Straighten Your Back // Dynamite Title Tuesday Oct. 8, 2024
My torso's weight bears down on my knees. 4, 5, 600 pounds of pressure spread them wide and I can feel the carpet slowly greet my balls as I lean forward in one lurid motion and clamp down with upper and lower jaw on the glass coffee table in front of me. KRINK my teeth splay out in every direction as bright hot red blood sprays in a perfect 180 degree radius out from the front of my face. This is how we behave when we watch wrestling on Tuesdays. It’s a fucked up night at a fucked up time and this cursed show is opening with sad sack John Moxley searching out loud for something that used to have an acute shape inside his mind.
Something that used to radiate and pulse within him. A revolutionary (as these things go) off beat time signature—the shape of pro wrestling to come (im sorry)—like a 3/4 or something worse like a 9/10—that reminded him of worse days that read better on paper. No hot dog stands or three dorks dressed like cops surrounded by ten million metric shit tons of some lost Ohio village’s worst and most-isolated.
God, John. There’s still a way through this. A way back to the boy from back then. Haven’t we let the tide of age drag us just ever so slightly off course. Toward some geeky technocratic MMA miasma. Swirling gray and brown water pushing into the corners of your mouth. Once it’s there it’s tough to get the taste out. It’s unrealistic, that taste. Even though it’s real—it’s fucking Rome, baby—it still feels plastic and fake over there. Some Friday or Saturday night race based Celebrity Death Match with modifiers turned off. Pick the leg, quick left jab, slight tug of the pink fleshy walls just past the sphincter. The real shit, eh John. Like your buddy with the unimpressive beard, fat cheeks and stoic social media presence. Take the rope off our rings and show these never-blooming small town wash outs what it means to come from a real dead city. Fucking concrete and leather. Sick shit. KAKRINK
It’s just a dark and stormy dance and youre a sunny sided geek with a lovely wife and some beautiful kid(s?) who—if you’ve got the fucking guts—will have the last memories of their father’s drinking deleted from their RAM and replaced by something nice you said or some way you surprised them. Inshallah (your god not mine, pal).
Listen, straighten your back. Draw a line from the top of your chest to the corner of the room and float in space as the face of AEW. The man on the box smiling at me while I ideate on suicide and chew through my breakfast.