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Submitted by Morpheus on Monday, May 15, 2006 at 8:32 PM EST
Losing Touch with Fake Reality With one leg outstretched and the other bent back to my chest the remote control rests loosely in my grip as I sit upon Star Hill. I have seen and been engrossed in the tumbling of windmill blades of Macross Plus dancing together in random harmonies so many times now I dare not attempt a count. So I turn off the DVD and begin my digital television surf through the waves of information and entertainment. Jumping by the moment to argue with two grossly different assistant district attorneys trying the rapists and murders who sit shoulder to shoulder with me and I instruct them to keep their heads held up high. I have been here before, argued these cases previously, and leave the courtroom with indifference to the sobbing families in attendance that my leather jacket sweeps by. Newspeak replaces the drawl of lawyers and a deified analyst calls me names as I disagree with his principle and venue. As I am thanked for being present for my screaming the interview ends for me. Music precedes a woman approaching me in a garden, it is always a garden where she catches me, to hawk yeast infection prescriptions with side effects that may include a yeast infection. Finally my surreal journey ends at the same spot it always does. Perversions not withstanding, hard bodies are pressed together with sweat dripping off of one another and back onto one another, along with other assorted fluids. My face pressed to the hard floor, air being cut off from the chiseled man behind me with his padded knee planted in my back. I narrate my own feeble resistance of the assault being perpetuated upon my larynx, and far away I cheer for my eventual demise. Perhaps if I made use of this remote control I would have a fighting chance, if only the man in black and white were not watching. And though I choose to stay in this fantasy world longer than I deemed fit for the others tonight, I can no longer undergo the fantasy for more than the most fleeting of moments. All too quickly I am thrust back onto an aeron chair, legs now raised above me upon my desk and crossed comfortably. Instead of living the experience I am now in a passive state, simply watching the action as it unfolds live before my telecast eyes. Once there was a time I could have stayed enthralled by it, become one or all of the players. Now, I am an observer. Too many years have ground down young bones into the words on the screen that relate supposedly authoritative views in pose. I am often left to wonder, as the screen is reflected off of dual pupils, if I am the only one who lost his childhood wonder in the buzzing of stereo broadcasts via the gentle hum of liquid crystal displays. Are words simply so greedy that they are compelled to hoard imagination and vicarious experience all for themselves? The man with the microphone is often lost is a glaze as I continue upon this locomotive of reasoning to see which station on the line it stops. Perhaps words are guilty of sin, avarice for enchantment; or are they simply prone to insatiability in the form of coveting our emersion? Why do Tolkien, Salvatore and Salinger still walk me in side by side with Aargorn, Drizz’t and Holphin after all these years, while other passions now elude me? The train stops at a monopoly station, and a school maid gets off the train, leading her troop of soldiers in two parallel lines, arranged by order of height. Identity is as uniform as the tomes bound to leather straps, which is an odd thing to carry these days. The imagery is striking to those who enjoy using it, albeit usually for others. Still, as the whistle sounds and the conception pulls away, I dismiss the obvious end in favor of what lies ahead. I stay on board. It is not the reading of those wanting surreal symbols that has stolen this wonder, but in the fascination for reproducing them. The loss is made real in every article and report. The man on the screen calling for the head of his enemy is less and less yourself with every opinion you write. The aerial moves become less and less fantastic every time you connect your brain to the phone jack and tell others how crisply they were or were not preformed. I leave the train, and the station is crowed. My peers of equal, greater or lesser quality mill about the station, for I am not alone. At least I am one of those elite few here who knows what this place is. Some of them stand on soap boxes and blame the fantasy itself, as though it was a poorly tiered module or their dice were rolling poorly. Others feign mere indifference, which they swear will go away with time. I know better. I see the same ink on their finger tips as upon mine. A homeless person lies upon the bench besides me, one of the castoffs of the writers and analysts. In his dementia he has removed himself from our equally demented society. The voices he replies to periodically are his escape now, and I envy him. He still has his fantasies. He did not sell his soul to report on escapism. Sadly, I cannot join him just as I cannot join the previously recorded and revealed bout. My eyes were already glazed over when I sat besides him. Further away from the spectacle I fly, a cord linked to the back of my neck pulling me further and further away – as I write this.  Part one of four. On the utopian prison on which I now reside, I am surrounded by art of all variety. Birds of paradise perch upon sculptures of impressive size and make carved from obsidian. Locked in a silent, never-ceasing vigil over this divine abode with naught to do but to watch and observe the trappings of existence. It is one in particular that inspires me to write this here now. A man of granite, chiseled in sharp lines and with only the minutest of contours necessitated by function, hidden in the foliage of a veranda. Little more than the most simply of monoliths, he appears to me often at night. Off the reflective waves, when the lunar glow illuminates the glassy tide, his positioning and stature is one of a silhouette. At once, it is a sculpture of no one and every one; an empty page for which those who watch back can apply their own likenesses and imageries. Questions of existence are so much more approachable when locked in childish personification. To challenge the meaning of one’s own self is a tortuous affair that requires introspection and self-judgment at best. At worst, you arrive in areas that have left the greatest of our philosopher’s without answer – far more uncertain for your troubles than when you began. Yet I find no difficulty when these thoughts are placed on another. After assigning the man of ebony a degree of humanity I am fully able to inquire who he is, what he is and what he does atop his eternal resting place. One of the great joys of such a practice is that the answers do in fact come. Even more jubilant than the simple matter of having resolutions is the variance with which I receive them. The stone is always the same, yet the stories are different each night I gaze at the figure. Tonight, I have come to the conclusion that I stare into the empty eyes of wrestling’s most dangerous man. Sharing a similar incarnation as myself, he is a man credited largely for the state of the sport today. His were a world of visions of a grander scale, aggressive tactics, stolen concepts and properties and large capital ventures – his was a world in which the United States and Canadian wrestling market was dominated by someone other than by the McMahon family. The statue twists and turns, animated by the inexhaustible forces of the human imagination, and the silhouette is no more. I stare at the visage of Eric Bischoff. Surprisingly little, which is not to say anything at all, has been made of the future emancipation of Eric Bischoff from his indentured servitude to World Wrestling Entertainment. It is possible that he has been too good of a performer the last ten years that his passion for the business and abilities within it have gone unnoticed. After all, he has been portraying a heel of varying types and levels for as long as most viewers can remember. Yet behind the on-air persona lies a man who has relationships with investors of no small magnitude and experience in television production, booking, dealing with corporations as well as something only his current employer can claim in nearly thirty-four years. Eric Bischoff has experience with success and experience with failure. By all accounts, the contractual status of Paul Heyman with the WWE is due largely in part to fear of his value to another promotion which might provide suitable competition to the North American mainstream wrestling monopoly. And yet, by like the renewal of agreements between former head of World Champion Wrestling’s is not being considered. Instead, it is readily believed that he will part ways with the promotion later this year upon his current deal’s expiration. Is the WWE his prison as this island is mine? Does the glass walls of Titan Towers, or the plaster of road hotel rooms, really compare to the endless surf that time my typing? Perhaps it is unfair to label him trapped. Unlike the events that surround my personal dystopia, Mr. Bischoff wanted to join the WWE. My pastures are in many ways more emerald, and yet his participation was entirely voluntary and, if his performances were of any indication, enjoyed. Still, “Uncle Eric” was there and not elsewhere. It is elsewhere that we, as fans of the supposed sport of professional wrestling, stand to see the most benefit. The qualifications of Vince’s old adversary are astounding, and the potential value to potential emerging rival is boundless. If Eric Bischoff so chose to remain in the industry upon his departure from the WWE, Eric Bischoff would be an asset for whoever was the first to shake hands on a deal with him. More than any other talent as it relates to changing the dynamic of the current wrestling scene in the United States today. And thusly, Eric is a dangerous man. Alteration of any type to the current balance of power and world wide spheres of influence would rock the medium to its very core I hold. The potential for improvement exists juxtaposed to the potential for destruction. TNA is still struggling to find success and a winning formula beyond excellent in-ring. Mexico is having its hottest business period in decades but is lead by a man of greater eccentricity than perhaps anyone in the business of promotion today. MTV is gearing to start a hip and fresh take on the sport, which unfortunately seems to be “Hip and fresh.” Japan features not one, but in fact multiple dying promotions. The interjection of an Eric Bischoff in a power position to any of these atmospheres would immediately turn things on their head. There are two possibilities for the purpose of the vigil. It might be to observe nothing more than to watch rolling waves, the waxing and waning of the tide just to see what washes up next. Or, it may very well be that the firm jaw and empty eyes of the sculpture are there for this very reason: projection upon base relief. I have looked upon him and seen the future but only to a point. With that warning in tow, maybe it is not simply the mind playing tricks on me when stone speaks. What will happen next? Welcome to my nightmare.  Part two of four. No longer secretly nesting beneath the beveled ledge of polished marble and rough hewn masonry they have begun to emerge from the cocoons of ichorous webbing. The long winter, with her murky heavens and intolerable fury, has passed. Now is the time of their coming. Pressing forth the plague still drips the slime and mucus of alien origin which had been home for so many months. The apricot-hued wings unfurl into the red luminance of a hideous dawn, and the creatures of unimagined horrors take flight. The swarm has come to paradise. Amongst them I sit, laboring as I straddle the borders of terror and nausea with those of bravery and anger. Indecisive, for my part, of whether to flee or to fight the blight–I instead do nothing. The droning of a million orange wings hums in both ears as they close in. Now, it is not the accursed dim that shakes me to the very core but the feeling that crawls along my flesh. And so appropriate a word; an accurate one. Barbed legs dance over my skin, prickling and tearing into my body to grip down securely. And as one makes its way indelicately over my eyeball I see the being born of a thousand insanities as one never before and, by the mercy of humanities benefactors, never again. You can quite literately see the blood, mustard in both color and texture, as it pumps beneath the chitin that encases their body. Aforementioned wings of no natural pigment laid flat over that carapace in stark contrast to the putrid off-white spots that caress their disgusting anatomy as it, in turn, caresses my pupil. I would like to say I screamed, but I was simply not brave enough to do so. Not even when it burrowed through my ocular lens to lay spawn at the base of my mind. And so, as the creatures inhabit my tropical confinement, the seeds of an eldritch muse are buried deep within my brain. The monsters have offered me their wisdom, so terrible and grand! These—these are monsters. Born of nightmare and raised in the depths of places best left unmentioned for one’s own mental well being. And through them, with them as the most base and loathsome of examples, can I know truly bare witness to others who would claim their title. Men in pompous costume, wearing fluting so outrageous that one would be hard pressed find a child truly intimidated by them, or his revolting dietary choices. Another man attempts to strike fear into the primal places in mankind’s heart with a bolt of electricity; one that grounds itself due solely because a supposed human being willed it to do so. A large mouse with a head far out of proportion would be more effective. Others walk through flames and call it from the ether, and all the while the audience laughs and prays not for salvation, but that their flash went off properly. The Boogeyman, The Undertaker and Kane—these are no monsters. Off camera, the characterization continues. One man is a monster due to aggressively pursuing his side of a financial dispute, resulting in the splintering of a family of renown. Of course, it is widely acknowledged the true culprit was interfamily greed and jealousy having stemmed forth from years of living beneath long and winding shadows of wrestling. And casting those shadows is one far too old to act so young, still entangled in a bitter and personal feud with another over issues so far under the bridge that only cobbles of structure even remains. Onlookers pass an abhorrent judgment upon one and chide the other, and possibly rightfully so. And yet Vince McMahon, Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels—these men are no monsters. And finally, there are the masterminds; those who would control the very psyche of the masses. They are the ones that would create a monster. And yet, for all their diplomas and Friends-credentials, so few of them have succeeded. Some have outright failed to the point of negative gains and made their charges far less intimidating than their realities. And what is it that makes a monster? The myriad legions of churning insects which swarm me now know well, for a perverted nature made them as such. And yet, what makes it in professional wrestling? What arcane and eldritch tome can be tapped to find the rite to release the maggots and worms that mark the coming of a true abomination? So many brave adventurers have faced the labyrinths before my innards were eaten by the parasite of curiosity and none before me have ever arrived at the answer. It is not the one who produces the situation that holds ultimate responsibility for the emotion conveyed. True, he must be believable and the player must be of high caliber, but his praise should end there. Instead, look to the face, contorted in pain and in anguish. Seek out the man whose mind is trapped in his own Island jail cell, decked not with the Louis XIV chairs you find inside mine or even made up of the walls of forgotten stone. The one who is to be so very frightened, it is the look on his face and from the air exhaled from his lungs that we shall face the creeping doom of mortality. It is in the overpowered, and yet self-righteous face of a Kurt Angle that the strongest man in the world comes to life. The selling makes not the Olympian, but his opponent, in a way that a bent carbon rod never could. The defiant look of Stone Cold Steve Austin as the image of The Undertaker reflects in his eyes makes the silent and unyielding giant appear as something akin to death warmed over. The rite is exposed! No manner of booking, trickery or subtle manipulations can ever create a monster. In wrestling, only an opponent can do that. With all other senses having already embraced the creatures that have been born to my world so suddenly, finally, I can even taste the mire of one as it crawls over my tongue. Not in, but instead out of my mouth. The very same seed of idea wiggles free from my lips, tasting of mire and my own vomit. As any good wrestler should, I sell the feeling appropriately. I hope the visual is illuminating to your vision. Eye am Eye.  Part three of four. The peacocks that share this place with me have retired to the winding tendrils of branches above for the night to huddle together closely in their own manner. Even the most fully matured male, who danced and spread forth his feathers to attract a spring mate, has silenced his calls for the night. The grand lights that shine beneath them will extinguish soon, leaving this courtyard dark. Toucans and parrots have grown quiet in their cells of wire and mesh, and somehow I envy them. Their confinement is understood; they can see the bars around them. It is the surf that crashes nearby that I must contend with here, on the island. The sound of footsteps that echo off of walls draped in a shadowy illumination carry me away from this supposed sanctuary, and I follow the path of manicured cobble. My destination lies not far off. Hidden in the darkness a tiny trail leads through briar onto a strange and intruding evidence of man. Surrounded by grass and flanked by darkness there are sixty-four squares alternating between pure, angelic white and the deepest slate. Two armies have formed ranks and taken this field and already are poised and at the ready to strike the other. I shudder to think who it was that made the first advance before I arrived. A single soldier, draped in the regalia of innocence and purity, has been pushed forward into the territory of the opposition. A sacrifice of a mere underling to suit the future desires of a monarch less benevolent than he would have you believe. With this initial first strike having presented as direct contradiction to the nature of those draped in ivory, I step around and quickly ally myself for those in ebony. Gargoyle and demons reach forward in their stasis, awaiting the command of their new arriving general. I step between a druid in long, flowing robes and a man of inky, gore-flaked armor atop his nightmarish mount, and commence with my counter attack. It is a sight to behold as battle strategies are put to ensue. The fevered, nearly maddening volume of steal sliding along steal as swords are drawn from sheathes almost eclipsed the cries of tactical adjustments along the array. Now if there were only someone to play this game of chess against—here all alone in the night. My one move is met without answer from the sky of stars. I gaze up at them, away from the life-sized board, and wonder what hideous alien worlds are lit by those very dots of light. Back to the game, no phantasms appear to offer resistance to my masterfully laid out plan; though it already has been carefully mapped out already. I win, by forfeit of a nonexistent being, and am left with nothing else to do tonight—except wonder. Does the board have a message for me? Perhaps it was a message, a divine hint that a mere white pawn had been manipulated for me to find. And yet, I did find it and I did react. No explanation or continuance was forthcoming. If I am then to believe that the fluorescently-lit flora around me did indeed set these aberrant circumstances at the arranged position with the prepared meaning, I must also believe that it has been experienced by now. Islands are not known for their devote wisdom. Less so for the frequency from which they impart upon spectators. This is not a matter so easily dropped. The game can teach you. The game can lead you in new directions. This one, oh so clever, shows you the way to no where. It is the build that is more successful than the finale. The money is in the chase—not in the arrival. It is for this reason that baby faces are intender to challenge heels for their championships or for well-deserved revenge; and why that ultimate title win and the vengeance take so much of our limited time here to occur. I could have found sixty-four squares with only five remaining to the field and needed only move a rook to obtain mate, how satisfying would this have been to my invisible watchers or left such a state? Yet it is in the beginning that the infinite is possible. The endlessness of the temporal stands lined up before us all. Successes that are suddenly ripped from the grasp of those we love and failures heaped upon them. The grisly determination of a hero not to be denied, learning and growing with each of the opponents hooks. Onlookers returning the scenario again and again waiting and pray in time with their sentiments, ready to pay for the privilege of hopefully being able to claim attendance when the culmination of the combined hearts and dreams of all merge together in jubilation for true, hard-earned victory. It is all that wrestling is supposed to be. Each man and woman standing arm and arm with one another; and yet each one of them alone in the dark. Each one’s mind gripped by the field, by the ring and by the long road to the end. The long game of the night is over. A peacock calls out from the distance, not as tired as I was lead to believe. Perhaps it was their ritual dance that displaced the origin of my mental journey, from opening to finishing. The distraction has taken me from my thoughts though, and Plato’s realm of ideas is gone from me. The disconnection leaves me with one last fleeting image. The long game of the night is in fact over. Where do you go from here? Where do the hearts and the dreams merge again? And as I depart, walking past the murky depths of the ocean, I know—the next board set up, the next chase. En Passant Capture  Part four of four As the magnificent gates smaller on the horizon, time has come to look back at this strange place which is and has been my home from a new perspective. We ferry through the harbor, splashing through the waves churned up by floating cities and transport vessels that, if not horizontal, would scrape the sky. It is not yet night when I look back, though the sun’s descent from the sky is clear, and it is in fact the last rays of daylight pouring forth over the ocean in a luminescent spray of the visible spectrum. Over the last month I have come to reflect on my new surroundings in unusual ways. The island on which I now live is all things paradise. The world’s elite and grandiose reside there, an impenetrable bastion of luxury, comfort and affluence. And despite my participation in the joys to be found here, from swimming with manatees and sipping at teas flavored with hibiscus flowers and red poppy, I have chosen to view this Myst as slightly different. It has been my Bastille. So far from home and locked in a perpetual state of pococurante, the mind begins to wander in new ways. Like tendrils of hair billowing in time with the palm leaves through the gentle breeze or the furling tentacles of a subterranean horror reaching out from the darkness to grasp hold of what unknowingly passes by, the supposedly innocuous landscape so perfectly manicured for my pleasures has permeated my mind. Perhaps it is an indication of my own ills that they have been manifest in visions of inky blackness silhouetted against a moonlit night, but this is how the fleeting jolts of inspiration have come to me. I can leave here for only so long before I must return. And now, upon the rolling waves of gray waters, with only the tree-lined edges of rock remaining in my fight, I can describe something I have had tragically too few flashes of as of late. I can see my prison from the outside, looking in. No more nighttime figures calling out questions, aeronautical insects to shock out answers, or even life-sized chessboards to present infinite, if somewhat lonely possibilities. I am too far away for all that. Now, the place is just a speck, and soon even that with disappear entirely. It is time to reflect, as I have done recently so often. I came here from my concrete jungle not so long ago, seeking a better existence and more opportunity than what I had found back at a place once called home. Relations here to fall back upon and all the fresh air a man could want. I have been miserable, lonely, and ultimately bored. Stimulating my senses and, in turn, my mind is something that I had grown so very used to that the boredom I encountered here, perfection by other’s standards, was an assault upon my mental facilities. And so I was forced to seek out those precious few activities and escapes I find enjoyable. The words first came to me while on a constitutional. Despite the now radiant coloring of my skin, I abhor the light and the wondrous tortures that it inflicts upon my pupils. And so, this stroll occurred at night. A geyser erupted besides me, one of hundreds that dot the landscape so that the lushness of palm can remain for the powerful that dwell here. Normally, I would have simply done my best to avoid it while moving along at my own pace. Instead, however, I looked at it. I watched as the liquid poured forth from the land, straight into the air, before slowly rolling over to douse a garden in the richness of life. I saw something in that water. With every droplet that spewed upward toward darkened heavens I could see deeper and deeper into the myriad and eldritch reality that was unveiling itself for me. And so I knew the arcane wisdom and terrible truth. Truth has a funny way of manifesting. I knew I was terribly twisted, and I had to share it all with you. I do so hope you have enjoyed my steam of consciousness diatribes, as much if not more than I have enjoyed penning them. For you see, the words that came to me when the island, dark and mysterious, shown them before me were about my life; my friends, family, loves and dislikes. And in there, somewhere between the dice and the controllers, was a little fake sport I have been watching my entire life. The sport was wrestling. And my boredom ceased. I had found a passion, as silly and juvenile as it often times is, that would sustain me here, alien upon this Earth. No one topic caught my attention more than the other, only the ideas that sprung forth as my eyes would wonder about this new, marvelous place. An argillaceous stone that morphs into an effigy over someone I happily observe on television. I knew the truth. And here it is. Everyone reading this now has certain passions: Things that he or she can absorb themselves into, and merge into as one. Just as water can be absorbed into the Earth upon which we stand. For me, there are a multitude of them. Wrestling is one. For all my complaints and my quarrels, things I do far less than some of my pears, I truly find great happiness in it. I have attended house shows, television events, and pay-per-views. I have watched, bought, downloaded and rented to relive the fun of the past. Wrestling is an escape for me, just as this ferry upon which I now ride is an escape, though a fleeting one, as temporary as this trip will be. And so, it hurts me to see it polluted. So much of it out there, varying types to appeal to every set of tastes, and yet it is constantly under attack from all sides. Least of all, it is under attack from within. From those who participate, in the ring or in the stands, all whom seem to unabashedly hate this mere entertainment medium to the very core. Many love it, and their stream of curses and damnations are intended to bolster support for improving it. While I take no umbrage at those, for at the very least their heart is well placed, they are still wrong in their course of action. So let me describe what I see this particular passion of mine to be. It is a world of fantasy, where the rules and logics that we apply to our normal, mundane lives, cease to exist. It is a place unlike any other on God’s green Earth that we can readily amuse ourselves with, yet leave when the episode is over and the last pin fall has been counted. And it is the leaving that is the imperative matter on the subject. For those who are not wrestlers themselves, they can climb free of the soil and return to the ocean surrounding my veranda. If you do not, you will be a part of the pant life. You will become one with the new reality, an odd one at that. And perhaps you too will grow to despise the nature of the flora for which you are now part. And if so… then you have lost your passion entirely. Become void of all that was ever good about your hobby. Alone in the dark, no water spouts, clay men, terrifying insects or life-sized chalk boards can ever bring you back from there. You have lost your touch with fake reality, as I once did, and woe it is he or she that can never return to happiness again. The secret revealed from almost a year ago, four chapters to revealing the matters I launched on the date of my birth in the year two thousand, five. Surfing the channels between repeated episodes of the numerous versions of Dick Wolf’s lawyer-filled vision of New York City, or sailing across a virtual landscape, joining by my informed colleagues, on a subway to represent the ports and nodes of a true information super highway. For a very long while, writing about wrestling made me dislike it. Watching wrestling made me love it again. And no matter how far away from the island I tread, or however many times I must return to it, a few hours of enjoyment are only a click of a remote away. The Island Email Rommel: SSchaeffer@mail.com *NEW GALLERY* Even MORE Hot Shots of TORRIE WILSON Tearing the Night Up!
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