time traveller coming from a future of pain. Because she sounded so old for someone not even out of her teen years. So old and so infinitely sad.
"You know, I don't - Argh I DON'T UNDERSTAND YOU," she spat, turning back towards me. "You fuck me, then you freeze me out. You take me on the road and introduce me into your world of life on the road then you tell me I'm not ready to travel with you. You want me to play little roles in your home movies, then you tell me I'm getting too clingy and we need space. What do you want from me?"
I pause, trying to parse out just how the kid responded to this. He would have said something glib, nonchalant, but smooth words don't fit in the roof of my mouth. I feel out of touch, drifting so far away from where I was when I first had this talk with Array, that I know that I'm missing the beauty of using the Animus to go back and fix yourself in the past. But it's me that's the problem. I can't follow this script because I do not know how to talk to her. I do not know how to form the words that can salvage this relationship, because I don't even know what words started tearing it asunder. It's a heartbreaking slide for me... because what it means is that, over the years, the decades, I've gotten worse. Those home movies she referenced, they were usually about me and her, and our relationship, but she always thought they were too weird and too unrealistic.
"We've been living together for a year, Kyle," Array crabbed. "I left my home for you. I stopped being just a kid for you. I gave up all of that, including my family. You're my family. You are my home. And then you take all of that, and you tell me that you can't let me in?"
There are tears in my eyes. Actual tears. I'm seeing this moment, from an outsider's perspective for the first time... I can't believe that I was ever so cruel to her, so uncaring. So I take her by her shoulders, and I resolve to claim the moment. Because that's all I am. I'm a man who has jumped out of the sky and is reaching his hand out, trying to grab a moment, like a shooting star out of the ether.
But then she puts her head down, and looks away, and I know the moment has exceeded my grasp. "No, I think you were right, Kyle. We should take a break... because you don't love me. You aren't capable of loving me, because you only love something if you're capable of caring about it more than you do yourself. If you love something, you wouldn't walk away from it."
I winced so hard at that, so hard. I thought of all the afternoons I spent with things and people and, even a job that I put time into. But if what she said was true, then did I ever love them at all, or were they there just to fill a void until I ran?
Array slipped the wool hoodie off her slim shoulders. In the original timeline, she had left with it, keeping it warmly against her body on many cold nights, and it reminded her of the boy with stars in his eyes and what might have been.
"You can have this back."
She tossed it in a heap at my feet, and she padded back inside, and even though I reached out for her, time began to distort and bend, and the moment was lost. I was pulled back into that rambling sense of travel, and sent backwards down the path.
IV. Semi-Constructive Criticism!
Part and parcel of the act of letting go of the baggage that comes with my return is the realization that everyone does not share my values.
That, I think, is what frustrates me so much when I step up to the controller. I'm cutthroat, I go in to win, so I get flustered when I'm up against people that don't care about the win, they just want to see competition get knocked off the proverbial Rainbow Road. That take shots at their betters with facile, nothing statements about shit they know nothing about. Like last summer, when Ryder Rebel came in talking about how Kyle Shane wasn't very good compared to people he'd watched on the TV in the 2013. But where is Ryder Rebel now? Didn't he ragequit because he was butthurt about never winning opportunities? I thought so. When letting go, you have to look at these people for who they are and what shelf life they have... and then it's your choice to let that shit slide. Or, if you're me, and you like talking shit to people, you can provide some, well, Semi- constructive criticism that completely breaks their fucking gimmick and speeds up their hasty exit. Like with Ryder. All I would have had to do is point out that for anything he said to me, he was never good enough to win even one of the titles that I have on my resume, and I'd watch him shut down with smoke fuming from his ears.
So such criticism can be a valuable, beautiful thing. It's deconstructing a shit gimmick or a retarded attitude, in the vein of when a puppy shits it's bed so badly that you smack it, rub it's nose in it and make sure it knows never to do something that bad again.
Which is good stuff, 'cause when I think of rubbing someone's nose in a noxious puddle of tripe repeatedly until they get the idea not to do it again, my mind immediately flies to John Cable.
Cable is probably the only other person besides me to whom the criticism of being overly long and verbose really applies but the thing about it is, is that for every ten words Cable uses, nine of them mean nothing. Cable, like his old buddy Sebastian St. Paul is a whorish nightmare of overly flowery bullshit and dialogue that's meant to sound intimidating but couldn't scare a fifth grader. What could, is that flat, pockmarked face he's brandishing around, like good fucking God man didn't you used to wear a mask for a reason? And now he's walking around unmasked, looking like a naked mole rat that's been evolved into an overly muscled humanoid. Hilariously, John Cable used to call himself "The Beast" which is just fuckin funny, because that sort of name brings up connotations of all sorts. Beasts are usually strong, yes, got that. But the term "Beast" is applied to those that show off supernally heightened strength, that does something that goes above and beyond. I'll admit there were a couple months there in the fall where I didn't give watching Brawl a thought, but a long, protracted feud with Flash Rotten's Silence isn't particularly indicative of feats of strength, nor is riding Tristan Slater's fucking coattails. Other usages of Beast denote demonic, animalistic, savage natures and that could not be farther from the truth when you look at John Cable. He looks far from animalistic; he looks dull-witted, incredibly sweaty, and probably impotent. Look at that picture on the fucking banner he's flying on his social media. It really looks like he's been caught in the act of shitting himself. Oooh, so ferocious.
But even John Cable seems to know that calling himself just a Beast doesn't hold water because he hasn't ever accomplished anything beastly. So he added the words Glorious Mandingo Beast to it; like that complicated title is going to be something that people remember him for. It might, because hoo boy there's a lot to unpack there. But a pasty white man calling himself an 1800's slur for African American is sure to raise the ire of the social justice warrior set, I'm just here trying to parse out what in the fuck it means. Is he trying to play himself up as some kind of jungle savage? His bad self, as I said, the ugliest, mayonnaise white, disgustingly flabby and quite possibly creepiest looking person on the roster? There is nothing in a svelte jungle cat there to look at. John Cable is not a sinewy warrior type. He's a big, lumpy muscled troglodyte that's too fucking stupid to stand on his own two feet. Look at his career trajectory. He's the back half of every team. He's the ugly muscle called on by little chickenshits to lift up heavy enemies and take their slings and arrows. He's the idiot that thought to go from Sebastian St. Paul to Tristan Slater was a wise career move, but when you look at John Cable, you still don't see someone who is a career man for himself. Tristan might as well have trotted out Lenny from of Mice and Men, told him that there would be rabbits if he went and fetched his belt back, and let him go. I am expecting some kind of literary response from John Cable, but really, there's no point. He knows I'm right. And he also knows, that his attention is better served to try to beat on the desiccated corpse of Famine of the Vile for ten minutes rather than trying to advance into the ladder match. Constructive criticism for Cable: Put the mask back on and focus on the bag of bones, white boy.
But if John Cable is famous only for being a henchman and a stooge to unsuccessful tag teams... (Glorious New Breed... jesus christ...) at least he's always tried to hitch himself to better people in that starfucker, chasing gold kinda way. Nick Ryan has always been known as JUST the lesser of two Ryan brothers, to the point where Hunter was so ashamed of the stink on that family name that he just started going by his first name in all caps. But a Ryan is a Ryan, and Nick Ryan is someone that I sincerely can't believe had the stones to try and step into this match. No really. It kind of says something something courage something. Nick might be brave to come in swinging so far above his weight class, but no one ever accused him of not trying. It's just that, every single thing Nick Ryan has tried, he failed at. In my time in WGWF, I've seen Nick Ryan come and go more than his brother ever did. I've seen him be a general manager of sorts, the head of a title division, and as part of a tag team. The team that lost to Zach Rizza, mind you. He was also, once, somehow, a World Champion in the WGWF, but that was one of the things that made you look at WGWF, get an anxious little squint in your eyes and say "...Really??", sorta like Mic Ferrari being a Hall of Famer. And I'm so sure, Nick Ryan's going to beat his chest. He'll remind us of some feud he had with Chris Page or some great moment he had in 2010 or whateverthefuck. He'll play himself up like he's coming for respect on his name that he's always been due. But it says a lot that we both returned on the same night, and I spoke passionately, I poured my heart out to the crowd and they responded with a "God of Game” chant that shook the rafters... and meanwhile Nick Ryan just sort of showed up, cheered that he was back in the WGWF for about two sentences and said that he was showing up in a tournament, a situation no one asked him to intervene in. Please, Nick. Nobody wants your mealy mouthed ass here.
The problem with the Ryan brothers is just amplified by you being who you are, Nick Ryan. There is never any edge to anything involving a Ryan, and it goes double for Old Nick. Not only does the name Nick Ryan conjures up the most vanilla, plain and boring mental image, listening to Nick Ryan speak is probably the least masculine feeling. It’s probably akin to someone slipping estrogen pills into a pint of Activia and handing it to you. And that’s when you have this plain, symmetrical, European type talking to you about how he’s going to take you on the Redline, or whatever it is. For some reason Nick Ryan’s one of those guys who’s so boring that they think maybe if they mention one of their signature moves in the middle of a speech it’ll conjure up the impression they could actually hit it. On a side note, when is the last time that’s even happened? What was the last feud Nick Ryan won? I could poll a panel, but they’d have to dig way back into the archives to find that one, and it still wouldn’t tell us when or if Nick Ryan has ever really been relevant. I mean, while he’s been gone, his brother has been in and out of the fed more than I have... but unlike Hunter, I’ve always managed to leave a stamp whenever I am here, and the fed never feels like it’s competing on the highest level when I’m not. People notice when I’m gone, is my point... whereas I have to assume that if there was a reason Nick’s return would be trending on Twitter it would be because people were saying “I thought Nick Ryan died.” Not that his passing would go fondly remembered, or even cared about three weeks after he was worm food. The world is full of bland tofu like little Nicky Ryan. And, if we go with the premise that Hunter is always the more successful and tougher opponent of the Ryan Brothers (he probably is since he’s beaten Nick so many times) then you have to realize that I’ve kicked Hunter’s ass three times in a row now. Constructive criticism: seriously, go back where you came from, why are you here?
On the subject of letting go... there’s one person who threw his name into the hat that, I sincerely have to see as one of the most painfully awkward throwbacks, that should have been thrown in the trash long ago. That person, is Jaymz Dante. Oh, you know he’s a special boy because his terrible parents named him with a YZ. This is a guy who, I can’t even say burst onto the scene because he didn’t abruptly or violently emerge anywhere; he just sort of showed up in the spring of 2008. I was watching, just as a fan, in the old days of the XWF and this cat emerges on Impact, their C show, their home for those not good enough to be immediately placed on Massacre... and wonder of wonders, this greasy, Hot Topic wearing little stringbean shows up and starts talking about how extreme he is. Talk about fucking throwbacks. More like anachronisms, painful reminders of how far we’ve come in the wrestling industry. See, for a very brief time, XWF was cropping up new titles every month, like the International Title, the Cruiserweight Title or, in Jaymz’ unfortunate case, the True Violence Title. Now. What were True Violence rules? ...Hardcore, they were virtually indistinguishable from the X-Treme/Extreme title they already fucking had, it was another stupid hardcore belt. Jaymz held this belt for a month before it got deactivated. And THAT was his only claim to fame. His only gasp at relevance. I know he didn’t win the X-Treme title at that time, because Downfall, Trent Gein and a few others were in that division and a Jaymz Dante never once broke through. So what we have here is some little shit that talks like a Mic Ferrari clone with more depressingly passe paeans of extreme violence. Who promised to show us what True Violence was, who never broke away from the pack. Who was a lesser hardcore champion, reigning over a belt nobody remembers. And what else did JaYmZ Dante accomplish? Jack fucking squat. He’s a supposed hardcore warrior that’s never won a war. His war was the fucking Grenada of extreme. It was a brief flash that nobody even fucking cares about ten years later.
I give the history lesson on Jaymz Dante, not because he matters, but because it illustrates his problem. Every single aspect of him from his look down to his True Violence upbringings have gone away, have passed him by. His mid-2005 Hot Topic look with the greased hair, bad piercings, faggy tattoos... he doesn’t look badass, he looks like one of the straight edge shitlords at hardcore shows that tries to fuck high school girls in his van. There is no remote upside to anything involving Jaymz Dante. It really feels like he was trotted out just to give something nobody has seen in a long time a try. But there’s a reason he was left in the dusty corner of the XWF storage closet gathering cobwebs. He’s fucking lame. His name is meant to sound edgy, or I guess possibly a little Satanic. It’s meant to strike fear into people with its bad spelling, but (I say this as a 6’2 beanpole that’s 87% legs and neck) there is nothing in a snap judgment at Jaymz Dante that looks remotely intimidating. Add to that the fact that we know he’s hung around Mic Ferrari at least a little. I mean, I’m relatively sure I’ve seen this chud providing a filler Greek chorus to Mic sometimes. So it’s incredibly possible he’s going to try and poke the bear here. Act smug about the fact that his hero beat me at Summer Madness, that the loser that nobody ever thought could achieve his goals ended up as a World Champion by beating the Game Changer. But there are a couple things that make that absolutely nothing to brag about... the fact that Mic Ferrari was a SHITTY World champion. I would have been all in on Mic getting the belt, hell, why not, he’d paid his dues and if he worked hard for it, who would I be to begrudge. Only, the first chance Mic got, he did what he always does: he sees that someone puts up a stronger effort than he’s ever capable of introducing and he starts hyperventilating. And the bigger, more salient problem I have with the idea that Jaymz Dante is going to try to parallel me taking Mic lightly and him winning, and me taking Jaymz Dante lightly and him winning is just this: he is no fucking Mic Ferrari.
Constructive criticism: Nobody even likes writing the name Jaymz, comma, Dante, it’s fugly and it makes people’s eyeballs bleed, change your name to something less woefully emo, like Blacknailpolish Ravendongs.
And when we speak of tryhards, we come of course, to our lovely little miss Starchylde. I gotta be honest, with a name like Alyce Starchylde I would have thought she would have been some kind of tribute to Bowie. Imagine my ennui then when I saw she was just another cliched Alice in Wonderland brat. With the added benefit of looking like a rodent that’s been gussied up in Suicide Squad cosplay. But the Lewis Carroll vibe is what Alyce seems to rely on heavily when she speaks, so I’m left to wonder... does this bitch know she stole her shit wholesale from Nathan Saniti, or is she just content to pretend that it’s all just public domain and she really is that out of ideas? Ahh, but Alyce is another one of those cuh-RAZY character’s we’re all so fond of, the kind that shows us their worlds of madness. The kind that are so in love with the imagery of asylums and darkness but also psychedelia, I guess owing to their parents dropping too much acid in the 70’s and them growing up worshipping Jefferson Airplane. But then you look at the hemorrhage of ridiculousness that Alyce parlays in her profile and the entire get-up makes sense. Spoiled little girl with a cliched parent death... and then, she grows up in an orphanage! She transferred to a mental institution! Oh, my gosh the originality is positively bubbling out of this like magma. I’ll bet you anything that during her stay in said looney hatch she encounters a white rabbit who pulled her into a looking glass, and the resulting insanity is all in some mixed up version of her head. Or is it?! Dun dun dunnnn.
So, to sum up, bratty little privileged girl. Bounced around from home to home for a while, throws tantrums when she doesn’t get her way, ages into the mental health system plays the game by throwing around “delusions” and acts nutso in that edgy on purpose way that Harley Quinn made popular to every girl under the age of 20. Am I in the ballpark? The sad thing is that Alyce hasn’t parlayed her crazy into any kind of manageable fighting style, which is probably because her pampered little tush never once hit up a training regimen or took a class in defense or combat. She didn’t even have an experience in fighting before she signed up for WGWF, which makes absolutely no sense because that’s a lawsuit waiting to happen... but no, I guess a company that hired Andy Johnson just wouldn’t care about that. But despite her having no training and not one meager skill to bring to the table she expects to waltz in her and take claim to the Intercontinental title, why? How does she even expect to win said fights, are the unicorns in her head going to do the fighting for her? Or maybe the Mad Hatter will drown them in tea and make them shrink with an “Eat Me” tag. Not the least of which, she lost in her first ever match, to the only one in this that seems like even raises the stakes of this tournament at all. So you have a girl that can’t even follow through on what she says she’s going to do. This is what happens when you let young girls from asylums out without medication, by the way. This stupid ass girl shouldn’t be out here competing for a championship she clearly has no place in. She should be taking some Ritalin cut with horse smack to curb her manic tendencies and shut her the fuck up so that she doesn’t spew out one of her tired, boring, “I am so crazy RAWR! XD” diatribes. Constructive criticism here: Girl, take your meds and calm your bony ass down. You are not a special snowflake because you hear voices in your head, nor are you interesting in any way.
And so we come to our final player, final target in the shooting gallery, third person in this six-way that looks like some kinda zoo animal, whatever you want to classify it as. The arguably wildest card out of all of this, our supposed King of Bullets, Jamie O'Hara. It would be easier to look at Jamie and shut him down with harsh words, if he didn't come from a place of so much grudging respect. Honestly, even despite his monotone demeanor, ripped off everything and general lack of the intangibles that put someone over the top, he would probably have been my most looked forward to an opponent in this thing if it felt like he was warranted being here. Jamie being part of this tournament just hangs a fucking lampshade on the nature of the entire thing. You didn't have to earn your way into this via any merit. You just had to want in. And that's why Jaymz Dante, Alyce Starchylde and Nick fucking Ryan are deal breakers; it's a given they're going to fall short. Jamie O'Hara is going to disappoint in this ultimately, because, despite his skill, all I've seen out of him has been underwhelming. This King, despite wanting to claim his crown and making a nice little case for it by the verbal lashing he gave Alyce... has yet to fucking earn it.
Realizing that not everyone can be Kyle Shane and win a championship on their third match. (Five years ago this month. Can you believe it?) But it goes deeper than that. Jamie O'Hara has had the entire fall and winter in my absence to step up and say something, and yet he's remained so inconsistent and, often, so quiet that the roster barely even seems to register he's there. There's leaving a footprint, and then there's allowing yourself to get pushed to the back of the line while someone else cuts in. It's kind of the ironic inverse of that stupid shit unimaginative idiots like Ryder Rebel and Tomoko Hanahara were always talking. About how if those big names were here, then Kyle Shane never would have prospered. I'd stepped away from the fed, and had nothing to do with it, and in months that went by Jamie O'Hara did nothing with the vacancy. Jamie couldn't have stepped in to fill the void, because the mid-card, and now, sadly, the World Title have been usurped by Tristan Slater, a man who so desperately has wished he could be Kyle Shane that he's copied every single thing that made me successful and yet has never replicated me. If Jamie O'Hara was going to hibernate in the winter and let the New Breeds and Frost's Extinction run things, and only now wake up and try to make his mark, then he's waited too long. His best chance was while I wasn't here... because I'm about to take his fucking postage stamp fiefdom of artillery and bring it crumbling down to rubble.
And the thing is that, Jamie did show Alyce, and he did show others like Nathan Miles that he could succeed if I wasn't part of the equation. But just by virtue of standing next to me, I outshine him and show him every flaw in his premise, every bit of lacking potential. Is he lacking in charisma? God, yes. But it still would have been doable. But that's also 'cuz ain't nobody except Kyle Shane got the balls to walk right up to his face, cut through the entire middle bullshit and tell him that his shtick would play a lot better if it wasn't so overexposed. What you have in Jamie O'Hara is someone who's tried to disguise their failings by wearing a goddamn t-shirt from Japan and laying a tangenital claim to a wrestling faction that's sold lots of merchandising, but is likewise at this point just a bloated, overblown and overused cliche. King of Bullets? Wow, son, it's like nobody's ever heard of what you're referencing before. I think it's a little bit Too Sweet that you never really get called out on the fact that you're just a lameass trying to fit in with the cool kids. You're like one of those poser fucking skater kids from when Tony Hawk was big that thought wearing JNCO pants and Airwalks made you fit into the X-Games crowd, when you personally lacked even the basest skill neccessary to ride a board. It's the same principle there. You put on that shirt, you dyed your hair goofy skunk colors, and while that King of Bullets act might play big in the Tokyo Dome, I find that it's just a hollow window dressing. Because no matter how you try to spin what your name denotes, it doesn't MEAN anything, Jamie. I call myself things like Game Changer, God of Game, and derpy little twits that don't like to pay attention to the lessons say obvious things like "Duhhhr, you call yourself the Game Changer but I don't see what game has changed?"
The answer is everything? The answer is at any point, when you're put in a match against Kyle Shane, has anyone ever had to put up less than their absolute best effort for an outside chance that they might win? I mean look at this tournament. When it was just the four of you at first, nobody CARED who would have won the belt when it all shook out, nobody would have even noticed if Jamie O'Hara or Alyce Starchylde walked out with the belt, because they're weak, pathetic, no name talent. Sort of the equivalent of Layne Shaddix, Bryan Gilligan or Richard Garcia, lacking staying power on every level. One of those clowns taking the belt therefore wouldn't have redeemed the IC title from the shit heaped on it by Tristan Slater holding on to it or Andy Johnson being given the belt like a fucking candy wrapper. Even when Nick Ryan came out and threw his name into the hat, nobody would have cared... because since when did Nick Ryan ever elevate or raise the stakes of anything. But then I came. And it went from a rote affair that had no interest and no stakes, to something of importance and drama. Because of the intrigue of me coming to reclaim the Intercontinental Title, and the strong history that comes with my legacy at Wrestlewars of being undefeated. Just by the simple act of putting my name in the hat, I went from this tournament being an afterthought, to it having meaning.
I have spent so much time deconstructing this tournament because I want you all to see things as they are, everything frozen in these slices of time; every moment held, analyzed, and the future foretold.
What this all means is that you are on the cusp of a flashpoint of historical significance. You are witnessing something amazing, a Wrestlewars moment a'borning. Something you wouldn't have had if I hadn't jumped back in, at this particular moment in history.
You will thank me for it, in time.
V. Carry Us Away...
I slammed the helmet off my head as I found myself back in my old, aching, worn out body, decades in the future. I glared across the lab at Chad, who looked at me inscrutably as he polished his glasses. "So, what did we learn?"
"I learned," I spat, "That I made the timestream worse? Who knows how things shook out between me and Array now, and without finding a way to come to some separate peace, who knows how that affected my mental state? Or what it did to my career?"
Chad, was, calmly, looking through a scrolling feed of data on an immersive display. He sized up what the feed was telling him. "So it sounds like bad news, good news. The machine works, but you didn't. It wasn't the fault of the machine, it was the fault of the person speaking the words through the avatar."
"Oh, will you give it a rest with all of this high concept mumbo jumbo." I was angry with myself, so much that I had let a moment in time slip through my fingers.
"No, think about it, Kyle... all of the adventures you've been on and the things you've seen, your world has always been a trip to the fantastic, but what it all boils down to is you using these fantastical methods to try and understand your own heart. To look through the lens of fiction and fantasy and, " here he held up the smooth, steel helmet of his own Animus apparatus, "Time travelling equipment to try to pierce the veil of your own humanity, to understand the core of yourself."
He seemed to be right, and I gathered that he was telling me not to give up now. Because the truth is, he was right. All the adventures, the ones I was remembered for and the ones I just made up in one hour because I needed to slap some shit together before the deadline, were telling one story, of me searching past, present and future to find and center myself, to fight back against loneliness and loss. And that was the beauty of what Chad was offering. I could go back and find myself, and I could fix things. Carry me away, Johnny...
I took the helmet from him in my hands. I looked at them holding the metal dome for a second, ravaged, purple-spotted and veined. I thought of her. And if I couldn't go back and fix that night, I would find another night further along.
So I punched a date in to the wristband, and closed my eyes. That sense of traveling motion, that slightly surreal, liminal feeling pervaded. And this time, I opened my eyes in a locker room. I felt, immediately, the gob of spit running down my cheek, and my eyes adjusted to their new reality I had jumped into. And there she was. Older, now more of a woman. And she was dressed like a provocative hellcat. Her eyes shone like black diamonds, as she reared back to spit on me again. Perhaps I was too locked into this timeline, because I roughly shoved her against the wall. I felt another presence looming in the room... and I knew the rough date figure I had punched in was too good at homing in on one of the darkest periods of my life.
I had taken hold of my body the night that Array left me for Tax. There he was, in fact, behind me, crowing and preening like the shithead he was. But Array was what I kept my eyes on here. Even now I felt such a palpable sense of loss and betrayal. "How could you do this to me?" I forced out the response.
"What I did to you? There you go again, Kyle", her voice was so roughened, so frightening compared to that girl's lilt. She was a woman who had had two or three years of hard living that I couldn't even think about. "You never once consider how the people you leave behind are doing. All you ever do is leave. Like, fuck you. Is the WGWF just supposed to wait with bated breath until you decide to come back every time? Am I?"
Tax' gloating was too much to bear. My head was swimming with all of this. "Your problem is, you want everyone to fawn over how special you are, all the time. You want people to thank you for giving them attention. You want them to beg you to come back when you leave, and you just don't care how it's going when you're not there."
"That's not fair." I stood up to her. She smacked me, pushing me off. The cuddly girl I had once entertained was toxic, violently pushing back and lashing out at me here. And didn't this just hit all too close to home.
"No? Fuck you, Kyle..."
"Array..."
"No. I'm done with you. I'm done with your shit. You come and go and come and go. You float back into my life every time you come through the same town as much. At least him, he respects me. At least he doesn't put validating how he's feeling over putting effort into a relationship."
I point in Tax's smirking direction. "HE, won't be as good to you as I would be. HE, would just use you up quicker than a tube of toothpaste and then all of the empty promises he gives you won't mean a thing."
"HE, won't rape me, Kyle. HE, won't strip me of my identity to make me feed in to his messiah complex, his need for validation. Because," she points at me, "That's what you missed ever since your mommy died. Somebody telling you what a special boy you are. That's why you've only ever done anything you've started."
My mouth became a firm line of hurt and rejection. "You're wrong." And then, I call some coordinates in, and a wristband melts onto my flesh, forming out of the marrow of my bones or something, the time travel band materializes and I punch in coordinates, intending to jump out of this body, jump out of this timeline.
"Oh, whatever, Kyle. Looks like you're running away, AGAIN, what a big shocker... you always just, run away, rather than stay and talk when things get too hard. You want to fix things, fix your need to bail on us. If you did that, then maybe you would have a chance."
There are so many conflicting emotions here I want to say to her... so many ways I could react. Indignant rage, impotent threats, violence... or I could say, that I'm sorry, and she was right. That I realize I'm not able to fix things between us, the more I try to salvage a working future for us, the worse I'll make things. I want to say goodbye to her, and for her to make her own life, find her own way to be happy, because all I ever did was leave on her.
I make the jump one more time, carrying myself away from there. There's a flash of light, and the locker room, and gloating Tax, and a furious Array are gone, and then as my eyes shut, I'm travelling again.
And when I open my eyes again, I am alone.
There's a symmetrical sorrow to this all now. I wanted to be alone so much before because I didn't know how to handle closeness. I walked away from endeavors that forced me to be emotionally open, when the only two emotions I could ever process was selfishness and rage. So it's always, at the very bottom of it, been for the best of intentions that I walked away, that I let go, from Array, from WGWF, from the only things that mattered to me, before I made things any more toxic. And so now, here, I find myself, having jumped to an unspecified point in Kyle Shane's timeline. In disgust, I manifest the wristband to build into view just so I can crush it, the thin metal bending and the hard light shattering in my fingers as I tear Chad's apparatus off my arm. No more tripping. No more trying to go back into the past. I stay here in this Kyle Shane, alone, and I get what I deserve.
He sits, in this storage room, surrounded by packed up boxes of everything he could fit a lifetime of loneliness into. It isn't much. Truth be told, it's a pathetic existence, and it's what he deserves. But that alternative? The alternative is to submit to the cycle. The alternative is pain, and hatred, and angst.
But it's also love. And caring. And light, to balance out the only life that this Kyle knew.
No. This is a good trade. A good lie. I sit down next to the boxes that this homeless vagabond is living his life out of. And I think, maybe it'll be good, to be here. To start something new. To be a different person this time.
The door to the storage room opened, and I heard her gasp. My heart jumped into my throat. Her eyes were kind this time, and I had time to marvel that sometimes, just sometimes...
...For every little thing I've had to sacrifice along the way, the universe gives something back in return.
VI. In The Morning And Amazing.
So, this is where I close out with the realest talk I've ever given you. I can't promise I'll stick around as long as I did last time, or the time before that. The WGWF still has it's problems, and I still have mine. It's still a toxic relationship that breeds burnout, contempt, and rage. But it gives so much back, and I know that I wouldn't be me without it. What matters is that the timelines have intersected and brought me here, now, to this moment, with all of the weight and history leading to a watershed moment with Kyle Shane at the flash point. To walk in to Wrestlewars, go through five other people in one night, and walk out, still undefeated, AND NEW, Intercontinental Champion.
If you want to see something, I will show you something... amazing. A bright, new, shining morning, a reinvigorated Intercontinetal title, and a brand new Kyle Shane, one you have not seen before.
Because come what may, I am chasing history here. And I know, the rest of you are simply toiling in my wake. That's not arrogance. That's not empty promises. I've seen the future, and in it, I have come alive. I have made so many memories that none of you can ever hope to catch up to, and have delivered on so many big matches where each and every one of you have failed. I'm more than a game changer, I'm a paradigm shift in human form, and you are all just static and frozen images of pasts that don't matter.
I am here, and until one of us breaks first, I'm back. Things may get ugly, but this time, I'm going to try something new, be more productive, give back more. It's more than the rest of you all do anyway. So, you're welcome.
This is history in the making for you all. For me, it's just Kyle Shane business.
"Don't leave again..." she sobs, quietly, into my chest. My heart felt like it was breaking as I wiped the tears away from Array's face. With the wristband torn off, I could cease to exist in this timeline and snap back to the future, be brought back to Chad's laboratory at any time. Or, this reality, altered, could cease to be. There are so many uncertainties and I can't think of a single one. She tells me a rushed explanation of her coming back to get some things we've both left out of storage. And she shyly, diverts around the topic of the past vitriol between us. It's water under the bridge, because we were separate for so long, and the toxicity levels dipped below radioactive. But I know, it's possible that it will get there again, and no matter how I'm getting out of this timeline, I know I will have to. For her benefit, all over again, before I make things worse. And she won't even realize it this time. Because the truth is I'm not sure how long I even plan to stay at this point of time, and I know, eventually, I'll have to get back to my timeline and leave her behind. Running out on her, in an entirely new light, all over again.
"I won't," I lie, "I won't, baby, sweet baby, I won't leave again, I won't..." I hold her close so she doesn't let my facial tic of uncertainty betray me. She doesn't care either way. She's just crying in sorrow and relief.
"Don't leave again," she pleads, over my tacit decision to do just that.
"I won't."
"Don't leave again..."